Author Archives: Reid Mukai

The ‘Hidden Mechanisms’ That Help Those Born Rich to Excel in Elite Jobs

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When two sociologists interviewed highly paid architects, TV producers, actors, and accountants, they encountered work cultures that favor the already affluent.

By Joe Pinsker

Source: The Atlantic

Over the past five years, the sociologists Daniel Laurison and Sam Friedman have uncovered a striking, consistent pattern in data about England’s workforce: Not only are people born into working-class families far less likely than those born wealthy to get an elite job—but they also, on average, earn 16 percent less in the same fields of work.

Laurison and Friedman dug further into the data, but statistical analyses could only get them so far. So they immersed themselves in the cultures of modern workplaces, speaking with workers—around 175 in all—in four prestigious professional settings: a TV-broadcasting company, a multinational accounting firm, an architecture firm, and the world of self-employed actors.

The result of this research is Laurison and Friedman’s new book, The Class Ceiling: Why It Pays to Be Privileged, which shows how the customs of elite workplaces can favor those who grew up wealthier. The authors describe a series of “hidden mechanisms”—such as unwritten codes of office behavior and informal systems of professional advancement—that benefit the already affluent while disadvantaging those with working-class backgrounds.

In January, shortly before the book’s U.K. release, I interviewed Laurison, a professor at Swarthmore College, who told me that while England’s class politics do differ from those of the U.S., his and Friedman’s findings about “money, connections, and culture” broadly apply to Americans as well. This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Joe Pinsker: In the book, you write about a financial cushion available to certain college graduates that you refer to as “the bank of mom and dad.” How does this work, and what are its consequences for who gets a chance at certain jobs?

Daniel Laurison: I think the image that we have—or the ideology, if you want to be political about it—is once you’re 18 or so, you make your own way and your class origin is not an important part of how your career goes from there. But what my co-author Sam and I found was, that’s not at all true.

In the book, we talked about people pursuing acting, which is a very contingent, hard path to pursue. Most people, when they start, aren’t making most of their money from acting, and so people who are able to rely on their parents to help them are much more able to pursue acting fully, because they don’t have to worry about maintaining a regular, full-time job just to eat and live.

That’s the starkest example in the book, but there are lots of other ways that having money from your parents can make a difference in your career. In the U.K., if you work in London, you’re likely to earn a lot more, and you’re more likely to be at the center of your field. And living in London is very expensive. So a lot of people who are living in London got some help from their parents to make a down payment on a house or some help with the rent, which was the case in fields other than acting, too. And the other place I think parents’ help makes a big difference is in who can take unpaid or very low-paid internships, which are the entry points for lots of high-status, high-paid careers.

Pinsker: And once people get these sorts of jobs, you write about the importance of “sponsorship”—basically, when some senior employee informally takes someone younger under their wing and helps them advance through the company. What did you notice about how those systems of sponsorship worked?

Laurison: I think that a lot of people, on some level what they think they’re doing when they sponsor young co-workers is spotting talent—they called it “talent-mapping” in the accounting firm we studied. But a lot of people we talked to were also able to reflect and say, “Part of why I was excited about that person, probably, is because they reminded me of a younger version of myself.” The word we use in sociology is homophily—people like people who are like themselves.

One of the big ideas of the book, for me, is it’s really hard for any given individual in any given situation to fully parse what’s actual talent or intelligence or merit, and what’s, Gosh, that person reminds me of me, or I feel an affinity for them because we can talk about skiing or our trips to the Bahamas. Part of it is also that what your criteria are for a good worker often comes from what you think makes you a good worker.

Pinsker: In the workplaces you studied, who tended to lose out in these systems of sponsorship?

Laurison: In three of the four fields we studied, it was poor and working-class people, and also women and people of color. There are lots of axes along which homophily can cloud senior people’s judgment about who’s meritorious.

Pinsker: You also talk a lot about the unwritten codes of behavior that can shape who advances and who doesn’t at certain workplaces. What’s an example of how that played out?

Laurison: Probably the best example of this is the television-production firm we studied. The name that we gave to the culture there was “studied informality”—nobody wore suits and ties, nobody even wore standard business casual. People were wearing sneakers and all kinds of casual, fashionable clothes. There was a sort of “right” way to do it and a “wrong” way to do it: A number of people talked about this one man—who was black and from a working-class background—who just stood out. He worked there for a while and eventually left. He wore tracksuits, and the ways he chose to be casual and fashionable were not the ways that everybody else did.

There were all kinds of things, like who puts their feet up on the table and when they do it, when they swear—things that don’t seem like what you might expect from a place full of high-prestige, powerful television producers. But that was in some ways, I think, more off-putting and harder to navigate for some of our working-class respondents than hearing “just wear a suit and tie every day” might have been. The rules weren’t obvious, but everybody else seemed to know them.

Pinsker: And trying to figure that out comes at an emotional and psychological cost, no?

Laurison: For a lot of people from poor and working-class or lower-middle-class backgrounds, being in these environments felt like you had to put on a performance all day. They didn’t feel at home and comfortable in their work environment—even people who had been quite successful, who had gotten toward the top of their occupations.

Part of that is because folks are comfortable in the culture, the class, the location, the people who they grew up with. And working in an occupation or professional culture that is radically different in some ways than what your family knows and does is challenging. But one way to address this is to change workplace cultures to be closer to what poor and working-class people—and women, racial and ethnic minorities, and other historically excluded groups—bring rather than just trying to teach those “others” how to adapt.

Pinsker: In the book, it was jarring to see over and over how invisible all of these processes tend to be, and how this obscures the way that people actually get and then excel in elite jobs. Some people you talked to clearly downplayed the help they’d gotten—what do you think was behind that?

Laurison: In both the U.S. and the U.K., there’s a really strong, widely shared implicit belief—in the U.S., it’s the American dream—that success and worth are nearly identical, that if you are really rich, you must be really smart and hardworking, and if you are poor, you must have messed up in some really big way. People want to believe that they got where they are because they’re smart and talented. And that’s often true to some extent, but it’s also true that there’s any number of people who are probably equally smart and talented who are not in their positions, because of the barriers that are erected. It’s hard to sit with the idea that maybe somebody else deserves to be where they are more than they do, and I think almost everybody wants to be able to tell a story of making it on their own.

A lot of the book is about the barriers that exist, but you can take that argument too far. I wouldn’t say that most of the really successful people we interviewed were bad at their jobs. But I think, for a lot of people, examining the ways that privileges you have are unearned is the same thing as saying “You are bad” or “You don’t deserve anything,” because we’ve got this deep connection between ideas of worth and ideas of success.

Pinsker: Having finished a research project like this, what do you think needs to change about the way these workplaces function? Do you think there are things that companies could do better?

Laurison: On one level, as long as access to education and jobs is unequal in terms of race, in terms of class, you’re not going to have equal representation of all the parts of society in many prestigious or exclusive occupations. So in a way, it’s about much bigger questions than a single company can deal with.

At the same time, I think there really are things that companies can do. You can affirmatively try to hire the people who don’t look like the people who are already there in terms of their race, gender, class origin, and other statuses. And you can try to think about what expectations or cultures at your firm are not really about the outcomes your firm needs to pay the most attention to.

To give an example from my own work, I know that in colleges and universities, students from poor and working-class backgrounds are much less likely to feel comfortable going to office hours than everybody else. So I require everybody, of any class background, to come talk to me, in an effort to make office hours open to everybody. I think there are analogies in other fields—there are unwritten rules where we can figure out what the norms are and then be explicit about them.

But still, there’s this larger question of how much inequality there is in the first place. If it wasn’t possible for somebody to make 10 times, 15 times what someone else does at the same organization, then it would matter a lot less how far people got in different organizations in terms of their earnings. And the broader context of the book is that part of what legitimizes big inequalities is the belief that outcomes are meritocratic.

Surgical Totalitarianism

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By Dan Corjescu

Source: Dissident Voice

You don’t have to control everything to be in total control.

In the modern world this seeming paradox is a systemic reality.

In the past, classic totalitarian governments sought to literally control every aspect of biopower.

As it turned out, this was a very inefficient and self-defeating way to maintain and increase scientific knowledge and technology, capital accumulation, and total effective power over the long term.

Modern totalitarian arrangements are far more culturally efficacious, superficially unobtrusive, stylistically democratic, and, most importantly, surgically precise.

In addition, modern totalitarian elites not only demand de facto control over society as such, but they also desire, as part of their inner ideological ethos, the exercise of that power to reproduce itself under maximum conditions of ease, pleasure, and comfort. Thus, the creation and maintenance of a consumerist society both materially and ideologically aids in the reproduction of neo-totalitarian power.

A consumerist society is to a large extent a self regulating mechanism for the constant pursuit of public spectacle and private stimulation. The senses and general life instincts are caught in a web of the pursuance of small pleasures. In this way, pleasure itself becomes an insidiously saccharine form of domination. Yet, from time to time, consumerist relations must be guided, reinforced, and given new goals and reflationary impetus from above.

The political structure in modern, surgical totalitarianism is set up in such a way as to give the appearance of active participation, psychological inclusion, and periodic mass mobilization. However, all consequential decision-making takes place behind this fraudulent structure and represents the true “commanding heights” of power. The political superstructure serves, at best, as perennial decoy and public delusion.

The modern “commanding heights” of power require massive amounts of data. It is through the acquisition, manipulation, and active forward interpretation of information that surgical totalitarianism is able to pick and choose its battles. At its most extreme, new “realities” are creatively and cynically constructed from its daily catch of strategic knowledge. The goal is always the same: distract, delude, deflate any possible challenge to the system through active suppression, co-optation (the preferred method), and, or, complete elimination.

In this way, any possible threats can be foreseen relatively far in advance and organizational strategies can be conceived for either their containment and/or elimination. The surgical nature of these methods allows for the relative negative freedom of civil society to generally evolve and reproduce itself in partial self-awareness in so far as it continues to demonstrate no substantive subversive tendencies to liquidate either the material reality and/or ideological superstructure of its own dependency on neo-totalitarian forms of power.

In the end, the system presents itself as perversely elegant, efficient, self-perpetuating, and, even, on a physical level, pleasant.

All bodily pleasures are on offer. Entertainment becomes incarceration. All is seemingly permitted while nothing is truly allowed. Power is diaphanous as it is all consuming. Critical dissent is tolerated because the mechanisms of mass blindness are secure.

It would be and has been a crucial mistake for Marxists of all kinds to think that capitalism is the root cause of the modern day pursuit of total power. On the contrary, surgical totalitarianism utilizes capitalism as just another source of power but not its ultimate ground. Power precedes capitalism. Hierarchy encodes the means and forces of production no matter what they are just as hierarchy projects a self-sustaining superstructure to deceive and deflect its potential challengers. Capitalism is but a modern day tool of hierarchical power. The real enemy is not capital but surreptitious hierarchy.

The true source of this state of affairs is the lust for control under any societal forms. Its origins are without doubt evolutionary. Aristotle famously defined human beings as “Zoon Politikon” or “social animal”. Yes, we are indeed social. But the “Zoon” or animal part of that equation warps that sociality into the insatiable desire to control and to dominate others. Ultimately, the Hobbesian origins of mankind from an age long state of “nastiness and brutishness” is, in part, to blame that man persists in being as a wolf to other men: Homo homini lupus est.

The Surrealism of the Information War

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By Gilbert Mercier

Source: News Junkie Post

The flow of knowledge and information is commonly considered the main vector of humanity’s progress through history. One would think that in our era, which is rightly called the time of the information super-highway, the sheer mass of information available to all humans, anywhere at any given time, would have exponentially increased our understanding of our world and each other. This is, however, not the case. As a matter of fact, paradoxically, one can easily argue that an overload of information has made the majority of people not more but less knowledgeable, less critical, more isolated, and more alienated from themselves and each other. The control and manipulation of narrative in the era of the information war has created a universal malaise that reaches even basic human issues such as masculine-feminine identities.

Well-compensated propagandists package information and ideas like products for mass consumption. The advance of technology was supposed to free mankind; instead it has created invisible chains. The fact of being constantly wired is an assault on our free will and cognitive functions, which behavioral information warriors study and harvest, to put them in giant blenders where all comes out inoffensive and predictable. The goal is to turn the rich and diverse human experience into a tasteless and colorless intellectual mush, and then make it palatable with artificial additives. Foie gras is considered a French gastronomic delicacy. It is nevertheless a form of cultural perversity. In the process, the geese are force-fed, to provoke a cirrhosis of their liver. In many ways, the gatekeepers of mainstream information use the same force feeding technique with people’s brains.

Unless people tightly lock themselves mentally into the delusions of dogmas, either religious or ideological, and seek comfort in a universe of magical thinking, the truth is never an absolute. This being said, in order to allow an acceptable level of conviviality in human society, thinkers should seek truth in the subjective reality while knowing that the holy grail of pure truth is the ultimate lie. If one would be so naive or foolish enough to think he has found the absolute truth, looking at it would be like staring straight into the sun at midday, without shields and with eyes wide open, for a full hour. In the process, the believer of absolute truth would go blind.

For anyone who is neither blind nor fully color blind, the distinction between a red object and a green one is not only instantaneous but also unquestionable. The difference between green and red is not open to interpretation or debate. It is in the rare realm of tangible facts.

Staying in the field of the color spectrum: all hues of green in the natural world are a secondary color that can be obtained by mixing the primary colors yellow and blue. Green can be argued endlessly to contain more yellow than blue, or vice versa, as well as a fraction of black, white, or brown to alter the shades and tones. In nature or on an artist’s palette, there are countless shades of green and our perception of these shades, while it can be analyzed and quantified scientifically, is largely subjective.

Colors, just like words, have an emotional impact. Hospital walls and other medical facilities are often painted in light tones of greenish-blue, for their soothing effect on people. Bright red has the opposite impact. It is used to attract maximum attention either from traffic lights, bull fights or firetrucks. And so greens are the calming hues of nature and relaxation, whereas reds are synonymous with alarm, blood, excitement, and sometimes the anger and urgency of an adrenaline rush, as illustrated by the popular expression “seeing red.”

The near-infinite range of the color spectrum is similar to the countless narratives expressed by languages. In linguistics, words and their clumsy or astute associations are used to convey information or emotions. Like colors, words carry messages, fragments of information that impact people differently and cannot be objectively quantified. It’s all “in the eye of the beholder.”

One can make an analogy between the false notion of an absolute truth and the vanishing point in a perspective drawing. A vanishing point is an optical illusion, just like the concept of pure truth is a cognitive illusion. In our surreal predicament of fake-news for some, which are true-news for others, it is as if we have moved into an absurd and nightmarish three-dimensional drawing with a multitude of vanishing points designed by the generals of the global information wars.

The people who conduct the information war are numerous. They can be the global media moguls like Rupert Murdoch; the journalists employed by corporate entities or governments; the policymakers who build a considerable influence within countless so-called think-tanks; the elected politicians and their cohorts of advisers and lobbyists; the super-rich businessmen, philanthropists in their own eyes, such as Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, Bob Mercer, George Soros and Pierre Omidyar, who want to impact world affairs; and even show-business celebrities. All have deep pockets and want maximum impact in the fight to shape the discourse and steer public opinion, often globally, in the directions that suit their specific needs.

Unless they are ideologues, the information warriors are mercenaries. Therefore it is money that shapes the global mainstream discourse in television, radio, newspapers and social media. Independent or dissident narratives are generally squashed by a lack of public exposure. The money talks and writes as the viewer-readers, hypnotized by a multitude of screens, become mere consumers to be sold, convinced, or subliminally seduced into a specific mindset. The job of the information warriors is to observe, condition, and predict behaviors. In this massive brainwash of the public, big money is at the same time the washing machine and laundry detergent.

Gates and Soros openly sponsor the prime fake-left publication, The Guardian; Bezos owns The Washington Post; and the Murdoch press empire’s crown jewel is Fox News. Other information warriors who claim to know the truth are on the fringe, at least in appearance. This is the case for media provocateur Alex Jones, who has claimed in court to be a performance artist, but who is nonetheless adulated by millions worldwide and treated like a Guru of truthful information. Jones runs, with his trademark manic energy, the raucous populist far-right conspiracy-theory laced Infowars. Mercer’s money gave birth to the populist far-right site Breitbart. Meanwhile Omidyar sponsors the soft-left, so-called progressive publication, The Intercept. All these lead information warriors want to take as many people as will follow them to their own vanishing points, on a journey towards their illusionary truth.

In their confusion and thirst for truth, people get caught like flies on tasty propaganda glue. The intricate labyrinths built by the information warriors prevent the real discourse, which should be about how to survive the imminent systemic collapse of global capitalism. It cannot be otherwise when global corporate imperialism itself controls the discourse worldwide. Hypnotized by a myriad of vanishing points, humans might be on a course to vanish.

Mueller Report Ends a Shameful Period for the Press

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By Chris Hedges

Source: Truthdig

The Mueller report’s categorical statement that Donald Trump and his campaign did not collude with Russia ends one of the most shameful periods in modern American journalism, one that rivals the mindless cheerleading for the Iraq War by most of the press. It further erodes and may prove fatal to the credibility of a press that has steadfastly rendered most of the country invisible and functions as little more than an array of gossiping courtiers to the elites.

“ ‘[T]he investigation did not establish that members of the Trump Campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in its election interference activities,’ ” the report by special counsel Robert Mueller says, according to a direct quotation given in an official letter by U.S. Attorney General William Barr.

The charge that Russia stole the 2016 presidential election, that Vladimir Putin has secret “pee tapes” of Trump cavorting in a Moscow hotel with prostitutes or that Trump has been a longtime “Kremlin agent,” repeated by reporters whose work I admired in the past, is demagoguery as pernicious as the vile taunts and racist tropes that come out of the White House. The press endlessly repeated such allegations while ignoring the expanding social inequality and suffering of a country where half the population lives in poverty, as well as the collapse of our democratic institutions. These facts, not Russian manipulation, saw enraged American voters elect a demagogue who at least belittles the elites, including those in the press, who sold them out. The charge that Trump was a tool of Russia is entertaining. It attracts billions in advertising dollars. It allows the press to posture as a moral crusader. But over the past three years this obsession blotted out most of the real crimes committed by this administration and the reality most Americans endure.

The mainstream press, owned by the corporations that have extinguished the democratic state and are fleecing the public, as well as destroying the ecosystem on which we depend for life, does not hold its employers to account. The empty chatter about Russia, including in The New York Times, exposes the bankruptcy of the U.S. media. MSNBC and CNN, which long ago abandoned journalism for entertainment, have breathlessly clogged the airwaves with ridiculous conspiracy theories and fantasies and used them to justify a faux crusade.

Don’t expect any of this to change. Rachael Maddow, like Jack Tapper or any other fatuous news celebrity, will not be held to account for slogging through this fiction night after night. Maddow will still collect her $10-million-a-year salary. And the handful of reporters who exhibited journalistic integrity—Glenn Greenwald, Matt Taibbi, Aaron Maté, Robert Scheer, Max Blumenthal and Katrina vanden Heuvel—will continue to remain on the margins of the media landscape. The press is an arm of the corporate-funded burlesque that has replaced the country’s political life and turned civic debate into a vast reality show.

The more the big news outlets try to spin this report, arguing that they need to see the full report rather than the attorney general’s summary, or that Jared Kushner sought to use the communications systems of Russian diplomats, the more credibility they will lose. And they do not have much credibility left. The lurid details of the president’s alleged sexual relations with a porn star and a Playboy bunny, and of “Russiagate,” have replaced journalism. These stories have nothing to do with the lives of most Americans. This descent into the inane and the tawdry gives immunity to Trump. In attacking the press he attacks an institution most Americans loath. And with good reason. The press, unwittingly, enhances a president it seeks to destroy. And its decline, accelerated by its collaboration with liberal Democratic elites who scapegoat Russia to avoid confronting their responsibility for trashing the country in the service of corporate oligarchs, will get worse. Little the press says about Trump will now be believed.

There was, of course, massive interference in our election by a foreign power—Israel. But try saying this naked truth out loud and you will suffer the character assassination, chanted by the unified chorus in the press and the political hierarchy of both parties, that was unleashed on Rep. Ilhan Omar. The engine driving our animosity toward Russia comes from the arms industry, which with the expansion of NATO up to Russia’s border—despite assurances given upon the unification of Germany that this would not happen—is making billions of dollars selling weapons to countries in Eastern Europe. The situation is also exacerbating tensions between two of the world’s biggest nuclear powers. But this is just one more suppressed truth.

The Trump administration has carried out policies that, rather than serve Russian interests, have further antagonized our relationship with Moscow. It has imposed sanctions. It is openly attempting to overthrow the government of a country that Russia supports, Venezuela. It is attempting to block the sale of Russian natural gas to Europe. It has sold weapons to Ukraine, a foe of the Kremlin. It has armed insurgents in Syria and carried out airstrikes, even as Russian troops seek to prop up the Syrian regime. It has withdrawn from the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty. But facts matter little to Russian-conspiracy theorists.

It is not only Trump who has obliterated the line between fact and fiction. It is the press. It hyped and reported allegations it never investigated or confirmed. And by doing this, repeating failures of the kind that appeared in its coverage of the invasion of Iraq, it has committed suicide. A nation that lacks a functioning press becomes a tyranny. This is not Trump’s fault, but our own.

A belief in meritocracy is not only false: it’s bad for you

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By Clifton Mark

Source: Aeon

‘We are true to our creed when a little girl born into the bleakest poverty knows that she has the same chance to succeed as anybody else …’ Barack Obama, inaugural address, 2013

‘We must create a level playing field for American companies and workers.’ Donald Trump, inaugural address, 2017

Meritocracy has become a leading social ideal. Politicians across the ideological spectrum continually return to the theme that the rewards of life – money, power, jobs, university admission – should be distributed according to skill and effort. The most common metaphor is the ‘even playing field’ upon which players can rise to the position that fits their merit. Conceptually and morally, meritocracy is presented as the opposite of systems such as hereditary aristocracy, in which one’s social position is determined by the lottery of birth. Under meritocracy, wealth and advantage are merit’s rightful compensation, not the fortuitous windfall of external events.

Most people don’t just think the world should be run meritocratically, they think it is meritocratic. In the UK, 84 per cent of respondents to the 2009 British Social Attitudes survey stated that hard work is either ‘essential’ or ‘very important’ when it comes to getting ahead, and in 2016 the Brookings Institute found that 69 per cent of Americans believe that people are rewarded for intelligence and skill. Respondents in both countries believe that external factors, such as luck and coming from a wealthy family, are much less important. While these ideas are most pronounced in these two countries, they are popular across the globe.

Although widely held, the belief that merit rather than luck determines success or failure in the world is demonstrably false. This is not least because merit itself is, in large part, the result of luck. Talent and the capacity for determined effort, sometimes called ‘grit’, depend a great deal on one’s genetic endowments and upbringing.

This is to say nothing of the fortuitous circumstances that figure into every success story. In his book Success and Luck (2016), the US economist Robert Frank recounts the long-shots and coincidences that led to Bill Gates’s stellar rise as Microsoft’s founder, as well as to Frank’s own success as an academic. Luck intervenes by granting people merit, and again by furnishing circumstances in which merit can translate into success. This is not to deny the industry and talent of successful people. However, it does demonstrate that the link between merit and outcome is tenuous and indirect at best.

According to Frank, this is especially true where the success in question is great, and where the context in which it is achieved is competitive. There are certainly programmers nearly as skilful as Gates who nonetheless failed to become the richest person on Earth. In competitive contexts, many have merit, but few succeed. What separates the two is luck.

In addition to being false, a growing body of research in psychology and neuroscience suggests that believing in meritocracy makes people more selfish, less self-critical and even more prone to acting in discriminatory ways. Meritocracy is not only wrong; it’s bad.

The ‘ultimatum game’ is an experiment, common in psychological labs, in which one player (the proposer) is given a sum of money and told to propose a division between him and another player (the responder), who may accept the offer or reject it. If the responder rejects the offer, neither player gets anything. The experiment has been replicated thousands of times, and usually the proposer offers a relatively even split. If the amount to be shared is $100, most offers fall between $40-$50.

One variation on this game shows that believing one is more skilled leads to more selfish behaviour. In research at Beijing Normal University, participants played a fake game of skill before making offers in the ultimatum game. Players who were (falsely) led to believe they had ‘won’ claimed more for themselves than those who did not play the skill game. Other studies confirm this finding. The economists Aldo Rustichini at the University of Minnesota and Alexander Vostroknutov at Maastricht University in the Netherlands found that subjects who first engaged in a game of skill were much less likely to support the redistribution of prizes than those who engaged in games of chance. Just having the idea of skill in mind makes people more tolerant of unequal outcomes. While this was found to be true of all participants, the effect was much more pronounced among the ‘winners’.

By contrast, research on gratitude indicates that remembering the role of luck increases generosity. Frank cites a study in which simply asking subjects to recall the external factors (luck, help from others) that had contributed to their successes in life made them much more likely to give to charity than those who were asked to remember the internal factors (effort, skill).

Perhaps more disturbing, simply holding meritocracy as a value seems to promote discriminatory behaviour. The management scholar Emilio Castilla at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the sociologist Stephen Benard at Indiana University studied attempts to implement meritocratic practices, such as performance-based compensation in private companies. They found that, in companies that explicitly held meritocracy as a core value, managers assigned greater rewards to male employees over female employees with identical performance evaluations. This preference disappeared where meritocracy was not explicitly adopted as a value.

This is surprising because impartiality is the core of meritocracy’s moral appeal. The ‘even playing field’ is intended to avoid unfair inequalities based on gender, race and the like. Yet Castilla and Benard found that, ironically, attempts to implement meritocracy leads to just the kinds of inequalities that it aims to eliminate. They suggest that this ‘paradox of meritocracy’ occurs because explicitly adopting meritocracy as a value convinces subjects of their own moral bona fides. Satisfied that they are just, they become less inclined to examine their own behaviour for signs of prejudice.

Meritocracy is a false and not very salutary belief. As with any ideology, part of its draw is that it justifies the status quo, explaining why people belong where they happen to be in the social order. It is a well-established psychological principle that people prefer to believe that the world is just.

However, in addition to legitimation, meritocracy also offers flattery. Where success is determined by merit, each win can be viewed as a reflection of one’s own virtue and worth. Meritocracy is the most self-congratulatory of distribution principles. Its ideological alchemy transmutes property into praise, material inequality into personal superiority. It licenses the rich and powerful to view themselves as productive geniuses. While this effect is most spectacular among the elite, nearly any accomplishment can be viewed through meritocratic eyes. Graduating from high school, artistic success or simply having money can all be seen as evidence of talent and effort. By the same token, worldly failures becomes signs of personal defects, providing a reason why those at the bottom of the social hierarchy deserve to remain there.

This is why debates over the extent to which particular individuals are ‘self-made’ and over the effects of various forms of ‘privilege’ can get so hot-tempered. These arguments are not just about who gets to have what; it’s about how much ‘credit’ people can take for what they have, about what their successes allow them to believe about their inner qualities. That is why, under the assumption of meritocracy, the very notion that personal success is the result of ‘luck’ can be insulting. To acknowledge the influence of external factors seems to downplay or deny the existence of individual merit.

Despite the moral assurance and personal flattery that meritocracy offers to the successful, it ought to be abandoned both as a belief about how the world works and as a general social ideal. It’s false, and believing in it encourages selfishness, discrimination and indifference to the plight of the unfortunate.

Saturday Matinee: Boogie

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“Boogie” (2009) is an animated Argentinian action comedy based on a cult comic by Roberto Fontanarrosa, and directed by Gustavo Cova. The voices of protagonists Boogie and Marcia were performed by Pablo Echarri and Nancy Dupláa and the 3D animated movie was the first made in Argentina and Latin America. The character of Boogie is an over-the-top caricature of a boorish, violent and fascistic American archetype, a type which was also skewered in William Klein’s “Mr. Freedom” (1969).

Members of most library systems can access the film by registering on Hoopla and viewing here: https://www.hoopladigital.com/title/11228016

Why Activists Fail

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By Robert J. Burrowes

Despite enormous ongoing effort over more than a thousand years, during and since the formation and shaping of the modern world, and as the number of issues being contested has steadily increased, activists of many types have made insufficient progress on key issues, particularly in relation to ending violence and war (and the threat of nuclear war), stopping the exploitation of many peoples and halting the endless assaults on Earth’s biosphere.

Of course, in order for those of us who identify as activists to have any prospect of success in these and other endeavors, we need to understand how the world works and to develop an interrelated set of nonviolent strategies that are being effectively implemented to address each of the key aspects of this crisis.

This is because there is a great deal wrong with how the human world functions and a staggering amount that needs to be done if we are to fix it and preserve the planetary biosphere in doing so, particularly given that the primary threats are now so serious that human extinction is likely to occur within a few years. See ‘Human Extinction by 2026? A Last Ditch Strategy to Fight for Human Survival’.

Of course, if human governance systems, ranging from international organizations like the United Nations and its various agencies to national, provincial and local governments functioned effectively, then we might expect these agencies, which theoretically function on our behalf, to have addressed these problems a long time ago. Or to do so now.

However, for reasons that are readily identifiable, these agencies have little power and routinely malfunction (from the viewpoints of ordinary people and the planetary biosphere).

So let me start by briefly explaining how the world works and then elaborating a few key points about strategy so that you can choose, if you wish (and, problematically, assuming there is still time), to play a more active and effective role, in one or more ways, in the struggle to make our world one of peace, justice and sustainability.

How the World Works: A Brief History

The formal human governance systems on Earth – that is, governments and intergovernmental organizations such as the United Nations – are controlled by the global elite which is invisible to, and hence not considered by, most people including activists. This, of course, is how the elite wants it and one can still readily find accounts that ask if the elite (by whatever name it is given) actually exists and even ascribe it a mystical quality. If the idea is not simply written off as a ‘conspiracy theory’.

Well the global elite exists and its membership can be readily identified. But let me start by briefly outlining how the global elite acquired its extraordinary control over world affairs.

Following the Neolithic revolution 12,000 years ago, agriculture allowed human settlement to supersede the hunter-gatherer economy. However, while the Neolithic revolution occurred spontaneously in several parts of the world, some of the Neolithic societies that emerged in Asia, Europe, Central America and South America resorted to increasing degrees of social control in order to achieve a variety of social and economic outcomes, including increased efficiency in food production.

Civilizations emerged just over 5,000 years ago and, utilizing this higher degree of social control, were characterized by towns or cities, efficient food production allowing a large minority of the community to be engaged in more specialized activities, a centralized bureaucracy and the practice of skilled warfare. See ‘A Critique of Human Society since the Neolithic Revolution’.

With the emergence of civilization, elites of a local nature (such as the Pharoahs of Egypt), elites with imperial reach (including Roman emperors), elites of a religious nature (such as Popes and officials of the Vatican), elites of an economic character (particularly the City of London Corporation) and elites of a ‘national’ type (especially the monarchies of Europe) progressively emerged, essentially to manage the administration associated with maintaining and expanding their realms (political, financial and/or religious).

Following the Peace of Westphalia in 1648, which formally established the nation-state system, national elites, increasingly of an economic nature as capitalism progressively developed and rapidly expanded, consolidated their hold over national societies and, as these elites internationalized their reach in the following centuries, by the second half of the C20th, a truly global elite had consolidated its control over the world.

Awareness of elites in earlier eras has been noted by some authors. For example, in his 1775 book An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith noted that ‘All for ourselves, and nothing for other people, seems, in every age of the world, to have been the vile maxim of the masters of mankind’.

But the work of C. Wright Mills in his 1956 classic The Power Elite is the original scholarly effort of the post-World War II era to document the nature of this elite, how it functions and why it had total control over US national society. Of course, despite scholarship of this nature, which has been added to routinely ever since, most people still believe the elite-sponsored delusion that international organizations, such as the United Nations, and national governments actually have some significant say in world affairs.

To jump to the present then, for the best recent account of how the global elite manifests today, see the book by Professor Peter Phillips titled Giants: The Global Power Elite. In this book, Phillips identifies the world’s top seventeen asset management firms, such as BlackRock and J.P Morgan Chase, that collectively manage more than $US41.1 trillion in a self-invested network of interlocking capital that spans the globe. The seventeen Giants operate in nearly every country in the world and are ‘the central institutions of the financial capital that powers the global economic system’. They invest in anything considered profitable, ranging from ‘agricultural lands on which indigenous farmers are replaced by power elite investors’ to public assets (such as energy and water utilities), to fossil fuels, nuclear power and war.

More precisely, Phillips identifies the 199 individual directors of the seventeen global financial Giants and the importance of those transnational institutions that serve a unifying function – including the World Bank, International Monetary Fund, G20, G7, World Trade Organization (WTO), World Economic Forum (WEF), Trilateral Commission, Bilderberg Group, Bank for International Settlements and Council on Foreign Relations – and particularly two very important global elite policy-planning organizations: the Group of Thirty (which has 32 members) and the extended executive committee of the Trilateral Commission (which has 55 members).

And Phillips carefully explains why and how the global elite defends its power, profits and privilege against rebellion by the ‘unruly exploited masses’: ‘the Global Power Elite uses NATO and the US military empire for its worldwide security. This is part of an expanding strategy of US military domination around the world, whereby the US/ NATO military empire, advised by the power elite’s Atlantic Council, operates in service to the Transnational Corporate Class for the protection of international capital everywhere in the world’.

‘The US military empire stands on hundreds of years of colonial exploitation and continues to support repressive, exploitative governments that cooperate with global capital’s imperial agenda. Governments that accept external capital investment, whereby a small segment of a country’s elite benefits, do so knowing that capital inevitably requires a return on investment that entails using up resources and people for economic gain. The whole system continues wealth concentration for elites and expanded wretched inequality for the masses….

‘Understanding permanent war as an economic relief valve for surplus capital is a vital part of comprehending capitalism in the world today. War provides investment opportunity for the Giants and Transnational Corporate Class elites and a guaranteed return on capital. War also serves a repressive function of keeping the suffering masses of humanity afraid and compliant.’

If you would like to read other books which also give a clear sense of elites and their agents operating beyond the law to the extraordinary detriment of humanity and the Earth, then I strongly recommend William Blum’s classic Killing Hope: U.S. Military and CIA Interventions Since World War II and Paul L. Williams’ eye-opening account of Operation Gladio: The Unholy Alliance between the Vatican, the CIA and the Mafia.

In plain language then: The global elite manages human governance systems for its benefit with no concern for ordinary people – who are considered unworthy – or the planetary biosphere. And the most important function that international agencies and governments perform, from the elite perspective, is that they appear to have control over certain jurisdictions and matters so that relevant constituencies focus their efforts, for example, on ‘changing government policy’ or changing the party in government. By having activist effort focused on lobbying governments or changing the party in government, this effort is absorbed and dissipated; hence, nothing of consequence changes because the elite has significant control over all major political processes, parties and their policies.

Of course, I should add that the elite is smart enough to make it look like something has changed occasionally, perhaps by allowing a small concession after years of effort (invariably on a ‘social’ issue, such as gay marriage, that doesn’t adversely impact their power, profits and privilege), so that most activist effort remains focused on governments and international governmental agencies. The elite also allows a ‘genuinely progressive’ candidate to emerge regularly so that activists are again suckered into putting effort into electoral outcomes rather than building movements for broad-based social transformation based on grassroots organizing.

In managing their already vast and endlessly accumulating wealth the global elite siphons a staggering amount of financial resources out of the global economy every day and channels these resources through secretive tax havens to evade tax. Globally, $US10billion of wealth produced by the labor of ordinary people is ‘lost’ each week in this way and more than 10% of global financial wealth (which doesn’t include non-financial wealth ranging from racehorses and yachts to artworks and gold bars) is now hidden in these secrecy jurisdictions. See ‘Elite Banking at Your Expense: How Secretive Tax Havens are Used to Steal Your Money’.

A small proportion (but nevertheless significant amount) of elite wealth is used to create and manage the dominant narrative in relation to the state of the world by financing production of this narrative, generated by elite think tanks, and then distributed through education systems, the entertainment industry and the corporate media. In short, we are bombarded with elite propaganda, given names such as ‘education’, ‘entertainment’ and ‘news’, that hopelessly distorts popular perception of what is taking place.

So why does all of the above happen?

In essence: global elite control of formal human governance systems for its own benefit is an outcome of the global elite’s insanity, as well as the insanity of those who serve it. ‘So what is sanity?’ you might ask.

Sanity is defined as the capacity to consider a set of circumstances, to carefully analyze the evidence pertaining to those circumstances, to identify the cause of any conflict or problem, and to respond appropriately and strategically, both emotionally and intellectually, to that conflict or problem with the intention of resolving it, preferably at a higher level of need satisfaction for all parties (including those of the Earth and all of its living creatures). For a fuller explanation, see ‘The Global Elite is Insane Revisited’ with a lot more detail in ‘Why Violence?’ and ‘Fearless Psychology and Fearful Psychology: Principles and Practice’. In brief, individuals who are not incredibly psychologically damaged, do not behave as described above.

In essence then, while the description of how the world works offered above is accurate, it is driven by an insane elite – endlessly and compulsively accumulating profit, power and privilege at the expense of ordinary people and the biosphere – and the insanity of those who serve the elite, such as virtually all politicians and businesspeople, bankers and accountants, judges and lawyers, academics and corporate media personnel.

Hence, struggles for peace, justice, sustainability and liberation (from military occupation, dictatorship, genocidal assault, coups and invasions), by various means (including those which are nonviolent), fail far too often. But not just because of the enormous power of the global elite. They fail because activists do not understand how the world works, including how the elite exercises its power and, in the case of those who use nonviolent action explicitly, they fail when activists do not understand the psychology, politics and strategy of nonviolent struggle. And while these subjects are not complicated, they do require time to learn.

To reiterate then, the answer to the question ‘Why do activists fail?’ is this: Virtually all activists do not understand strategy and so they do not campaign strategically. This means that anything done – whether a decision in a meeting, a phone call or email, an action or event planned and executed – simply fails to have the impact it could have. Let me elaborate this explanation using just three basic components (out of twelve) of sound nonviolent strategy.

Before doing so I should emphasize that I am talking about those who identify as ‘activists’. I am not talking about lobbyists (or those who use activism in the service of lobbying). Moreover, I am assuming that all activists are using some version of what they understand as ‘nonviolent action’, whether or not they claim to be doing so or even realize they are, simply because no other tradition of activism offers the comprehensive strategic guidance that the literature on nonviolence offers.

So what should activists do so that their efforts have strategic impact?

Strategic Analysis

The foundation of any sound strategy – particularly if campaigning on major issues such as to end war, to end the climate catastrophe, to halt destruction of the fresh water supply and the rainforests, to defeat a coup, occupation or invasion nonviolently, to transform the global economy, to bring down the global elite… – is a thorough understanding of the conflict.

This means, most importantly, having a clear sense of the ‘big picture’ (including those overarching structures and actors in far-off places that maintain/perpetrate the local manifestations of violence and exploitation), not just the detail of the issue on which you focus. Fundamentally, this requires an astute understanding of the global power structure. If we do not understand how power works in society, particularly structurally, including in relation to the conflict we seek to resolve, then we cannot plan and implement a strategy that will work. As the historical record tragically demonstrates.

But it also requires our analysis to include a reasonable understanding of how key issues (such as war, destruction of the climate and environment, and exploitation of women, working people and indigenous peoples) intersect and reinforce each other. If we do not understand something of these relationships then we cannot plan strategy that takes these relationships into account and thus adequately account for all variables driving a conflict. Again, as the historical record painfully demonstrates.

So, for example, the failure of most climate and environmental activists to adequately consider the role of war (and military activity and violence generally) in destroying the climate and environment means that a primary driver of these two conflicts is barely mentioned let alone discussed and then actually tackled strategically – ideally by working in tandem with antiwar activists – by activists working to end the climate catastrophe and defend the environment as a whole.

But this failure to consider the ‘big picture’ is also the reason why most climate activists are focused on switching (from fossils fuels and nuclear power) to renewable energy and miss the fundamental point that we are destroying the entire global environment – including the fresh water, rainforests and oceans – and unless we dramatically reduce, by about 80%, our consumption in all key areas involving both energy and resources of every kind – water, household energy, transport fuels, metals, meat, paper and plastic – and immediately cease driving, flying and eating meat for starters, we have no chance of averting human extinction. See ‘Will humans be extinct by 2026?’ and ‘Climate-Change Summary and Update’.

Which is also why simple, structured approaches to this reduction of consumption, while dramatically expanding our individual and community self-reliance so that all environmental concerns are effectively addressed, must be part of any effective strategy to address the climate/environment catastrophe. See ‘The Flame Tree Project to Save Life on Earth’.

In one simple sentence: We cannot save the climate without saving the rainforests too, and ending war.

Having written all of the above, it is important to acknowledge that there are plenty of fine sources of accurate information on specific issues produced by independent think tanks and activist scholars and researchers. For example, you will find plenty of information about weapons corporations and weapons expenditure (still rising) on the website of the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute and the climate movement produces some rigorous research, with the latest report meticulously documenting that bank financing of fossil fuels is still rising despite the Paris climate ‘agreement’ in 2015. See ‘Banking on Climate Change: Fossil Fuel Finance Report Card 2019’.

Strategic Focus

If we do not thoroughly analyze the conflict, it is impossible to identify the appropriate strategic focus for action and to then plan tactics that address that focus. This inevitably means that we are essentially guessing what to do, not knowing in advance, as we should, that the action we take will have strategic impact.

Moreover, guessing what action to take, usually on the basis of what is familiar or what feels good – perhaps because we get out with a bunch of ‘good people’ – virtually inevitably leads to poor choices like organizing a large demonstration. Demonstrations are notoriously ineffective, as world history’s largest demonstration on 15 February 2003 – involving demonstrations in more than 600 cities around the world, involving up to 30,000,000 people, against the imminent US-led war on Iraq – see ‘The World Says No to War: Demonstrations against the War on Iraq’ – illustrated yet again. Single actions and numbers are not determinative; strategy is determinative. Obviously, large demonstrations could be effective, if they were strategically focused – never on governments though – but only a rare activist understands this with the recent worldwide ‘School Strike 4 Climate Action’ demonstrations on 15 March and the ‘Hands off Venezuela’ demonstrations on 16 March graphically illustrating this lack of understanding and thus wasting opportunities to make a strategic difference.

Let me explain this notion of strategic focus with a simple example, and then invite you to consider it in a little more detail.

Given the critical role that airline flights, travel by car and eating meat, for example, play in destroying the climate and, in the case of the first two, driving US-led wars for control of fossil fuels, imagine if all of those students attending the School Strike 4 Climate rallies had used the day to sign a personal pledge – the Earth Pledge? – which read something like this:

Out of love for the Earth and all of its inhabitants, and my respect for their needs, from this day onwards I pledge that:

  1. I will not travel by plane
  2. I will not travel by car
  3. I will not eat meat and fish
  4. I will only eat organically/biodynamically grown food
  5. I will minimize the amount of fresh water I use
  6. I will not buy rainforest timber
  7. I will not buy or use single-use plastic, such as bags, bottles, containers, cups and straws
  8. I will not use banks that provide any service to corporations involved in fossil fuels, nuclear power and/or weapons
  9. I will not get news from the corporate media (mainstream newspapers, television, radio, Facebook…)
  10. I will make the effort to learn a skill, such as food gardening or sewing, that makes me more self-reliant
  11. I will gently encourage my family and friends to consider signing this pledge.

Imagine if at all future climate rallies, participants were given the opportunity to sign such a pledge.

And imagine if at every demonstration against war, every participant was given the opportunity to sign such a pledge. There is little point yelling (or displaying a sign that reads) ‘No war for oil’ when you are the one using the oil. Surely, that would be hypocritical, wouldn’t it?

If it seems too difficult for now, would you sign the pledge after crossing out one or two items that you might reconsider later?

Perhaps, we can even mark 2 October 2019, the 150th anniversary of Gandhi’s birth, and the International Day of Nonviolence, as a day of world commitment with local ceremonies, small or large, around the world so that people can attend an event to make a public pledge of this nature too.

With the Earth under siege, would you sign such a pledge? What would you need to reorganize about your life to make it manageable?

The point then is this: It is easy to ask someone else to change their behaviour. It is more effective to change your own. And, if we do, we functionally undermine the cause of problems that concern so many of us.

Anyway, somewhat more elaborately, if you want strategic focus in your campaign strategy to end war or the climate catastrophe, for example, check out the two strategic aims and the basic list of strategic goals in ‘Campaign Strategic Aims’. And for the two strategic aims and the basic list of strategic goals to defend against a range of military threats, see ‘Defense Strategic Aims’.

This requires, vitally importantly, that the tactic in any given circumstance is thoughtfully crafted to achieve the strategic goal carefully identified as appropriate for this stage of the campaign. See the relationship and distinction between ‘The Political Objective and Strategic Goal of Nonviolent Actions’.

And for a better understanding of the power of nonviolent action and how to frame it for maximum strategic impact, see also ‘Nonviolent Action: Why and How it Works’.

Strategic Timeframe

Inadequate analysis, perhaps because you simply believe, without investigation, what the global elite is telling you via its many channels, such as its captive mainstream processes (including education systems and the corporate media), might lead you to work to a wholly unrealistic timeframe.

Unfortunately, this is precisely what is happening with the climate catastrophe. Unquestioningly following the elite-controlled discourse on this issue leads most people, including climate activists, to work to an ‘end of century’ timeframe or to believe, for example, that we have until 2030 to end our use of coal. And yet even some mainstream sources, such as the UN, are already reporting the catastrophic consequences of having set the utterly inadequate goal of limiting the global temperature increase to 2° (or 1.5°) celsius above the preindustrial norm. See, for example, ‘Global Linkages – A graphic look at the changing Arctic’ and ‘3-5°C temperature rise is now “locked-in” for the Arctic’.

So it is imperative that activists use their analysis (based on truthful sources) to make a realistic assessment of the timeframe. It might not be convenient to have less time than we think is necessary to precipitate the changes we want but our responsibility as activists includes the need to tell unpalatable truths (which the global elite and its agents will never do).

Fundamentally then, tell the truth. If there is a choice between being popular and telling the truth, I encourage you to always tell the truth. Deluding ourselves that we are doing a fine job and affirming each other for minor gains won’t avert human extinction or save those countless lifeforms, human and otherwise, who die each day as a result of our incredibly dysfunctional and violent world. Nor will it help those who are living under occupation, dictatorship or military assault.

Of course, telling the truth will scare many people. But it is still sounder strategy to trust people to hear the truth well, no matter how unpalatable it might be. Besides if we do not tell the truth and trust people, we have no prospect of mobilizing them strategically in the time we have left.

Needless to say, if you are going to tell the truth to others, you need to be courageous enough to perceive it yourself first. And to act on it.

Summary

In the above three sections, I explained the importance of a sound analysis, strategic focus and an appropriate timeframe as well as the importance of telling the truth, in developing and implementing an effective nonviolent strategy. This applies whatever the nature of the struggle: a peace, justice or environmental campaign or a defense or liberation struggle.

But effective strategy requires more than these three components and each of these components must also be soundly understood and rigorously implemented.

So if becoming more strategic appeals to you, check out either of these websites: Nonviolent Campaign Strategy or Nonviolent Defense/Liberation Strategy.

Or, for a quick overall look at the twelve components of nonviolent strategy, check out the Nonviolent Strategy Wheel on each site, such as this one.

In addition, if you want to focus on parenting children so that they are powerfully able to deal with reality and not get suckered into the widespread addictions of over-consumption and militarism – see ‘Love Denied: The Psychology of Materialism, Violence and War’ – or into believing that lobbying governments is the way to precipitate change, then you are welcome to consider making ‘My Promise to Children’ and learning the art of nisteling. See ‘Nisteling: The Art of Deep Listening’.

Of course, if you have problems reducing your consumption or questioning the efficacy of military violence, then consider addressing the unconscious psychological impediments to this. See ‘Putting Feelings First’.

If you like, you can also join the worldwide movement to end all violence by signing the online pledge of ‘The People’s Charter to Create a Nonviolent World’.

A Final Word

Some corporate economists are concerned that the global economy is facing a ‘downturn’ and, possibly, even entering a recession. As a result, they are arguing for measures to boost economic growth.

The reality, however, is that industrial civilization is already steadily and rapidly breaking down – with an endless sequence of climate and environmental catastrophes now taking place: for one of the latest, see ‘Death toll jumps in Mozambique storm as 15,000 await rescue’ – and will collapse completely within a few years. Why? Because the Earth has very little left to give without a staggering amount of regenerative inputs (some of which we can supply but others that require geological time).

But you do not need to believe me.

Consider the evidence for yourself.

If, after reading the lengthy list of documents, scientific and otherwise, cited in the key articles about near-term human extinction mentioned above, you can search out compelling evidence to refute the argument for near-term human extinction that is presented, then I hope you will share this evidence widely so that we can all be relieved that we have more time than an increasing number of courageous scientists are warning at risk to their livelihoods and professional appointments.

But if you cannot refute the evidence cited above or find the evidence that does it to your satisfaction, I invite you to respond thoughtfully and powerfully by taking immediate action to start systematically and substantially reducing your personal consumption while systematically increasing your personal and community self-reliance, in 16 areas, at the same time. Again, see ‘The Flame Tree Project to Save Life on Earth’.

I can assure you that if we ‘step down’ the global economy systematically while increasing our self-reliance at a (much) lower level of consumption (which will also demonetize economic activity), then all of those corporations – such as those producing fossil fuels, mining strategic minerals and destroying rainforests – will cease producing products for which there is no market. They will simply have no financial incentive to do so. And this will functionally and ongoingly undermine the power of the global elite to manipulate us into surrendering our power by lobbying governments and surrendering our labor and resources to buy their products to increase their power and profits. Moreover, elites will have less incentive to start and fight the wars to steal the resources necessary to make the products our over-consumption currently requires.

As you probably realize, it is your own action that gives you credibility (and moral authority) to then encourage others to follow your example, and for you to campaign for others to change their behaviour too. One hundred years ago, Mohandas K. Gandhi – perhaps anticipating the latest UN report: ‘UN Alliance For Sustainable Fashion addresses damage of “fast fashion”’ – was reminding us that ‘Earth provides enough to satisfy every person’s needs, but not every person’s greed.’ And he modeled the minimal consumption he asked of others in his own life first. At his death, he owned two outfits of handspun cotton, which he made himself on a spinning wheel, and a pair of sandals.

We do not have to be as frugal as Gandhi but we do need to substantially reduce our consumption and increase our self-reliance if we are to have any chance of preserving a biosphere that will sustain life for viable populations of all species.

Activists need to have the courage to act this out and then spread this message to everyone (particularly in the industrialized world): not waste their time asking elite agents, like governments, to support the switch to renewable energy or stop fighting wars to steal resources.

If we are to fight effectively to preserve the biosphere, we must do it strategically.

 

Biodata: Robert J. Burrowes has a lifetime commitment to understanding and ending human violence. He has done extensive research since 1966 in an effort to understand why human beings are violent and has been a nonviolent activist since 1981. He is the author of ‘Why Violence?’ His email address is flametree@riseup.net and his website is here.

Robert J. Burrowes
P.O. Box 68
Daylesford, Victoria 3460
Australia

Email: flametree@riseup.net

Websites:
Nonviolence Charter
Flame Tree Project to Save Life on Earth
‘Why Violence?’
Feelings First
Nonviolent Campaign Strategy
Nonviolent Defense/Liberation Strategy
Anita: Songs of Nonviolence
Robert Burrowes
Global Nonviolence Network