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TechnoratiAmerica Is in Need of a Moral Bailout
In decaying societies, politics become theater. The elite, who have hollowed out the democratic system to serve the corporate state, rule through image and presentation. They express indignation at AIG bonuses and empathy with a working class they have spent the last few decades disenfranchising, and make promises to desperate families that they know will never be fulfilled. Once the spotlights go on they read their lines with appropriate emotion. Once the lights go off, they make sure Goldman Sachs and a host of other large corporations have the hundreds of billions of dollars in losses they incurred playing casino capitalism repaid with taxpayer money.
We live in an age of moral nihilism. We have trashed our universities, turning them into vocational factories that produce corporate drones and chase after defense-related grants and funding. The humanities, the discipline that forces us to stand back and ask the broad moral questions of meaning and purpose, that challenges the validity of structures, that trains us to be self-reflective and critical of all cultural assumptions, have withered. Our press, which should promote such intellectual and moral questioning, confuses bread and circus with news and refuses to give a voice to critics who challenge not this bonus payment or that bailout but the pernicious superstructure of the corporate state itself. We kneel before a cult of the self, elaborately constructed by the architects of our consumer society, which dismisses compassion, sacrifice for the less fortunate, and honesty. The methods used to attain what we want, we are told by reality television programs, business schools and self-help gurus, are irrelevant. Success, always defined in terms of money and power, is its own justification. The capacity for manipulation is what is most highly prized. And our moral collapse is as terrifying, and as dangerous, as our economic collapse.
Theodor Adorno in 1967 wrote an essay called "Education After Auschwitz." He argued that the moral corruption that made the Holocaust possible remained "largely unchanged." He wrote that "the mechanisms that render people capable of such deeds" must be made visible. Schools had to teach more than skills. They had to teach values. If they did not, another Auschwitz was always possible.
"All political instruction finally should be centered upon the idea that Auschwitz should never happen again," he wrote. "This would be possible only when it devotes itself openly, without fear of offending any authorities, to this most important of problems. To do this, education must transform itself into sociology, that is, it must teach about the societal play of forces that operates beneath the surface of political forms."
Our elites are imploding. Their fraud and corruption are slowly being exposed as the disparity between their words and our reality becomes wider and more apparent. The rage that is bubbling up across the country will have to be countered by the elite with less subtle forms of control. But unless we grasp the "societal play of forces that operates beneath the surface of political forms" we will be cursed with a more ruthless form of corporate power, one that does away with artifice and the seduction of a consumer society and instead wields power through naked repression.
I had lunch a few days ago in Toronto with Henry Giroux, professor of English and cultural studies at McMaster University in Canada and who for many years was the Waterbury Chair Professor at Penn State. Giroux, who has been one of the most prescient and vocal critics of the corporate state and the systematic destruction of American education, was driven to the margins of academia because he kept asking the uncomfortable questions Adorno knew should be asked by university professors. He left the United States in 2004 for Canada.
"The emergence of what Eisenhower had called the military-industrial-academic complex had secured a grip on higher education that may have exceeded even what he had anticipated and most feared," Giroux, who wrote "The University in Chains: Confronting the Military-Industrial-Academic Complex," told me. "Universities, in general, especially following the events of 9/11, were under assault by Christian nationalists, reactionary neoconservatives and market fundamentalists for allegedly representing the weak link in the war on terrorism. Right-wing students were encouraged to spy on the classes of progressive professors, the corporate grip on the university was tightening as made clear not only in the emergence of business models of governance, but also in the money being pumped into research and programs that blatantly favored corporate interests. And at Penn State, where I was located at the time, the university had joined itself at the hip with corporate and military power. Put differently, corporate and Pentagon money was now funding research projects and increasingly knowledge was being militarized in the service of developing weapons of destruction, surveillance and death. Couple this assault with the fact that faculty were becoming irrelevant as an oppositional force. Many disappeared into discourses that threatened no one, some simply were too scared to raise critical issues in their classrooms for fear of being fired, and many simply no longer had the conviction to uphold the university as a democratic public sphere."
Frank Donoghue, the author of "The Last Professors: The Corporate University and the Fate of the Humanities," details how liberal arts education has been dismantled. Any form of learning that is not strictly vocational has at best been marginalized and in many schools has been abolished. Students are steered away from asking the broad, disturbing questions that challenge the assumptions of the power elite or an economic system that serves the corporate state. This has led many bright graduates into the arms of corporate entities they do not examine morally or ethically. They accept the assumptions of corporate culture because they have never been taught to think.
Only 8 percent of U.S. college graduates now receive degrees in the humanities, about 110,000 students. Between 1970 and 2001, bachelor's degrees in English declined from 7.6 percent to 4 percent, as did degrees in foreign languages (2.4 percent to 1 percent), mathematics (3 percent to 1 percent), social science and history (18.4 percent to 10 percent). Bachelor's degrees in business, which promise the accumulation of wealth, have skyrocketed. Business majors since 1970-1971 have risen from 13.6 percent of the graduation population to 21.7 percent. Business has now replaced education, which has fallen from 21 percent to 8.2 percent, as the most popular major.
The values that sustain an open society have been crushed. A university, as John Ralston Saul writes, now "actively seeks students who suffer from the appropriate imbalance and then sets out to exaggerate it. Imagination, creativity, moral balance, knowledge, common sense, a social view-all these things wither. Competitiveness, having an ever-ready answer, a talent for manipulating situations-all these things are encouraged to grow. As a result amorality also grows; as does extreme aggressivity when they are questioned by outsiders; as does a confusion between the nature of good versus having a ready answer to all questions. Above all, what is encouraged is the growth of an undisciplined form of self-interest, in which winning is what counts."
This moral nihilism would have terrified Adorno. He knew that radical evil was possible only with the collaboration of a timid, cowed and confused population, a system of propaganda and a press that offered little more than spectacle and entertainment and an educational system that did not transmit transcendent values or nurture the capacity for individual conscience. He feared a culture that banished the anxieties and complexities of moral choice and embraced a childish hyper-masculinity, one championed by ruthless capitalists (think of the brutal backstabbing and deception cheered by TV shows like "Survivor") and Hollywood action heroes like the governor of California.
"This educational ideal of hardness, in which many may believe without reflecting about it, is utterly wrong," Adorno wrote. "The idea that virility consists in the maximum degree of endurance long ago became a screen-image for masochism that, as psychology has demonstrated, aligns itself all too easily with sadism."
Sadism is as much a part of popular culture as it is of corporate culture. It dominates pornography, runs like an electric current through reality television and trash-talk programs and is at the core of the compliant, corporate collective. Corporatism is about crushing the capacity for moral choice. And it has its logical fruition in Abu Ghraib, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and our lack of compassion for the homeless, our poor, the mentally ill, the unemployed and the sick.
"The political and economic forces fuelling such crimes against humanity-whether they are unlawful wars, systemic torture, practiced indifference to chronic starvation and disease or genocidal acts-are always mediated by educational forces," Giroux said. "Resistance to such acts cannot take place without a degree of knowledge and self-reflection. We have to name these acts and transform moral outrage into concrete attempts to prevent such human violations from taking place in the first place."
The single most important quality needed to resist evil is moral autonomy. Moral autonomy, as Immanuel Kant wrote, is possible only through reflection, self-determination and the courage not to cooperate.
Moral autonomy is what the corporate state, with all its attacks on liberal institutions and "leftist" professors, has really set out to destroy. The corporate state holds up as our ideal what Adorno called "the manipulative character." The manipulative character has superb organizational skills and the inability to have authentic human experiences. He or she is an emotional cripple and driven by an overvalued realism. The manipulative character is a systems manager. He or she exclusively trained to sustain the corporate structure, which is why our elites are wasting mind-blowing amounts of our money on corporations like Goldman Sachs and AIG. "He makes a cult of action, activity, of so-called efficiency as such which reappears in the advertising image of the active person," Adorno wrote of this personality type. These manipulative characters, people like Lawrence Summers, Henry Paulson, Robert Rubin, Ben Bernanke, Timothy Geithner, AIG's Edward Liddy and Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein, along with most of our ruling class, have used corporate money and power to determine the narrow parameters of the debate in our classrooms, on the airwaves and in the halls of Congress while they looted the country.
"It is especially difficult to fight against it," warned Adorno, "because those manipulative people, who actually are incapable of true experience, for that very reason manifest an unresponsiveness that associates them with certain mentally ill or psychotic characters, namely schizoids."
203 Comments so far
Show AllOk sorry for bein' a tad surly. I had a bad week and wanted to stick up for my friend. Big group hug. lol.
Sioux Rose gets a lot of flak from the anti-spirituality clique of the Left. That's why she's defensive. Sioux uses the language of astrology and the New Age movement to reach people with her message. She also writes like an angel and isn't bad to look at. :)
The Left needs more people than ever and more diversity along with that. It's as if every other person who posts here is an atheist white guy with a PHD who pushes a pencil for a living, never gets his hands dirty, and is insulated by academia. You people must be angry at your wealthy right-wing parents and still wanna lash out. lol.
Btw, blue-collar metalhead here. I guess I should pretend to like Morrissey and then dig myself into a hole to the tune of $25G's to get a degree in poli-sci before I post here or show up at a rally.
Yeah, if you don't like her posts, skip 'em. Lord knows I skip o'er certain fatheads around here, but I'll be reading hers.
I remember when my kids first got into online chatrooms. Often there would be an 'age check' amongst the participants. So this is ours.
I'm a blue-collar high school graduate, always worked with my hands, doing art, handcrafts or refinishing furniture. Right now I have drywall patch stuck to my shirt. We just moved to an old farm and I'm sure I have been blessed with chicken shit on my shoes, which means I have eggs in my coop.
My dad's a preacher and my husband's an atheist. (I'll tell you right now atheism does not negate spirituality.)
I was lucky enough to grow up in the 70's, with arguably the best music ever produced. Though the clothes were hilarious and provide many yuks when looking at old photos. Did we really wear purple plaid pants? Oh my yes. But we had Lou Reed and David Bowie and the Kinks and Bad Company. We had radio stations that played whole album sides without commercial interruption.
My own kids sometimes have trouble just recycling, but I have hope for the grandkids. My son-in-law works at Wal-mart which annoys me no end, but I'd probably be a lot more annoyed if he was unemployed.
Just like a lot of you, I and my family are stuck in the middle of what's great and what really sucks about America. My husband worked full time since he was 14 and now is retired at 50. We've been savers and debt reducers and have nothing but a mortgage, BUT- his retirement is in danger due to the Wall St. Casino.
I'm a doer but I go to the computer for breaks and to write, read and try to interact. I need a lot of breaks some days.
I don't mind astrology or anything else that helps shed light on the human condition. And when you can turn a phrase like Sioux Rose you can write about what ever you want. I trust her posts to have at least one real gem of wisdom or insight, and often an entire line of eloquent reasoning.
That's not to say that she's the only one! I enjoy so many of the posters here, but it does get acrimonious at times.
This is still the best place I have found to interact on the net. My local paper censors all comments in their online edition. (I've been censored a lot.) I like the way the threaded comments work, you can have a good discussion with individuals while the rest of the thread continues.
What I'd really like to see, and I think you alluded to, is some unification of the "Left" as a way to bring about change. I'm too old to spin my wheels, I want to know that when I do something it will make a difference. But I'm not to old to act, and that's what I'd like to do.
In the words of Tracy Chapman:
This youthful heart can love you and give you what you need
I said this youthful heart can love you and give you what you need
But I'm too old to go chasing you around
Wasting my precious energy
Another blue collar metalhead here who also happens to love Sioux's posts.
This explains a lot :
"Every society gets the kind of criminal it deserves."
—ROBERT F. KENNEDY
The legal fact of corporate personhood (I think) is at the root of this immoral situation. Corporations are virtually immortal which leads to their pathological behavior. Remove that personhood and you limit a good deal of the problem, beginning with the "free speech" issue of corporate lobbying and funding of elections. Until this is done (and only a revolution will accomplish this, I, afraid) there is certainly no hope for democracy as we envision it.
Fear of death is indeed a strong motivator - and why corporations are supposed to be chartered for a specific time, like any other legal contract. It is not only the immortality - but the resurrection of failures under a new name that gives this beast so much power. Limited charters - with strong recall features - are necessary in a capitalist society. The personhood question is a non-starter, since it came about through a clerical error in the first place. The people running corporations need to be held responsible for bad or criminal - or immoral (anti-social) behavior. Then they wouldn't take such great risks - which is the point they use to sell themselves! How many socially-useful innovations came out of corporate research, as compared to individual and/or university research? In some cases, we fund the research (public universities) and then pay again when patents are given to corporations - we get screwed twice, even before the larcenous bailouts!
If Obama is able to restart this credit based economy the revolution may be deferred until after I'm dead. Eventually we have to have an economy based on saving and cooperation. Nothing else is sustainable.
Amazing! What most of you have to offer is bashing the United States in which you have the freedom to do so without being hauled off to prison.
Make stupid comments bashing men by referring to their testicles, really intelligent! Women are just as much to blame for the state we are in!
Blame sports and hardworking people who pay the taxes that you apparently would love to give to everyone who feels they are entitled not to work but have everything they want.
Solution, turn our schools into dens of socialization as if they are not already which is why we are turning out unintelligent people. After all, we want to make little Suzy feel good about herself!
Pamper the entitlement crowd who like to play the victim card instead of going to school or training, getting a job and taking personal responsibility.
Carp about our being involved in Iraq and Afganistan but nothing about what Israel is doing to Palestine.
You know, here is a thought for you, if you dislike the United States so much, you can always leave. Go to another country and spend your time complaining about that country OR you can get a job, pay some taxes, act like a grownup!
By the way, I am white, straight, female and conservative and I like it that way! In fact some of the most hate filled, ugly, self-righteous idots are the blazing liberals!
You were not born like this. How is this attitude working out for you? You sound unhappy. Not everything has to be about competition.
"What most of you have to offer is bashing the United States in which you have the freedom to do so without being hauled off to prison."
If your child did something wrong, I'm assuming you would criticize and correct his behavior because you are supposed to be your child's caretaker.
By analogy, if we feel the USA has done something wrong, then the people, as the legitamate caretakers, should have the responsibility to criticize and correct America's behavior or have our elected leaders do so for us. Unfortunately, our criticisms (especially on financial bailouts) usually fall upon deaf or hostile ears. The only recourse is then to scorn/change/circumvent the irresponsive leaders and flawed systems blocking our voices.
"Blame sports and hardworking people who pay the taxes that you apparently would love to give to everyone who feels they are entitled not to work but have everything they want."
On the contrary, Americans have the lowest real minimum wage of the 1st World, yet American workers work longer than our foreign counterparts. Why should most American workers accept this when their (corporate) bosses make huge bonuses and often evade taxes?
"Solution, turn our schools into dens of socialization as if they are not already which is why we are turning out unintelligent people. After all, we want to make little Suzy feel good about herself!"
In my opinion, having seen my fellow classmates, Americans schools produce average people not because of the lack of rigor, but because most teachers expect little of their students and students learn to expect little from their classes other than a grade. Thinking, actual learning (applying knowledge), and the curious love of learning is not required of normal students; in fact, questioning teacher or policy, even when clearly justified, can result in disciplinary overreaction.
In more competitive districts, families, and "tracks", thinking is sometimes required of some classes, but even most "honors" students rarely think critically (as few were trained to do so) about their assignments, much less societal or personal values. Usually, the grade/award becomes more important than ethics, sleep, or human relationships.
"Carp about our being involved in Iraq and Afganistan but nothing about what Israel is doing to Palestine."
Please look at all of this forum's articles. There's plenty of seething criticism of Israel.
"Pamper the entitlement crowd who like to play the victim card instead of going to school or training, getting a job and taking personal responsibility."
I am all for more schooling, but why should schooling be mainly for a job? Utilitarian learning is not only dull, it doesn't usually encourage reflection and self-growth. Not to mention, why should anyone accept college debt in order to have a chance for a decent-paying job that they may hate doing?
Also, what exactly do you mean by "personal responsibility"? Why should it be the jobless man's fault that his job was outsourced (cheaper labor), downsized (bad times), or slashed (merger)? To the businesses, such people and such skills are expendable. After failing to find another (temp) job for the next few months, is it so unreasonable to lose hope of ever finding another job, especially if this hypothetical worker doesn't have the money for re-training?
"Make stupid comments bashing men by referring to their testicles, really intelligent! Women are just as much to blame for the state we are in!"
That's true; everyone is complicit in society's values, but as the article noted too well, this society values competition too much. Society's heroes, the most talked about, tend to be the men of action (police, military) and the deciders (CEOs, mafia dons, presidents), traditional masculine roles often requiring, as the article noted, manipulation. The mindest of "I'll use or ruin anyone I meet" and "gotta be #1" invites distrust, lying, treachery, secrecy, hoarding, and other sociopathic, even illegal, behavior.
This is one of the best articles I've seen on CD. I especially like his mention of the relationship between masochism and sadism in a culture that values success at all costs. I hope Hedges (and maybe Robert Jensen) will expand on this in the future.
Remark and suggestion well taken!
The role of sports in our culture to promote and instill aggressive behavior in young men and now increasingly in women, too, needs to be exposed as well.
One of my elders taught me that the "only difference between good or bad, positive or negative, right or wrong-------- is choice".
Good luck America, you really need it.
N A T I V E _ S O N,
Thank you for pointing out the immense power of CHOICE coupled with PERCEPTION.
Of course having a choice depends upon knowing of ( and believing in ) more than one obvious selection or past preference of action.
This is the wisdom of the ages distilled for those willing to learn.
I mentioned something similar below at time stamp :
npwr.luv March 24th, 2009 11:42 am
Namaste
Enjoyed "Sneaker's" comment about your Nation's govt being a criminal enterprise since day one. I can't disagree with that at all. As soon as Columbus said that was it for the Native Tribes except a few remote tribes that haven't been swallowed up by the cash register world who still live off the bounty Creator provides them through nature.
This old Indian is just a day older & the people who own the Mortuary just rub their hands together a little faster as the prospect of making money off my Carcase grows nearer for them.
It's ok, they have to eat, too, you know.
The story of how Jesus visted Wovoca is at wwww.wovoca.com. Jesus was doing a little Interdimensional Travel that day.
I am just passing through this world.
Life is good. What an experience! It's always best to forgive.
The ones that people look to for a moral compass are these days the least moral of the lot. I am referring to Christianity when I say this. These people took one of the corrupt and immoral Presidents in the history of this country and made him a icon of their movement. They were willing to overlook his stealing the office of President in 2000. They were willing to overlook lies he told to start a war with Iraq and getting 10's of thousands of people killed. They were able to overlook his robbing the poor to give to the rich. They were able to overlook his shady duplicitous practices to vote him right back into office in 2004. Because he would imposed their agenda upon a country. In short they were more concerned about making abortion and gay's illegal they were about the moral characters of a President and his entire administration. They were not remotely concerned about the welfare of this country just their agenda. In short they for sale to the bidder who would impose their belief's. As far as I can see Christianity has become the worst offenders in the moral story. These people are capable of lying straight faced and never batting an eyelash. They have literally no conscious or ethics. They expect the rest of the country to follow in their footsteps and a lot have made the mistake. Which is why we have a collapse of morals in this country. These people have no clue that morals goes a whole lot further than sex. As far as they are concerned it begins and ends with sex. In their hope to turn this into a Christian Nation they have been willing to commit any crime themselves to attain their goals. The actions of a corrupt President had everything to do with the moral decay of a country.
Unresponsive (unresponsible) perfectly describes my experience, as an individual farmer. working ?with? Organic Valley--Family of Farms. Ohh, but how could be that be? They've labeled themselves 'organic' and 'family' (USDA approved), they must be good! No, they're not....they're abusive power brokers, charlatans and 'massagers of message', managers of perception--out and out LIARS. Call George Siemon, president of OV, 1-888-809-9297 to complain if you care about truth and family farms.
Excellent article, grounded in the facts of our predicament, by Chris Hedges.
Thank you, Chris. Thanks to anyone else who cares.
USDA and Organic Valley be damned.
I don't agree with the sentiment man should not exist on this Earth because of the crimes against nature and sense committed by industrial North. Nor do I believe global warming is dire enough to eradicate all of man unless governments sadistically initiate nuclear/biological war or poison all the remaining land (to the point no life can survive).
However, given the track record of empire, large-scale civilization (centralized power), and aristocracy (in all its disguises), there's not much to fear except the above. A fascist stage will be short-lived since nature (both human and biological) will limit their effective reach of power. Individually, for our activism and politics, any of us will probably end up in jail, or worse, but collectively, the will to think critically and for the future cannot be erased. Greed, TV, indoctrination, and reacting to the news (instead of acting--I know I don't do enough) can only dull our curiosity and humanity.
That being said, I think many of us prefer a better state, not a completely absent one. Why else would we debate and fight for government regulations of banks when all we need is food, water, and each other? I know I've said this elsewhere, but I think we need to prepare for the worst (government implosion) communally and fight for the best (a restored government) nationally. This is not an either/or; in fact, this separation (usually along city/country lines) makes Leftists more divded then necessary and is a cause of working class division (that the elites capitalize on).
As for the article's point, I have seen this firsthand. My parents chose these insane values (they weren't born here), but not before I had decided otherwise. I'm about to go to college, and my parents seem to care far more than I do that I learn a "practical art" and earn "lots of money". Every week, I spend hours in pointless argument.
At school, I am exactly the type of student that always questions choices, texts, and policy. Most of my teachers, however, are fairly supportive, but they deal with the "honors" track kids. In "regular" classes, I've seen the teacher treat me above the other kids or even themselves, while ignoring/insulting the "normal" kids whom they expect nothing of. As a TA, I've seen blatantly repressive actions from certain teachers, usually to mask the fact they don't know the material well enough to teach without a book/CD. (Like many of us on here, I can protest this all I want, but the bad teachers rarely change their habits.) Apathy, ignorance, and self-doubt become daily lessons. One doesn't need to think, much less act morally to pass, and this manipulative/carefree attitude is actually the worst in the "honors" classes because students without the habit of thinking cannot otherwise meet expectations. One can only wonder why our leaders act in exactly the same way.
Yeah...I agree.America Is in Need of a Moral Bailout.Thanks.
Zenerx
Sytropin
The answer is for us to become neo-humans! Want to know how?
Visit: www.dangerouscreation.com
What "America" is that?
USA has been a criminal enterprise from day one.
Sioux's one of the forum's best kept secrets. :)
The author sez, "Only 8 percent of U.S. college graduates now receive degrees in the humanities, about 110,000 students. Between 1970 and 2001, bachelor's degrees in English declined from 7.6 percent to 4 percent, as did degrees in foreign languages (2.4 percent to 1 percent), mathematics (3 percent to 1 percent), social science and history (18.4 percent to 10 percent)."
I remember when I majored in English in college instead of engineering, which is what they were pushing at the time. People said I was crazy. "You won't find a job if you're an English major." As if college is all about being obedient and getting trained for a job.
I guess they were right. It was too expensive being obedient, and I was therefore too worried about how to pay for everything, so I quit, now work in a blue-collar job and feel like a 2nd class citizen much of the time. After all, I don't have that degree, that car, that house, all those things one "needs" to be "respectable."
Hell, I've learned more about life just being in the workforce. It's been an eye-opener.
You think that if we socialized education, like we should do with healthcare, that we could break the military/industrial complex's hold on academia?
"Any form of learning that is not strictly vocational has at best been marginalized and in many schools has been abolished."
Even if USans at risk of falling into the fascist trap were to express interest in the humanities, there is still something about the culture that makes it extremely difficult for USans to take the humanities seriously. It seems to be a combination of two things: The extreme right's fear/loathing campaigns that keep the people in eternal fight/flight mode, and the left's failure to counter that. The left's failures are particularly problematic. There has to be an alternative to rightwing extremism, but there isn't one in the USA.
I don't have my glasses, does that headline read,
"America is Indeed An Amoral Sellout"?
Man, what an article. It seems as if from Tuesday to Sunday everything is somewhat solemn around here but meanwhile Hedges is like a storm gathering strength and momemtum off the coast until another Monday comes around and BAM!--he rolls in like a tidal wave--a tsunami!
We could use just such a tsunami in public sentiment to roll across the country right about now.
Thank you, Chris Hedges, for another article that makes explicit our deeply disturbed predicament.
Check out Joel Bakan's book "The Corporation: The Pathological Pursuit of Profits and Power", and the documentary film "The Corporation" by Mark Achbar, Jennifer Abbott, and Joel Bakan.
we acknowledge looming planetary disaster, and our own behavioral role in it, but cannot loose ourselves from the psychological framework within which our daily lives transpire...we use the word education as if it means something, even judge ourselves and others by it, while, with the next breath, excoriate the fraudulence of the very thing, citing very real and accurate criticisms...we do the same with professions and possessions...even while able to understand the relationship between industry, consumerism and global death, we still produce and consume, and proudly...no wonder i'm going insane...I'm caught in a whirlpool of hypocrisy, being sucked under, while frantically reaching for the receding, saving branch...when one tries to comment or live against the system from within the system, watch out...
"...we use the word education as if it means something..."
Interestingly, I recently read something that describes people's reaction to the economic meltdown as rushing to get more education in order to find jobs on the Titanic. Maybe we should finally be educating ourselves (and each other) in skills that will serve us in the new world - the one made by hand.
"rushing to get more education in order to find jobs on the Titanic."
Describes the "self-help" industry to a tee.
Great quote.
thank you...that bit helps clarify my feelings...
Sioux Rose
DUBET: First of all this is a planet of paradoxes, but secondly, it's wise to do things by degree... rather than all or nothing. You can use less, and let the mainstream excuse for culture mean less and less; but you are part of a planet weaniing itself of these devices the way the 2 year old is reluctantly taken off the breast. Nice n' easy does it... by degrees, my friend, by degrees.
I respect you and would never take pot shots at you, but that's what we heard morning until night from southern politicians about civil rights in the sixties.
thank you...I try to be patient, and can be so...I am beginning to experience very real effects, however, of the changes occurring in our economy, and cannot help but feel part of the anguish is the continued clinging to the discredited staus quo...the resistance to change being much worse than the change itself...
Sioux Rose
DUBET: Suppose someone considered changing where they lived. They never really get to the point they can embrace the change, but suddenly a flood arrives or a tornado and their home is gone. Sometimes the wave of change is larger than the thinker, sometimes its momentum carries along those who have not yet reached the internal point of critical mass. The rising tide of various injustices and unspeakable stupidity and callous disregard on the part of those I must reluctantly refer to as leaders is now a force let loose, one we will reckon with, like it or not. This is why being CENTERED on the inside, and living with REGARD for other human (and other sentient) beings is significant. Even in Biblical tales (take them as cautionary works if you're an atheist), in times of great testing, the moral fiber of each individual makes itself known. The ones who pushed others aside to get to the Titanic's lifeboats may be the ones who next time go down in the freak ferry accident. Karma is an equal opportunity employer.
Its a shame that the other 99% of Americans are Sheep, ignorant and uneducated and just don't understand whats going on and won't let the people that really know, that understand everything so well tell them what to do. They cling to their bibles and guns, insist that everyone should work, don't like it that non citizens take their money and are upset that their kids are caught in a fight between elites and are not getting diddly squat for an education. The idiots.
A lot of our moral structure has been replaced by culturalism. Thats fairly obvious. There is a lot of selective compliance to our laws. Good or bad? We are about to find out.
I believe you have already found out.
A nation of sheep? Maybe--but I think it's more accurate to say a nation of wolves.
Except that it gives wolves a bad name.
Considering that the denial percentage in your posts on this site. Thomas, is about 99% as well, I don't think you are in a position to criticize anyone.
More is a troll,
He is precisely the manipulative personality type described so accurately above. The city can be in flames and they are happy if they live upwind and they quickly move out of fire insurance stock and into building contractors. They respond but they don't feel. If they didn't do so much damage to society, I would feel sorry for them. As it is, they'll get increasing silent as they begin to get DOWNWIND. They respond.
"Corporatism is about crushing the capacity for moral choice. And it has its logical fruition in Abu Ghraib, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and our lack of compassion for the homeless, our poor, the mentally ill, the unemployed and the sick." How sadly true.
A far too harsh assessment, and an inaccurate one as well...
"Good or bad?"
Good question. What does your intuition tell you?
Our elites are imploding. Their fraud and corruption are slowly being exposed as the disparity between their words and our reality becomes wider and more apparent.
The United States must have a peaceful revolution whose first step is to rid itself completely of the Republicans and the Democrats, two so-called political parties that are totally corrupt and incompetent. If that first step is not taken, nothing else of any real consequence can possibly follow. Death by a thousand cuts, long in the making but absolutely inevitable, will be the result.
One of the pillars of modern society that is almost never attacked is the institution of professional sports. Most of us enjoy the energy and escape that comes from watching and playing sports and resist any awareness of how deeply our thinking is shaped by the experience of teams competing against each other in pursuit of such abstract rewards as a touchdown or a home run. The millions that top players make ought to alert us to how crucial this institution is in maintaining the existing order.
From childhood we are taught never to question the basics. (Just imagine a ten year old kid who insisted there ought to be an extra base between first and second - he'd be mocked by his peers and immediately referred for counseling and some heavy medication)
Obama is a normal guy and he likes sports. This only makes him more appealing. However, there is a link between his love of basketball and his inability to question the fundamentals of the American economic, political and military systems. He could no more order the troops out of Afghanistan tomorrow than he could question the value of the NCAA.
Our schools and colleges are fundamentally tied to the idea of sports. Just mention Ohio State, USC, UNC and what image is evoked? Libraries full of books? I don't think so. The question is why is education so inextricably linked to sports, if they were not central to its mission. Which is, just as Hedges says, to discourage questions and to encourage faith in the existing order.
However, the love of team sports that is now pervasive is a recent innovation, coinciding with the rapid industrialization of the country after the Civil War. Baseball, for example, was an informal game played by soldiers during the war but soon after had emerged in its present form along with the giant corporations. The example has now spread all over the world. Even Osama Bin Laden used the language of soccer when planning the 9-11 attacks.
If you include sports in your critique of American society, it is easier to see that our problems are not so much moral as cultural. We see life in terms of teams, of points on a scoreboard, of games lost or won. And that may be our deepest delusion.
This is what my father said after WWII. It was obvious how popular sports were in the Nazi regime - and with good reason. Organized sports are a military operation - they are based on the same set of rules (written in stone) and demand both a 'winner' and a 'loser' - and woe to the losers! People are expected to take sides - there is no middle ground, and sports are no longer played for enjoyment or physical exercise. It's all about winning and losing - it's all about war - it's all about beating somebody else. Just listen to some of the school 'war chants' - the words 'Kill' - 'Slaughter' - 'Murder' - are popular.
Until we take sports out of ALL schools, pound into kid's heads that keeping score is unimportant - that how you play the game is the ONLY thing that's important - we will be in this inescapable bind. But just try telling that to rabid parents! They'd go nuts - they'd want to lynch you immediately. I even hear such nonsense as 'sports bring in money to the school' - as if we don't have enough money in this country to properly educate our kids WITHOUT corporate or military sponsors! Insanity. You reap what you sow. And then wonder why 'bullying' is so pervasive!
"More sports for everyone, group spirit, fun, and you don't have to think, eh? Organize and organize and super-organize super-super sports. ... The mind drinks less and less."
- Ray Bradbury "Fahrenheit 451"
Sioux Rose
VALATIUS: Short answer: Men like to play with balls.
Longer view: A focus on two teams segues extremely well into the Mars-based version of reality that's only about winners and losers and posing one people/team against another. Furthermore, as you suggest, the inculcation to rules establishes a mindset resonant with other forms of authoritarianism. The subtext of at least several sports--boxing and football--is that MIGHT makes right, or tends to win the game. A lot of sexism is involved, too, if at times covertly. After all, men who don't measure up to these macho contests are considered girlie men or sissies, or whatever the effeminate nature of the put-down. I often ponder where the collective testosterone wasted on these new Roman arena spectacles might instead be directed, you know at such things like reclaiming a responsive democratic republic, one answering to the TRUE needs of its citizens. Just as the constant commercialized media uses an assortment of holidays to push gifts/products, sports desensitize a population to the matters that really count. While audiences watch American Idol or the latest sports spectacle their government has been sold to the dogs of mammon.
I like a lot of what you have to say - but when you bring up astrology, my eyes glaze over... and I just skip whatever else you had to say. A lot of people are turned off by astrology - and those that aren't already know all about it. Could you please tone it down a bit? It feels like someone preaching their religion to me constantly - and it is very irritating - I like my own religion just fine, thank you, but I don't force it on everyone I meet in almost every post...
Sioux Rose
Sorry ARMY, astrology is a focal point of how I view the world, and you will almost never come upon its explanations applied to politics and cycles of history. The only astrology 90% of people come upon is the pabulum ego-massaging horoscope columns seen in popular periodicals. It's fine with me if you just pass my posts right on by.
Gee, are you always this defensive? If I wanted to 'just pass my posts right on by' - I wouldn't have bothered to mention the astrology obsession... did you ever consider that you may have something important to say, or is this all about sniping? And yes, I know astrology goes deeper than horoscope columns - but it does become a broken record, at times, and I just thought I'd mention the deleterious effects of such. No need for you to get bent out of shape. And then people wonder why no one will tell them when they have 'bad breath' or and 'open fly' - for instance.
Wait . . . who's the one doing the "sniping" here? If I'm not mistaken, 'twas you who got "bent out of shape" by one of her posts and decided to deride her for it.
For the record, there are many of us on CD who thoroughly enjoy Sioux Rose's posts and always love to see them on any article here. She is one of the most lucid posters here by far.
Peace.
Sioux Rose, as always it's stimulating to read your comments. You touched on three separate things I wold like to mention, if I may.
First, you are so right about the forced march to the mall each and every holiday to spend money on garbage. This has got to be the easiest thing for all Americans to quit. Last Christmas my family went green and recycled, reused, etc. It was great.
Second, I actually do love the reality show of the UFC. Two evenly matched competitors use skill, strategy and brute force to subdue their opponent. Once one of them is unable to defend himself, the fight is stopped. This is just so incredibly honest about the character of men and their desire to claim physical superiority that I find a purity in it. No WMD's, just: I want to kick your ass. Sometimes I wish that modern day conflicts could be solved by sending only two gladiators into the arena to settle our differences in this manner.
Third, I love American Idol for one reason: this is exactly the format we need to develop if our political process is to improve. For the next presidential election, we'd start with say, 20 candidates from various areas of the country. Have them sing in a particular style (i.e. discuss the economy) for three minutes, and at the end of the show America votes and the person with the least votes goes home. Next week they do it again, but they sing about human rights, or education. Everyone votes and someone goes home till there's two people left and they get the jobs (Pres. and V.P.) based on votes. (There would be no moderator or commentators, though. They just waste time.)
The best part is that America already understands this concept and would be a lot more amenable if we called it "American Idol Style" voting, than instant runoff voting.
Sioux Rose
ELAINE: Singing is too limited a repertoire. Let them do a strip tease, or a trapeze act, or show how they can train gorillas. Given what's passing for leadership these days, I'd take a talent show or veritable beauty contest over "the usual suspects." And thank you for the compliment. This particular Hedges article really moved me. I am so glad to see him speak of other than a kind of mixed idolatry FOR war.
Wow, thanks for a hilarious mental picture.
This article has certainly created a good discussion here on this thread.
sports also reinforces the notion of a select few participants attempting to secure victory on behalf of a non-playing, yet involved audience (school\city) they represent...not unlike one's governmental representatives making decisions for one, is it?
Is not the superbowl the day with the greatest amount of domestic violence in the USA?
… AND quite ironically, for "Men like to play with balls."
It's the smaller and smaller sized balls,
that are typically associated with those wealthier sports fanatics :
basketball
soccer
football
tennis
golf
Glad to see survivor being mentioned. This show was a good example of the ethical decline, promoting not only back stabbing but the killing of other animals for entertainment.
RE: Nazi camps.
The belief in human supremacy is still around. As long as the idea that humans are special in a good way, and the concept of Sin still suggests humans are the "best there is," you can never hope to address the underlying causes of the type of systematic and organized injustices that humans practice.
Humans have always decided the worth of others according to subjective criteria conveniently determined by those who stand to benefit.
When racism was challenged, the argument usually given was that skin colour doesnt matter, its being human that counts. This doesnt address the issue of human arrogance.
If you are white and against racism, you would be more effective by attacking the notion that being white is important. Or saying, if you can discriminate against blacks, what is to stop someone from discriminating against other whites, since they have always done it despite the laws.
Liberate yourself form the notion that you are in a special group is the first step to fighting the type of mindset that leads to elitism.
It certainly goes far beyond how humans treat each other to how they treat members of other species.
We need to reign in corporate power. To do this is very feasible.
Policies and laws have to be adopted that say corporations are not people, do not have human rights, and are here to serve the public benefit. If they do not, they will be dissolved.
POCLAD.org is one resource for the movement to rewrite the constiutional law that defined corporations as people and provided them human rights, which they have used for over a century to wield excess power and control policy.
Thank you for offering this POCLAD link.
I agree, let's start by reigning in Obama and Geithner. I refer you to Paul Krugman's response to Obama's latest giveaway to wealthy elites on this site.
I think one of the biggest problems is the treadmill effect: there's never a chance to stop everything and re-analyze...if we were to do so, the immediate needs would be water, food and shelter...given the need to learn to self-think again, stopping the incoming flood of 'should-think' is critical, on everything from religion to education to economics to politics...to cease parting families every day, shuttling kids to school and parents to work, with thought taking place at neither regarding why this is so, or whether it should be...to cease blasting, drilling and dozing the earth into toxic products, and to cease purchasing and using such products, tossing them into pits or oceans when finished with them...
How do we turn the Elite position This Is How We Make You Live, supported by treachery and weaponry, and change it to No, This Is How We Choose To Live...?
To spend time together as families and neighbors, returning the earth to vegetation...
Healthcare and electricity...
I'm so tired of working my entire life away for the wrong reasons, and raising my kids to do the same, when it makes absolutely no logical sense, especially when we're killing our planet in the process, yet other options aren't allowed for under our current system, riding atop ownership of property, as it is...
Can we live without owned property? Electricity? Big Pharma? Stores, products and shopping? Can we rejoin the ranks of the humble, harmonious animals, yet do so with wisdom and dignity? Can we clean up our mess, right down to the last nurdle and radioactive bullet?
"I'm so tired of working my entire life away for the wrong reasons, and raising my kids to do the same, when it makes absolutely no logical sense, especially when we're killing our planet in the process, yet other options aren't allowed for under our current system, riding atop ownership of property, as it is..."
Your feelings are well noted, dubet. I would venture to say that almost everyone feels this at some level. Some, however, have developed such a thick veneer of pathological lies and denial, that they can't possibly recognize the truth of what they know.
Be that as it may, I feel compelled to do what I can. Not that I have decoupled myself from this reality and live in a collectivist utopia, but I am doing things in stages - where possible. It's not easy and I come under some fire for what I do. I even am called out occasionally by my "friends" for being elitist because everyone can't be on the same page at the same time (a defeatist attitude if ever there was one).
I would simply suggest that the first thing you, or anyone else, need do to change course, is to stop. Stop running the mouse wheel for just a little while and give yourself time to think and really feel. And, trust your instincts. The problem is that all the noise of this manufactured life keeps us (purposefully) from hearing our own voices, even when they are screaming at us to stop.
I'm not saying just stop going to work and paying your bills, but stop buying into the notion that you have no choice or options. If you realize what you are doing to your own life, you must realize what you are doing to your kids'. That should give you the impetus to stop...then change course.
It might help to go to town meetings and fight those nuts on the zoning board that make 'normal' life impossible - like the demand for a certain size lot, certain minimum size (huge) house, and no 'farm' animals allowed. We can see how far out of control this goes in the 'gated communities' - where absolutely nothing is allowed. (You can't even hang out laundry to dry! Or have your kids move back in with you!)
The most productive efforts I ever made was fighting the zoning commissions (we won) - and that's where everyone can start. Go to the meetings, and change your town. Then we can have 'mom and pop' storefront-homes again, without all that zoning nonsense. When I was a kid, my cousing had a 'beauty parlor' in her livingroom area, many barbers worked out of their homes, and people kept chickens (and even a cow) in the back yard. It all got zoned away by corporate shills. We can change it back - we MUST change it - and go back to smaller homes (750sq ft was once a 3-bedroom LARGE home, with 2 baths and adequate for a growing family. Kids slept 2 or 3 to a room, and older folks could have a small 2-room house if they desired.)
Same goes for school board meetings - start going, and then RUN. Make the changes necessary by starting in your own community. Grass-roots is the ONLY way anything changes, one small step at a time. Yes, it's time-consuming and slow - but that's how it all got twisted in the first place! If you can't go - find a retiree who is on the same wave-length (or convince them) and send them instead. Just make sure you vote for them!
Not sure if it's entirely necessary to run for the boards (though, it's a good thing to do), but it does work if you fight City Hall.
To whit: A couple of city ordinances (So. Portland and Portland, Maine) were changed recently when citizens petitioned their cities to allow chickens in their back yards. It was a fight, but they did it! There are a few requirements (no roosters!), but it can be done and is done by people who don't know that it can't be done.
"Dare to be naive." Buckminster Fuller
No roosters?!? I understand of course, they will be noisy, but that means no population increases to replace those taken for food, and no eggs either....
Well, this is now, while we still have local codes. In the "world made by hand", anything may go, including roosters.
I grew up in South America and you could hear roosters (and dogs) everywhere. Not a problem. Actually, it was an oddly comforting sound - kind of like real life happening.
Nanoo
I feel need to correct you on the part, and no eggs either. Hens lay eggs as part of their natural life cycle. No rooster required for hens to lay as their only part is for fertilization.
America was built on crime, land theft, slavery, illegal wars and genocide going back to 1492. There's no amount of money in the universe for a moral bailout now.
You are 100% correct--except that it should be "The Americas" were built....
Not really, no other country in the continent has committed as many crimes against other nations as the US has. Plus the article's about the US.
We're witnessing the morphing of U.S. education, which was once the envy of the world and the engine of our economy, into the Credential-Industrial Complex.
A bachelor's degree (unless you're willing to saddle yourself with crippling debt right out of the gate) is simply unaffordable for the majority; the elites have seen to it that their inbred spawn don't have to compete on a level playing field with the likes of you and me.
We might borrow a page from Ireland under the Brits: establish the digital-age equivalent of "hedge schools," which were illegal in part because they taught children in their forbidden native tongue, and whose teachers, while they were among the poorest, were also among the most respected and sought-after.
Sioux Rose
JETHRO: Systems may break down to the point where the old elite club can't function. Then it will be a return to the apprenticeship scenario. Who will be most valued when society breaks down? The one who can fix machines with simple applications, the one who can patch roofs, design simple aqueducts to collect rain, the ones who have an affinity with the green world and can grow foodstuffs.
If you've ever seen Lina Wurtmueller's film, "Swept Away," (not Madonna's version!) you might get a sense of what I'm saying.
..."the point where the old elite club can't function"
This is going to be the scary part. I don't see them as going down quietly. Rather like the guy who bulldozed his former house rather than let his ex-wife and her new boyfriend have it.
Agreed on your movie review(s).
My suggestion (as is the case with many posts here) was aimed at preventing or forestalling that point toward which we seem to be hurtling. I confess that I sometimes romanticize the aftermath, but the reality is unlikely to be so neat as to uniformly punish the guilty and reward the virtuous.
The human qualities:- naturally responsive, naturally compassionate, morally autonomous, resilient, soft rather than hard, giving forth rather than competitive, and others similar to those posited by Chris Hedges and Thomas Adorno as the opposite of the more or less pathological personality being created by modern education, are together what was called by Morihei Ueshiba, the Founder of Aikido, makoto (jap.). The comprehensive development of makoto was one of the original purposes of Aikido practice..
Balzac had it short and sweet:
"Behind every great fortune is a great crime."
[ _____ C O R P O R A T E __ P S Y C H O P A T H Y _____ ]
This is very real, what Chris Hedges explains -- but he stops short of calling the system of gov't that we have a pathocracy ( ruled by psychotics ).
We need to be asking ¿ __W H Y __ S O __ M U C H __ G R E E D __ ?
Hedges closes with the indirect ( and dated ) insinuation of Theodor Adorno :
""It is especially difficult to fight against it," warned Adorno, "because those manipulative people, who actually are incapable of true experience, for that very reason manifest an unresponsiveness that associates them with certain mentally ill or psychotic characters, namely schizoids.""
OUR COLLECTIVE aversion to accurate diagnosis of our extreme malady is likely based upon our authoritarian structure of who can decide and declare "medical conditions" -- despite many experts saying exactly this ( they get no air time at all ) -- although the exhaustive evidence painstakingly accumulated through viewing Stalin's regime is missing from main stream America ( jacka$$ $ewer main $stream Media ).
See Montague Ullman, M, D.
http://siivola.org/monte/papers_grouped/uncopyrighted/Misc/corporate_psychopathy.htm
We are the sane ones, who confront a gov't of psychopaths and fascist corporapists -- they have no shame, nor sense of morality -- and are driven to extremes of avaricious consumption of US.
The study and science of _ E V I L _ is called Ponerology, which is well described here :
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0v7PJmKKsfM
http://www.sott.net/articles/show/159950-Psychopathic-Groups-and-Distorted-Definitions
http://www.sott.net/articles/show/158887-Leaders-With-No-Conscience
http://www.sott.net/articles/show/156270-Beware-the-Psychopath
http://www.sott.net/articles/show/154692-Political-Ponerology-What-We-Can-Learn-from-Conservatives-Abo...
http://www.sott.net/articles/show/153239-How-Societies-Regress-to-Become-Pathocracies
http://www.sott.net/articles/show/152974-The-Role-of-Ideology-in-the-Development-of-Evil-Regimes-Patho...
http://www.sott.net/articles/show/152452-Political-Ponerology-A-Science-of-Evil-Applied-for-Political-...
http://www.sott.net/articles/show/148141-The-Trick-of-the-Psychopath-s-Trade-Make-Us-Believe-that-Evil...
There ARE wolves amongst us, and they look and act very similar to moral folks -- except that their emotional lives are 'cardboard cutouts' of real relationships, and deviant manipulation and control are hard-wired into their existence.
Not all psychopaths are serial murders, but all serial murderers are psychopaths.
Until we learn to ostracize these demented and wickedly evil manipulators, our freedoms and quality of LIFE are essentially forfeited.
The psychopathic ( totally illogical ) uncontrollable drivenness to GREED, is why the economy is destroying itself, the usual self-regulation of "capitalistic" self-interest -- does not apply when there is really no sense of SELF.
This is not the problem of unrestrained capitalists, as unrestrained psychopaths who are in control of capitalistic institutions.
Namaste
npwr 12:17 Your exposition is bolstered by the quote in an adjacent article on water in which a corporate stooge says "There would be no water without business"(someone must have cut his tether or Cerebral cortex).
"There would be no water without business": a gem of the sort of inverted and perverted ideology which assaults us and seeks to intimidate us every single day.
It is not unlike the psychos who are trying to convince us by instilling fear in us by raising the specter of economic collapse, that we could not live without the economic arrangement that has been ours for the last, say, hundred years or so -- the HOLY ECONOMY we hear about incessantly in the news, be it in the papers, on the radio or on television, as if it had a life of its own and our life depended upon it, as if we were helplessly dependent on THE ECONOMY, victims of its machinations and its whims, as if there had been no human history before THE ECONOMY came around to breath us into life.
Excuse me, business psycho, let me set things aright for your sick mind: "There would be no business, monkey business or otherwise, without water," just as, more generally, there would no economy without the Earth and its riches, and without living laboring individuals.
F*CK THE HOLY ECONOMY!
"F*CK THE HOLY ECONOMY!"
Agreed - so, do it!
You have the power. There is no "we" in this, only "I". What can _you_ do to F*CK THE HOLY ECONOMY?
Answer that, and you have more power than the HOLY ECONOMY has!
Give the economy a S0C7!
Don't worry too much about the feasable, the makeable, the doable, me, power, and having more power than whatever you may fancy: I have already started taking care of that side of things in my life. I just don't talk about it. (Hint: see Richard Heinberg's Web site as an example.)
I am not all interested in having more power than or in competing with the economy; I am merely trying to restore control over my life.
"I am merely trying to restore control over my life."
Well, yeah, that's what I was addressing. That's the thing that we're all trying to get a handle on in our lives when it seems as if they're so out of control. The problem is, if we do it alone, we build little fortresses that can't last - it has to be done with others. Only healthy and strong and trusting communities will last and give us the support we need to survive Peak Oil...and whatever else the Perfect Storm throws our way (Hint: see Chris Martenson's site).
I think that I did not quite understand you, then, and I apologize for that.
Yes, I agree entirely with you. Here in my 'hood, I am connecting with my few neighbors as best as I can. It's not always easy, though, because people have been so used to living in isolation.
Thank you very much for telling me about the Chris Martenson site: I started listening to his crash course. Good stuff.
T E D
That's very funny ( but I had to look it up )
S0C7 is an error that means you had a check exception while your job was executing.
You create a whole new flavor of NSF ( from hell ), when the " check " bouncing goes all around the global economy -- punching holes in everyone's balances.
Now that's a novel way to create a HOLEy economy, and sink everyone's a$$ets.
Namaste
Well, I was making a (bad) pun on abendland's moniker. I used to be a mainframe programmer (dinosaur) and dealt with my share of S0C7 abends, usually, in the wee hours of the morning.
I'm not hoping for anything to destroy people's assets, just that people take control of their own lives however they can and at the same time, start bringing down the behemoth runaway economy.
I received in my email in box.
How to profit off the impending water crisis.
Included was how to subsribe to a newsletter that would give advice on which CORPORATIONS to invest in wherein one would make tremendous profits based upon their control of various water supplies.
Inside that message is all that is wrong with the concept of Private property and Capitalism.
Pathocracy is about right.
Though I prefer kakistocracy.
W A I G U O R E N
Thank you for your comment, and although similar, your definition doesn't cover the scientifically EVIL scope of the accumulating deception.
kakistocracy
"Government by the least qualified or most unprincipled citizens."
Let me break it down.
These ponerological people appear to be citizens, but have no capability for civilized behaviors.
They are certainly not the least qualified technically ( degrees & experience ) -- it is their utter disregard for any internal assemblance of ethics and their immorality -- and most crucially shows up demonstrably in their actual actions, that disqualifies them implicitly and explicitly.
Namaste
Yes, yes, npwr.luv
Hedges starts out beautifully. But “moral corruption” isn’t the problem, can’t be changed with ideas, and schools shouldn’t teach values. Governments, and therefore schools, are usually controlled by the wealthy, even more by the ruling misconceptions of the day. So the values taught will be the values valued by people as ignorant as the average person, or the values of exactly those people who will benefit most by having an ignorant, uninformed citizenry.
Hedges and Giroux see the symptoms—sadism, the attack on moral autonomy, etc. but misdiagnose the disease and thus prescribe the wrong cure—or at least, not the essential cure. The question is not cognitive values but emotional health (as Adorno, taken in larger doses, makes clear). Once we are healthy, untraumatized, securely attached people (what happens to us as children when we get enough of what we need from our early caregivers) living in a society that actively encourages us to follow inner wisdom and calling, healthy ideas will take root and others will be ignored and ridiculed—as most of the dominant ideas of the last 50 years should have been.
“Moral autonomy” shouldn’t be confused, as it might easily be, with the kind of Thatcherite “..there is no such thing as society. There are individual men and women...” which is a sign of maladaptive attachment problems. An illusion of separateness is what Buddhism would call it. This physio-emotional attitude is deeper than ideas and deeper than classroom lectures can reach; it is at the heart of our society and at the heart of our problems, from global warming to economics to war and occupation to overflowing prisons and drugs.
I like the work of George Lakoff, although in framing the differences between conservatives and liberals he misses the essential psychological basis of views on the nature of humanity and the universe—that is, are we alone or are we in this with other beings? Our earliest and continuing experiences determine how we answer that, and that’s the nature of our disease.“Autonomy” is not as clear and accurate a word as say, “enlightened interdependence”.
Our disease must be cured by parents supported by extended families and by society; it requires living surrounded by nature, by equality, by questioning, by kindness, by the example of people willing to look unflinchingly at themselves and their world and stay engaged. Among other things.
Of course schools should teach values, it's part of REAL education. By that I don't mean 'Christian values' or 'American/Australian/etc. values' but social skills in the broadest meaning of the term, which includes the understanding that there are other people to consider, the importance of sharing and respect for others, their wishes and needs, self-reflection, honesty,courtesy alongside asking questions and critical thinking - a strategy to operate succesfuly as a human being. Pretty much what Chris Hedges talks about. The basics should already be there, it's the parents' job to take care of that, but the school is there to develop these skills while also teaching us grammatical rules and science.
I grew up in a deeply catholic, communist (I know!) country, attended state run child care and schools and I can tell you, they all did their best to deliver sensible, thinking human beings. At that time there was the understanding that people who are able not only to perform complicated calculations in their head as well as to engage in civilised way with others are the best asset a country can have.
That's what makes the Finnish education system so successfull - people learn for life not for a well paid job.