how to save the world

I was not surprised that the coronation of Biden went off peacefully. It was pretty clear that the gang of overpaid Trump PR people who orchestrated 98% of what happened in DC earlier this month concluded that, thanks to the 2% who stormed the Capitol and got all the headlines, it was a total PR disaster.

The Jan 6 event involved millions of dollars in promoting a protest, complete with massive stages with expensive Jumbotron TVs and even a US-Open-style Executive Tent for the Trump family and friends. And it backfired. They should have known: In progressive protests it’s never the large numbers who march peacefully that get the media attention; it’s the tiny Black Bloc type minority smashing windows and looting. Why should it be any different when conservatives protest?

After that PR disaster, the Trump PR corps just gave up, and the result was the small handfuls of protesters we’ve seen over the past few days, far more militant in their beliefs but completely disorganized, unfunded and unrepresentative of anyone but their own tiny membership.

Some recent articles, I think, drive home where America now sits, and here’s where I think that is:

1. About 45% of the US population is centrist (often described in US media as ‘progressives’ or ‘liberals’, but just middle-of-the-road or slightly right of that by the standards of most western democracies). They voted for Democrats, were pleased with the election results, and worried about the 45% in group 2 below, who they have almost no personal contact with, and so don’t realize that they are politically almost indistinguishable from themselves, other than their positions on a few social issues like abortion. Their fear was and is exaggerated and exploited by media hype and political opportunism (“polarization!”).
2. About 45% of the population is right-of-centre, socially conservative, and small town/rural Republicans. They were unhappy with the election results and bewildered by media and politicians who incessantly insisted the election was stolen. They are not sure quite what to believe, and they are worried about the 52% in groups 1, 3, and 6, who they have almost no personal contact with, and so don’t realize that they are politically almost indistinguishable from group 1, other than their positions on a few social issues like abortion. Their fear was and is exaggerated and exploited by media hype and political opportunism (“communists!”).
3. About 6% of the population are actual real progressives and socialists, not sure if they are pleased with the election results but relieved it wasn’t worse. They’re relatively informed and capable of critical thinking beyond the oversimplified fear-mongering coverage of the media on “both sides”. So they understand that beyond a lot of posturing and a more diverse-looking cabinet, the same corporate interests that actually determined economic, political and military policy under past administrations remain firmly in control and will dictate actual policy going forward. They’re not happy about that.
4. About 2% of the population are actual real economic conservatives, not sure if they are pleased with the election results but relieved it wasn’t worse. They’re relatively informed and capable of critical thinking beyond the oversimplified fear-mongering coverage of the media on “both sides”. So they understand that beyond a lot of posturing and a more diverse-looking cabinet, the same corporate interests that actually determined economic, political and military policy under past administrations remain firmly in control and will dictate actual policy going forward. They’re quite happy with that. They actually can’t lose. A good proportion of the top caste of Americans (“the 1%”) probably fits in this group.
5. About 1% of the population are truly right-wing idealistic libertarian militia-types (this link will give you a sense of how they’re feeling now.) They were outraged by the election results, have little to lose and would actually like to see a permanent authoritarian government of like-minded right-wingers who would restore rigid patriarchy and/or dismantle government ‘social’ services. They’re nostalgic for what never was.
6. About 1% of the population are truly left-wing idealistic libertarian militia-types (this link will give you a sense of how they’re feeling now.) They were outraged by the election results, have little to lose and would actually like to see a complete dismantling of authority (especially police, governments and borders).

This delicate balance, which I’ve tried to depict in the chart above, has been in place for nearly four decades. Some thoughts on how the balance has shifted over the years:

• The line between groups 1 & 3, and between groups 2 & 4, is pretty fluid, with voters moving back and forth depending on the times and the rhetoric. That’s why Bernie Sanders (group 3) was actually electable.
• On much of the left coast of the US my sense is that groups 1 & 2 are a bit smaller and groups 3, 5 & 6 a bit larger. In the US south, I suspect groups 2 & 6 are a bit larger and groups 3 & 5 are a bit smaller. while in the Northeast the opposite is probably true.
• I think young people tend more towards groups 3, 5 & 6, but since they gravitate to groups 1, 2 & 4 as they get older the system tends to stay in equilibrium.
• Most of the Americans I know are probably in group 3, though with perhaps some sympathy with those in group 6 except when they act like Bloc-heads. Similarly, I think a lot of US conservatives from group 2 have been goaded to be somewhat sympathetic to the group 5 “militias”, except when they act like antler-heads.
• I don’t think the majority of Americans in any of these groups are as war-mongering or as enamoured with and beholden to corporatist interests, as either the Republican or Democratic administrations they’ve voted for. But both parties rely utterly on the ultra-rich corporatists and media for the campaign funds and coverage they need to win elections. So only that tiny group is getting the kind of government they really want. The rest of us are bullied, fear-mongered and propagandized to make the false choice between Tweedledum and Tweedledee. Inequality disenfranchises almost everyone.
• Because groups 2, 4 and 6 combined are less than 50%, Republicans and conservatives have to rely on gerrymandering, the senate representation distortion, and the obsolete electoral college to win elections. They’ve become pretty good at it over the last four decades. It especially helps when group 3 shrugs and decides (with some justification) it really doesn’t matter, so they don’t vote.

My sense is that the situation in Canada isn’t much different, except the third group is probably somewhat larger and the fifth and sixth groups probably somewhat smaller, mostly for cultural reasons, as depicted above.

In Canada, because groups 2, 4 and 6 combined are less than 50%, they have to rely on the “first-past-the-post” system of elections that has allowed them to win close to 40% of multi-party elections over the past 4 decades with only 40% of the votes, because the centrist and progressive parties split their 60% of the votes among 3-5 different parties. My sense is that the political landscape in much of Europe and other anglophone countries is not dissimilar to Canada’s.

So I’m not terribly worried about the loss of democracy, though I agree with Adam Gopnik that we can never give up trying to make it work better, and should never assume it will last forever. (Groups 5 & 6, tiny as they are, are large enough to create havoc, especially with warfare — both military and political — becoming increasingly asymmetric).

The rally on Jan 6 supposedly attracted an estimated 25,000 people, of which about 98% were probably from group 2 (clueless, unarmed, protest “tourists” who reacted to Trump’s people’s herculean PR campaign to show up for the rally and party even though they never got invited into the tent). That’s a really poor return on the massive publicity investment — after all, Greta Thunberg attracted 20 times that number to Montréal for her climate march with much less spending. Though of course, ultimately neither event made any difference.

The media didn’t even show much of the action with the giant stages, speeches, Jumbotron displays or the Trump tent — it was more fun (and better for their ratings) to show the guy sprawled in Nancy Pelosi’s office or the antler-head playing to the cameras in the Senate chamber. Instead, some of them showed the tent video after the fact as if the attendees were celebrating the invasion of the Capitol, although the tent was only occupied during the rally where Trump had spoken two hours earlier, and then the family left for the private dining room in the Oval Office well before the ‘invasion’ of the Capitol began. But, gotta keep those ratings up.

I think the far greater problem is that, due to the above-noted distortions in the electoral systems, conservatives are justifiably worried that if the system isn’t somehow constantly rigged in their favour, they’ll never hold power. And they’re absolutely correct. So there’s a lot to be gained for conservatives in both the US and Canada to fire up “their” group 2 & 4 voters through fear-mongering.

And then, of course, there’s a lot to be gained by the centrist parties (US Democrats, Canada’s Liberals) to fear-monger that since the system is rigged, they may never hold power, so they have to turn out in extraordinary numbers (and not split the vote) to prevent the minority from always winning. And they’re absolutely correct.

It’s a completely fucked-up system. But to me, the real outrage remains the one that the media never talk about: the total control that the corporatists, who finance all the major parties in both countries, and who own the media, have over the levers of power and policy, no matter which party wins.

And so we have American munitions enabling the endless atrocities in Yemen, and the endless war-mongering against Iran, China and Russia, no matter who wins the US election, and we have Canadian governments buying pipelines and pimping for big oil, no matter who wins the Canadian election.

And we have both governments paying lip service to addressing climate change while doing nothing of substance to even slow it down. (And don’t say the Democrats just need time — they had time under Clinton and Obama and did nothing.)

Unlike authoritarian overthrow, which is a small but real risk, these outrages are happening, here and now, and the parties and the media are all complicit, conning us all. Nero would be proud.

Just in case you’re new to reading this blog — this situation cannot be fixed. This is what political, social, economic and ecological systems in collapse look like. Everyone in power knows that no one can prevent these collapses from happening, and all they’re doing is posturing, offering false reassurances (to keep people obedient, prevent widespread panic, and tamp down the numbers of the nothing-to-losers in groups 5 & 6), trying to prop it all up a little longer, and making sure they have their own personal escape and insurance plans in place. And perhaps trying to buy into their own rhetoric, to make it all seem less hopeless.

I learned a lot over the past 20 years talking candidly with climate scientists (and a few economists), with the cameras off and no media in earshot. They’ve known we’re fucked for a long time, but they dare not say so publicly, and in some ways, they don’t even dare admit it to themselves. It doesn’t matter which of the six groups you’re in — none of the forms of salvation their leaders promise has a hope of working. Might as well talk and play with the deck chairs, because on this voyage on Spaceship Earth, there are no lifeboats.

Caravaggio’s 1601 painting The Incredulity of St Thomas, based on the biblical story that gave rise to the expression “Doubting Thomas”. Image from wikipedia, in the public domain.

One of the downsides of keeping a blog is that it leaves a permanent record of all the dumb things the writer once believed. I’ve left all my posts up because sometimes it’s a useful reminder of how much I’ve learned in 18 years.

So here, in all false humility, is a list of things I once believed that I now think are preposterous. Some of them caused needless suffering, to others and to myself. Others were quite absurd, an indication of how carried away we idealists can get by the most precarious of information and well-honed arguments. Still others were just gullible. I wasn’t sure how to rank them so I’m just going to put them out there:

I once believed:

1. That we have free will. That people are to blame for, in control of, and responsible for, their actions. That we are more than the product of our genetic and cultural conditioning.
2. That we can do anything we set ourselves out to do. That entrepreneurship, practiced well, is a roadmap to joy, sustainability and self-fulfillment open to everyone.
3. That through learning and “innovation”, and study of indigenous cultures, or if we all just [fill in the blank], we can yet “save the world”, by which I meant, ambiguously, both the natural, more-than-human world and the human civilization that has now largely destroyed it.
4. That 9/11 was an “inside job”. (You know, that sixth tower…)
5. That squalene in military vaccines during the Gulf War was a dangerous and unnecessary experimental “adjutant” that was added just to save manufacturers money. (Is there anything bad we couldn’t have believed about Dick Cheney?)
6. That hierarchy, schooling, “free” markets, “work”, non-plant foods, monogamy, centralization and privatization have their useful place.
7. That eating well and exercising are not that important to our health, and that we can actually choose to eat well and exercise, or not. That bodies are all (substantially) the same in terms of what makes them healthy or not.
8. That a small number of people with wildly disproportionate knowledge and power could if they chose bring about major change in our world.
9. That conversation, language, the Internet, and story-telling enable powerful communication and understanding. That there is a large appetite for thoughtful, investigative, well-researched, challenging and imaginative writing, by journalists, scientists, philosophers and creative minds.
10. That the world (meaning either the randomness of events in the cosmos, or life in human society) is unfair.
11. That indirect activism works.
12. That by studying systems we can change them. That predicaments are just particularly-challenging “wicked” problems.
13. That most people want to know the truth. That most people are fundamentally curious, and basically healthy.
14. That we can actually imagine a world very different from the one(s) we have directly experienced (especially if we’ve read about it in cultural studies or sci-fi).
15. That hope is essential to our continuation and health, and that depression (which I suffered from for a good part of my life) is a curable disease.
16. That there is such a thing as “good” and “evil”.
17. That we are the most conscious and intellectually advanced species in the history of the planet.
18. That reason is more reliable as the basis for belief and action than intuition.
19. That the human “self” is real and in control of the mind and body it believes it occupies.
20. That anything is real or separate. That time and space and people and “things” actually exist and that things “happen” within and to them.

I added the last two somewhat reluctantly. I no longer believe they are true, but my behaviour, including my writing on this blog, clearly demonstrates that some well-entrenched “me” still accepts them, still presumes they are the case.

These are all things I wanted to believe, so it was not that hard for me to do so. Believing them made things easier, made everything that seemed to be happening make more sense, and relieved the cognitive dissonance that any conflicting views I might entertain brought up.

So what has changed so much in the past 18 years that I no longer believe any of these things that I would have once ardently argued for (and often did)?

My conditioning has changed. The people in my life now are very different, fewer in number and less certain about what they believe. The dogma of the educational prison and the corporate workplace with their QAnon-like “fear and obey” message no longer holds power over me like it once did.

I trust my instincts more than I used to, realizing that human intuition has evolved over a million years to integrate knowledge much better than reason and thinking alone can. I am much less swayed by arguments from people in my “progressive” social circles, no matter how articulate or impassioned they may be, when they are unsupported by dispassionate reason, evidence or science. I may still want to believe them, but I find I just can’t, when it entails blaming people for their outrageous actions, when that behaviour will never be fixed through enmity, indoctrination, incarceration, use of power, or argument (or, sadly, any other type of “fix”.) Things are the way they are for a reason, and it is no one’s “fault”.

I seem to have outgrown the severe depression that handicapped me for much of my life, and I think that has cleared my thinking and liberated energy for a reconsideration of beliefs that I clung to unreasonably for many years. And retirement has certainly helped.

My small circle of exceptionally intelligent and sensitive friends have modelled much healthier thinking, reactions, beliefs and behaviours than my own, and in the process have enormously helped me to become more self-aware and self-knowledgeable, more equanimous, more critical of unchallenged ideas, and both physically and emotionally healthier. I am blessed, and these radical changes in worldview are largely their astonishing gift to me.

Over the years I have made the arguments for all of these changes of belief, repeatedly, in this blog, and the purpose of this post is not to persuade anyone or to drag these issues back up for debate. The newest belief changes have not come through argument, but rather from just sitting with what seems to be, and what seems to be happening, and seeing what arises. The only one who can change anyone’s mind is themselves.

So I guess my purpose in writing this is to see how far I’ve come since I started using this blog to think out loud in public. You can draw your own conclusions about whether it’s a progression or a regression. I’m sure there’s more to come.

Thanks for reading and listening, and telling me what you think, all these long years.

———

(PS: Regarding #5, it is kind of interesting that 13 years after the suicide of squalene champion Bruce Ivins, who was accused of being the 2001 US anthrax mailer even though the evidence against him was dubious and the possibility of his creating the weaponized anthrax alone was absolutely zero, the mystery of the perpetrators of the anthrax mailings, which occurred just before and were used to justify the draconian Patriot Act and the invasion of Iraq, has never been solved.)

AP photo by John Minchillo

It’s been fascinating to see the response of what passes for “progressives” in western nations to what has unfolded in the US over the past few days. Suddenly they’ve gone all Law & Order, wanting police to clamp down hard on the antler-heads that briefly and easily occupied Congress, and on the narcissistic, psychopathic leader who goaded them to do it. You almost wonder if this was actually concocted by some mad right-winger who wanted to give everyone a taste of what “defunding and abolishing the police” might actually lead to.

First of all, this was not a coup, nor even a coup attempt. Despite the tragic deaths it was all theatre, right down to the antler-heads’ heavy make-up. Although some of them smashed their way in, many of them waltzed in through the front door, even taking selfies with some of the cops. That’s not to say it wasn’t serious. The behaviour of the invaders — not only mask-less but posing for photos and not concealing their identities in any way — wasn’t an act of bravado but one of nihilism. They felt they had nothing to lose.

Of course the police response was deplorable — had these been BIPOC protesters there would have been a bloody confrontation with dozens or hundreds killed and injured. And of course the invasion was predictable — authorities were too busy monitoring tweets and Facebook posts to take a gander at the explicit organizing instructions on the right-wing Parler, Dlive and other social media overtly encouraging and coordinating violent confrontation.

It has often been said, perhaps unfairly, that people get the governments they deserve. The choice in the US right now is between a party baldly willing to subvert democracy to keep a privileged white ultra-conservative caste in power indefinitely, and a party owned and run by a centre-right corporatist caste utterly beholden to the military-industrial-financial complex which is “democratic” in name only. The hold of the dominant castes on both parties has been growing stronger each decade. No party even vaguely represents either progressives or the working class. The citizens have been systematically and ruthlessly propagandized by lies, misinformation and fear to fiercely support either the Democrats or the Republicans, although neither cares a whit for their interests.

This is a system problem, one that is now beyond repair and will have to collapse, like all unsustainable, dysfunctional systems, and be replaced by a new system, which may well be just as unsustainable and dysfunctional, given the accelerating manifold crises that any new systems are now likely to emerge in. The American political system, like our global economic system and our global ecology, is in a well-advanced stage of collapse.

Giuliani and the rest of the whacked-out career criminals who pandered to Trump for money, power and pardons are all just cogs in the machine, now being replaced with a cadre of diverse-looking militaristic and economic hard-liners, whose only interest is to ensure the Republicans continue to look even worse to the majority of voters than the Democrats. Not a difficult task.

If you’ve read this blog before, you probably know I am not about to prescribe solutions for collapsing systems. There are none. But what I can do is to highlight a couple of the more insane ideas that are now being suggested to deal with the political crisis. Quite a few scientists, philosophers and other reasonably informed thinkers have pointed out the overwhelming evidence that we humans have no free will, and that as a result, negative reinforcement (incarceration and other punishment) simply never sustainably works.

Many progressives have long understood that the real point of abolishing police forces is to replace their presence and their budgets with resources for income and wealth equalization and the provision of social services that will prevent the desperate behaviours that underlie the “need” for police, lawyers and other anachronistic relics of our paternalistic, deeply prejudiced penal systems. While it is grating to acknowledge that the obnoxious antler-heads are only acting out their lifelong conditioning, and the only consequence of imprisoning them will be to harden them and make them even more dangerous, that’s probably the truth.

Nevertheless, today we have the New Yorker saying Trump and the rioters must be severely punished to serve as a deterrent against future similar behaviours. And we have the New York Times saying it’s time to “crack down rather than reaching out”.

The result of our ‘civilized’ destruction of neighbourhoods and communities has been to alienate us all, to the point we can no longer see the vast and widespread state of shame, despair, desperation, rage and humiliation that underlies the kind of behaviour we saw in the streets of Washington DC this week, and the vote two months ago — and in the streets all over the world last summer, though they are not at all equivalent actions. We can no longer appreciate that it is our disconnection from each other that has polarized, alienated, ostracized and traumatized us to the point we consider half of our population “deplorables”. We don’t understand how they think and feel. We don’t want to. We are afraid to. We are so isolated in our insulated social bubbles that we have no contact with them.

A very conservative Manhattan-based co-worker of mine told me a number of years ago that he was finding it increasingly difficult to sympathize with “most” New Yorkers. He found them ignorant, uninformed, emotionally distant, tasteless, insufferably idealistic, and intolerant. A few hours later he described how he and his family lived: His kids were chauffeured to their private schools (public transit and public schools were “dangerous” and “useless” respectively). He took a limo to and from work, where he spent most of his waking hours. His (employer-subsidized) condo had an extensive security staff and systems that kept everyone out who didn’t have an invitation from an owner. His wife and his staff did all his shopping. He went only to private parties and exclusive restaurants. In short, he and his children had no contact at all with anyone outside the elite 1% of Manhattan’s most privileged. He had no friends outside that elite. How could he possibly know “most” New Yorkers well enough to judge them?

Joe Bageant likewise once told me that the main reason most Appalachians never vote for Democratic Party candidates is that they’ve never met one. In fact, they’ve never even met anyone who admitted to being a Democrat. How can anyone be expected to ever change their mind when they’re completely surrounded by one point of view?

And Canadians have no reason to be smug. The same polarization has been intensifying here over the past 40 years, and the proportion of right-wing extremists is growing rapidly. More than a few of the US “militia” leaders, including the Proud Boys founder, came from Canada. The current Canadian conservative party leader recently openly advocated that prisoners (a disproportionate number of whom are BIPOC) should be the very last Canadians to be offered the CoVid-19 vaccine. The government of Alberta includes a raft of known racists and hate-mongers. If you walk down the streets of Vancouver you’ll see a population that is more than 50% BIPOC, but walk into executive offices, banks, the million-dollar-and-up condos, the posh restaurants, boutiques and private clubs (if you are allowed past security) and you’ll see a very different crowd. Vancouverites walk right past each other every day, but they live in utterly different, disconnected worlds, and they simply don’t see each other. How can we possibly expect to understand how others think, and feel, with such isolation?

So. You want to hear my view of what we should do to deal with Trump, the antler-heads, the deplorables, the oblivious elite, the corrupt military, political and financial establishment, the small number of borderline fascists, the large number of unaware racists and caste-ists, and the even larger number of numb, angry, alienated, hopeless, desperate, struggling, defeated, exhausted “citizens” of our allegedly great “nations”?

It’s too late. You can try going out and meeting with them — get outside your neighbourhood and they’re likely to be at least half the people you see. But it won’t do any good now. They won’t trust you enough to talk with you, not the way you’re dressed, or the way you talk. They’re scared, backed into a corner. It takes an extreme state of anomie and outrage for 75 million people to drag themselves out to vote for a pathetic, illiterate, mentally ill, fear-driven, hate-filled, incompetent crotch-grabbing misogynist, the biggest business failure in the history of our planet — just to make a statement that anything’s better than what they believe (since no one has ever bothered to meet with them and calmly persuade them otherwise) is the current, deteriorating state of the country that the “other” party has caused.

If you do meet with them, you’re not going to change any minds. You might become less scared, less judgemental, less angry at “them”, and totally shocked at what has happened, and has been happening since the US (and Canada) were founded, that you never realized, never dreamed was going on.

Listen to them tell you that “most so-called” homeless people leave their cars in nearby alleyways and beg because “they’re too lazy to get a real job”. Listen to them tell you how they lost their jobs, their homes, their families, because “a bunch of goddamn greedy rich bastards” outsourced their livelihoods, foreclosed on their homes, blocked them from declaring bankruptcy because they maxed out their 28%/annum-interest credit cards to pay for surgery that failed, or for a university for their kids that turned out to be a fraud, just so the “bastards” could jack up their corporate profits to “earn” their million-dollar bonuses.

But talking with them won’t change anything. The system’s broken. Parts flying off in all directions now — watch out. When the Ponzi scheme markets collapse, it’s going to get nasty. When the people are told they can’t drive their cars or fly to visit their kids or parents because it’s killing the planet, that they can’t eat meat because it’s causing the obliteration of 90% of the world’s species, that it’s immoral to have children in a world suffocating with a grotesque overpopulation of humans, they’re going to do a lot more than dress up in paint and occupy some politician’s office.

The politicians know. The party’s over. There’s a reason all major parties in most western nations are obsessed with “national security”. They’re right to be. The planet’s been plundered to benefit the 1%, and now there’s only the dregs left, and the insane belief that somehow collapse can be averted. Just like the rats in the overcrowded chamber, we sense that something’s terribly wrong, that the hoarding has begun and that things will soon get a lot uglier. Just like the rats, we are starting to see the violence, the desperation, the fear and hiding and denial. And soon, the suicides, and the eating of the young.