A Movement for Literary Liberty
Specters are haunting America; nay, our whole world: the specters of cultural indifference, apathy, mediocrity, and mendacity.
When, in the course of cultural development, the literary, journalistic, and artistic disciplines become filled with weakness, deception, and submissiveness, people within that society cease to be independently thinking individuals. They, instead, become sheep to political, religious, and economic would-be shepherds; wolves waiting to prey upon the unwary.
Indifference and apathy are phantoms which distract the citizens in much, if not all, the world. This ennui is only one of the self-perpetuating responses to the fear fed to people by global mass media. One only needs to look to the years of worldwide torture, war, suffering, and fiscal corruption that filled the chronicles of the first part of the 21st century to find legitimacy in these statements.
We put forward as epitomizing Mediocrity the two-dimensional, formulaic drivel that constitutes the majority of popular literature permeating our society. News stands and bookstores are replete with simplified and pre-digested ideas fit for “general” consumption. Interlaced with the fiscal and political mendacity of large media corporations, this 24-hour-a-day pulp-fiction dulls the senses, leading people to become indifferent to their own personal, ethical, and cultural development.
Over-stimulated to the point of deafness by the perpetual howls of mass media, individuals become ever on alert, waiting for the next big misfortune or menace. People are further told they are powerless to combat those threats, that they must be worried, afraid, or restrict their lives to strictly accommodate the ever-growing terrors of the world. The populace seeks to escape by those means provided by newspapers, network television, and mass market literature. They look for solace and solutions in the very words that befuddled them in the first place. Hence the irony within the chains binding the literarily challenged.
The great literature of the past, as well as thought-provoking literature of the present is ignored as “too highbrow” and remains unapproachable by the media. Young adults have become unaware of its existence. Disparagement of higher learning and cultural enrichment in favor of education focused toward only technical and manual labor, and the remuneration achievable from this employment, has bred an alarming indifference to intellectual pursuits in this country.
Indifference breeds fear of that which through lack of interest becomes unknown. Fear arises from the abdication of pursuit of truth and the abandonment of responsibility. Fear drives scarcity. Fear drives alienation, lassitude, and a lack of growth. Fear is what drives the primal man and not the evolved human being.
In such an environment, when the air of similitude, ignorance, and mass production becomes intolerable to those who believe in self-determination and continual personal development, it is an imperative that individuals and groups of like-minded people rise up and perform the service of emancipating minds from fear, severing the shackles of the emotive self, and providing access to a scholarship of freedom. By introducing alternate forms of thought, by exalting the importance of questioning “the norm,” by inducing the habits of truth and responsibility in general culture, citizens will begin to understand that they have real power to shape the society they inhabit, and to demand the same of their leaders.
The doctrine that Alternate Way puts forth seeks to transcend the boundaries of political, religious, or fiscally-imposed statuses in the lives of people throughout the world. True human evolution can only be realized when humans free themselves of fear, apathy, and the renunciation of action. Once begun, literary freedom does not allow those who devote themselves to it to forsake it whenever they like.
To these ends, we of Alternate Way Press evince these principles in all we do:
- To help individuals and communities move beyond limiting personal beliefs, restrictive world views, and restrained ideas.
- To counteract the retreat that fear creates.
- To live in the moment and assist others in recognizing what is truly important in the human experience
- To create an atmosphere of expansion, abundance, and vision rather than contraction, scarcity, and ignorance.
- To grow, from an unorganized pool of potential, where all materials have a possible use, into a crystalline structure in which those materials are used to fulfill potential and carve facets of all that is possible.
For the support of this declaration, we mutually pledge to each of our authors and artists, as well as to each other, our time, focus, and efforts to make our endeavors known to the wider world and future generations.
The betterment of all human minds is a vast mission. We will not shirk from our duty in performing this honorable and necessary undertaking.
