Rethinking Systematic Change: Unions, Myth, and the Power of Collective Action

Imagine sharks convincing all humans that any conflict had to be resolved through violence, unarmed, and in the water.

This is what the U.S. has done to us around our concept of what systematic change can look like.

We've been taught a very specific, extremely narrow concept of what systematic change can be that puts us at an impossible disadvantage.

And it's worth taking a close look at what that concept is, who benefits from this narrow, limited concept of change, and who suffers.

And most importantly by far, we need to think about what other forms of change can look like.

The U.S. has one strength. It's an enormous hammer.

It uses that hammer in diverse and creative ways, from trade embargoes to militarized police, but it's all the same hammer.

And they spend billions shaping our concept of change so that we can all see this hammer and how we'll never have a hammer that large.

If you're not familiar with the Pentagon's unholy alliance with Hollywood, it's worth taking the time to look into.

I haven't seen the whole thing yet, but the documentary Theaters of War, How the Pentagon and CIA Took Hollywood, looks like an amazing place to start.

What this means is that every film we've ever seen that involved the military was vetted and approved by the U.S. military, and they don't do that for fun.

They do it too constantly, through both subtle and overt messaging,

reinforced the idea that any challenge to U.S. supremacy in any way would not only be futile, but suicidal.

And it works.

Anytime anyone talks about change, all the comments are full of people saying that we'll never win an armed conflict,

or that they're ready to throw down an armed conflict, and both are falling for the same propaganda.

Here's the thing.

Even though the U.S. has, essentially the U.S. is, one enormous hammer, we already have a far larger and more powerful tool.

We have the shop that built the hammer.

We have the forge that created it.

We have a hydraulic press that can shatter it.

We can melt it down and make it into far more useful and less harmful sets of tools.

This great shop we already have, which built the hammer, which can break the hammer, and which shapes the world, is our labor.

Without our labor, a hammer can't move, can't harm a single person, can't threaten anyone at all.

The effects of this are not instantaneous.

They already have an astounding amount of our labor stockpiled in the form of their billions of dollars.

They're counting on being able to use the labor they stole from us against us.

When they overwhelm the courts and wash away the last vestiges of democracy in our government,

they're using our own blood and sweat to drown us into servitude.

But even as that happens, they're still dependent on our labor for the continuance of the system.

They need us to comply and obey for the hammer to continue threatening us into compliance and obedience.

So this particular moment in time is pivotal.

If we continue to provide our labor, then we're complicit in our own subjugation,

and it's likely the end of a livable world for us and everyone we love.

They can't make us comply.

They simply don't have enough cops for one to stand behind each and every one of us at our jobs forcing us to work,

and even if they did, we could still refuse to obey.

But for us to withhold our labor alone, for us to simply, on our own, not go to work or stop working at our jobs,

has no effect on the system.

We'll be fired, they'll hire some other desperate person to fill our position,

and the system won't be affected at all.

So unless we act together, then we have no power over this system at all.

This is what unions are for.

Unions and unions alone are the only reason that we have weekends, overtime pay, vacations, minimum wage laws, child labor.

Everything that makes work remotely survivable was bought with the blood of union members,

against the will of the U.S. government.

Government's never done a single thing for workers of their own volition.

They're dragged into that legislation, kicking and whining the whole time,

and then once it's passed, against their will, they take full credit for it,

and loudly claim it's because land of the free or whatever.

It's lies. It was always unions.

The Hammer knows this.

It's why they've spent centuries doing everything they can to crush unions.

It's why Project 2025 makes unions explicitly and completely illegal.

Unions can work very, very fast, much faster than standard legislation,

and Project 2025 is moving very fast.

So we are now in a race.

If we realize that together we can withhold our labor and shut this entire system down,

then we win a livable future and the possibility of a healthier world.

If the fascists take control of the U.S. military and ban all union organizing before we can do that,

then the entire environment, everything and everyone we know and love,

suffers through a fascist hellscape until global warming cooks us all.

These are the stakes.

There's a reason you've never seen a Hollywood movie about this type of change.

There's a reason there are no blockbuster hits about people of all backgrounds,

races and genders working together to withhold our labor from a system that is profiteering from our suffering,

and it's not because those wouldn't be popular.

There's a reason you've never seen cinematic, well-directed, compelling films

where the U.S. military stands impotently by while millions of people withhold their labor,

military looking confused long enough that the soldiers realize who their actual enemies are,

form their own union, and join us.

Yeah, I know the military can't legally unionize,

but unionization is not something that anyone can give or take away from us.

It is a fundamental human right.

You can talk with your coworkers and form a union,

no matter how illegal the people who benefit from you not doing that say it is.

Remember how withholding your own labor alone without organizing with your peers is self-harming and impotent?

The same exact principle applies to voting.

Everyone all over the political spectrum arguing for this or that fringe candidate

without the coordination to create meaningful pathways to actual victory

are thinking and acting like people withholding just their own labor alone.

We could institute grassroots, non-legislative, rank-choice voting

with thresholds in place so that we only utilize it when we have the commitments to make taking the White House possible.

We don't need the government to do that.

We could do it through a trusted, well-respected open-source organization,

Wikipedia or Linux come to mind.

But without that level of organization,

if you don't live in a rank-choice state,

then simply voting for a fringe candidate is just as effective as not going to work tomorrow at creating systematic change.

Our power is in each other, and our organization is with each other.

Unions can provide strike wages, meaning we can get paid to strike against this system.

And unions are international. This means they're set up to work globally.

That means that if, through our unions, we approve to general strike,

we could ask for contributions for strike wages from global unions and even governments.

If I were any other country in the world right now, looking at what's happening in the U.S.,

I would see funding U.S. labor strikes as the best possible investment in the future of the world.

Unions can buy organizations.

With a fraction of TikTok forming a union, we could simply buy this app and run it democratically.

When a lot of people in the U.S. say revolution,

they say it with the same tone that I might say, if you flap hard enough, you can fly.

This is by design.

In reality, the world is revolving all the time.

In political reality, the foundations of Western humanitarian law were all bought with blood,

from the Magna Carta to the establishment of the English Commonwealth

and the overthrowing of the monarchy in 1469.

These foundations of modern law were not given by authority.

They were taken by people against impossible force and against all odds.

This month, the U.S. Supreme Court effectively overturned Magna Carta.

Seems like they might need a reminder.

So this weird idea that revolution is impossible makes about as much sense to me as flat earth theory.

We're already revolving, always have been.

The only question is whether we'll be agents in the current revolution or passive victims of it.

The world and the U.S. will look very different in 20 years, one way or another.

We'll be in a corporate fascist hellscape or not.

Hiding in self-excusing centrism because we've been taught to fear the word revolution

and aggressively taught that the only way to create change is one that we're at a severe disadvantage in

won't save us and it doesn't excuse us from the complicity of our inaction.

Ursula Le Guin said,

This leads me to the last and perhaps largest point.

Many years ago, I read a wonderful book that I can remember nothing about but its thesis.

And I mentioned this in hopes that someone else has read it and can point me to it again.

Her thesis was this.

The power of the current system that we are in is the power of the system that we are in.

The power of the system that we are in is the power of the system that we are in.

The power of the system that we are in is the power of the system that we are in.

And the power of the system that we are in is this.

The power of the current system that we are fighting is not actually its enormous hammer.

It is the myth of its enormous hammer.

So we're not merely engaged in a logistical conflict.

We're engaged in mythological conflict.

And mythological power always favors truth, which is the opposite of fascism.

So our greatest strength is a union of mythological power.

So our greatest strength is a union of mythological power.

We are at our core mythological beings.

We are more powerful than anything else.

We're terrible at seeing reality. Our memories are abysmal.

We're awful at everything except projecting meaning.

Show someone three dots, they see a triangle. This is what we do. This is what we are.

So claim it. Find your mythological power and practice it.

Turn the world towards health and wellness with it.

Everything else, every other tool of meaningful systematic change flows from myth.

From withholding labor to armed resistance, our capacity to see our tools at all,

Let alone use them in effective ways that set us up for success,

Flow from myth.

So watch what you watch. Entertainment is not passive.

You're teaching yourself with every film you watch and game you play.

Until we realize this, we're being taught without our consent or our knowledge.

And it's not for our benefit.

Once we realize this, we become beings of conscious, embodied mythological power

with the full weight of responsibility that that entails.

You're not just some overdeveloped monkey with anxiety.

You're a mythological being in a mythological world.

With that said, I'll leave you with two book suggestions.

The first many of you have already guessed. It's Octavia Butler's Parable Series.

She could see 30 years ago.

She predicted exactly what's happening now, to the point where

Make America Great Again was literally the slogan of the fascists taking over the US in her books.

Like it or not, we're in Butler's timeline, and we would do well to read her.

God is change. Be like water.

The second is Sophie Strand.

Her work is redefining my world these days.

She deconstructs ancient myths about masculinity in wildly powerful ways.

I thought about just reading whole chapters of her book,

The Flowering Wand, rewilding the sacred masculine as videos.

They're so poignant.

She's doing mythological work. I'll leave you with this quote of hers.

Instead of thinking we are always failing, narratively and physically,

what would it mean to recontextualize these wounds as portals?