Opposing the System

by Charles A. Reich

Charles A. Reich's new book breaks the prolonged silence of progressive voices in the face of increasing social breakdown. Carrying forward the analysis in his best-selling classic, The Greening of America, he calls for a fundamental change of direction before our country is torn apart by internal conflict. The past twenty-five years have demonstrated that uncontrolled economic power destroys the organic basis of human society, causing insecurity, depletion of earnings, the unraveling of family connections, the rise of inequality, poverty, violence and crime, and the malignant neglect of our social and natural habitat. We make things worse by blaming each other, attacking symptoms rather than causes, abandoning our principles and ideals, and attempting an impossible return to the past. Opposing the System provides a more intelligible picture of our world and a more penetrating diagnosis of our malady than has heretofore been available. It shows how efforts at reform, including the counterculture and mainstream liberalism, failed not because of unattainable goals but because of reliance on a false map of reality - a map shared with today's conservatives. Once this map is discarded, we regain our ability to imagine a far better and more hopeful future. With both political parties committed to essentially the same pro-System course, there is no institutional means for stopping the ongoing destruction of our society. Accordingly, Charles Reich declares the time has arrived for opposition to the System as a whole. We must condemn it as both morally bankrupt and as a threat to the survival of our species. We must reassert our sovereign power as citizens to create a society respectful of nature and human needs.

Hardcover

First published September 26, 1995

About the author

Charles Alan Reich was an American academic and writer best known for writing the 1970 book The Greening of America, a paean to the counterculture of the 1960s.

Reviews

[Catherine · Rating 5 out of 5]

In chapter one, I read this:

There is a very real danger that those now in control will drive us straight off a cliff. Undeterred by mounting evidence of impending social catastrophe, they may bring about such dangerous inequality, such widespread insecurity, and such massive damage to the natural and human habitat that the deprived and dispossessed will wreak havoc in return.

What boggles my mind is that this book was written in 1995. Charles Reich saw then what we have become even more of. He pretty much write that when you boil everything of value down to its economic value, it is bad for society and humanity. what he couldn't have seen yet was the fracturing of our culture by the various peg holes of entertainment, education, and careers that we end up inhabiting due to the infinite varieties of the internet offering and unabated greed.