"At any given moment there is an orthodoxy, a body of ideas which it is assumed that all right-thinking people will accept without question." "It is not exactly forbidden to say this, that or the other, but it is "not done" to say it, just as in mid-Victorian times it was "not done" to mention trousers in the presence of a lady." "We are an animal of habit." "We live, fight, bleed and ultimately die for our habits." "And those very habits shape the world around us, and dictate how we might lead our lives." "Before long, it soon becomes difficult to shift our behaviour from anything that we are not familiar with." "This is a film about you, me, and the routine of obedience." "It is an attempt to show what it means to be obedient in a time where our habits will ultimately shape the world in which we no longer wish to live." "The world as it is today is a place where companies have replaced countries." "It is no longer the governments of countries that decide how things run and how people live." "Instead, prime ministers have been replaced with directors, presidents with CEOs, parliaments with board members, and civil servants with business strategists." "Dominant shareholders drive policies, not constituents." "Former world leaders leave administrations to return to work for bank or giant investment firms whilst we scout for the next generation of politicians from successful corporations as if to imply that running a profitable company is like representing and deciding how people are to live their lives." "It was not long ago that we saw big businessmen as people to be wary of." "But somehow we have invited them to lead our countries." "We unite behind brands, behind celebrities rather than behind nations." "We have become more than nation States;" "we are corporation States." "But how did this happen?" "At what point did business replace government?" "Unregulated Capitalism had proved itself to be deeply flawed in the Great Depression." "So why is it everywhere today?" "The War in the 1940's created a demand for big businesses to manufacture bombs, tanks, air-crafts and all manner of other war-craft materials." "Many companies adjusted their assembly lines to suit the needs of war." "It was highly profitable." "The war also unleashed radical new forms of mass propaganda that made it possible to engineer public opinion." "There were revolutions in radio, cinema, photography, cheap mass publications and graphic arts." "This new propaganda exploited recent understandings of mass psychology and its pioneers like Sigmund Freud." "Their works became the basis of communication and how individuals would interact with each other." "War propaganda was churned out to rally people against a cause, to unite a country and get assistance behind the war effort." "As the war persisted corporate profits boosted the US economy and people began to readress their criticism of the capitalist system." "But the war also destroyed long-held values and self-perceptions that had once characterized contemporary live." "It replaced them with fear, distrust and the hedonism of the consumer society." "Before the 1940s there existed many mass movements, enraged by the abuses of business." "But this new propaganda drove any and all competing ideas and values underground." "It vilified all who did not speak the language of business and State." "War propaganda not only supported the war but also discredited dissidents and reformers as traitors." "This rise of mass propaganda effectively killed populism." "It began the death of the traditionally liberal forces that could offer resistance to the capitalist machine." "For this mass propaganda to work State could not do it alone." "They hired corporations to help them talk to the people." "The origin of all modern advertisements, all mass communications, has its foundations in war." "And as the Second World War drew to a close, big business, anxious to maintain their high war-time profits, eagerly looked on to where the next conflict might emerge." "To ensure financial security during the Cold War giant US corporations began to split their manufacturing lines throughout the US to provide as many jobs in as many States as possible." "In this way, they had a powerful influence over the government." "No member of Congress would risk action against a corporation that provides a high number of jobs to people in their constituency, for fear of a voter backlash." "So these businesses could essentially control the way in which" "Congress would make decisions, and choose how policy would be made to favor corporate profit." "This was a huge advance in the privatization of US govt, and from here on priorities were increasingly made according to what was good for corporations rather than what was good for the people." "Government media began to be replaced by corporate media." "The quaint literary serials, local reports, town debates and other forms of popular expression vanished from newspapers." "It was replaced by celebrity gossip, the new, angry rhetoric of the Cold War, and nationally syndicated columns." "Papers became commercialized and centralized." "and business of mass propaganda also brought in vast sums of advertising revenue to the media." "The corporate and government propaganda narrowed the parameters of acceptable debate." "It began the consolidation of the press by huge companies that would end with nearly everything you see, hear, read, disseminated from roughly half a dozen corporations." "And for all of Rupert Murdoch's talk of ending the reign of the elites, he presided over the rise of media monopolisation." "It turned the news into the elites echo chamber." "Today the privatization of the government functions is enormous." "In the US there are 18 military and civilian intelligence agencies, and 70 percent of their combined budget is outsourced to corporations." "The Pentagon has privatized 69 percent of its workforce." "The Afghanistan war effort is almost wholly privatized." "Businesses now run wars and play more part in international conflicts than any State does." "Corporations have 35,000 lobbyists in Washington and thousands more in state capitals that dole out corporate money to shape and write legislation." "They use committees to solicit employees and shareholders for huge donations in order to fund business-friendly politicians." "It is now a global practice, from the Politburo of China to the British Parliament." "Labor leaders make lavish salaries and are considered junior partners within corporate capitalism as long as they do not speak in the language of class struggle." "Politicians like generals are loyal to the demands of the corporate State in power." "They retire to become millionaires as lobbyists or company managers." "Artists who use their talents to foster the myths and illusions that bombard our society live comfortably in the Hollywood Hills." "Journalists who prize access to the powerful more than they prize the truth report lies and propaganda to propel us into wars around the world." "Education has experienced a similar corporate takeover." "suffering from cuts in government funding, these institutions have transformed themselves into vocational schools." "They have become breeding grounds for system managers, trained to serve the corporate State." "Many of these universities have swelled the budgets of their departments with millions in corporate money." "University deans paid enormous salaries as if they were heads of investment banks are judged almost solely on their ability to raise money." "The arts, just as hungry as the media for corporate money and sponsorship, refuse to address the social and economic disparities that create suffering for tens of millions of citizens." "Commercial artists peddle mythical narratives, the ones propagated by corporations, self-help gurus, Oprah Winfrey and the Christian Right, that if we dig deep enough within ourselves, focus on happiness, find our inner strength, or believe in miracles," "we can have everything we desire." "We inhabit a system of "Inverted Totalitarianism", the political coming of age of corporate power and the political demobilization of the citizenry." "Inverted Totalitarianism differs from classical forms of totalitarianism, which revolve around a demagogue or charismatic leader." "It finds its expression in the anonymity of the corporate State." "The corporate forces behind inverted totalitarianism do not replace decaying structures with new, revolutionary ones." "They do not import new symbols and iconography, as classical totalitarianism movements do." "They do not offer a radical alternative." "Corporate power claim to honor electoral politics, freedom, and Constitutions, but these corporate forces corrupt and manipulate power as to make democracy impossible." "We have yet to fully grasp that corporations are not concerned with common good." "They exploit, pollute, impoverish, oppress, kill, and lie to make money." "They throw poor families out of homes, let the uninsured die, wage useless wars to make profits, poison and pollute the ecosystem, slash social assistance programs, gut public education, trash the global economy, plunder the government treasuries," "and crash all popular movements that seek justice for working men and women." "They worship money and power." "Capitalism is a revolutionary force that consumes greater and greater numbers of human lives, until finally it consumes itself;" "leaving nothing but a dead zone." "Corporations have seized power from the hands of the citizens, that the Constitution and all guarantees of personal liberty have become irrelevant, and that the phrase consent of the governed is meaningless." "We experience nothing more than hollow acts of political theater, all happening under the guise that democratic debate continue to exist, when in fact they do not." "This is the world as it is." "It is global and it is what we obey." "The vague and unspecific promise of a better tomorrow is all that politicians have left to offer." "It is only with this system of unfettered capitalism they promise us the brighter future that awaits us:" "a brave new world." "This is the future of the current system." "This is the future of obedience." "In the coming years, corporate power will continue to pollute and poison the ecosystem, and propel us into a world where there will be only masters and serfs." "There will be no check to a system of governance designed to enrich a tiny elite and plunder an entire planet." "Liberals, socialists, trade-unionists, independent journalists and intellectuals, many of whom have once important voices in our societies, will be banished or muzzled by corporate control through academia, culture, the media, and government." "It will create a power vacuum filled by speculators, war profiteers, gangsters, and killers." "The "patriotic" citizen, plagued by fear of job losses and impossible terrorist attacks, will give their support to widespread surveillance and the militarized State." "Military and intelligence agencies will be held above government, as if somehow they are not part of the government." "The most powerful instruments of State control will effectively have no public oversight." "The money that could be used to house and to provide food and health to millions will be channeled to the development of increasingly sophisticated weaponry, like drones or AGM144-Hellfire missiles, which sucks the air out of its victims' lungs." "And yet the civic, patriotic, and political language we will use to describe ourselves will remain unchanged." "We will find our collective identity in the same national symbols." "We will continue to deify our nation's founders, our leaders from history." "But the countries we celebrate will become illusions." "They will not exist." "At first people will indulge in a habit of intellectual avoidance." "You will not want to appear to be political." "You will be afraid of seeming controversial." "You will want to keep a reputation for being balanced, objective and moderate." "Your hope is to be asked back, to consult, to be on a board or prestigious committee, and so to remain within the responsible mainstream." "You will be employed." "The mass propaganda used by the power elite will employ the talents of many people." "The work of justifying corporate power will continue to be carried out by an educated elite, drawn from the liberal thinkers." "It is these people who will continue to create the jingles, advertising, brands, and mass-produced entertainment that keep us trapped in a cultural and political illusion." "The corporate salaries that these individuals earn will sap their moral and intellectual independence." "It is one of the great ironies of corporate control that the corporate State needs the abilities of intellectuals to maintain power, yet outside of this role, it will continue its refusal to permit intellectuals to think or function independently." "Hollywood, the news industry, and television will increasingly become instruments of inverted totalitarianism." "They will saturate the airwaves with manufactured controversy, whether it is a political sex scandal or the dispute between talk-show hosts, or the extramarital affairs of celebrities." "We will confuse knowledge with our potted responses to these non-events." "Those who continue to resist will become members of the underclass." "As long as they collaborate with the power elite, and merge with the instruments of corporate oppression, there will be a few positions of comfort and privilege." "But all those who seek to work as artists, journalists, professors, labor organizers, dissident politicians or clergy will increasingly struggle without adequate health insurance or reliable incomes." "Newspapers and print culture will disappear completely, supplanted by the blogosphere, the social media universe, and interactive television." "Ironically we will watch an increasingly number of so-called "reality-shows", but reality will leave our culture." "It will be ceded for a culture of emotionally driven narratives, where facts and opinions are interchangeable." "A fantasy reality, where meaning is distorted, when words or sentences arrive in any bite-size forms and are taken out of context, alongside emotionally charged images." "Words and images will dismember reality and it will leave dissidents speaking in a language that will often be unintelligible to the wider society." "As we shift from printed image, the old artifacts grounded in print will become as obtuse and unintelligible as hieroglyphics." "News images will offer us an endless whirlwind of emotion, and at the same time creates historical amnesia." "We will forget how we got here." "A populace entranced by these fragments, pictures, videos and spectacles, a populace that can no longer find the words to articulate what is happening to it, is cut off from rational discourse." "We all express our reality through the use of selected and isolated facts, half-truths or lies, that do not make sense." "Illusion will become true." "The great promise of the Internet —to open up dialogue, break down cultural barriers, promote democracy, and unleash innovation and creativity—is just a utopian dream." "It will instead accelerate our division into antagonistic clans where we are sucked into virtual tribal groups that chant the same slogans and hate the same enemies." "Internet trolls become digital crowd mobs." "The Web, like cable news outlets, will form anonymous crowds to vent collective rage, intolerance, and bigotry." "The Utopian promoters of the Internet will insist that the "hive mind,"" "a vast virtual collective, will propel us towards a brave new world." "But this simply is not true." "The Internet is populated by the crowd, and not the hive." "And the crowd can turn into a mob, all too easily." "The Internet will starve professional critics and artists." "The only journalism and art that will endure will be that which draws advertising." "The only income left for most of those who create will be earned through the self-promotion and the orchestration of celebrity." "Writers, musicians, artists, journalists, and filmmakers must transform themselves into celebrities to earn money, or vanish from public consciousness." "Cultural and artistic expression will be replaced by the tawdry, banal, and often idiotic distractions that draw huge numbers of users on YouTube." "The Internet will complete the final assault on the arts and intellectual inquiry." "Any work that cannot gain corporate sponsorship or attract advertising revenue will be ignored." "And funding a civilization through advertising is like trying to get nutrition by connecting a tube from one's anus to one's mouth." "Ordinary citizens will increasingly suffer, and people get scared." "They will want to live their lives, raise their children and be happy, but this will not be possible." "Standards of living will go down and unemployment will skyrocket." "It will lead to random shootings and suicides." "Acts of domestic terrorism will become a common place, and the State will erode more civil liberties to control mass protests." "Many will retreat into the dead talk of policy and analysis." "Or worse, the far-right, the British National Party, the English Defence League, the Tea Party protesters, the myopic supporters of Sarah Palin, the veterans signing up for Oath Keepers, and the myriad groups of armed patriots," "will bring into their ranks legions of dispossessed workers, angry libertarians, and many others who, until now, were never politically active." "The attraction of the right wing, and the war-makers, will be that they appear to have the courage of their convictions." "And it will not be the right-wing parties that gain support:" "the far right-wing is who will sweep the polls." "Eventually it will only be a matter of time before an honest, charismatic figure arises, and people's frustration and disillusionment, their justified anger, and the absence of any coherent response, will lead them to this person." "All he or she needs to believe is that there is an enemy, someone to blame." "These movements will eventually mutate into full-blown fascist movements." "We will be told that we have to defend ourselves and the honor of the nation." "Military force will be exalted, and people will be beaten up." "They will begin to advocate violence." "The deterioration of the political systems will generate resentment." "Resentment against a disenchanted secular world will find deliverance in the ecstatic escape of unreason." "Societies that do not reincorporate the unemployed and the poor into the economy, giving them jobs and relief from crippling debt, become subject to the hysterical mass quest for ecstatic deliverance in the absurd." "The emerging racism and violence that roams about the edges of society will lead into a full-blown inferno." "The hatred for radical Islam will transform itself into a hatred for Muslims." "The hatred for undocumented workers in states such as Arizona will soon become a hatred for Mexicans and Central Americans." "The hatred by those defined as American patriots, a largely white mass movement, will become a hatred for African Americans." "The hatred for liberals will morph into a hatred for all democratic institutions, from universities and government agencies to cultural institutions and the liberal media." "They will see themselves, and the values they support, swept aside." "Due to the lack of any articulated alternative in a time of financial and environmental collapse the way is clear for military values of hypermasculinity, blind obedience, and violence." "This cruelty runs like an electric current through reality television and trash-talk programs, where contestants endure pain and humiliation while they betray and manipulate those around them in a ruthless world of competition." "These are the values championed by an increasingly militarized society, and the manipulation and dishonesty in the financial sector." "Friendship, trust, solidarity, honesty, and compassion are banished to the unadulterated world of competition." "It is the militarisation of the everyday." "Economic and ecological collapse will hurt everyone, except, of course, the corporate elite, who will seek only financial gains amongst the collapse." "As a result human misery will be compounded." "Indeed, it will be viewed as a source of profit." "Corporations will continue in their attempt to buy and control the world's supply of clean water." "And seed prices, controlled by corporate seed companies, will skyrocket." "All essential elements for existence will offer corporations the potential for profit." "The demand for capitalist expansion, in a time of growing scarcity and environmental collapse, means we will endure harsher forms of abuse and repression." "Eventually we will try to bring the system to its knees, but we will realise ourselves as political beings too late." "We will understand too late the dynamics of capitalism and human evil." "We will realise too slowly that we must challenge every level of management." "We will call for sweeping social transformations, and for this we will be destroyed." "As communities fragment under the weight of internal chaos and the increasingly dramatic changes caused by global warming and economic despair, they will face a difficult choice." "We can openly resist, or retreat into a pure survivalist mode, a form of primitive tribalism." "But this retreat will leave participants as morally and spiritually bankrupt as the corporate forces arrayed against them." "And the elites that successfully convinced us that we no longer possessed the capacity to understand the truth or to fight back against the chaos caused by economic and environmental catastrophe, will use their resources to create privileged little islands" "where they will have access to security and goods denied to the rest of us." "Masses may periodically strike out with a blind fury against increased State repression, widespread poverty, and food shortages, but they will lack the ability and self-confidence to challenge in big and small ways the structures of control." "The fantasy of a widespread popular revolts is just that—a fantasy." "Many will also naively believe that it can be countered with physical resistance and violence." "But violence has inherent problems." "Those who prove most adept at defending societies under siege, come from the criminal class." "Violence is a drug." "Those most addicted to violence are those who have access to weapons and are hunger for force." "And killers rise to the surface of all armed movements, even those that could be defined as just, and contaminate them with the intoxicating and seductive power that comes with the capacity to kill and destroy." "You pit monster against monster." "And the sensitive, the humane, and the gentle, those with a propensity to nurture and protect life, are pushed aside and often murdered." "It is a romantic vision of war and violence that is put forth by mainstream culture." "Those who resist with force cannot hope to defeat the corporate State." "They will not keep alive the cultural values that must be sustained if we are to have a future worth living." "Armed resistance movements are always mutations of the violence that spawned them." "Sometimes it is, of course, unavoidable," "But violent response to repression, whether it achieves its goals or not, is counterproductive." "Violence must be avoided, although finally not at the expense of our own survival." "Perhaps we will continue to believe in change, in real democracy." "Yet democracy, a system to challenge the status quo, has been corrupted to serve the status quo." "We will be left with no way to turn and instead choose inaction." "The idea that we can always make more money, meet new quotas, consume more products, and advance our careers, this idea that human and personal progress is somehow inevitable, leads to political passivity." "Our passivity is due in part to our inability to confront the awful fact of extinction, either our own inevitable mortality or that of the human species." "The emotional cost of confronting death is painful, and we prefer illusion." "The election and re-election of Obama was one more triumph of illusion over substance." "It was a skillful manipulation and betrayal of the public by a corporate power elite." "We mistook style and ethnicity for progressive politics and genuine change." "The goal of a branded Obama, as with all brands, was to make passive consumers mistake a brand for an experience." "And this is why Obama was named" "Advertising Age's marketer of the year for 2008." "Passivity permits societies to transfer their emotional allegiance to the absurd and ignore real problems." "It exacerbates despair." "It keeps us in a state of mass self-delusion." "Once we are drawn into this form of magical thinking, the structure and goals of the corporate State are not questioned." "This magical thinking, coupled with its bizarre ideology of limitless progress holds out the promise of an impossible, unachievable happiness." "It has turned whole nations into self-consuming machines of death." "Once credit dries up for the average citizen, once massive joblessness creates a permanent and enraged underclass, once the cheap manufactured goods that are the opiates of our commodity culture vanish, we will evolve into a system that closely resembles classical totalitarianism." "Cruder, more violent forms of repression will be employed as the softer mechanisms of control favored by inverted totalitarianism prove useless." "The huge bureaucracy that sustained empire will cease to function as communities collapse into localized enclaves." "The great monuments of capitalism, like the abandoned temples of past civilisations, will stand as deserted relics of a lost age, as the world alters drastically around them." "Some of us will build small, self-contained structures, ones that do as little harm as possible to the environment, and try to weather the collapse." "Those who survive will need isolated areas of farmland distant from urban areas." "Cities will be like deserts, and violence will spread outward across the urban landscape, as produce and goods become prohibitively expensive and State repression becomes harsher and harsher." "The giddy, money-drenched, choreographed carnival, the petty spectacle of politics, will divert our attention from the collapsing world around us." "The glitz and propaganda, the ridiculous obsessions imparted by our electronic hallucinations, and the spectacles that pass for political participation, will mask the deadly ecological assault by the corporate State." "We will convince ourselves that global warming never existed, or we will concede that it exists but insist that we can adapt." "Both responses will satisfy our mania for eternal optimism and our reckless pursuit of personal comfort." "And all around us, the natural world will change." "High in the Arctic, the summer sea ice will disappear." "The dark water that remains absorbing more solar radiation than reflective white ice, significantly increasing the rate of global warming." "The Siberian permafrost will disappear, sending up plumes of methane gas from underground." "The Greenland ice sheet and the Himalayan-Tibetan glaciers will melt." "All remaining nations and corporations will make a rush for the polar regions." "Huge fishing trawlers will rip up the sea floor and kill corals, rhizomes, tube worms and other species that nurture new shoals of fish." "They will leave behind barrened underwater wastelands of mud and debris." "Forests will be cut down incessantly for fuel and commodity." "Water will become contaminated." "Air will become saturated with carbon emissions." "Soil will be depleted." "Acidity levels in the oceans will skyrocket." "Atmospheric temperatures will soar." "We will push the other animals that we share this planet with towards extinction." "The Earth will become ecologically impoverished." "And someone, somewhere, will make obscene sums of money from it." "Corporations, indifferent to what is sacred, see the death of the planet as just another investment opportunity." "They will scurry to mine the exposed polar waters for the last vestiges of oil, gas, minerals and fish." "And this very corporations will dictate our relationship to the ecosystem on which we depend for life, ruling out all chance of survival." "The final phase of 5,000 years of settled human activity ends with collective insanity." "One of the only coherent philosophical positions is revolt." "It is a constant confrontation between man and his obscurity." "It is not aspiration, for it is devoid of hope." "We cannot influence fate." "We will all die, and our individual beings will be obliterated." "But we have a choice in how we live." "A living man can be enslaved and reduced to the historic condition of an object." "But if he dies in refusing to be enslaved, he reaffirms the existence of another kind of human nature." "The corporate elite does not argue that the current system is just or good, because it cannot, but it has convinced the majority of citizens that there is no alternative." "But we are not slaves." "We have a choice." "We have the moral capacity to refuse to be either a victim or an executioner." "We have the moral capacity to say no, to refuse to cooperate." "Any boycott or demonstration, any occupation or sit-in, any strike, any act of obstruction or sabotage, any refusal to pay taxes, any fast, any popular movement, and any act of civil disobedience ignites the soul of the rebel" "and exposes the dead hand of authority." "But we can no longer seek to reform a broken system." "Let the empire collapse;" "sometimes we must die to be reborn." "And if it's broken, break it in half." "We can march in Copenhagen." "We can join the International Day of Climate Action and its worldwide climate protests." "We can compost in our backyards and hang our laundry out to dry." "We can write letters to our elected officials." "We can vote for Obama and chant, "Yes We Can,"" "but the corporate power elite is no longer concerned with our aspirations." "Real changes for society do not and cannot start at the top, where the power elites reside." "Those who hold power will not act with the urgency required to protect human life and the ecosystem." "Decisions about the fate of the planet and human civilisation are in the hands of moral and intellectual ogers." "These political and corporate masters are driven by a craven desire to accumulate wealth at the expense of human life." "The leaders of these corporations now determine our fate." "They are not endowed with human decency or compassion." "Yet their lobbyists make the laws." "Their public relations firms craft the propaganda and trivia pumped out through systems of mass communication." "Their money determines elections." "Their greed turns workers into global serfs and our planet into a wasteland." "As climate change advances, we will face a choice between obeying the rules put in place by corporations, and rebellion." "Those who work human beings to death in overcrowded factories in China and turn the Gulf of Mexico into a dead zone are the enemy." "They serve systems of death." "We cannot appeal to their better nature." "They have none." "EX" "We will either defy the corporate elite, which will mean civil disobedience, a rejection of traditional politics for a new radicalism and the systematic breaking of laws, or see ourselves consumed." "The future, if we obey, will be wrested from us." "Acts of resistance are moral acts." "They take place because people of conscience understand the moral, rather than the practical, imperative of rebellion." "They should be carried out not because they are effective, but because they are right." "Those who begin these acts are always a few." "But no act of resistance is useless, whether it is refusing to pay taxes, fighting for a Tobin tax, revoking a corporate charter, holding global Internet votes, or using Twitter to catalyze a chain reaction of refusal" "against the capitalist machine." "The Internet has been the latest technological instrument of control." "But technology is morally neutral." "It serves the interests of those who control it." "And those who control it today are destroying journalism, culture, and art while they herd the population into clans that fuel isolation, self-delusion, intolerance, and hatred." "We must trust that resistance is worthwhile." "The media, the arts, scholarship, and political and social movements must become conduits for unvarnished moral outrage and passion." "We must defy systems, and even laws, that permit corporations to strangle our culture." "But they will hate us for it." "All who speak in a moral voice, one tied to facts rather than illusions, will become freaks." "A culture, once it no longer values truth and beauty, condemns its most creative and moral people to poverty and obscurity." "And this is our destiny." "The corporate elite will label us the enemy." "They will condemn the rebel as impractical." "They will dismiss their stance as counterproductive." "They will chastise the rebel for being angry." "They will use the hypocritical language of compromise, generosity, and understanding to argue that we must accept and work with the current systems of power." "But the rebel is not concerned with self-promotion or public opinion." "The rebel knows that, as Augustine wrote, hope has two beautiful daughters, anger and courage." "Anger at the way things are and the courage to change them." "This defiance, this capacity to say no, is what mass culture and mass propaganda seeks to eradicate." "As long as we are willing to defy these forces, we have a chance, if not for ourselves, then at least for those who follow." "Acts of rebellion permit us to be free and independent human beings." "But rebellion is not the same as revolution." "Revolution works towards the establishment of a new power structure, and we cannot repeat the mistake of revolution." "Rebellion is about perpetual revolt and permanent alienation from power." "And it is only in a state of rebellion that we can hold fast to moral imperatives that prevent a descent into tyranny." "There is a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can't take part;" "you can't even passively take part." "And you've got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you've got to make it stop." "And you've got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it, that unless you're free, the machine will be prevented from working at all." "Hope is a word that is applicable only to those who grasp reality, however bleak, and do something meaningful to fight back, which does not include the farce of elections and the involvement in mainstream political parties." "Hope is about fighting against the real forces of destruction, not chanting "Yes We Can" in rallies orchestrated by marketing experts, or just begging Obama to be Obama." "Hope, in the hands of realists, spreads fear into the black heart of the corporate elite." "But hope, real hope, will remain thwarted by our collective self-delusion, unless we choose it to be otherwise." "We will either obey, or rebel." "Subtitles:" "Carlos Pérez Barranco"