Don't the institutions of Empire hold all the power?

As powerful as they may seem, the institutions of Empire have only the power that we the people choose to yield to them. Although Empire has ruled for 5,000 years, our time is distinctive, because it brings both the imperative and the opportunity for people to make a collective choice to withhold their power from the institutions of Empire and redirect it to the work of bringing forth the new cultures and institutions of Earth Community. The imperative comes from the human confrontation with environmental limits. Liberating ourselves from Empire has become a condition of meaningful species survival.  The possibility comes from new communications capabilities available only since the early 1990s. For the first time since the first humans walked the earth our technology allows ordinary people to organize on a global scale. This is why deep change is now possible that was never possible before.

The greatest barriers to achieving the Great Turning to Earth Community exist only in our minds. The cultural stories of Empire tell us we live in the best of all possible worlds and have no real alternative to the status quo. Constantly repeated by corporate media, these stories become the prevailing cultural stories and induce a kind of cultural trance that holds us captive to the dominator systems of Empire.

The key to change is to break the trance, grow community, and bring forth through a process of emergence the stories and institutions of a new era of Earth Community to displace the stories and institutions of Empire.

As stated so eloquently by Frances Moore Lappe in Getting a Grip,