While we are daily witness to the powers of progress manifest in the extraordinary mechanical technologies we have developed in the industrial age, we remain woefully unaware of the most basic causes of social change in our society. Our lack of social awareness does not result from the difficulty of understanding social problems, it results from the active repression of such awareness.

The political resistance movements that developed in the twentieth century were adapted to conditions of economic growth. When an economy is growing, petitioning through political and legal means to assure increasing access to rights and wealth for traditionally disenfranchised groups met with a measure of success, and that success was the foundation for further movement building. Those movements cannot, as they are currently structured, guide us through the coming age.

Many of the problems that we see as having purely political roots are strongly influenced by economic and ecological factors. Social issues that may seem far apart, such as ecological stress and women's rights for instance, have common roots. In the modern context, much of the political unraveling that we are witnessing can be understood in terms of the limitations of growth of modern industrialism.

The growth of fundamentalism and militarism, the decline of civil liberty and the environment, all of these problems are going to get worse if we do not find a new means to address them.

There are real solutions to these problems, but they are going to involve a quantum leap, both in thought and in action, beyond our current methods of political engagement. The solutions themselves are not even terribly difficult, they are simply well outside of our current range of vision and will.

Table of Contents

Our Fate
Civil Liberty
---- The Rise and Fall of Liberal Democracy
Women's Rights
--- What the Heck is Going on in South Dakota?
Peak Oil, Biofuel, and Genocide
---- Neoliberalism's End Game?
Ecological Decline
--- 101 Painless and Ineffective Ways to Save the Whole Damn World Versus Real Solutions
Witch Hunting
--- Terrorists, Communists, Drugs and Sorcerers: Wars that Were Never Meant to be Won
Why Large Groups of Intelligent People do Foolish Things
Real Solutions
--- The End of the Conservative/ Liberal Piecemeal Crap

A book review of Culture Change by Keenan Dakota;

Culture Change: Civil Liberty, Peak Oil and the End of Empire by Alexis Zeigler is a book that is meant to change your life; no, the author aims higher than merely changing the lives of his readers, he aims to change the way society is structured and the way cultures evolve. Who knows? This book is powerful enough that it is possible it will someday change society, but it will certainly change reader’s lives; enter at your own risk.

If you decide to read Culture Change, you will get to experience the sublimely satisfying experience of having the content of thousands of books digested and explained to you in a way that feels comfortable and comprehensible. Mr. Zeigler has apparently read every book ever written. Culture Change ties together historical events and culture shifts that most people have never considered in the same thought: contraception and peak oil, the four food groups and Chinese immigration in the US in the 1880s. Or witch hunts in Europe in the middle ages and the current booming prison population.

The contention in Culture Change that black men are in jail now due to a modern day witch-hunt initially sounded ludicrous to me. But Culture Change ties the pieces together in a crisp, readable fashion: "Consider for a moment who we normally blame for urban decay. A teenage drug dealer stands in the popular mind, like the witches of the inquisition, as the supernatural force that has destroyed urban neighborhoods. The reality is that urban poverty is planned, a means of keeping wages down and profits up."

Witch hunting looms large in this slim volume, because, contrary to what you may have believed, witch hunts loom large in how a society keeps the rich on top: "Witch hunting will continue to be used against the lower class and disempowered ethnicity’s as a means of deflecting blame for economic deprivation." As the reader proceeds through Culture Change, there are many of these ‘aha! moments, when opaque, rarely thought about bits of history, suddenly all fit together. Not just history, Culture Change covers historical movements, not as a mere intellectual exercise, but to show how the forces that moved historical societies are the same tides that are moving societies today.

Culture Change has no specific political bias, The author views both left and right with equal disdain. Mr. Zeigler gallops across the political spectrum with the sword of an iconoclast, skewering the prescriptions of the right and left. By the end of this book, few liberal or conservative icons are left standing. But Culture Change, is more than merely a polemic about how doomed the world is; Culture Change ends with set of hopeful prescriptions for changes to our society for "devolving power away from transnational corporate oligarchy and into local communities, and evolving a sustainable and conscious culture based on locally accessible power."

This book carries powerful and well-packaged ideas for conscious cultural evolution. Few readers will be blithe to do nothing after reading this book; it is a clarion call to action. In that regard, it is a dangerous book. Read it at your own risk: you have been warned.

Buy Culture Change