©
Somehow I clicked on “blogsofnote.blogspot.com”. Let me just say that there are some nasty, quirky and creative blogs out there. Check it out. You can find a blog on almost anything.
For example hulaseventy.blogspot.com deals exclusively with random connections of a full-time mom and photographer based in Oregon. She’s been blogging since 2005 and she’s had 31,000 people check out her bio. There’s another woman who’d like to be a stripper but isn’t, and another who draws and posts weird cartoons of her day, and has 1228 regular followers. It’s a smorgasbord.
After a few days or so, this column will end up on a blog, too. Whatever you think of the column, it’s not written as a blog. I’d have to say that I’m not a blogger. For those of you who haven’t guessed by now, a blog is like a mental scrap-book, an Internet diary covering whatever interests you.
My column is just too long to be any good as a blog. And I don’t follow really blogs, either. I think it’s because I love reading too much, and it’s hard to read much on a computer screen. I figure on-screen reading tops out at about 150 words or so, and even that’s a strain. The best blogs mix photos, art and text together into an interesting pastiche on a topic.
My life seems to be taking on the same fragmented characteristics these days. There seems to be less time for long, concentrated work. Instead, there are more frequent interruptions. More small intrusions, more small tasks to be fit in along the way. Kids need help with homework. Phone calls need attention, e-mails need answering and so on. I read recently that only 3.5% of our work time is engaged in actual production. At that rate it’s amazing we get anything done at all. It’s as if we’re becoming more and more fractured.
I’ve noticed this shortening of attention span is a growing trend. We’ve even managed to divide our lives into distinct compartments. As kids we grow up in the suburbs where we hang out with lots of other kids just like us. Then we move to a university town, and hang out with lots of students like us. Then we move to the big city to kick-start our careers, gain experience with big-brand corporations and party like crazy until we meet the right significant other. Then we move back to the suburbs to raise our kids. Once our kids are safely away at college we sell our house in the suburbs for a big profit and we retire to quaint towns like St. Andrews. And finally, when our health begins to fail, we move as close as we can to the best health care services we can find.
You might call it the “periodic life”. And what is clear in this lifestyle is the lack of any geographic specificity—or any geographic loyalty. We’ve evolved a kind of a post-industrial nomadic lifestyle.
If our loyalties are not geographic or tied to the land, then to what or to whom are we connected? Increasingly, I think, our loyalties are aimed at ourselves—through self-expression and personal development. While our friends may still be important (that is, coworkers and people we went to school with), finding an audience is even more important. We need to be noticed.
The root causes for this self-direction are complicated. There’s a lot coming at us. On one hand we’re busier than ever, and our time is more fractured than ever, our attention spans shorter. On the other hand we’re more fixated our jobs, our careers and getting ahead. But is there something more we’re truly craving, and why?
In the simplest sense, we always crave what is already hardwired into our nature. And what is hardwired into our nature is to work with our minds and our hands in a meaningful way for our community.
So two things might be missing to cause the craving. One could be the lack of meaningful work. The other might be the lack of connection to community. So who or what has hijacked our work and our sense of community?
The sacredness of work and community are long gone. Taking their place is a corporate reality. And clearly, large corporations set their agendas around profits and investments, not people. In fact, reducing labour costs is a consistent feature of corporate planning. So an ongoing level of unemployment at, say 5 to 7% is seen as “acceptable”. Large corporations also beget smaller corporations, which are then tied to the same agenda, right down to the local owner-operators like truckers. And these small businesses at the bottom of the pyramid are the ones that have to take up the slack when big corporations make cuts. For this, the guys at the top get bonuses and golden parachutes, while the guys at the bottom apply for welfare.
This is the end result of handing over the business of “production” to corporations. Under the corporate model, everyone supplies a specialized piece of the work, but no one actually builds a whole product. And of course there’s a recent evolutionary history to this, from industrialist Henry Ford all the way to Henry Paulson the investment banker. The corporate modus operandi seems to be “give us the job and let us do the thinking.”
There’s obviously a great deal of cash involved in this process, too. I recently stumbled across a YouTube video on Ellen Brown a financial critic and lawyer who talks about the 300-year history of the big banks, especially the privately controlled Bank of England and the U.S. Federal Reserve. In each case, the Rothschild family figures large in a business that can literally print its own money and regularly “earn” 40% on its loan portfolios. Brown concludes, correctly, that citizens who don’t control their own money supply do not control their own destinies.
I find it interesting, with such powerful information on the Internet, that there is so little public outrage about the injustice and so much more interest in rather trivial self-gratification.
But then again, it’s not the information; it’s the medium. The Internet, like all corporatized networks, favours specialization of topics, fragmentation of thought and the elimination of spontaneous collective dissent. You could call it the “Babelizing” of the people.
So the only answer at the personal level is, of course, to just do your own thing. If your thing is cool you can blog about it. You might even get yourself noticed. As if it mattered…
Thursday, October 15, 2009
Thursday, October 8, 2009
Inside the unbreakable conspiracy of silence
©
What do you say to someone who wakes up from 38-year coma? That’s exactly how I felt after reading the first chapter of E.F. Schumacher’s old book, “Small is Beautiful.” It’s as if I’d read the book on night back in 1973, fallen asleep, and been shaken awake today—only to find nothing positive had actually happened.
Who is Schumacher? He’s a dead white guy. He exited in 1977, so he’s been gone a while. Before that he was a German economist who was interned in Scotland during the war, published an essay which was “discovered” by the great Maynard Keynes—Lord Keynes—for whom he worked, studied under and later abandoned. Schumacher had moral issues with Keynes, who theorized that “fair is foul, and foul fair—for foul is useful and fair is not.”
What Keynes was really saying was this. In order to create global wealth, short-term policies should favour avarice and greed as wealth-creation generators. In a kind of giant “trickle down effect” this new wealth would filter down to the world’s poor, and everyone would live more or less happily ever after.
Schumacher didn’t buy it. As the chief economist for the British coal board, he knew that natural resources were limited, especially fossil fuel. He began to fiercely criticize the corporate economists who, he observed, had confused “income” with “capital.” Schumacher believed, correctly, that neither nations nor global businesses were factoring the worth of “natural capital” into their financial equations. They, in fact, were placing no value at all on these capital assets, at least at the time. Here’s Schumacher in his own words:
“The illusion of unlimited powers, nourished by astonishing scientific and technological achievements, has produced the concurrent illusion of having solved the problem of production. The latter illusion is based on the failure to distinguish between income and capital…the irreplaceable capital which man has not made, but simply found, and without which he can do nothing.”
If natural capital was more or less “free” on the balance sheets, then corporate income could be further maximized by adjusting other predictable inputs, such as reducing labour costs, another practice that Schumacher detested.
He went on to calculate the effects of exponential consumption of fossil fuel, and predicted dire consequences by the year 2000—such as oil wars in the unstable Middle East, dwindling reserves of oil, rising energy prices and the increasing dependency of have-not regions, such as Japan and Europe, on foreign oil. I haven’t checked out the numbers, but at first glance it appears that Schumacher’s most pessimistic conclusions have come true. For almost 40 years we’ve done nothing to kick the oil habit. We’re using more than ever, every day.
Someone recently wrote to tell me that he enjoyed reading my column but disagreed with my “fossil fuel politics.” Up until then I hadn’t realized that I had any fossil fuel politics. I’d only been worrying about what’s going to happen when we start running low on the stuff.
Lately, though, I’ve met with a few politicians who do have some political interest around fossil fuel issues. Yet not one of the politicians I have met will publicly announce that we’re facing a serious energy crisis in the years ahead. But in private it’s a different story. One retired politician admitted to me that we’re all headed for a very rough time in just 10 to 20 years. He said it quietly, as if just uttering the words would send them leaking through the walls.
Here’s the real situation, and it’s much worse than we’re being told on the evening news. We have just hit or will soon be hitting “peak oil.” That means we’re on the 50-year downward slide to near total depletion. Can your kids imagine life without oil? They’d better get used to it. We’re also on the way to hitting “peak population,” about 9 billion of us by the year 2050. We’re simultaneously entering a period of “peak economic globalization,” which means that the “developing” nations will be striving to attain the same standard of living as the rest of us, including our rates of mass consumption. And some time in this century, before all the oil is gone, we’ll hit “peak natural resource thresholds,” which may include runaway climate change, drought, species extinction, exhaustion of rare minerals and other interesting phenomena.
And the most interesting phenomenon is how little we hear about this from the mainstream media. It’s as if there were a conspiracy to keep us hooked on reality shows, shopping in malls and hanging out on-line—to banish these dire thoughts from our minds. Or focusing our attention on “fear-for-profit” issues such as swine flu, economic meltdowns and job losses. The intention of our leaders, both corporate and government, seems to be aimed at keeping everyone’s head down. And it must be working. In fact, Schumacher wrote about this same kind of conspiracy in relation to industrial labourers (many of whom have been “off-shored” since then).
“That soul destroying, meaningless, mechanical, monotonous, moronic work is an insult to human nature which must necessarily and inevitably produce either escapism or aggression, and that no amount of “bread and circuses” can compensate for the damage done—these are the facts which are neither denied nor acknowledged but are met with an unbreakable conspiracy of silence—because to deny then would be too obviously absurd and to acknowledge them would condemn the central preoccupation of modern society as a crime against humanity.”
Schumacher’s message is more than clear. The future won’t support endless industrial progress based on greed. Human consumption has natural limits, which we are now exceeding. A long list of eminent thinkers agree, from earth scientist James Lovelock to economist John Gray to former politician and traveling climate activist Al Gore.
But if we’re publicly hearing most of the big thinkers agree—despite the silence in the mainstream media—why are so few of us actually concerned, not to mention doing something about it? Are we simply that stupid? Or could it be that we just don’t care what we leave to our children?
Come to think about it, why is it so hard to wake up from my own coma—and start practicing what I already know? It’s not that hard to figure out. We’re running out of oil and there’s going to be hell to pay.
What do you say to someone who wakes up from 38-year coma? That’s exactly how I felt after reading the first chapter of E.F. Schumacher’s old book, “Small is Beautiful.” It’s as if I’d read the book on night back in 1973, fallen asleep, and been shaken awake today—only to find nothing positive had actually happened.
Who is Schumacher? He’s a dead white guy. He exited in 1977, so he’s been gone a while. Before that he was a German economist who was interned in Scotland during the war, published an essay which was “discovered” by the great Maynard Keynes—Lord Keynes—for whom he worked, studied under and later abandoned. Schumacher had moral issues with Keynes, who theorized that “fair is foul, and foul fair—for foul is useful and fair is not.”
What Keynes was really saying was this. In order to create global wealth, short-term policies should favour avarice and greed as wealth-creation generators. In a kind of giant “trickle down effect” this new wealth would filter down to the world’s poor, and everyone would live more or less happily ever after.
Schumacher didn’t buy it. As the chief economist for the British coal board, he knew that natural resources were limited, especially fossil fuel. He began to fiercely criticize the corporate economists who, he observed, had confused “income” with “capital.” Schumacher believed, correctly, that neither nations nor global businesses were factoring the worth of “natural capital” into their financial equations. They, in fact, were placing no value at all on these capital assets, at least at the time. Here’s Schumacher in his own words:
“The illusion of unlimited powers, nourished by astonishing scientific and technological achievements, has produced the concurrent illusion of having solved the problem of production. The latter illusion is based on the failure to distinguish between income and capital…the irreplaceable capital which man has not made, but simply found, and without which he can do nothing.”
If natural capital was more or less “free” on the balance sheets, then corporate income could be further maximized by adjusting other predictable inputs, such as reducing labour costs, another practice that Schumacher detested.
He went on to calculate the effects of exponential consumption of fossil fuel, and predicted dire consequences by the year 2000—such as oil wars in the unstable Middle East, dwindling reserves of oil, rising energy prices and the increasing dependency of have-not regions, such as Japan and Europe, on foreign oil. I haven’t checked out the numbers, but at first glance it appears that Schumacher’s most pessimistic conclusions have come true. For almost 40 years we’ve done nothing to kick the oil habit. We’re using more than ever, every day.
Someone recently wrote to tell me that he enjoyed reading my column but disagreed with my “fossil fuel politics.” Up until then I hadn’t realized that I had any fossil fuel politics. I’d only been worrying about what’s going to happen when we start running low on the stuff.
Lately, though, I’ve met with a few politicians who do have some political interest around fossil fuel issues. Yet not one of the politicians I have met will publicly announce that we’re facing a serious energy crisis in the years ahead. But in private it’s a different story. One retired politician admitted to me that we’re all headed for a very rough time in just 10 to 20 years. He said it quietly, as if just uttering the words would send them leaking through the walls.
Here’s the real situation, and it’s much worse than we’re being told on the evening news. We have just hit or will soon be hitting “peak oil.” That means we’re on the 50-year downward slide to near total depletion. Can your kids imagine life without oil? They’d better get used to it. We’re also on the way to hitting “peak population,” about 9 billion of us by the year 2050. We’re simultaneously entering a period of “peak economic globalization,” which means that the “developing” nations will be striving to attain the same standard of living as the rest of us, including our rates of mass consumption. And some time in this century, before all the oil is gone, we’ll hit “peak natural resource thresholds,” which may include runaway climate change, drought, species extinction, exhaustion of rare minerals and other interesting phenomena.
And the most interesting phenomenon is how little we hear about this from the mainstream media. It’s as if there were a conspiracy to keep us hooked on reality shows, shopping in malls and hanging out on-line—to banish these dire thoughts from our minds. Or focusing our attention on “fear-for-profit” issues such as swine flu, economic meltdowns and job losses. The intention of our leaders, both corporate and government, seems to be aimed at keeping everyone’s head down. And it must be working. In fact, Schumacher wrote about this same kind of conspiracy in relation to industrial labourers (many of whom have been “off-shored” since then).
“That soul destroying, meaningless, mechanical, monotonous, moronic work is an insult to human nature which must necessarily and inevitably produce either escapism or aggression, and that no amount of “bread and circuses” can compensate for the damage done—these are the facts which are neither denied nor acknowledged but are met with an unbreakable conspiracy of silence—because to deny then would be too obviously absurd and to acknowledge them would condemn the central preoccupation of modern society as a crime against humanity.”
Schumacher’s message is more than clear. The future won’t support endless industrial progress based on greed. Human consumption has natural limits, which we are now exceeding. A long list of eminent thinkers agree, from earth scientist James Lovelock to economist John Gray to former politician and traveling climate activist Al Gore.
But if we’re publicly hearing most of the big thinkers agree—despite the silence in the mainstream media—why are so few of us actually concerned, not to mention doing something about it? Are we simply that stupid? Or could it be that we just don’t care what we leave to our children?
Come to think about it, why is it so hard to wake up from my own coma—and start practicing what I already know? It’s not that hard to figure out. We’re running out of oil and there’s going to be hell to pay.
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