Domesticating the Human Mind

You are free to think independently, so long as you can justify your independent thought with historical precedent and the appropriate application of predefined rules of logic.  Think for yourself, but make sure you cite your sources.  The college classroom is just another venue for propaganda, helping to ensure that the machine has the right kind of friction, helping to weed out the outliers that could cause potential damage to the system’s smooth operation. 

And even nonconformity becomes a kind of participation, a service to the system, a lubricant to ensure the gears remain sharp.

  

Drinking the Koolaid

Lemmings don’t really commit mass suicide.  It’s an old myth that was popularized by a staged sea-plunge in a Disney movie in the late 1950s.

To my knowledge, humans are the only animal capable of purposely ending its own life—and certainly the only species capable of mass suicide.

Why is that?  What could drive a creature to engage in collective acts of self-destruction? 

I suspect that collectivist social activities such as mass suicide, organized warfare, professional sport spectatorship, and Christmas shopping are not part of our genetic heritage, a manifestation of some evolved primate herd mentality.  Chimpanzees have been observed engaging in cooperative behavior that includes gang killings and small-scale “warfare;” but there is nothing that would suggest that the participants in these events are not acting independently, as individuals.  And we are, after all, 98% chimpanzee.  But maybe there is something in that remaining 2% that makes us prone to mindless acts of self-destructive conformity.

Again, to my knowledge, subsistence hunter-gatherer societies have not been observed engaging in mass activities of this sort.  They have individual suicide (although at a far lower frequency than occurs in our “civilized” society).  And they have warfare.  But the warfare is not organized in a way that comes close to comparing with the zombie hoard-soldier approaches seen with agrarian and industrial societies.  Modern military combat is predicated on the careful coordination and timing of mass action: an approach reflected in the image of men in identical uniforms marching in lockstep.  And our war narratives are laced with tales of selfless bravery: a soldier who jumps on a live grenade to save his comrades; whereas a Plains Indian warrior in battle is a “free agent” who takes orders from his own intuition and experience.  He is very unlikely to intentionally take an arrow for a fellow warrior—in some circles, such an act would be an insult to the intended target.       

It is difficult to support the idea that mass suicide—or collectivist behavior of any kind beyond that found in the family unit—is part of our DNA.  And if the propensity to engage in mass suicide is not genetic, then what is its source? 

Arachnophobia

In previous posts I have suggested (and written explicitly) that corporations are anti-human.  That’s not to say that corporate entities never act in ways that appear on the surface to be in humanity’s best interest.  Corporations, as parasites, have a stake in the short-term wellbeing of their hosts.  It is my understanding that many spiders don’t kill their prey outright.  Instead they paralyze them, immobilize them and keep them alive so that they can siphon off their fresh body fluids at their leisure.   

Who is We?

I was reading an article in a “green” magazine recently about the changes we need to make if we want to save our planet for future generations—nothing surprising, enlightening, or particularly useful.  Old news.  I’ve probably read over a hundred of these kinds of articles in the last few years, and each one leaves me with slightly less patience for then next.  They appear to be increasingly preachy or trite or both, but it is not the tone of these articles that is sapping my stamina.  Nor is it the all-to predictable content. 

It’s the use of pronouns. 

Specifically, it’s the liberal use of we, us, and our as if there were actual meaningful referents for these words.  “It is up to us.” “We have to change the way we think about our relationship with the environment.”

Who the hell is we?  Which us?  Who is the owner of our?  

If the authors are intending these terms to refer to some generic “everyone,” then they’re talking nonsense.  Everyone did not just release a quarter of a billion gallons of oil into the Gulf of Mexico.  Everyone is not harvesting old growth forests or draining sensitive wetlands to build condos.  Everyone did not strew depleted uranium munitions all over northern Africa.  Everyone is not marketing disposable razors, beverage and processed food containers, and tampon applicators that end up in a giant plastic vortex in the Pacific Ocean.  Everyone is not gouging mountains into oblivion and sending endless coal trains to CO₂-spewing power plants.  Everyone is not killing the planet.  Very specific people with very specific agendas operating within very specific power structures are killing the planet.  In fact, a good argument could be made that it’s really no one at all, that it’s the power structures themselves—and not any specific group of individuals—that are squeezing the life out of the biosphere.

Or perhaps the authors really believe that individual people, you and I, are responsible for our ecological woes.  Because my kitchen toaster uses electricity from coal, I shoulder part of the burden for the destruction of the Appalachians.  In my greed for crisp jam-covered bread in the morning, I share the blame for global climate change.

Claiming that individuals (you and I), are part of the cause suggests that individuals (you and I) have some actual power to effect a solution.  This line of reasoning is, of course, delusional.  Neither you nor I have ever had any meaningful choice in the matter.  True, some people in economically “advanced” countries have some trivial options with respect to the volume and nature of their consumer behavior, how much and what type of energy they use; they have some limited say about how actively and how directly they participate in the despoilment of the planet.  But such control is always exercised over the omnipresent backdrop of a large-scale industrial consumer-based system.  It is only because the society you and I live in is the highly advanced planet-killing monster it is, that we have the freedom to titrate our consumption in the first place.  .

But there is something more insidious about the idea that individual people acting with free will are responsible for civilization’s destructive nature.  It is a well-used diversionary tactic that helps to ensure that those entities that are actually responsible are never made to atone for their transgressions.  To put it in psychological terms, it is a subtle form of “blaming the victim.” 

The Keep America Beautiful Campaign was launched In the 1970s and funded largely by beverage and fast food companies in response to the threat of bottle-bill legislation requiring beverage manufactures to reuse their product containers.  It was as a well-planned and highly successful corporate diversionary tactic with the dual goal of equating environmental pollution with litter (effectively diverting attention from less visible but far more deadly industrial pollutants) and convincing the public that a handful of uncaring individuals were responsible for the problem (thus eliminating corporate responsibility for the environmental impact of their over-packaged consumer products).  In many ways, the “green” movement of the last decade is just a larger and more ubiquitous iteration of the Keep America Beautiful Campaign. 

Ecosystems can be saved, the impact of climate change can be diminished if only we would take the initiative and do something about it!

But if by we is meant the everyday citizens of our global corporate civilization, there is absolutely nothing we can do.  Civilization is a hierarchical system for consuming and concentrating resources.  The global corporate industrial complex is a machine designed specifically to consume the planet at an ever-accelerating rate.  That is its purpose, its unspoken prime directive.  And the microscopic proportion of the global human population who temporarily occupy the apex of the system’s power hierarchy, the ones most responsible for our situation, are not free to act in any way that is counter to the prime directive.  You can’t change the rules and play the game at the same time.

There are some things that we can do to that might actually have an impact on our situation—things that you and I can do acting together or alone.  But they are not the kinds of things that will ever find their way to the pages of any magazine that solicits corporate advertising.

 

Why corporations hate people

Wealth and power are synonymous.  In recent decades the power of wealth has become increasingly concentrated among an elite few, and the disparity between the wealthy-powerful and the poor-powerless is increasing at an accelerating rate. 

The primary mechanism driving the increasing disparity in wealth and power is a legally sanctioned embodiment of greed, an act of economic legerdemain called the private corporation.  Corporations were originally created as organizational structures that would allow for the pooling of economic resources to accomplish large-scale tasks, building a bridge or a stretch of railway, for example, tasks that were beyond the economic scope of single individuals.  Their state charters were limited to specific purposes, and they were dissolved as soon as those purposes were accomplished—or beforehand if they were not operating according to the chartered agreement.  Thus a corporation’s power may have been substantial, but its reach was tightly focused, and its existence was temporary. 

Things have changed.

Today’s corporations are different creatures entirely.  They are open-ended both in terms of their specific tasks and their duration.  And their potential for power is virtually limitless.  The modern transnational corporation is a machine whose sole purpose is the concentration of wealth.  Think of a giant planet eating robot from a 1950’s era science fiction movie, only instead of metal, imagine its body is composed of laws and legal procedures, and instead of a network of servos and massive hydraulic pistons, its movements are controlled by a hierarchical arrangement of corporate executives and administrators.  The corporation’s brain is its board of directors who act on behalf of the interest of distant shareholders in much the same way that a mindless planet eating sci-fi robot acts out the will of the malevolent aliens who created it and sent it to Earth.  People, human individuals, play only two roles in the corporate scheme: as resources to exploit in the quest for ever increasing wealth, power, and control, or as occupants of supportive positions within the structure of the corporation itself, literal cogs in the corporate machine.  Frequently the distinction between these two roles is blurred—especially at the lower reaches of the corporate hierarchy, the hourly wage-earner. 

It is not hyperbole to say that our global civilization is an organization of and for corporations, and that human beings participate in civilization only in proportion to their ability to participate in roles designed for them by these corporate entities.  You are either a consumer of corporate products and services, or you are involved in providing those products and services for consumption by others and you are a consumer of corporate products and services.  Most of us fall into the latter category.  Most multinational corporations are incorporations of corporations, that is, they are corporate organizations of multiple corporations, many of which are in turn composed of smaller corporations.  Always at the bottom of the hierarchy, though, are individual people, human beings, consuming or otherwise facilitating the corporate agenda.  Thus the power wielded by any corporation ultimately depends on the active participation of actual people.  This is a potential frailty, a potentially exploitable weakness in the corporate machine, a focal point of attack for those who would liberate us from corporate control, from civilization’s death star. 

It is also this weakness that powers the corporate drive to dehumanize.  The more that people think of themselves in terms of their corporate role, as consumers for instance, rather than in terms of their humanity, the less likely anyone will think to exploit this weakness.

Civilization is not a genetic disease

Mother culture provides several cleverly crafted ways of deflecting questions directed at the validity of her narratives.  Deep questioning of the status quo is a form of insanity.  Those who would question the legitimacy of civilization are clearly in need of psychiatric attention.  Those who would write a blog echoing the suggestion that we need to end civilization intentionally before it crashes on top of us are insane but harmless: the caricature of the lunatic marching in the street with the sign reading “the end is near.”  It’s important that anyone who suggests dismantling the status quo is made to appear crazy and at the same time irrelevant.  Any attempts to engage in rational discourse with civilization’s apologists are met with knee-jerk retorts that assume the form of rational rejoinder: “We need civilization” or “Civilization does more good than harm.”  And from those who acknowledge that civilization has generated some serious problems, we often hear variations on: “With the right changes, we can make the system work” or “Our technology will eventually solve our problems.” Lurking behind all of these is the assumption that civilization is part of what it means to be human, that it is inevitable and thus the problems it creates are unavoidable.

Civilization is not coded in our DNA!   

The fact that industrial civilization exists means that it is compatible with our evolved capacities (at least in the short term); but compatible does not mean inevitable.  Civilization depends on our evolved mnemonic and linguistic faculties and our ability to represent the world symbolically, along with our willingness to engage an artificial world of abstract reified entities.  But that does not make civilization obligatory any more than Nike corporation is a natural outgrowth of bipedal locomotion. 

In Avoiding Today's Pain, We Ensure Tomorrow's Agony

“It is too late to stop now.  Industrial civilization has developed gargantuan inertia.  Change is painful; the average person will not be willing to accept the pain.  The average person will fight to the death to keep their corporate shackles firmly in place.”

It is true that dismantling civilization is going to be inconceivably painful.  There is no way around that.  It will involve a magnitude of change beyond that of the most devastating natural disaster.  It will involve a disruption in the predictability of daily life currently experienced only by people living in active war zones.  As I write this, the media are reporting on the displaced fishermen and others in the Gulf of Mexico, struggling to come to grips with the loss of their livelihood as oil continues to gush from the ocean floor.  For many of them, the mere loss of connection with industrial civilization, the loss of their role, their place in the gears of the machine, their ability to continue to consume, is devastating to the point of suicide.   Imagine what will happen when civilization itself dissolves.

Wars, natural disasters—or greedy-oil-company-generated disasters, as the case may be—however, are not good models for what will happen as civilization starts to disintegrate.  First, regardless of the magnitude of suffering, wars, earthquakes, and oil spills remain local disturbances.  The global corporate infrastructure is unaffected by localized human or environmental tragedy.  Second, their impact beyond the very short term is largely restricted to the poor and powerless.  This is clearly evident in the aftermath of the earthquake in Haiti and in the wake of hurricane Katrina.  Then there is Somalia and Afghanistan and [insert your impoverished war torn nation of choice here], where the daily loss of human life is not granted even the courtesy of a dismissive shrug in the west.  Also, despite their long lasting impact on the local people and environment, they are nonetheless seen as temporary, ephemeral catastrophes that evaporate into the dark mists of memory after a few news cycles.

The disintegration of industrial civilization will not have a limited local or temporal impact.  And, not only will it not be restricted to the poor and powerless, it will erase entirely the distinction between rich and poor, powerful and powerless.  It will not be the kind of change that leaves any residual hope (or, eventually, desire) for a return to what industrial civilization calls normality.  

To say that dismantling civilization will be painful doesn’t even begin to cover it.  That people will resist is only human nature.  That some will be willing to die fighting for the right to continue live a dehumanizing existence is also human nature—how many slaves have willingly forfeited their lives in service of their masters over the centuries?

***

When it comes to pain, maybe we have three choices.  We can rip the bandage off as quickly as possible, and endure the intense but transient sting.  Or we can slowly peal it off, stretching the pain out, slicing it into small but manageable pieces.  Or we can let the wound remain under the bandage, festering and septic from lack of exposure to the healing air, until we lose the limb to gangrene. 

Bomb Your Local Walmart

There is no chance of winning the fight against the corporate machine by playing by the rules because the game itself is designed to assert the interests of corporations over those of human beings. 

Suppose, for example, that you wanted to remove an existing Walmart from your local neighborhood.  Walmarts are extremely difficult pests to exterminate once they have become established.  Because they are so effective at displacing their competition, they quickly become the only neighborhood source of many “essential” consumer products.  They also (marginally) employ a number of local people, which feeds the illusion that they are good for the local economy—despite the fact that the lion’s share of their take is siphoned away from the local economy and exported out of state, and the fact that their displaced competition represented more and better-paying local jobs.  Needless to say, you are not going to remove Walmart by circulating petitions and attending city counsel meetings.

Walmart is clearly not in your best interest—both as an individual human and as a public citizen.  But Walmart is a corporation, and is thus protected as a rightful being by the entire weight of the US legal system and the entire might of US law enforcement, and so unless you are a billionaire you have very little power that you can wield—if you play by the rules.

We need another term.  It’s not terrorism if the target of your violence is incapable of experiencing the human emotion of fear.  It’s not terrorism if you are trying to eliminate something that is itself a source of planet-wide terror.  Emancipationism?  Freedomism? 

Re-humanizationism?

Old Dog Don Quixote

There is a large wind farm going up a few miles down the road from where I live.  The windmills are massive steel structures, perhaps 165 tons each.  And they are transported in large pieces that take up two lanes of highway.  When the farm is completed, there will be literally hundreds of them.  In addition, there is an extensive network of towers being erected to transport the power—hundreds of steel towers and uncountable miles of wire. 

It’s my understanding that steel is fairly energy-intensive to produce.

One web site reports that it costs 30,000 a year to maintain a single windmill, and that they have about a 20-25 year lifespan.  In addition to the energy necessary for maintenance (cost and energy are not equivalent), how much energy does it take to produce the steel, and fabricate, transport, and assemble the parts?  And the wire?  And the towers?  I assume the towers and wire have a finite lifespan as well.

Will a windmill be able to provide enough energy over its lifespan to produce its replacement?  Or will its replacement also be manufactured in coal powered steel mills and transported by diesel powered trucks and assembled with diesel powered cranes (the cranes and trucks also manufactured in coal powered plants)?  

Are wind farms (and solar farms and etc.) a real solution to any of our energy problems?  Or are they just another way of accelerating the rate at which the industrial machine is consuming the planet?  

Big Brother on the Road

OnStar, a wholly-owned subsidiary of General Motors, Inc., is billed as an innovative vehicle safety and security system.  It consists of an onboard computer GPS system networked into the car’s systems and equipped with the ability to transmit and receive data.  It can automatically call for help when you have an accident.  It can even make hotel reservations and check your email for you.  If your car is stolen, the system allows the police to pinpoint the location of your car and engage an ignition block preventing the car from starting until they get to the scene.

Interesting.  And this is supposed to make me feel safe.

The OnStar system is (theoretically) capable of providing a permanent record of all the places you have driven your car, the routes you took along with the specific dates and times, should anyone be interested in that information.  But I’m sure no one would ever be interested in that information.  I’m sure that as long as you don’t do or say anything wrong, you have nothing to worry about. 

But wait.  Suppose your car isn’t stolen.  Suppose, just for the sake of argument, that you are an activist protesting the corporate status quo, and that someone in a position of power has taken issue with your protestations to the point that they want to have you silenced.  You sense that it is time for you to lay low for awhile, so you get in your car to drive to your sister’s place to hide out for a few weeks.  But for some reason, your car won’t start…