Background on the Manifesto....

My manifesto deals perhaps most fundamentally with the powers that be and how they're dragging their feet in relation to the environment and the many man made humanitarian issues present at this point in time.

Implicitly I chose to direct my criticisms towards John Locke, and Thomas Hobbes, two familiar enlightenment era philosophers who's ideas greatly inspired the institution of Capitalism.  John Locke proposed an initial "state of nature" from which human beings took from the "commonwealth" all that was necessary and claimed that to leave the natural environment untended by humanity was in fact to waste it.  This by the way is all coming out of second treatise on government.  He goes on to say that the invention of a monetary system allows for unlimited capital gain.  This sounds pretty harmless on paper but it is pretty easy to see that this is surely not the reality, especially in an environment that doesn't have the unlimited resources Locke speaks about.  Nevertheless much of Locke's treatise On government is directed towards the notion that Government has the foremost obligation to ensure an individuals right to massing property and capital.  In my view this is unfounded and our government however influenced by this enlightenment thinker do little to even resemble the already faulty principles Locke promotes.  Locke has been heavily criticized to date, and my criticism is only referential at best.

Next is Hobbes, who I address in an allegorical way mostly.  In his famed work Leviathan he famously describes life without government as "... nasty, brutish, and short”.  Hobbes position is that upon entering into government there is a so called social contract which ensures the safety of the populace as the populace gives deference to the governing body.  

The reason these two thinkers stick out is because their enlightened philosophy was fundamental to the development of systems such as capitalism and the institution of a republic as it appears in our country today.  I feel that this mode of thinking is extremely dated and is intrinsically problematic.  Yet it continues to govern much of our contemporary mode of thought.

Also nationalism was invented roughly around this time...

Another important piece of background info pertains to Karl Marx and the communist manifesto, it's a crucial document and I won't be paraphrasing the whole thing here.  A few essential aspects though are Marx' theory of Historical Materialism, which defines clearly the relationship between the resources of a culture and the culture itself.  This is a broad simplification but I think it's sufficient to just recognize the relationship between culture, and economy.  An appreciation of this is fundamental.

Next up is Jeremy Rifkin's contemporary work, empathic civilization which again I cannot paraphrase, but paints an interesting picture of human nature which like Marx and unlike the above mentioned enlightenment philosophers, espouses the realization that humanity is fundamentally an adaptive species forming itself around external stimuli rather than having any real "fixed" properties aside from that of the biological.   Furthermore the "empathic impulse" is a defining principle of humanity, it is essentially our ability to, in a near literal sense, "be", another person or another thing, it is the development and enrichment of this faculty, through healthy attachment environments (attachment theory of psychology), that allows for the positive aspects of the human character to come through, conversely, oppression of this human necessity leads to anti-social and violent behavior.  Another important concept put forth in Rifkin's book is how different paradigmatic shifts occur in consciousness as new modes of communication arise.  This can be seen from the advent of language, through the telegraph, up to the internet, currently we are in the era of Dramaturgical consciousness.  The advent of information technology and the network of global communications allows for previously unimagined potential, or exploitation...

Finally a few nuances appear in my writing that are direct references to Philosopher/Theologian Alan Watts, who puts for the proposition in his lecture series  Ecology & Religion that man kind has hitherto seen themselves in opposition to or as seperate from the their natural environment (this again is can be traced back to the enlightenment and the scientific revolution, with their notions of being committed to the conquest of nature).  Through a reevaluation of this very important concept we can begin to design a more symbiotic relationship with our environment instead of the unsustainable model we've come to enjoy.  At any rate this is just a little essential background that may help to expound on what I've written.