The above image was made using stable diffusion with the prompt 'Harnessing the power of belief.'
We all routinely assign legitimacy to the features of our human ecology that comprise consensual reality. Some features of this reality are physical and thus impossible to regard as anything but legitimate. Other features are more like games that we play to organize our activity. National borders. The economy. Non-human entities like corporations. Our belief in these things grants them legitimacy. Without that belief, they would cease to be.
These are realities that we create. It's well within our power to create other realities. The powers that be attempt to limit our use of this power in a wide variety of ways. And yet, their authority itself stems from our use of this power. Their legitimacy would vanish overnight if everyone stopped recognizing it.
It would of course be catastrophic if the control regime's perceived legitimacy vanished overnight. Every one of the regime's systems arose to solve problems, and these problems would quickly overwhelm society in the absence of these systems. At the same time, the new problems created by the control regime are themselves overwhelming society. Solving these new problems within the regime's systems is impossible. These systems can't be changed from within, but they may be acted upon and forced to change by outside forces.
In practice, outside forces can only mean groups of people. Everything big that changes begins with a group of people all believing the same story. This salient fact isn't lost on the powers that be. There are consequently massive coordinated propaganda and censorship programs underway to manipulate us into believing the official story over all other stories.
This may all seem very general and abstract, but there's a crucial point here. It is in our power to determine which shared stories are and are not legitimate. We could even strip the legitimacy from the entire corporate world with little more than an act of will, reviving the idea of corporate death penalties, but carried out by extrajudicial processes of our collective consciousness.
At the level of individual companies, Pfizer has a body count as high as any criminal cartel. From my perspective, they're more a criminal cartel than a legit business. Maybe we should start treating everyone involved in their enterprise like the criminals they are. Treating them like criminals in a social sense, because they clearly own the legal process.
I like to say that government is legitimate to the extent that it protects freedom and illegitimate to the extent that it impinges upon it. Along similar lines, businesses are legitimate to the extent that they add value to society and illegitimate to the extent that their behavior is parasitic. These legitimacy thresholds may sound unrealistic, but that's only because we've been conditioned to accept tyrannical government and parasitic corporate overlords.
It's in our power to improve the situation by refusing to continue granting legitimacy to the powers that be when they behave badly. But we can't merely dismiss our broken institutions and companies without simultaneously establishing better alternative institutions and companies. This is already happening in some areas, but in other areas it hasn't yet begun.
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