Woman or mouse, Pam Omidyar? Where are you in this tale?
March 23rd, 2010
Democracy,
a system ideally designed
to challenge the status quo, has been
corrupted and tamed to slavishly serve the status
quo. We have undergone, as John Ralston Saul
in slow motion. And the coup is over. They won. We lost. The abject failure
of activists to push corporate, industrialized states toward serious environmental
reform, to thwart imperial adventurism or to build a humane policy toward
the masses of the world’s poor stems from an inability to recognize
the new realities of power. The paradigm of power has
irrevocably altered and so must the
paradigm of resistance
alter.
Too many
resistance movements
continue to buy into the facade
of electoral politics, parliaments, constitutions,
bills of rights, lobbying and the appearance of a rational
economy. The levers of power have become so contaminated that
the needs and voices of citizens have become irrelevant. The election
of Barack Obama was yet another triumph of propaganda over substance
and a skillful manipulation and betrayal of the public by the mass media. We
mistook style and ethnicity – an advertising tactic pioneered by the United
Colors of Benetton and Calvin Klein – for progressive politics and
genuine change. We confused how we were made to feel with
knowledge. But the goal, as with all brands,
was to make passive consumers
mistake a brand for an
experience.
Obama,
now a global celebrity,
is a brand. He had almost no experience
besides two years in the senate, lacked any moral core
and was sold as all things to all people. The Obama campaign was
named Advertising Age’s marketer of the year for 2008 and edged out
runners-up Apple and Zappos.com. Take it from the professionals. Brand
Obama is a marketer’s dream. President Obama does one thing and
Brand Obama gets you to believe another. This is the essence
of successful advertising. You buy or do what the
advertisers want because of how they
can make you feel.
We live in a culture
characterized by what Benjamin DeMott
called Junk Politics.
or the reparation of rights. It always personalizes issues rather than
clarifying them. It eschews real debate for manufactured scandals, celebrity
gossip and spectacles. It trumpets eternal optimism, endlessly praises our moral
strength and character, and communicates in a feel-your-pain language.
The result of junk politics is that nothing changes, “meaning zero
interruption in the processes and practices that
strengthen existing, interlocking systems
of socioeconomic
advantage.”
The cultural belief
that we can make things happen
by thinking, by visualizing, by wanting them,
by tapping into our inner strength or by understanding
that we are truly exceptional is magical thinking. We can always make
more money, meet new quotas, consume more products and advance our career
if we have enough faith. This magical thinking, preached to us across the
political spectrum by Oprah, sports celebrities, Hollywood, self-help
gurus and Christian demagogues, is largely responsible for our
economic and environmental collapse, since any
Cassandra who saw it coming
was dismissed as
“negative.”
This belief,
which allows men and women
to behave and act like little children,
discredits legitimate concerns and anxieties.
It exacerbates despair and passivity. It fosters a state
of self-delusion. The purpose, structure and goals of the corporate
state are never seriously questioned. To question, to engage in criticism
of the corporate collective, is to be obstructive and negative. And it has
perverted the way we view ourselves, our nation and the natural
world. The new paradigm of power, coupled with its bizarre
ideology of limitless progress and impossible happiness,
has turned whole nations, including
the United States, into
monsters.
We can march
in Copenhagen. We can join
Bill McKibben’s worldwide day of climate
protests. We can compost in our backyards and hang
our laundry out to dry. We can write letters to our elected officials
and vote for Barack Obama, but the power elite is impervious to the charade
of democratic participation. Power is in the hands of moral and intellectual trolls
who are ruthlessly creating a system of neo-feudalism and killing the
ecosystem that sustains the human species. And appealing
to their better nature, or seeking to influence the
internal levers of power, will
no longer work.
We will not,
especially in the United States,
avoid our Götterdämmerung. Obama, like Canada’s
Prime Minister Stephen Harper and the other heads of the
industrialized nations, has proven as craven a tool of the corporate
state as George W. Bush. Our democratic system has been transformed into
what the political philosopher Sheldon Wolin labels inverted totalitarianism.
Inverted totalitarianism, unlike classical totalitarianism, does not revolve around
a demagogue or charismatic leader. It finds expression in the anonymity of the
corporate state. It purports to cherish democracy, patriotism, a free
press, parliamentary systems and constitutions while
manipulating and corrupting internal levers
to subvert and thwart democratic
institutions.
Political candidates
are elected in popular votes by citizens
but are ruled by armies of corporate lobbyists in
Washington, Ottawa or other state capitals who author the
legislation and get the legislators to pass it. A corporate media controls
nearly everything we read, watch or hear and imposes a bland uniformity of opinion.
Mass culture, owned and disseminated by corporations, diverts us with trivia,
spectacles and celebrity gossip. In classical totalitarian regimes, such as
Nazi fascism or Soviet communism, economics was subordinate to
politics. “Under inverted totalitarianism the reverse is true,”
Wolin writes. “Economics dominates politics – and with
that domination comes different forms
of ruthlessness.”
Inverted
totalitarianism wields total
power without resorting to cruder forms
of control such as gulags, concentration camps or
mass terror. It harnesses science and technology for its dark
ends. It enforces ideological uniformity by using mass communication
systems to instill profligate consumption as an inner compulsion and to substitute
our illusions of ourselves for reality. It does not forcibly suppress dissidents, as long as
those dissidents remain ineffectual. And as it diverts us it dismantles manufacturing
bases, devastates communities, unleashes waves of human misery and ships jobs
to countries where fascists and communists know how to keep workers
in line. It does all this while waving the flag and mouthing patriotic
slogans. “The United States has become the showcase
of how democracy can be managed without
appearing to be suppressed,”
writes Wolin.
…The philosopher
Theodor Adorno wrote that the exclusive
preoccupation with personal concerns and indifference
to the suffering of others beyond the self-identified group is what
ultimately made fascism and the Holocaust possible: “The inability to identify
with others was unquestionably the most important psychological
condition for the fact that something like Auschwitz could
have occurred in the midst of more or
less civilized and innocent
people.”
The indifference
to the plight of others and the
supreme elevation of the self is what the
corporate state seeks to instill in us. It uses fear,
as well as hedonism, to thwart human compassion. We
will have to continue to battle the mechanisms of the dominant
culture, if for no other reason than to preserve through small, even
tiny acts, our common humanity. We will have to resist the temptation
to fold in on ourselves and to ignore the cruelty outside our door. Hope endures
in these often imperceptible acts of defiance. This defiance, this capacity to say
no, is what the psychopathic forces in control of our power systems seek
to eradicate. As long as we are willing to defy these forces we have
a chance, if not for ourselves, then at least for those who
follow. As long as we defy these forces we remain
alive. And for now this is the
only victory possible.
[...] Thich Nhat Hanh [...]