 I recently acquired, as a birthday present from my children, a set of books written in the 1980s and 1990s, books that were too far ahead
of their time to have achieved much success when they were published,
and which you won't find in the bookstores because they've been pushed
off the shelves by more recent releases. Some of my articles over the
next few weeks will be reviews of these books, with my usual tangents.
This article is based on David Edwards' 1995 book Burning All Illusions, released in the UK (where Edwards succeeded in and then dropped out of the business world) as Free to Be Human.
The
book is not my style -- meandering, polemical, too psychoanalytic --
but its ideas are very important. The core idea of the book is that we
have been imprisoned by our culture, not through any corporatist
conspiracy, but by ourselves, a complex and collective adaptation to
the increasingly difficult circumstances in which our species finds
itself. We have met the enemy and he is us. What's worse, the
chains that bind us are so evasive and subtle that we're usually
unaware of our own confinement. Our adaptation meets the needs of the
day, so, as I'm so fond of saying these days, we do what we must.
There
is a framework, an unwritten set of unquestioned assumptions that this
self-induced prison is based upon. Edwards harps on one such assumption
-- "the unchallengeable [capitalist virtue] of maximum economic growth
through maximum corporate profit" -- though I think there are others,
shared by a large majority of people despite differences in their
sociopolitical frames. These unchallengeable tenets are pounded into us
through media propaganda, and the (mainstream) media filter their and
our reality by virtue of five things (this borrowed from Chomsky):
- the size, concentrated ownership, owner wealth and profit orientation of the dominant mass media
- their dependence on corporate advertising
- their sources of ready, steady inexpensive 'news' (overwhelmingly from rich and powerful institutions)
- their averseness to flak from vested interests (lawyers, pressure groups, pseudo-foundations, fundamentalist religions etc.)
- their temptation to pander by oversimplifying and vilifying 'straw man' enemies
Even
when they employ investigative reporters determined to find the truth,
the mass media can't help themselves. These five filters define who
they are, and reporters who don't recognize this reality are tossed into the buzzsaw. There is no "freedom of the press", Edwards asserts. He includes two wonderful quotes on press conformity:
Thoreau:
"There is no need of a law to check the license of the press. It is law
enough and more than enough to itself. Virtually, the community have
come together and agreed what things will be uttered, have agreed on a
platform to excommunicate him who departs from it, and not one in a
thousand dares utter, or even think, anything else." [Consider this in
the context of the recent furour against the NYT for daring to reveal to terrorists
that the Bush Administration was illegally requisitioning everyone's
private bank records, supposedly to trace terrorist money flows, as if
terrorists would be surprised by this!]
John Pilger: "A group of
Russians touring the US before glasnost were astonished to find, after
reading the newspapers and watching television, that all the opinions
on the vital issues were the same. 'In our country', they said, 'to get
that result we have a dictatorship, we imprison people, we tear out
their fingernails. Here you have none of that. So what's your secret --
how do you do it?' "
There is no freedom of dissent in business either, he asserts:
The
real choice is between obedience and expulsion. For this reason there
is a powerful tendency for people to want to believe that their
thoughts and behaviour at work are voluntary -- the alternative of
perceiving the actual conflict is simply too painful...A person will
suffer more intensely the more he or she is strong and
independent...Given the hopelessness of resistance, there is a powerful
incentive for individuals to become less aware of their own feelings,
beliefs and needs. Indeed the only rational solution may be to become
dead inside.
And, he says, the education system further
reinforces the propaganda, the learned helplessness and the futility of
resistance through seven fundamental lessons (this borrowed from Gatto):
- the lesson of confusion -- try to absorb disconnected facts without reason or meaning
- the lesson of class position -- compete, know your place, conform to succeed or face 'shameful' failure
- the lesson of indifference -- don't care too much; obedience, not enthusiasm, is rewarded
- the lesson of emotional dependency -- someone else will tell you whether you're right or wrong
- the lesson of intellectual dependency -- someone else will tell you what to do/think and not do/think
- the lesson of provisional self-esteem -- your worth depends on the assessment of others (experts and peers)
- the lesson of no privacy -- there is no time or place for independent thought or action
Through
education, the media, and business we are indoctrinated into accepting
the necessity and seeking the rewards of conforming to the political
and economic system, hammer into anvil. What's more, Edwards says, "the system has an interest in our believing that we freely choose
these conforming goals", and that there are no viable alternative ways
to live. As a result, he says, "large numbers of people are necessarily
in various states of psychological ill health". Psychology plays its
role, convincing us that our illness is our own fault,
due to something in our past that precludes us from "adjusting
properly". "In our culture it is considered a virtue to 'cheer up', to
hide our unhappiness rather than expose the truth" -- the truth that it
is this society that makes us ill.
Learned helplessness is
endemic in such a system. Edwards quotes EF Schumacher, describing
response to his London Times article "Insane Work Cannot Produce a Sane
Society", as saying "The remarkable thing is that...there were no hot
denials or anguished agreements; no reactions at all...People read it,
sighed and nodded, I suppose, and moved on". This alienation,
disconnection and 'dis-ease' is the consequence of self-inflicted
conformity of thinking, behaviour and belief. Realizing it only
increases the anguish -- better to sublimate it, or you'll end up in
the same state as Tolstoy, who wrote:
At
first I experienced moments of bewilderment; my life would come to a
standstill, as if I did not know how to live or what to do, and I felt
lost and fell into despair. But they passed and I continued to live as
before. Then these moments of bewilderment started to recur more
frequently. On these occasions, when my life came to a standstill, the
same questions always arose: "Why? What comes next?"
Finally,
Edwards gets around to solutions, what he calls a "chest of tools for
intellectual self-defence". You really have to dig for them, but it's
worth the effort. Here are the tools in a nutshell:
- Mindfulness: Pay attention to what's happening and what's being said, and why. Things are the way they are for a reason -- study until you know what it is.
- Self-awareness: Pay attention to what you're doing, and not doing, and why.
- Open-mindedness: Don't prejudge. Listen. Be willing to change your mind, consider something radical, even, to most, unthinkable.
- Acceptance of responsibility: Don't blame victims for their own misfortune; it's rarely their fault.
- Critical
thinking: Especially of the status quo, what you read in the mass
media, and messages from commercial organizations and special interest
groups.
- Refusing to self-censor: It's the first stage in self-paralysis and unhappy conformity.
- Rejecting simple, comforting answers: Issues and problems are usually complex.
- Not compromising: The 'lesser of two evils' is a slippery slope.
- Refusing
to hate: Avoid letting yourself be provoked into hating or
scapegoating. People are generally well-intentioned, and stirring up
hatred is usually done by people with ulterior motives to distract you
from discovering those motives.
- Reducing your dependence: On
the economic, political, educational systems and mainstream media. When
you're dependent, your ability to criticize and voice your criticisms
is impaired.
- Disobeying: Constantly challenge authority, ask questions, say and do what others fear to.
- Learning: Especially through first-hand observations and stories from people on the front lines. Sidestep the filters.
- Not rationalizing: Don't be seduced into believing something just because you want to, or because it's easy or self-serving.
- Celebrating
your uniqueness: Accentuate your difference. Don't be everyone else.
Embrace others but don't become them just to 'belong'.
- Loving
yourself: Don't accept messages from anyone in any form that tell you
that to be 'lovable' you need to do X or own Y or believe Z. Don't let your sense of self-worth be dependent on others' attention or approval.
- Wondering: Imagine, be 'bewildered' (literally, be wilder!), free of the need for certainty.
Some of these, of course, are easier said than done. But still, it's an interesting list.
The
important lesson from all this, I think, is that escaping the prison is
a life-long, constant, and often lonely journey. Back in the 1960s when
we dissented and refused to conform, and we ended the Vietnam War, we
figured we'd won, and rested on our laurels. And soon those of us who
had rejected the system and moved out en masse to the Edge,
started to get sucked back in by the black hole and all its seductions
and promises and lies, until everything we had gained had been lost
again. And what did we do? Rationalize. We said it was just youthful excess, and it was time to grow up and get real. Arrrgh! We had made such progress, so fast!
Thanks
to the Internet and the ability it has given us to access information
and ideas that are not filtered by the mainstream media, and to support
each other as we employ the 16 tools above, we have another chance.
We can't blow it this time -- there is too much at stake. We cannot
settle for just electing a Democratic or a New Democratic or even a
Green political regime, and think the battle against conformity is won,
that we are free. We cannot mistake milestones for the end of the journey. Perhaps most importantly, we must continue to push much farther
out to the Edge, even if that means leaving those who are not yet ready
behind, for now. We cannot wait for them. If that means the radicals
have to shrug off the progressive moderates, and the 'deep green'
environmentalists have to reject the 'pale green' technophiles as no
better than the overt anti-environmentalists and corporatists, then so
be it. If we allow ourselves to be held back, compromise, one step
forward two steps back, we will get exactly nowhere.
The Aha! moment for me was tool #15 above, a means of coping with Gatto's 'lesson of provisional self-esteem'. We all long so much
for attention and appreciation (hell, it's the lifeblood that keeps the
blogosphere alive!) How did we allow ourselves to become so dependent on others for how we feel about ourselves?
It's such an irony in a society that prides itself on its rugged
individualism. It's a measure of how effective the invisible prison is,
that we've been beaten down to the point that we're afraid to be
ourselves, to be different, to be authentic.
We
have such a long way to go! Those tools are going to get a lot of use.
Fare forward, voyagers. See you, I hope, on the far edge. |
MADE IN CANADA
trust your
instincts 
