What a field-day for
the heat
A thousand people in the street
Singing songs and carrying signs
Mostly say, hooray for our side…
(Allegro)
A thousand people in the street
Singing songs and carrying signs
Mostly say, hooray for our side…
(Allegro)
Our original reflection was concerning how a Paranoid Author
would conspire, were he so inclined, to develop and implement a plan to subvert
a nation like America. Richard Rubenstein suggested a model for such a
conspiracy in The Cunning of History,
and defends his philosophical mooring, and by extension my futuristic fantasy,
with the following points.
1)
Scientific Theory. In the scientific way of
speaking about nature there is the principle that biological
life is imperialistic, which is to say that living things, in their
populations, will naturally expand into available space in order to dominate that
space and to ensure their own survival.
2)
Rubenstein’s Conclusion (100). If this is an
accurate description of nature, then it is useless to speak of the ethical life
of the individual, because "In all biological populations there are innate
devices to adjust population growth to the carrying capacity of the
environment. Undoubtedly, some such device exists in man."
Rubenstein (8-11) also enumerates and then illustrates what
he thinks are at least two of those plausibly “innate devices” or “control
mechanisms” that, even perhaps without our “conscious knowledge,” regulate
human population and ensure its suitable expansion.
1)
War as a
mechanism of population control. At the Battle of Verdun (begins February
1916) the German general’s strategy, says Rubenstein, was entirely biological
in nature. “For the first time in memory a European nation had attempted to
alter the biological rather than the military and political balance of power with
an adversary." In this 9-month long battle, approximately one million men
died. At the Battle of the Somme (begins July 1916), the British lost approximately
60,000 men the first day. By December
1916 approximately 1,100,000 British, German, and French were dead in order for
the British lines to move forward just 6 miles.
On
Rubenstein’s calculation, in WW I there were on average 6,000 state-made dead
per day for 1,500 days, which means that each and every one of the countries
involved in this conflict (i.e., Albania, Arabia, Austria-Hungary, Belgium
and colonies, Brazil, Bulgaria, China, Costa Rica,
Cuba, Czechoslovakia, Estonia, Finland, France
and Empire, Great
Britain and Empire, Germany
and Empire, Greece, Guatemala, Haiti, Honduras, Italy
and colonies, Japan, Latvia, Liberia, Lithuania,
Luxembourg, Montenegro, Nicaragua, Panama, Persia, Philippines, Poland, Portugal
and colonies, Romania, Russia, San Marino, Serbia,
Siam, Turkey, Transcaucasia, and the Unites States of America) were in
tacit agreement that some 10 million state-made dead represented a satisfactory,
acceptable, and indeed desirable, political, economic, and moral loss.
2)
Bureaucracy
as a mechanism of population control. It also seems pretty self-evident
that in order for States to function as the gatekeepers for the regulation of
human population and expansion, there needs to be some sort of fundamental organization
or bureaucracy. One of the tools for this in the Nazi period was denationalization, the use of the status
of statelessness for certain selected populations inside the greater population.
Rubenstein (33): “Men without political rights are superfluous men. They have
lost all right to life and human dignity. Political rights are neither
God-given, autonomous nor self-validating. The Germans understood that no
person has any rights unless they are guaranteed by an organized community with
the power to defend such rights. They were perfectly consistent in demanding
that the deportees be made stateless before being transported to the camps.
They also understood that by
exterminating stateless men and women, they violated no law because such people
were covered by no law.”
What we need to retain for our Fantastic Reflection, then,
is that there are two natural “control mechanisms” that regulate human
population and ensure its suitable expansion: War and Bureaucracy.
Paranoia strikes deep
Into your life it will creep
It starts when you're always afraid…
Into your life it will creep
It starts when you're always afraid…
(Obbligato
- Allegro)
So, as the paranoid oracle-author of a potential American future,
what philosophical ingredients would I need to assemble in order to transmogrify
the E
Pluribus Unum into the Nazi State of Rubenstein’s vision? Straight-forward
wars and official state-made dead are integral to our plottings, of course, but
there are also other, less noticeable steps that can be taken to dehumanize or
destroy humanity beyond the destruction of individual bodies. The State can dehumanize
or disappear the philosophical idea
of the Individual.
Now a promising
recipe, which the Paranoid Author could follow in order to prepare the ground
for the philosophical death of the Individual, would be the following: I) find ways to neutralize the idea of
the cogito-Individual, as did the philosopher Martin
Heidegger for his Nazi State; II)
create an economic setting in which there was a strong and independent economic
culture that The People believed in or valued or needed, and that The People could not control or dominate; and III) design a type of general cultural
or State environment,
·
where All and Sundry were somehow being
controlled,
·
where there is an appearance of Freedom reigning,
·
but where no one actually has the practical freedom
or leisure to act against the agendas represented or furthered by Moneyed
Interests.
Plot-lines in the
Fantasy.
I. Neutralize the idea of the cogito-Individual.
In order to make a philosophical reconstruction of America along the lines of
Rubenstein’s vision, the Paranoid Author would need to start a process of dismantling
the philosophical idea of the cogito-Individual. One part of this neutralization
or dismantlement is the creation of a pervasive atmosphere of Fear, because it
is necessary to convert the listener into an Emotional Person, a strongly
feeling (believing) person who will naturally follow, rather than the calm path
of rational consideration and analysis, the
impulsive inclination of irrational emotions. In such a widespread environment
of fear, the People would learn to respond with fear in the following general
areas:
a)
Fear
relevant to Religion – Fear of displeasing God, end of the world,
destruction of the planet, fear of hell, damnation, eternal punishment, loss of
heavenly crowns, etc.
b)
Fear
relevant to Economics – Fear of job loss & unemployment, banking
issues, crashes, downturns, big business, financial mismanagement, Ponzi
schemes, mortgage defaults, debt ceilings, bankruptcies and liquidations, financial
instability, debt in general, money shortage, rising cost of education, economic
ratings, etc.
c)
Fear
relevant to Politics – Fear of immigration, health care reform, civil
liberties, political difference, defense spending, socialism, Social Security,
Welfare, Medicare, wars and more wars, Iran and the bomb, Arab Spring, Islamic
fundamentalism, War on Terror, War on Drugs, War on Poverty, War on Christmas,
War on Women, etc.
d)
and Fear
relevant to Social Issues – Fear of abortion (because it displeases God,
see above), gay and lesbian rights (because it displeases God, see above), diversity,
sexual predation, smoking pot, race issues, global warming, pornography, contraception,
the environment, stem cell research, et al – see also Politics, Economics, and
Displeasing God.
Ia. Neutralize the idea of the cogito-Individual.
(Ostinato). Additionally, the
Paranoid Author could create a society that neither values nor rewards
learning, that systematically vilifies
teachers, that places the bar low enough for pupils and students so that
measurable standards of learning progressively
decline over the long-term. It is a reasonable prediction, all factors
considered, that low and under-achieving youth will develop into low and
under-achieving adults, thereby reducing the competition pool for labor at the
upper levels; so the State that deliberately adopts a social principle of undereducating
its young people will have an undereducated, and more easily swayable, adult
population in the following generation. Cheap labor will attend on every
corner; fears and emotions and conspiracy theories will abound.
Ib. Neutralize the idea of the cogito-Individual.
(Ostinato). Finally, to neutralize
the idea of the cogito-Individual in America, the Paranoid Author would
polarize the population at large on general issues. Individuals would be encouraged
to identify emotionally with a major political party, or group, or platform; the
increase in group identification would psychologically diffuse the
“individual-ness” of the individual, would encourage the growth of Unreasoning
Emotionalism in the general society, and would contribute to the overall
culture of generalized Fear. To polarize people in this way would also serve
to breed into We the People a fundamental social dysfunction based on an
emotional dissonance –
ü
together with our own feelings of patriotism or love
of country, we also believe that most other Americans are profoundly confused
or misguided or simply wrong in their
feelings of patriotism;
ü
although we all learned in school that we are
individual elements of We the People, we still have the strong feeling, indeed
the conviction, that we are nationally yoked together with people who are not
our religious, economic, political, intellectual, and/or social equals.
Within a very few generations of orchestrating into existence
a generalized culture of
Fear, the Paranoid Author of America’s Potential Future would have generated
a population that identified itself through collectivizing values, such as patriotism,
which are grounded in the individual emotionally rather than intellectually; this
would effectively allow a partial transfer of practical democratic power to
emotionally inspired groups instead of to thinking individuals.
II. People, Belief, and Economic Culture. In
order to construct an America that would look like the German State of the Nazi
era, the Paranoid Author would also need to grow a strong and independent Economic
Culture that The People valued, then believed in, and then needed for their
economic survival, but which The People could not control or dominate. Such a
value could be created along the lines of a Corporate Culture, which would encourage
the existence and growth of a massive
conglomeration of companies driven by profit, whose profits could be
guaranteed that much more because these companies would be exempted from a tax
commitment to the U.S. due to their international legal status. An additional
“touch” would be to make it so that this C-Culture has legal
standing, so that it can influence in turn the direction of political
elections in the U.S., and especially those at the highest levels. This would naturally
encourage the C-Culture to make financial contributions to politicians who
favor the economic agenda and philosophical vision of the C-Culture, thus
furthering the acceptance of that economic cultural agenda as an “American”
value.
A possible
example of the type of Corporate Culture that our Paranoid Author might create,
would be reflected in the American political setting that enabled the United
States Supreme Court 2010 ruling on Citizens
United v. FEC.
III. The Appearance of Freedom. For the
purposes of plot, however, it would not be sufficient simply to create a dependent
relationship between The People and an Economic Culture whose mission is
assessed in terms of Compulsory
Profit. The Paranoid Author would also have to create a general cultural environment
where, as we said above, everyone thinks they are free, but where no one
actually has the freedom to act in opposition to the agendas of the Moneyed
Interests.
So once we
had generated an adequate Corporate Culture, and had brought The People around
to valuing, believing in, and then needing that C-Culture, the active icing on
the passive (cup-)cake
would be to restrict and obstruct the power of the individual worker-laborer to
stand against that C-Culture. So the Paranoid Author would then invent a labor
pool that is powerless
to oppose the interests of the massive corporate entities, either to control
wages, or to determine working conditions, health benefits, retirement, etc. In
a hauntingly parallel, union-breaking plot line from American current events, Wisconsin
and its governor Scott Walker, have furnished interesting and relevant food for
my fantasy-laden thought over the past year:
IIIa. The Appearance of Freedom. (Ostinato). I can also imagine that if,
for purposes of plot development, a Paranoid Author needed to restrict the
power of both the State and the individual to stand against the Corporate
Culture, he might introduce into his narrative the device of giving almost unlimited
credit to almost everyone. The idea of debt, both
individual and national, is a great and very effective means of enslavement,
because Individual Debt actually functions just like State Debt in compelling the
debtor to yield up Power (i.e., transfer Loyalties) to the creditor. The idea
of Individual Debt allows the individual to hamstring himself all by himself – to
buy houses, cars, appliances, furniture, televisions, stereo systems, clothes, jet
skis, jet ski trailers, vacations, food, gas, etc.; and the evil bit of beauty
in this narrative device is that even when the consumerable object itself is
long gone on its journey to built-in obsolescence, the financial debt for the
purchase of the object remains. Business wins; or as Hercule Poirot might have
said: Cherchez l’argent.
Likewise,
the idea of State Debt allows The
State to hamstring itself through collective liability – to pay for wars,
infrastructures, schools, hospitals, social services, etc. It was due to support
from Business, after all, that Napoleon Bonaparte succeeded in his coup d’état
following the French Revolution. His financial indebtedness to those same
Business Interests (primarily a coalition of slavers and exiled plantation
owners) who funded his rise to power, also obligated Napoleon
to reciprocate the favors, £ for £, by introducing legislation
that would reverse the course of revolutionary France, and cause its return to an
extremely aggressive and repressive form of Business Slavery in the French
colonies – all in the interests of the Sugar Trade. Cherchez l’argent.
IIIb. The Appearance of Freedom. (Ostinato). Even more icing on the
proverbial cupcake of debt could be provided by health
care—not the having of it, but the individual and societal indebtedness
caused by the lack of it. Medical expenses were the top cause of bankruptcies
in America in 2011 – a total of 1.6 million people, a stunning number that surpasses
the population of 82 of the world’s 230 countries.
Stop, now, what's that
sound
Everybody look what's going down
Stop, children, what's that sound
Everybody look what's going down…
Everybody look what's going down
Stop, children, what's that sound
Everybody look what's going down…
(Resolution
- Repeat and fade)
So is there something happening here, or am I just paranoid?
How realistic is such a Fantasy Future for America? Well, it certainly would not
be the
first time America had been caught out on such a turning in the road;
fortunately, though, Germany lost that war for all of us, which corrected that
particular potential wrong-turn in America’s history.
Nations-going-wrong
is not new in this telling. But what do we do as individuals when we suspect
that our Nation is going down a Wrong Path in the Woods, and there is no handy
GPS to right Us? Well, the Americans have a long tradition of protesting, in a bluesy
kind of way, by singing their anger and grief. This is a kind of populist public
airing of dirty laundry, which is certainly idiosyncratic, and also, at least
anecdotally, effective. According to the Internet
God: “In the 20th century, the Union Movement,
the Great Depression, the Civil Rights Movement, and the War in Vietnam all
inspired protest songs.” Concerns for the environment in America are already evident from an 1837
song, Woodman, Spare That Tree, although, fortunately,
the song never caught on.
From 1900 to 1920 there
were Protest Songs inspired by the Labor Movement, and what Americans would
tend to call Class Struggle (which in the U.S. took the form of conflict
between labor and management, rich and poor), and also The Great War. Popular
songs from this period were, The Preacher and the Slave and Bread and Roses.
The 1920s and 1930s echoed with
songs of protest against The Great Depression (see Class Struggle above) and
Racial Discrimination, which will have a good long run in America. A popular
song from this period is Ragged Hungry Blues.
In the 40s and 50s there will be
protest songs in favor of the labor movement and against McCarthyism, as there
will be Anti-Nuclear protest songs. From this generation comes the Pete Seeger
tune, Which
side are you on?
In the 60s, of course, there were protests
for every taste and every budget. One could sing and protest about the Civil Rights Movement, the Vietnam War, and Peace and Revolution. These songs and protests would wend
their way into the 70s, as did the war, and would join their dithyrambic countrified
beats to the newer cadences of soul music.
The 80s would hear Anti-Reagan
protest songs, and would oversee the birth of rap music; and the 90s would hear
the advent of Hard-Rock Protest Bands, songs of Women's Rights, and Protest
Parodies.
So I suppose that a traditional response to the America of
my paranoid fantasy would be, when and if, for The People to sing out its
disapproval very publically.
There are
also very concrete steps The People can take, though, when it seems to them that
the Nation is going down a wrong national road. In the case of the Supreme
Court decision on Citizens United, for example, what happens when The People do
not support a Supreme Court ruling? Is there any recourse for The People, or is
the National Monolith gone awry? Yes, there is recourse and remedy. State
initiatives, motivated by Concerned
Citizens, could push Congress to create a constitutional amendment
to the U.S. Constitution, which would allow the legislature to overturn decisions
arising from a judicial branch of government gone on philosophical walkabout.
Let The People write songs in protest and sing
them; sign petitions; be concerned; have a big loud voice and make it heard;
READ. In the end, though, it would seem that all these Big Thoughts
take us right back ‘round to the cogito-Individual, to a Socrates,
who, in the name of Justice, stood his ground in the face of undeniable State
corruption… till death did them part.
