Feral's Renegade Research is about connecting dots and discovering new ways of seeing to bring a new world into being. The “dots” to be connected are those bits of experience, information, impressions, curiosities, hunches, memories, intuitions and ideas that fill our waking hours (even if we’re barely conscious of them as such) and that leak into our dreams when we sleep. The way we connect them to form “reality” is largely dependent on the constitution of our basic schema, the conceptual framework that organizes and helps us “make sense” of the events in our daily lives. For most of us, the underlying schema, the "reality" we have had to accept and adapt to, has been formed within the capitalist paradigm.

In recent years it has been getting harder even for the most ardent supporters of the capitalist system to justify the ugliness of its so-called “excesses,” which now appear to us as its unmasked face contorted by the corruption at its heart. For more and more people, the greed, exploitation, state torture in the name of "homeland security," starvation in the midst of plenty, private paramilitary forces in the service of corporations killing campesinos with impunity, refugees made homeless by proxy wars, generations growing up in refugee camps, trade deals in which heads of countries sign away the rights to the natural resources their people need to sustain their existence, CEOs getting million-dollar bonuses for "restructuring" workers out of their jobs, and the myriad miseries imposed upon people everywhere by capitalism's "excesses" can no longer be justified in the name of "progress." Capitalism doesn't make sense as a socioeconomic system. We need to create new schemata to support our vision of a new and better world for the benefit of all -- not just the few.

Fortunately, the dominant paradigm, which posits that we are fundamentally motivated by individual self-interest, is in an advanced state of decomposition resulting from its own internal contradictions. We may have believed it was just “reality” in the past, but it has become so burdensome for most of us, and so disastrous for so many of us, that we can now hear the choruses of small voices breaking through from the other side of the media blackout on hope. Those voices are saying that another world is possible because another world is necessary.

Inspired by those voices of hope, Renegade Research seeks out news, essays, articles, reports, book reviews, communiqués and commentary relevant to the work of changing the world. I hope you'll find my dispatches interesting and informative. Although the ideas presented are within the context of the life narrative of one person, Feral Sage, the purpose of Renegade Research is to provide a basis for discussion and further research, especially of the renegade kind. It's an incitement to think about the world as it is and as it could be.

My opinions are, as are all opinions (however well-informed), subjective -- and I hope sometimes maybe even subversive. But they carry no "weight" beyond their resonance within you. Any ideas they might spark in your thinking are yours to develop and to pass on. The content of these pages is meant to assist you in your own critical analysis of the life-and-death issues we (the human population of the entire world) are facing in these times. We are all responsible for connecting our own dots. The freedom to do so is also our fundamental right. Weaving our disparate realities into the fabric of a new world is a community project of global scope.

Renegade Research is inspired by dialogical conversation with others who also believe that another, better world is possible and who are completely committed to bringing this new world into full reality. I thank all of you for your gift of inspiration, for being the change you wish to see, for being critical thinkers, and for skilfully deconstructing the dominant paradigm. Many of you are daring to create a new world at tremendous cost to yourselves, and even at great risk to your lives, in the face of the powers of violence. May the vision you have of a new world continue to take root and grow throughout the world, and may solidarity swell like a tidal wave.

To those who share the desire to create a better world, I hope that the research contained in these pages will prove useful to your world-changing efforts.

Feral Sage

feral@renegaderesearch.org
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