Meat, Complicity, and Thou
The Imperium started with the Roman Empire and continued to the Holy Roman Empire, the British Empire, the American Empire, and to the Global Corporate Empire. White Christian patriarchal male elites have for the past 2500 years shaped our relationships with others, all life and the Earth to enrich themselves and maintain their domination: tribute, tithes, mercantilism, national capitalism, and transnational capitalism. The Imperium denies the sacredness of the Earth and all life, a core Christian belief, causing Western people to believe themselves apart from the rest of life and Earth and superior to all. This denial of the sacred and promotion of white Western exceptionalism has led to the Imperium’s deluded belief that it has no moral responsibility or ecologic restraints.
The Imperium imposes its oppressive regime upon others through fear-conditioning, rewarding the complicit with privileges, intimidating those who resist, and subjugating those from whom they steal land and their labor. White privileged people, especially those living in the U.S., live within a culture of complicity. We cannot effectively resist the Imperium until we have overcome our complicity with the harms of the Imperium.
We (white privileged people) need to free ourselves from our complicity with the harmful ways of the Imperium and learn how to cultivate loving and caring relationships with the sacred within other people, all life, and the Earth, acting in ways that restore Earth’s harmony and balance.
MCT will focus on ways to overcome our complicity with the Imperium. By understanding our complicity within the global corporate food regime, we might see through our exceptionalism, the root of complicity with what harms. We might resolve to do the right thing even if it is the harder thing to do.
The time has come to try something different from what the culture of the Imperium allows us to do. Unless we overcome our complicity, life and Earth we will not survive the omnicidal trajectory of the Imperium.
Many of us share the frustration that all the strategies we have tried in the past have not deterred the Imperium. We have not yet tried overcoming our own exceptionalism and complicity with what harms others and the Earth.
The complicit, those who support and cooperate with the Imperium within the U.S., consists primarily of White Americans who have benefited from the Imperium conquests, colonization, and domination in the forms of land and privileges. We need to free ourselves of our complicity before we can discern together how to uproot the Imperium.
The problems of the community must be solved by of the community.
