Escaping the Prison

The book is not my style — meandering, polemical, too psychoanalytic — but its ideas are very important. The core idea of the book is that we have been imprisoned by our culture, not through any corporatist conspiracy, but by ourselves, a complex and collective adaptation to the increasingly difficult circumstances in which our species finds itself. We have met the enemy and he is us. What’s worse, the chains that bind us are so evasive and subtle that we’re usually unaware of our own confinement. Our adaptation meets the needs of the day, so, as I’m so fond of saying these days, we do what we must.

There is a framework, an unwritten set of unquestioned assumptions that this self-induced prison is based upon. Edwards harps on one such assumption — “the unchallengeable [capitalist virtue] of maximum economic growth through maximum corporate profit” — though I think there are others, shared by a large majority of people despite differences in their sociopolitical frames. These unchallengeable tenets are pounded into us through media propaganda, and the (mainstream) media filter their and our reality by virtue of five things (this borrowed from Chomsky):

• the size, concentrated ownership, owner wealth and profit orientation of the dominant mass media
• their dependence on corporate advertising
• their sources of ready, steady inexpensive ‘news’ (overwhelmingly from rich and powerful institutions)
• their averseness to flak from vested interests (lawyers, pressure groups, pseudo-foundations, fundamentalist religions etc.)
• their temptation to pander by oversimplifying and vilifying ‘straw man’ enemies

Even when they employ investigative reporters determined to find the truth, the mass media can’t help themselves. These five filters define who they are, and reporters who don’t recognize this reality are tossed into the buzzsaw. There is no “freedom of the press”, Edwards asserts. He includes two wonderful quotes on press conformity:

There is no freedom of dissent in business either, he asserts:

And, he says, the education system further reinforces the propaganda, the learned helplessness and the futility of resistance through seven fundamental lessons (this borrowed from Gatto):

• the lesson of confusion — try to absorb disconnected facts without reason or meaning
• the lesson of class position — compete, know your place, conform to succeed or face ‘shameful’ failure
• the lesson of indifference — don’t care too much; obedience, not enthusiasm, is rewarded
• the lesson of emotional dependency — someone else will tell you whether you’re right or wrong
• the lesson of intellectual dependency — someone else will tell you what to do/think and not do/think
• the lesson of provisional self-esteem — your worth depends on the assessment of others (experts and peers)
• the lesson of no privacy — there is no time or place for independent thought or action

Through education, the media, and business we are indoctrinated into accepting the necessity and seeking the rewards of conforming to the political and economic system, hammer into anvil. What’s more, Edwards says, “the system has an interest in our believing that we freely choose these conforming goals”, and that there are no viable alternative ways to live. As a result, he says, “large numbers of people are necessarily in various states of psychological ill health”. Psychology plays its role, convincing us that our illness is our own fault, due to something in our past that precludes us from “adjusting properly”. “In our culture it is considered a virtue to ‘cheer up’, to hide our unhappiness rather than expose the truth” — the truth that it is this society that makes us ill.

Learned helplessness is endemic in such a system. Edwards quotes EF Schumacher, describing response to his London Times article “Insane Work Cannot Produce a Sane Society”, as saying “The remarkable thing is that…there were no hot denials or anguished agreements; no reactions at all…People read it, sighed and nodded, I suppose, and moved on”. This alienation, disconnection and ‘dis-ease’ is the consequence of self-inflicted conformity of thinking, behaviour and belief. Realizing it only increases the anguish — better to sublimate it, or you’ll end up in the same state as Tolstoy, who wrote:

Finally, Edwards gets around to solutions, what he calls a “chest of tools for intellectual self-defence”. You really have to dig for them, but it’s worth the effort. Here are the tools in a nutshell:

1. Mindfulness: Pay attention to what’s happening and what’s being said, and why. Things are the way they are for a reason — study until you know what it is.
2. Self-awareness: Pay attention to what you’re doing, and not doing, and why.
3. Open-mindedness: Don’t prejudge. Listen. Be willing to change your mind, consider something radical, even, to most, unthinkable.
4. Acceptance of responsibility: Don’t blame victims for their own misfortune; it’s rarely their fault.
5. Critical thinking: Especially of the status quo, what you read in the mass media, and messages from commercial organizations and special interest groups.
6. Refusing to self-censor: It’s the first stage in self-paralysis and unhappy conformity.
7. Rejecting simple, comforting answers: Issues and problems are usually complex.
8. Not compromising: The ‘lesser of two evils’ is a slippery slope.
9. Refusing to hate: Avoid letting yourself be provoked into hating or scapegoating. People are generally well-intentioned, and stirring up hatred is usually done by people with ulterior motives to distract you from discovering those motives.
10. Reducing your dependence: On the economic, political, educational systems and mainstream media. When you’re dependent, your ability to criticize and voice your criticisms is impaired.
11. Disobeying: Constantly challenge authority, ask questions, say and do what others fear to.
12. Learning: Especially through first-hand observations and stories from people on the front lines. Sidestep the filters.
13. Not rationalizing: Don’t be seduced into believing something just because you want to, or because it’s easy or self-serving.
14. Celebrating your uniqueness: Accentuate your difference. Don’t be everyone else. Embrace others but don’t become them just to ‘belong’.
15. Loving yourself: Don’t accept messages from anyone in any form that tell you that to be ‘lovable’ you need to do X or own Y or believe Z. Don’t let your sense of self-worth be dependent on others’ attention or approval.
16. Wondering: Imagine, be ‘bewildered’ (literally, be wilder!), free of the need for certainty.

Some of these, of course, are easier said than done. But still, it’s an interesting list.

The important lesson from all this, I think, is that escaping the prison is a life-long, constant, and often lonely journey. Back in the 1960s when we dissented and refused to conform, and we ended the Vietnam War, we figured we’d won, and rested on our laurels. And soon those of us who had rejected the system and moved out en masse to the Edge, started to get sucked back in by the black hole and all its seductions and promises and lies, until everything we had gained had been lost again. And what did we do? Rationalize. We said it was just youthful excess, and it was time to grow up and get real. Arrrgh! We had made such progress, so fast!

Thanks to the Internet and the ability it has given us to access information and ideas that are not filtered by the mainstream media, and to support each other as we employ the 16 tools above, we have another chance. We can’t blow it this time — there is too much at stake. We cannot settle for just electing a Democratic or a New Democratic or even a Green political regime, and think the battle against conformity is won, that we are free. We cannot mistake milestones for the end of the journey. Perhaps most importantly, we must continue to push much farther out to the Edge, even if that means leaving those who are not yet ready behind, for now. We cannot wait for them. If that means the radicals have to shrug off the progressive moderates, and the ‘deep green’ environmentalists have to reject the ‘pale green’ technophiles as no better than the overt anti-environmentalists and corporatists, then so be it. If we allow ourselves to be held back, compromise, one step forward two steps back, we will get exactly nowhere.

The Aha! moment for me was tool #15 above, a means of coping with Gatto’s ‘lesson of provisional self-esteem’. We all long so much for attention and appreciation (hell, it’s the lifeblood that keeps the blogosphere alive!) How did we allow ourselves to become so dependent on others for how we feel about ourselves? It’s such an irony in a society that prides itself on its rugged individualism. It’s a measure of how effective the invisible prison is, that we’ve been beaten down to the point that we’re afraid to be ourselves, to be different, to be authentic.

We have such a long way to go! Those tools are going to get a lot of use.Fare forward, voyagers. See you, I hope, on the far edge.