Chapter 43: More Food for Thought
1) We are capable of a wide variety of social structures. Millennia of experience has shown that hierarchical socioeconomic structures always become dysfunctional, oppressive, and incompatible with human happiness and well-being, reinforcing our most destructive traits while suppressing our constructive ones. Abuse of power is amplified and institutionalized. Recent research has shown that being in a position of power actually shuts down the brain centers for empathy and compassion. Therefore it’s clear that we must abandon hierarchical social systems in favor of peer-based, cooperative, symbiotic ones.
Yes, we are capable of living in cooperation and symbiosis. Each of us has unique contributions to make to our community. Given our strongly social nature, it is reasonable and logical to postulate that our diversity evolved, or was created, to give us the optimal range of abilities and personality types needed to maximize our ability to survive and thrive, just as the organs and cells in an organism’s body work symbiotically to sustain themselves, each other, and the being whom they comprise.
2) When you hear the terms “Free enterprise” and “Private Enterprise” they probably call up connotations of mom-and-pop shops and the freedom of individuals to live their lives and pursue their livelihoods freely. Sadly, in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, the terms in practice refer to the dominance, interests and affairs of the modern feudal lords and their corporations.
The epitome of this reality is embodied in the concept of “corporate personhood,” that pernicious legal fiction that grants corporations the same rights as human beings in many legal settings. Thus, “private enterprise” in practice means the enforcement of the “rights” and will of employers, especially corporations, over the rights of employees, clients, small businesses, and any real human person who wishes to live outside the socioeconomic system. It also shields individuals within corporations from consequences if they cause harm.
The misperceptions inherent in the cultural myths for these phrases, the belief that they express individual rights and empowerment, serve to reinforce a population to be docile and compliant. We see this clearly in the United States, with the trend of recent years to redefine “religious liberty” to mean the “right” of those in positions of power and control, such as employers, lenders, landlords, and service providers (including healthcare providers) to deny service to, fire, refuse, exclude, and otherwise discriminate against and harass any individual who has any trait that the person in the power position claims is against their religion. Yet there is no parallel trend of laws and interpretations upholding and protecting the religious liberty and rights of the individual with respect to the power-position entity. When push comes to shove, the feudal lords are allowed to enforce and inflict their views and agendas on us serfs and peasants, in almost every case. Corporations have usurped and co-opted the inalienable rights of human beings, leaving us increasingly under their thumbs.
Constitutional and other legal protections for human beings are, through legal sophistry, wrested from us, redefined, and repurposed to enforce and enshrine the power and “rights” of the modern feudal lords and their corporations. We are disempowered in the process. It also sidesteps separation of church and state, since corporations aren’t government and in their “private” domain are given free reign to impose their agendas with little to no likelihood of legal consequences.
The current “religious liberty” trend is in reality a face put on a move to further consolidate power and control into the hands of the modern feudal lords and their vassals while stripping us of our rights and protections. This power consolidation is disguised under patriotic and religious rhetoric and the liberal use of symbols and terms that trigger strong conditioned positive, sympathetic visceral responses in many people.
The use of “religious freedom” or “religious liberty” are especially effective at gaming support; after all, who would oppose religious liberty? It’s very important to thoroughly research and question any such terminology on the lips or pens of legislators. When you hear “Religious freedom,” “religious liberty,” “pro-life,” “national security,” “racial purity,” “family values,” “at-will employment” or any similar kinds of phrases, please dig deeply and identify their real intentions and effects.
Such terms are used by highly skilled propagandists to disguise the real intentions and effects of draconian legislation by linking them to relatable and sympathetic-sounding buzzwords. This is nothing new. Dictators throughout history have done the same. It little differs from the “doublespeak” from the book 1984 where people are brainwashed to believe that “war is peace” and other contradictions. As initiators of the Transition, we will need to resist the appeal of such humanistic, patriotic sounding terms and look at what lies behind them in any particular context and openly refer to them by accurately descriptive terms.
3) Repeatedly repeating the same actions while expecting a different result is one popular definition of insanity. Yet we humans have a side of our nature that resists change, that clings to the familiar, even if it harms us.
The current dominant socioeconomic feudalistic paradigm has shown itself countless times to be inimical to widespread human happiness, harmony, empowerment, and thriving. Many attempts have been made to tweak it so that it promotes human happiness and well-being. All of them fail sooner or later, because the paradigm, by its core operating principles, cannot be made to promote anything but a modern feudal socioeconomic structure. That won’t change, any more than a fish can be adapted to live on land. It is dangerous to keep trying. The only solution is to completely scrap the current paradigm and replace it with one designed to promote and reinforce thriving, harmonious, symbiotic, dynamic societies of empowered, free, fully realized, and highly engaged members.
4) Under the current dominant paradigm, fewer and fewer people gain control over time over more and more resources. This miniscule segment of the population comes to largely control land, food, water, healthcare, and more and to determine how much we’re paid and how much we’re charged for goods and services.
The modern feudal lords exert more power and control than government in many key areas, are not answerable in any way to the people, and increasingly control and influence the people in government, even when government is constituted to be responsible to the people.
Greed and arbitrary exercise of power are the norm in those strata, accepted as reasonable. The socioeconomic paradigm strongly reinforces this behavior, and does nothing at all to limit or discourage it.
This behavior reaches staggering extremes. Examples abound. For example, pharmaceutical companies have been observed openly cornering the rights to long-existing medications that they didn’t develop, and then raising the price thousands of percent, putting them out of reach of most people. Some offending CEO’s show no remorse when interviewed, expressing their belief that their moral duty is to provide maximum profits and value to their (wealthy) shareholders, and nothing beyond that. Providing effective medication, easily available, to those who need it, does not come into the equation. These people decide which medicines to develop, and which not, based on profitability, not benefit to human beings. They are in fact criminals against humanity, causing untold harm, and yet they aren’t charged with any crimes, because the paradigm strongly reinforces such behaviors. One only has to read the writings of Milton Friedman to appreciate how deeply this doctrine is ingrained in the socioeconomic canon.
Massive corporations routinely slow production to raise prices as high as the market will bear. This tiny group of modern feudal lords control vast and vital resources as their “private property,” that impact every aspect of society. This gives them tremendous leverage and influence over people in government. The feudal lords can threaten to cut production, or to flood the market, or to move their operations overseas, putting politicians in a position such that they have to “play ball” in order to prevent massive harm to the public good. The feudal lords are also able to bribe, blackmail and manipulate those in government. Thus they exert far more influence over the functioning of government, than the people, the electorate to whom those in government are officially and theoretically responsible.
Those at the top of the socioeconomic pyramid have the power to blackmail both the government and the people, by causing outages, shortages, and effectively blocking any measures taken by government that displease them. The feudal lords and their corporations also make massive contributions to the campaigns of politicians, and pay lobbyists to manipulate and influence lawmakers to support their agendas.
In societies where one’s rights, freedoms, access, options, quality of life, and the respect one is given are almost entirely determined by one’s place on the socioeconomic pyramid, the modern feudal lords of the corporatocracy often don’t even need to resort to blackmail, bribery or manipulation. Their very position in the hierarchy causes most politicians to defer to them by default, putting their interests over those of the people.
This socioeconomic paradigm cannot help but give rise to some version of a modern feudal corporatocracy, where a handful of modern feudal lords rule with an iron hand over the rest of us, in direct contradiction of the Constitutionally established government of, by and for the people. Even the most carefully defined democratic government will inevitably become subsumed to the feudal lords and their corporations, if it coexists with this socioeconomic paradigm. Therefore, this socioeconomic paradigm is functionally and operationally incompatible with, at cross-purposes with, and inimical to any kind of free and thriving society of thriving individuals with government of, by and for the people. 5) Under the current modern feudalistic paradigm, high stress, anxiety, anger and even rage are chronic and rampant. Tragically, we tend to look for someone to blame, go after, punish or avenge ourselves upon.
For generations, the modern feudal lords have finely honed and perfected their skills at advertising, marketing, and other forms of propaganda to reliably manipulate us to serve their agendas. That’s why people gather at stores in the middle of the night to score this year’s hot item that’s (predictably) in short supply. That’s why we feel pulled to buy things that we’d never, on our own, feel the need to have.
These same manipulative skills are used by the modern feudal lords to lead us to focus our pent-up anxiety and anger upon one another, fanning and magnifying existing fires of ethnic, religious, national, generational and other inter-group fear, resentment, blame, and destructive competition. We are encouraged and led to see ourselves as opposed groups with a strong, irrational “us vs them” mentality, where “they” are to blame for our struggles and injustices. Thus we are kept divided and controlled. It doesn’t take much for violence to erupt. We’re kept dependent on currency to access all of our needs. Currency is kept scarce, with not enough to go around. It’s easy to keep stirring the pot so we fight each other rather than focus on the paradigm that is behind the inequities in order to decisively change it forever for the better, which would deprive the modern feudal lords of the power, privilege, opulence and control to which they are addicted. Like any addicts, they react reflexively to any threat to their addiction.
Thus divided, we remain disempowered, controlled, and compliant to supporting the modern feudal power structure. It’s an age-old strategy used by despots and dictators since ancient times. Under oppressive conditions, people will feel anger, fear and resentment. The feudal lords channel those emotions to set us against each other. Sometimes there is an out-group upon whom most of society is focused. Sometimes it takes the form of mutual antagonism between various groups. It’s a great way to keep us from realizing that responsibility for our oppression rests in the socioeconomic paradigm under which we’re operating. This strategy has worked well for despots as far back as we have historical records.
We who intend and plan to create a truly universally empowering society where every one of us can thrive, and where the benefit of one becomes the benefit of their fellows, must consciously resist all temptation to blame or resent one another for our plight. We must put aside mutual resentments, commit and act in concert to nonviolently but forcefully overthrow the modern feudal socioeconomic power structure and replace it with a new, peer-based, symbiotic paradigm that will enable each and every one of us to be empowered, to thrive, to live up to our fullest potential, and to reach our greatest fulfillment while making our greatest contribution, and work together with mutual respect to build a society where human dignity, empowerment, thriving, harmony, and freedom are the norm.
Let us always remind ourselves and each other, that those who are like us and those different from us are all our peers and fellows, all potential allies and comrades in a worthy undertaking, all worthy of respect, dignity, quality of life, access to resources, and more. When you look at the person ahead of you in line at the grocery store or sitting next to you at a sporting event, learn to think of them as a potential friend, ally, and benefactor, no matter how they look, speak, worship or dress. That’s the only way that we’ll be able to change the socieconomic world we live in so that we can all thrive in mutual benefit, in peace. As long as we’re struggling against each other instead of taking control of the paradigm to change it, we are freely enabling the power of the modern feudal lords and enforcing our own disempowerment.
5) The modern feudal socioeconomic paradigm under which we live is structured so that, regardless of how hard we work and apply ourselves, only a microscopically tiny percentage of us can ever “make it.” Yet we keep “playing the game,” dutifully playing our assigned role as compliant, hardworking serfs or peasants. We’ve been steeped in the cultural myth and propaganda that “anybody” can “make it” if they work long, hard and diligently enough. This myth is treated as though it were in the same category as gravitation, electromagnetism, and the speed of light, even though it is demonstrably untrue and applies to a human-created construct that only continues to function for as long as people consent and cooperate to keep it going.
We are programmed to believe that if we just work harder and longer, we’ll achieve the ability to be confident that we can easily constantly ransom our existence without stress or worry about insufficiency. This is what’s called “financial freedom.”
As mentioned before, this myth bears little meaningful relationship to reality. The psychological mechanisms that keep us playing the “game” are identical to those that keep some gamblers playing in casinos while losing. In both cases, there are a few dramatic examples of people who “made it big” playing craps, roulette, or the loyal-hardworking-employee game. The actual likelihood of any one person “making it big” in either context is vanishingly small. In the mainstream socioeconomic structure, there simply isn’t room that high up on the wealth-and-power pyramid for more than a very few to make it. In practice, the likelihood of achieving “financial independence” by being a loyal, hardworking employee is, in practice, miniscule. Yet belief in this myth may cause some to resist the Transition due to believing they’ll “make it” if they just keep playing long enough.
Alongside this cultural myth are other myths that interact with this one to keep people compliant. One such pernicious misconception is the carry-over Cold War myth that modern feudalism equals democracy and freedom, and that therefore anything that isn’t modern feudalism is Communism or dictatorship and tyranny of one kind or another. Because this began as propaganda, very few people are aware or knowledgeable of what the concepts of Communism, Socialism, Democracy, Capitalism, and theocracy actually mean. People often react out of conditioned responses without questioning or understanding the assumptions behind their actions and decisions.
Realistically, the dominant socioeconomic paradigm creates, reinforces, and amplifies wolves in sheep’s clothing. As an analogy, in The Wizard of Oz, once Dorothy knows the truth, she only needs to click her heels together to return home. In our case, once we know the truth, we can free ourselves by simply changing the way the “game” is played from the bottom up, which involves matter-of-factly ignoring the socioeconomic chain of command (in every context) and eliminating all forms of currency from all forms of transactions. We will need to be determined and committed, and be prepared to resist by all necessary means, any attempt to intimidate, coerce, seduce, or trick us into returning to the modern feudal system.
We grew up soaked in the socioeconomic myths and propaganda. We must be constantly diligent inside ourselves and amongst us, to reverse the effects of those beliefs, to teach ourselves to consciously recognize, ignore, and tune out the myths that have kept us compliant and complicit in our own enslavement and supporting the socioeconomic pyramid on our backs for many generations.
Self-awareness is vital. Changing any habit is a challenge. Many people in abusive relationships choose to remain in them, both from fear of the unknown, fear of the abuser, and a sense in futility. The Biblical story of the ancient Israelis’ liberation from Egyptian slavery includes a passage where they seriously consider going back, rather than face challenges of the unknown. In our case, as with these other cases, our best prospect is to stay the course, to be undeterred and committed to advance into the new paradigm, no matter how daunting it may seem.
The deposed former feudal lords will certainly try to seduce and cajole us back into compliance with their dominance, by playing upon every human vulnerability within us. We must be ready to recognize, identify, neutralize, and immunize ourselves against all such voices from within and from without.
7) Some of us have been led and programmed to believe that any departure from the current dominant modern feudalistic socioeconomic paradigm will bring privation, oppression, dehumanization, and misery. The reality is just the opposite.
This comes from Cold War propaganda, reinforced by horror stories from so-called “communist” countries whose implementations were deeply distorted, just as is the implementation of “democracy” alongside modern feudalism in other countries. Many people react with horror at images of bleak East German cities or the Cambodian killing fields; yet do not react similarly to images of equally bleak U.S. cityscapes or scenes of murdered and tortured victims of the Pinochet Chilean regime which was installed in power by the CIA, against the will of the Chilean people, in order to forcefully protect the interests of powerful corporations. Atrocities are atrocities, regardless of who commits them upon whom, in the name of what.
In fact, many “communist” countries’ interpretations formed starkly class-stratified societies in sharp contrast to the classless societies envisioned by Marx and Engels. Those countries were just as broken as the class-stratified “Western” countries, arriving from a different starting point. In the People’s Republic of China, that cognitive dissonance is so extreme that their behavior is starkly similar to that of the United States economically, while their rhetoric pretends the opposite.
In fact, only a fundamentally synergistic, symbiotic, peer-based, egalitarian socioeconomic paradigm can be expected to generate a society of universal thriving, empowerment, quality of life, freedom, peace, and human dignity. Both Eastern Soviet-style communism and Western U.S. style socioeconomic feudalism have repeatedly and consistently shown themselves to generate a predatory society in which all prey upon all and a tiny minority engorges itself upon the lifeblood of everybody else.
Like opiates and stimulants, the dominant modern feudalism offers the illusion of bliss and prosperity, a few brief highs followed by a losing battle to just stave off feeling sick. Just as an addict’s life comes to be dominated by getting the next fix, our lives under modern feudalism are dominated by getting the next fix of currency to ransom our existence against the unrelenting default denial. Unlike the drug addict, whose condition is recognized as a treatable disease, we modern serfs and peasants are forced by the very paradigm under which we are born, to live like drug addicts, in thrall to the drug of currency with no option of rehabilitation, unless we boldly choose to non-violently force a change, to refuse to use the drug of currency in any capacity. Think of the Boston Tea Party or the Indian Salt March, in a different way. When we utterly discard currency in all forms, it can no longer be used by some to control others’ access to resources.
Real economics of, by and for the people, coupled with government of, by and for the people, will usher in a new, unprecedented era of universal thriving, prosperity, well-being, empowerment, peace, fulfillment, and freedom exceeding anything we’ve ever seen, a Renaissance to dwarf all prior Renaissances. To get there, we must identify our illusions and become utterly impervious to them.