“Every social system we know of has some kind of power system embedded in it. In our society it is embedded economic power which has overwhelming influence on the state. That is the core of the power system. Any power system is going to defend itself. One of the ways it defends itself is by creating barriers to perceiving what it is and that is something you have to learn to disentangle when you try to investigate a society.” Noam Chomsky

How we penetrate these barriers and dismantle the self protective apparatus of the elites who create them is a way of finding out how the world works, the western world anyway. From school we are taught about our society mainly from an inward perspective and we learn mostly what others in the world can do to us rather than what we do to them. Much of our western history is the glorification of murder and robbery in a grand scale. We discover this if we care to look beyond how it is perceived in most history books. It can be taught and drummed into us from an early age to make irrational choices through belief systems, myths, propaganda and fear. The proper study of this history is key to understanding how these barriers are created and maintained.

Getting out into the world is the best way to get to understand things. When dealing with human beings it is essential to get in amongst them. The less components, technologies, barriers, human or otherwise the better. Face to face engagement is the best guard against misunderstanding and avoiding the barriers we sometimes inadvertently create ourselves.

Speak truth to power when we could be speaking to people. The powerful like nothing better that we should spend most of our time explaining to them the errors of their way – which they already know anyway. This can form a self created barrier and time wasting tactic when we should be spending time helping others to organise against them?

The tyranny of words in the computer age. Seemingly the average computer user has written more words than Shakespeare did in his whole life. True or not, in Shakespeare time the oral tradition was the essential carrier of information. The oral tradition still remains the most powerful vehicle for transmitting ideas and breaking down barriers.