Theo Kitchener talks about 'Doing it Ourselves'

- by Theo Kitchener and Doing It Ourselves

Doing It Ourselves' initial political thinking was that there was a collapse coming, that would be both slow and fast at times, that there was a fast chunk coming sometime soon in the form of a global systemic banking crisis, and that if we worked hard enough to spread alternatives that these could form the basis of a new society that we could transition to through the collapse.

Unfortunately I now wonder how much confirmation bias had to do with that strategy. I wanted to share a bit about how I and Doing It Ourselves have come to change our politics.

 A few years ago the climate stuff really hit me. I think we often believe that we've internalised something, when actually we've taken on a bit of it but we're still mostly in denial.

At that point I realised that if we were serious about avoiding runaway climate change, we needed a lot more than just a slow transition.

It had to be fast and it had to go against the powers that be, which is quite difficult to do in a transition model where things just spread because of the self-interest of individuals wanting to be prepared for peak oil and financial collapse.

The same is the case with shutting down all the nuclear power plants, a lack of maintenance and many more meltdowns is what's likely to happen if we just transition without fighting the system.

The next thing was when we did a thought experiment about how we would deal with a systemic banking crisis if we were the government.

Luke realised that if they were smart, they would go to the public and say something along the lines of: "We're going to have to shift to a planned economy temporarily in order to deal with the crisis. If we don't, the whole economy is going to fall apart and there will be total chaos. So everybody just keep going to work, and we'll organise rations and everything will be fine". And then more likely than not, it would end up being part of a shift towards authoritarianism.

 n top of all of that, financial collapse has taken way longer to not fully happen yet, than any of us thought it would.

Governments and central banks have been really adept at manipulating markets and delaying the crisis. While I think the logic of the system still means there has to be a banking crisis at some point, I no longer have any certainty at all that it will be anytime soon, nor that when it happens that it's likely to lead to the kinds of changes that we want. I think to be honest that it was easy to believe that that might just work, largely because we were disillusioned with other kinds of activism working, and we really wanted something to be game-changing.

We've been thinking and talking a lot over the last year about how we could build the kind of movement that we actually need to get systemic change. Because we need to avoid runaway climate change, put an end to poverty, stop biodiversity loss, free the refugees (and stop creating refugees), remediate all the pollution, stop nuclear power, change the system so that people in general find fulfilment rather than unhappiness, and so many more things.

Currently, we never seem to actually win any of our campaigns, partially because of powerful vested interests manipulating things, and partially because we're all complicit with the system. Cognitive dissonance plays a big part in this it makes sense that we can be happier ignoring the problems rather than seeing that we are part of the reason for them.

We need to build a movement that can get past cognitive dissonance and overcome the vested interests. Our next shot at a game-changing strategy is to try to bring together the building alternatives and resistance parts of the movement. We believe that through promoting alternatives, more people will be able to see that there could be another way that might actually make them happier, and get rid of the guilt, anger, shame and grief they feel about the state of things. Without that awareness, it seems we can't get enough people resisting to actually win our campaigns, let alone bring about systemic change, which really if you think about it, is necessary to really change most of the things that matter to us.

Systemic change was always at the heart of what Doing It Ourselves was all about, in a way it's only a slight change of strategy. We still believe that our civilisation is in decline, that we need to radically simplify our lives to live within the planet's bounds, and that there are plenty of positive and exciting ways to do that. We're just adding in that we need to fight for that to actually happen, otherwise it probably won't.

 So we're rebooting Doing It Ourselves, putting forward a utopian politics that can hopefully break through the disillusionment. We're keen to promote alternatives, support resistance movements, encourage cultural change and engage the community at large.

We have heaps of new exciting plans including a radio show on 3CR, a new animation/film, community engagement conversations, culture jamming, workshops and heaps more.