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Profound
Psychological Perspectives and Prescriptions for Trying Times
An Earth Manifesto
publication by Dr. Tiffany B. Twain
The famous
pamphleteer Thomas Paine wrote, during a dark hour of the Revolutionary War in
1776: “These are the times that try men’s souls.” In times of trouble we need someone to speak words of wisdom to
us, clearly, cogently, truthfully and convincingly. When we are absorbed in a bubble of fear and uncertainty, we can
become paralyzed and lose the ability to rationally gauge our best courses of
action. In hard times we look to
supposed experts, political leaders, economists, spiritual authorities, gurus,
saviors or philosophers to provide us with guidance, assistance, reassurance
and comforting direction and help us overcome adversities and our fears and
insecurities. Or we look to ideologues
and demagogues, and this is dangerous.
Modern
industrial capitalism is essentially driven by the goal of making profits
through the stimulation of resource exploitation and materialistic
consumption. In 2008, a variety of
factors got us into an economic crisis that was more severe than any since the
Depression of the 1930s. These
contributing factors include bubble economic policies, deregulatory ideologies,
and the promotion of debt financing and highly-leveraged speculation. It would be a good idea, as we recover from
this economic malaise, to do so in ways that can be sustained in the long
run. We need to re-orient ourselves,
restructure our societies, rethink our national trajectories, and boldly move
forward.
When economic
growth falters, many social problems intensify and come into clearer
focus. Economic hardships force us to
reconsider our personal habits and goals and activities. We need courage, perseverance, and
philosophic equanimity during such times.
And we need to reconnect with healthy aspirations and authentic goals
and what truly matters most.
Our economies
are structured to be dependent on increases in consumption and continuous
population growth to stoke economic expansion and create wealth and provide
jobs for the increasing population. Yet
we are beginning to see that there are limits to the extent we can use up
non-renewable resources and over-harvest renewable resources. There are limits to the damage we can do to
natural ecosystems with impunity, and to the amount of garbage and toxic wastes
we can produce without causing significant adverse consequences. There are also limiting factors associated
with the burning of fossil fuels and the amount of greenhouse gases we can spew
into the atmosphere without exacerbating destabilizing climate change and other
unintended adversities.
The purpose of
this essay is to delve into the psychological aspects of capitalism,
consumerism and human nature, and to seek incisive understandings of better
ways forward. Before this
investigation, I turn to the bigger context of these considerations.
The Bigger Context:
Materialism Evaluated
President Obama gave a commencement speech to graduates of the
University of Notre Dame in May 2009.
He declared to those assembled at this Catholic university:
“Too many of us view life only through
the lens of immediate self-interest and crass materialism. The strong too often dominate the weak, and
too many of those with wealth and with power find all manners of justification
for their own privilege in the face of poverty and injustices.”
Modern man still
has primitive instincts, and human nature has aspects that are both noble and
ignoble. The spiritual sides of our
character and selves are the domain of our most noble motives, like aspirations
for peace, fairness, compassion, kindness, healthy community and virtuous
behaviors such as acting with prudence, justice, fortitude and temperance. Materialistic impulses like greed, envy,
acquisitiveness, pride of possession, jealousy, immoderate selfishness and
ruthless exploitation of people and natural resources, on the other hand, lie
on the ignoble side of the scale. Even the
conservative Pope Benedict XVI occasionally railed against rampant materialism,
as has Pope Francis. Consistent with
the philosophies of almost all religious traditions, these Popes have pointed
out that worldly goods, money and power are transitory, and that ultimately
they are not deeply fulfilling.
Boethius, an influential Roman consul and
philosopher, long ago made a similar argument in his book Consolation of Philosophy.
This was the most widely copied work of secular literature in Europe for
many centuries. Treachery had reduced
Boethius from a position of power and wealth to that of a condemned prisoner in
524 CE. Then, in prison, a vision of
‘Lady Philosophy’ came to him, embodying true wisdom and compassion. He derived consolation from this vision, and
realized that happiness comes from within.
He wrote:
“Understanding
of the self only arises in relationship, in watching yourself in relationship
to people, ideas, and things; to trees,
the earth, and the world around you and within you. Relationship is the mirror in which the self is revealed. Without self-knowledge there is no basis for
right thought and action.”
Materialism, self-understanding and proper relationship can be seen from
a perspective that sheds light on much of human history. An age-old battle has been waged from time
immemorial between the flesh and the spirit.
All concepts of virtue and vice, of sin, and of heaven and hell
originate in this basic dualistic conflict.
Some people seek meaning and fulfillment primarily through material
things and pleasures. Others seek
purpose through spiritual practices like worship, prayer, meditation, yoga, and
seeking enlightenment and transcendence.
Stoics and ascetics embrace a sense of rigorous propriety and a
puritanical denial of pleasures, and they even sometimes mortify their
flesh.
In contrast, Epicurean connoisseurs take a more humane and indulgent
approach and seek out the pleasures of delicious food, pleasing beverages,
stimulating intercourse, swelling accomplishment, and the satisfaction of
yearnings. Most Americans, it seems, do
not live by any particular philosophy, and they carouse at every opportunity,
eating and drinking and dancing and flirting and gambling and laughing and
loving and singing and striving and struggling and arguing and fighting and
such.
Buddhist philosophers say that ‘desire is the source of all
suffering’. Surely there is some truth
in that point of view, and there is a kind of merit in detachment from
obsessive concerns about outcomes.
Luminous forces have done battle with dark forces from time immemorial,
and this is a struggle within us between virtue and vice, ascetic denial and
Epicurean indulgences, and the spirit and the flesh. In thinking about this tension between the spirit and the flesh,
a perplexing vision comes to me of the alternating nobility and pathos of
people who sublimate their physical desires.
As John Fowles observed, “We are designed to want; with nothing to want, we
are like windmills in a world without wind.”
I have a great deal of respect for Buddhists like the Dalai Lama, whose
spirituality is not confused with motives for power and control like those of
the leaders of established churches.
Unlike some religious leaders, the Dalai Lama does not espouse narrow,
parochial or bigotry-prone doctrines that interfere with the otherwise noble
aspects represented in many religious traditions.
Plunged in thought, I reflect on the fact that joys and sorrows affect
every one of us, and future joys and sorrows will be felt by each of us, in
unknowable measure. Pleasure and pain
are our lot between the moment of our first breath and that of our last. For some, the joys are sadly few; and for millions, the sorrows and profound
anxieties are many. Some people seek
adventures and new experiences, fresh perspectives, and the road less
taken. Others prefer traditional activities,
the reassuring solace of the known, and the comfort of the same old path; these people tend to oppose change and
close-mindedly reject new ideas, and they strive to belong and to conform.
John Fowles pointed out in The
Aristos that one reason there is a such a “great contemporary attraction”
of philosophies like Zen Buddhism, and of mind-altering drugs, both of which
tend to facilitate the discovery of virgin beauty in familiar objects, is that
our search for the new and the virgin is difficult to satisfy. This puts us in a situation similar to that
of Midas: “Everything he touched turned
to gold, and from then on became useless to him. We crave the virgin beauty, but as soon as we experience it, it
turns to gold … or boredom. We have to
move on. The satisfaction of the desire
is the creation of a new desire.”
People
tend to either figuratively favor the god Dionysus, Greek god of wine and
revelry, ecstasy, inspiration, instinct, adventure, intoxication, song, music
and dance; OR, they favor the god
Apollo, the god of peace, leisure, serenity, beauty, intellectual contemplation,
logic and philosophic calm. This is
another aspect of the conflict between the impulses of the body and flesh
versus those of the mind and spirit.
This is a contrast between intention and action that may be related to
the dominance of the left-brain over the right-brain; it’s like the age-old contest for domination either by feelings,
emotions and intuitions OR by thoughts and rationality.
Heroic
omnivorous souls like Nikos Kazantzakis’ character Zorba in Zorba the Greek seek ultimate expression
through the thorough whetting of appetites in life. They embrace and exhaust all things with passion, so that when
death finally comes, it will find a world-traveling spirit sufficiently spent
that it will voice no wild lament, and express no sad regrets, and will instead
feel a sense of deep satisfaction at a life well lived. One could, in contrast, live the life of a
saint and embrace visions of a life of eternal glory in Heaven while others
supposedly burn in Hell for having believed erroneously, or one could strive to
do good, while alive, for reasons unrelated to religious dogmas. “To do no harm”, is a pretty good motto!
No
ultimate right and wrong exists between these alternate ways of being and these
differing visions of life. The best
that one can do is to assimilate the best of these contrasting ways of being by
living life with moderation, appreciation, respectful awareness, reasonable
self-esteem, fair-mindedness and a generosity of spirit. And every person is well-advised to try to
focus on what really matters most in life – our physical and mental health and
an affirmative bond with people important in our lives. Emotional intelligence is a key, and this
brings a big smile to my face as I recall Pixar’s film Inside Out and the
evoked concept of the emotional control center in each person’s brain, where
Joy struggles with Sadness, and Anger blows his top while Fear and Disgust try
to grab control to do their thing. Seek
balance, and act with emotional intelligence.
“Money
Makes the World Go ‘Round”
John Fowles
also writes in The Aristos: “Each age has its mythical happy man; the one with wisdom, with genius, with
saintliness, with beauty, with whatever is rare and ‘the Many’ are not able to
possess. The twentieth century’s happy
man is the man with money.” He also
notes: “Much more than we let
philosophies guide our lives, we allow obsessions to drive them; and there is no doubt which has been the
great driving obsession of the last one hundred and fifty years. It is money.” … “Having, not being, governs our time.”
Money can, to a
certain extent, buy the variety and security that most people strongly
desire. To create a fairer, happier and
more secure citizenry, we should make our economic system much fairer by
championing middle-out economics instead of buying the Big Lie that we must let
trickle down economic policies dominate.
To accomplish this, effective reforms must be made to our political
system to make it more just by reducing the unfair influence of Big Money. The significant increases in disparities of
inequalities and wealth that characterize our current neo-Gilded Age are
socially undesirable. Our public
policies have stoked the envy of Have Nots, and given greater power to the
protective jealously of the Haves. These
policies have powerfully motivated people to indulge in conspicuous
consumption. This state of affairs is
cynically unwise and excessively damaging to the environmental commons.
In John
Bunyan’s allegorical book The Pilgrim’s
Progress from This World to That Which Is To Come, the allegorical characters Christian and
Faithful are traveling through the wilderness seeking salvation and entry into
the Celestial City of Heaven. Christian
had even abandoned his family for this quixotic quest. They must pass through the town of Vanity
where there is a year-round fair, called Vanity Fair. Bunyan notes that “… all that is sold there, or that comes from
there, is vanity.” … “This is no
newly-begun business, but a thing of ancient standing.” At Vanity Fair, “there are at all times to
be seen” every kind of material thing, and lusts, pleasures and delights of all
sorts, as well as “jugglings, cheats, games, plays, fools, apes, knaves, and
rogues, and that of every kind”. The
religious travelers, striving to remain on the straight and narrow, took no
interest in the goods for sale, asserting that, “We buy the truth.”
The truth?? –
Maybe yes, and maybe no, I say! Myth,
fables, simplistic understandings and dogmatic certitudes may be appealing in
many ways, but the fullness of nuance and complexity are needed for the best
understanding of who we are, and of what our best courses of action should
rightly be. See Inspiration, Imagination, and the Deep Well of Human Impulses in
the Earth Manifesto for more information about John Bunyan and the context of
his religious perspectives.
The Foibles of a
Societal Emphasis on Consuming Things
While industrial
civilization relies on consumerism, this strategy is a shortsighted and
spiritually bankrupt expediency that serves to disconnect us from nature and
the wholesomeness of healthy relationships and communities. Compulsive consumerism is in some regards a
pathetic form of mental disconnection within our souls from our authentic well-being. It represents a materialistic way of living
that is correlated to an oft-bemoaned decline in the standards of our society’s
morals, ethics, and levels of happiness and satisfaction. When people over-indulge in excesses of any
sort, they are like addicts who must undergo withdrawal treatments to wean
themselves from their addictions.
Consumerism and advertising equate personal
happiness with the purchasing of material possessions. Consumerism creates a kind of pathology that
can produce angst and emptiness. Some
of its primary symptoms are addictive behaviors. Shopping and buying things have figuratively become preferred
drugs of choice. Addictions to shopping
and buying things that we often don’t need are one characteristic of industrial
society. Other similar addictions in
our modern world include dependence on alcohol, drugs, anti-depressants,
gambling, video games, electronic devices, and a domineering compulsion to try
to control everything.
This pervasive pattern of addictive behaviors
strongly influences our economics, our politics, and our interpersonal
relationships. It is a pattern of
excesses and out-of-control consumption that results in people in the U.S.
consuming 70 times more per person, on average, than a person in India. Such behaviors are not qualitatively different
from well-known behavior patterns of substance abusers.
A psychotherapist named Sally Erickson, producer
of the documentary, What a Way to Go:
Life at the End of Empire, once observed:
“What most of us experience, when it comes to
addiction, is a pattern of continually seeking more of what it is we don’t
really want and, therefore, never being fully satisfied. And as long as we are never satisfied, we
continue to seek more, while our real needs are never being met.”
Consumerism
is a reflection of the fact that in our culture we do not promote authentic
forms of deeper meaning and purpose in our lives, not nearly as much as we
promote the acquisition of possessions.
Evangelical religions are not honest, relevant or ecumenical enough to
propitiously provide for these needs.
Many people try to make up for this sense of hollowness by shopping and
buying. There is overwhelming evidence
that people who have materialistic attitudes and values are less happy and more
prone to anger, depression and anxiety than those who are less
materialistic. If
a survey were done on the Top Ten Most Wonderful things that contribute to
well-being in people’s lives, we would find that almost all of them are
non-material things.
The
main psychological determinants of happiness include good relationships, strong
friendships, meaningful work, a broad education, community connectedness, the positivity of affirmation and recognition, physical
health, leisure time undertakings, creative and artistic pursuits, simplicity
of living, participatory sports, intimacy, kindness, peaceful coexistence,
spiritual practices, and the appreciation of nature.
Annie
Leonard’s first online video, The Story
of Stuff, talks about a crisis caused by our addiction to the growth in
consumption, and the dysfunctional and detrimental aspects of consumerism
involved in the extraction of resources and the profligate production,
distribution, consumption and disposal of goods. The Story of Stuff provides a fascinating perspective on such
things as the pathos of a system designed for planned obsolescence and
fashion-related ‘perceived obsolescence’.
It concludes with a powerful argument for better ways forward, and for
the restructuring of our economy. And
it adduces many ideas on how we could achieve economic justice and ecological
sustainability. I highly recommend
watching this short film, and all of her subsequent ones!
Fulfillment vs. Addiction
Psychologists say that the purpose or function of
an addiction is essentially to put a buffer between ourselves and the
experience or awareness of our emotions.
Addictions serve to numb us, so that we are out of touch with what we
know and what we feel. This numb buffer
zone eventually becomes a habitual coping mechanism. There are many socially accepted surrogates for genuine
well-being and healthy connectedness -- things like alcohol, Prozac, obsessive
work, or Jesus -- but these things do not in general truly heal.
Addictions, according to psychologists, often
arise as the result of some violation of the self. This wounding is like a deep trauma that can come from any number
of causes: economic hardship, broken
relationships, domestic abuse and violence, illness, the death of a loved one,
prejudice, racism, discrimination, hateful feelings, warfare, and even
insidiously mundane things like shame, rejection, insecurity or feelings of
inadequacy.
Writer-activists like Chellis Glendinning even
assert that consumer culture drives a “culture of empire” that is inherently
abusive, because this system is built on the exploitation of resources and the
subjugation of others. Those who live
under such systems tend to undergo a wounding or trauma that leaves society
suffering from a collective form of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. Glendinning examines the disturbing
relationship between addiction and the ecological crisis in her book, My Name is Chellis and I’m in Recovery from
Western Civilization.
In an essay on what she calls “techno-addiction”,
Glendinning writes about our “primary” and “secondary” sources of
satisfaction. Primary needs are those
needs that are intrinsic to human beings and necessary for life: nourishment, safe shelter, love, awareness,
meaning, purpose and spiritual succor.
When primary needs are not met, people sometimes turn to “secondary”
sources, which include material possessions, gadgets, electronic devices,
pornography or drugs. Eventually people
can become obsessed with secondary sources “as if our lives depended on them.”
It
is these secondary sources of satisfaction that our economic and political
systems often promote. In doing so,
they reinforce addictive behaviors and help drive the consumer machine. Businesses
stimulate demand with seductive advertising and sly sales tactics that utilize
slick demonstrations, persuasive testimonials, sexy user imagery, or amusing
parody. Product advertising
exploits people’s unconscious motivations and manipulates hidden psychological
desires. Television and radio ads often appeal to our base instincts for dominance
over others. They titillate us, or urge
us to conform. They generally do not
appeal to our higher and more virtuous instincts. Consumption is promoted not only through persuasive
corporate marketing, but also through misguided government subsidies, perverse
incentives and the encouragement of consumerism in holidays like Christmas and
Valentine’s Day.
Advertising and the media generally do not
contribute to wholesome values. They help condition people to envy and to
be envied. They use sex and celebrity to sell products, they glamorize
youth, and they divert people’s
attention from vitally important things by using sensationalism in the news and
shallow distractions like stories of scandal, intrigue and violence. We are entertained by sports spectacles and
vicarious experiences of the glory of victory and the agony of defeat. A sinister side-effect of these influences
is that they encourage winning at any cost.
Slick marketing makes us less aware of positive values such as integrity
of character, honesty, thoughtfulness, healthy moderation, genuine
connectedness, responsible thrift, generosity of spirit, positive forms of
communication, and real civic responsibility.
I saw a funny Bumper Sticker the other day that
read: Clear the Road. I’m SIXTEEN!
That spirit of unbridled youthful impetuosity is
admirable for its enthusiasm, but not for any kind of untrammeled merit.
Marketing and Consumer Psychology
Our corporate consumer culture is driven by
consumers who are rarely satisfied with what they buy. People are conditioned to always want to buy
the newest and the biggest in order to feel like they are somebody. If more authentic needs were being met, it’s
a good possibility that certain markets would contract or collapse. Knowing this, businesses have in a sense
engineered our identities to encourage disposable goods and accommodate planned
obsolescence. We are told that every
few years we need an upgrade.
Tellingly, we call it our “new look” or the “new you.” Whole industries are based on this.
“We can see where consumer psychology has led us,”
one observer notes. “It’s a
disaster. It’s the kind of thing that
has caused the human organism and psyche to go so far out of balance. Marketing to our unconscious leads us down a
dangerous path that promises satisfaction and wholeness and a sense of
importance and worth, without us having to do anything but spend. But none of these things come in any real
sense unless we work hard at them.”
It is foolishly shortsighted for us to let such
pervasive persuasion result in consumerism that threatens the future well-being
of life on Earth. This is especially true in light of heedless resource
depletion and stimulated population growth.
Our societies would be better off, in the long run, if we invested more
money in well-rounded critical-thinking education, efficient uses of energy,
climate action conservation efforts, national infrastructure, fair opportunity,
social justice, honest family planning and free contraception. Instead of
doing this, our leaders squander taxpayer funds and borrow money from the
future to give generous tax breaks to rich people, and to fund pork barrel
projects, increase corporate and citizen “entitlements”, ramp up spending on
weapons, warfare, foreign occupations and war reconstruction projects. Naively, conservatives insist on the
teaching of abstinence-only sex education for young adults. We should change these priorities and alter
this paradigm!
Remember the Immediate Aftermath of the
Attacks of September 11, 2001
Times of crisis provide our nation with greater
opportunities to make significant positive changes for the future. But in desperate times, our leaders all too
often champion shortsighted expediencies.
For instance, in the aftermath of the terrorist attacks of 9/11,
President Bush urged the American people to go shopping. He could have instituted a bold program
after 9/11 that would have steered us toward energy independence by developing
fossil fuel alternatives; he could have
helped wean us from our using polluting non-renewable fossil fuels by
encouraging us to use energy more efficiently, and to consume less fuel. This would have lessened our dangerous
dependence on the volatile Middle East for our energy supplies. The Bush administration could also have
implemented a modest tax increase on gasoline to pay for its “war on terror”,
instead of financing preemptive warfare with borrowed money that added to the
dangerously growing national debt. This
would have represented a small amount of ‘sacrifice’ that would have left our
national economy in much better shape.
He could have; he should
have; but he didn’t.
In the face of the daunting obstacles we face, we
must not despair. After all:
“Despair is the solace of fools.”
---Today’s Special, a humorous film released in 2009
The Implications of Consumerism as a Gambit
for Social Control
Making addictions seem natural through strategies
that promote consumerism curiously had its beginnings in early 20th
century notions of psychology and social control. The story of how hyper-consumerism and the “consumer self” came
into being is the subject of a BBC documentary titled The Century of the Self.
One of the theories that emerged was the brainchild of Sigmund Freud’s
nephew, Edward Bernays, who was a sloganeering progenitor of ‘public
relations’. Bernays helped Woodrow
Wilson sell the First World War to the American public by inventing the tag
line, “Making the World Safe for Democracy.”
Bernays says in the film, “Public Relations is really just propaganda,
but we couldn’t use the word because the Germans had.”
Bernays showed American corporations how to
encourage people to buy material goods that they didn’t need. He did this by connecting those products to
people’s subliminal thoughts and unconscious desires and unmet needs. This made Bernays a powerful man, and he
used this influence to propose that similar principles be used in politics to
control the masses. This
social-control-through-indulgence model was later excoriated in Aldous Huxley’s
Brave New World, a book that is a critique of consumerism and the
vapidity of a culture based too much in the mindless seeking of pleasure. Brave
New World is a “futuristic dystopia” in which freethinking and human
attachment have either been outlawed or genetically modified out of most human
beings. In its place is an oppressive, dumbed-down hierarchical ‘Big Brother’
society that is pathetically characterized by conformity, dependence, lots of
high-tech entertainment, sexual promiscuity, and a powerful, all-purpose
narcotic drug called Soma. This feel-good drug is dispensed to dispel
deep thinking and quell unpleasant feelings.
Soma is similar, disturbingly,
to the most widespread drugs sold today in the U.S. -- anti-depressants.
We seem to be creating a Cowardly New World by letting our political process be dominated by
amoral corporations and concomitant dysfunction that results from heedless
diversions and manipulative propaganda.
Our leaders tend to exploit people’s feelings of ethnocentric
supremacism to support high spending on the military, and some drugs like
alcohol, coffee and nicotine are encouraged while others like cannabis are
harshly repressed. I advocate more
enlightened policies, and more progressive ones!
The Epiphanies of Sigmund Freud and John
Fowles
To
better understand the psychological underpinnings of this situation, it is
helpful to examine the insights of Sigmund Freud into the essential nature of
the human psyche. Freud analyzed the
mind/self as being governed by three principal aspects: (1) the ego,
which represents the province of conscious desires; (2) the id, which represents the more obscure
province of subconscious motivations;
and (3) the superego, which
governs the emotional intelligence that strives to balance and control these
other two powerful forces in our minds.
Freud contended that each person internalizes the
ego values that society regards as being fulfilling. The nobler aspects of us as individuals seek fulfillment through
such things as our contribution to society and our senses of meaning,
integrity, connection, love and accomplishment. Consumerism, on the other hand, teaches the ego to forsake
honorable integrity, and to vainly inflate itself with material things, and to
associate and confuse self-worth with net worth and material possessions and
conspicuous consumption.
Author
John Fowles realized that there is also a more subtle force that is growing
deep in the modern soul. This is the ‘nemo’, which represents the psychic
force that motivates us to try to be somebody, to be remembered, and to
thwart our profound fear of being an insignificant nobody. The nemo
is activated by such haunting anxieties as feelings of psychological emptiness,
ephemerality, futility and insignificance.
Nemo feelings are agitated by
knowledge of unfairness and inequalities in life. The idea of the nemo is
proposed in John Fowles’
thought-provoking book The Aristos.
Fowles recognized that people seek personal senses
of self-esteem and security by trying to either conform, or to conflict. People conform by striving to obtain the
status symbols society defines as hallmarks of success. For instance, many people obsess over money,
or consume conspicuously (Bling!), or seek identity by adopting uniforms of
belonging. Alternatively, to gain
attention or a sense of self-importance, people often choose to conflict. They seek meaning in striving to be unique
and embracing countercultural ideals, opposing the conventional, being cool or
‘bad’, seeking liberation, trying to escape by altering their consciousness, or
indulging in the allures of the forbidden.
Most people, deep down, want to be respected as “somebody”, or to create
some sort of lasting legacy.
Marketing propaganda exploits these conscious and
subconscious human impulses by taking advantage of natural drives that help
define our senses of meaning and self-importance, especially the drives for
security, belonging, social status, and sexual attraction.
These ideas are being explored because it seems
probable that once we more clearly understand the psychological motivations
that underlie our actions, we will have a better chance of changing our
behaviors and modifying our economic system so that our societies become
dedicated to healthier and nobler causes, and to things that really matter the
most. The restructuring of our
societies to give people more wholesome purposes and positive potentialities
would be distinctly advantageous. It
could help us create saner individuals and healthier communities, and it could
motivate us to give greater respect to the biotic health and sustainable
well-being of Mother Earth.
I
express the opinion in Comprehensive
Global Perspective – An Illuminating Worldview that the “nemo of
neoconservatives” is driving mankind headlong in the direction of potential
calamity. Nationalistic neoconservative
convictions of God-appointed self-righteousness were particularly strong during
the George W. Bush presidency. Such
ideas impelled us down an arrogant, ignominious and imperialistic path. The neoconservative worldview facilitates
unjust domination by authorities and serves to promote special privileges for
cronies and insider elites. As a result,
our nation indulged in prideful empire building and militaristic world dominion,
as well as white supremacy, misogynistic male dominion, social repression,
puritanical domestic policies, brutal prisoner interrogation policies, and
theocratic Christian hegemony.
Neoconservatism also fervently championed unfettered capitalism and rather
irresponsible profiteering. In
contrast, I advocate that we create fairer societies and make more courageous
attempts to coexist with others peacefully. And I encourage everyone to
wholeheartedly seek more far-sighted ecological understandings!
That
paragraph was written years before Trumpism made its ugly advent on the
national scene. I feel very strongly
that we need positive change, and that Trump is having a calamitous impact on
the world by stoking fear, division, bigotry, sexism and American xenophobia. Reject that negative ruse!
John
Fowles tellingly noted in The Aristos
that “we are all psychological dwarfs, and we have the complexes and
psychological traits that are characteristic of dwarfs: feelings of inferiority, with compensatory
cunning and malice.” Yikes! (Apologies to real dwarfs for this
generalization!)
“A healthy and wholesome cheerfulness is not
necessarily impossible to any occupation.”
--- Mark Twain
Critical Insights … or Merely Psycho-Babble?
Many of the above psychological insights have been
plagiarized from an article by Charles Shaw that was originally published on AlterNet. I recently found it copied into one of my ‘Germinating’
files. This essay borrows extensively
from Shaw’s valuable ideas. He pointed
out that an activist, preacher and performance artist named ‘Reverend Billy of
the Church of Stop Shopping’ says that consumerism has become our great
national addiction. The ‘Reverend’ was
the star of the film What Would Jesus
Buy? He preaches a gospel of
anti-consumerism, saying that if we are ever going to move away from being
consumers and back to being good citizens, our society needs “to go into
recovery”. He added: “I recommend at least 60 to 90 days away
from shopping just to detox. If we
don’t repent,” he warns, “then the Shopocalypse is coming!” Hmmm …
A great dilemma
presents itself. If we were all to do
less shopping, the economy would undergo a dramatic contraction. This, in fact, did happen in 2008 due to a
credit crunch and the trend reversal of the “wealth effect” that Alan Greenspan
had so diligently and rashly cultivated.
For years thereafter, the faltering economy has been affected by another
development: not only did average Americans
spend less money because tens of millions of people were unemployed and almost
everyone had lost some of their net worth, but many rich people also began to
show a greater sensitivity to ostentatious spending. What would happen if people stopped acting on materialistic and
egocentric impulses to attain higher social status? Wealthy people might become more mindful of the ecological folly
of consuming extravagantly and wastefully.
I mean, maybe they’d feel this way just a little, outside of Texas? Ha!
The decades-long
American economic strategy of hyper-stimulating the international economy is
creating serious problems. This
strategy creates an economy that is like a proverbial house-of-cards. By foolishly facilitating consumerism,
empowering multinational corporatism, stoking easy credit, cultivating bubble
economics, encouraging aggressive borrowing from home equity, and incurring
more and more debt, we create an unstable economy. At the same time that the home appreciation bubble burst and the value
of equities fell precipitously (the Dow Jones Average fell more than 50%
between 2007 and 2009), we approached levels of consumer and government debt
that may have been close to the maximum that is prudent or sustainable. We should therefore figure out how to
restructure our societies in new ways that are productive, ways that create
millions of jobs while also taking into account the overarching importance of
economic activities that are ecologically sound and sustainable. Human activities should become restorative
of Earth’s ecosystems, rather than being destructive of them. This is a challenging paradox, but we would
be wise to come to grips with it.
We can do this.
But we need to be honest about all the interrelated aspects of this
quandary, which include the adverse impacts of uncontrolled population
growth. When our civilizations were
mostly agrarian, it was desirable to have many children because it meant cheap
labor and a form of family security for people in their old age. As the industrial revolution led to rapid
urbanization and transformed societies by making it much more costly to feed
and educate children, large families became outmoded and “social security”
programs became more necessary. Progress
toward more effective and more easily available contraception in the past
century has allowed people to better plan the number and timing of their
offspring, and this has led to remarkable demographic changes and smaller
families. The average woman of child-bearing age in Mexico, for instance, had SEVEN
children thirty years ago, and today they are begetting an average of fewer
than THREE children. The speed with
which this demographic change took place is astonishing.
Leading indicators tell us that resource limitations
and conflicts over diminishing resources mean that people need to be flexible
in adapting to new conditions in which even smaller families make better
sense. The quality of life must
take precedence over the quantity of children we have. But it is unfortunately a truism that
religious establishments find it to be difficult to recruit gullible converts
to their doctrines, and they know from long experience that when believers have
large families the Church automatically has greater success in indoctrinating
pliable adherents. To assure continued
growth of their influence, they staunchly oppose sensible sex education and uses
of contraceptives, and reasonable prerogatives and reproductive rights for
women to choose to terminate a pregnancy an unwanted pregnancy.
But Churches must evolve, and cease their opposition
to pragmatic and socially intelligent family planning. As Mark Twain pointed
out, “The church is always trying to get other people to reform; it might not be a bad idea to reform itself
a little, by way of example.”
A Riff
on the Real Population Connection
There
is a remarkably simple reason that social conservatives and religious
fundamentalists promote the abstinence-only method for birth control. It is an obvious yet astonishing reason: it doesn’t work! This is not just a matter of opinion, it is statistical
fact. And why might these folks
champion a policy that doesn’t pan out as advertised, given that non-abstinence is one of the most
powerful motivations in relationships between sex-obsessed males and fending-off
females? Again, it’s simple and
obvious. These folks don’t want the
approach to work, because in its failure, more children are born who can be
persuaded to believe in the religious dogmas of churches, strengthening their
power and influence. This attitude is
subtly affiliated with more indirect motives that stimulate consumerism and
increased demand and future profits.
Many
religious people have a core conviction that God wants humankind to be fruitful
and multiply. So, to them it is a sin
to take any steps to prevent pregnancies.
This is “so yesterday” a position, a yesterday driven by a now-outmoded
morality rooted in the desirability of high birth rates to provide cheap labor
on the farm and to provide security to parents in their old age.
Today,
high birth rates threaten to overwhelm Earth’s ecosystems by speeding up the
rate at which we deplete the natural resources that sustain us. Expanding numbers of needy and greedy people
are having the ominous impact of disrupting the global climate and altering
normal weather patterns, and of threatening to drive half of all species of
life to eternal extinction within the next century or so. This profound paradox is a conundrum that
may confound us, but it is too important to ignore!
Faith, n. Belief without evidence in what is told by
one who speaks without knowledge, of things
without parallel.
-- Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary
This week, the
global population will grow by more than 1.5 million people. As the organization Population Connection
points out, that’s like adding a city the size of Phoenix or Philadelphia every
week! One in ten people already lacks
access to clean drinking water around the world right now, and one in eight
doesn't have enough food to eat, and one in five lives on less than $1 a
day. As we struggle to support more
than 7 billion people on Earth, rapid population growth is pushing too many
people to the margins. The quality of
life for those alive must begin to receive greater emphasis than the quantity
of people we can bring into the world.
One out of
every 20 human beings that has ever lived is alive right now. Such is the result of the sensational
longevity revolution and rapid growth of human numbers. If our growing human population continues to increase, the
house of cards we are building will become increasingly unstable. Such a trend will make an eventual
catastrophic crash in human numbers ever more likely and severe. To improve the quality of life for everyone
everywhere, we should resolutely act to reduce population growth and stabilize
the number of people on Earth.
Population stabilization is just one facet
of the changes we need in our societies.
One of the most far-reaching and positive ways of making this a better
world would be to encourage girls and women to get an education. Empowering women turns out to be positive
for society as a whole. Mothers,
sisters, wives, daughters and all female ‘significant others’ in our societies
deserve greater respect and appreciation. They also need more clearly
articulated rights and civil protections in our patriarchal societies. This is one of the most profound and
courageous undertakings we could commit to, and it would be a definite win/win
situation for men as well as for women.
It would likely reduce gender stresses, improve interpersonal
relationships, and help reduce the size of families. It would improve the potential quality of life for most children,
and reduce the rate of increase of many of the environmental pressures on our
home planet that are being caused by rapid population growth.
Faith that does not admit of doubt is absurd. As Barack Obama said in a May 2009 commencement address to
graduating seniors at the University of Notre Dame: “This doubt should not push away our faith. But it should humble us. It should temper our passions, cause us to
be wary of too much self-righteousness.”
Religious people, as well as those who are not religious, should
remember that we need to have respectful dialogues rather than to demonize
others. We need to be able to
communicate with a generous understanding to find common ground. Barack Obama has called for open hearts,
fair-minded words, and open minds in the search for common ground in debates
over issues like abortion, women’s rights, and stem cell research. Such sentiments strengthen moderate forces
that reside inside established churches, and could mitigate the discord
involved in culture wars. They harken back to the noble aspects of religious
teachings that say “Love thy neighbor”, and put the spotlight on the fact that
right wing and conservative elements have too stubbornly dominated religious
debate in recent years. Moderate and
liberal elements must take back their churches from extremists who have had dominion
for so many years.
“True
story.”
--- Rowbear
Global Recovery
Good reasons exist for humanity to be open-minded
enough to consider going into a type of ‘global recovery program’ from our
growth-addicted consumerism. Addictions
can be conquered, according to the insightful psychologist Carl Jung, only
through a true spiritual awakening.
Likewise, ecologists believe that only a global spiritual awakening will
end the cultural consumer addiction that is ravaging the planet, wiping out
wildlife and causing a planet-wide ecological crisis. This is a provocative way of understanding! For deeper ecological understandings, peruse
the aforementioned Earth Manifesto ‘magnum opus’, the Comprehensive Global Perspective:
An Illuminating Worldview.
In Chapter #98 – True Values
of this epistle, this observation is expressed:
Television, radio, newspaper and magazine advertising tend to indoctrinate
us with false values. They effectively enshrine the gods of materialism
on the highest pedestal of our imaginations. Above all, the message of
advertising is that happiness is found in possessing things. It subtly
preaches that you should get all you can for yourself, and that you should get
it all as quickly as possible. It champions variety, pleasure seeking,
luxury, indulgence, and the avoidance of boredom. Shopping and owning
things have become central ways for us to make ourselves feel “cool” and
special and more worthy.
Our shopping-seduced consumer culture is causing us to fail to appreciate
truer values. We have supersized our meals, our houses and our
automobiles. But these “gains” have
come at a high social and environmental cost, and they are arguably diminishing
the true quality of our lives. I have
faith in the potentiality of people to develop richer lives without at
the same time impoverishing the planet and harming others.
Another aspect of the gross
commercialization of our societies is the manipulation of children for
marketing purposes. Using the “Nag
Factor”, advertisers exploit the credulity and vulnerability of children to
manipulate them into nagging their parents to buy things. Especially harmful is the marketing of
unhealthy junk foods to children, including sugary cereals, candy, soda pop and
fast food. This contributes to obesity
and childhood diabetes and other health problems. Saturation marketing by the toy industry even affects young minds
by diminishing the imagination of children through corporate tie-in toys that
narrow play activities. These trends may
effectively brainwash children into being good consumers rather than being good
citizens and more virtuous human beings.
Mild austerity can actually be a tonic for
the character, whereas wild riches quite often prove corrosive. (“There but for the grace of God go I.” ---
Ha!) The economic hard times of World
War II forced people to ride bikes, plant gardens, mend clothes, recycle,
reuse, spend more time in cooperative endeavors with neighbors, and cultivate
good friendships. These were fine
things. “Moderation in everything!”
Historical Perspective Is Valuable
It is widely
recognized that capitalist economic systems during the past century have
out-competed and supplanted centrally-planned ones in countries worldwide. Ideological arguments have arisen that
stubbornly insist capitalism should be allowed to flourish with a minimum of
government interference. But every
economic system is structured according to rules and laws and regulations that
govern the rights and prerogatives of producers and consumers, and capital and
labor. Our economies simply must be
better structured and more fairly designed.
Powerful incentives and disincentives should be instituted to advance the
common good and prevent socially harmful activities like wasteful usages of natural
resources, worker exploitation, fraud, insider trading, conglomerate abuses,
and the unacceptable externalizing of costs upon society and the ecological
commons.
We need to
manage our economies much better.
Unbridled competition leads to risky excesses and many forms of
unfairness, injustices and increased inequalities. Such distortions and excesses can create dangerous and highly
detrimental hardship and economic bubbles that lead to recessions. On the other hand, too much bureaucracy and
bigger government create excessive red tape and can be wasteful, vulnerable to
corruption, inefficient and anti-competitive.
A better balance must be struck between laissez-faire capitalism and
overly-regulated capitalism.
Economic
fundamentalists must relent in their stubborn insistence on deregulation and
regressive changes in taxation and other policies that serve to concentrate
wealth ever more narrowly in the hands of the few. We can no longer let our politics be dominated by rich people and
big corporations. All Americans should
support policies that focus on a fairer balance between the goals of consumers
and investors, on the one hand, and differing goals that are consistent with
the common good, on the other. We must
transcend hyper-partisanship, and begin to cooperate together to ensure that
our political system delivers prosperity that is broadly shared. We should not lose sight of the fact that we
need to strive to make sure that economic and social conditions are consistent
with greater good goals in both the short term and the long term.
The
ideology of Reaganomics largely opposed public investment, other than ramped-up
spending on the military. Investments
in the military can be astoundingly wasteful, yet Ronald Reagan emphasized
‘defense spending’ over all other spending priorities. This is why budgets were reduced, on an
inflation-adjusted basis, for education, job training, infrastructure, and
basic research and development during his administration. George H.W. Bush and George W. Bush pursued
some similar targeted tactics and goals.
This may be one reason that Republicans are reluctant to make health
care a universal right. The Republican
Party did champion a costly new drug entitlement program in 2003, but this move
can accurately be seen as ‘corporate welfare’ for the pharmaceutical industry,
not as a true concern for the well-being of older citizens, and certainly not
as a wise program from the standpoint of younger people, whose interests are so
inadequately represented.
The
policies of ‘Obamanomics’, in contrast, are theoretically committed to forms of
public investment in people, productivity and innovation. There is good reason for this, according to
economist Robert Reich: “In a global
economy, capital moves to wherever it can get the best deal around the
globe. That means capital and jobs go
to nations that can promise high returns either because labor is cheap and
taxes and regulations are low, OR because labor is highly productive
due to a well-educated work force that is healthy and supported by modern
infrastructure. Which type of nation do
we want to be?”
“For the better part of
the last quarter century, our implicit economic strategy has tended toward the
first. But that’s a recipe for lower
wages and lower living standards for most Americans, and for widening
inequality. The only resource that is
rooted uniquely in a national economy is its people – their skills and insights
and capacities to collaborate, and the transportation and communication systems
that link them together. Everything
else -- including capital, technology, designs, even factories and equipment –
can move around the globe with increasing ease.”
Let’s
support more intelligent policy-making!
We really should engage in more farsighted planning because we are faced
with a “perfect storm” of problems, including unfolding shortages of food and
water and insufficient energy resources.
These problems make it urgent that we deal boldly with the challenges
that confront us. These shortages will
likely unleash more unsettling and risk-laden public unrest and cross-border
conflicts and mass migrations as people flee from the worst-affected regions,
according to the United Kingdom’s chief scientist, Professor John Beddington. The world is heading for major upheavals
that will come to a head by 2030, says Professor Beddington. “The growing population and success in
alleviating poverty in developing countries will trigger a surge in demand for
food, water and energy over the next two decades, at a time when governments
must also make major progress in combating climate change.” NOW is the time to begin coping with these
problems!
A Ditty About Thomas Paine
The pamphleteer
Thomas Paine was a common sense American hero who passionately advocated for
individual freedoms and a fair modicum of social and legal equality for the
people in the American colonies, and for democratic representation in a federal
government independent from the tyranny of the British Empire. Paine inspired generations of Americans
toward exceptional purpose and revolutionary ideals.
In the Musical Pins and Needles in 1937, the lyrics
from the song Status Quo are
revealing:
In 1776 Tom Paine was
writing books with a might and main
The Tory said “Now man alive
Stop giving out with this here liberty jive”
“Don’t sing of people’s
rights that way
They might believe in what you say
So stop your song it’s not polite
Pipe down before you start a fight”
You don’t say, Teacher,
is that right?
Aha, but Tom Paine
looked ahead
And to those Tories, Thomas said no, no, no, no
When you got to go, you got to go
You can’t stand still on freedom’s track
If you don’t go forward, you go back
You can’t giddyup by saying Whoa
And sitting on your status quo.
Today’s
conservatives are like Tory loyalists were to the British monarchy during
Thomas Paine’s day. Conservatives have seriously harmed our nation in
the past 35 years. This is
astonishingly ironic. The Party of
so-called conservatives threw caution to the wind when they controlled the
Executive branch of the federal government from 2001 to 2009. They gambled wildly and acted very
irresponsibly. They undermined
precautionary principles of ecological sanity.
They opposed scientific consensus understandings. They supported ideological fiscal policies
that dismantled proven safeguards against economic depression. They sought regressive changes in the tax
system to make it much less fair for the majority of people, in favor of the
wealthy. They promoted empire-building
and U.S. military aggression. They gave
more power to multi-national corporations and business lobbyists and the
military/industrial complex. They
struggled against Golden Rule fairness principles and measures that would
ensure more social equality. They
strongly opposed change, even when it was smart and sensible, except when they
wanted to do such things as reduce regulations on banks and infringe on
constitutional rights in the name of national security. They defended the rights of women to have unlimited
numbers of children but opposed women’s reproductive prerogatives. And they claimed to support human life, but
were eager to apply the death penalty and seemed to care more about the
quantity of life spawned than the overall quality of life for the general
populace.
As a result of these misguided policies, conservatives lost the national
elections in November 2008, and progressives won a great political
victory. At the time, I wrote:
“It is now time for progressives to demonstrate the integrity of their
beliefs by acting in ways that are consistent with creative, humanistic and
fair-minded thinking. Some say that it
is our moral obligation to do better as winners than either we, or our
political opponents, have done in the past few decades; that we need to put aside our differences
and decline to vilify those who have vilified us. In any case, we need to build more effective bridges and
coalitions to solve the daunting challenges that face us. And we must not compromise our founding
American principles; instead, we should
articulate them more clearly, and work to find win/win solutions that help make
our nation a more productive place with more solid foundations.”
Unfortunately, Republicans immediately decided to sabotage all
progressive initiatives, and everything the black man in the White House tried
to do, in a hard-times-swindle effort to regain power, and they have harmed
prospects for the greater good ever since then.
My best prescriptions for healthier societies are detailed in Common Sense Revival and online in three
compendiums that can be found in Part Four of the Earth Manifesto: (1) One Dozen Big Initiatives to Positively
Transform Our Societies, (2) Three
Bills of Right: A Triumvirate of Responsible Actions for the Greater Good;
and (3) Progressive Agenda for a More Sane
Society. Check them out!
We should boldly and open-mindedly move forward to create a better
future. One of my pet theories is that
a commission of two dozen smart people drawn from diverse backgrounds and
independent of partisan political influences could come up with far better
plans for a prosperous and propitious way forward than we are currently
achieving with 535 members of Congress and our vested-interest-dominated
political process. This commission would
be like the impartial panels of ordinary citizens that form Civil Grand Juries
in every County in California. Such
groups of people could recommend smarter budgets and better plans and wiser
compromises that would be designed to make our world a fairer one. A commitment should be made to listening to
their findings, and to acting upon them!
I
have traveled extensively around Europe, North Africa, Asia, the Pacific
islands and Latin America, and I can assure readers that there are good people
everywhere. Another of my pet theories
is that it’s entirely reasonable to believe that the best strategy for us to
adopt would be one in which we collectively choose to make our country and
nations worldwide more just, so that inequities do not make stresses worse and
cause increasing poverty, violence, insurrections and wars.
Another Salvo is Lobbed at Extreme Conservatism
Readers will recall the core idea of this manifesto that the
education and relative empowerment of women around the globe would likely yield
a better overall quality of life for all of humanity. It is thus a big problem to have politicians strongly oppose
fairer treatment of women.
Think
about Paul Ryan, one of the “Young Gun” leaders of the Republican Party. A fair assessment of Ryan’s stances on a long litany of issues reveals
him to be an opportunistic politician who is one of the least women-respecting
leaders in the U.S. He admittedly has a
lot of company in the ranks of the far right, but he is outside the mainstream
of American sensibilities. Ryan,
shockingly, “might just be one of the most anti-woman politicians of all time”,
according to MsRepresentation. Ryan
keeps proposing budgets that would undermine the safety nets for low-income
women and their children, and wipe out millions of jobs currently held by
women. He often proposes to give big
breaks to large companies that compete with smaller women-owned
businesses. He wants to cut both Medicare and Medicaid, programs whose majority of beneficiaries are women and racial
minorities. He has consistently opposed paid parental leave
for employees who have newborn children.
And he adamantly proposes to cut
budgets for food stamps, childcare, and programs that provide critical
care to old people, children and people with disabilities.
Ryan advocates
giving additional big tax breaks to wealthy people. Ryan voted against the Lilly
Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, and he is an anti-choice poster boy who wants
abortion rights overturned even though they have been established precedent in
national law since 1973, in accordance with the Supreme Court’s fair-minded Roe vs. Wade decision. Ryan is against the Affordable
Care Act (‘Obamacare’), and he vehemently
opposes birth control coverage in this legislation. He actually has asserted that the Affordable Care Act “violates our founding principles” by not
letting organizations deny women basic health care needs. Wrap your brain around the bizarre
contradictions in that mind-bending point of view!
Throughout his tenure in the House, Paul Ryan has voted repeatedly to
reduce funding for Planned Parenthood, thereby taking money away from efforts
to detect cancer in women and prevent sexually transmitted diseases. He co-sponsored a federal Sanctity of Human Life Act, a type of
“personhood” bill that declared life begins at the moment a woman’s egg is
fertilized by a sperm. To give a
two-celled union of a sperm and an egg the same rights, or more, than a woman
already alive is a concept that was even rejected by voters in conservative
Mississippi in November 2011.
Paul Ryan also voted against
the repeal of “Don’t Ask Don’t Tell” in the military and has consistently opposed gay rights and marriage
equality and the elimination of workplace discrimination against gay
people. His record on immigration is terrible;
he voted against the DREAM Act and in favor of legislation in 2005 that would
have made it a felony to violate immigration laws in Wisconsin.
Paul Ryan’s
first name is derived from the Apostle Paul, one of the most influential early
Christian missionaries of the first generation of Christian believers. Paul was certainly no saint with respect to
women, for he once declared:
"Women should remain silent in the churches. They are not allowed to speak, but must be
in submission, as the law says. If they
want to inquire about something, they should ask their own husbands at
home; for it is disgraceful for a woman
to speak in the church.” Both Paul the
Apostle and Paul the congressman apparently subscribe to the school of thought
that recommends women be kept silent, subservient, and pregnant. The persistent power of patronizing
patriarchal and antediluvian attitudes is remarkable!
Paul Ryan is
reputedly a genial character, so let’s give him credit for this attribute. But put yourself in his shoes and see how it
looks to adopt the positions affecting women that are described above. The “optics” look exceedingly bad! And today, by supporting D. Trump, despite
that presidential candidate’s many inflammatory remarks, he is being blatantly
opportunistic and grotesquely opposed to the common good.
“Before you criticize someone you should walk a mile in their
shoes. That way, when you criticize
them, you are a mile away,
and you have their shoes!”
--- Random
Thoughts quote by Frieda Norris
Why
Don’t We All Do More Good?
Mark Twain regarded himself in his later years as an icon of common
sense and public virtue. He once said,
“Always do right. This will gratify
some people and astonish the rest.” Ha!
– A good call.
Think about the philosophic aspects of this humorous statement. Some people say we do not have freedom of
will, and that all our actions are determined by inherited propensities or
social conditioning. Others say, in
contrast, that we have complete freedom of will. John Fowles writes: “Most
religions and codes of justice have supposed complete freedom of will in order
to make their ethical and punitive systems effective; and this is more forgivable, if no less undemonstrable, than the
determinist reduction of all human behavior to mechanics.”
While almost every person would say they believe people should do good,
few do all the good they could. This is
one of the deep contradictions of human nature. John Fowles, in his philosophical treatise The Aristos, considers this issue, noting: “For the last two and a half millennia
almost every great thinker, every great saint, and every great artist has
advocated, personified and celebrated -- or at least implied -- the nobility
and excellence of the good act as the basis of the just society.”
Yet the bulk of
mankind seems to apprehend “a perverse but deeper truth: it is better generally to do nothing than
generally to do good.” Fowles adduces
many reasons for this shortcoming. We
are not only seekers of spiritual nobility, we are also eternal seekers of
reward for ourselves. We expect
recompense for doing good, and more than just a clear conscience or a feeling
of self-righteousness. We hope to get
benefits in return, or approval, or recognition, or personal gratitude, or
community esteem, or we seek to assuage a sense of guilt. John Fowles lists the principal causes that
he sees for this failure to do good: a
perception that the action that is contemplated is so small in relation to the
final intention that it seems pointless;
an uncertainty of what the outcome may be, or a conflict of
intentions; a fatalistic belief that it
is only an illusion that we have freedom of choice in willing an action; the complex nature of understanding; a feeling that it is futile to oppose an
“evil”; or a belief that our opposition
will give ‘counter-support’ to what is opposed.
If
we were to structure our societies so that the incentives for doing good were
more attractive, more good would unquestionably result. We all face a multitude of anxieties in
life, from fundamental universal anxieties to special individual
anxieties. These anxieties should unite
us rather than isolate us. When we let
them divide us, as John Fowles explains:
it is “as if the citizens of a country would defend it by each
barricading himself in his own house.”
In any case, positive attitudes are
extremely important in our lives.
Sylvia Boorstein, the prominent Buddhist who also happens to be a Jewish
grandmother, has written: “We don’t get
a choice about what hand we are dealt in life.
The only choice we have is our attitude about the cards we hold and the
finesse with which we play our hand.” I
say, then: Let us collectively begin to
play our hands with more fair-minded, sensible and visionary finesse! Mother Mary comes to me, Speaking words of
wisdom: Let it be!
Although there are healthy and valuable
aspects to maintaining a positive attitude, my mind wanders to Bill Moyers’
keynote address to the Environmental Grantmakers Association that he made in
October 2001. He observed that he once asked a friend on Wall Street what he thought
about the stock market, and the friend replied, “I’m optimistic.” He then asked, “Then why do you look so
worried?!” And his friend answered:
“Because I’m not sure my optimism is justified.” An existential Ha!
Though perplexity may confront us in many
things, transcendent changes are required for our well-being, and for the
well-being of our children and their descendants. Let’s find the areas that we share of common ground, and in this
agreeable unity, let us strive to leave a more sensible legacy to the
future. Let us “pay forward” some
overarching social good!
Truly,
Dr. Tiffany B. Twain
Hannibal, Missouri
January 1, 2010
(edited and updated in December 2012,
March 2014 and May 2015 and August 2016)
Postscript
Admittedly,
when a person explores psychological insights without being a professional, it
makes them vulnerable to a psychoanalytical assessment of all aspects of their
own character and persona and motives.
Well, I plunge ahead audaciously anyway. A popular 1995 ‘New Age’ book titled The Celestine Prophecy asserted that a synchronicity of
coincidences can be discovered in events that take place, and that these
coincidences have deep meanings and mystical connections. In attempting to understand the significance
of such contentions with my whole soul, I can see the extraordinary import of
the unfolding sequence of occurrences in my life, as clearly as if I have been
wandering in the desert for 40 days and 40 nights. Fate!
A Closed Mind in a Wonderful Thing To
Lose
--- Bumper Sticker 2009
(I’m of two minds about this matter!)
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Germinating Observations
An Interlude of Deserved Ridicule
Rising
inequality creates a heightened risk of pitchforks symbolically coming out in
outrage, and this threat to the established status quo could easily play into
the hands of wealthy people who jealously and ruthlessly defend their vaulted
privileges by scaring We the People
into dutifully supporting conservative law-and-order politicians. Neither continued increases in inequality
nor measures that are overly repressive are consonant with future well-being in
a free and fair country.
Watch Professor
Robert Reich be darling in his Mini-Me Mini Cooper automobile in the
enlightening film Inequality for All, and
hear him be heroic in championing more egalitarian national policies in this
important documentary film. His
commendable stance is reminiscent of the smart reforms mediated by the wise
statesman Solon, who had a much
better solution for all concerned when he saved ancient Athens from revolutionary conflict by mediating a far-reaching common sense
compromise between the
aristocratic hoi oligoi and the vast
majority of the hoi polloi more than 2,500 years ago.
Increasing extremes of income inequality and disparities in
wealth in the United States are becoming so grotesquely prnounced that even
some Republican politicians occasionally mention it and say something should be
done about it. But every one of them
pretends to be absolutely convinced that they have a surefire remedy for this
risk-laden, divisive and terribly general-Welfare-eroding problem. First of all, they know exactly who to blame
for the problem -- the black guy in the White House! And, of course, all those people that they regard as being
extremely liberal.
Here is the solution they propose and fervently hope to be
able to put into effect as soon as they gain control of the Presidency, adding
to their majorities in the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives.
What we must do is to slash taxes on the highest levels of
incomes and on corporations, and on the two out of every 1,000 people who are
so wealthy that they will be required to pay estate taxes on any amounts
exceeding $5 million per parent after they die.
This plan is avowedly dang-blasted certain to diminish that
dangerous inequality real soon, just as soon as the beneficient effects of this
generosity begin to trickle down to the 98% of Americans who earn less than
$250,000 per year. And with all the
gushing good times that these plans will usher in, Republicans triumphally
promise to start balancing the budget.
“You must vote Republican”, they chant, “and we will
drill-baby-drill into all wasteful government programs and lazy people’s
entitlements that are causing such grief in the world.”
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
I am not naive. Saving
our democracy from the on-going anti-democratic Tea Party-fueled and Dark Money financed rightward tilt in
the U.S. will be extremely difficult. Niccolo Machiavelli, that shrewd, insightful
Machiavellian political philosopher, sagely observed back in 1532:
"There is
nothing more difficult to take in hand, more perilous to conduct, or more
uncertain in its success, than to take the lead in the introduction of a new
order of things."
However, I recognize an even bigger picture reality -- the
Rule of Two Impossibles. When
changing the status quo in a progressive direction is declared politically
impossible, but the alternative option to ruthlessly perpetuate the status quo
proves to be impossible to an equal or greater degree, the first impossibility
curiously becomes much more feasible.
And when reactionary forces strive to change the status quo in
retrogressive directions, the heightened risks of pitchforks coming out makes
the probability better for us to change our system to make it fairer.
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A working class
hero is something to be
Keep you doped
with religion, and sex, and TV
And you think
you're so clever and classless and free
But you're still
fucking peasants as far as I can see
A working class
hero is something to be
There's room at
the top, they are telling you still
But first you
must learn how to smile as you kill
If you want to
be like the folks on the hill
---
John Lennon
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