Watching this presidential election unfold is close to convincing me that democracy, at least as it is practiced in the United States of America, is untenable. Most of the people in the US are opposed to the war, to Obama's drone war, (and to having drones flying overhead "protecting" us), are not overtly racist or sexist, think that women should be paid commensurate with men for the same job, shudder at the idea of child labor, don't care if gay people get married, and believe that freedom of religion does, in fact, include freedom from religion. (Even though most cling to some god belief and would not actually vote for an atheist.) Yet somehow, in a supposed democracy, none of this is reflected much in American political circles.
It may be that what we like to call "democracy" in the US is nothing of the kind. The SCOTUS, institutionalizing what has been a long trend in American politics, sanctioned bribery and political corruption as having been written into the Constitution. I think an argument can be made (and should be made somewhere by someone that matters) that Citizens United was an act of treason; betraying the people of the United States by openly selling the political system to the highest bidder. The result is that only candidates vetted by the richest of the rich make it onto the ballot. When it comes to Presidents the voter is left with a choice between an Ivy-league trained, corporate sanctioned, very wealthy Republican; or an Ivy-league trained, corporate sanctioned, very wealthy Democrat. That same money, that same vetting, flows all the way down to State Houses and Governor's mansions.
Admittedly that is not much of a choice and we are left with a kind of sham democracy; depressingly reminiscent of elections held in places like the old Soviet Union, China, and Cuba. One could vote, but the voting did not mean anything. On the other hand one might suggest that, as a voting group, us Americans are simply not very bright. Corrupt as the system has become, as unresponsive as it is to the actual desires of the majority, we keep voting for the same basic crew; Nixon (Ford) - R8, Carter - D4, Regan - R8, Bush I - R4, Clinton - D8, Bush II - R8, Obama - D4. Why?
Maybe it is us voters. We decry dependence on foreign oil, then buy SUVs and get all puffed up with indignity at idea that the evil government should set mileage standards. We struggle under the weight of our health care costs then smoke, drink, and get fatter every year. We can barely afford our housing costs yet, for many of us, most of the rooms in our homes go unused much of the time. We work harder and harder every year, (its called "being efficient"), bitch as our share of the economic pie shrinks and then vote in "business leaders" who eviscerate unions and cut any regulations that impinge on corporate profits; be they worker safety and compensation laws, or environmental protection laws. We have, all of us, drunk deeply of the cool-aid that "The business of America is Business" while apparently forgetting that whole, "Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness" thing. We actually believe that unrelenting exponential growth, on a planet with fixed and limited resources, is somehow a sustainable economic model that is necessary for us to buy happiness.
We constantly vote against our own economic, political, and social interests. Working folks vote in corporate lackeys. Religious people vote for people who follow a different religion and who would restrict religious freedom if they could. (I don't understand why the Protestant will vote in the militant Catholic thinking that, somehow, the Catholic will protect the right to reject the Pope's teachings. Meanwhile, the agnostic or atheist humanist who insists of the freedom of all religion, is somehow the threat.) People who embrace the institution of marriage in a society rapidly abandoning marriage as a necessity for either happiness or love, vote in those who seek to restrict the types of people who can get married. Women overwhelmingly vote for men who would restrict the rights of women. Men overwhelmingly vote for other men who are sure to send their sons and daughters off to yet another completely ludicrous (and if recent history is any guide) un-winable war.
It may be that we are collectively stupid. But I like to remember that we are also, still, a race of children; a country of children; and we watch a lot of TV. And lets be honest; TV is not entertainment. It is relentless social, political, and economic propaganda. We should constantly remind ourselves of this one, universal, unrelenting fact - whenever we look at a TV screen the odds are overwhelming that someone is lying to us. They have an agenda and our well being is not included, or even considered. What we see is ugly, hate, prejudice, endless violence, simplistic resolutions to contrived conflicts, pure political bullshit, human beings held up as "normal" who don't look or act anything like the human beings we see in real life, and the most manipulative enticements to consumerism that unlimited money can produce and project.
Think of this rather silly deception that fills our TV screens; no matter how many beauty products we buy, no matter how many exercise machines we order, no matter what kind of food we eat - we will never look like the people in the ads. Hell, even the people in the ads don't look like the people in the ads. We can be healthy, we can be happy, we can be beautiful and attractive as real human beings, but we are never going to look like that.
But the TV has convinced many of us that; 1) We might look like that if we buy what they suggest and, 2) if we do we will be happy. So we continue to watch the TV, buy the stuff they suggest, and wait to be happy. Maybe it is time to turn this thing around?
If we turn off the TVs, or at least watched them with an unrelenting skeptical eye, we would do a lot to move away from being children. We would cut off the most direct route of political corruption enshrined by the Supreme Court, that of TV advertising. Political machines cannot buy our vote if we are not watching their TV ads. Thirty second political ads are propaganda so pure they would have embarrassed Hitler; served up straight from the witch's brew of Citizens United, Madison Ave, and Hollywood. They should, each and every one of them, be an insult to our intelligence (even limited as that may be). We should be offended. We should be so insulted that we just turn it off. If the cost of watching "Dancing With the Stars" is being subject to the latest Republican and Democratic political vitriol, the return on investment is way to low. The rest of the advertisements are not much better.
Go a step further, take a moment and imagine a world without commercial TV. It is a magical place. Children play outside, use their imaginations for toys and games and explorations of the real world, interact with real human beings. Adults who want to know something about something go look it up. By that process alone much of the bullshit would be winnowed away. Instead of a 30 second helping of nonsense people would read parts of, or maybe the whole, of a candidate's latest campaign speech. (You can look it up on the Internet or get a U-tube feed of the actual event.) Direct, him to us, without some talking head getting in the middle to explain what the candidate really said. What? I heard what he fucking said, who asked you?
Where would a normal person go to learn about evolution? Maybe read a little by someone who has studied biology? Who would give much of a care about what a basically uneducated TV preacher says about biology and earth history? A political leader who claims to be an Young Earth Creationists should be as unelectable as one who insists that the earth is flat and that the sun orbits around us. (And please tell me the flat earth guy is unelectable or all is truly lost.)
We don't live in that imaginary world. Instead we live in a world where barely educated, TV zombied, propaganda mesmerized blocks of voters put sorry excuses for human beings in charge. We do that. Our democracy does that. And we need to do better.
We need a better vision than the one provided by mass media. One of the TV programs I have watched once in a while (over the Internet where I don't have to suffer commercials) is a "reality" program called "The Deadliest Catch." A wanna-be live aboard sailor, anything that has much to do with boats and big open water will catch my eye for a little while anyway. But you know what? Most of my reaction to the show is, "How can these Captains be such utterly incompetent leaders?" I don't see hard men doing a hard job in the face of Mother Nature. I see arrogant little pricks, often utterly irresponsible, lording over their freezing deck hands from cozy, warm, wheelhouses. Surly we can come up with better heroes, better examples of leaders and adventures, than these. My assumption is that these guys aren't really like this - it is TV after all. I mean, would you put up with such shit or just toss the jackass overboard and drive the boat home?
Maybe that's the vision we need for our democracy. Toss the jackass(s) overboard. Drive the boat home.
Friday, June 22, 2012
Thursday, June 7, 2012
Tribes
My guess is that most of us hold to the idea that we are rational human beings who are capable, at least once in a while, of handling facts and doing some clear thinking. But what human beings are really about is belonging to a tribe.
When it comes down to a pretty narrow focus we actually do okay accepting facts and doing some clear thinking. Much of our day-to-day living, especially in the complex environment of a first world society, is survived by accurately assessing our surroundings and acting accordingly. We drive cars, handle problems at work, and manage to walk across streets without getting run down...most of the time anyway. My take is that ability to deal with the here-and-now was programed deep into our brains as we evolved in a predator filled world. That same evolution also built in our need for the tribe.
Americans in particular love the ethos of the rugged individual, the lone wolf, the self-made man. It is an enjoyable fantasy that most of us buy into at least a little. But it is still fantasy. Without the tribe none of our ancestors would have survived; and neither would we. Our language comes from the tribe and with it our very ability for abstract thought. The tribe teaches us our skills, protects us when we make mistakes, rewards us for pulling our share of the social load, cares for us when we are ill and, ultimately, honors us when we die. The evolution of humanity is the evolution of the tribe.
For something like 200,000 years human tribes were pretty basic units built on loose family associations. It was likely less than 10,000 years ago that multiple tribes began to cooperate in the first, embryonic city-states based on agriculture. The best guess seems to be there were about 8,000,000 people on the planet when we started to tend crops. Now there are some 7,017,821,327 of us filling the globe. Tribes overlap in camps, communities, towns, cities, states, nations, and alliances. They also overlap in religions, ideologies, guilds, unions, avocations, and hobbies. This maze has obscured the tribal boundaries in our world; but not in our minds.
Some tribes we are born into, other we are swept into by the currents of our lives but very, very rarely do we get to chose one. After all, the tribe has to chose us as much as we have to chose the tribe, and the reality is tribes are not big on accepting outsiders. Whatever the path into the tribe though, in our heads belonging to and being accepted by the others in the tribe is the most important thing. It is more important than accepting facts. It is more important than clear thinking. It is more important than understanding the truth about anything outside of staying loyal to the tribe.
Which makes for some weird realities. The tribe of Christianity I once called mine insisted that women should be subject to men based on the claim that the first woman listened to a talking snake. We insisted that the world was created at roughly the same moment as the stars; that all the plants and animals came into being at the same time and share the same basic history; and that a guy we called Noah built his self a big-assed boat on which millions upon millions of animal species all rode out a flood. The discoveries of science, contradictory stories in the bible, and the observations of my own eyes were all filtered through the ideology of the tribe and were ignored, re-interpreted or explained away as necessary.
It isn't just religious tribes that make for such strangeness. Political ideologies ignore facts and history at least as often as religion. Conservatives believe things about taxes and jobs, governments and regulations, that are blatantly untrue. Liberals believe things about taxes and jobs, government and regulations, that are just as blatantly untrue. But a Conservative needs to be a conservative more than he or she needs to be correct about policy, as does the Liberal, the Libertarian, the T-party rebel, the Socialist and the Anarchist. (Of those my wish would be that the Anarchist could be right and sometimes I think of myself as being a part of that tribe...yet they are probably the most wrong headed of the bunch. The anarchist dreams of free human beings freely associating to their mutual benifit; just about the opposite of tribe. See what I mean?)
Yet we still hold some ability for rational thought, and along that path is the growing realization that tribal warfare could well spell the end of all. We need to figure out how to keep our evolution as tribal animals from killing us all off.
A good start is for each of us to think of the tribe we hold most near. Then, as honestly as we can, review the ideology of that tribe. In there somewhere will be at least one claim, one demand, one detail, that is clearly at odds with the universe as it actually exists. For the young earth creationist it might be the starlight known to have started its journey earthward billions of years ago. For the conservatives it might be the fact that at least some fortunes are held by people who didn't earn them and have little right to claim them as tax free gifts. A liberal might admit that government regulations are often burdensome and counter-productive and that collecting taxes and throwing money at a problem will often make the problem worse. In any case find a fact, a true thing that the tribe dismisses, and accept that the tribe is wrong.
You may have to keep your insight to yourself. A character of tribe is that it doesn't like being called on something but, just because we know our tribe is wrong about this fact or that, doesn't mean we want to be forced out or leave. The idea here is to hold in the very core of one's own heart the knowledge that the tribe is not right about all things all the time. (It may be that staying with the tribe is neither possible or desirable; depending on what one discovered is untrue. Some in the tribe of "Christain" will have nothing to do with me now. Nor would it be honest for me to claim membership in that tribe.)
Lots of good things come from holding on to this basic truth. Knowing that the tribe is not perfect can ward off much evil. People who know the tribe can make mistakes are much less likely to strap on bombs or call for genocide or throw acid in the faces of little girls. Such may even discover useful points of agreement with other tribes usually seen as rivals. Some conservative religious tribes may (for example) decide that the conservative political tribe's disdain for helping the poor is not a match; but that the secular humanist commitment to a fair and just society is. That doesn't mean that the conservative religious person must reject all of the conservative political tribe's positions. But it does mean a conservative religious person might find common ground with some secular ideas and maybe even some point of agreement with more liberal tribes within their own religion. Any maybe, knowing there is some common ground here and there, tribes will eventually learn to disagree with a little more tolerance and a lot less hatred.
If we are to thrive as a people we will have to admit to the power tribal boundaries hold over us while still finding a way to reach across as many of those boundaries as often as we can.
When it comes down to a pretty narrow focus we actually do okay accepting facts and doing some clear thinking. Much of our day-to-day living, especially in the complex environment of a first world society, is survived by accurately assessing our surroundings and acting accordingly. We drive cars, handle problems at work, and manage to walk across streets without getting run down...most of the time anyway. My take is that ability to deal with the here-and-now was programed deep into our brains as we evolved in a predator filled world. That same evolution also built in our need for the tribe.
Americans in particular love the ethos of the rugged individual, the lone wolf, the self-made man. It is an enjoyable fantasy that most of us buy into at least a little. But it is still fantasy. Without the tribe none of our ancestors would have survived; and neither would we. Our language comes from the tribe and with it our very ability for abstract thought. The tribe teaches us our skills, protects us when we make mistakes, rewards us for pulling our share of the social load, cares for us when we are ill and, ultimately, honors us when we die. The evolution of humanity is the evolution of the tribe.
For something like 200,000 years human tribes were pretty basic units built on loose family associations. It was likely less than 10,000 years ago that multiple tribes began to cooperate in the first, embryonic city-states based on agriculture. The best guess seems to be there were about 8,000,000 people on the planet when we started to tend crops. Now there are some 7,017,821,327 of us filling the globe. Tribes overlap in camps, communities, towns, cities, states, nations, and alliances. They also overlap in religions, ideologies, guilds, unions, avocations, and hobbies. This maze has obscured the tribal boundaries in our world; but not in our minds.
Some tribes we are born into, other we are swept into by the currents of our lives but very, very rarely do we get to chose one. After all, the tribe has to chose us as much as we have to chose the tribe, and the reality is tribes are not big on accepting outsiders. Whatever the path into the tribe though, in our heads belonging to and being accepted by the others in the tribe is the most important thing. It is more important than accepting facts. It is more important than clear thinking. It is more important than understanding the truth about anything outside of staying loyal to the tribe.
Which makes for some weird realities. The tribe of Christianity I once called mine insisted that women should be subject to men based on the claim that the first woman listened to a talking snake. We insisted that the world was created at roughly the same moment as the stars; that all the plants and animals came into being at the same time and share the same basic history; and that a guy we called Noah built his self a big-assed boat on which millions upon millions of animal species all rode out a flood. The discoveries of science, contradictory stories in the bible, and the observations of my own eyes were all filtered through the ideology of the tribe and were ignored, re-interpreted or explained away as necessary.
It isn't just religious tribes that make for such strangeness. Political ideologies ignore facts and history at least as often as religion. Conservatives believe things about taxes and jobs, governments and regulations, that are blatantly untrue. Liberals believe things about taxes and jobs, government and regulations, that are just as blatantly untrue. But a Conservative needs to be a conservative more than he or she needs to be correct about policy, as does the Liberal, the Libertarian, the T-party rebel, the Socialist and the Anarchist. (Of those my wish would be that the Anarchist could be right and sometimes I think of myself as being a part of that tribe...yet they are probably the most wrong headed of the bunch. The anarchist dreams of free human beings freely associating to their mutual benifit; just about the opposite of tribe. See what I mean?)
Yet we still hold some ability for rational thought, and along that path is the growing realization that tribal warfare could well spell the end of all. We need to figure out how to keep our evolution as tribal animals from killing us all off.
A good start is for each of us to think of the tribe we hold most near. Then, as honestly as we can, review the ideology of that tribe. In there somewhere will be at least one claim, one demand, one detail, that is clearly at odds with the universe as it actually exists. For the young earth creationist it might be the starlight known to have started its journey earthward billions of years ago. For the conservatives it might be the fact that at least some fortunes are held by people who didn't earn them and have little right to claim them as tax free gifts. A liberal might admit that government regulations are often burdensome and counter-productive and that collecting taxes and throwing money at a problem will often make the problem worse. In any case find a fact, a true thing that the tribe dismisses, and accept that the tribe is wrong.
You may have to keep your insight to yourself. A character of tribe is that it doesn't like being called on something but, just because we know our tribe is wrong about this fact or that, doesn't mean we want to be forced out or leave. The idea here is to hold in the very core of one's own heart the knowledge that the tribe is not right about all things all the time. (It may be that staying with the tribe is neither possible or desirable; depending on what one discovered is untrue. Some in the tribe of "Christain" will have nothing to do with me now. Nor would it be honest for me to claim membership in that tribe.)
Lots of good things come from holding on to this basic truth. Knowing that the tribe is not perfect can ward off much evil. People who know the tribe can make mistakes are much less likely to strap on bombs or call for genocide or throw acid in the faces of little girls. Such may even discover useful points of agreement with other tribes usually seen as rivals. Some conservative religious tribes may (for example) decide that the conservative political tribe's disdain for helping the poor is not a match; but that the secular humanist commitment to a fair and just society is. That doesn't mean that the conservative religious person must reject all of the conservative political tribe's positions. But it does mean a conservative religious person might find common ground with some secular ideas and maybe even some point of agreement with more liberal tribes within their own religion. Any maybe, knowing there is some common ground here and there, tribes will eventually learn to disagree with a little more tolerance and a lot less hatred.
If we are to thrive as a people we will have to admit to the power tribal boundaries hold over us while still finding a way to reach across as many of those boundaries as often as we can.
Sunday, June 3, 2012
The tyrants are winning
Americans continue to find it difficult to find good jobs. Those who have jobs continue to find that their share of the economic pie continues to shrink. Republicans insist that, should the Obama administration have followed their economic policies, the economy would be recovering. It is likely that a good number of Americans will agree; completely forgetting that several decades of following Republican monetary policy is what devastated the economy in the first place.
Democrats don’t seem to have a lot to say, which is understandable. For the most part Obama and the Democrats have also followed Republican economic policy. The tax code remains mostly the same, as do banking regulations and government tax support of particular industries and corporations while ignoring others. The reality is both the Republican and Democratic leadership are ardent supply-side capitalists; they are the infamous 1%.
All of the political leadership in this country believes that capitalism is the source for all political, moral and social policy as well as all economic policy. Maybe that is the real problem?
Capitalism as an economic system works pretty well. It provides incentive and rewards for those who provide innovative answers to societies problems; those who design new goods and services, those who dream up new systems of interaction and communications. This kind of capitalism doesn’t wait for, or depend on, groups or governments or corporations to come up with new ideas. Therein lay its strength.
But capitalism is all about profit and rewards, which means it is essentially egocentric and selfish. As such it has little to offer when it comes to governing. It has little to offer when it comes to structuring a society. And it has nothing to offer when it comes to social justice, morality, the picking of allies and enemies, or the expansion of human rights and liberty. Indeed, history has demonstrated time and time again that capitalism will gladly sacrifice justice, civil rights and liberty if profits can be made by doing so. It follows then that governing and building and supporting a civil society, has little to do with capitalism. Yet both political parties are completely sold to the idea that capitalism is the end all and be all to all aspects of society. Until we abandon that idea the country will continue to suffer and falter, drifting away from civil rights and liberties, and sinking slowly under the politics of hate and division.
How that happens with the current political leadership is the question. I don’t think it can. Obama is as fully indoctrinated into the “capitalism only” ideology as is Romney. Americans are pretty much united in the consensus that the current policies have failed, but neither party offers an alternative. No matter who one votes for, one is voting for the capitalist, the 1%, those at the top of the economic ladder who are committed to staying there at any cost. And unfortunately they think they can only stay there at the expense of everyone else.
This all-encompassing worship of capitalism is reflected in another bit of American propaganda; that capitalism and democracy must go hand in hand, that one cannot exist without the other. It sounds good and certainly serves the purposes of America's ruling elite, but it does seem to ignore much of the rest of the world. In the west many countries decried by America's right wing as "socialist" still manage to be thriving democracies. (Given that many are much more sensitive to corruption one might argue their form of democracy is much more healthy than is ours.) On the other hand China is moving forward with many capitalist reforms; but democratic reform is still far off.
Democracy is a political system where the population has at least as much to say about how society is ordered as do the political leaders. This can work out exceedingly well but, as history as shown over and over, there is no guarantee that it will. Capitalism, at least as it is practiced in the US, is an economic system that is run by the capitalists. As such it is, at least on this fundamental level, the opposite of democracy. Indeed, in any tyrannical political system the ruling elite end up looting the resources of the society, hording most of the goodies and living grotesquely opulent lives at the expense of the population.
In that sense capitalism in the US has simply become a tool used a different breed of tyrant to consolidate power. It has become incompatible with a free society. There are only two possible outcomes. The tyrants can lose as people free themselves from the illusion that profits have something to do with building a just, free and long lasting society. Right now that would mean both political parties in the US would lose.
Or the tyrants can win. Since there is no alternative to the two political parties in the US it seems pretty likely that the tyrants will win.
Democrats don’t seem to have a lot to say, which is understandable. For the most part Obama and the Democrats have also followed Republican economic policy. The tax code remains mostly the same, as do banking regulations and government tax support of particular industries and corporations while ignoring others. The reality is both the Republican and Democratic leadership are ardent supply-side capitalists; they are the infamous 1%.
All of the political leadership in this country believes that capitalism is the source for all political, moral and social policy as well as all economic policy. Maybe that is the real problem?
Capitalism as an economic system works pretty well. It provides incentive and rewards for those who provide innovative answers to societies problems; those who design new goods and services, those who dream up new systems of interaction and communications. This kind of capitalism doesn’t wait for, or depend on, groups or governments or corporations to come up with new ideas. Therein lay its strength.
But capitalism is all about profit and rewards, which means it is essentially egocentric and selfish. As such it has little to offer when it comes to governing. It has little to offer when it comes to structuring a society. And it has nothing to offer when it comes to social justice, morality, the picking of allies and enemies, or the expansion of human rights and liberty. Indeed, history has demonstrated time and time again that capitalism will gladly sacrifice justice, civil rights and liberty if profits can be made by doing so. It follows then that governing and building and supporting a civil society, has little to do with capitalism. Yet both political parties are completely sold to the idea that capitalism is the end all and be all to all aspects of society. Until we abandon that idea the country will continue to suffer and falter, drifting away from civil rights and liberties, and sinking slowly under the politics of hate and division.
How that happens with the current political leadership is the question. I don’t think it can. Obama is as fully indoctrinated into the “capitalism only” ideology as is Romney. Americans are pretty much united in the consensus that the current policies have failed, but neither party offers an alternative. No matter who one votes for, one is voting for the capitalist, the 1%, those at the top of the economic ladder who are committed to staying there at any cost. And unfortunately they think they can only stay there at the expense of everyone else.
This all-encompassing worship of capitalism is reflected in another bit of American propaganda; that capitalism and democracy must go hand in hand, that one cannot exist without the other. It sounds good and certainly serves the purposes of America's ruling elite, but it does seem to ignore much of the rest of the world. In the west many countries decried by America's right wing as "socialist" still manage to be thriving democracies. (Given that many are much more sensitive to corruption one might argue their form of democracy is much more healthy than is ours.) On the other hand China is moving forward with many capitalist reforms; but democratic reform is still far off.
Democracy is a political system where the population has at least as much to say about how society is ordered as do the political leaders. This can work out exceedingly well but, as history as shown over and over, there is no guarantee that it will. Capitalism, at least as it is practiced in the US, is an economic system that is run by the capitalists. As such it is, at least on this fundamental level, the opposite of democracy. Indeed, in any tyrannical political system the ruling elite end up looting the resources of the society, hording most of the goodies and living grotesquely opulent lives at the expense of the population.
In that sense capitalism in the US has simply become a tool used a different breed of tyrant to consolidate power. It has become incompatible with a free society. There are only two possible outcomes. The tyrants can lose as people free themselves from the illusion that profits have something to do with building a just, free and long lasting society. Right now that would mean both political parties in the US would lose.
Or the tyrants can win. Since there is no alternative to the two political parties in the US it seems pretty likely that the tyrants will win.
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