The Dying Americans

Posted on December 10, 2015 by Reid Mukai

By Chad Hill

I’ve often used the term “the final solution for the working class,” in reference to the current American policy towards its vast intercoastal peasantry who, for reasons of circumstance or inclination, do not subject themselves to the decade or so of wildly expensive education that qualifies them for the remaining jobs on offer. It may be a reflection of my readership that I haven’t received any pushback. As someone who is in that same working class, I can clearly see what is happening around me, and I’m not alone. David J. Blacker, in his book, The Falling Rate of Learning and the Neoliberal Endgame, also broached the subject of eliminationism, going so far as to study the German holocaust literature of the 1930’s which calmly and rationally discussed how to deal with the problem of getting rid of the millions of excess people whom the elites determined were “undesirable” in the brave new world they were creating.

After last week, it’s hard to argue that this is hyperbole. The news that America’s white working class between the ages of 45-65 has dramatically falling life expectancy, alone against nearly the entire world, received a surprising (to me) bit of coverage. When I first read it, I assumed it would be just another footnote story that I would write about here, but would be ignored everywhere else. But it received a surprising amount of coverage: even Paul Krugman wrote about it. I suspect a large part of that was due to the fact that it was research by the most recent economics “Nobel” laureate Angus Deaton and his wife, so it was harder to ignore than if it had been from some unknown researcher.

Often times you hear about a “dieoff” due to our situation. I think this study confirms beyond a doubt that the dieoff is already happening. Yet, consider that, before this study became popularized, you would have never heard about it in the mainstream press. Still doubt the collapse is real?

It’s not people dying in the streets, though, unlike some of the more feverish TEOTWAKI peak oil predictions. From the research, elevated levels of suicide and drug abuse are the prime culprits. It’s the million little deaths that go unnoticed in the obituary columns of decaying communities all across this formerly prosperous nation. Someone overdosed in a back alley. Or a meth lab exploded. Or maybe they were killed in a car accident, or decapitated while driving their motorcycle too fast. Or they were shot by police. Or they are dying of liver failure by age 40. Or, increasingly, they are ground down slowly by the many chronic diseases such as diabetes that are symptomatic of the chronic stress and horrid (yet highly profitable) junk food diet of most Americans. It’s a dieoff all right, but it’s never framed as such. You can see it all around you: the overcrowded jails filled with unemployed people, the overcrowded hospitals filled with sick, obese people, the folks standing on the medians and freeway offramps with cardboard signs and living their cars, all while the media just goes on reporting about spectator sports and celebrity gossip as though nothing bad is happening. Ignorance really is bliss.

The obvious analogy here is Russia after the fall of the Soviet Union, as many people writing about the study have pointed out: The Dying Russians (New York Review of Books). But there was no “collapse” of the United States. Or was there? Instead, we’re told by the media and politicians that everything in every way is getting better and better for everyone. Just look at the latest iPhone! Television screens are huge! Even the very poor have indoor plumbing! And you can Google anything you like, so what are you complaining about, loser?

Everything is famed as personal failure, thus the dieoff is just a million stories of individual failure with no overall pattern. Nothing to see here, more along. Study and “work hard” (whatever that means), and you’ll be okay. Certainly that fear is behind the epidemic of overwork, presenteeism and grinding hours of unpaid overtime Americans are putting in at work in the hope of not being next. It’s like being the model prisoner in a concentration camp, though. Ask the turkeys this month if being a good turkey had any effect on their ultimate fate. The Parable of the Happy Turkey (Global Guerrillas)

Up until now, Americans have been happy turkeys. Thus, they cannot comprehend what is happening to them. In America it is taken for granted that the ultimate locus of control is on the individual, and that there is no such thing as society. That belief has been heavily promoted over the past thirty years, along with the “create your own reality” and other assorted positive thinking nonsense (thanks Oprah!), and I think we can see why.

And since we see this always as personal failure and are not allowed to see it as systemic failure, the poor and formerly middle classes take it out on themselves instead of the system. After all, America is the land of opportunity; if you don’t “make it’ (whatever that means), you have no one to blame but yourself! Of course it is not true; the musical chairs job market and winner-take-all economy means that only a tiny number of people even have a shot at the middle class anymore, and a lot of that is due to geography, pre-existing social connections and luck.

They don’t have to kill you if they can get you to kill yourself.

And although framed as a tragedy, I wonder if to some extent this behavior on the part of working class males is a logical response to living in the kind of society that the United States has become. In a society that has no use for them anymore and where they have no sense of purpose and no hope for the future, it seems like suicide is a rational response. After a certain age, you realize that you have been sorted to the “losers” pile. If you live in the vast suburban flatland of Middle America, you likely live in a decrepit house somewhere in the anonymous miasma of strip-mall suburbia, buy disposable plastic crap made in China from baleful fluorescent-lit Dollar Stores, drive an older model pickup truck or SUV with a bad muffler and bad brakes over potholed streets and under rusty bridges, while all the jobs around you aside from the hospital and the university (which are mainly female-staffed) are minimum wage, dead-end jobs where you have to smile and wear a uniform. You realize you’re never going to meet the girl of your dreams since hypergamy is still baked into female mating choice, despite what some feminists claim. You realize you will never get that that great job that will allow you to be upwardly mobile and live in relative ease and comfort, and life is a bitter, hard struggle relieved only by the occasional joint and video games. Or you’re divorced and paying child support to your former wife who’s managed to keep herself presentable enough to hook up with one of the few remaining alpha-males, and half your income goes to support the kids you never see. Or your deadbeat loser children have been working multiple McJobs and living in the basement for years with no hope of even affording a one-bedroom apartment, and between them and the wife you never speak to anymore, you can’t even get into your own damn bathroom. You realize that, like most Americans, you will never afford to retire and will have to work your boring, dead-end job under your asshole supervisor until you literally drop dead. So why wait?

I mean, who wouldn’t kill themselves or anesthetize themselves with drugs and booze in an environment like this?

I once read an online commenter say that the rich are the beta testers for the lifestyles we will all be living in the future (and thus no restraints must be put on their wealth accumulation if we are to experience that future). But that commenter had it wrong. Rather, it is the poor–those living on less than a few dollars a day; those who live in ghettos marred by gangs and drug abuse; those with their heat, water, and streetlights turned off, who are the beta testers for the lifestyles that most of us will be “enjoying” in the near future. As William Gibson said, the future is already here, just not evenly distributed.

Given the above, I can’t help but think of the “Rat Park” experiment. Rats in a cage, when given a choice between water and drugs, would overdose themselves to death on the drugs, neglecting even basic self-maintenance. But a cage is a boring, repetitive, stressful environment for a rat, so you might expect the animals to anesthetize themselves with whatever was on offer. But rats living in an environment specifically designed to be pleasant and give the rats what they needed to thrive did not overdose themselves to death; they preferred healthier behaviors instead. It’s worth noting that most of the drugs we use today have been known for hundreds or even thousands of years, but were not abused by the native peoples who discovered them. That is reserved for modern, “advanced” societies. The Rat Park experiment (io9)

I once wrote that if you wanted to intentionally design a social environment to drive a primate insane, you would develop something pretty much identical to modern-day America (advertising, chronic stress, inequality, separation from nature and each other, boring, repetitive work, constant surveillance, and on and on…). It’s pretty obvious how Rat Park parallels life in twenty-first century America with its ubiquitous television, concentration-camp schools complete with metal detectors, freeways and cul-de-sacs and landscapes of Applebees™ and Walmarts; along with a steady diet of Pizza Hut and Taco Bell. It’s hardly an environment designed for human flourishing, is it? Rather, it is designed to maximize “economic growth” at all costs. The results of that experiment are as plain to see as they are predictable.

Most people who are still relatively comfortable are content to write off the people who are living in deprived circumstances among them right now, especially in the United States where so many of those poor are African-American. But more and more, whites are experiencing what they had previously dismissed as “black problems” due to their racist attitudes: the hopelessness and despair, the unemployment, the sociological pathologies; the drug abuse, divorces, domestic violence, youth gangs and so on. It’s not race, it’s environment, as Rat Park showed. Given a certain environment, an animal–any animal–will behave a certain way. Its totally predictable. We know this, but why do we pretend it is not true? Instead we reliably chalk it all up to “the Cult of Personal Failure.”

But this leads to an even larger question, one that gets to the heart of our modern predicament. We have to ask ourselves, what kind of society are we creating where so many people see death as preferable to living in such a society? In what kind of a society do people see life as so miserable that they prefer to kill themsleves, either slowly or immediately? That is, why is this the end result of hundreds of years of supposed “progress?”

Fundamentally, how do you feel about this society? Do you feel good about this society? Do you feel good about the school-to-prison pipeline? Do you feel good that there are more prisoners than small yeoman farmers? Do you feel good that it is a felony to show us how our food is produced? Do you feel good about students mortgaging their future for jobs that won’t exist by the time the bill comes due? Do you feel good about hospitals treating chronic diseases taking the place of farming and making things as basis of the America’s rural economies? Do you feel good about police armed with body armor and and tear gas? Do you feel good about wall-to-wall advertising preying on our weakness and insecurities? Do you feel good about the atmosphere of incessant adversarial competition against everyone else for the shrinking pool of jobs on offer which pay enough to afford rent?

If so, why?

This puts a crimp on the Panglossian “everything in every way is getting better for everyone,” rhetoric that you hear so often in the media. What I find amusing is that this rhetoric used to come from the Left–that the welfare state would eliminate poverty, racism, that everything was under control and circles of cooperation would get larger and larger, and so on. But now, I mostly hear the Panglossian rhetoric coming primarily from the Right, whose preferred God is the unregulated “free” market. It’s in the Right-wing propaganda now that I constantly hear how wonderful everything is, and that those who are complaining are either delusional misfits or just jealous. Here is a prime example from the Right-wing National Review:

Good news abroad, and good news at home: In 1990, there were 2,245 murders in New York City. That number has fallen by 85 percent. Murders are down, often dramatically, in cities across the country. The overall rate of violent crime has fallen by about half in recent decades. U.S. manufacturing output per worker trebled from 1975 to 2005, and our total manufacturing output continues to climb. Despite the no-knowthings [sic] who go around complaining that “we don’t make things here anymore,” the United States continues to make the very best of almost everything and, thanks to our relatively free-trading ways, to consume the best of everything, too. General-price inflation, the bane of the U.S. economy for some decades, is hardly to be seen. Flexible and effective institutions helped ensure that we weathered one of the worst financial crises of modern times with surprisingly little disruption in the wider economy. Despite politicians who would usurp our rights, our courts keep reliably saying that the First Amendment and the Second Amendment pretty much mean what they say. I just filled up my car for $1.78 a gallon.

The world isn’t ending.

The world is healthier, wealthier, and less hungry mainly because of the efforts of millions of unknown investors, entrepreneurs, farmers, workers, bankers, etc., all working without any central coordinating authority….There is much left to do: We have unsustainable fiscal situations in the Western welfare states, irreconcilable Islamist fanatics originating in points east but spread around the world, environmental challenges, and that tenth of the human race that still needs lifting out of hardcore poverty. But we have achieved a remarkable thing in that unless we mess things up really badly, in 50 years we’ll be having to explain to our grandchildren what a famine was, how it came to be that millions of people died every year for want of clean water — and they will look at us incredulously, wondering what it must have been like to live in the caveman times of the early 21st century.

Liberal Democracy and Free Markets, Take a Bow (National Review) Or better yet, strap on flight suit and hang up a “Mission Accomplished” banner.

Yes, for the folks on the Right, it truly is a Golden Age. There are a few flaws in the ointment like those pesky welfare states and all that but, hey, gas is cheap! Can’t you just feel the bright, shiny future ahead? Here’s a another sampling from The Wall Street Journal:

The trajectory of the world doesn’t justify this pessimism. People are living longer on every continent. They’re doing less arduous, backbreaking work. Natural disasters are killing fewer people. Fewer crops are failing. Some 100,000 people are being lifted out of poverty every day, according to World Bank data.

Life is also getting better in the U.S., on multiple measures, but the survey found that 55% of Americans think the “rich get richer” and the “poor get poorer” under capitalism. Sixty-five percent agree that most big businesses have “dodged taxes, damaged the environment or bought special favors from politicians,” and 58% want restrictions on the import of manufactured goods.

Has the World Lost Faith in Capitalism? (WSJ) Silly people, how dare they “lose faith!” Once we stamp out every last vestige of “socialism” we can restore that faith.

So what’s going on here? Listening to the Right, one gets the appearance that things have never been better, and that people are just totally irrational and determined to complain no matter how good they have it, despite voluminous scientific literature portraying optimism bias as the default cognitive condition for most people.

I think it stems from two areas – the Neoliberal experiment has clearly been an unmitigated disaster, so the literature constantly has to portray a rosy picture for those still living in the elite ideological bubble by cherry-picking data: Cheer – Inequality is Falling Globally!! (and similar nonsense) (Pieria). It’s much like the “happy peasant” literature that prevailed on the eve of the French Revolution and during early Industrialism to convince upper-class readers that their efforts were actually for the good of all, not just themselves; it’s just that the feckless peasants were too short-sighted to realize it. The elites, for some reason, have a need to believe, despite all the evidence to the contrary, that the free-market fundamentalism they subscribe to is making everyone–not just them–better off. Perhaps it is a remedy for cognitive dissonance and a guilty conscience.

The second agenda might be to cover up the agenda of eliminationism referred to above.
Going back to the original topic, it’s fairly clear that getting rid of the lower classes is, as The Joker put it in The Dark Knight, “all part of the plan.”

Now that might seem a bit paranoid, but consider this – the governors of many states are withdrawing basic social protections for their poorest citizens, and actually paying for the priviliege! Here’ Kevin Drum:

…the states that refuse to expand Medicaid are denying health care to the needy and paying about $2 billion for the privilege. Try to comprehend the kind of people who do this.

The residents of every state pay taxes to fund Obamacare, whether they like it or not. Residents of the states that refuse to expand Medicaid are paying about $50 billion in Obamacare taxes each year, and about $20 billion of that is for Medicaid expansion. Instead of flowing back into their states, this money is going straight to Washington DC, never to be seen again. So they’re willing to let $20 billion go down a black hole and pay $2 billion extra in order to prevent Obamacare from helping the needy. It’s hard to fathom, isn’t it?

Red States Spent $2 Billion in 2015 to Screw the Poor (Mother Jones)

Last week, McClatchy documented the unnecessary pain being inflicted on red state residents by their elected Republican representatives…Roughly 260 million Americans (roughly 85 percent) already have health insurance provided by their employers, the government or through individual policies they purchased. In places like Oregon, Colorado, New York, California and other, mostly Democratic states, governors and state legislators accepted the expansion of Medicaid to provide free health insurance for those earning up to 138 percent of the federal poverty (FPL). For those earning between 138 and 400 percent of the FPL, the Affordable Care Act’s subsidies will help them purchase insurance in the private market. But in the states where Republicans said “no” to the expansion of Medicaid, the picture is much different. As the AP explained the coverage gap:

Nearly 2 in 3 uninsured people who would qualify for health coverage under an expansion of Medicaid live in states which won’t broaden the program or have not yet decided on expansion.

The resulting Republican body count is staggering. Thanks to the GOP’s rejection of Medicaid expansion, 1.3 million people in Texas, 1 million in Florida, 534,000 in Georgia and 267,000 in Missouri will be ensnared in the coverage gap.

Health Insurance “Coverage Gap” Coming To A Red State Near You (Crooks and Liars)

That’s right, Republican governors are blowing a hole in their budget just to remove social protections for the poor. Often times, “unaffordability” is cited as a justification, but clearly this is not at work here. It’s pure ideology. But what is that ideology? Here’s more detail:

American conservatives for the past several decades have shown a remarkable hostility to poor people in our country. The recent effort to slash the SNAP food stamp program in the House; the astounding refusal of 26 Republican governors to expand Medicaid coverage in their states — depriving millions of poor people from access to Medicaid health coverage; and the general legislative indifference to a rising poverty rate in the United States — all this suggests something beyond ideology or neglect.

The indifference to low-income and uninsured people in their states of conservative governors and legislators in Texas, Florida, and other states is almost incomprehensible. Here is a piece in Bustle that reviews some of the facts about expanding Medicaid coverage:

In total, 26 states have rejected the expansion, including the state of Mississippi, which has the highest rate of uninsured poor people in the country. Sixty-eight percent of uninsured single mothers live in the states that rejected the expansion, as do 60 percent of the nation’s uninsured working poor.

These attitudes and legislative efforts didn’t begin yesterday. They extend back at least to the Reagan administration in the early 1980s…

Most shameful, many would feel, is the attempt to reduce food assistance in a time of rising poverty and deprivation. It’s hard to see how a government or party could justify taking food assistance away from hungry adults and children, especially in a time of rising poverty. And yet this is precisely the effort we have witnessed in the past several months in revisions to the farm bill in the House of Representatives. In a recent post Dave Johnson debunks the myths and falsehoods underlying conservative attacks on the food stamp program in the House revision of the farm bill.

This tenor of our politics indicates an overt hostility and animus towards poor people. How is it possible to explain this part of contemporary politics on the right? What can account for this persistent and unblinking hostility towards poor people?

Why a war on poor people? (Understanding Society)

Let’s restate this to be clear to make sure the point is not lost: these states are willing to lose money in order to make sure their poor die quicker. Clear enough? And we’re not even talking about things like the outright cold-blooded murder of the homeless by police, the breaking up of homeless encampments, the mass incarceration, and return of debtors’ prisons, and so on. It’s expensive to be poor in America. We do everything by the Matthew Effect from jobs to education, and wonder why class mobility is nonexistent. Yet we’re still told that everyone wants to be an American, that it’s the land of opportunity, and that things have literally never been better.

Thrown in jail for being poor: the booming for-profit probation industry (Guardian)

Much of the well-funded efforts of plutocrats and their allies has been to repeal the Affordable Care Act (which was designed by Right-wing think tanks), not to reform it or replace it with something more effective, but to return to the predatory status quo ante. Now, businessmen may be greedy, short-sighted and sociopathic, but they are not stupid. They surely know that the American System is wildly more expensive than any other place on earth, but they are willing to lose billions of dollars in profit just to make sure people don’t get health care! Think about that. A European friend said to me once that he didn’t understand why American businesses seemed to want sick, insecure employees who either don’t have access to health care, or are worried about going broke trying to pay for it. It seemed totally irrational to him. But it’s only irrational if you don’t understand the underlying ideology of eliminationism. Some societies actually want to kill off their own people, as Nazi Germany and other tragic examples have shown.

And it’s of a piece with the withdrawal of mass education that Blacker documents in his book. The elites are disinvesting from society in every way because they just don’t need us anymore. And their propaganda mills are dedicated to making sure the blame is squarely placed on individuals so that we will internalize learned helplessness which has prevented any effective resistance. Or their mills are insisting that it’s just not happening, and everybody is really better off, as we saw above, except for a few churlish losers who have no one to blame but themselves (and are probably looking for a handout).

Who turned my blue state red? (NYT). A great explanation of America’s crab mentality.

I’ve featured the analogy of horses that some economists use before. Human beings may have found other jobs (which is debatable), but the population of horses just went down in line with the work that was available for them to do. I think it’s obvious that this is a good analogy for what’s happening.

…Similarly, one could just as easily have said, a century ago, that: “Fundamental economic principles will continue to operate. Scarcities will still be with us…. Most horses will still have useful tasks to perform, even in an economy where the capacities of power sources and automation have increased considerably…”

Yet demand for the labor of horses today is vastly less than it was a century ago, even though horses are extremely strong, fast, capable and intelligent animals. “Peak horse” in the U.S. came in the 1910s, I believe. After that there was no economic incentive to keep the horse population of America from declining sharply, as at the margin the horse was not worth its feed and care. And in a marginal-cost pricing world, in which humans are no longer the only plausible source of Turing-level cybernetic control mechanisms, what will happen to those who do not own property should the same come to be true, at the margin, of the human? What would “peak human” look like? Or–a related but somewhat different possibility–even “peak male”?

Technological Progress Anxiety: Thinking About “Peak Horse” and the Possibility of “Peak Human” (Brad DeLong)

Off to the glue factory with the middle class, then. As long as it’s kept diffuse enough, it will never be picked up on; “Work Makes You Free” hangs in the air over our heads instead of over the entry gates. Perhaps we should just inscribe it on the Gateway Arch.

So, all told, the self-destructive habits of the middle-aged white poor are hardly irrational. Rather, it seems to be to be the most rational response to the type of world we’ve created. The only question is, why do so many of us apparently want to stay on this path?

There is something extraordinary happening in the world

Posted on December 6, 2015 by Reid Mukai

By Gustavo Tanaka

Source: Medium

A few months ago, I freed myself from society, I’ve released myself from attachments I had and fear that locked me to the system. And since then, I started seeing the world from a different perspective. The perspective that everything is changing and most of us have not even realized that.

Why is the world changing? In this post I’ll list the reasons that take me to believe this.

1 — No one can stand the employment model anymore.

Each one is reaching its own limit. People that work in big corporations can’t handle their jobs. The lack of purpose starts to knock the door of each one as a desperate scream coming from the heart.

People want to escape. They want to leave everything behind. Look how many people trying to become entrepreneurs, how many people going on sabbaticals, how many people depressed in their jobs, how many people in burnout.

2- The entrepreneurship model is also changing

A few years ago, with the explosion of the startups, thousands of entrepreneurs, ran to their garages to create their billion dollar ideas. The glory was to get funded by an investor. Investor’s money in hand was just like winning the World Cup.

But what happens after you get funded?

You become an employee again. You have people that are not aligned with your dream, that don’t give a damn to the purpose and everything turns into money. The financial return starts to be the main driver.

Many people are suffering with this. Brilliant startups start to fall because the model of chasing money never ends.

We need a new model of entrepreneurship.

And there is already many good people doing this.

3- The rise of collaboration

Many people have already realized that makes no sense to go alone. Many people awake to this crazy mentality of “going on your own”.

Stop, take a step back and think. Isn’t it an absurd, we, 7 billion people living in the same planet get so separated from each other? What sense does it make, you and the thousands (or millions) of people living in the same city turn your back to each other? Every time I think of that I get kind of depressed.

But fortunately, things are changing. All the movements of sharing and collaborative economy are pointing towards this direction. The rise of collaboration, sharing, helping, giving a hand, getting united.

It is beautiful. It brings tears to my eyes.

4- We are finally starting to understand what the internet is

Internet is an incredibly spectacular thing and only now, after so many years we are understanding it’s power. With internet, the world opens, the barriers fall, separation ends, union starts, collaboration explodes, help emerges.

Some nations made revolution with the internet, such as the Arab Spring. In Brazil we are just starting to use better this magnificent tool.

Internet is taking down mass control. There is no more television, no more few newspapers showing the news they want us to read. You can go after whatever you want, you relate to whoever you want. You can explore whatever you want, whenever you want.

With internet, the small starts to get a voice. The anonymous become known. The world gets united. And the system may fall.

5- The fall of exaggerated consumption

For many years, we have been manipulated, stimulated to consume as maniacs. To buy everything that was launched in the market. To have the newest car, the latest iphone, the best brands, lots of clothes, lots of shoes, lots of lots, lots of everything.

But many people have already understood that it makes no sense at all. Movements such as the lowsumerism, slow life, slow food, start to show us that we have organized ourselves in the most absurd possible way.

Each time less people using cars, less people buying a lot, each time more people trading clothes, donating, buying old things, sharing goods, sharing cars, apartments, offices.

We need nothing of what they told us we needed.

And this consciousness can break any corporation that depends on exaggerated consumption.

6- Healthy and organic eating

We were so crazy that we accepted eating any kind of garbage. It only needed to taste good, that was ok.

We were so disconnected, that the guys started to add poison in our food and we didn’t say anything.

But then some guys started to wake up and give strength to movements of healthy eating and organic consumption.

And this is going to be huge.

But what does it have to do with economy and work? Everything!

The production of food is the basis of our society. Food industry is one of the most important in the world. If consciousness changes, our eating habits also change, and consumption changes, and then the big corporations must follow these changes.

The small farmer is starting to have strength again. Also people who are planting their own food.

And that changes the whole economy.

7 — The awakening of spirituality

How many friends do you have that practice yoga? What about meditation?

How many used to do it 10 years ago?

Spirituality for many years was a thing of the esoteric people. Of those weird people from mysticism.

But fortunately, this is also changing. We got to the limit of our rationality. We could see that only with the rational mind we cannot understand everything that happens here. There is something more happening and I know you want to understand.

You want to understand how things work in here. How life operates, what happens after death, what is this energy thing that people talk so much, what is quantum physics, how can thoughts become things and create our reality, what are coincidences and synchronicities, why meditation works, how is it possible to cure with the hands and what about these alternative therapies that medicine does not approve, but work?

Companies are promoting meditation to their employees. Schools teaching meditation to kids.

8 — Unschooling movements

Who created this teaching model? Who chose the classes you have to take? Who chose the lessons we learn in history classes? Why didn’t they teach us the truth about other ancient civilizations?

Why should the kids obey rules? Why should they watch everything in silence? Why should they wear uniform?

Take a test to prove that you learned?

We created a model that forms followers of the system. That prepare people to be ordinary human beings.

But fortunately there are many people working to change that. Movements like unschooling, hackschooling, homeschooling.

Maybe you have never thought of this and you are chocked with the points I’m listing here.

But all these things are happening.

Silently, people are awakening and realizing how crazy it is to live in this society.

Look at all these movements and try to think everything is normal.

I don’t think it is.

There is something extraordinary happening.

— — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — —

Gustavo Tanaka — Brazilian author and entrepreneur, trying to create with my friends a new model, a new system and maybe helping to create a new economy.

Counterculture: The Rebel Commodity

Posted on November 29, 2015 by Reid Mukai

By James Curcio

Source: Rebel News

Let’s talk about being a rebel.

Everyone seems to want to be one. But it’s not entirely clear what it means. Does it take camo- pants? A Che T-shirt? A guitar? Is it just doing the opposite of whatever your parents did? “Be an individual, a rebel, innovate,” so many advertisements whisper. They’d have us believe that True Revolutionaries think different. They use Apple, or drink Coke. We signal our dissent to one another with the music we listen to and the cars we drive.

There’s something very peculiar going on here, something elusive and deeply contentious.

In the 1997 book, Commodify Your Dissent, Thomas Frank laid out a thesis that may appear common sense to those that have watched or lived in the commodified subcultures of the 90s, 00s, and beyond. A New York Times review comments,

… business culture and the counterculture today are essentially one and the same thing. Corporations cleverly employ the slogans and imagery of rebellion to market their products, thereby (a) seizing a language that ever connotes “new” and “different,” two key words in marketing, and (b) coaxing the young effortlessly into the capitalist order, where they will be so content with the stylishly packaged and annually updated goods signifying nonconformity they’ll never so much as consider real dissent — dissent against what Frank sees as the concentrated economic power of the “Culture Trust,” those telecommunications and entertainment giants who, he believes, “fabricate the materials with which the world thinks.” To have suffered the calculated pseudo-transgressions of Madonna or Calvin Klein, to have winced at the Nike commercial in which the Beatles’ “Revolution” serves as a jingle, is to sense Frank is on to something. (After reading Frank, in fact, you’ll have a hard time using words like “revolution” or “rebel” ever again, at least without quotation marks.)

The urge to rebel fuels the same system they ostensibly oppose. Whether it’s in arms trade, or far less ominously, manners of dress and behavior, there are dollars to be made fighting “The Man.” And maybe making money isn’t always an altogether bad thing. But it is certainly a complication, especially for those espousing neo-Marxists ideals.

As Guy Debord observed, “revolutionary theory is now the enemy of all revolutionary ideology and knows it.” Rebel movements are a counterculture, regardless of what they call themselves.

Rebellion is Cool

We’ll begin with a quintessential icon of the branded, shiny counterculture. The Matrix. We’ve probably all seen it. Even as an example it’s a cliché, and that’s part of the point. Here’s a framed sketch of the first movie, for those that haven’t: when it first ran, it was a slick take on the alienation most suburban American youth feel, packaged within the context of the epistemological skepticism Descartes wrestled with in the 17th century. Taken out of the cubicle and into the underworld, we witness the protagonist “keeping it real” by eating mush, donning co-opted fetish fashion, and fighting an army of identical men in business suits in slow motion. The movie superimposes the oligarchic and imperialist powers-that-be atop Neo’s quest of adolescent self-mastery. A successful piece of marketing — you can be sure no one collecting profits or licensing deals let their misgivings about “the Man” keep them from paying the rent.

This is not to point an accusatory finger, but rather to show the essential dependence of the counterculture upon the mainstream, because counter-cultures are not self-sustaining, and every culture produces a counter-culture in its shadow, just as every self produces an other. Any counterculture. Punk, mod, beatnik, romantic, hippy, psychedelic, straight edge, or occult. Even the early adopters of Internet culture started a group of outsiders that shared a collective vision,

The computer enthusiasts who could only dream of an open, global network in 1990 would go on to staff the dot-coms of the next decade. The closed networks that once guarded forbidden knowledge quickly fell by the wayside, and curiosity about computers could no longer be imagined a crime.

Our cyberspace today has its share of problems, but it is no dystopia — and for that, we must acknowledge the key part played by the messy collision of table-top games, computer hacking, law enforcement overreach and cyberpunk science fiction in 1990.

This article explores the strange history of Peter Jackson games, TSR, and the FBI. But it wasn’t the only one. Shadow Run, another popular cyberpunk RPGs of the 1990s, presented one of the more seemingly-improbable of cyberpunk futures, where you could play a freelancing mutant scrambling to survive in an ecosystem of headless corporations connected through cyberspace. Sound familiar? The Matrix just represented the final translation of these and similar fringe narratives into the mainstream.

Future vision has some effect on future reality, both in the identities we imagine for ourselves and the technologies we choose to explore. They almost always have unexpected consequences. Now we carry the networked planet in our palms, granting near instant communication with anyone, anywhere and anytime, and your intended subject isn’t always the only one listening.

We shouldn’t be surprised by this feedback loop. Without laying the material, mythic, and social groundwork for a new society, counterculture cannot be a bridge; it almost invariably leads back to the mainstream, though not necessarily without first making its mark and pushing some new envelope.

This even presents something of a false dichotomy — that old models of business can’t themselves be co-opted by countercultural myths. Yesterday’s counterculture is today’s mainstream. What better way to understand the so-called revolution of iPads or social media?

Our cultural symbols and signifiers are never static. Psychedelic and straight edge can share the same rack in a store if the store owner can co-brand the fashions, and people can brand themselves “green” through their purchasing power without ever leaving those boxes or worrying about the big picture. AdBuster’s Buy Nothing Day still capitalizes on the “rebel dollar.”

Rebellion is cool. “Cool” is what customers pay a premium for, along with the comfort of a world with easy definitions and pre-packaged cultural rebellions. This process itself isn’t new. The rebel or nonconformist is probably a constitutive feature of the American imagination: original colonies were religious non-conformist, the country was founded by rebellion, the frontier, the civil war, the swinging 20s, Jazz, James Dean, John Wayne, Elvis, the list goes on. The non-conformist imagination is as paradoxically and problematically American as cowboys and indians, apple pie and racism.

The territory between aesthetic, ideals, and social movement is blurry at best. But the most well-known expression of this trend in recent history is the now somewhat idealized 1960s, a clear view of which has been obscured through a haze of pot-smoke and partisan politics. Though this revolution certainly didn’t start in the 1960s, there we have one of the clearest instances of what good bed-fellows mass advertising and manufacturing make when branded under the zeitgeist of the counterculture.

When people bought those hip clothes to make a statement, whose pockets were they lining? It’s a revolving door of product tie-ins, and it all feeds on the needs of the individual, embodied in a sub-culture. The moment that psychedelic culture gained a certain momentum, Madison Avenue chewed it up and spit it back out in 7up ads. That interpretation of what it meant to be a hippie, a revolutionary, became an influence on the next generation. The rise of Rolling Stone magazine could also be seen as an example of this — a counterculture upstart turned mainstream institution.

While advertising and counterculture get along just fine, authenticity and profit often make strange bedfellows. But they aren’t necessarily diametric opposites, either. As movements gain momentum, they present a market, and markets are essentially agnostic when it comes to ideals.

There are many examples of how troubled that relationship can be. The Grunge movement in the 90s, before it was discovered, was just a bunch of poor ass kids playing broken ass instruments in the Pacific Northwest. This was the very reason it struck disenfranchised youth — the relationship between those acts and the aging record industry in many ways seemed to reflect the relationship of adolescent Gen Xers with their Boomer parents. They retained the desire to “drop out,” as Timothy Leary had preached to the previous counterculture generation of Laguna Beach and Haight Ashbury, but without the mystical optimism of “tuning in.” Hunter S Thompson maybe presaged this transition in the quotation from Fear and Loathing In Las Vegas that’s now rendered famous to the kids of 90s thanks to Terry Gilliam’s film adaptation,

We are all wired into a survival trip now. No more of the speed that fueled that 60’s. That was the fatal flaw in Tim Leary’s trip. He crashed around America selling “consciousness expansion” without ever giving a thought to the grim meat-hook realities that were lying in wait for all the people who took him seriously… All those pathetically eager acid freaks who thought they could buy Peace and Understanding for three bucks a hit. But their loss and failure is ours too. What Leary took down with him was the central illusion of a whole life-style that he helped create… a generation of permanent cripples, failed seekers, who never understood the essential old-mystic fallacy of the Acid Culture: the desperate assumption that somebody… or at least some force – is tending the light at the end of the tunnel.

I don’t think it’s a great stretch to imagine the suddenly-famous bands of the Grunge era as a part of this same legacy. Alice In Chains or Nirvana songs about dying drugged out and alone weren’t oracular prophecy, they were journal entry. And it became part of the allure, because it too was “authentic.” The greatest irony of all was that the tragic meltdowns and burn outs that followed on fame’s heels became part of the commodity. (Not that this vulture economy is new to tabloids).

Our narratives about authentic moments of aesthetic expression or innovation often depict them like volcanic eruptions: they build up and acquire force in subterranean and occluded environments, before erupting in a momentary and spectacular public display of creativity. It is telling that this quote from On The Road has become so popular, very likely cited in the papers and journals of more rebellion-minded American teens than any other from that book, “… The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars.”

Hendrix, Joplin, Morrison, Cobain… the 27 Club is big. And quite a few more could be added if it was “the 20-something club.” Are the public self destructions of so many young, creative minds informed by this myth, or do they create it?

Maybe a bit of both. The Spectacle, in the sense Guy Debord uses it, disseminates its sensibilities, styles — a version of the truth. The particular moves ever toward the general, as facts gradually turn to legend and, eventually, myth. Mainstream appropriation is the process in which aesthetic movements affect broader society and culture. The ideals need a pulpit to reach the people, even if invariably it is fitted with guillotines for the early adopters once that message has been heard.

YOUR FATASS DIRTY DOLLAR

A message is a commodity, or it is obscure. Capitalism survives so well, in part, because it adapts to any message. If we instead think counterculture is an ideal that exists somehow apart from plebeian needs like making money, then countercultures will forever hobble itself. It doesn’t matter that these ideologies have little in common. It is the fashion or mystique that gets sold. Anti-corporate ideology sells as well as pro-. When all an ideology really boils down to is an easy to replicate aesthetic, how could they not?

Where do we draw the line between idealism and profit? The question is how individuals utilize or leverage the potential energy represented by that currency, and what ends it is applied to. Hard nosed books on business by the old guard, such as Drucker’s Management: Tasks, Responsibilities, Practices say exactly the same thing, in a less epigrammatic, Yoda-like way: profit is not a motive, it is a means. This much, at least, doesn’t change with the changing of the (sub)cultural tides. Within our present economic paradigm, without profit, nothing happens. Game over.

Those who position themselves as extreme radicals within the counterculture framework just disenfranchise themselves through an act of inept transference, finding anything with a dollar sign on it questionable. To this view, anyone that’s made a red cent off of their work is somehow morally bankrupt. This mentality generally ends one way: howling after the piece of meat on the end of someone else’s string, working by day for a major corporation, covering their self-loathing at night in tattoos, and body-modifications they can hide. That is, unless they lock themselves in a cave or try to start an agrarian commune. None of this posturing is in any way necessary, since business rhetoric itself has long since co-opted the countercultural message. For instance, this passage from Commodify your Dissent,

Dropping Naked Lunch and picking up Thriving on Chaos, the groundbreaking 1987 management text by Tom Peters, the most popular business writer of the past decade, one finds more philosophical similarities than one would expect from two manifestos of, respectively, dissident culture and business culture. If anything, Peters’ celebration of disorder is, by virtue of its hard statistics, bleaker and more nightmarish than Burroughs’. For this popular lecturer on such once-blithe topics as competitiveness and pop psychology there is nothing, absolutely nothing, that is certain. His world is one in which the corporate wisdom of the past is meaningless, established customs are ridiculous, and “rules” are some sort of curse, a remnant of the foolish fifties that exist to be defied, not obeyed. We live in what Peters calls “A World Turned Upside Down,” in which whirl is king and, in order to survive, businesses must eventually embrace Peters’ universal solution: “Revolution!”

“To meet the demands of the fast-changing competitive scene,” he counsels, “we must simply learn to love change as much as we have hated it in the past.” He advises businessmen to become Robespierres of routine, to demand of their underlings, “‘What have you changed lately?’ ‘How fast are you changing?’ and ‘Are you pursuing bold enough change goals?’” “Revolution,” of course, means for Peters the same thing it did to Burroughs and Ginsberg, Presley and the Stones in their heyday: breaking rules, pissing off the suits, shocking the bean-counters: “Actively and publicly hail defiance of the rules, many of which you doubtless labored mightily to construct in the first place.”

Growth on its own is never a clear indicator that the underlying ideals of a movement will remain preserved. If history has shown anything, it is that successful movements spread until core message becomes an empty, parroted aesthetic, as with most musical scenes and their transition from content to fashion; or that core is otherwise so emphasized that the meaning within is lost through literalism, as we can see in the history of the world’s major religions. One version of early Christian Gnostic history — of “love thy neighbor,” “all is one,” and scurrilous rumors of agape orgies — were replaced by the Roman Orthodoxy and the authority provided through the ultimate union of State and Religion. The hippies traded in their sandals and beat up VWs for SUVs and overpriced Birkenstocks. The relationship between ideology and act is far to complicated to enter into here, but the counter-history of Communism when viewed against the backdrop of Marxist ideals is perhaps equally insightful.

Enantiodromia, the tendency of things to turn into their opposites, is as much social observation as psychological. It oftentimes seems that succeeding too well can be the greatest curse to befall a movement. When the pendulum swings far in one direction, it often turns into its opposite without having the common decency to wait to swing back the other way.

As we’ve seen, this was part of the supposed downfall of counterculture in capitalism: “suits” decided they could deconstruct an organic process and manufacture it. They could own it from the ground up.

But this isn’t necessarily so. The branding of Cirque Du Soleil points toward a third option — arts movements will be dissected in the jargon of marketing, and they must succeed on those grounds to be taken seriously or accomplish anything.

Burning Man isn’t suddenly opening its gates to the wealthy. Yacht Communism has been a part of that movement ever since it gained some mainstream appeal, likely before. Seen as an arts and cultural movement, it has been vastly successful. Seen as an example of how to create a true egalitarian society, it would be an utter failure. But that was never the point.

Two weeks at Burning Man might be fun, even transformative, but spend two years there and you’d find out what hell is like.

The Reason You Work So Hard to Participate in the Rat Race

Posted on November 15, 2015 by Reid Mukai

By M.J. Higby

Source: Waking Times

Ralph Waldo Emerson once said, “A man in debt is so far a slave.” Money has no intrinsic value yet we spend our days damaging our health and spirit in order to obtain it. Why do we sacrifice our well-being for it? Is it the cliché that “we just want to provide a better life for our kids than we had?” Is it just way of the civilized world? The most important question to ask, however, is what power do we have to change this way of thinking and living? The reality is simple: money is a vehicle for social control. Debt makes us good, obedient workers and citizens.

The traditional workweek started in 1908 at The New England Cotton Mill in order to allow followers of the Jewish religion to adhere to Sabbath. With the passage of The Fair Labor Standards Act in 1938, the 40-hour workweek became the norm. Data from the 2013 American Community Survey showed that the average commute time in America is about 26 minutes each way. According to a Gallup poll, the average workweek in America is 34.4 hours, however, when only taking into account full time workers, that average shoots up to 47, or 9.4 hours per day during a 5-day workweek. Keeping averages in mind then, between commuting, working and figuring in an hour for lunch (usually less), that puts us at approximately 11 hours and 40 minutes for the average full time worker. If you have a family with young kids, just add in another few hours for homework, baths, etc.

When the day is done, how much time do you have for yourself? To exercise, meditate or otherwise unwind the way that all the healthy living gurus preach? And how much of yourself, your presence of mind, is left to devote to family? We give the company the heat of our most intense mental fire while our families get the smoke. Yet Jeb Bush, the 2016 GOP presidential hopeful, says we need to work more.

The answer to why we put ourselves through this daily grind is multifaceted. The most pervasive reason is workplace and societal pressures. We are raised in a matrix of sorts. The cycle starts around the age of five when we are expected to adhere to a regimented 8-hour day of school. At this age, we don’t have the intellect to question why, so we mechanistically follow the path that’s laid out. This daily path becomes engraved in our minds and becomes as automatic as the sun’s daily journey. Our school system is adept at churning out working class individuals en masse. We are taught along the way not to question authority, again adhering to the working class mentality.

On the opposite end of the spectrum are those in power. They are the ones that like to color outside the lines. Many books abound with titles such as The Wisdom of Psychopaths that illustrate how people with psychopathic traits, ones who don’t tend to follow rules, are often found in managerial roles such as CEOs all the way up to presidents of countries. With these rare manipulative, coldhearted personalities in place and the rest of us following like good sheeple without questioning, the stage is set for compliance.

If you have been in the working world long enough, then the following statement should ring true: if you work extra hours, you are a great worker; if you decline, you’re useless and apathetic. In the work world, there’s typically no in between. The pressure to succeed for the pride and benefit of the company unfortunately supersedes that of the pressure to be a good parent, sibling, son or daughter. According to a study done by the economic policy institute, between 1948 and 2013, productivity has grown 240% while income for non-managerial workers has grown by 108%. To make up for this discordance, pride of doing what’s best for the company has been employed as a motivational tactic. This tactic has been used as a sharp IV needle that’s been inserted into our veins and we have willingly ingested the contents that are injected through it. Pressure to conform toward achieving the company’s goals has overcome our will to be compensated accordingly.

The other side of this pressure comes from society as a whole outside the education/workplace. A close friend of mine works for a state court and makes about $40K/year. He is also a self-employed business owner on the off hours. I estimate that he works about 70-80 hours a week. He owns a home in a well-to do neighborhood and he drives a seventy thousand dollar luxury car. This crystallizes the saying ‘big hat, no cattle.’ But when a lie is told over and over, the lie becomes the truth.

When we look at someone who drives a luxury car and lives in an upscale part of town, we see this as success because of how often that visual of it has been pounded tirelessly into our minds. We fail to see that these are nothing but symbols of success and false ones at that. They appear real because as a society, we have been conditioned to see them this way by the advertising industry. In the book, The Millionaire Next Door, the authors annihilate this illusion. Numbers don’t lie and the statistics show that most true millionaires, those with a net worth of over one million dollars, do not own those luxuries that we typically associate with success and wealth. They view them as the reality of what they are: a depreciating liability. According to the book, the typical millionaire owns a home in the two to three hundred thousand dollar-range and a non-luxury automobile. If something goes wrong with either, they have the cash reserves to fix it. On the other hand, the commonplace owner of the luxury home and car can’t afford the roof and the tires respectively without going deeper into debt if they should need replacing.

Ownership of these symbols of wealth becomes a self-perpetuating illusion to satisfy the psychological need for acceptance. Unfortunately, human behavior dictates that emotional needs often override logical thinking. It’s been said that the borrower is slave to the debt-owner and with luxury items, debt is the rule, not the exception. Debt is healthy for those in power and contributes to a needy and thus obligated worker.

The current wisdom of slave, spend and save for retirement has only one destiny. That destiny can be summed up in three sentences. Spend your healthiest and most productive years working to support a life of materials and thus illusions of success while elevated stress damage your health. During this time, be sure to save enough money for retirement so you can enjoy those years of the subsequent poor health. And lastly, do it in the name of pride for your company and country.

I take pride in being American, as I’m sure most Americans do, however, if you’re reading this you’re likely smart enough to see the holes in the daily grind. It saps our creative potential and our physical, as well as our spiritual energy. We don’t need any studies to tell us how stressed we are and subsequently, how unhealthy we are. The physical manifestations of stress such as obesity, hypertension, heart disease, increased risk of cancer, depression, anxiety and many others tell us all we need to know. They tell us that we need a better work/life balance. They tell us that the pendulum has swung too much in the direction of work and away from life. Fortunately, there’s a way that we can take it back.

The most important way to restore this balance is to realize the power that we, as consumers, hold. Tyler Durden, the protagonist in the film, Fight Club said it best…

“…advertising has us chasing cars and clothes, working jobs we hate so we can buy shit we don’t need.”

The marketing and advertising industry know, more than anyone else, what motivates the human mind and how to tap into those instinctual drives. To defend against this industries seductiveness, we need to journey within ourselves and bring to light what’s really important to us. What most of us will find is that experiences and time well spent, not materials, are what makes us happy. In the book, aptly titled Well Being, the authors Tom Rath and Jim Harter discuss how experiences have been proven to make us happier than material posessions.

We revel in the anticipation of the experience, we enjoy the experience itself and we look back on it fondly for as long as we live. We do this while the expensive car or house that we borrowed money long ago to obtain falls apart causing us to borrow more money. If we live according to the rule that everything we purchase, with the exception of a home, is acquired by cash, then we fail to become slaves to debt and by extension, work. We no longer relinquish our power to creditors.

Oscar Wilde was famously quoted as saying that anyone who lives within their means suffers from a lack of imagination. Materialistically speaking, living by this notion will bind us with shackles to a life of debt servitude. When we rip those shackles of debt from our wrists, our minds become clear and we see what truly makes us happy. We spend more time with friends and family. We focus on our passions and hobbies. In essence, we get back to the foundation of what it means to be human. After all, none of us will ever arrive upon the mountain of our last moments of existence wishing we spent more time at the office. We will instead arrive wishing we completed that book, that painting or that experience with those we love most. For those can be purchased not with debt, but with time. And there is no more cunning, covert and deceitful thief of time as that villain we call debt.

About the Author

M.J. Higby practices medicine in Phoenix, AZ. He is passionate about martial arts, most notably Brazilian Jiu Jitsu. He enjoys writing about mental, spiritual and physical well being and questioning the methods by which we attain it. You can reach him on Facebook and Twitter @MJHigby

Oil and Money – Lessons Learned

Posted on November 11, 2015 by Reid Mukai

This is a concluding post for an excellent 7 part long-form series featured on the Hipcrime Vocab blog. While this serves as an adequate synopsis of what was covered, I highly recommend the series for it’s depth and scope starting with the introduction.

Source: Hipcrime Vocab

The first thing I learned is that I bit off more than I could chew, lol. I was intending a simple book review, and it turned into a lot more than I intended to write. I also learned how difficult and thankless a task blogging can be. I’m glad at least a few of you chimed in to let me know you enjoyed it.

One major thing I learned (which I already sort-of knew) is how much real resources have to do with the economy, and economic history, despite economists’ insistence that land, labor and capital are all that matter. In fact, real resources appear to be the MAJOR driver of our economic fortunes. Even Forbes magazine had to admit: The Recessions of 1973,1980,1991,2001,2008 Were Caused By High Oil Prices. Energy doesn’t matter, huh?

I was really taken aback at how recent this all is. I was somewhat aware the historic problem with oil was that there was too much of the stuff. Eric Roston, in The Carbon Age, writes, “Gasoline was a throwaway by product of kerosene refining until the early 1900s, used sometimes in solvents or as fuel for stoves. In 1892, two cents a gallon was a decent price. For another thirty years, apothecaries were the makeshift filling stations.”

But I had no idea just how much of a glut there was and how people thought it would last forever. That it was so cheap we needed the Texas Railroad Commission to hold back production so that the prices would be high enough. I mean, this substance contains the equivalent of ten to eleven years of human labor (1750 Kilowatt hours of human labor), for crying out loud! And it is a non-renewable resource! I was amazed at how far we went in coming up with new uses for the stuff, to the point destroying perfectly good and workable infrastructure just so we could use more of it. Can anything be more insane?

The long boom was driven by the exploitation of oil as a resource. This led to the dominance of the ICE (Internal Combustion Engine). All of the knock-on effects of the ICE were behind the post-war boom. I mean, you could write a book about all the economic development caused by cars and trucks. In fact, truck driver/delivery is still the most common job in most states to this day! The ability to deliver goods cheaply anywhere had so many knock-on effects, from the creation of whole new cities to the rise of big-box retailers. Let’s not forget that everything in that big-box retailer is made from plastic which is made from petroleum feedstocks. Kunstler calls the suburbs the greatest misallocation of resources in human history. It’s easy to see how that’s true.

I didn’t know that it was only as late as 1959 that petroleum overtook coal to be more than 50 percent of our energy use. I didn’t know that coal only became the world’s predominant energy source after 1900. Before that, we were still essentially in a wood/biofuel economy. As I wrote before, that’s pretty recent – less than three generations.

We think of the 19th century as the era of coal, but as the distinguished Canadian energy economist Vaclav Smil has pointed out, coal only reached 5% of world energy supply in 1840, and it didn’t get to 50% until about 1900.

The modern oil industry began in 1859, but it took more than a century for oil to eclipse coal as the world’s No. 1 source. “The most important historical lesson,” Dr. Smil says, is that “energy resources require extended periods of development.”

The Power Revolutions (WSJ)

Peak oil ideas made it sound like oil (specifically petroleum) was the only resource that matters to the economy, so that once oil production stops growing, the economy will collapse. That’s clearly not the case (oil is 36 percent of the world’s energy). There are lots of other fuels in the mix. However, things like fracking, tar sands, and offshore drilling clearly mean that cheap, easy-to-get oil is on the wane. Oil is cheap now because of fracking – not the tight oil itself, but rather because the fear of it is keeping prices low by the Saudis. That will change. I’m always amazed at the people who run out and buy SUVs the minute the oil price goes down. Do they expect it to be cheap forever or do they expect to drive their car for only a year? It’s also cheap because our economy is in the crapper.

Forget who the candidates are and all the campaigning and the billions of dollars spent– If oil prices are high, the economy is in recession, and the incumbent party will lose power. You can pretty much predict any presidential election by this fact alone. Two-thousand is the only one that sort-of breaks the mold, and that was such a bizarre election between the hanging chads, the voting fraud and the Supreme Court. In other words, it’s not just the economy driven by energy prices – it’s the political world too. Everything else is just meaningless fluff.

At the end of the day, whether a president presides over a good economy or a bad economy is almost entirely down to oil prices.

The other thing that strikes you is the “Groundhog Day” nature of the situation. Oil prices get high, we get worried about the environment, and there’s a great boom in alternative energy, energy efficiency, environmental impacts, worries about the economy and supply chains, and so forth. Then oil prices go down and we forget all about alternative energy and all the inherent problems with relying on a finite resource. All the progress toward getting off of oil stagnates, and people assume oil will be cheap forever. Then they get high again, and suddenly it all becomes important again, and we have to go back to square one (compare the EV-1 to Tesla, for example. Heck, Edison built an electric car!). Charles Mann had a great line along the lines of “The human propensity to see flukes of good fortune as never coming to an end,” or something like that.

Given the manipulation of oil prices, it’s hard to see natural economic factors as ever being able to do the right thing when it comes to energy. When prices get high, new supply comes online and alternatives are pursued. But then oil prices crush the economy, demand falls more in line with supply, the price falls, and the initiatives are halted. It feels like the invisible hand is attached to an idiot. Maybe this time we’ll finally get serious.

Prices are temporary conditions. Peak oil is permanent.

The drug dealer analogy of us being addicted to oil is shopworn, but it is just so accurate. It was only once we were addicted to the product that they could jack up the price, and then we HAD to pay what they demanded. But like a drug that devastates the lives of its users, when you hit rock-bottom you try to get on the twelve-step program and get your life back. Then, the dealers will lower the price to keep you addicted, and the cycle begins again. Plus, every dealer wants to be your dealer, so they need to be just a little bit cheaper than the next guy. Barring that, they will bind together with the other dealers to keep the price high and protect their “turf.” The economics of drug dealing and oil are eerily similar. I wonder if anyone’s formally studied this.

In the past each new energy source was added on to the previous ones. Now we are talking about substitution – a totally different ballgame. That is, new energy sources will replace old. That’s substitution, not expansion.

Cheap oil combined with the opening up of China drove globalization. There is no way we could build the largest moving structures ever built to transport goods if we didn’t have a fuel source cheap enough to make it worthwhile. A single ship can move 19,000 containers, enough to move 300 million tablet computers.

That oil played a role in foreign policy shouldn’t be a surprise, but looking at exactly how it led to the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, the civil war in Syria, the removal of Qaddafi, the propping up or removing of dictators, and the positioning of armies around the globe was still eye-opening. So much foreign policy is dictated by access to oil. So much…

I was actually unaware of the Eurodollar and how I caused the fall of Bretton Woods. As Smith illustrates, going back to the gold standard is practically impossible (sorry libertarians). I was unaware of the role that Petrodollar recycling played in the Latin American debt crisis. I was aware of how the Petrodollars funded terrorism. I’m sure readers of Dmitry Orlov were familiar with the role oil and grain prices played in the fall of the Soviet Union. Again, this made Reagan look like a genius.

What I really wanted to describe is how the oil price crisis came about and how it led directly to the rise of Neoliberalism. I also wanted to show how Jimmy Carter’s “failure” and Ronald Reagan’s “success” was based mostly on oil prices. Some people would take issue with that, but it’s hard to separate one from the other. Is it 100 percent? Maybe not, but what percentage was oil prices? Seventy? Fifty? Twenty-five? Surely it played a role.

The problem is that it made Neoliberalism look like a success. People came to believe that unions were evil, and tax cuts for the rich and corporations, deregulation, and speculation were the magic keys to prosperity. But throughout the Neoliberal reign, oil prices were either stable or crashing. When that wasn’t the case, as in 2007-2008, the system came apart. The rise of China also made Neoliberalism appear to work. But it was smoke and mirrors – cheap uneducated labor, overinvestment, state-controlled enterprises, artificially cheap currencies, entire cities built with no people in them, etc. It was a Potemkin’s village on the scale of a nation. Globalization is a Ponzi scheme.

But now Neoliberalism is literally tearing the world apart. Some major reasons:

1.) Turning the speculators loose. The oil price rise and the food price rise seem to be mainly problems of market speculations (i.e. greed and fear, always the real movers of markets, not supply and demand). This has, in turn, led to political turmoil as we saw in the Arab Spring. If speculation continues to cause price rises for essentials like food, fuel and water to pad the fortunes of speculators, expect more chaos and collapse. Even in the U.S., the actions of Enron and “Kenny-boy” lay caused serious harm to economies, not expansion. And we spent enough on the bailouts to give every unemployed person a job and every homeless person a home, with billions left over. Is this how economies should be run?

2.) The suppression of worker wages has caused massive hardship around the world. The abandonment of full employment as a policy goal has led to a worldwide unemployment crisis that is destabilizing the world. Unemployed people have nothing to lose. People with nothing to lose tend to revolt (see above). The gutting of social services and welfare safety nets has also led to poverty and desperation all around the world. It calls into question the ability of capitalism to deliver broad increases in living standards everywhere. We are clearly not seeing that. We’ve been in reverse for some time. Shouldn’t an economic system make us ALL richer, rather than provide winners and losers? If it can’t, what kind of system is it?

3.) Globalism spreads not only the wealth around, but the poverty too. Some countries, notably Western Europe, have attempted to defend their citizens, while others like the United States, did nothing to insulate its workers from third-world wages and working conditions (and even encouraged them). Rising living standards in China and India are one thing, but falling living standards in formerly wealthy countries make the rich capitalists richer, but cause anger and consternation which is easily exploited by the unscrupulous and power-hungry. This is also destabilizing. Just look at all the anger in the U.S. today searching for a scapegoat.

4.) Austerity and the straitjacketing of governments has led to wealthy, industrialized countries “undeveloping.” The United States is a nation of private affluence and public squalor, with one-third of its children living in poverty, entire cities abandoned and crumbling, urban areas too expensive for median income workers, the infrastructure of a banana republic, poor access to education and healthcare, pockets of poverty, ghettoes, etc. Greece is being gutted as an example to the West. This is leading to rise of right-wing parties in Europe, again redolent of the run-up to the Second World War.

5.) The faith in Markets to solve all problems is especially disastrous with an ongoing environmental crisis. Instead of rationing or capping, instead we get easily gamed “cap and trade” markets to reduce emissions. Nature is just “natural capital,” and every drop of water, tree leaf, and grain of sand must be assigned an owner and a price. In other words, all of nature must be subsumed into the market, because markets are the only way we can solve our problems! This is a Neoliberal idea. Look at how the United States responded to the crisis in the seventies by contrast.

6.) Debt crises have caused massive hardship around the world. As I learned, Mexico’s reputation as a haven for poverty, prostitution, drug gangs, etc. was only after the Latin American debt crisis of 1982. That, in turn, led the massive influx of Latin American refugees into the United States turning America into a Latin country overnight. Prior to 1979, places like Afghanistan, Iran, Lebanon, Egypt, Iraq, Algeria, Syria and Libya were stable, secular, relatively prosperous places (See this. And this). Now look at them. Yes, they had dictators and human rights violations. But compare it to today. Latin America has fared somewhat better, largely by finding a way to reject or bypass Neoliberalism. Africa has not fared well, either. Note that you only heard about collapse and famine after the 1980’s (remember Ethiopia?). Yes, Africa was poor before then, but it seemed to be heading in the right direction. Not any more.

7.) People from these wrecked countries are heading to the Western industrialized countries in massive waves of migration–Latin America for the United States and Canada, and the Middle East and Africa for the European Union. This has driven down wages and caused the rise of nativist parties. Everyone is heading for the lifeboats as more and more countries become failed states. There is simply not enough room for all. But rebuilding these countries would mean abandoning the Neoliberal paradigm, forgoing debt and putting into place quasi-socialist policies. Then again, the rich can always retreat to floating offshore islands (and eventually space colonies).

It’s clear that much of the money that has not been collected by governments has gone not only into speculation as opposed to productive activity, but in purchasing political representation. This has led to democracies devolving into oligarchies and a mistrust of democracy in general. The buying of politicians and the media blocks any attempts to deal with collapsing systems. We’ve seen ever greater instability and ever greater bubbles under Neoliberalism now that government has been “contained” and workers have been “disciplined.”

The answer to our problems should be clear: abandon Neoliberalism and return to the mixed economy. Stop hamstringing governments. End speculation. Tax the rich. Close offshore tax shelters. Raise tariffs. Defend domestic industries. Write down the debts. Pursue full employment policies such as a job guarantee, reduced working hours and an basic income guarantee. Distribute essential social services through the government, and let the market handle non-necessities. Regulate to deal with externalities. Impose limits on natural resource extraction. Decarbonize energy.

All of this used to be common-sense. Now it beyond the pale.

The problem is, it’s a ratchet effect. We cannot go back, because TPTB will not allow it. And since the 1970s, they learned they had to not only control the government, but the information we imbibe day after day, otherwise we would instruct our government to do something the powerful may not want. Instead, we had to be convinced that Neoliberalism is the only valid economy – hence the think tanks, talk radio, publishing mills, Fox news, etc. Any sense of common purpose or solidarity is evil “socialism.” As we learned, even “liberal” news sources are fully dedicated to defending this paradigm at all costs, even at the cost of credibility. And the funding of the political classes by the wealthy will ensure that anything that threatens the fortunes of the oligarchs will be a non-starter, even if people do see past the media rhetoric.

The change in economics swallowed the hope of the sixties. How much does it have to do with Neoliberalism, and how much with oil prices? A lot of commenters say, “Hey, the oil is gone, we just need to learn to be peasants.” They point out that American wages stopped growing in 1973, around the time domestic oil production peaked in the U.S. But I think that’s simplistic. American wages stopped growing, not everyone else’s–not what we’d expect in an energy descent scenario. Rather, I think it was the wealth transfer of the seventies, and the politics it engendered, that was the primary culprit. The oil shock opened the door for globalized Neoliberalism, and that is the primary cause of our misfortune. By using oil as an excuse to be politically passive, we remove any chance at creating an economy that works better for all and play into the hands of the powerful.

I think old economy Steve puts it best. Or shall we say, “mixed economy” Steve:

Towards a Critical Public Pedagogy of Predatory Anthropocene

Posted on October 9, 2015 by Reid Mukai

By Michael B. McDonald

Source: The Hampton Institute

In 2015, a group of scientists published ” The trajectory of the Anthropocene: The Great Acceleration “. They showed that rising consumption and increasing rates of impact on Earth Systems began after the Second World War. It was the expansion of economic activity charged by increasing resource use that created new technologies that expanded rates of consumption. This was a celebrated new socio-economic phase called the Great Acceleration that was supposed to lead to full employment and a bright future for all. It was also the beginning of a next phase of world capitalism accelerated by increasing urbanization. By 2008 humanity officially entered a new urban phase where 50% of the earth’s population lives in urban spaces. More cities will be built in the next thirty years than in all previous human history. Earth System scientists have shown that all of these changes are having unprecedented impacts on the Earth. Human life is changing the Earth, they call it anthropocene.

But the Great Acceleration did not lead to full employment nor a bright future. In fact, it has led to massive inequality created by a very small percentage of people controlling a staggering amount of wealth. In 2010, OECD countries had 18% of the earth’s population but accounted for 74% of GDP. But only .1% controlled this vast wealth through a system that I call predatory anthropocene.

The system of predatory anthropocene can be found in changes to the global economy and a fundamental shift in the way the economy works through its transformation of subjective, social and environmental ecologies, what Felix Guattari called the Three Ecologies. One aspect of this change has been called semiocapitalism, the blending of imagination, ideas, language and capital. Semiocapitalism works by capturing evolutionary life. Belonging, for instance, is now produced by the consumption of psycho-social products that gain economic value in consumption and are financed by increasing debt. The GDP of the United States is now 70% consumption.

Making community through mass consumption is eroding the anthropological basis upon which human life is built. We need a language for this. Perhaps we need to recognize that the communicative and biological systems of the human species have habitats. The biosphere sustains biological life while the ethnosphere sustains communicational life. The biosphere is quite well known but the ethnosphere less so. Wade Davis suggests that the ethnosphere is a global quilt of local cultures, a band of cultural life functioning in tandem with the biosphere for the creation, organization, and expression of human communicational life.[1] The ethnosphere is a collection of languages, ideas, and dreams. It is the anthropological rituals that have accompanied human evolution, has organized social reproduction, it is the institution of language [2] in all its complexity, but is also beyond language.[3] When people talk about humanity in general, they mean the biosphere and ethnosphere, the cultures of the world in their physical, expressive, subjective dimensions. But now ethnosphere complexity is reduced by global commodities, unique cultures consumed by Hollywood-hegemony, human imagination consumed by consumer products, dreams being replaced by corporate produced and globalized desires. A single system is producing hegemony in ways that no single system was ever before capable. It is necessary for us to see that our species is under threat by a monster system that we have created, a monsterous, cancerous, predatory system poisoning the Earth. Henry Giroux has argued that:

What makes American society distinct in the present historical moment are a culture and social order that have not only lost their moral bearings but produce levels of symbolic and real violence whose visibility and existence set a new standard for cruelty, humiliation, and mechanizations of a mad war machine, all of which serves the interest of the political and corporate walking dead-the new avatars of death and cruelty-that plunder the social order and wreak ecological devastation. We now live in a world overrun with flesh-eating zombies, parasites who have a ravenous appetite for global destruction and civic catastrophe. (2014, xi-xii)[4]

Because I follow Guattari’s cybernetic view I am less certain than Giroux appears to be, that is it possible to tell zombies from non-zombies in a period where a) agribusiness replaces agriculture and transforms all aspects of domestic life that b) creates stretches of suburbs that wipe out, without social discussion, the farmland that has laid the foundation of human flourishing, c) as mounting debt continues without slowing and without discourse in the public sphere, as d) waves of fellow humans are dislocated everyday due to military, economic, and environmental calamities. And none of this is news, we watch all of it studiously, staring at our displays unmoved by the misery and pain we see on the faces, and hear in the cries of fellow humans. Too many of us escape our responsibilities to confront this pain by fleeing to walled-in communities whose walls are maintained, not by bricks but by the capacity to carry the mortgage debt (that machinically contributes to predatory anthropocene) in the hopes of living in relative safety while the poor (who can not access debt) are left in decaying city centers. But as foreclosures swept across America after the housing bubble burst, suburban safety was shown to be precarious. It is important for us to take notice of the fact that we know all of this and collectively do very little to change it. We sign petitions on Facebook, but we still shop at malls that we built on farmland and we clearly have little access to empathy. And I am not saying this to be critical of you. I am truly stuck. After many years of being inspired by Adbusters and semio-politics and culture jamming I’m not sure what the next step is. I feel free space disappearing. I’m looking for options.

This difficulty of expressing empathy tells us something about hegemony under semiocapitalism. We now know that empathy is not something we develop, but something that we shut down. Vittorio Gallese in ” The Manifold Nature of Interpersonal Relations: The Quest for a Common Mechanism” has shown that for us to “know that another human being is suffering or rejoicing, is looking for food or shelter, is about to attack or kiss us, we do not need verbal language” (Virno 2008: 175) we only need the activation of what Gallese called mirror neurons a “class of premotor neurons [that] was discovered in the macaque monkey brain that discharged not only when the monkey executes goal-related hand actions like grasping objects, but also when observing other individuals (monkeys or humans) executing similar actions” (Gallese: 522). Experiments successfully illustrated that mirror neurons were also in the human brain “positioned in the ventral part of the inferior frontal lobe, consisting of two areas, 44 and 45, both of which belong to the Broca region” (Virno: 177). Mirror neurons allow us to experience what we see. When we see someone doing something that we’ve never done, our brain reacts as if we are doing it, what Gallese calls “embodied simulation.” This means that empathy is not something that we need to develop it is something that is functioning in our brains whether we like it or not. But as Paulo Virno points out, humans are clearly adept at seeing other humans as not-humans in order to override “embodied simulation”. We are constantly unmoved watching violent death in both fiction and non-fiction, and constantly enacting laws to restrict sexuality and eroticism in the social sphere. In this context there is little doubt that a public pedagogy of human negation is taking place that values violence and negates the erotic energy that produces new human life! What this means is that “every naturalist thinker must acknowledge one given fact: the human animal is capable of not recognizing another human animal as being on of its own kind.” How does this public pedagogy of negation occur? Virno argues that verbal language, “distinguishes itself from other communicative codes, as well as from cognitive prelinguistic performance, because it is able to negate any type of semantic content.”(176). Through language we are able to negate others as not-human, shutting down the empathy that is produced by mirror neurons. But all is not lost as Paulo Freire points out, pedagogies of dehumanization can be countered through critical pedagogy. That we might learn to negate dehumanization is our hope, to dissolve the oppressor-oppressed binary through the creation of new anti-predatorial segnifications. Virno suggests that while language introduced human-negation into communication it also provides us the technology to negate-negation. In this way critical pedagogy is the negation-of-negation. But only when it is used in this way. I make one amendment to Virno’s suggestion, that it is necessary to go beyond the notion of linguistic negation to identify the ways that negation is in the production of subjectivity, not just in the linguistic negation but in complex existential negations that occur within complex machinic semiotics. It is necessary to see the ways that the production of aesthetic systems produces collective subjectivities that produce We’ness as well as Other’ness.

Cultural technologies produce cultural workers who reproduce subjectivity-producing systems that produce subjects who reduce the ethnosphere and pollute the biosphere. Theodore Adorno was right to be concerned about the culture industry just as Walter Benjamin saw with clear sight the dangers of the absorption of aesthetics into politics. They both saw that the industrialization of the satisfaction of desire, what we might call affective-capitalism, has significant socio-political-economic impacts. There is a real danger when anthropological rituals developed for the social life are replaced by capitalist products. The production and satisfaction of desire on the marketplace is a constantly undermining of love of the local, a replacement of belonging with having the same mass manufactured private property, the replacement of environmentally-embedded anthropological bonds with capital resource consuming exchange. The production of subjectivity is consumed by the factory, negating living, thus extending the contractions of capitalism beyond the factory into all aspects of live time. Giroux has called this a “new kind of authoritarianism that does not speak in the jingoistic discourse of empowerment, exceptionalism, or nationalism. Instead, it defines itself in the language of cruelty, suffering, and fear, and it does so with a sneer and an unbridled disdain for those considered disposable. Neoliberal society mimics the search for purity we have seen in other totalitarian societies” (2014, xvii). And it does so through the production of subjectivity, in the distribution of social subjection and the institution of machinic enslavement. Together these form the contents of the public pedagogy of culture industry, the negation of lived time that blocks access to mirror neurons, limits our ability to negate the negations of the neoliberal culture industry, thus limiting our ability to resist through the production life affirming social machines, liberatory and collectively produced social subjectivations and life affirming machinic enslavements.
I, Terminator

Some people however, are arguing that the changes I call predatory anthropocene are a step forward for humanity. Luciano Floridi, for instance, imagines a new humanity as interconnected informational organisms (inforgs) active in “sharing with biological agents and engineered artifacts, a global environment ultimately made of information” (2011,9). Collectively these inforgs produce an infosphere that either replaces or contributes to the ethnosphere. But Floridi does not account for political economy and therefore misses that his dreams of the infosphere are enslaved by the algorithms of capitalism.

Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi however, shows that inforgs are not liberated informational workers but are ‘cognitariate’ (exploited proletarians of information) controlled by the automatisms of machinic enslavements, no longer disciplined but under subjectively captured within the new means of control. Machinic enslavement is not discipline, but it is none-the-less controlling. No longer is there a need for an authority to hover over your shoulder to keep you in line. Machinic enslavement works to lead you into accepting the circuits of capture and control embedded cybernetically in modes of production, exchange and consumption. In the machinic enslavement of predatory anthropocene your only value is through economic consumption, and control is located in your desire to fulfill your consumptive role. Desire (libidinal, economic, social) is no longer a location of liberation, but a mechanism of discipline. This is power within predatory anthropocene.

Floridi’s infosphere and its cognitarians are colonizers machinically enslaving dreams and desires. Their colonization does not in fact produce the infosphere but instead a nightmarish mechanosphere. The mechanosphere converts the anthropological ethnosphere into capitalist products, cognitive capitalism “produces and domesticates the living on a scale never before seen” (Boutang 2011, 48). Felix Guattari and Franco Berardi “emphasize that entire circuits and overlapping and communicating assemblages integrate cognitive labor and the capitalistic exploitation of its content”[5] in a model they call semiocapitalism, that captures “the mind, language and creativity as its primary tools for the production of value”( Berardi 2009, 21). Our language is being transformed into capitalist value, our words, dreams, desires and subjectivities are lost to the mechanosphere, “the authoritarian disimagination machine that affirms everyone as a consumer and reduces freedoms to unchecked self-interest while reproducing subjects who are willingly complicit with the plundering of the environment, resources, and public goods by the financial elite” (Giroux 2014, xxi).

Predatory anthropocene not only massively increases earth system impacts but creates massive inequality. In early 2015 year Oxfam released Working for the Few a terrifying document that shows, “Almost half of the world’s wealth is now owned by just one percent of the population” and that, “The bottom half of the world’s population owns the same as the richest 85 people in the world,” and that this already extreme economic disparity is getting worse.

But we do not tell stories of predatory anthropocene to our children. Instead we tell myths of consumption, stories of gleeful elves happily working in non-unionized factories making toys for unproblematically good children, all the while supported by a covert group of elf spies that complicit parents move around their house for weeks. This is the childhood public pedagogy of predatory anthropocene where domestic life is machinically enslaved to global capitalism, domesticated to surveillance-of-consumption, young lives converted to effective consumer-citizens. Perhaps it’s time to start telling our children the very true story of predatory anthropocene, the killer system that we have created and released into our world but refuse to name, refuse to accept, and spend a great deal of money and words denying. There is no sense denying predatory anthropocene, we need to talk of the monster that is killing our planet, we need to develop a critical pedagogy of predatory anthropocene, to learn to negate the negation.

Notes

[1] Davis, Wade. (2007). Light at the Edge of the World: A Journey Through the Realm of Vanishing Cultures. Vancouver, BC: Douglas &McIntyre Ltd.

[2] Virno, Paolo. (2008). Multitude: Between Innovation and Negation. Los Angeles, California: Semiotext(e)Foreign Agents Series.

[3] Here I am thinking about post Spinozist philsophers that argue for a semiotics beyond language signification and even beyond logocentric significations and include Gilles Deleuze, Felix Guattari, Michel Foucault, Maurizio Lazzarato, Rosi Braidotti. Most compelling is the Deleuze and Guatarri suggestion that Lazzarato has picked up on in Signs and Machines and Governing by Debt that there is a machinic order as well as a logocentric order. My argument here is that predatory anthropocene functions through a machinic order that is little impacted by traditional semiotics, by political sloganeering, or even by radical critique. That there must be a politics of doing, or dropping out of predatory anthropocene in the way that Franco ‘Bifo’ Berrardi suggests in After the Future.

[4] Giroux, Henry (2014). Zombie Politics and Culture in the Age of Casino Capitalism New York: Peter Lang Press.

[5] Genosko, Gary. 2012. Remodeling Communication: From WWII to WWW. Toronto, Can: University of Toronto Press. (pg. 150)

Now Streaming: The Plague Years

Posted on October 7, 2015 by Reid Mukai

By A. S. Hamrah

Source: The Baffler

When things are very American, they are as American as apple pie. Except violence. H. Rap Brown said violence “is as American as cherry pie,” not apple pie. Brown’s maxim makes us see violence as red and gelatinous, spooned from a can.

But for Brown, in 1967, American violence was white. Explicitly casting himself as an outsider, Brown said in his cherry pie speech that “violence is a part of America’s culture” and that Americans taught violence to black people. He explained that violence is a necessary form of self-protection in a society where white people set fire to Bowery bums for fun, and where they shoot strangers from the towers of college campuses for no reason—this was less than a year after Charles Whitman had killed eleven people that way at the University of Texas in Austin, the first mass shooting of its kind in U.S. history. Brown compared these deadly acts of violence to the war in Vietnam; president Lyndon B. Johnson, too, was burning people alive. He said the president’s wife was more his enemy than the people of Vietnam were, and that he’d rather kill her than them.

Brown, who was then a leader of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and who would soon become the Black Panther Party’s minister of justice, delivered a version of this speech, or rant, to about four hundred people in Cambridge, Maryland. When it was over, the police went looking for him and arrested him for inciting a riot. Brown’s story afterward is eventful and complicated, but this is an essay about zombie movies. Suffice it to say, Brown knows about violence. Fifty years after that speech, having changed his name to Jamil Abdullah al-Amin, he’s spending life in prison for killing a cop.

The same day Brown was giving his speech in Maryland, George A. Romero, a director of industrial films, was north of Pittsburgh in a small Pennsylvania town called Evans City. Romero was shooting his first feature film, a low-budget horror movie in black and white called Night of the Living Dead. Released in October 1968, the first modern zombie movie tells the story of a black man trying to defend himself and others from a sudden plague of lumbering corpses who feed on the living. At the film’s end, he is unceremoniously shot and killed by cops who assume he is a zombie trying to kill them. The cops quickly dispose of his body, dumping it in a fire with a heap of the undead, as a posse moves on to hunt more zombies.

Regional gore films were nothing new in themselves; a number had appeared earlier in the 1960s. Night of the Living Dead, with its shambling, open-mouthed gut-munchers dressed in business suits and housecoats, might have seemed merely gross or oddly funny in a context other than the America of 1968. But Martin Luther King Jr. had been assassinated six months before its release. The news on TV, which most people still saw in black and white, consisted largely of urban riots and war reports from Vietnam. The My Lai Massacre had occurred the month before King was shot.

Romero’s film, seen in the United States the year it came out, had more in common with Rome Open City than it did with a drive-in horror movie made for teens—it was close to a work of neorealism. And it was unfunny and dire, much like John Cassavetes’s Faces, released the same year, whose laughing drunks stopped laughing when they paused to look in the mirror. Romero was a revisionist director of horror in the same way that Peckinpah and Altman were in their career-making genres, the western and the war movie.

Romero cast an African American in the lead, and he shifted the horror genre’s dynamic, aligning it with black-and-white antiwar documentaries like Emile de Antonio’s In the Year of the Pig, also released in 1968, and distinguishing it from the lurid color horror films Roger Corman and Hammer Films had been turning out up till then. Those films made certain concessions to the film industry; Night of the Living Dead did not. This was an American horror movie, so it needed no English accents or familiar character actors. It was grim and unflinching, showing average citizens, played by average people, eating the arms and intestines of their fellow townsfolk. Romero drove home this central point—that a zombie-infested America differed from the status quo only in degree, not in kind—by ending his film with realistic-looking fake news photos depicting his characters’ banal atrocities.

Mainstream film reviewers, including Roger Ebert, were shocked and disgusted by Night of the Living Dead. They discouraged people from seeing it, but Romero’s images proved to be indelible. The film’s reputation grew. In 1978 Romero made the film’s first sequel, Dawn of the Dead, this time in color. Today, if there’s one thing every American knows, it’s that zombies can only be killed with a shot to the head. This is common knowledge, cultural literacy, a kind of historical fact, like George Washington chopping down the cherry tree. American-flag bumper stickers assert that “these colors don’t run,” but one of them does. It runs like crazy through American life, through American movies, and now TV, like a faucet left on.

Dead Reckonings

The Huffington Post has had a Zombie Apocalypse header since 2011, under which the editors file newsy blog posts chronicling our continuing fascination with zombie pop culture, alongside any nonfiction news story horrible enough to relate to zombies or cannibalism. The infamous Miami face-eater attack of May 2012, which the media gleefully heralded as the start of a “real” zombie apocalypse, contributed to America’s sense that it could happen here, provided we wished for it hard enough. Reading through the Zombie Apocalypse posts, one gets a growing sense that we want the big, self-devouring reckoning to happen because it is the one disaster we are truly mentally prepared for. It won’t be the total letdown of the Ebola scare.

The face-eating incident was initially linked to bath salts: ground-up mineral crystals everyone hoped would become the new homemade drug of choice for America’s scariest users. It turned out the perpetrator, although naked, was only high on marijuana. He was black, killed by the police as he gouged out his homeless victim’s eyes and chewed his face on a causeway over Biscayne Bay. The incident was captured on surveillance video. Here in the golden age of user-generated content, the zombie movies self-generate—much like zombies themselves. The bridge backdrop of this all-too-real zombie vignette neatly summed up both the crumbling condition of America’s infrastructure and our more generalized state of neoliberal collapse.

The zombie apocalypse, our favorite apocalypse, seems to unite the right and left. It combines the apocalypse brought about by climate change and the subsequent competition for scant resources with the one loosed by secret government experiments gone awry. Better still, both of these scenarios, as we’re typically shown in graphic detail, will necessitate increased gun-toting and firearms expertise.

More than that, the fast-approaching zombie parousia allows us to indulge our fantasies of a third apocalypse, one that only the most clueless don’t embrace: the consumerist Day of Judgment, in which we will all be punished for being fat and lazy and living by remote control, going through our daily routines questioning nothing as the world falls apart and we continue shopping. Supermarkets and shopping carts, malls and food warehouses all figure prominently in the iconography of the post–Night of the Living Dead zombie movie, reminding us that even in our quotidian consumerist daze, we are one step away from looting and cannibalism, the last two items on everyone’s bucket list.

Still, despite its galvanizing power to place all of humanity on the same side of the cosmic battlefront, the zombie apocalypse, like all ideological constructs, nonetheless manages to cleave the world into two camps. One camp gets it and the other doesn’t. One is aware the apocalypse is under way, and the other is blithely oblivious to the world around it.

To confuse matters further, people move in and out of both camps, becoming inert, zombified creatures when obliviousness suits their mood. People blocking our progress on the street as they natter into their hands-free earsets stare straight ahead, refusing to admit that other people exist. At least they don’t bite us as we flatten ourselves against walls to pass them without contact. A paradox of the ubiquity of zombie-themed pop culture is how there are surely next to no people left who have not enjoyed a zombie movie, TV show, book, or videogame, yet there are more and more people shuffling around like extras in a zombie film, moving their mouths and making gnawing sounds.

The smartphone-based zombification of street life is a strange testament to Romero’s original insight, which becomes more pronounced as the wealth gap widens. The disenfranchised look ever more zombie-fied to the rich, who in turn all look the same and act the same as they take over whole neighborhoods and wall themselves up in condo towers. This, indeed, is exactly what happens in Romero’s fourth zombie movie, 2005’s Land of the Dead, which predicted things as consequential as what happened during Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans and as minor as the rise of food trucks.

The Zombie Apocalypse is also a parable of the Protestant work ethic, come to reap vengeance at the end of days. It assures us that only very resourceful, tough-minded people will be able to hack it when the dead come back to life. If the rest had really wanted to survive—if they deserved to survive—they would have spent a little less time on the sofa. But here, too, the simple and obvious moral takes a perverse turn: the best anti-zombie combatants should be the ones who’ve watched the most zombie movies, yet by the very logic of our consumer-baiting zombie fables, they won’t be physically capable of survival because all they did was watch TV.

Selective Service

What these couch potatoes will need, inarguably, is the protection of a strong leader, one who hasn’t spent his life in the vain and sodden leisure pursuits that they’ve inertly embraced—Rick Grimes in The Walking Dead, for instance. Why such a person would want to help them is a question they don’t ask. With this search for an ultimate hero, the zombie genre has veered into the escapism of savior lust, leaving Romero’s unflinching, subversive neorealism behind. In Night of the Living Dead, a witless humanity is condemned by its own herd mentality and racism. In latter-day zombie fictions, a quasi-fascist social order is required, uniting us regardless of race, creed, or color.

The predicament of the characters (and the actors) in all the nouveau zombie movies relates to this passive consumerism. Both the characters and the actors in new zombie movies have to act like zombie films don’t already exist, even though the existence of Romero’s films is what permits the existence of the film they are in. Somehow, the characters pull their savvy out of thin air. They must pretend that they have never heard of zombies, even as they immediately and naturally know what to do once their own particular Zombie Apocalypse gets under way.

This paradox underscores the fantasy aspect of the twenty-first-century zombie infatuation, in which a fixed set of roles is available for cosplay in a repeatable drama that already took place somewhere else. The difference between Romero’s films and the new zombie movies is that the more time that passes since 1968, the more Romero’s films don’t seem like they were designed as entertainment—even as they are endlessly exploited by the zombie-themed cultural productions that copy them, and even as they remain entertaining. The new zombie films cannibalize Romero’s films in an attempt to remake them ideologically, so that we will stop looking for meaning in them and just accept the inevitable.

The Primal Hordes

A primal fantasy of the Zombie Apocalypse is that when the shit hits the fan, we will be able to kill our own children or parents. We won’t have a choice. The decision to get rid of the generation impeding us will have been made for us by the zombie plague, absolving us of responsibility. We are, after all, killing somebody who is already dead and who, in his or her current state, is a threat to our continued existence.

Against the generalized dystopian entertainment landscape that followed the economic collapse of 2008, the Zombie Apocalypse made more sense than ever. But YA action-drama dropped it in favor of promoting teen heroes who were stronger than their nice-but-loserish sad sack parents. This is the uplifting generational affirmation that imbues Suzanne Collins’s Hunger Games franchise and Veronica Roth’s Divergent trilogy.

YA comedy, on the other hand, did not ignore zombie movies. Instead, it domesticated the Zombie Apocalypse, making it friendly. Nonthreatening zom-coms showed young viewers how the opposite sex was really not that scary, that being in a couple was still the most important thing, and that dystopias gave nerds an unprecedented chance to prove they could get the girl or boy. Dystopia, it turns out, is really a best-of-all-possible-worlds scenario for starry-eyed-kids-with-a-disease, or so we learn from zom-coms like Warm Bodies and Life After Beth.

The latest iteration of this trend, which sets a zombie heroine in a marginally less dystopian world that mirrors our tentative economic comeback, is the CW TV show iZombie. The series is a brain-eating entertainment for tweens in which they learn you can be okay and have a chill job even if you’re a living corpse who’s just trying to figure things out. When a zombie gets her own tween-empowerment show on The CW, it’s a good indication that zombies don’t carry the stern, unbekannt stigmas they used to. Zombies, much like corpses in TV commercials, are used as grotesque comic relief in things like animated Adult Swim shows. Such is the diminished status of the zombie; it is now a signifier that can be plugged in anywhere. To paraphrase the undead philosopher of capitalism’s own walking-dead demise: first time cannibalism, second time farce.

Reality Bites

The way zombie movies progress, with isolated groups splitting into factions and various elimination rounds as contestants disappear, suggests that Night of the Living Dead is also a secret source of reality TV. It makes sense, then, that 2009’s Zombieland, one of the first YA dystopian zombie entertainments, was penned by screenwriters who created The Joe Schmo Show and I’m a Celebrity . . . Get Me Out of Here!

Zombieland’s protagonist, a college-age dude played by Jesse Eisenberg, is a bundle of phobias, an OCD-style follower of rules who finds himself in a Zombie Apocalypse after an unexpected date with a hot girl out of his league (Amber Heard) goes wrong. Mentored by Woody Harrelson, who more or less reprised this same role in the Hunger Games movies, Eisenberg’s millennial character undergoes a reality-TV-scripted makeover. In expiation for his pusillanimity in the opening reel, he winds up rescuing a tough girl (Emma Stone) who also would have been out of his league in the pre-Apocalypse scheme of dating. Zombieland presents Eisenberg as gutless and Stone as ruthless, but she’s the one who ends up a hostage, and he becomes her hero. In fact, one of his rules, “Don’t be a hero,” changes on screen to “Be a hero,” as we once again learn that millennials really do have what it takes to kill zombies. Earlier in the film, Eisenberg accidentally shoots and kills a non-zombie Bill Murray, playing himself, showing that millennials can also, regretfully, take out Baby Boomers, including the cool ones who aren’t undead.

Edgar Wright’s 2004 Shaun of the Dead, the first movie zom-com, was a more intelligent version of this same storyline. An English comedy from the “Isn’t it cute how much we suck?” school, Wright’s film acquiesced to the coupling-up plot rom-coms require, but not without first presenting the routine, pointless daily life of its protagonist (Simon Pegg) as pre-zombified. Shaun of the Dead will likely remain the only sweet little comedy in which the protagonist kills his mother, a scene the film has the guts to play without flinching. The joke of Wright’s film is that it takes something as brutal as a zombie apocalypse to wake us from our stupor and to show us how good we had it all along. By the film’s end, Pegg and his girlfriend (Kate Ashfield) are in exactly the same place they were when the film started, but now at least they live together. A cover of the Buzzcocks’ song “Everybody’s Happy Nowadays” jangles over the credits, providing a zombified dose of circa-1979 irony.

Wright and Pegg’s goofy rethinking of the zombie movie proved how firmly zombies are entrenched in our consciousness, and how easy they are to manipulate for comedic effect. The same month Shaun of the Dead came out, a Hollywood remake of Romero’s Dawn of the Dead was released. It, too, cleaned up at the box office. This new Dawn of the Dead seemed like it was made by one of the nerds in the American zom-coms, a jerk desperate to prove he’s bad-ass. (The director now makes superhero movies.) Johnny Cash’s “The Man Comes Around” accompanies the opening credits, setting a high bar for artistic achievement the ensuing film does not come near to clearing. Jim Carroll’s “People Who Died” plays at the end—its placement there as repulsive as anything else in the film.

As all nouveau zombie films must, the remake starts in the suburbs, where a couple is watching American Idol in bed, underscoring the genre’s newfound connection to reality TV. The film’s CGI effects, which at the time injected a souped-up faux energy into the onscreen mayhem, dated instantly. They’re now the kind of off-the-rack effects featured in Weird Al videos when someone gets hit by a car.

The main point of this new Dawn of the Dead is that after the Zombie Apocalypse, people will spend their time barking orders at each other and calling each other “asshole.” The film nods in the direction of loving the military and the police, and totally sanitizes Romero’s use of a shopping mall as a site of consumerist critique. Like many films of the 2000s, it postulates that living in a mall wouldn’t be a Hobbesian dystopia at all; it would be rad. If the remake had been made five years later, maybe it would have had to grapple with the “dead malls” that began to adorn the American landscape with greater frequency after the economy collapsed. Instead, the mall serving as the film’s principal backdrop is spotless and fun. The remake’s island-set, sequel-ready false happy ending makes one long for the denouement of Michael Haneke’s Funny Games—a longing more unimaginable than any real-life wish-fulfillment fantasy about the Zombie Apocalypse actually coming to pass.

The American Way of Death

Fanboys liked the Dawn of the Dead remake and, inexplicably, so did many critics. Manohla Dargis, then at the Los Angeles Times, wrote that the film was “the best proof in ages that cannibalizing old material sometimes works fiendishly well,” a punny sentiment she might well walk back today.

The next year, when George A. Romero released his first new zombie film in twenty years, it did not fare as well in the suddenly crowded marketplace of the undead. While Land of the Dead (2005) is fittingly seen as something of a masterpiece now, on its initial release it puzzled genre fans, who had gotten used to the sort of “fast zombies” that were first featured in the nihilistic-with-a-happy-ending British movie 28 Days Later (2002). Romero’s new film was as trenchant as his others, but many fans weren’t having it.

IMDb user reviews provide a record of their immediate reactions. “This movie was terrible!” one wrote the month Land of the Dead premiered. “The storyline—can’t use the word plot as that would give it too much credit—was tedious! Some say it was a great perspective on class? Are you kidding me!!!” Less then a year into George W. Bush’s second term, Romero was archly depicting a society much different from the one he’d shown in Night of the Living Dead. This new society—today’s—was more class-riven, more opportunistic, more cynical. And Romero, even while moving in the direction of Hawksian classicism, was exposing these failings with radical acuity. His dark fable of two Americas at war over the control of the resources necessary to survive was concise, imaginative, and well constructed. Few at the time wanted to consider the film’s style, which seemed out of date compared to the Dawn of the Dead remake. Fewer still wanted to grapple with its implications.

Ten years later, it is clear that no American genre film from that period digests and exposes the Bush era more skillfully than Land of the Dead. Romero’s film was uncomfortably ahead of its time, and like his other zombie work, it hasn’t dated; it speaks of 2015 as much as 2005. Tightly controlled scenes avoid the pointlessness and repetition of the nouveau zombie films, limning class struggle in unexpected ways. Zombies, slowly coming to consciousness, use the tools of the trades from which they’ve been recently dispossessed to shatter the glass of fortified condos. A zombie pumps gas through the windshield of a limo. The rich commit suicide, only to come back to life as zombies and feed on their children. America, as the original-zombie-era Funkadelic LP taught us, eats its young.

As zombie fantasies go, these scenes are much richer than the random, unsatisfying mayhem of the nouveau zombie films. Romero, unlike his counterparts, does not shy away from race. He shows African Americans pushing back against the injustices and indignities of a militarized police state, thereby completing a circle that began with Duane Jones’s performance in Night of the Living Dead.

Walking Tall

For the latest generation of zombie enthusiasts, the zombie genre means just one thing: AMC’s massively popular cable series The Walking Dead. The show is so much better than any of the recent non-Romero zombie movies that it’s among the leading exhibits in the case against the cineplex. The show’s politics and implications are widely discussed, and The Walking Dead has engendered national debate about all sorts of ethical issues, including something Romero’s films raised only in the negative: America’s future. But the first problem The Walking Dead solved was how to make its own debates about these things interesting: whenever scenes get too talky, a “walker” sidles up and has to be dispatched in the time-honored fashion. At its core, the zombie drama is like playing “You’re it!” The show could be called Game of Tag.

The Walking Dead debuted in 2010, emerging from a period in U.S. history when, all of a sudden, we found ourselves in a junked, collapsed, post-American environment. New dystopian dramas, especially the YA ones, reflected this chastened reality. The Walking Dead looked at first like it might become just another placeholding entry in this cavalcade of glumness, much like TNT’sSpielberg-produced, families vs. aliens sci-fi show Falling Skies. Zombies were maybe the most dated way possible to dramatize our newly trashed world.

It was The Walking Dead’s dated qualities, however, that saved it from becoming cable TV’s Hunger Games. The show’s grunge aesthetic and majority-adult cast situated it elsewhere. And if that particular elsewhere felt like the past as much as the future, that was part of what made the show work for premium cable’s Gen X audience. Greg Nicotero, a makeup man who worked under Romero, is one of the show’s producers. His presence indicated the people behind the show took the genre seriously, unlike anyone else in Hollywood who had touched it.

Television works by imitating success, by zombifying proven formulas through a process called mimetic isomorphism. When television producers saw The Walking Dead’s ratings beating broadcast-network ratings—a first for cable drama—they took notice and began spawning. Copies of copies like Resurrection, The Last Ship, The Leftovers, and 12 Monkeys showed that plague is contagious, but it doesn’t have to be zombie plague. Meanwhile, The Walking Dead continues its success, and AMC will debut a companion series this summer, unimaginatively called Fear the Walking Dead.

If the worst zombie movies unselfconsciously imitate higher-gloss broadcast-network reality trash like Survivor, The Walking Dead succeeds by staying closer to the lowest grade of cable-network reality TV. The world of The Walking Dead is closer to Hoarders than it is to Big Brother. Hoarders presents an America engulfed in mounds of trash that its psychologically damaged possessors can’t part with. Mounds of Big Gulp cups and greeting cards and heaps of car parts and instruction manuals overwhelm their homes, spilling into their yards. Shows like Storage Wars, Pawn Stars, and American Pickers present an America of valueless junk that maybe somebody can make a buck on—if only by televising it for our own lurid delectation. These shows are the opposite of pre-collapse valuation shows like Antiques Roadshow, in which the junk people had lying around proved to be worth more than they had imagined. The detritus of Hoarders is worthless, the kind of trash that will blow around everywhere after the Zombie Apocalypse.

Hoarders vs. Horde

In his recent book 24/7, an analysis of the end of sleep and our twenty-four-hour consumption-and-work cycle, Jonathan Crary writes that “part of the modernized world we inhabit is the ubiquitous visibility of useless violence and the human suffering it causes. . . . The act of witnessing and its monotony can become a mere enduring of the night, of the disaster.” Zombies, not quite awake but never asleep, are the living-dead reminders of this condition, stumbling through our fictions. When they are not transformed by the wishful thinking of ideology into our pals, they retain this status.

Celebrated everywhere, zombies are the opposite of celebrities, who swoop into our disaster areas like gods from Olympus to rescue us from the calamities that also allow them to flourish. Zombies, far from being elevated, descend into utter undistinguishable anonymity and degradation, which is why they can be destroyed in good conscience. Brad Pitt, one of the producers of ABC’s Resurrection, also starred in World War Z, the most expensive zombie movie ever made. The last line of that odious movie—the first neoliberal zombie movie—is “Our war has just begun.”

Whatever that was supposed to mean to the audience, these fables of the plague years drive home just who the zombies are supposed to be—and who, when the plague hits, will helicopter out holding the machine guns. Col. Kurtz’s faithful devotee from Apocalypse Now, Dennis Hopper, the counterculture hero who became a Republican golf nut, plays the leader of the remaining 1 percent in Land of the Dead. “We don’t negotiate with terrorists,” he says when he’s faced with the choice between his money and our lives.

Indulge . . . & Undermine

Posted on September 6, 2015 by Reid Mukai

Source: CrimethInc.

Have you noticed—exhortations to indulge yourself are always followed by suggestions? Adherents of doctrines seek footholds to claim territory within you, salesmen grasp for handles to jerk you around . . . from new-age prophets to advertisers, from pornographers to radicals, everyone exhorts you to “pursue your desires,” but the question remains: which ones? The “real” ones? Who decides which those are?

This just makes it clear what’s going on: a war for your soul on every front. And those much talked-about desires are all constructed, anyway—they change, they’re dependent on external factors, culture, the whole context and history of our society. We “like” fast food because we have to hurry back to work, because processed supermarket food doesn’t taste much better, because the nuclear family—for those who still have even that—is too small and stressed to sustain much festivity in cooking and eating. We “have to” check our email because the dissolution of community has taken our friends and kindred far away, because our bosses would rather not have to talk to us, because “time-saving” technology has claimed the hours once used to write letters—and killed all the passenger pigeons, besides. We “want” to go to work because in this society no one looks out for those who don’t, because it’s hard to imagine more pleasurable ways to spend our time when everything around us is designed for commerce and consumption. Every craving we feel, every conception we form, is framed in the language of the civilization that creates us.

Does this mean we would want differently in a different world? Yes, but not because we would be free to feel our “natural” desires—no such things exist. Beyond the life you live, you have no “true” self—you are precisely what you do and think and feel. That’s the real tragedy about the life of the man who spends it talking on his cell phone and attending business seminars and fidgeting with the remote control: it’s not that he denies himself his dreams, necessarily, but that he makes them answer to reality rather than attempting the opposite. The accountant regarded with such pity by runaway teenage lovers may in fact be “happy”—but it is a different happiness than the one they experience on the lam.

If our desires are constructs, if we are indeed the products of our environment, then our freedom is measured by how much control of these environments we have. It’s nonsense to say a woman is free to feel however she wants about her body when she grows up surrounded by diet advertisements and posters of anorexic models. It’s nonsense to say a man is free when everything he needs to do to get food, shelter, success, and companionship is already established by his society, and all that remains is for him to choose between established options (bureaucrat or technician? bourgeois or bohemian? Democrat or Republican?). We must make our freedom by cutting holes in the fabric of this reality, by forging new realities which will, in turn, fashion us. Putting yourself in new situations constantly is the only way to ensure that you make your decisions unencumbered by the inertia of habit, custom, law, or prejudice—and it is up to you to create these situations. Freedom only exists in the moment of revolution.

And those moments are not as rare as you think. Change, revolutionary change, is going on constantly and everywhere—and everyone plays a part in it, consciously or not. “To be radical is simply to keep abreast of reality,” in the words of the old expatriate. The question is simply whether you take responsibility for your part in the ongoing transformation of the cosmos, acting deliberately and with a sense of your own power—or frame your actions as reactions, participating in unfolding events accidentally, randomly, involuntarily, as if you were purely a victim of circumstance.

If, as idealists like us insist, we can indeed create whatever world we want, then perhaps it’s true that we can adapt to any world, too. But the former is infinitely preferable. Choosing to spend your life in reaction and adaptation, hurrying to catch up to whatever is already happening, means being perpetually at the mercy of everything. That’s no way to go about pursuing your desires, whichever ones you choose.

So forget about whether “the” revolution will ever happen—the best reason to be a revolutionary is simply that it is a better way to live. It offers you a chance to lead a life that matters, gives you a relationship to injustice so you don’t have to deny your own grief and outrage, keeps you conscious of the give and take always going on between individual and institution, self and community, one and all. No institution can offer you freedom—but you can experience it in challenging and reinventing institutions. When school children make up their own words to the songs they are taught, when people show up by the tens of thousands to interfere with a closed-door meeting of expert economists discussing their lives, that’s what they’re up to: rediscovering that self-determination, like power, belongs only to the ones who exercise it.

Shout it over the rooftops: Culture can belong to us. We can make our own music, mythology, science, technology, tradition, psychology, literature, history, ethics, political power. Until we do, we’re stuck buying mass-produced movies and compact discs made by corporate mercenaries, sitting faceless and immobilized at arena rock performances and sports events, struggling with other people’s inventions and programs and theories that make less sense to us than sorcery did to our ancestors, shamefacedly accepting the judgments of priests and agony columnists and radio talk show hosts, berating ourselves for not living up to the standards set by college entrance exams and glamour magazines, listening to parents and counselors and psychiatrists and managers tell us we are the ones with the problems, buying our whole lives from the same specialists and entrepreneurs we sell them to—and gnashing our teeth in secret fury as they cut down the last trees and heroes with the cash and authority we give them. These things aren’t inevitable, inescapable tragedies—they’re consequences of the passivity to which we have relegated ourselves. In the checkout lines of supermarkets, on the dialing and receiving ends of 900 numbers, in the locker rooms before gym classes and cafeteria shifts, we long to be protagonists in our own epics, masters of our own fate.

If we are to transform ourselves, we must transform the world—but to begin reconstructing the world, we must reconstruct ourselves. Today all of us are occupied territory. Our appetites and attitudes and roles have all been molded by this world that turns us against ourselves and each other. How can we take and share control of our lives, and neither fear nor falter, when we’ve spent those lives being conditioned to do the opposite?

Whatever you do, don’t blame yourself for the fragments of the old order that remain within you. You can’t sever yourself from the chain of cause and effect that produced you—not with any amount of willpower. The trick is to find ways to indulge your programming that simultaneously subvert it—that create, in the process of satisfying those desires, conditions which foster new ones. If you need to follow leaders, find leaders who will depose themselves from the thrones in your head; if you need to “lead” others, find equals who will help you dethrone yourself; if you have to fight against others, find wars you can wage for everyone’s benefit. When it comes to dodging the imperatives of your conditioning, you’ll find that indulge and undermine is a far more effective program than the old heritage of “renounce and struggle” passed down from a humorless Christianity.

To return, finally, to the original question—yes, we too are making suggestions about which desires you pursue. We would be scoundrels to deny that! But we would be scoundrels not to make these suggestions, not to extol freedom and self-determination in a world that discourages them. Exhorting others to “think for themselves” is ironic—but today, refusing to oppose the propaganda of the missionaries and entrepreneurs and politicians simply means abandoning our society and species to their control. There’s no purity in silence. And liberty does not simply exist in the absence of control—it is something we have to make together. Taking responsibility for our part in the ongoing metamorphoses of the world means not being afraid to take part in the making of our society, influencing and being influenced as we do.

We make suggestions, we spread this propaganda of desire, because we hope by doing so to indulge our own programmed passion for propaganda in a way that undermines an order that discourages all of us from playing with our passions—and so to enter a world of total liberty and diversity, where propaganda and power struggles alike are obsolete. See you on the other side.

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