Parallel society vs. totalitarianism – how to create a free world

RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL – We live in a time of disruptive technologies and innovations that create new markets and new value networks or start at the bottom of an existing market and eventually displace established market-leading companies, products, and alliances.

Is it perhaps time to apply this business model to society as a whole? Do we need to create parallel forms of education and science, parallel political structures, a parallel information network, and free parallel markets that build a parallel economy to escape authoritarian state structures and a political and financial system that does not reflect our needs and desires?

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This video from the ‘Academy of Ideas’ takes on this question to better understand why this might be an alternative and what such a thing might look like.

Some dissidents in totalitarian communist regimes have argued in the past, looking at the parallel structures that have already emerged or could emerge in the future, that they could gradually supplant or humanize the existing official structures.

The reason for creating parallel structures and parallel societies at that time was simple. Since the official system had a monopoly on violence and was too powerful to challenge directly, the best way to avoid it and defy it was to ignore it as much as possible.

At that time, the parallel society began with spontaneous actions of mutual self-defense in different parts of society. Those who participate are active people who can no longer bear to passively watch the general rigidity of decay, bureaucracy, and the suffocation of any lively idea or sign of movement in the official sphere.

Instead of eliminating the repressive state structures, it was better to build better systems that could function as alternatives.

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