Republican VP nominee Palin shows off her kill to one of her daughters
If
you watch people's body language, you see a lot of power displays.
Advertising is a form of bullying. Political conventions are orgies of
power displays, as are wars and rapes and all forms of humiliation. The
celebrity media (which is what most of the mainstream media have
become) wallow in showing exhibitions of power. Prisons and mansions
and titles and fences and chains and guns are all expressions of power.
Power
becomes important only in times and places of scarcity, when it is used
to allocate resources. Money is the medium through which this is done.
In dysfunctional societies, almost all human energy is devoted to the
use of power to siphon wealth (and with it power) from those who have
little to those who have a lot and want more.
As soon as you see
such societies as sick, and desperate, you can begin to understand why
this is so. What we all seek and receive, in healthy, natural
societies, is attention and affection. These are the ultimate media of
exchange among creatures who are inherently social. But when a society
comes under horrific stress, and faces desperate shortages of
everything, from the bottom to the top of Maslow's hierarchy of needs,
power becomes the medium by which all of those resources can be
obtained and secured -- including attention and affection.
For
the rich and powerful to leverage that power into attention and
affection, they need to control the media, the political and economic
systems, and the educational system. The media, through advertising and
propaganda, portray the rich and powerful, and the winners of fierce
competitions for wealth and power, as deserving of attention and
appreciation -- even adulation. The education system is put to work
teaching the young that hierarchy is beneficial, and that obedience and
fierce competitiveness are the only way to succeed, the only socially
'acceptable' behaviours. Universities teach that business is all about
leadership, the 'management' of 'human resources', and surviving only
through ferocity and outperforming others, pushing others
('competitors') down to get 'ahead'. Businesses reinforce this.
Those
who don't succeed in these ruthless political competitions are
marginalized, treated as failures. And those who fail are blamed
entirely for their own failure: They didn't work hard enough, compete
ferociously enough, overcome the adversity that was (totally
unnecessarily) thrown their way. If they try to fight back, the rich
and powerful will, through the media, label them 'terrorists', and
gleefully kill, torture and lock them away.
We're no different
in this regard from the caged rats who, as the amount of food relative
to population is reduced more and more, become more pathological,
violent, competitive, fierce, antisocial, hierarchical and unequally
wealthy and powerful. In a pressure cooker situation, even the most
peaceful will kill to protect what's theirs. And it is now in the
interests of the increasingly pathological rich and powerful to make
the entire world a pressure cooker. Those without power are kept under
constant stress, worried about 'not having enough', and dumbed down
from citizens to mere 'consumers' of the rations meted out by the
powerful. Behave, and you'll get more rations. Behave really well, and
we just might let you be one of us.
So as I have grown older, I
have become more belligerently egalitarian. I have grown to detest all
manifestations of power, some of them obvious, some subtle, but all of
them startlingly and increasingly visible in our modern society:
- violence and cruelty of all kinds, physical, emotional and psychological
- displays
and exhibitions of dominance, submission and humiliation (including
virtually everything produced in Hollywood and by the mainstream music
corporations, and virtually all pornography)
- manipulation,
propaganda, coercion, seduction, lying, spin, bullying, power-based
persuasion, advertising, PR, and empty rhetoric (talk radio, sermons)
- psychopathy, and other means of inuring the human spirit against sympathy for and empathy with others
- hierarchy, leadership, win-lose voting, obedience, slavery of all kinds
- suffering, imprisonment, torture
- power role-playing and abusive co-dependent behaviours
- corruption, bribery, influence peddling, lobbying
- competitions
of all kinds, including wars, competitive sports, reality TV, debates,
arguments, adversarial elections, most business performance appraisal
and reward processes
- weapons, armies, police forces, lawyers, sport-hunters, politicians
- raids, threats, unreasonable laws and other forms of oppression, repression, suppression and intimidation
- fences,
private property, 'no trespassing' signs, private clubs, locks, titles,
barbed wire, prisons, cages and other confinements, walls
- indebtedness, homelessness
- unreasonable expectation-setting
The
idealist in me believes that, in a healthy, natural world, we would
see, need, and be damaged by, none of this. But if you read human
history, at least since civilization began, it is made up of little
else. What the mainstream media, the film and music industries present,
both as information and as entertainment, is made up of little else. We
are surrounded, inundated, obsessed with these things. Perhaps most of
us now think this is what life consists of, this is what's important,
this is the only way to live.
The novel I keep starting again and again to write, The Only Life We Know,
is set in a future world, after the collapse of civilization culture
and portrays the emergence of an astonishing diversity of small local
human cultures, connected and belonging to natural ecosystems. These
local cultures exhibit none of the manifestations of power listed
above, because there is simply is no need for them, and because, in the
absence of a need for them, the people of these cultures intuitively
and steadfastly refuse to make room for them.
Some people have told me that, without any of the things bulleted above, it will of necessity be a boring novel.
I'm going to prove them wrong.
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