Web page
|
Recent Works
|
|
Alternative Media Sources alternative news wires from The Progressive Review Environlink news about the environment |
If we are to accept the idea of democracy and a tolerance for all sorts of ideas, we have to accept that some people will think differently than others.
"Are you tired of sending your hard earned dollars to large environmental groups who use it to send you more junk mail in return?"
--League of Wilderness Defenders
Modern society is not all that it seems. The realization is that in order to reverse the negative social and environmental trends that threaten to undermine our very existence, we must thoroughly understand the visualization of the technological visionary. Misguided as they were, they at least meant well, or did they? How many us the know the truth of what we are? How many are not afraid to confront those truths.
Vaclav Havel, President of the Czech Republic, in a speech which he gave at Independence Hall, in Philadelphia on July 4, 1994 suggests that the modern age has ended. Havel seems to see the present time we live in as a transitional age where it seems that old modern ideas are on the way out and a new idea of life seeks to emerge. He says that "new meaning is gradually born from the encounter, or the intersection, of many different elements." So one could infer from such reasoning that the modern process which is disturbingly destructive to natural systems as well as indigenous human cultural and social systems is to some extent necessary to the process of developing a global society...a global society that is gradually removing itself from that destructiveness. The question is: will this gradual change in the way we as modern people see and do things, from the reckless reductionism and consumerism that supports the industrial age to the more enlightened holist perspective of new post-industrial age?
The significance of personal transformation in our lives, can never be underestimated. Much of the modernist view of the world seeks to assume that overcoming personal dysfunction is not nearly as important as devising sophisticated new technologies to solve the world's problems. Push button solutions represents a false path that has been the core of the modernization process. In fact it is still yet not known if the effects of technology is having a net negative effect on the humanity, since much of the progress of technology stems from short term thinking and the policies and actions that emanate from such mind sets.
What lurks behind the illusion of modern progress is the reality of the human condition, which can not be alleviated with new fangled high technologies. If one feels the need to affect the world, then one must be transformed by the need to do so. One way this can be achieved is by giving of ourselves to others. We can heal ourselves by helping others to Heal.
Never can the political be isolated in the quest for personal transformation since, as we transform ourselves, to a more functional state the understanding growths within us of the need to attack the forces in society which have a inherent interest in perpetuating sickness in society. The personal is the political in that the quest for personal self-realization often has a powerful political impact. Politics also becomes personal in that our personal habits and lifestyles have a effect on our political views. We grow frustrated as those who claim to serve the public interest only engage in finely honed and meticulously practiced disinformation campaigns. For their power ambitions and addictions outweigh their need to serve in the public interest. From president Bill Clinton on down, politicians cannot of course let the public become aware of the full extent of this charade, since a democracy is supposed to serve the people. Yet this idea of serving the people is in fact really little more than annoying technicality and yet it is a great thing, for many "highly educated people" since it justifies whole industries of professionals and experts in a multitude of fields: from public relations experts to lobbyists to handlers, lawyers fundraisers and consultants.
Despite the supposed cynicism of the average mainstream America, the level at which the media systems are able to create disinformation, weakening the electorates sense of reality is simply amazing. People have the potential to be aware, contrary to what some elites think, yet the public eschews such understandings for obvious reasons: they feel that they are powerless to affect change, in a corrupt society that is based on lies and deception, in much the same way as nearly every other society in the world is. For a individual to seek to emerge from the lies is not in their best interests as narcissistic, career orientated Bill Gates emulators. Hence we live in a world where people are reluctant to be aware of the need to make uncomfortable compromises in every aspect of their lives, for such realizations make it harder to criticize the people of the establishment, for we all engage in various modes of self-censorship.
Regardless of all this, there is the sense that when we elect someone to public office, they will save us from bad government and rule not only with rational competence but with moral conviction. We are compelled to fall into line; to act a certain way in order to become clean within the pervasive dirtiness of corruption which we are all faced with in our lives, so as to save the national character of the nation. However usually such notions are little more than pretensions exerted by opportunist manipulators of the public mind. When Guiliani realized that the typical New York persona was bad public relations for the city's immense tourism industry, he started a war against rudeness with his campaign of niceness.
My writing is that which strives to wake up the deeper meaning that lies within us all. If a conscious raising is to be achieved, those who feel a need to change the way we as humans relate to each other, must act not as detached, objective professionals but as humans. As writers, artists and communicators who feel the need in their hearts and souls to rise to the occasion of the dismal human and ecological condition. How do we respond to this when we feel so helpless to change the world, and even something so relatively mundane as changing ourselves. There is nothing mundane about it! Personal change and rebirth is the key, and yet I feel so far from it. Well that is the heart of what makes us depressed. We feel cut off from tools that we need to become effective actors in this world.
"Words have spectral bands of meaning, like chemical elements, and reflect differently depending on how the light of intelligence shines through them." Many different ideas into such a fluid subjective realm of the human language express the permeable and transient state of our words. Thoughts as reality for the undisciplined turn into weapons of devastating force. In the midst of this fear of the untrained masses creating a crisis of democracy--a veritable tyranny of the masses--is what they use to rationalize their (the establishment) belligerent behavior towards the people they rule over. The media mimics the state confusing reality with the way the elites conceive and perceive reality. All the massive institutional authorities march lock-step with another, despite occasional blundering and whistle-blowing missteps And the schools with the aid of the "deadweight of calcified textbooks -- economics textbooks especially"-- "words turn to bricks, turning pages into walls, opaque in their superficial literalness. Intelligence turns solid walls into transparencies, metaphorical overlays charged with links to future interpretations (Saros Institute)."
How do we define Mental illness and how should we define mental illness? Is there a aspect of the process in which are socially conditioned that is keeping us from being objective and fully able to understand the depth of the actual causal factors that are leading to mental illness? The whole idea of normalcy has been and still is a relative notion based each society's set of values and norms. Another important aspect of mental illness relates to the pace and stress of modern life. Michael Foucault's panopticon has been used by many post-modernists (The Panopticon of Stress) as a way to understand how people are manipulated into tolerating and subjecting themselves into high-stress lifestyles which often take a toll on their health and well being. And what about America's Favorite addictions?
The Importance of Healthy Ecosystems
Nature must become seen as a basic part of our lives. Modernity has moved us away from nature, by way of its arrogance. Without healthy ecosystems to sustain us, we will die and present trends indicate a lack of recognition within humanity of the importance of the natural systems that sustain us.
Exploring Potential Future World Scenarios and Trends
Present levels of economic growth are simply
not viable. The environment's natural resources are being used
more rapidly that than they can be replaced. But we have come to
rely on them for our sense of achievement and success within
modern capitalistic societies. A steady state economy is the only
realistic solution to prevent massive human social decline. The UNEP along with a multitude of scientist and
groups (United Nations Environment Program) say that current
rates of natural resource degradation cannot continue. The World Wide Fund
for Nature has developed the
Living Planet index as a way to measure the environmental degradation that
has come about as the result of unprecedented levels of economic growth.
The Fourth World
Now many experts see the affluent consumer dominated First World (the developed world), the now defunct Second World (former Soviet Union and its satellite states), the poverty stricken though also moderate income Third World, and now a new sublevel version of the Third World is now dubbed the super-poor Forth World. The idea that some people are so poor that the experts had to build a "new world" for them, captures the increasing and immense disparity between rich and poor in the world. So in actuality my the Title of my report When Two Worlds collide is a misnomer, but I still choose to see the difference as primarily bi-polar, so as to keep things simple.
Although what happens in these lands much seen distant to the problems and situations that we have deal with in everyday lives as Americans, what is going on there--the massive ecological, social and cultural degradation does and will eventually affect us. Many affluent people cannot relate to why things often happen the way they do in the Third World. When we speak of environmental problems there has been a greater awareness of the population problem (a Third World problem), than there has been of the rampant consumerism that dominates the Western and developed nations. This despite the fact that only 20 percent of the people in these affluent developed countries now consume over 86 percent of the world's resources. It is believed by many (and the evidence is there to back it up) that it is the extremes in wealth and poverty which lead to the most environmental devastation.
In the Third World desperate times call for desperate measures, in order to find a place for the peasants that are literally busting at these country's seems, and to gain needed foreign exchange, the natural areas are rapidly being ripped apart and dismantled for lumber. They are then used as plantations to grow tropical fruits and coffees that go mainly to the developed nations and as pasture for animals which are also primarily geared for Western consumers. A good example of this is in Indonesia, Brazil, Malaysia and Mexico, where there have been serious problems in the last few years as large chunks of the rainforest have been obliterated.
The Gaia Hypothesis
The Gaia hypothesis began in the imaginative mind of James Lovelock who while working at NASA saw satellite pictures of the planet earth. That got him thinking about the way biology sees the totality of life. In fact the biological and scientific mainstream did not really think about such holistic ideas very much, for it was much more concerned with specialized phenomena and all this happened science as a whole became less and less interested on the complex ways in which the systems of the world interacted with each other. Charlene Spretnack expresses the sentiment that, "Holistic thinking is not a retreat from capitalism; it is an enlargement of it, to a more comprehensive and more efficient means of analysis (The Spiritual Dimension of Green Politics 29). However laissez faire capitalism---the corporate capitalism as we all know and love it--is dying, most are just too in the mainstream of our society are just too short term oriented to realize this.
The Dominant Social Paradigm
The reversal of the prevailing dominant social paradigm which centers around material values of money, power and position, implies nothing less than a social transformation. Though such notions seem unrealistic to many, it in fact is the present human demands on the earth that are unrealistically pushing various human and non-human systems throughout the planet to the breaking point. Therefore we appear caught in between two untenable realities, the ideal, and what passes for the real within the warped human mind, caught under the spell of capitalist driven consumerism.
The all American need for power illustrates the embedded nature of social dysfunction, as we cling to illusions that represent not what is good for humanity, but what is good for ourselves and our immediate circle of friends and family.
Economics as if People didn't Matter
Mainstream economics operates in denial to the basic idea that the environmental degradation which is the byproduct of economic growth, is a cost that is not properly accounted for in the present economic system. Also significant is the assumptions made in a time when America appears to be leading the world again. The economics professions appears flooded with irrational exuberance, which may threaten the future relevance of the profession. Mainstream economics is not a objective science, because it affirms the subjective ruling class interests as well as its own professional interests and notions about capitalism. Most of the economics profession therefore is not so much essentially interested in truth or in creating a better more just economic system so much as it in affirming the dominant social paradigm and its value to that system of social control.
The Panopticon
The panopticon, is a old idea developed by a utilitarian philosopher named Jeremy Bentham. He sought to use to technology and a better understanding of human nature to create a more efficient prison system in the form of the panopticon. It is the engineering of a architectural psychology of space which encourages rigid conformity out of fear of social retribution. This is based on the idea central to modernism and liberalism that it is more efficient to manipulate somebody to do what you want them to do, rather than physically subjugating one to assimilate your value system. This is done through self-surveillance as people internalize social norms through the mass media and educational systems.
The Panopticon is about the sinister aspect of technology and its ability to invade our privacy and our independence as human beings, so as to make us into something else.
Manufacturing Consent
The media has a vital role in society. We all assume that this is as the founding fathers intended: to keep the people informed of the goings on of the state and society. Manufacturing consent. The aesthetic reality of commercial culture, is a powerful force that is driving hyper-consumption or consumerism. Michael Foucault--a post-modern philosopher expressed the idea that things are not all they seem within modernism, and that every action often has a equal and opposite reaction, that often exists very subtly under the surface of the mainstream consciousness. Steward Ewen who wrote PR:A Social History of Spin appears to make the same assumption in saying that as the aristocratic order broke apart, and democracy transparency took over, thing were not all that they seemed. The new ruling classes had to use these more subtle ways to get the people to bend to their will. These subtle ways of manipulating the public's consent are difficult to empirically prove (Herbert Marcuse). "The exigencies of power were by necessity, increasingly exercised from behind the pretext of the common good (Ewen)." The history of Public relations, is illuminates how this emerging field demonstrated and still demonstrates its utility to established interests that periodically come under siege by the onslaught of democratic institutions coupled with a increased public awareness of corporate and government injustices. By serving as one of the staging areas for the manufacture of consent in a democracy, public relations forms an important bulwark against an empowered and informed public. PR's main task is to ensure that modern societies do not develop into fully functioning democracies, so it ensures that people do not have the information or understanding of society to be informed and to make informed decisions.
The Illusion of Autonomy is the idea that we are not really individualistic as we would like to believe that we are. Theodore Adorno says the idea of individuality is but a figment of one's superficial imagination. A illusion of autonomy suits one's sense that they are their own person. Yet we all conform by seeking to emulate that which we see as most cool or hip in the culture and therefore accessorizing ourselves with what we deem as the proper, consumer goods. These goods are not made for the fact that we really need them in a material sense, so much as how they give us a identity that we can take pride in, by the fact that we are expressing ourselves as unique individuals, through consuming, wearing and purchasing these items of consumer and popular culture.
Redeveloping a Sense of Community
School for the Noetic Sciences
(Arcosanti) is situated in the Semi-desert of central Arizona only a mile or
two from the I-17 the interstate that cuts across the state. Arcosanti is
called a urban laboratory by its founder Paulo Soleri, because it is a way of
putting his idealistic philosophies and architecture into some real world,
physical form. It is a experiment in alternative living. Not only is
it a unique vision for our societies; our cities, but it is also relatively
unique in relation to philosophers who have rarely actually tried to bridge the
distance between their abstract discussions and the real, practical world.
The vision is no doubt radical to many conventional thinking minds, since the
arcology is about the development of more intensive modern integration of
culture and art into the aesthetic; the architecture of the community. It is a
political statement, in that it is about the construction of communities, as if
the experiences and the perspectives of the people in these cities mattered.
Of course presently what matters is primarily the interests of big business and
the developers who have only short term interest that primarily and almost
exclusively revolve around maximum profit. So they do not plan long term,
when they construct urban areas, to ensure that the cities they build will be
designed and constructed so as to give their residents a high quality of life,
over many lifetimes. This arcology
is about the construction of a city where people matter, where the influence of
cars is minimized, and conspicuous consumption is discouraged.
There are also many projects going on within what is called
the intentional communities
movement.
The Communities Directory/Website is a clearinghouse for information about the communities movement
Developing a community sphere from which you sustain yourself is not only important in economic terms of self-sufficiency, but also from the stand point of living lightly on the earth, and having the opportunity to help others. The desire to build a new emerging alternative economy, emanates from a understanding of the possible externalized impact of the false premises which underlie the dominant social paradigm. Many speak of a socially transformed world where a new economic system and way of thinking will have to emerge. This is where the idea of alternative business becomes relevant.
September 19, 1999
After several years of "planning", I decided to set up a web page from which to communicate to the world. It is my hope that this website will serve as a platform to
Contact me at [email protected]
