Beyond Civilization by Daniel Quinn - Excerpts

[Quinn develops the idea of tribal forms of making a living, as opposed to hierarchical civilizations. Mostly a theoretical discussion rather than a pragmatic how-to on how to pull off a transformation of work environments - except for why and how to be successfully homeless.]

Beyond Civilization: Humanity’s Next Great Adventure. Daniel Quinn. 1999. ISBN 0609604902

EXCERPTS

Making food a commodity to be owned was one of the great innovations of our culture. No other culture in history has ever put food under lock and key – and putting it there is the cornerstone of our economy, for if the food wasn’t under lock and key, who would work?

“If the world is saved, it will not be by old minds with new programs but by new minds with no programs at all.”

Programs never stop the things they’re launched to stop. No program has ever stopped poverty, drug abuse, or crime, and no program ever will stop them.

Old minds think: How do we stop these bad things from happening?
New minds think: How do we make things the way we want them to be?

Old minds think: If it didn’t work last year, let’s do MORE of it this year.
New minds think: If it didn’t work last year, let’s do something ELSE this year.

“What works so well that programs are superfluous? What works so well that it never occurs to anyone to create programs to make it work?”

Tribal humans were successful on this planet for three million years before our agricultural revolution, and they’re no less successful today wherever they manage to survive untouched, but many people of our culture don’t want to hear about it. In fact, they’ll vigorously deny it.

Clearly all spreading mechanisms have one thing in common: they confer benefits on those who do the spreading … The benefit conferred shouldn’t, however, be confused with the mechanism itself.

Most programs take this form: Outlaw the thing that’s bothering you, catch people who do it, and put them in jail.
Old minds think: We have to write tougher and more comprehensive laws.
New minds think: No unwanted behavior has ever been eliminated by passing a law against it.
The fact that programs of this sort invariable fail doesn’t trouble most people.

It’s been established beyond a shadow of a doubt that there is an exact correlation between how hard you have to work to stay alive and how great your dependence on agriculture is. Those who grow the least also work the least, and those who grow the most also work the most.

One can imagine how desperately the pontiffs, potentates, dynasts, princes, pendragons, princelings, rajahs, hierophants, priests, priestesses, and palace guards of all these tottering civilizations must have desired to implant in the minds of their vacillating subjects this very simple concept: Civilization must continue at ANY cost and must not be abandoned under ANY circumstance.

Our history is full of underclass insurrections, revolts, rebellions, riots, and revolutions, but not a single one has ever ended with people just walking away. This is because our citizens know that civilization must continue at any cost and not be abandoned under any circumstance. So they will go berserk, will destroy everything in sight, will slaughter all the elite they can get their hands on, will burn, rape, and pillage – but they will never just walk away.

This is an example of the Cultural Fallacy, which is: The memes of our culture arise from the very structure of the human mind itself, and if you don’t have them, there must be something wrong with you.

I visit many classrooms, and the students one way or another always bring me around to a point where I ask how many of them are champing at the bit to get out there and start working on the pyramids their parents worked on throughout their lives and their parents before them. The question makes them uneasy, because they they’re supposed to be absolutely thrilled at the prospect of going out there to flip burgers and pump gas and stock shelves in the real world. Everyone’s told them they’re the luckiest kids on earth – parents, teachers, textbooks – and they feel disloyal not waving their hands at me. But they don’t.

No special control is needed to make people into pyramid builders – if they see themselves as having no choice but to build pyramids. They’ll build whatever they’re told to build, whether it’s pyramids, parking garages, or computer programs.. Karl Marx recognized that workers without a choice are workers in chains. But his idea of breaking chains was for us to depose the pharaohs and then build the pyramids for ourselves, as if building pyramids is something we just can’t stop doing, we love it so much.

We can walk away from the pyramid, but we can’t melt away into the jungle. The Mayan solution is utterly gone for us, for the simple reason that the jungle itself is gone and there are six billion of us. Forget about going back. There is no back. Back is gone. But we can still walk away from the pyramid.

… in our meme about civilization there’s another meme that is implicit: Civilization is humanity’s ULTIMATE invention and can never be surpassed. That’s precisely why it must be carried forward at any cost, because there cannot possibly be any invention beyond it. If we were to abandon civilization (gulp!), then we’d be finished! If there’s going to be any future for us, our first invention must be a meme-killer.

Something BETTER than civilization is waiting for us. Something much better – unless you’re one of those rare individuals who just loves dragging stones.

Our cultural vision was shaped by people who were perfectly satisfied with the notion that the universe they saw was in its final form, and had come into being in that form – in a single stroke, so to speak. The Genesis tale of creation didn’t originate this notion; it merely affirmed it: God did his work, saw it was in no need of improvement, and that was that.

People will (ordinarily) put up with being miserable for only so long. It’s not the quitters who are extraordinary and mysterious, it’s we, who have somehow managed to persuade ourselves that we must persist in our misery whatever the cost and not abandon it even in the face of calamity.

Before becoming full-time farmers, the Maya, the Olmec, and all the rest practiced hunting and gathering or some combination of farming and foraging. Doesn’t the fact that they eventually became full-time farmers indicate they were less than perfectly satisfied with these lifestyles? That’s exactly what it indicates … But doesn’t this indicate that their traditional lifestyles were less than perfect? Certainly it does. Natural selection is a process that separates the workable from the unworkable, not the perfect from the imperfect.

The tribal life doesn’t turn people into saints; it enables ordinary people to make a living together with a minimum of stress year after year, generation after generation.

The tribal life isn’t about spears and caves or about hunting and gathering. Hunting and gathering is a lifestyle, an occupation, a way of making a living. A tribe isn’t a particular occupation; it’s a social organization that facilitates making a living.

… there’s a difference between painting in order to make money and making money in order to paint.

Many small businesses start in a very tribal way, with a few partners pouring in all their resources and taking out only what’s needed to survive, but this tribal character quickly disappears if the company becomes a conventional hierarchy.

The rough outlines of this social organization are familiar to everyone through the Egyptian model. You have a highly centralized state organization that consolidates in itself all economic, military, political, and religious power. The ruling caste, headed by a living deity in the shape of a pharaoh, Inca, or other divine monarch, is supported by a priestly bureaucracy that regulates and supervises the labor force conscripted for (among other things) the construction of palace and ceremonial complexes, temples, and pyramids.

The way rulers benefit from the success of the society is vastly different from the way the masses benefit, and the pyramids and the temples testify to the importance of the rulers, not to the masses who build them.

Kids of all ages run off to join the circus. No one runs off to join Disney World.

Wherever civilization emerges, tribalism withers and is replaced by hierarchalism. Hierarchalism works very well for the rulers but much less well for the ruled, who make up the mass of the society. For this reason, the few at the top like it very well and the masses at the bottom like it very much less well.

Every civilization brought forth in the course of human history has been a hierarchical affair. The thing we call civilization goes hand in hand with hierarchy – means hierarchy, requires hierarchy … You can have hierarchy without civilization, but you can’t have civilization without hierarchy … All dedicated pyramid-builders should stick with civilization. The rest of us just want something else, and it’s high time we had it.

Spending more will certainly get you more, but it won’t necessarily get you more of what you want.

To overthrow the hierarchy is pointless; we just want to leave it behind. As everyone knows (especially revolutionaries), hierarchy maintains formidable defenses against attack from the lower orders. It has none, however, against abandonment. This is in part because it can imagine revolution, but it can’t imagine abandonment. But even if it could imagine abandonment, it couldn’t defend against it, because abandonment isn’t an attack, it’s just a discontinuance of support.

I wasn’t surprised to hear from many youngsters … who know the world is full of things they should want to do – and who imagine that there must be something dreadfully wrong for them for failing to want it.

Well-intentioned people often want to feel they’re giving up something, which is only to be expected in a culture where all ethical and religious systems commend self-denial. In hierarchical societies it’s always a good idea to make poverty sound like a blessing (and the rich are always especially vain about their austerities).

Civilization isn’t a geographical territory, it’s a social and economic territory where pharaohs reign and pyramids are built by the masses. Similarly, beyond civilization isn’t a geographical territory, it’s a social and economic territory where people in open tribes pursue goals that may or may not be recognizably “civilized”. You don’t have to “go someplace” to get beyond civilization. You have to make your living a different way.

Above all, nothing must be done that would encourage the homeless to remain homeless. In short, homelessness must be made as unremittingly difficult, degrading, and painful as possible, and you may be sure that our public guardians know well how to accomplish this.

Making and keeping the homeless as miserable as possible is cherished as a sort of tough love, the very best and kindest thing we can do for them. The only trouble is, for some strange reason, it doesn’t work worth a damn.

Every year we pass more laws, hire more police, build more prisons, and sentence more offenders for longer periods – all without moving one inch closer to “ending” crime. It didn’t work last year or the year before that or the year before that or the year before that, but you can be sure we’ll try it again this year, know beyond a shadow of a doubt that it won’t work this year either. Every year we spend more money on our schools, hoping to “fix” whatever’s wrong with them, and every year the schools remain stubbornly unfixed. Spending money didn’t work last year or the year before that, or the year before that or the year before that, but you can be sure we’ll try it again this year, knowing beyond a shadow of a doubt that it won’t work this year either. Every year we try to make the homeless go away, and every year the homeless remain with us. We couldn’t shoehorn them back into “the mainstream” last year or the year before that or the year before that or the year before that or the year before that, but you can be sure we’ll try it again this year, knowing beyond a shadow of a doubt that it won’t work this year either.

We deeply believe in taking a military approach to problems. We proclaim a “war” on poverty. When that fails, we proclaim a “war” on drugs. We “fight” crime. We “combat” homelessness. We “battle” hunger. WE vow to “defeat” AIDS.

One element of acceding to homelessness is accepting the fact that the poor will consistently choose the least worst alternative available to them. If you find them living under a bridge instead of in a nice, clean municipal shelter just a block away, you can be absolutely sure they haven’t made a mistake – from their point of view. The shelter’s admittance procedures may be intolerably invasive, arbitrary, or humiliating, or its rules may be Draconian. Whatever, the discomforts of sheltering under the bridge are more endurable.

Acceding to homelessness would look like helping the homeless succeed WHILE being homeless. What an idea! I can almost hear the howls of outrage from both liberals and conservatives that must greet such a concept. Help people succeed at being homeless? We want them to fail at being homeless! (So they’ll return to the mainstream.)

Don’t try to drive the homeless into places we find suitable. Help them survive in places they find suitable.

The important thing to see is that we were not “giving up” something by being tribal. We were getting something by being tribal –something that would have been out of reach otherwise. We weren’t tribal because we were noble and altruistic; we were tribal because we were greedy and selfish.

I think what’s needed at a minimum is a group of people (1) who, among them, have all the competencies needed to start and run a given business, (2) who are content with a modest standard of living, and (3) who are willing to “think tribally” – that is, to take what they need out of the business rather than to expect set wages.

The fact that ethnic tribes can provide their members with cradle-to-grave security is a true measure of their wealth.

In a famous interchange at Columbia University, a faculty member who asserted that the faculty is the university was immediately told by the president of the university (former U.S. president Dwight D. Eisenhower) that the faculty are employees of the university. Mr. Eisenhower isn’t on hand to contradict me when I say that the members of the tribe aren’t employees of the tribe, they are the tribe. Indeed, that’s the whole difference. Because the tribe is its members, the tribe is what its members want it to be – nothing more and nothing less.

The tribe, in fact, is just a wonderfully efficient social organization that renders making a living easy for all – unlike civilization, which renders it easy for a privileged few and hard for the rest.

Communes never begin in this haphazard way. They’re “intentional” communities, originating among people who want to live together in pursuit of common ideals, usually in relative isolation. Communes are about living together and may or may not involve working together. Tribes (and I speak here of “new” tribes, of course) originate among people who want to pool their energies and skills to make a living together. Tribes are about working together and may or may not involve living together.

It’s a fundamental tenet of our cultural mythology that the only thing wrong with us is that humans are not made well enough. We need to be made of finer materials, to some set of better specifications (provided, perhaps, by greened-up versions of our traditional religions). We just need to be made kinder, gentler, sweeter, more loving, less selfish, more far-sighted, and so on, then everything will be fine. Of course, no one succeeded in making us better last year or the year before that or the year before that or the year before that – but maybe this year we’ll get lucky … or next year or the year after that.

If you can only be free living on a mountaintop or a desert island, then clearly you’re something less than free.

Whether by intention or not, suicides often reveal themselves in their choice of means. The guilty hang themselves. Sacrificial victims slash their throats. The discarded throw themselves off buildings or bridges. Tormented minds blow their brains out.

… the “story” we’re enacting in our culture is this: The world was made for Man to conquer and rule, and Man was made to conquer and rule it; and under Man’s rule the world might have become a paradise except for the fact that he’s fundamentally and irremediably flawed.

Old minds think: How do we solve these problems?
New minds think: How do we make happen what we want to happen?

Focus instead on what you want to happen and how to make it happen, rather than on all the things that might keep it from happening.

Most people formulate their own questions. Don’t take on the responsibility of figuring out what their difficulty is. Never try to answer a question you don’t understand. Make the askers explain it; keep on insisting until it’s clear, and nine times out of ten they’ll supply the answer themselves.

QUOTATIONS

Jacques Attali
Machines are the new proletariat. The working class is being given its walking papers.

Jospeh Chassler
Yeah, well, it’s pretty lonely at the bottom, too.

Buckminster Fuller
You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.

Marshall Sahlins
The world’s most primitive people have few possessions, but they are not poor. Poverty is not a certain small amount of goods, nor is it just a relation between means and ends; above all it is a relation between people. Poverty is a social status. As such it is the invention of civilization.

Marshall Sahlins
We are inclined to think of hunters and gatherers as poor because they don’t have anything; perhaps better to think of them for that reason as free.

Ten "Cannots" by W.J.H. Boetcker

TEN CANNOTS
Reverend William John Henry Boetcker (1873-1962)

You cannot keep out of trouble by spending more than your income.

You cannot establish sound security on borrowed money.

You cannot help little men by tearing down big men.

You cannot help the poor by destroying the rich.

You cannot strengthen the weak by weakening the strong.

You cannot bring about prosperity by discouraging thrift.

You cannot lift the wage earner up by pulling down the wage payer.

You cannot further the brotherhood of man by inciting class hatred.

You cannot build character and courage by taking away men's initiative and independence.

You cannot help men permanently by doing for them, what they could and should do for themselves.

The Freedom Outlaw's Handbook by Claire Wolfe - EXCERPTS

The Freedom Outlaw’s Handbook: 179 Things to Do ‘Til the Revolution. Claire Wolfe. 2007 ISBN 978-1581605785

EXCERPTS

When freedom is illegal, criminals make laws and Outlaws make freedom.

America is at that awkward stage: It’s too late to work within the system but too early to shoot the bastards.

Don’t vote; it only encourages them.

Get your private information out of the public eye
· Get a PO box or private mail box (Mail Boxes, Etc. or some such)
· Never put your home address on applications or order forms
· Don’t use credit cards if you can avoid it.
· Be self-employed or work underground

Don’t pay more taxes than you must
When George W. Bush invaded Iraq in 2003, Dave Gross went on strike. He quit his job, lowered his income to a level at which he shouldn’t have to pay any income taxes – and began detailing the entire experiment on his Web site (http://www.sniggle.net/Experiment/) as a guide for others. His is a safe but adamant form of tax resistance- and he’s discovered that not only are there fewer problems than he anticipated, there are surprising lifestyle blessings, as well.

NEVER talk with the feds.
Title 18 USC 1001 makes it a federal crime to lie to any federal investigator. As former Domestic Diva and federal prisoner Martha Stewart found out so painfully in 2004 – the smallest lie you utter in talking with a fed can put you behind bars. Ooops – poor Martha never got charged for the “crime” they were allegedly investigating her for (insider trading). She mainly got charged for being foolish enough to talk with them at all.

Don’t let the government control your kids
As of this writing, one state, Michigan, has even announced that every parent of a newborn (that is, every parent it knows of) will be automatically subjected to a criminal background check from now on. This is supposed to identify child abusers who’ve lost their parental rights. As with state schooling, SSNs, compulsory vaccines for minor childhood illnesses, and DNA collection, everything done to your children is done in the name of being for the children.

Get started with PGP
If you’re not already encrypting your e-mail: TIME TO START.

Surf anonymously
Both marketers and gov-o-snoops just love to track your movements around the Internet.

Shunning
Shunning does work better in small communities than in big cities where the target of the shunning has many other options. But make no mistake; it does work. Citizens of northern California’s cannabis-growing counties have used it for years to make drug-prohibition agents unwelcome. And U.S. Forest Service bureaucrat Gloria Flora resigned during a long, heated dispute over public access to land in Elko County, Nevada – driven out by local residents who refused Forest Service employees service in restaurants and otherwise shunned them.

Check your computer for keystroke loggers
Most loggers are made for windows.
General information and help: http://security.resist.ca/keylog.shtml
Extra help for Mac users: http://macscan.securemac.com

Use Linux
SuSE Linux from Novell http://www.suse.com/us/
Mandrake Linux http://www.mandrakesoft.com

Getting a drivers license without a Social Security number
Since there’s still no legal requirement that any American actually have a Social Security number … and since a variety of religious denominations vehemently oppose the SSN (usually on the basis of it being the Mark of the Beast described in Revelation 13:15-18) … most states will still issue you a drivers license if you submit an affidavit stating that you have no SSN.

Follow your bliss
You “know” you couldn’t make a living as an artist, hitchhike around the world, build a better mousetrap, live off the land, build a cabin in the woods, invent cold fusion, write the Great American Novel, raise sheep for a living, move to a mountaintop, be self-employed, live in a hamlet in Vermont, join a monastery, lead an insurgency movement, or build wooden clocks for a living. But you only “know” because other people told you so.

Maybe you’re already a “terrorist”
Remember, this is not the America we learned about in school. The federal government can declare any organization to be “terrorist”, for any reason – and can thereafter confiscate its resources and persecute its contributors.

Cultivate some Mormon friends
There is a really bad joke that goes like this:
“Do you know what’s in the most basic disaster survival kit?”
“A rifle and a directory of the local Mormon ward” …
Whether you agree with their teachings or not, the Saints have other valuable lessons to teach us all. They are one of the most cohesive social groups in the world. Their church-run welfare system – based on the dignity of work, voluntary contributions and mutual aid – is more effective and more truly humane than any government system ever devised.

End the Drug War
The government doesn’t need the Drug War anymore. It’s now got the War on Terrorism as an excuse to spy on, arrest, terrorize, detain, and cow us. Not to mention all those other wars on everything from poverty to “obesity”. Not to mention “wars” on half the oil-producing nations of the globe. So what the heck, surely the gummint should be willing to give up one little tiny war, right? The Drug War, as we know from decades of bitter experience and thousands of analytical books and articles, has done absolutely nada, zip, zero, nothing to “get drugs off the street.”

The Free State Project (and its wild west cousins)
The Free State Project is a plan to get 20,000 freedom-loving activists to move to New Hampshire and work to deeply reduce the size, scope and coercive power of government. The idea is that, in a state with a small population, 20,000 activists (as opposed to 20,000 couch potatoes) can have a disproportionate voice in both government and culture.

Government supremacist: the power of words
It’s not “public schools”. It’s government schools.
The government isn’t “us”. It’s them.
They aren’t our “representatives”. They are “politicians” – which everyone knows is a dirty word.
We don’t obey laws. We’re subject to edicts.
They aren’t peace officers any more. They’re enforcers or law enforcers.
It’s not “taxation”. It’s confiscation.
It’s not an entitlement. It’s a giveaway.

Demilitarize the cops
If there’s one trend that’s become dangerously pervasive across the police departments of America, it’s militarization. Tempted by free or cheap military equipment and federal training, besotted with the “glamour” of Hollywood cops kicking down doors and roughing up suspects, cops from New York City to Mayberry have gotten into machine guns, midnight raids, camo outfits, black facemasks, and other accoutrements of terrorist death squads.

There’s a difference between police and soldiers, and it’s an important one. Police are supposed to protect the public against a minority of violent or thieving people. Soldiers are supposed to kill the enemy. You don’t want that latter mentality distorting your local “thin blue line”.

Fly the Gadsden flag
You’ve seen it – the bright yellow flag with its coiled rattlesnake and the words, “Don’t Tread On Me.” That’s the Gadsden flag, designed during the American Revolution and once a candidate for the role now played by the Stars & Stripes.

Know your rights as a juror – and promote everybody’s rights
FIJA, the Fully Informed Jury Association, needs everybody’s support. It has one, clear, simple, beautiful purpose: to tell jurors and prospective jurors what modern judges will not – that they have the right to judge the laws as well as the facts. If you’re on a jury and you think a law is stupid or unfair, you have every right to find the defendant not guilt on that basis. It’s an ancient right, and it’s one juries have often exercised by default anyway. (One reason prohibition ended was that juries were refusing to convict people who violated it. But judges – with no basis in law or tradition – usually tell jurors the exact opposite.)

Put some teeth into the Bill of Rights
The Bill of Rights was added to the U.S. Constitution as a condition of ratification. Its aim: to ensure that a strong central government would never overrun the powers of the states and the rights of the individual.

Another worthy organization, the Bill of Rights Defense Committee (http://bordc.org/) is dedicated to getting cities and states to pass resolutions declaring that they won’t enforce those aspects of the Patriot Act that violate the Bill of Rights.

Create a one-person “organization”
How many big-government-promoting organizations, widely quoted and taken extremely seriously by the media, are not much more than one or two people with a good sense of PR and the sympathies of the press? It’s harder to be taken seriously if you are libertarian or “right-wing”, but not impossible if you are persistent and professional in your approach, or if you live in an area small enough for the media to be desperate for stories.

Learn to disappear in a crowd
Here’s something fun to try that could also save your life. Practice invisibility. That is, practice being in various kinds of crowds and public settings and blending in so perfectly that no one really sees you. Try being the perfect fan at a football game, even if you detest the sport. Try being the tweedy professor on a college campus, even if you didn’t make it past high school. Be the tired mother at the grocery store, the sharp reporter at the crime scene, the business executive at the airport, the street person in the plaza.

Guerrilla gun tactics
Until recently, the “moderates” in the gun-rights movement argued that confiscation would never happen in the U.S. Even after Australians and Britons lined up like sheep in 1997 to turn in their firearms, some said it couldn’t happen here. Then California Attorney General Dan Lundgren announced a confiscation of SKS rifles with detachable magazines. That was a fiat decision, later fortunately overturned. However, in 1998, Massachusetts passed a draconian gun law that required – among other monstrosities – confiscation of many types of firearms from anyone failing to get a state license to own their own existing, legally possessed property.

Cellphones and checkpoints
It’s a good idea to carry a cellphone in your vehicle. You already know that. But here’s another good use for it. If you’re stopped at a checkpoint, you can call a friend, relative, or prearranged contact … and report on your location, what agencies are conducting the checkpoint, and what exactly is being done to the stopped motorists.

Don’t be a terrorist
Terrorism is properly defined as organized, systematic violence carried out against non-government targets for the purpose of producing fear and submission. Despite all the blather in the media and on the floor of Congress, an act has to have all those elements to be true terrorism. Therefore, people who attach only government agents and property aren’t terrorists. They’re guerilla fighters. Whether they are fighting in a good cause or not is up to history – and each of us individuals – to judge. But terrorists they ain’t.

Someday, it will be time
Few things are more painful and depressing than watching freedom be legislated, regulated, and decreed away. It’s even harder when Our Glorious Leaders assure us they’re destroying freedom for the sole purpose of saving freedom, and it’s worse yet when the vast majority of our fellow citizens merely not their heads in response like dashboard doggies.

QUOTATIONS

Edward Abbey
Let us hope our weapons are never needed – but do not forget what the common people knew when they demanded the Bill of Rights: An armed citizenry is the first defense, the best defense, and the final defense against tyranny. If guns are outlawed, only the government will have guns. Only the police, the secret police, the military, the hired servants of our rulers. Only the government – and a few outlaws. I intend to be among the outlaws.

Samuel Adams
If you love wealth greater than liberty, the tranquility of servitude greater than the animating contest of freedom, go home from us in peace. We seek not your counsel, nor your arms. Crouch down and lick the hand that feeds you. May your chains set lightly upon you; and may posterity forget that you were our countrymen.

General Elias Alias
Whoever owns one’s debt owns one’s ass.

Anonymous
Truth is stranger than fiction and also harder to make up.

Charles Bradlaugh
If special honor is claimed for any, then heresy should have it as the truest servitor of human kind.

Charles Bukowski
The difference between a democracy and a dictatorship is that in a democracy you vote first and take orders later; in a dictatorship don’t have to waste your time voting.

Albert Camus
Integrity has no need of rules.

Albert Camus
The future is the only kind of property that the masters willingly concede to slaves.

Douglas Casey
Inventions like gunpowder, the printing press, and the computer have done far more to overpower oppression than every volume of political thought ever written.

Benjamin Disraeli
Wherever is found what is called a paternal government, there is found state education. It has been discovered that the best way to insure implicit obedience is to commence tyranny in the nursery.

Max DePree
We cannot become what we need to be by remaining what we are.

Alan Dershowitz
Foolish liberals who are trying to read the Second Amendment out of the constitution by claiming it’s not an individual right or that it’s too much of a safety hazard don’t see the danger of the big picture. They’re courting disaster by encouraging others to use this same means to eliminate portions of the Constitution they don’t like.

Albert Einstein
Never do anything against conscience even if the state demands it.

Padraig Flynn
Fate is an open road, and all you can do is put your foot on the gas and Drive, Baby, Drive.

Mohandas K. Gandhi
The first principle of non-violence is the non-compliance with everything that is humiliating.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
As soon as you trust yourself, you will know how to live.

Robert D. Graham
Once you stop fearing government, the government fears you.

General Alexander Haig
Let them march all they want, so long as they continue to pay their taxes.

Robert A. Heinlein
Secrecy is the keystone of all tyranny. Not force, but secrecy … censorship. When any government, or any church, for that matter, undertakes to say to its subjects, “This you may not read, this you must not see, this you are forbidden to know,” the end result is tyranny and oppression, no matter how holy the motives. Mighty little force is needed to control a man whose mind has been hoodwinked; contrariwise, no amount of force can control a free man, a man whose mind is free. No, not the rack, not fission bombs, not anything. You cannot conquer a free man; the most you can do is kill him.

W.G. Hill
The threat of people acting in their own enlightened and rational self-interest strikes bureaucrats, politicians, and social workers as ominous and dangerous.

Adolph Hitler
The most foolish mistake we could possibly make would be to allow the subject races to possess arms.

Mary McCarthy
Bureaucracy, the rule of no one, has become the modern form of despotism.

Kinsey Millhone
Once people think you’re bad, you might as well be bad. It’s more fun than being good.

Benito Mussolini
Fascism should rightly be called Corporatism as it is a merge of state and corporate power.

P.J. O’Rourke
This country was founded by religious nuts with guns.

William Pitt the Younger
Necessity is the plea for every infringement of human freedom. It is the argument of tyrants; it is the creed of slaves.

Terry Pratchett
“But look,” said Ponder, “The graveyards are full of people who rushed in bravely but unwisely.”
“Ook.” [said the orangutan]
“What’d he say?” said the Bursar …
“I think he said, ‘Sooner or later the graveyards are full of everybody,” said Ponder. “Oh blast. Come on.”

Ayn Rand
The man who produces while others dispose of his product is a slave.

George Bernard Shaw
The things most people want to know about are usually none of their business.

Henry David Thoreau
How does it become a man to behave toward this American government today? I answer, that he cannot without disgrace be associated with it.

Henry David Thoreau
The authority of government … can have no pure right over my person and my property but what I concede to it.

Alan Watts
But when no risk is taken there is no freedom. It is thus that, in an industrial society, the plethora of laws made for our personal safety convert the land into a nursery, and policemen hired to protect us become self-serving busybodies.

Walt Whitman
The shallow consider liberty a release from all law, from every constraint. The wise see in it, on the contrary, the potent Law of Laws.

The Freedom Manifesto by Tom Hodgkinson - Repeat Excerpts

This is a repeat from an April 2008 posting. There will be more like this coming up. Pick and choose whatever suits your needs.

The Freedom Manifesto: How to Free Yourself from Anxiety, Fear, Mortgages, Money, Guilt, Debt, Government, Boredom, Supermarkets, Bills, Melancholy, Pain, Depression, Work, and Waste. Tom Hodgkinson. 2006. Harper Perennial, New York. ISBN 978-0060823221

EXCERPTS

I have tried to bring together three strands of thought into a philosophy for everyday life; these are freedom, merriment and responsibility, or anarchy, medievalism and existentialism. It’s an approach to life that is also known as having a laugh, doing what you want.

In seeking freedom, I would define myself as an anarchist. In anarchy, contracts are made between individuals, not between citizen and state.

How to be free? Well, like it or not, you are free. The real question is whether you choose to exercise that freedom …

Anxiety suits the status quo very well. Anxious people make good consumers and good workers. Governments and big business, therefore, love terrorism – they adore it, it’s good for business.

Anxiety is the sacrifice of creativity in the service of security. It is the giving up of personal freedoms in return for the promise, never fulfilled, of comfort, cotton wool, air-conditioned shopping centers. Security is a myth; it simply doesn’t exist. This does not stop us, however, from constantly chasing it.

Belief in the abstract invention ‘career’ is a middle-class affliction. The lower orders, wisely, don’t quite have the same faith in progress and self-betterment as the bourgeois classes and neither do members of the aristocracy.

And now more than ever before, the middle classes attempt to impose their career ethic on everyone else. This is called ‘government’.

Governments sell themselves by promoting the idea of ‘equal opportunities for everyone to make the best of themselves’ when really what they mean is ‘equal opportunities for every slimebag to rat on his friends and colleagues in order to worship the false god of career advancement.’

Career is just posh slavery. And career is an institutionalized putting-off a paradise deferred.

Career, then, is a Protestant invention and an ideal for living that would have been impossible in the more fatalistic Catholic medieval society.

‘Learn a craft’ is what I suggest to young writers who contact the Idler: carpentry or blacksmithing or gardening or upholstery; such pursuits sit alongside the life of the mind very well.

Clearly we need to find a town of 50,000 people, 50,000 freedom-seekers, put a wall around it, declare it an independent republic and get on with things on our own. The medieval cities demonstrated to [Prince] Kropotkin that, left to our own devices, we can do a much better job of organizing our affairs than any government.

Solar panels are anarchy in action.

And as for your plans for the future? Well: we all know the Jewish joke: How do you make God laugh? Tell him your plans.

… our resentment makes it hard for us to escape. Resentment can be a barrier to freedom.

Resentment of others – ‘It’s all right for you,’ the feeling that life is just that little bit easier for everyone else around you – is the first manacle that must be cast off in the quest for freedom.

The problem is not that people are different, but that they do not respect differences.

For some unfathomable reason, everyone seems to want an expensive watch. But isn’t it mighty peculiar that what is in actual fact a symbol of slavery should also have become a status symbol? Wearing a watch indicates to others that you have bound yourself to the modern industrial tempo.

It is one of the triumphs of the capitalist project that the slave-driver is now inside us, which saves an enormous amount on the wage bill.

We should abandon the expression ‘free time’, because it implies its opposite, ‘slave time’.

As the unusual German historian Johan Huizinga says in The Waning of the Middle Ages, modern man sees himself primarily as a worker, and this is the great change. No praying, no fighting, no working the land. Just work, hard work.

Competition is a slave’s creed. We think that by beating up the other guy we elevate ourselves, but, in fact, we are debasing ourselves to the level of a slave. To be competitive is a sign of submission as, really, it just means that we are carrying out the master’s wishes.

… ‘financial services’ – and there’s a euphemism for usury if ever I heard one …

… debt has been compared by many to a modern form of indentured labour. You get into debt, and then you are stuck in a job you hate in order to pay off the debt. This helps the system, as it means that most of us are more or less kept quiet and toiling.

It is credit, not cash, that makes wealth: apparently, rich people are often simply more spectacularly in debt than the rest of us.

To free yourself from the cycle of work-spend-debt-work, simply stop consuming and start creating.

Don’t make luxury into a meaning.

We desire things, we are attached to things, we believe that things will make us better. This process serves the postponement of desire which is one of the characteristic features, indeed a motor, of large-scale capitalism. The desire for things produces a restless craving, and this restless craving leads us into the world and into our schemes for betterment.

This is how capitalism works: through a constant stream of disappointments which encourages the spending of more and more money.

To work hard to produce useless items of nothing and then to make that the sole purpose of living – this is the insanity of desire.

So, put simply, if you have somewhere to live, enough money to buy or produce good food, friends, books and plenty of booze and cigarettes, then how bad can life be?

Desire and modern capitalism preach that means are unimportant and that ends are all: ‘I’m only doing my job.’

… fear is actually rather convenient to the smooth functioning of an orderly society. A docile population which is terrified of the authorities in their various forms, whether supermarket, bank, school or boss, and afraid of other human beings, will more likely depend on objects and institutions to give them guidance, solidity, security and a sense of meaning.

Fear keeps us observing life rather than living it. We are spectators rather than participators.

Fear is a tool of control. It is fear of punishment that will keep a classroom quiet and make the teacher’s job easier; it is fear of the sack that will keep the grumbling workers quiet. Fear is also an efficient controlling device. It also helps us to fulfill our roles as consumers. It is fear of life itself that keeps us spending in the arcades and typing our credit-card numbers into websites.

One source of fear is certainly the education system. Little children are fearless, imperious anarchists, and the education system works and works on them over a period of fifteen years to instill docility so that they won’t complain too much when they end up with a boring job.

Life is about nothingness, so go and create your own life and enjoy it. Everything is vanity, fiction, conditioning, self-created, mind-forg’d.

Vanity and absurdity are the same thing – mere creations of man’s imagination, utterly without meaning.

Governments do too much and they do most of it badly.

Politics is not the art of running a country, it is the art of persuading the people that they need a set of paid politicians to run the country.

… the final insult is that we pay the government between a quarter and a half of our income for the privilege of being patronized and bossed around.

There is a real alternative to elected governments. It is self-government, or anarchy, or running one’s own affairs without relying on external authority.

Anarchy is about the creative spirit fighting the cowed spirit, and the battle has to start within ourselves.

What can we do to be ourselves, rather than trying to conform and contort ourselves into a uniform model? Well, we can start simply by ignoring government. The best way to smash the state is to take no notice of it and hope it goes away.

An important mental step in escaping the power of government is to understand that to some degree, we ourselves are complicit with the problem. By not acting for ourselves, we allow others to act for us.

In the existential world, where life is absurd, you may as well create your own life.

In order to keep bureaucracy and taxes to a minimum, we will earn small amounts of money and instead do favours for each other. We don’t want affordable housing, jobs and shopping centers. Those are slave’s perks, handed down by authority, which may be more or less lenient according to whichever government fate has installed. What we want is to create our own little aristocracies, as D.H. Lawrence has it. We want soil, caravans and trees, smallholdings, vegetable patches, art and crafts. And beer and books. That’s all.

Government is a license for people to kill and rape each other; government creates the killing and raping while pretending to prevent it.

Machines have never liberated us from toil, due to the fact that they need minding by a human being and are owned by the capitalists, in whose hands they become instruments of enslavement and prolonged boredom.

The accusation ‘unprofessional’ means ‘You did not behave like a machine today.’

Digital technology may supply you with what you want, but it won’t supply you with what you need.

The future is always about machines. But I don’t think about the future; I think about the present. The future is a capitalist construct. The past teaches us that the future has let us down, and let us down many, many times. Dreaming of some kind of technological utopia in which the machines will do all the work has failed us before, and it is failing us now, with our new faith in digital technology.

… the fact is, the past is a great treasure store of good ideas for living, ideas that were actually applied and whose results we can see. The problem with ideas of the future is that they are untested; they are all speculation, fantasy.

The very thing that we take on board in order to provide us with security – a home – seems to offer instead only anxiety and a feeling of being trapped.

The mortgage, which puts all the burden of buying a house on the individual, is the logical outcome of the individualization of ownership. But the reality is that in being sold the idea that we should all own our own house, we have simply given into a giant usury con.

We need to diffuse land ownership, ban usurious mortgages, stabilize rents and bring house prices right down. We could perhaps do this by simply losing interest in money-making.

The problem with vagabondage is that big governments can’t stand it. They hate the chaos, the unruly elements, the sense that people are wandering around the country doing what they like. When governments increase in power, they all have a resentful way of cracking down on vagabonds.

Putting a lot of time and money into mortgages and the ‘dream home’ is never going to be more than a distraction from the real issue, which is you, and your state of mind.

The family, which should be a source of pleasure, fun, cosiness and nourishment, seems everywhere to produce misery, anger, door-slamming, shouting, cruelty, fighting, death and abuse.

The modern family merely represents a financial burden – in other words, an inducement to take jobs you don’t like.

The commodification of childcare is another of the unhelpful effects of capitalism. You earn money doing something you don’t like in order to pay someone else to ‘do the childcare’, i.e., look after your children.

By confirming the existence of a problem, you create a market. That is why the pharmaceutical industry is forever creating new illnesses; that is why the insurance industry is forever creating new fears; that is why the government is forever creating new enemies.

The wonderful thing about children is not their so-called innocence but their passion, their passion for life and living. This can take the form of tears or laughter, and we need to get it into our heads that tears and laughter are both to be welcomed. You can’t have one without the other. They may even enjoy it – like the medievals, who seemed to embrace all extremes of passion. It is this passion that we need to find in ourselves.

We are fatally over-scheduling our children and creating a nation of useless dependents unable to do anything for themselves apart from the spectacularly useless and costly occupations of computer games, tennis and ballet. We are creating a generation of children who don’t know how to play.

Quality of life has been sacrificed to quantity of life. Living as long as possible rather than living as well as possible – that seems to have become the goal.

Fear of pain, indeed, might be seen as fear of life, since life is pain.

Pain will never leave us. Live with it. Instead of putting energy into destroying pain, we need to put energy into creating pleasure. Pleasure for yourself and pleasure for those around you. Sex, music, dancing, beer and wine, good company, good work, merry cheer: these are the antidotes to pain, and they are of course only pleasures because we know pain. Without pain, there would be no pleasure.

Private pension plans claim to sell you ‘peace of mind’, i.e., freedom from fear, but the reality is the opposite: they sell us fear and then sell the apparent solution to that fear – money.

So, when it comes to pensions, I am firmly of the ‘eat, drink and be merry, for tomorrow we may die’ school. Belief in pensions produces a kind of slavery. If you don’t believe in pensions, then you believe in yourself and you believe in looking after yourself. This makes you free.

Funnily enough, the people who encourage others to worry about the future are those who want your money now.

It makes perfectly logical sense that in societies based on a collective ideal, manners and rituals are of the highest importance, whereas in societies based on a competitive ideal, manners are useful only as a means of getting what you want.

Disintegrating manners are a sign of a disintegrating society.

Don’t bother setting up free republics or moving to a country which offers more liberties. Simply declare yourself to be an independent state. Do not involve and coerce others. This is the only way we will effect a proper revolution.

Self-importance is a trap, because the moment we start to think that we actually matter is the moment when things start to go wrong. The truth is that you are supremely unimportant, and that nothing matters. All of man’s striving is for nothing; all effort is wasted. To realize that everything is meaningless is tremendously liberating, since it then leaves us completely free to create our own lives and ignore the plans that others have for us.

So we can see why artists and writers traditionally tend towards Roman Catholicism, while Protestantism is the religion for the serious man of business, the practical man.

We are all supposed to want to become rich. Wanting to be rich is one of the motors of a competitive world. Wanting to be rich is what keeps us striving, working, fighting, struggling, competing, conning and abandoning morals. And wanting to be rich is the precise impulse that is exploited by the people who actually do become rich, the usurers and the investors, the market manipulators, because they exploit our greed for their own ends. Wanting more money removes us from enjoying the present; it is therefore a Puritan trait. We should celebrate what we have. Wanting to be rich is actually the first desire that must be cast off in the pursuit of freedom.

Do it now. Give things away for free and money will lose its power over you.

… since shopping is today seen as our patriotic duty, to be thrifty is actually to be unpatriotic, and therefore it gives one a pleasant sense of rebelling against the state.

It is not thrift as self-denial and the preaching of sobriety, industry, frugality and virtue to the lower orders that I am recommending; it is more a spirited reclaiming of one’s own finances.

We should also be thrifty with our time, and that means not rushing through things and not wasting our time by giving it to an employer.

The tragedy of the nineteenth century was that Western man came to see himself, first and foremost, as a worker. Life became a serious business. Frivolity, mirth, play, ritual, dance, music, merriment, dressing up: those childish pleasures, all central parts of life for the nobles, priests and peasants of old, had been under constant attack since the middle of the sixteenth century.

Make money out of what you are doing anyway. In my case, I spend each morning writing and reading, and the rest of the day is given up to household work: gardening, cleaning, baking … The evenings are for drinking, eating and talking.

Education itself is a putting-off, a postponement: we are told to work hard to get good results. Why? So we can get a good job. What is a good job? One that pays well. Oh. And that’s it? All this suffering, merely so that we can earn a lot of money, which, even if we manage it, will not solve our problems anyway? It’s a tragically limited idea of what life is all about.

If the mortgage company owns 90 per cent of it, how can this be said to be owning your own house? Instead, you are in slavery to two authorities, the employer and the mortgage company. Fall behind on these payments, and the mortgage company will literally take your home from you. Therefore, you will subject yourself to all sorts of humiliations at work out of fear of losing your job.

Relaxing the hold that work has over your life and replacing it with play can be a slow and gradual process. The key to enjoying a life beyond full-time employment is to realize that, once you stop working full time, you start to become a producer, a creative person, rather than a consumer.

Be a jack of all trades; abandon perfectionism. Embrace the creed of the amateur. Do it for love, not money.

If you enjoy your work, then it’s not work. As my friend Sarah says, the trick to living free is to wake up every morning and screech: ‘Morning, Lord, what have you got for me today?’

QUOTES

Matthew de Abaitua
[Retirement:] secular afterlife.

St. Thomas Aquinas
Abstinence in eating and drinking has no essential bearing on salvation: The kingdom of God is not meat and drink … the holy apostles understood that the kingdom of God does not consist in eating and drinking but in resignation to either lot, for they are neither elated by abundance, nor distressed by want.

Simone de Beauvoir
Few tasks are more like the torture of Sisyphus than housework, with its endless repetition: the clean becomes soiled, the soiled is made clean, over and over, day after day.

Aldous Huxley
There will never be enduring peace unless and until human beings come to accept a philosophy of life more adequate to the cosmic and psychological facts than the insane idolatries of nationalism and the advertising man’s apocalyptic faith in Progress towards a mechanized New Jerusalem.

John of Brunn
A man who has conscience is himself the Devil and hell and purgatory, tormenting himself. He who is free in spirit escapes all these things.

E.M. Forster
Only connect the prose and the passion and both will be exalted, and human love will be seen at its height. Live in fragments no longer.

Masanobu Fukuoka
Humanity knows nothing at all. There is no intrinsic value in anything, and every action is a futile, meaningless effort.

John Keats
Beauty is truth and truth beauty,
That is all ye know and all ye need to know.

C.S. Lewis
I believe a man is happier and happy in a richer way, if he has ‘the freeborn mind’ … and in adult life it is the man who needs, and asks, nothing of the Government who can criticize its acts and snap his fingers at its ideology.

Penny Rimbaud
Our lives are uniquely and intrinsically our own. It is a responsibility that few seem willing to bear.

Bertrand Russell
Democracy, as conceived by politicians, is a form of government, that is to say, it is a method of making people do what their leaders wish under the impression that they are doing what they themselves wish.

Jean-Paul Sartre
It is … senseless to think of complaining since nothing foreign has decided what we feel, what we live, or what we are.

Henry Suso
…Untrammeled freedom … When a man lives according to all his caprices without distinguishing between God and himself, and without looking before or after.

Leo Tolstoy
… even if the absence of government really meant anarchy in the negative disorderly sense of that word – which is far from being the case – even then no anarchical disorder could be worse that the position to which governments have already led their peoples, and to which they are leading them.

Raoul Vaneigem
The consumer cannot and must not ever attain satisfaction.

Dark Ages America: The Final Phase of Empire by Morris Berman - Excerpts

Dark Ages America: The Final Phase of Empire. Morris Berman. 2006. ISBN 0-393-05866-2

EXCERPTS

In his famous essay of 1784, “What is Enlightenment?”, the German philosopher Immanuel Kant wrote, “Enlightenment is man’s release from his self-incurred tutelage,” which he defined as his “inability to make use of his understanding without direction from another.” Sapere aude!, cried Kant; “have the courage to use your own reason! – that is the motto of enlightenment.”

Quite honestly, we may be only one more terrorist attack away from a police state.

Despite the unifying patriotic rhetoric that permeates the United States, on some level Americans are not really fooled; at bottom, each person knows he or she must continually “reinvent themselves,” which is to say, go it alone. America is the ultimate anti-community.

American citizens cannot choose not to participate in the utterly fluid, high-pressure society that the United States has become. Liquid modernity is, in short, quite rigid: a world of compulsive self-determination.

On the grassroots level of people’s working lives, this merger of our identities with the economy is surely one of the most destructive aspects of the new globalized world order.

The Italian political theorist Antonio Gramsci pointed out long ago that if you capture people’s minds, their hands will follow. He called this “hegemony”, the symbolic level of the dominant culture that convinces people – the evidence of their lives notwithstanding – that this is the best of all possible worlds.

… “one dollar, one vote”, which is actually the description of a plutocracy.

Globalization is our destiny; it is, in effect, the final phase of capitalism. We did not evolve to this place by accident, and short of massive civilizational breakdown, there seems to be now way to alter this trajectory – not even slightly.

In the absence of broad structural awareness, alternatives to a world characterized by liquid modernity don’t have much of a chance. It is also the case that the absence of such alternatives is our consciousness is an inherent feature of this world. In such a context, anything truly different, and certainly anything truly creative, has to swim against an enormous tide of commercial garbage.

The fact is that liquid modernity has a strongly addictive quality to it: its participants are often convinced that death is actually life. In “The Numbing of the American Mind,” Thomas de Zengotita points out that it constitutes “a vast goo of meaningless stimulation.”

… the more money moves to the center of our lives, the more cynical we become about higher values. This … generates a culture of sensation, a longing for speed and excitement, because natural excitement is increasingly absent.

Modern American childhood … is for the most part an education in shopping.

The upshot of all of this is that school is turned into a venue for corporate and consumerist indoctrination – with the blessing of many schools and probably most of society.

The reason shows such as Seinfeld or Friends were so popular is that they depicted community situations – i.e., ones in which people hang out together on a daily basis and have a shared history. The irony of millions of isolated Americans sitting home alone and vicariously participating in a group experience that they themselves will never have, because they will never have it, hardly needs comment …

In what other context would we expect to find “reality” shows on TV, such as Survivor, in which screwing the other person is the name of the game, and which millions find vastly entertaining.

… “social capital”, the connections among individuals that are based on reciprocity and trust.

Shopping malls are now America’s most distinctive public space, and mall culture is about being in the presence of others, but not in their company.

… it is precisely in the declining phase of a civilization that it beats the drum of self-congratulation most fiercely.

Negative freedom … is essentially the freedom to be left alone. Societies without this type of freedom tend to be tribal (or organic) in nature, heavily dominated by custom and tradition. In those cultures, the separation of church and state – a mainstay of secular democracy – is usually absent.

As a California migrant worker once remarked to his family, on a return visit south of the border over the Christmas holiday, “The gringos don’t like to be reminded that they are corpses.”

… Osama’s laundry list of grievances … in particular the fact that the United States has inherited the mantle and pattern of nineteenth-century European imperialism: military garrisons, economic control, support for brutal leaders, exploitation of natural resources.

Beginning with the Wilson administration, taxes collected for individuals were used to provide corporations with loans and subsidies for overseas expansion.

Michael Hunt defines ideology as a structure of meaning that is part of the culture – so much a part, in our own case, that we take it for granted, are not really aware of it, and regard other ideologies as aberrant.

Americans still live in a world in which Anglos are on top, Europeans follow, and the Third (read: nonwhite) World sits at the bottom … Plainly put, Americans don’t respect cultural patterns different from their own, and this has facilitated an imperial foreign policy.

The American Dream involves something more comprehensive than just making money … it includes Americans’ vision of themselves as bringing freedom and the American way of life to the world, being atop a racial hierarchy (although this is no longer expressed overtly), and keeping political revolution at bay.

Across much of Asia and Latin America, our allies cared nothing for democracy; their allegiance was to our dollars, not to our values. Nor did we care, so long as they let us install military bases and said the “right” things.

Recall what [George] Kennan wrote: that the USSR viewed the outside world as hostile, was persuaded of its own doctrinaire rightness, insisted on the elimination of all competing powers and ideologies, believed that no opposition to them could possibly have any merit, and saw their regime as the only true one “in a dark and misguided world.” Let’s not kid ourselves: it would be hard to find a better description of American postwar foreign policy, right down to today.

It is this, to my mind, that makes [Carter] so unusual; it sets him off from presidents such as Reagan or Bush Jr. – men who were (are) very doctrinaire and who confuse(d) strength with rigidity (the American public does as well). Carter accepted compromises and contradictions when necessary, and saw the foreign policy arena as one necessarily fraught with conflict and inconsistency. Allied with this, he did not think in oppositional terms, and since that is all the media and public seem to be able to do, his message got lost.

It is no accident that [Carter] was defeated by an actor, a not terribly astute, sloganeering individual with an opposite modus operandi. Popularity with the media was at the top of Reagan’s list. He was not interested in the substantive details of foreign policy; he probably couldn’t even understand them. What interested the fortieth president was rhetoric, public appearances, and ceremonial duties. He had no intellectual curiosity whatsoever; his political philosophy amounted to little more than “us good, them bad”, and that was basically what most of the American people wanted to hear.

We love our large, energy-inefficient vehicles, and don’t seem to be too preoccupied with the fact that other peoples of the world have to die in large numbers so that we can live an extravagant and wasteful lifestyle.

Americans as a people don’t really like to look inward. Our feelings on the subject are much closer to, say, Bush Sr. than to Jimmy Carter. Whenever the elder Bush was asked probing questions, his immediate response was “Don’t stretch me out on the couch.”

[Andrew] Bacevich claims that [America] had a “globalization” strategy in the 1890s and that it was still operative one hundred years later. Then as now, the goal was to create an integrated international order that offered no barriers to the flow of goods, capital, and ideas, and that is administered by the United States.

The German philosopher Hegel referred to this as “negative identity,” the process of creating an identity for yourself by defining yourself against something. Ultimately, he said, it never works, for to say “I am not that” is at root empty; it doesn’t tell you who you actually are, and in essence enables you to hide from that question.

When you get down to it, globalization, besides being an updated euphemism for imperialism, is not much more than the elite version of shopping.

That September [2002], the White House released the “National Security Strategy” (NSS) … We shall “rid the world of evil”, it fatuously declares; we shall act preemptively; we shall act alone if necessary; and w shall decide who is or is not an enemy, and deserving of “regime change”. In a word, we are going to militarily rearrange the world to suit ourselves. The war on Iraq began almost exactly six months later.

Hendrik Hertzberg of The New Yorker argues that the NSS was a “vision of what used to be called, when we believed it to be the Soviet ambition, world domination.” The document, he claimed was a prescription for a benevolent American dictatorship, as well as for perpetual war. A regime in which the cops have to answer only to themselves, he pointed out, had a name: police state.

In the case of the Bush Doctrine, coupled with the Bush administration’s assault on civil liberties, I think it can be argued that we have been in the midst of a slow-motion coup d’êtat, one that has, in fact, been building since the late seventies, and that can now, in the wake of the 2004 presidential election, finalize its program for a one-party system and a theocratic plutocracy.

To realize their dream of a pax Americana, Wolfowitz, Rumsfeld, Cheney, et al. relied in the 1990s on a number of think tanks and front groups that have interlocking directorates and shared origins in those earlier organizations: the American Enterprise Institute, the Center for Security Policy, and the Center for Strategic and International Studies, among others. They provided the Bush Jr. administration with policy advice and personnel. They also relied on right-wing media empires to blanket the public space with their message, in much the same way – if more powerfully – that the yellow press of Hearst and Pulitzer did during the Spanish-American War. Thus Rupert Murdoch disseminates propaganda via Fox News, and the Weekly Standard is a mouthpiece for defense establishment intellectuals (for instance, Richard Perle, who is also a fellow of the American Enterprise Institute). There is also the National Interest and the Washington Times (the latter owned by the Reverend Sun Myung Moon), which also owns the UPI newswire. The result is a “seamless propaganda machine” that has effectively destroyed public discourse in the United States, to the point that we now dwell in a kind of right-wing propagandistic fog.

When individuals “get religion” – and there is really no other name for the Manichaean anticommunism that gripped America during the Cold War – reason and even common decency typically fly out the window, and the results are frequently horrific.

Our basic Middle Eastern policy is by now fully transparent to the Islamic world: the United States supports whoever serves and extends its power, and that can change at a moment’s notice.

On 1 November 1983 Secretary of State George Shultz received intelligence reports showing that Iraq was using chemical weapons almost daily. The following February, Iraq used large amounts of mustard gas and also the lethal never agent tabun (this was later documented by the United Nations); Reagan responded (in November) by restoring diplomatic relations with Iraq. He and Bush Sr. also authorized the sale of poisonous chemicals, anthrax, and bubonic plague.

An intellectual lightweight who didn’t really know what he was doing, Bush Sr. was quickly pushed aside by history after he had fulfilled his role as a catalyst for certain events. By the time his son came to power, the new world order – that is, global American hegemony and the final phase of empire – was pretty much in place. Being a lightweight – or a vacuous marionette, in George Jr.’s case – was not a liability but actually an asset; that Bush Jr. was (is) a hollow mouthpiece for a self-destructive imperial project is an arrangement that makes the project all that much easier to fulfill. That “he’s a real nowhere man” is not an obstacle for a nation sliding into chaos while it is trying to convince itself that it is in charge of the world. Indeed, it’s a perfect fit.

The “coalition” bombardment of Iraq began on 17 January 1991 (Baghdad time) and went on for forty-three days … As many as 200,000 people died. Targets chosen included water and sewage treatment plants, electrical generating plants, oil refineries, transportation networks, factories, bridges, roads, and irrigation systems, much of which bombing constituted violations of international law … There was also a kind of demonic violence exercised against retreating Iraqi forces, who were massacred in flight on February 26-27, after a cease-fire was already in place (also a war crime, in violation of the Fourth Geneva Convention).

… as philosopher Douglas Kellner points out, there was really no single reason that the United States went to war; rather, it was “overdetermined”, a confluence of political, economic, and military considerations all coming together. Yet the most suspicious aspect of the whole affair, according to foreign policy expert Christopher Layne, was the Bush administration’s inability to articulate a coherent rationale for it, which suggests that the core reason lay in the values and premises of the foreign policy elite – principles that they themselves couldn’t clearly articulate – regarding the concept of a new world order.

But whatever the U.S. policy has been on the [West Bank] settlement question, the one thing the United States has decidedly not done is force the issue by threatening to pull the plug on the huge amount of foreign aid it gives Israel each year. The reason for this lies in the latter’s role as our proxy in the Middle East.

The Nixon Doctrine – that certain countries in key regions of the world would play the role of “local police” under the direction of the U.S. ….

And because Israel serves as America’s proxy, supposedly protecting U.S. economic and strategic interests; because Muslims the world over know about the $3 billion subsidy and where Israeli weaponry comes from; because they see the United States consistently voting against the Palestinians, and for the Israelis, in the United Nations, even on human rights issues – for all these reasons, they despise the United States, and cite the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as the key sticking point in their relations with the West.

The enemy – “evil” – can never be defeated by definition; there are no possible criteria for what a victory would consist of.

As the British journalist George Monbiot predicted even before the “National Security Strategy” was issued by the White House in September 2002, “If the U.S. were not preparing to attach Iraq, it would be preparing to attack another nation. The U.S. will go to war because it needs a country with which to go to war.”

… when a powerful nation can pick fights only with the small and the weak, it is because appearances to the contrary, it is weak itself.

… on 19 July 2004 Newsweek broke the story that the White House and the Justice Department had, for several months, been discussing the possibility of postponing the November 2 presidential elections, which would have been a first in American history, if it had come to pass. If power at all costs is the game, then democratic elections, protection against torture, civil liberties – all of the things we used to take for granted – become expendable, and practically overnight. As America morphed from a republic into an empire, these sorts of changes began to occur quite naturally, the unthinkable became perfectly thinkable, after all. Nor have most Americans, it must be said, been overly concerned about this new direction in which we are moving. Indeed, a large percentage of them are probably not even aware of it.

Two days after 9/11, Chalmers Johnson remarked in an interview, “I know it sounds cruel to say, but the people of New York were collateral damage of American foreign policy.”

In very rough terms, the central drama of American history is that of an expanding capitalist economy that gained momentum, moving faster and faster, feeding greedily on technological innovation (especially after World War II), eventually steamrolling all other values except those of a market economy, and heavily influencing U.S. foreign policy in its wake.

Our typical idea of the perfect vacation is to go somewhere that has escaped the ravages of “progress”, or that can create the illusion of having done so, because we are disgusted by urban decay and suburban sprawl and meaningless jobs to which we commute an hour or more every day.

“It has been our fate as a nation,” wrote Richard Hofstadter, “not to have ideologies, but to be one.” Americanism, in short: that is our religion.

As Clay McShane points out in Down the Asphalt Path, trolleys contradicted basic American values. They were dirty and overcrowded and made it impossible for the middle class to isolate itself from the lower classes – blacks and immigrants in particular. Meanwhile, by 1932 General Motors formed a consortium of tire, oil, and highway companies to buy and then shut down streetcar systems, bribing local officials when necessary. In the next quarter century, as 1974 Senate antitrust hearings revealed, GM, by means of monopolies and interlocking directorates, killed off more than a hundred electric surface rail systems in forty-five states.

From a European point of view, says sociologist Ray Oldenburg, American suburbs are like prisons. There is no contact between households, and one rarely knows one’s neighbors. There are no places to walk or cafes to sit where people drop in and socialize or read the newspaper.

Portland politics does not revolve around race because the place is one of the whitest cities around, and Oregon one of the whitest states. Given the absence of the “white flight” factor endemic to much of the United States, there hasn’t been that great a motivation for suburban housing in the greater Portland area.

The truth is that cities and civilization are nearly synonymous, and if the former die out, so do the latter. Nor does renaming a phenomenon change it. Techno-oriented or not, the new suburbs continue the trend of racial and class segregation; have not become independent economic entities; are destructive of the environment; epitomize the culture of consumption; and lack the diversity, cosmopolitanism, political culture, and public life that real cities have. The ethos of the technocity remains what the suburban ethos has always been: resistance to heterogeneity, and the desire to live apart.

.. the sad fact is that daily American life contains a great amount of violence and ignorance and is pervaded by a lot of (repressed) alienation and spiritual emptiness.

As Fareed Zakaria notes, the sacred cow in the United States is the American people, to which politicians have to pay ritual homage if they value their careers. No matter how manifestly stupid the people’s behavior is, American politician praise their sagacity. Uttering the phrase, “the American people”, says Zakaria, is tantamount to announcing a divine visitation; anything has the force of biblical revelation if it is ascribed to this mystical, all-knowing entity.

It seems to me that the people do get the government they deserve, and even beyond that, the government who they are, so to speak.

Shopping, of course, is a pretty pathetic religion, but if “God” can be said to be where someone puts most of their attention, then the data are in. Americans spend far more time in shopping malls that in church, for example, and by 1987 the country had more malls than high schools.

The basic perception of Americans from the outside is that we are children, adolescents at best, and Bush is just such a person.

Those of us who now have different values from the country may have to look elsewhere for hope, quality, humanism, and – possibly – freedom, which is not exactly what we had in mind when we were growing up.

Note that since World War II, we have avoided taking on an equal power. Our engagement with the Soviet Union itself was a balancing act involving the (often judicious) use of diplomacy. When we actually attacked, it was at the periphery: Korea (a stalemate); Vietnam (a defeat). Otherwise, the engagement consisted of covert operations against virtually defenseless nations or massive attacks on puny countries or tinpot dictators (Grenada, Panama, Iraq, and so on).

Leaving its abysmal record on human rights aside, China is beginning to resemble the United States in Mandarin. It seems to have no larger vision, and there is absolutely no indications that its emergence as a superpower will herald a better world.

So many Americans posses what might be called a kind of “life stupidity”: they haven’t a clue as to what the good life really is. Like Edward G. Robinson in Key Largo, they think it amounts to a single word: more.

… former Wall Street Journal reported Michael Ybarra, in Washington Gone Crazy, demonstrates quite clearly that the anti-Communist hysteria of the late 1940s and 1950s was not really a response to espionage or an external threat, but more fundamentally “a conservative reaction to the New Deal,” a long-standing series of resentments that included “rural rancor toward urban cities, nativist dread of encroaching minorities, fundamentalist anxieties over the spread of secular values,” and the like. When you add to these the contemporary hatred of knowledge and Enlightenment thinking, and the subliminal awareness that we have become unmoored and are basically failing as a nation, you have a rather potent brew on your hands.

QUOTATIONS

Robert Bellah
Our material success is our punishment, in terms of what that success has done to the natural environment, our social fabric, and our personal lives.

Cicero
Not to know what happened before one was born is always to be a child.

Samuel Huntington
The West won the world not by its superiority in its ideas or values or religion … but rather by its superiority in applying organized violence. Westerners often forget this fact; non-Westerners never do.

H.L. Mencken
As democracy is perfected, the office of president represents, more and more clearly, the inner soul of the people. On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart’s desire at last and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.

Emmanuel Todd
Theatrical military activism against inconsequential rogue states … is a sign of weakness, not of strength … This is classic for a crumbling system … The final glory is militarism.

Polly Toynbee
God’s chosen people, uniquely blessed, nurture a self-image almost as deranged in its profound self-delusion as the old Soviet Union. The most advanced … nation on earth knows nothing of itself, irony-free and blind to the world around it.

Sharon Zukin
The seduction of shopping is not about buying goods. It’s about dreaming of a perfect society and a perfect self.

Creating a New Civilization by Alvin Toffler and Heidi Toffler - Excerpts

Creating a New Civilization: The Politics of the Third Wave. Alvin Toffler and Heidi Toffler. 1995. ISBN 1-57036-223-8

EXCERPTS

Even more jarring and significant, however, is the growing transfer of political power away from our formal political structures – the Congress, the White House, the government agencies and political parties – to electronically-linked grassroots groups and to the media.

What is needed, we believe, is a clear distinction between rear-guard politicians who wish to preserve or restore an unworkable past, and those who are ready to make the transition to what we call a “Third Wave” information-age society.

The emergent civilization writes a new code of behavior for us and carries us beyond standardization, synchronization and centralization, beyond the concentration of energy, money, and power.

Today all high-technology nations are reeling from the collision between the Third Wave and the obsolete, encrusted economies and institutions of the Second.

The Second Wave created mass societies that reflected and required mass production. In Third Wave, brain-based economies, mass production (which could almost be considered the defining mark of industrial society) is already an outmoded form. De-massified production – short runs of highly customized products – is the new cutting edge of manufacture. Mass marketing gives way to market segmentation and “particle marketing”, paralleling the change in production.

Anyone reading this page has an amazing skill called literacy. It comes as a shock sometimes to remember that all of us had ancestors who were illiterate. Not stupid or ignorant, but invincibly illiterate. Not only illiterate, they were also “innumerate,” meaning they couldn’t do the simplest arithmetic. Those few who could were deemed downright dangerous. A marvelous warning attributed to Augustine holds that Christians should stay away from people who could add or subtract. It was obvious they had “made a covenant with the Devil.”

The only reason we ship huge amounts of raw materials like bauxite or nickel or copper across the planet is that we lack the knowledge to convert local materials into usable substitutes.

While land, labor, raw materials and capital were the main factors of production in the Second Wave economy of the past, knowledge – broadly defined here to include data, information, images, symbols, culture, ideology, and values – is now the central resource of the Third Wave economy.

Work itself is transformed. Low-skilled, essentially interchangeable muscle work drove the Second Wave. Mass factory-style education prepared workers for routine, repetitive labor. By contrast, the Third Wave is accompanied by a growing non-interchangeability of labor as skill requirements skyrocket. Muscle power is essentially fungible. Thus a low-skilled worker who quits or is fired can be replaced quickly and with little cost. By contrast, the rising levels of specialized skills required in the Third Wave economy make finding the right person with the right skills harder and more costly.

Economies of speed replace economies of scale. Competition is so intense and the speeds required so high that the old “time is money” rule is increasingly updated to “every interval of time is worth more than the one before it.”

In Second Wave or smokestack societies an injection of capital spending or consumer purchasing power could stimulate the economy and generate jobs. Given one million jobless, one could, in principle, prime the economy and create one million jobs. Since the jobs were either interchangeable or required so little skill that they could be learned in less than an hour, virtually any unemployed worker could fill almost any job. In today’s super-symbolic economy this is less true – which is why a lot of unemployment seems intractable, and neither the traditional Keynesian nor monetarist remedies work well.

In today’s global economy, pumping money into the consumer’s pocket may simply send it flowing overseas without doing anything to help the domestic economy. An American buying a new TV set or compact disc player merely sends dollars to Japan, Korea, Malaysia or elsewhere. The purchase doesn’t add jobs at home.

The jobless desperately need money if they and their families are to survive, and it is both necessary and morally right to provide them with decent levels of public assistance. But any effective strategy for reducing joblessness is a super-symbolic economy must depend less on the allocation of wealth and more on the allocation of knowledge.

We will also have to begin according human-service jobs the same respect previously reserved for manufacture rather than snidely denigrating the entire service sector as “hamburger flipping.” McDonald’s cannot stand as the sole symbol for a range of activities that includes everything from teaching to working at a dating service or in a hospital radiology center. What’s more, if, as is often charged, wages are low in the service sector, then the solution is to increase service productivity and to invent new forms of work-force organization and collective bargaining. Unions, primarily designed for the crafts or for mass manufacturing, need to be totally transformed or else replaced by new-style organizations more appropriate to the super-symbolic economy. To survive they will have to support rather than resist such things as work-at-home programs, flextime and job-sharing.

In lowbrow industrial economies, wealth was typically measured by the possession of goods. The production of goods was regarded as central to the economy. Conversely, symbolic and service activities, while unavoidable, were stigmatized as nonproductive. The manufacture of goods – autos, radios, tractors, TV sets – was seen as “male” or macho and words like practical, realistic or hardheaded were associated with it. By contrast, the production of knowledge or the exchange of information was typically disparaged as mere “paper pushing.”

Marxist economists, if any thing, have had a harder time trying to integrate high brow work into their schema, and “socialist realism” in the arts produced thousands of portrayals of happy workers, their Schwarzenegger-like muscles straining against a background of cogwheels, smokestacks and steam locomotives. The glorification of the proletariat and the theory that it was the vanguard of change, reflected the principles of a lowbrow economy.

In brief, production is reconceptualized as a far more encompassing process than the economists and ideologists of lowbrow economics imagined. And at every step from today on, it is knowledge, not cheap labor, and symbols, not raw materials, that embody and add value. This deep reconceptualization of the sources of added value is fraught with consequence. It smashes the assumptions of both free-marketism and Marxism alike, and the material-ismo that gave rise to both. Thus, the ideas that value is sweated from the back of the worker alone and that value is produced by the glorious capitalist entrepreneur, both implied in material-ismo, are revealed to be false and misleading politically as well as economically.

A one-party political system is designed to control political communication. Since no other party exists, it restricts the diversity of political information flowing through the society, blocking feedback and thus blinding those in power to the full complexity of their problems. With very narrowly defined information flowing upward through the approved channel and commands flowing downward, it becomes very difficult for the system to detect errors and correct them. In fact, top-down control in the socialist countries was based increasingly on lies and misinformation since reporting bad news up the line was often risky. The decision to run a one-party system is a decision, after all, about knowledge.

A Third Wave economic policy should not pick winners and losers, but it should clear away the obstacles to professionalization and development of the services needed to make life in America less stressed-out, less frustrating and impersonal. Yet no political party as yet has even begun to think this way.

America’s schools, for example, still operate like factories. They subject the raw material (children) to standardized instruction and routine inspection. An important question to ask of any proposed educational innovation is simply this: is it intended to make the factory run more efficiently, or is it designed, as it should be, to get rid of the factory model altogether and replace it with individualized, customized education. A similar question could be asked of health legislation, welfare legislation and of every proposal to reorganize the federal bureaucracy. America needs new institutions built on post-bureaucratic, post-factory models.

Against the Machine by Lee Siegel - Excerpts

Against the machine: Being human in the age of the electronic mob.
Siegel, Lee. 2008. ISBN-13: 978-0385522656

EXCERPTS

Convenience is an essential part of what most contemporary commercial propositions promise to bring us.

But a revolution in convenience cannot possibly be … anything that can be called a revolution. And yet the Internet has indeed caused a revolution. It’s just that the prophets of the Internet don’t ever want to talk about what type of revolution it is.

Satisfying our own desires has become more important than balancing our relationships with other people.

We live more in our own heads than any society has at any time, and for some people now the only reality that exists is the one inside their heads.

The Internet is the first social environment to serve the needs of the isolated, elevated, asocial individual.

Technology is a catalyst for bringing forth some human traits and suppressing others.

Ten years ago, the space in a coffeehouse abounded in experience. Now that social space has been contracted into isolated points of wanting, all locked into separate phases of inwardness.

What kind of idea do we have of the world when, day after day, we sit in front of our screens and enter further and further into the illusion that we ourselves are actually creating our own external reality out of our own internal desires?

Today’s New Entrepreneur represents an all-out assault on the idea that a person can exist outside the sphere of the marketplace.

People don’t want their privacy invaded. They now want other people, as many people as possible, to watch them as they carefully craft their privacy into a marketable, public style. Real private life has gone underground; it is a type of contraband.

… people have now come to expect inner life to be performed, rather than disclosed.

But self-expression is not the same thing as imagination.

What “self-expression” does not mean is the making of art – of any kind of art, popular or high. You would not refer to The Catcher in the Rye as a major feat of self-expression …

The comparison of art to self-expression would make no sense if the latter had not entirely supplanted the former in the lives of self-expression’s vast number of producers and consumers.

Like the novice performers on American Idol, every one of those videobloggers is performing some piece of popular culture; you recognize the shticks of a hundred comedians you’ve seen on television …

Let’s accept [Alvin] Toffler’s crude and simplistic definition of what is still the modern economy: an arrangement in which life is divided into producing – that is, earning a living – and buying what other people produce or provide. Though Toffler doesn’t say so, in the activity of buying we also find our leisure time. We do so by purchasing a product or a service and then, once the transaction is finished, by withdrawing into our private space to enjoy it. For Toffler, however, a social space in which nothing economic takes place is a terrible waste. It is a kind of sin.

In Toffler’s vision of the future, countless activities that were once disinterested and private, or simply leisurely, are converted into one type of transaction or another. Indeed, no private or leisure time exists. Every private thought is performed for public consumption, and every leisure moment (from toilet training to lovemaking) is a highly focused search for a specific gratification, guided by experts serving you in their field. No unexpected events or unanticipated human contact need apply.

[Pierre] Omidyar’s eBay directly took its cue from Toffler’s “prosumer” – it has hyperefficiently perfected the art of having people cram its products down their own throats, and all in the transvaluing name of “democracy” and “libertarianism”.

No matter how different the Web sites are that you visit, the experience of being on them is similar.

… on Match.com, she and I are learning to perform ourselves, and package ourselves, and sell ourselves to each other. We sound like everyone else, and like everything else.

… if you are the “seller” – a funny irony takes place. Amid all these infinite-seeming choices, the only way to stand out and be chosen is, paradoxically, to sound more and more like everyone else. But you must sound more like everyone else than anyone else is able to sound like everyone else.

The saddest person experience, the most outrageous sex act, the most blatant insult, gets “produced” as a video clip or blog entry for worldwide consumption. Demassification is a more advanced means of allowing mass culture to reach down deeper into life. Product and producer get enfolded into the single individual, who then goes public in order to tout his privacy.

All the imitation and derivation stem from the fact that on the Internet, success – like choice and access – exists for its own sake. Since the greatest success is, well, being greatly successful, you choose a performance that’s already been certified as being a big success. Popularity being the best guarantee of success, you end up imitating the most proven popular act. You must sound more like everyone else than anyone else is able to sound like everyone else.

When you’re an adolescent, to be like someone is often a prerequisite for being liked by that person.

Maybe he was the “class clown”, who ingratiated himself at the price of his dignity. Or the boy who vandalized or outraged in order to please. Or she was the “easy” girl. Such a person did not appeal to other people on the basis of a quality that he shared with them, a quality that was also the essence of an activity which did not belong to anyone: athletic prowess, dramatic skill, intellectual capacity. Such a person divorced popularity from identity, and from the kind of accomplishment that might boost self-esteem and strengthen identity. He transformed his very self – not his interests, talents, or skills, his self – into a product that he tailored to fit the needs of others. For this type of person, there was no such thing as other people to try to relate to. There was only an audience to try to please.

The Internet loves preadults … What could be more democratic than uttering an obscenity?

… its wild success lay mostly in the fact that [Malcolm] Gladwell was writing a guide to making yourself a prosumer. The Tipping Point is a how-to book on Homo interneticus.

The Internet’s premium on popularity as the sole criterion of success gives the lie to its claims of “choice”, “access”, and increased opportunity for individual expression.

In Gladwell’s eyes, the self is always a packaged commodity. It is a product we shape and sell through our performance of what we want other people to think is going on inside us.

Popular culture used to draw people to what they liked. Internet culture draws people to what everyone else likes.

A quirk attracts attention. Originality holds it.

Like the people on YouTube and on the social-networking sites, on the Internet dating sites, and in the blogosphere, [American] Idol’s striving singers package and perform their privacy for public consumption. What makes this show, this enemy of originality, so original is that the private and the public are literally fused and exposed before your very eyes. In the race for popularity – that is, fame without accomplishment – the self is left behind. They just want to be liked. They just want to be big.

The rise of reality TV, which celebrates physical and psychological imperfection, is a revolt against the oppressiveness of other people’s fame – a rebellion against the oppressive authority of those glamorous, unattainable “screen icons”. An even more explicit uprising against glamorous authority is the celebration of mediocre, merely derivative talent on the anti-original Idol. Fame is now a “virus” that “infects” the masses by means of its “contagiousness”. Popularity has bullied fame out of its perch.

If he were starting out today, the photographer Robert Frank, for example, would not be traveling across America, snapping pictures of ordinary life. He would be orchestrating his photographs to look like stories about American life, artificially real stories that we had to mentally project ourselves into in order to complete.

Rhythm is music’s first person, as the close-up is film’s.

Commercial culture … is all about the gratification of your self-interest, and it involves the total engagement of your ego.

“Web 2.0” is the Internet’s characteristically mechanistic term for the participatory culture that it has now consummated and established as a social reality.

Although Web 2.0 is the brainchild of businessmen, many of its promoters extol it with the rhetoric of “democracy”, that most sacred of American words. But democracy is also the most common and effective American political and social pretext.

… when Internet boosters speak ringingly about “the many wrestling power from the few”, as Time put it, what they usually mean is finding a different way for the same old few to bring in many new customers.

”Convenience” is also the rote answer to another fundamental question: Why does anyone not employed in the news media need a constant flow of news and information?

The Internet does indeed have achievements in the news business. It has forced the traditional news outlets to seek out more and more trivial news, in order to compete with the Internet. And it has engorged the “old” media with streams of useless information. The latter development is yet another consequential creation of a new value that thrives behind the mask of an old one. For what this new religion of information has done is to pretend that information now has the power of knowledge. In the process, knowledge has been devalued into information.

You desire knowledge for its own sake, not for the sake of knowing what someone else knows, or for the sake of being able to pass it on to someone else. Knowledge guarantees your autonomy. Information gets you thinking like everyone else who is absorbing the same information.

… the Internet has no interest in knowledge for its own sake. It prizes information because, unlike knowledge, information has exchange value on the market.

Wikipedia, with its video-game-like mode of participation, and with its mountains of trivial factoids, of shifting mounds of gossip, of inane personal details, is knowledge in the process of becoming information. At the same time, consume participation in the creation of the news is information crumbling into particles of incoherence.

But we are living in a popularity culture, where being liked is the supreme value. Therefore, few people write critically about anything any more. Instead of criticism, the air brims with mockery and sarcasm …

[Wyatt Mason] argued that social criticism is now mostly in the hands of the comedians and that their humor was characterized by a tone which was “so sarcastic, so ironic, so sardonic.” … Perhaps Mason did not want to risk the cascade of obloquy that would have fallen on him from the popularity-driven blogosphere if he had developed an argument about, say, the similarity between the contemptuous sarcasm of sensationally popular Stephen Colbert and the contemptuous sarcasm of sensationally unpopular George W. Bush. Who could blame Mason for his caution, given the deafening clamor of mockery, taunting, and rage that is all around us? The deafening clamor of tons upon tons of information being chewed up and spat derisively out. The sound of the blogosphere.

Blogs are in the vanguard of the popularity culture. They must sound more like everyone else that anyone else is able to sound like everyone else. On any given day, the political and gossip blogs move in lockstep from one hot topic to the next. What gets attention is the most outrageous variation on what everyone is talking about. That gets the most links, and the most links get the most page views, and the most page views win the highest Google ranking. Traditional media outlets have divided the business side from the editorial side. Bloggers, who are prosumers par excellence, are in the business of selling their only product, which is themselves.

… since the blogosphere represents mass opinion galvanized by the promise of approval and recognition, it is more mainstream than the so-called mainstream media ever were.

FIVE OPEN SUPERSECRETS
1. Not everyone has something meaningful to say.
2. Few people have anything original to say.
3. Only a handful of people know how to write well.
4. Most people will do almost anything to be liked.
5. “Customers” are always right, but “people” aren’t.

Now the blogosphere’s drags on fairness, honesty, and accuracy are accepted as an immutable condition, a set of trade-offs that have to be made for the sake of democracy, anti-elitism, true dissent, and greater access to information. It follows, then that any criticism of the blogosphere is antidemocratic, elitist, protective of the status quo, and a form of censorship.

In the name of “full participation”, unbiased, rational, intelligent, and comprehensive news, news as a profession, like the practice of law or medicine – will be come less and less available. Standards will get drowned out by the mass pressure of universal access. For universal access requires that the news deliver universally appealing items. Like demagogic politicians, who appeal to appetite and emotion rather than reason, this will be the age of demagogic journalism.

Internet users generally, however, and bloggers especially inhabit an absolutely solitary space in which other people exist as stick figures filled out by the user’s or blogger’s conception of them. It is a personal space disguised as a social space. In the blogosphere, the ego operates unobstructed by other egos. That’s why virulent hatred comes so easily, and why any response to it comes as a shock, and an outrage. Stick figures are not supposed to answer back. Not when they exist mostly in our head.

You never enter the Internet as you would enter a park, or go onto the street, or browse through a bookstore. You don’t go online to just go for a walk, not knowing what you’ll find or who you’ll meet. You go online to look for something. Everyone you meet online is looking for something, too. The Internet is the most deliberate, purposeful environment ever created.

QUOTATIONS

Brady, Jim
The best thing about the Web – you have so much information about how people use it – is also the worst thing.

Gladwell, Malcolm
When we are trying to make an idea or attitude or product tip, we’re trying to change our audience in some small yet critical respect: we’re trying to infect them.

Turner, Fred
[for Stewart Brand] the rhetoric of community provided the ideological cover necessary to transform a potentially stark and single-minded market transaction into a complex, multidimensional act.