OpEds: Won’t get fooled again - The Greanville Post

Won’t get fooled again
(title from a 1971 song by The Who)

BY ERIC SCHECHTER, Links for a Wildly Left
Freedom is sweeping the world. But to retain that freedom, we’ll need to see things more clearly. I’ll share what I’ve seen about truth, peace, sustainability, and the economy.

We’re off to a good start – the worldwide “Occupy” movement is taking Bob Dylan’s 1965 advice: “don’t follow leaders.” But we also need to learn from the 1999 film “The Matrix” (or Plato’s allegory of the cave): the world is not as it appears. Some deceptions are flat-out lies, contradicting physical fact. But more subtle and powerful are the biased and misleading interpretations of the significance of physical facts. (That’s what Lakoff calls “framing.”)

Uncovering the truth is going to be difficult. I’m not absolutely certain of anything – but I urge you to distrust anyone who is certain. We all have different trusted sources for what we believe to be factual information, and trust cannot be won through debate. Perhaps it can be won through dialogue. And keep in mind that, to make our views more understandable to other people, we need to understand their views.

War Is A Lie. There were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq in 2003. The Gulf of Tonkin incident never happened in 1964. And though there may have been good reasons for the USA to enter World War II, they were not the reasons the public was given. Nearly all of the terrorist “plots” foiled by the FBI over the last decade were created by the FBI – including the one recently blamed on Iran. But perhaps the biggest lie is when the politicians draw a line on a map and say “this is our border, and the people on the other side are different.” Actually, you and I have more in common with the people in funny hats that we’ve been bombing, than with the suits in Washington and Wall Street who have been profiting from the wars and thereby bankrupting our country.

The USA’s military policy is crazy: we’re making new enemies faster than we’re killing old ones. Every innocent civilian who loses a home, a limb, or a loved one as “collateral damage,” gains a reason to pick up a box-cutter or a bomb vest. Free people might do something we don’t like – but I’d rather reduce the chance of that through friendship than through “stability” (a euphemism for control).

Global warming is accelerating, because of feedback loops (look it up). Droughts, floods, and hurricanes are becoming more frequent and more intense; arable land area is shrinking. These facts, plus the fact that all the cheap oil will soon be gone, mean that our civilization is going to collapse soon. Only the government is large enough to do anything about the immense changes headed our way, but our plutocracy (government by the rich) isn’t interested in anything that might disturb their current profits and that doesn’t net them a quick additional profit. The fossil fuel companies have paid a few scientists – generally not climate scientists – to deny global warming. And politicians gobble that up, because they’re getting big campaign contributions from those companies. Evidently we need to overthrow the plutocracy.

Politicians are concocting wedge issues, trying to distract us from the mess that the economy has become. Rising unemployment and sinking wages are the greatest concerns for most people in our society; most of them haven’t realized that those are inevitable consequences of late-stage capitalism, and can’t be fixed by reforms. The explanation for that is not particularly technical or complicated:

Under any economic system, the methods and tools of production gradually improve, and so productivity rises – i.e., the same goods and services are produced with fewer person-hours of labor. That would make us all affluent, if we were all valued members of a team. But instead the gains are pocketed by the owners and executives, and surplus workers are fired. Then there are more unemployed competing against each other for fewer jobs, so wages sink.

Yes, the Federal Reserve is making the rich richer. But so is every other aspect of capitalism! It concentrates wealth into ever fewer hands, impoverishing everyone else, like the board game “Monopoly” – which might be “fair” if everyone played by the same rules, but even then it would be cruel to the less fortunate. The market ignores externalized costs, and prices natural resources at the cost of extraction rather than the cost of replacement. It privatizes and plunders the commons, and thereby poisons the ecosystem. It is destroying the world – even the rich can’t eat money!

The root cause, as ubiquitous and unnoticed as the air we breathe, is private property, which trains us all to be selfish and greedy. When your interests are separate from mine, then your loss is not my loss, and might even be my gain; shopping replaces community. Hunter/gatherers 10,000 years ago knew that no one can own the rivers or forests; we must regain that understanding. John Lennon sang “Imagine no possessions – I wonder if you can.” We must, and soon.

Eric Schechter is a teacher of math and seeker of truth residing in Nashville. He is a member of the Links for the Wildly Left discussion group on Facebook.

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