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The Free Range Activism Website have analysed the way political activism is being policed and controlled by a state that is becoming ever more resistant to dissent and civil disobedience. I would add that The State (most Western states) appear to have developed the consensus that in the likely tough years ahead it will be necessary to control the populace and constrain the rise of citizen democracy:
What’s the relationship between the recent ‘authoritarian’ crack-down on “protesters” in Britain, the current economic crisis, the debate on growth, the economy, climate change and resource depletion? Perhaps not that obvious?… A new report from the Free Range Network ties these issues together to try and find a deeper motivation behind the recent authoritarian shift against protest and dissent in Britain — yes, the threads are there if you look for them!
Gerald Celente is a trends forecaster who has predicted an awful lot that has come true over the years. He calls the current slide the ‘greatest depression’. By now those who share his predictions have gone from thousands to perhaps millions.
James Kunstler says this will ‘not be your grandmother’s depression’ because the Western World no longer has the socio-economic resilience to handle a protracted period of negative economic growth – it is now a house of cards system with a long way to fall before it finds a solid base. Track back through some of my earlier posts or search with the terms ‘resilience’ or ‘fragility’ to see my take on the state we are all in. And here is a mild taste of what the UK could be in for in the same vein.
Get to know your community, its strengths, its resources, and get building your family’s and your community’s resilience now. For you Brits – see the www.transitiontowns.org
Do you still think that Peak Oil is nonsense?
Do you think that the End of Suburbia is a fantasy?
Now, if you are waking up to the reality that most sane people have recognised for the past decade (and many visionaries pointed to 3-4 decades ago) then may I have your ear for the next message:
Oil is a minor part of the overall problem. Yes, oil has created the technologically based way of life we take for granted, fuelled the agricultural revolution, but also brought us rapidly to the point where we’ll have to do without it. We have squandered it.
The next problem is how to repair the 25% of topsoil that we have deliberately washed into the oceans. I hope George Bush has it in his prayers because there is no technological answer to that one.
We have moved from Agrarian to Industrial civilisation, now in the throes of the information age, but our only real hope is a transformation to a horticultural civilisation (while retaining our current ability to communicate globally) and while leaving the rest of nature to go wild, to heal, if we humans are to have any chance of survival one hundred years from now.
Without fossil fuel based fertilisers (and oil to fuel the farm machinery) our only extant option for feeding our populations is a new agricultural revolution in which we repair the ecosystem from our backyard outwards, from the bottom up, not from some complex remote sensing satellite. We could all start today by putting our shit in the soil in the yard rather than washing it out to sea. It’s so simple but from a human motivation point of view it sounds absurd. We have to convince millions of nature deprived people that soil under the finger nails is civilised – against hundreds if not thousands of years of enculturation against nature. George Bush, give us a technological answer to this problem please?
And before you respond, Peak Uranium will quickly follow Peak Oil. If we go down the nuclear route without a safety net then it will confirm my suspicion that the human race just isn’t fitted for this planet.
The coming horticultural revolution will mean that we have to live our lives and consume, and take responsibility for this planet, locally. The permacultural village, with the best of human knowledge to date, with global communications, may just give us a chance.
Any alternatives to offer?
In about 1990 I saw a television programme which changed my worldview forever. It was on UK Channel 4 and titled Visionaries. The subject of this episode was Bill Mollison and permaculture. Peak oil entered my consciousness at that point and since then every concept I discuss or think about, from space travel to my compost toilet, comes back to the carrying capacity of this planet.
However, it has taken the best part of two decades for Mollison’s vision to shift inside me, from information to reality. It has taken 18 years to come back to our nature, to come back to reality; from a piece of cognitive information through to emotional/expanded consciousness / direct perception and real knowledge. Back to where I would have been if this sick culture hadn’t separated me from my real relationship with the world – regaining the senses – instead of educating me this culture indoctrinated me into believing in progress (hahaha) technology (hahaha) and in human social hierarchy (hahaha). I was blind and now I can see.
But 18 years! We don’t have 18 years to wake the population to this necessary point. It may take even longer than that. Shaun Chamberlin’s concept of Dark Optimism (see David Fleming’s forthcoming Lean Logic: The Book of Environmental Manners) is something I have embraced all my life, it is a concept familiar daily to remaining hunter-gatherer communities, it is about being optimistic with no faith or end in sight, it is about embracing life without faith in some outcome or life after death or promise of a better life. It is about entering darkness, the jungle, illness, The Wasteland, with ‘…an indomitable belief in the potential of humankind’ and all that human kind offers us here and now, community, family, emotional connectedness (and that doesn’t include Production: our potential, our nature, is not to produce things, it is about Being not Having).
The dominant culture hates Dark Optimism: there has to be light, there has to be something positive to grasp, dark is negative, people don’t like dark, people won’t consume dark. Darkness doesn’t sell, stay on message – light is good, have faith in the light, don’t think about the roots of your problems, and all will be well. Don’t mention the darkness – focus on the light. This culture isn’t going to change and embrace what it considers to be Dark (climate change, peak oil, collapse of civ, and ‘going back to the land’, and the antithesis to ‘civilised progress’ – the land and ‘pagan’ nature) in order to find a way through to the light, to the dark, to the light, to the dark, to a balance. No. This culture needs 24 hour light as prescribed by the Confidence in Capitalism doctors and they are not going to stop giving out the drug – their jobs depend on ever greater consumption by 6 billion people.
This truly is a dark prospect and I embrace it. We can overcome and beat the stake through the heart of this sick culture and we can be optimistic that we are in the sorority of humankind which in its essence will give us all the emotional strength we need. The beast that is this sick culture is a temporary abberation, an imbalance in our natural state – a disease that once had the name of Satan before that concept was corrupted when power got hold of religion; ‘Satan – don’t go there, only embrace the light cos’ big J said so.’ I am certain that Jesus of Nazareth in his original words and meaning was really a proponent of embracing the dark in order to fight our Dragons. His message, voiced my millions of others who are less charismatic, that somehow we have to kill this Beast (no pacifism there) which resides in all our hearts, that the way our long out-dated classical thinking and its reductionism create the divisions in human and natural society, that the denial that we are all one living life is part of the sickness, is more valid now than ever before.
Keep your friends close and your enemies even closer: embrace the Dark, hold it close till you feel its pulse and then drive the stake in, kill the Beast – the patri-hierarchical System, the Brownshirts, Authority, and human power over others, and we’ll find our way back to Eden. But do we have time in the face of this emergent property (the System) which is beyond the grasp and control of individuals? Should we adopt Derrick Jensen’s approach – essentially for those who have woken up to take down civilisation forcefully? Or could it be done peacefully in the short time we have left?
The clock is ticking – it’s now some two years since Peak Oil seems to have occurred.
In these interesting times historical and emerging factors meet, compete, complexify and throw out all manner of emergent properties. The failure to take responsibility for the planet on which we depend is perhaps the core factor. How we arrived at this point is the key to understanding how humans will continue to survive.
Ultimately it is our culture which must change if we are to sustain human life on this planet called Earth. The green philosopher Derrick Jensen argues that the dominant culture (Civilisation) will not change. It is a central premise of this blog that given certain emerging circumstances change to a non-abusive ecologically sound culture is possible. I would not like to hazard a guess at the probability, but I think and feel that it is greater than zero.
Transition Phase
Let’s illustrate by looking at a process that has been changing for a very long time, and which now promises to change radically over the next few decades. Mass communication has evolved. Eastern civilisations and early Western societies developed memes which survive today and which explain (often allegorically, metaphorically, and in coded terms) the reasons for the often negative structure of contemporary society in enduring messages. These message speak to us now and are as relevant as they ever have been. The messages come across even in our Western Christian dialogue. Symbols and written language, copied written language are millenia old.
Fast forward to the emergence of mass literacy, mass written word (Caxton’s printing), telephony, radio, televisual communication, and the full democratisation of communication rising ahead of us in the form of the internet and its baby – open source knowledge.
We stand at the frontier of knowledge-is-power for all. Information is now bottom-up meets top down. Folk truth is power’s nemesis, coming soon to a small screen near you. The exponential sharing of information is beginning to subvert all attempts at social control and authority. This process has been slowly increasing and more rapidly so since around the 1960’s, and it is now reaching a tipping point into a less hierarchical socio-economic structure.
A state of anarchy, Leviathan, The Mob, self-organising society, rhizome, call it what you will but it is an emerging reality. This factor alone is a revolution in the structure of human society after many thousands of years of hierarchical social order. It is a part of the accelerating restructuring of socio-economic processes as human consciousness continues to shift and ‘grow’.
The human mind, in its conservative ordered, received wisdom state, is unprepared for what lies ahead. Dealing with the flattening of human socio-economic hierarchy may relieve some the social pressures caused by the submission of many of our individual powers, but in the vacuum of transition many other pressures will emerge. We will return to communication in detail later, now consider control.
Familiar Attractor
In contrast with our increasingly liberal and less authoritarian zeitgheist there is an enduring personality trait within us, one which was first described as ‘old fashioned personality’ but which has now been named by Altemeyer as Right Wing Authoritarianism or RWA.
Right-wing authoritarianism (RWA; Wikipedia definition) is a personality and ideological variable that is defined by three attitudinal and behavioral clusters which correlate together:
Authoritarian submission — a high degree of submissiveness to the authorities who are perceived to be established and legitimate in the society in which one lives.
Authoritarian aggression — a general aggressiveness directed against deviants, outgroups, and other people that are perceived to be targets according to established authorities.
Conventionalism — a high degree of adherence to the traditions and social norms that are perceived to be endorsed by society and its established authorities.
The ‘right wing’ label is unwise in my view, since Altemeyer accepts that while some 80 percent of those showing higher than average scores on RWA measures tend towards the right of the political spectrum, some 20 percent tend towards the left. This is not about politics but attitude and behaviour towards people and the natural environment. It concerns the legitimising of control and abuse of human and non-human others rather than the traditional meaning of legitimate authority which fell consensually on representatives of specific interests in a physical and usually local community – the elders, the mothers, the braves, the seers.
Hence authoritarianism is not a political mindset, it is a psychological phenomenon built around the need to reduce uncertainty and increase control. Altemeyer gives a clear psychological reason for the RWA label. This is simply that the Right-Wing is concerned at its core with that which is writ – that which is literal, and judged from this basis to be empirical despite the fluidity and relativistic nature of the written word, human language, and the world in general. This focus on binary and classical thinking (and behaviour) rather than ecological and relativistic thinking exposes the psychological process in the human need to control.
People who are high on RWA scores tend to exhibit compartmentalised (black and white) thinking and are more likely to follow the established conventions and authorities in society. When those conventions shift and authorities become more diffuse (as in a less hierarchical socio-economic system) then this increases anxiety among those with high RWA scores. When that increases to fear we have set the scene to give power to a ’strong’ Hitler or Mugabe leader who promises to reduce the uncertainty, to remove the threat to peace of mind (liberalism) as it grows within society – to regain control and the hierarchical definition of ‘order’ rather than the complexity definition of order.
Right Wing Authoritarianism is a psychological state that can change with differing situations. The greater exposure to other groups of people, university education, this reduces RWA scores. The RWA phenomenon as exhibited in Western industrialised civilisation exposes the deeper cultural anxiety and Cultural Post Traumatic Stress Disorder within this form of society. The fear of ‘uncontrolled’ others feeds greater insularity and thus more certainty, and hence greater fear of those in other areas of society with whom we are already hesitant or fearful of interacting. Thus, the increased ability to communicate and socialise could permit society to evolve towards greater segregation and hence even more RWA attitude and behaviour.
The RWA state, in which authoritarian leaders and followers submit to the authority that they create among their group (submission) and aggress against those who deviate or who are from other groups, is clearly illustrated in the first item of Altemeyer’s measurement scale: “Our country desperately needs a mighty leader who will do what has to be done to destroy the radical new ways and sinfulness that are ruining us.” People who strongly agree with this are showing a tendency toward authoritarian submission, aggression, and conventionalism.
The mindset is also apparent in related psychological research: Stanley Milgram’s fake ‘electro-shock’ experiment into human obedience to authority, and Philip Zimbardo’s Prison Experiment into the behaviour between prisoners and guards in a constructed situation. In the former, people were prepared to deliver near fatal doses of electricity simply because they were instructed to do so by someone who appeared to hold authority, despite the fake protestations and screams of their ‘victim’. In the latter guards and prisoners started to behave in ways which illustrated how easily simply control over others can turn into emotionless aggression and helpless submission. These experiments have gone a long way to explain events such as war crimes. The RWA personality construct has indicated that to varying extent the RWA mindset exists in all of us, whether as an authoritarian leader or follower.
RWA is the personality dimension posed to react in aggressive ways to an acceleration in the unpredictability of our society. Let’s leave that one to unpack later, and move on to another factor bubbling around in the flux at the moment.
Cascading Failures
Industrialised, information-based, society is growing ever more complex in its socio-economic relationships. This growing complexity and its lack of redundancy of function has been countered by the need to maintain control.
Control in the context of social complex systems means ownership of highly connected socio-economic nodes, be they physical or informational, and thus the necessary transformation of those processes from non-linear to linear in order to maintain ownership, control, and the desired level of efficiency/profitability. As John Robb illustrates, this situation means that failure of one highly connected node can lead to a cascade of failures to other nodes. The North Eastern power failures in the US and Canada illustrated how such a cascading failure can lead to the loss of a whole system. The same goes for almost any scale-free network (social, economic, cultural, communications, etc) whose node is controlled.
Resilience is futile in a complex society in which the enduring meme of possession and control places vulnerability in the hands of a few who put energy into profiting from the control of non-equilibrium nodes (imbalance in connectivity; dependency; hierarchy). Monoculturalism (corporatism/centralised control) is the ideology and socio-economic instability is the result. The growing disparity in wealth between the poorest and richest on our planet describes both the non-equilibrium state and the potential for socio-economic failure even though all seems to be neatly secured down at present.
The instability is continuing to grow despite the apparently effortless way in which new techologies appear to offer robust solutions. Faith in Genetically Modified Organisms (GMOs) is an example of this way we have of placing all our eggs in one basket and feeling secure about it, and so is faith in the resilience of the internet which is a scale-free soup of strange attractors and fragile nodes which we depend upon. Overall we live in fragile, homogenised, linearly constructed society which will become increasingly unstable, particularly so if its energy supply ceases to increase.
Unconscious Mass
The Sufis have long recognised that few people in human societies ever become fully conscious, individuated, and self-actualising to the extent where we can make deeply informed decisions about our lives, societies, and our politics. Most of us are carried along in a tide of unconscious behaviour which is reinforced by societies which remove our human responsibilities – or where irresponsibility is promoted through commercial advertising and institutionally derived social control methods. Enlightenment is only for a few who can break through these and the other Veils of Maya.
However, peer-to-peer communication is now permitting those who can become awakened to follow that path of enlightenment and engagement with society, while offering an even quicker fix of the lowest common denominator by the tonne to those who would rather just swallow what is offered than take a step towards human growth. Communication means that more people are wakening up to the true situation and making their voice and actions heard while more are trodden down by that very same situation.
But situation awareness, education, knowledge, wisdom, these are the concepts of human evolution. Our consciousness is evolving toward a sense of inner authority and inner responsibility. Those who are waking up to the true causes of the human condition as currently experienced, they are increasing in number and spreading truths everywhere. We cannot escape the truth, and in the comparative daylight of the internet truth continues to spread and infect the darker corners. As some awaken, others become threatened by that emergence of individual power.
The time seems to be approaching when we see the relationship deteriorate between those who believe in outer forms of authority and hierachical structure of civilisation, and those who embrace order and structure of society from within their own hearts. This is what the bible terms apocalypse – a time of revelation and upheaval in which good will prevail over the chaos of several thousand years of ill-conceived societal power structures. As Marx put it – when enough people become radicalised (aware of the root of their problems) then there will be revolution. “The revolution will not be televised… The revolution will be live.”
Altemeyer, R. 2006 The Authoritarians LULU
Jensen, D. 2007 Endgame: The Problem of Civilization Wikipedia
Robb, J. 2007 Brave New War Global Guerillas
Pesce, M. 2008 Hyperpolitics (American Style) Personal Democracy Forum
Diamond, J. 1997 Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fate of Human Societies. Norton. Wikipedia
Diamond, J. 2006 Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Survive. Penguin. Wikipedia
Jensen, D. 2000 A Language Older than Words. Context, New York.
Jensen, D. 2002 The Culture of Make Believe. Context, New York.
Abram, D. 2007 The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-than-Human World. New York, Vintage.
Spowers, R. 2002 Rising Tides: A History of the Environmental Revolution and Visions for an Ecological Age. Canongate, Edinburgh.
Schumacher, E. 1973 Small is Beautiful: A Study of Economics as if People Mattered. Vintage
Hertsgaard, M. 1999 Earth Odyssey: Around the World in Search of Our Environmental Future
Bakan, J. 2004 The Corporation: The Pathological Pursuit of Profit and Power
Sagan, C. 1992. Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors: A Search for Who We Are. Random House
Sagan, C. 1992. The Dragons of Eden: Speculations on the Evolution of Human Intelligence. Ballantine.
Quinn, D. (1992) Ishmael
And I feel… more than a little peeky.
Watch the End of Suburbia and see how you feel
The US concentration camps fill me with a sense of foreboding. Why would an influx of Mexican immigrants need rounding up and imprisoning, are they all expected to have rabies or something? What possible civil emergency requires the detention of millions of people behind barbed wire under watchtowers? The key strength that any nation has in times of emergency is the self-organising power of its people, and not the central organising power of governments which only gets in the way. So I struggle to understand why a US government thinks that detention centres for millions of people are a valid part of FEMA’s work. That’s why I find this offical explanation hard to believe.
Terrorism? The potential for locking up millions of suspects, and possibly dissenters too, after the next terrorist attack on the US? This too is difficult to understand. Locking the door after the horse has bolted makes no sense. Nor does internment of mostly innocent people prevent anything, it is a form of collective punishment which creates martyrs and further serves terrorist recruitment. If you eventually let them go a significant number will become bombers in revenge for their treatment, further fuelling terrorism. What do you with all those people whom you do not want, aliens, non-people? Keep them incarcerated for life, or worse? Who will know they are there, will they be disappeared? I shudder to think.
Only dictator-led states round people up these days with no recourse to open courts, not states that are built on foundations of freedom, democracy and free speech. The ominous term ‘rapid development of new programs’ says it all, as if the concentration camps are not already way beyond the pale. History shows that it starts this way, the programs are normal, they are necessary for the good of all: be reasonable, be quiet, do not dissent (no, seriously be a compliant citizen or we’ll lock you up too). The Patriot Act, the Military Commissions Act, the UK’s Civil Contingencies Bill and Anti-Terror legislation are all contributing to what Gramsci called the cultural hegemony. This makes creeping state power over a population difficult to perceive. We won’t notice the reality of the function creep until its too late to take any action, then democracy will be truly gone. Fully effective democracy may already be slipping away.
An emergency can be declared in the US, as the following article points out, with the stroke of a presidential pen rather than by a majority vote in congress. From that point on, no one can challenge what’s happening without a significant risk of being locked up themselves. You think its not possible? The history of the twentieth century rings some very loud warning bells. I won’t be visiting the US again, no thanks. Read more…
