The Power of Numbers
Reclaiming a World in Harmony Through Conscious Will
We’re born into a human world with social structures and hierarchies that existed before we did, and we are taught to believe and participate in them as if they have always been there, and that we are powerless to change them. Like cattle, who have numbers stamped into their ears, we are given a number at birth—not unlike a brand -almost as if each person is considered property to some sort of owner. People are then taught in their formative years and eventually land in the world of “adults,” who work in order to earn an income to be able to live, as if food and shelter can only be had by trading the time of our lives for it.
We then have our incomes extorted to feed into the state, so that social orders such as governments, police, and military can rule over everyone with an iron fist. We are witnesses to abuses of power, war profiteering, police brutality, and the rich who steal people’s pensions get a slap on the wrist, while the poor are sentenced to years in prison for stealing a loaf of bread.
What we’ve been conditioned to believe is the way to be and belong in society is a profoundly twisted, sick, and perverted distortion of reality. Yet we’ve been taught that these systems are right and good and absolutely necessary, to ensure order instead of chaos. As our history has shown, our social systems often eventually give rise to, and empower, evil people who mislead millions to suffering and misery. Jean-Jacques Rousseau saw this shadow in The Social Contract, mourning that we are born free yet stumble into chains, our natural liberty traded for a pact that binds us to such distortions. Would you agree that these social systems are diseased? That they are terminal, like cancer?
What if I told you that taking the power away from the “powerful” is a lot simpler than you might think? After all, no matter what human being has won the game of amassing wealth, they are still mere mortals, just like everyone else. Are they free to do as they please without any recourse, without any recompense, if what they do is malevolent to the masses? Étienne de La Boétie, in The Discourse on Voluntary Servitude, revealed the fragile truth: those who rule do so only because we permit it, their iron grip dissolving when we refuse to uphold it. If people who have a lot of money have decided that they can direct the ways of the world, and have beings blindly do their bidding in perpetuity with no consequences, they are sorely mistaken. Winning at amassing money is not what qualifies a person to make decisions for the sovereign, against their will - no.
What qualifies a person to have true and real, lasting power has to do with a rule of law that most mortals are not privy to. It has to do with consciousness, with benevolence, and with love and reverence for life - principles that Lao Tzu’s Taoism alludes to, where harmony with natural law outlasts the fleeting might of force. These seem like simple enough concepts to the uninitiated, but they have profound implications for the future of the human race, if they so desire to manifest a new world - one that is healthy, one that thrives, and is in homeostasis with natural law. Those bereft of the aforementioned things do not inherit the world to come, but the world of their making, which is infected with the insidious iniquities of greed, lust for power, and the like - basically what we are witnessing in the here and now.
Do you want to know why things are the way they are? They are that way precisely because we blindly go along with conditioned social “programming.” It is as a house of cards, without a solid foundation, destined to crumble and fall away. The truth is, every human being has the power to change the world for the better. We are not commodities to exploit, we are not insignificant individually, for if we endeavor collectively, we affect the whole. The key is in the power of numbers. What we do individually has the power when multiples of us do so collectively. Collectively, individuals are working for psychopathic corporate conglomerates, drug and war profiteers, and authoritarian governments. It takes a larger number to collectively work together to either regulate, transform, or ban and dismantle altogether any organizations that are ultimately antithetical to life and only serve to create misery and suffering. We can divest from any and all conglomerates that do, and put our time and resources into cooperative movements that serve to heal and remediate, that create heaven on earth, rather than hell on earth.
We can craft a world free from exploitation that unethically profits from disease and war at the expense of our collective life. This power must rise without coercion, without the shadow of tyranny or authoritarianism. We can do so not by force or bending wills, but by living by example, by saying no to those who collectively err. Imagine instead a swelling tide of willing hearts - communities choosing to share resources as they did in times of old, weaving bonds of mutual care, or turning from the lures of profit-driven giants to nurture what sustains life. History offers glimpses; India’s salt marches, born of shared resolve, and Iceland’s quiet remaking of its banks.
What we seek is a world where fields bloom from love and reverence, where learning lifts spirits rather than molds them, where our societal systems heal rather than wound, where justice honors the spirit of the law, rather than perverts it - all flowing from our collective voice and choice. The old adage says, “Where there’s a Will, there’s a Way.” It’s now up to us to willfully reaffirm the life that we want on this sacred planet, and show everyone the way. The more of us that do, the greater our collective outcome for a more prosperous and ethical world of harmony, health, and wellness. We inherit the world to come by our collective will, our collective thoughts, our collective voice, and our collective actions. It is time to call in the world that we all want.
Like my content?
Support my work with Ko-Fi