“Our true destiny…is a world built from the bottom up by competent citizens living in solid communities, engaged in and by their places” David Orr.
The quote above explains my views succinctly. It needs more explanation, but my whole blog is about explaining this simple quote. Then I got looking at my Facebook page – something I do occasionally. I came across a whole lot of memes about sustainability and control that made me both laugh and ponder the world we currently live in. These memes and clips tell me that a great number of people see through the endless lies that we are bombarded with daily.
“The rules are simple: they lie to us, we know they’re lying, they know we know they’re lying, but they keep lying to us, and we keep pretending to believe them.” ― Elena Gorokhova, A Mountain of Crumbs. And similarly, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, author of Live Not by Lies, says, “We know that they are lying, “They know that they are lying. They even know that we know they are lying. We also know that they know we know they are lying. too. They, of course, know that we certainly know they know we know they are lying, too, as well. But they are still lying. In our country, the lie has become not just moral category, but the pillar industry of this country.” Of course, Solzhenitsyn was talking about the old Soviet Union, but his words echo completely true for the hierarchical systems that run our world today.
All this lying isn’t something that is recent, it has been going on for centuries, even millennia. It’s just that the lies we face today are more complex and insidious. I do believe that globally more and more people are breaking through the lies barrier that keeps us trapped in a materialistic consumer mindset. And then the impressive ways that Statistics are used to befuddle us. In an early post I discuss how statistics are used. Just because you hear that a statistic doesn’t mean the data it confirms is valid. I think I hear as many lies using statistics from people with vested interests as I do from used-car-salesman types. What we measure determines the outcome of what we see. So, the first question should be to determine precisely what is measured. Another meme I saw on FB, “Our economy should be measured by how the bottom 30% are doing in the local markets, not how the Top 1% are doing in the Stock Market!” I have mentioned this several times in this blog. The lie of economic success stems from a faulty measurement. With inflation running rampant at more than 8%, how many of us feel the prices impact us hard, yet the elites seem to be thriving. The day will come when what is ethical matters more than what is profitable.
I saw a clip from the film ‘My Dinner with Andre (1981).’ If you prefer ‘Fast and Furious’ or ‘John Wick’ franchise films, then this film may not be your first choice, but I recall how profound it was in its observations of modern living. This is one of those love it or hate it films because the whole film is simply about a riveting conversation between “Old friends Wallace (Wallace Shawn) and Andre (Andre Gregory) haven’t seen each another in five years and agree to meet for dinner. Andre, a once well-known theater director, dropped out of the New York scene to travel the world, while Wallace stuck around, finding only mixed success as a playwright. As they sit down to eat, Andre launches into a series of fantastic stories from his time away, and Wallace can’t help but notice how different their worldviews have become” Rotten Tomatoes.
I came across a meme about how social media has created so many ego problems. I am always amazed how so many people use social media as a relatively anonymous platform to vent their biases and to make sure that everyone knows them. One meme, “Life is short. Make sure you spend as much time as possible on the internet arguing with people you don’t know” really cracked me up. To add to that, an explanation of how social media works: Me: “I prefer mangoes to oranges.” Some random online person: “So basically what you’re saying is you hate oranges? You also failed to mention pineapples, bananas, and grapefruits. Educate yourself. I’m literally shaking.” And then I saw the best response meme. “Before you argue with someone, ask yourself, Is this person mature enough to grasp the concept of different perspectives? If not, there is no point to argue.”
I am not decrying people having opinions, but being unwilling to see any other perspectives is not a formula for living well with anyone outside of a narrow clique. I think it merely perpetuates the divisiveness and separation that allows the hierarchies to control us. Similarly, we now have the problem of ‘Radical Reduction of Permissible Speech.’ This inevitably is done by self-righteous people that police our language so that we never have discussions about things we need to discuss openly. I recall an older English woman in the 1970s (Mary Whitehouse) who went out of her way to publicly report smut and nudity. She was so effective in getting everyone to look at the very material she wanted banning that the porn industry launched a pornography magazine titled ‘Whitehouse.’ Heaven forbid we get upset about discussing our uniqueness instead of seeing it as a benefit. Nowadays people don’t defend what is right; they defend whom they like and benefit from. Self-interest isn’t necessarily a negative either, but it has to be tempered away from selfishness with a desire to help others thrive.
So, what does building a new society from the bottom up look like. “What I do think we need is reparations, the democratization of wealth, the re-creation of the commons, and the outlawing of financial systems of theft and speculation. Communities must become their own developers through broadly democratic planning and democratic access to non-extractive financing” Ed Whitfield (see link for full article). I think we all share a dream of living well and being sovereign. We don’t need to think the same but we can thrive by seeing our differences as benefits. Jimmy Carter said it succinctly, “We become not a melting pot but a beautiful mosaic. Different people, different beliefs, different yearnings, different hopes, different dreams.” “Ideologies separate us. Dreams and anguish bring us together” Eugene Ionesco.
A quote I recently saw expresses the core of what I am getting at, “Maybe with a little less ego, a little more kindness, and a few less limits on one’s imagination, we can encourage an atmosphere where achieving unity, honesty, and self-expression is simply the norm and not the exception” Carrie Coulton.
The lie of our global economic system is perhaps the most egregious after the lie of scarcity. As I said above, measuring the stock-market as a sign of success is a huge lie for the 99% without the ‘spare cash’ to gamble in the stock market. Whenever the pundits echo how great the stock-markets are doing, I always think back to the many market crashes in the last 150 years, especially the great ones like 1929 and 2008. And after every one, like after every great war, we exclaim never again will we let the elites do it to us. But they lie to us and we carry on letting them do it – see the quotes in second paragraph above. The Fat Cats didn’t suffer during the Great depression after 1929, they made out like bandits. Similarly, the modern Fat Cats after 2008 not only had us bail them out, but they generously gave themselves massive bonusses (on the order of tens of millions of dollars each) just to rub it into our faces that they are controlling the system. And they are promising to do the same in the next coming massive crash. How will we respond worldwide this next time?
And we can’t expect the corporate system to have a change of heart. I am always amused by university business courses in ‘Ethics’ and how they managed to spend a whole term on the topic. After all, there is only one real ethic they live by, which is to generate profit for their investors. “The way we’ve set up corporations, even a majority vote of stockholders cannot demand that a corporation’s policies reflect the public good or preserve the environment for future use. That’s because profit is the one and only motive. It’s up to government and it’s up to people to protect the public interest. Corporations are simply not allowed to” David Suzuki. And since governments are in cahoots with the corporations, that leaves us, the people only, that can change the system.
To be Continued …………
0 Comments