Dissent

Madame M (how do you find the time to blog with running MI-6? lol),

I am recognizing of capitalism’s (in all its varied forms) achievements, and they are indeed often great, especially in the realm of opening up human inventiveness. Those achievements have also often come at great cost, many of which continue. That those “achievements” have been divorced from an environmental ethic is only one of the deep and continuous costs. And capitalism is only another in a long line of ill-distinguished systems that have marginalized too many in completely uncaring and often dismissive or exploitative patterns.

Comparisons of what it has “achieved” additionally have cultural assumptions of what is worthwhile also built in. Communal societies have different value systems and would find repugnant many of the so-called beneficial “achievements” of capitalism, let alone the visible drawbacks and side-effects. We like to trumpet the value of relationships in this society, but they are mostly shallow, and even the ones that are not rarely compare with, say, the relationship-centric interactions of a typical African culture.

More government involvement can and often does have the effect you describe, and we need to be ever watchful about the excessive selfishness and its effects. Yet it is too easy to make a blanket statement of dismissal about government involvement. When corporate capitalism becomes as powerful as it today has, that corporatism has latent fear of practically only one thing—the people’s anger mobilized through their government. That government is the only entity large enough and powerful enough to bring them to heel short of spontaneous and widespread revolt. And because those corporations know that, they have made a penetrating and enervating emasculation of the government process, while expertly and selectively feeding people’s disdain and even hatred of government (thereby robbing the people of often the only vehicle they can effectively exert their will through against the corporations, short of revolution or the like).

You’ll find no disagreement from me about the need for personal responsibility. We have been too passive about what has been beamed and shoved at us, and must awaken and decide to relate to those things differently than we typically have.

Yes, our false-gods economists, who have trumpeted consumer spending, say that our saving and paying off debt is slowing recovery, for those economists are part and parcel of the sick and unrealistic “economy” we have had. If there is a hope of changing our ways, this long and painful period we are going through may be it. Yet it won’t come from small-minded political theatrics and shading politics toward punishing the party in power because that party didn’t somehow (magically) fix the economy quickly. Neither party is really offering anything but platitudes and failed policies, and both are well divorced from tough reality because they care much more about power and their petty maneuverings than they do about the country. They argue about all sorts of tangential things while the backbone of the country, the middle class, gets smaller every day as people spin out of it, many of those people having little to no chance of getting back in it.

The churning I describe is not necessarily the quest for new and improved: it is the necessity of replacing what is at best briefly usable junk with…more briefly usable junk. Your words to the salesman—priceless truth! One small caveat for some companies, however: the relentless driving as price being the absolute bottom line for a product has made it a good deal harder for the good companies to bring quality to the table. When price is what the consumer demands (often because, as an exploited employee, he or she has very restricted income to work with), the market will respond—and parts with less quality are cheaper and satisfy what the consumer says he or she has to have.

People are angry to hear dissenting views, often because in this connected but really disconnected world where the individual feels put upon for a host of reasons, the dissenting view is treated both as a personal attack and another loss of what most people feel they have too little of: having the world go the way they want. Some of that is undoubtedly now-nowism and retarded maturity, but some is the sad fact of individuals in a too individualistic society who are dealing with too many changes too fast—and many of those changes not being to their liking or even beneficial at all (and some downright harmful). And Lord Acton’s quote: timeless wisdom for the ages—and too little heeded.

My answer to your last question: Yes, it is possible (and not necessarily even a la the old film “Rollerball”). I think the corporations are largely smart enough to avoid too much blatant exercise of power, but instead do so by the globalization phenomenon prevalent so far, plus spouting “free-trade” while mercilessly manipulating it to their advantage. No, I don’t see we have reached the point of their near-total control yet, it being harder to effect complete enough than many people realize. Yet many corporations, largely through their money and influence, are already more powerful than many governments, although the bigger governments are certainly problematic as to being able to always influence effectively. The answer to how all this unfolds awaits most in what the citizens of this country and the world become. If they become merely consumers and passive observers, lured by the dream of materialism of one form or another, the corporations will achieve all the control those corporations need to get what they want. If on the other hand, the citizens become not just non-passive, but critically thinking, then human possibility can open up more toward the enlightened and hopeful progression seen in fiction like Star Trek.