10 Years of Engage

Engage! is now ten years old. I started this blog back in 2015, after making my Bodhisattva vows. The blog was a way for me to express and work through my lifelong commitment to social progress and my later practice as a Buddhist. 2025 marks the 10th anniversary of Engage, and its final conclusion. This is the last year that I will be publishing this blog. The primary reason for closing the blog is financial: I can’t afford to keep the blog ad-free and pay for an exclusive domain name. Without paying for the ad-free status, readers will be subjected to a stream of distracting and disgusting ads that I have no control over. Some people have computer systems that eliminate distracting items, but not everyone does. Engage will remain online as an archive, but I have no plans to publish more articles. I am in the process of writing a novel which occupies my writing time. However, I have a few more things to say before I sign off.

Billionaire Capitalism will Destroy this Planetary Ecosystem.

The greatest threat to the ecology of our planet is not people’s choices about household consumption: what we eat, how we drive, what we buy, use and throw away, although all of those actions are critical. The actions of state and local governments are also critical, as are the policies of the Nation State. But beyond those layers of market choice and governance, Billionaire Capitalism trumps them all (pun intended). What will destroy this planetary ecosystem is Billionaire Capitalism.

George Monbiot has been saying this for years, and intellectually I knew he was right, but now I feel it in my bones. Like everyone else, I have been watching the capture of the US federal government by billionaire techno-fascists from Silicon Valley and Corporate Media. I have seen that in one short year a few billionaire white men, who are deeply racist, sexist and xenophobic, can destroy everything we’ve achieved in terms of social progress for the last 50 years. They will block and dismantle every law and regulation we’ve put into place to protect people and ecosystems. All our efforts to change our household habits, to put laws into place to protect our species, land, water and air, will be destroyed by Billionaire Capitalists so they can exert total control over society and extract more wealth.

And they simply don’t care. They don’t care if everything dies, if we all die. They don’t care if there are few humans left on the planet other than themselves and those few who serve them. The techno-fascists are eugenicists who believe in the ‘natural’ supremacy of a Master Race. And they believe they are the Master Race.

Empires fall. All things are impermanent. All things pass. Systems collapse. We are witnessing the final stage of a global system that will inevitably collapse and destroy itself. This is what I learned as a doctoral student in social ecology, studying systems theory. All systems go through a series of growth stages towards ‘climax’ states that are fragile and over-connected, with insufficient resources to sustain themselves. Collapse can be either partial or total, but collapse always happens in every system. And collapse always begins from the top down. Elites fight for remaining resources and destroy each other, and destroy the base they depend on. It turns out that the people at the top, the apex predators, are the most vulnerable to collapse.

The totalitarian control that Billionaire capitalists exert over our minds, bodies, our speech, what we believe, create and share with each other, will continue for decades into the future. Although collapse is sudden and catastrophic (another principle of systems theory) I will probably never live to see the end of this regime.

What can I do then? I will continue to go on being and doing what I have always been: a queer artist. As a queer person, the mere fact of my existence is itself an act of political resistance to a regime that says I should not even exist. As an artist, I imagine and create worlds that the techno-fascists want to silence and suffocate. What they want is total technological control, and the work I do as a human artist defies that control. It’s never been more clear to me that the human arts are the most powerful form of resistance to techno-fascism. We think and believe as we want, we imagine and dream the worlds we desire, and we create our lives as we see fit for ourselves. We create worlds and forms of existence that aren’t supposed to be. Free and independent human artists defy every form of totalitarian silence and control. If there is any hope for surviving this system collapse, artists are at the forefront of those who will lead the captives to freedom.

Art is Political

So that is why I have dedicated myself to continuing my work as a Bodhisattva in the form of my artistic endeavors. Under a totalitarian technological system that exalts machines over the fate of humanity, Art is activism.

The following video is a film about a drag performance artist in Moscow. Their performance is not overtly sexual, but it is highly disturbing to the fascist culture of Moscow. As the artist Gena says in the film, “Drag has always been political.” Bravo.