Some time back, I opened the Sunday New York Times. The main headline, front page, top right, was “At many homes, more profit and less nursing.” The article described nursing homes in the U.S. where private investors cut costs to raise profits.
Nurses profitably fired. Nursing home residents profitably brokered into oblivion. Lives decline, yes, but stocks climb. Bottom line glory.
Are you surprised? I doubt it.
Suppose millions read, “Militant Martians take over nursing industry. Patients die. Aliens profit.” How many readers of that report would pile into the streets, peering every which way to protect our elders and ourselves. Martians beware.
Millions know that relatives, friends, and even ourselves endure the intrinsic, relentless, and merciless dynamics of capitalism. We suffer. Owners profit. Do we even look up from our IPhones?
Martian invasion – fight like hell. Capitalist depravity – pass the popcorn and click the remote.
In old folks homes, residents suffer dormancy and death. In colleges young minds atrophy into party mania and apathy – being well prepared to later administer or inhabit the old folks homes. Few rebel.
Why does hypothetical calamity imposed by invaders provoke limitless outrage, while actual calamity imposed by home grown social institutions provokes depressed yawns?
Futile fatalism thrives when people think there is no alternative to capitalist business as usual. Futile fatalism becomes virulently suicidal when people think there is no alternative to slip sliding toward hell.
Check the temperature, water levels, wind, and waves. We are all slip sliding to hell. Check militarized cities, droned populations, proliferating wars, dissipating health, rampaging starvation. We are all slip sliding to hell.
If tractor beams from alien spaceships were dragging us into hellish flames, we would fight back. But when suited sycophants with spiffy briefcases tell us to “have a good day” while negotiating us to hell, we smile back.
Futile fatalism. If we believe no alternative exists, our pains feel inevitable. Acceptance becomes maturity.
Suppose peaceful Uranians view us from a long distance. Wouldn’t they deduce that we are a population of cowardly ignoramuses?
Our college credentialed professionals walk with their heads held high expecting those who lack degrees to scurry out of their way. Professionals who earn lots of money (though perhaps not obscenely much), see themselves above everything damning. But please realize that in talking about futile fatalism, I am not referring mainly to poor people who suffer serious repression and who lack access to substantive information. The poor endure violence at the end of a club or confined by the clink of a jail door. They are daily impoverished by a flurry of contracts. That the poor cringe a bit at all that, isn’t cowardly or ignorant. It is cautious.
And please note that in referencing futile fatalism, I also do not have in mind the really rich and powerful. I don’t mean the owners, senators, administrators, big time bosses, and media moguls. I don’t mean the pin striped inhumane elites who just do what their training, conditions, interests, and long-since ingrained anti social mindsets despicably require them to do.
No, in referencing futile fatalism, I mean people who are educated and substantially insulated from repression and retribution. I mean somewhat comfortable people not, however, at the top of society’s mountains of materialism. I mean well dressed, well spoken, well poised, well fed people, not obscenely rich and powerful, but reasonably wealthy and, taken together, highly influential.
You and me, with our college degrees, we are the stupid cowards or, if you prefer, ours is the cowardly stupidity. And our fatalism is a virus. And it is spreading at the speed of silence – which means, damn fast.
I mean the family doctor, with a local practice but no social involvement. I mean your kids’ fifth grade or high school or college teacher, a caring type, educated, great dinner company, but not socially active. I mean each worker who enjoys the benefits of an effective union, like firefighters, and who displays ample caring for friends and neighbors, and even for people they don’t know who might be burning up in the buildings they risk themselves to save, but who show no concern for people burning up in poverty or fricasseeing in furnaces ignited by bombs labeled made in the USA.
I mean the miles of minions toiling in well paid and somewhat authoritative managerial and professional jobs. I mean people comfortably beyond survival incomes. People who have TVs, internet access, books, and at least reasonably good credit ratings. People who may have a piano, a couple of cars, and, yes, a folk guitar. I mean people who have some comfort and some insulation from the violence of inner city life, albeit often suffering alienating and even perverse work requirements. I mean people who have plenty of access to true information, even if getting it would take some effort.
In other words, referring to futile fatalism I mean people who are not pathological, not jack booted maniacs. I mean people who are not, by virtue of their positions, so domineering over others as to inevitably become so horrendously self interested and jaded that anything other than vile selfishness in economic and political life is long since beyond their comprehension. I mean people who are not so horribly smashed and isolated and beaten by their circumstances, that anything beyond seeking bare survival would require a Herculean undertaking.
I mean, then, nice people like you, nice people like me, nice people who are watching from within their homes and jobs while America rains destruction on others. Nice people who are watching from within their homes and jobs America’s internal dissolution into escalating repressiveness. Nice people, liberal people, sensitive people, caring people, educated people, watching, watching, watching, but not doing anything much to stop the daily calamities that owe to capitalism.
I mean good Americans. Futile fatalists.
We the futile fatalists say to ourselves, in some subterranean channel of our minds, “hey, self, there is no better world. Pay attention, self – there is nothing good that you can do outside your small circle of friends. More, self, if you make your deep down submerged distaste for the pain and suffering you see all around you apparent to others, you will, in that act, look different. You will not fit. You will be dissident. And gee, what’s the point of suffering the incredible loss of comfort that being dissident entails merely to protest jackboot repressive trends at home and massively violent mayhem abroad, much less to protest the daily assault against all wage slaves, not to mention the cooking of the planet unto drowning?
“Self, do you understand? If you cannot totally eliminate it, keep your bitterness hidden. There is nothing to do about all the horror. It You should care for you. You should care for your family. You should make believe all is well. Smile. Look happy. Display calm civility. Say to one and all, “have a nice day.” Say it again. And hope against hope, during unwanted moments of clarity, that some miracle will make things better before you have to worry about keeping the jackboots away from your life too, or you feel the urge to blow your own sorry head off in despair. Put a lid on sentiment. Curb solidarity. Stifle humanity. Be a happy, and cowardly, idiot.”
How can we possibly overcome futile fatalism given that for a fatalist anything that appears perfunctory just adds to the malady?
March in place. Hold the line. Make an appearance. Fight the good fight unto defeat. Be on the side of the angels unto the graveyard. Do it all separate from all else. Do anything that screams out or even just inadvertently implies to any fatalist wanting to so interpret it, that we can’t win – and thereafter all entreaties will just bounce off the fatalists’ slicked down cynicism.
Being a lemming following the crowd over a cliff saying hooray for our side, “have a good day,” is pretty pitiful. How much more pitiful is it to go over a cliff, barreling along like all the rest, but moaning about how unjust it is, how painful it is, how stupid it is, and how un-lemming like we are, while nonetheless churning away, cliffward and then over, saying, of course, “have a good day,” right to the end?
But what can cause people currently hell bent on collective cliff diving, to transcend that pastime? What can meet that challenge?
Well, first, here is what won’t meet the challenge.
Polite toe tapping won’t meet it. Passive and even passionate litanies of doom won’t meet it. Even big marches and rallies, occurring over and over, but staying one size, much less shrinking, won’t meet it.
Nor can movements hope to meet the challenge if they exude disdain for non members. Nor if they harbor habits that reveal that they are mainly about posturing, or mainly about grabbing brass rings for themselves, regardless of the impact on others.
Movements without a vision of what they intend to do and of how they intend to do it, and without a compelling explanation of why and how each member’s efforts can constructively aid the process, won’t meet the challenge.
So we need to share inspiring, convincing, and liberating vision that demolishes the view that no other world is possible. We need to hold our vision passionately but flexibly participate in its on going definition and development.
We need to enunciate and advocate a picture of a broad pattern of activity that can plausibly lead from where we are to where we wish to wind up, always steadily growing our movement even when we suffer periodic defeats in specific battles.
We need to incorporate the new ways people find for winning changes, and to create an environment in which they are not only welcomed to contribute, and not only empowered to contribute, but steadily strengthened in their commitment to contribute.
And yet even all that will need an additional edge to it. Futile fatalism is not a minor malady. Futile fatalism has defense mechanisms of considerable robustness and power. To conquer futile fatalism, we not only have to have shared vision, shared strategy, and a movement that is empowering, congenial, and inspiring, we also have to communicate what we have, advocate it, trumpet it, and literally propel it into people’s awareness, until all sentient souls have no choice but to see it, and face the facts and prospects.
People suffering futile fatalism won’t spontaneously come to movements wanting to change the decaying world they daily navigate. We are going to have to push our alternative – both vision and strategy – into constant view of people who are hell bent on looking in every other imaginable direction.
We are going to have to make our beliefs constantly present to people, even intrusive upon people – until they register them, comprehend them, face them, and decide about them.
Such communicating will require more than writing our vision and strategy down, or even speaking it at rallies or teach-ins, as good as it would be if we were doing a whole lot more of each. We will have to undertake actions that make attention to visionary and strategic messages unavoidable. We will have to somehow elaborate, refine, and convey vision and strategy everywhere.
But we don’t own TV channels. We don’t own billboard companies. We don’t own radio stations. We don’t have financial means to easily shout into everyone’s consciousness from coast to coast over and over. So we must instead use clever deeds, clever actions, to arouse interest we then address by bringing our words straight to people in endless conversations.
We must have deeds and actions and conversations that are so audacious and so provocative and yet also so respectful of the people we communicate with, that those people have to hear our vision, have to assess our strategy, and thus have to communicate and think and transcend futile fatalism, in turn refining the newly shared vision and strategy with their own insights.
And how do we do this? No one fully knows, yet. But here is the point of this screed. A whole lot of people better start thinking about this big task instead of just going through the motions of what decades of habits have proclaimed constitutes being a radical, but which the same decades of habits have also taught us damn well won’t be sufficient to produce really radical, much less revolutionary change.
The participatory potential around us is enormous. Almost no one outside profiteers loves profit making, pummeling others unto death, polluting, and prevaricating. Most of the population is ready for a hopeful, compelling, plausible, alternative.
There is a young woman at Columbia University in NYC. She was raped by another student there – who was accused in some other instances of rape, as well. She was effectively ignored by Colombia and other authorities – another horrible violation. Reports are that she is attending classes – but, as she navigates from class to class, she carries the mattress from the bed on which she was raped. Now that’s a smart tactic. That mattress, in her hands, is a one person in your face yet totally respectful and respect inducing consciousness raising campaign. Just think what groups of people, mutually supportive, could accomplish if this one young woman can do this?
If movements compellingly and compassionately provide vision, strategy, and especially audacious activism, and if they nurture and refine all three with contributions from each new person who comes aboard, then movements will succeed. If not, then not.
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4 Comments
I have often wondered when I would read an article like this.
Perhaps it my futile fatalism, but the people described above are not neutral, undecided, or unaware. They got where they are by taking advantage of a system that benefits people like them at the expense of all others. They understand how the system works and the effects it has. Many would be more quick to oppose anyone who attempts to disrupt that system than to ever play a part in dismantling it.
Correction.
There is one CALLED Inclusive Democracy. Not “calked”.
Inclusive Democracy may BE another. Not “get” another.
No apostrophe in last “its”.
I tend to agree with all the above. But what is the vision? Are there a few? Many? Does each vision require slightly different strategies? How elaborate should the vision be? Some visions are merely utopian hopes and dreams, not clear models. Some are vague notions. Clear models are few. In fact, I really only know of one. There is one calked Inclusive Democracy, but it’s economic model is not as well elucidated as Parecon. However, Takis Fotopoulos has a strategy for attaining the Inclusive Democracy vision. Would it be different from one that leads towards a participatory society or an economic alternative like Parecon?
How to know which one to sell? What vision would elicit confidence in the minds of the everyday people described above? Parecon? Inclusive Democracy? Peer Economy? Pluralist Commonwealth? Market Socialism? Community Economics? Localism? All of the above? Are some passing phases on the way to others, or another?
What are the values underpinning the visions? Are they all the same? Do they all promote and foster values that are universally held dear? Clearly Parecon was designed to foster and promote equity, solidarity, diversity and self-management. It is rather a complete model, well thought through. Are all the others? Do the others promote and foster behaviour in concert with all the above values?
Yep, I tend to agree with the above article. I tend to relate to its passion and sense of urgency and frustration. Clear, well thought out, respectable alternative visions or models need to be audaciously elucidated and respectfully spruiked. Parecon is such a vision or model. Inclusive Democracy may get another. A Pluralist Commonwealth another or a phase to pass through? Peer economy, or too embryonic at this stage?
Social Ecology? Or does it need something like Parecon to complete it?
How to sell a visio with confidence? How to have confidence in a vision? To know it is worthy of one’s energy and time as opposed to some other one? Can different visions be brought under the same roof. Or does this just elicit confusion and a less than coherent strategy that could see the movement degenerate into sectarian cliques that undermine its ability to attract people to it or to garner the confidence of the ordinary everyday people described in the article above?
Aside from all the above, I tend to agree with Michael Albert. I think what he suggests should be at the heart of all serious organising that has nothing less than total system change as it’s goal.