volunteerism Volunteerism is the idea that you do something à volonté, of your own free will, not because you have been told to, or even asked by someone, but simply because you see something that, in your opinion, should be done. You can do it, and you want to do it, so you do it. It is also the idea that you act out of love, avec un sens de tendresse même pour le milieu où tu te trouves—with a sense of tenderness for your surroundings, without thinking in advance of the compensation, financial or other, you can expect to receive. It is absolutely necessary to the functioning of a sane society that a certain amount of space be left open to this sort of free action. I would even say that nearly all the space should be left open to this purpose, and that actions organized in advance by a central authority should be the very rare exception, taken only in times of real crisis. Unfortunately, to achieve this state of affairs requires the complete reorganization, or deorganization really, of the way we live. This is because, in the kind of society we have today, we are surrounded on all sides by situations where value is fixed in the marketplace, which in turn is enforced by a system of propaganda, military and police, production and distribution controls, and even the mechanisms of modern electoral democracy. In a system where everything from the land we live on, and where our food is grown, to the flow of information has a price fixed in the marketplace, it is no longer possible to act in any sense à volonté. We must sell our time or our passions in the marketplace in order to be able to purchase the necessities of life there. This amounts to having to buy back what by rights belongs to us in the first place, with the inevitable loss of value that occurs when the middleman, the buyer-seller, takes his percentage.
	location: Paris date: March 8, 1992 average rating: [not rated] your rating (0-10):