How We Created A Population Incapable Of Radical Change

I was going to tell yet another personal anecdote, but I don’t think there’s anybody here who doesn’t believe that we’re being conditioned to continuously consume… …to believe that if you aren’t continuously consuming while disregarding all consequences, that there’s probably something seriously wrong with you.

To be more positive, there is talk amongst some MSM pundits that our youth have tired of all this destructive mindlessness, much of it at their own expense, and are increasingly moving towards radical change.

Ian said Our education system, as anyone who had gone thru it knows is about sitting down, not talking unless giving permission, and giving teacher the answer they want the way they want it. Our adult lives are about giving the boss what they want, the way they want it. This is how we spend most of our time from about age five.

That is true. But has there ever been a society where it was not true?

Before there was mass education, children worked from about age 5 onward. If their parents were peasants or small farmers, they worked on the farm, essentially performing slave labor, and were beaten if they failed to perform.

The only exception to this were the spoiled children of the wealthy, who had servants to do the work for them.

It’s hard to imagine a cohesive society that does not value conformity. In my mind there is a great deal of evolutionary value to conformity and social cohesion. There is a little bit of value to independent thinking.

From the formative years I recognized schooling as conditioning, and I rebelled through grade school, middle school and high school and beyond through university while paying a price every step of the way, which price is still being paid in old age.
The personal aside, nobody’s really talking it to the streets, and even the extant protests—no matter the numbers—are lost in the louder noise.
So what to do? Bend down, bend over or aspire to a higher rebirth upon dying?
Lotsa questions no answers.

For most people, their only “skill” is shopping.

I have been watching a lot of TikToks put out by house builders and home inspectors lately — and one really smart guy whose woodworking encompasses making clever tools and jigs. It is fun to see skills but even more impressive to see organization.

I am not sure how a house or almost any building gets built without serious errors — if it ever happens. So many details, first of all and then so many ways for the sequencing of tasks to go wrong.

I cannot say that I now think many in the building trades are insufficiently “supervised”. Building inspectors all have many horror stories (not infrequently involving other inspectors).

On the other hand, thoughtful builders can be quite impressive.

We are trained to be sheep and caged flightless chickens. Does that explain the number and aggression of wolves and foxes? Maybe it does. And maybe it is the monopolizing of opportunity by the very few and very rich.

As Ian says, the passivity, morally and practically, of we shopping sheep, so proud of the iPhones we do not understand, so forgetful of elite misbehavior, so nonchalant about a demented President with the right initial after his name.

Every living thing wants to maximize their control over resources. In successful social animals this control is usually kept within socially acceptable limits. Unfortunately for humans, there’s plenty of history where large groups of humans haven’t been able to maintain socially acceptable limits while controlling resources, resulting in disaster for most of the group.

I really don’t think the dynamics behind these collapses are that hard to understand. But I still have trouble with understanding how social animals prevent the hitting bottom part. Maybe instead of studying stuff like say, the Mayan collapse (with causes being pretty obvious), we should be studying those groups where collapse was impending but prevented.

When I was in school in the 1980’s, in the British influenced international school system in east Africa and the Canadian public school system, thinking for oneself was still, to a point, encouraged and traditional “western” freedoms like free expression, freedom of assembly, a free press and so forth were presented as positive and worth preserving and even fighting for.

In high school in a small Canadian city we even formed an Anarchist Club (the logo was a baseball bat with the circle A symbol emblazoned on it) and boycotted school events like pep rallies for the sports teams that we thought had no educational value. That got us kicked out and we went to the school board office to file a complaint and then to the town newspaper which took us seriously and wrote a front page article with our story. We were eventually let back in without having to drag our parents in for a meeting as the principal had demanded.

That same year we performed a Dead Kennedys song at the talent show and as part of our act we peeled the maple leaf off the Canadian flag and revealed a Nazi swastika underneath.

That would be unthinkable today.

For radical change to happen people need to be motivated by a popular vision of what the post-change world will look like. But we are incapable of imagining a world beyond capitalism – in part because there is no adversary like the Soviet Union to challenge capitalism and because the idea of the free thinking individual, limited as it was, is no longer prevalent in the education system. Instead of being encouraged think independently kids are taught to defer to various experts, like doctors and counsellors.

Changes in the formal education system and lack of an official opposition to capitalism produces individuals that are much more circumscribed and more deferential to authority than previous generations.

So what has to happen before people can think beyond the present again?

Satisfice (vb): to act in such a way as to satisfy the minimum requirements for achieving a particular result

Okay, so my cats prefer to get all begging-noisy for their treats because they know it’s easier than attacking the treat jar, since that could result in serious consequences.

I once worked in a place which attempted a “total performance” philosophy. For years they’d been the local leader in their field but were now having business eaten away by spinoff companies. Their solution was clear. They had to get the very most out of each and every employee.

Their strategy was two pronged. First, management held RaRa / fire and brimstone meetings with workers stressing their drive towards excellence. Second, everybody’s work accomplishments, quality and quantity, would be available for all to see on the public network.

At the end of the day, the system was a complete failure. Many of the best employees went unrewarded and were even eliminated, while many of the worst were retained or even promoted. IMHO, this was the result because most of the employees unconsciously rejected the total performance system, because they knew they weren’t capable of total performance. And so too was most of senior management. And so things turned Lord of the Flies political.

So where do we go with this?

I don’t think the age of peasant farmers was likely as stultifying as many believe. For one, in that sort of situation everything is a problem to be solved so everyone needs to be a problem solver. Most everything needs to be made, so everyone is a maker (which is problem solving). Some will be quite good at a particular thing and become say the best carpenter in the village, but most likely you’ll still learn how to carve your own spoons and bowls.

Even just a generation ago a farmer was a carpenter, mechanic, electrician, plumber and every other hat one can wear. It wasn’t an easy life, but I don’t know many modern people who feel their lives are all that east. The difficulty is just different.

Being a hippie anarchist is fine as far as it goes, I suppose, but politics is about power, which ought to be about organizing society, organizing a better world, not futilely protesting a world run by others, where your contribution is a failure to participate in government.

There is no opposition to the neoliberal order and has not been since the 1980s. Politics stopped being something people did, participating in the state. Politics as a social space was yielded to performance art designed to manipulate emotional response accompanied by art criticism. It stopped being about designing and building the society and became about predators feeding on the dismantling of the society, while political “observers” did theatre criticism. Choosing able leaders as part of a process organizing to accomplish political goals in governance was replaced by opinion polling and well-qualified candidates and credentialed experts.

I submit that most people treat politics as unreal for the very good reason that it is unreal, a show no more real than some reality teevee competition or a fictional dramedy. FTX falling apart or the daily War in Ukraine alongside the retrospective The Crown on Netflix — willful suspension of disbelief required for “normal” enjoyment; conspiratorial speculations as lurid as desired give a further option of believing whatever you like.

People who have lived through the multiple deadly crises of the 20th century and their continuation into the 21st want (or seem to want) nothing more than stability of some kind. Most don’t want and can’t conceive of radical change, even when it’s happening right in front of them, precipitated by politicians, oligarchs, economists or on-air personalities.

My point, I guess, is that radical change is taking place all around us. Environmental change certainly, but the whole neo-LibCon ideological experiment — and failure for most of us — as well.

The People are showing little interest in precipitating more radical change, though the petit bourgeoisie is ready– much of it says –to take over the rotting apparatus of government and rule through their chosen dictator/saviour, but they haven’t figured out quite how they might do it or what the end result should be. Maybe we’ll find out as the hulks of parliaments and congresses in the Anglosphere lurch around looking for purpose and competence.

I agree with Astrid who quotes Mike Duncan that every Revolution is unlikely until it happens. Yep.

Thanks to Astrid for the recommendation. I was already cognizant of American Exception’s podcast because they’ve done a lot of shared podcasting with 2 of my favorites who (like Ian) I also do monthly support of, Chapo Trap House and Ben Norton’s Multipolarista– in fact, I heard a long Multipolarista podcast with Ben and Aaron Good of AE just in the last 2 days on some interesting info about the US actually supporting the big OPEC “boycott” jacking up of gas prices in the late 70s because all the oil was paid for on international markets in $$$, so the US actually benefited in a big way over time (Michael Hudson has covered this as well). Additionally the 2 of them discussed that the US deep state likely crashed the oil markets in 2014 to damage 3 deep state enemies, Venezuela, Russia and Iran. This is nowhere near as crazy as it sounds if one examines the data, the Saudis were complicit both times in strangling the market (1970s) then over-producing to glut and lowering the price in 2014. Up until Biden did his phony Kabuki about making Bonesaw a “pariah”, & the US lost a major partner (now cozying up to BRICS and rejecting the US, which even Bonesaw recognizes is utterly hypocritical about lecturing anyone on “human rights” or press freedom. Julian Assange, cough cough!) Anyway there is lots of great info out there if one digs just a bit and we are living thru “interesting times.” I thought again about Ian’s header for this piece and I think it is too strong . . . Americans are not just scared of “radical” change, they are scared of even timid, incremental change, as the fact that Bernie was demonized as a “crazy” Socialist who would found gulags for the rich, had the Dem. Presidential nomination stolen from him 2x right out in the open, with the Dem voters obediently going for shambling, hard-right old Joe once Obama cleared the rest of the field away– & now Bernie shills for his “friend” Joe who deliberately botched college loan forgiveness, handed the party over to Mansion & Enema the first 2 years of his term and s%its all over the faux-Progressives who recommended tiny amounts of actual aid to people post-pandemic, only respecting them when they vote for billion$ more to be shoveled to the failed Ukraine proxy war. . . Anyway, I agree that revolution can occur very suddenly when things get bad, I think we may be seeing some attempts in EUrope after a hard winter, we’ll see . . . but the US, I don’t know, I think a pretty large majority is thoroughly soaked in what Nietzsche called “slave morality” & will continue to serve the Oligarchic dream until they’re freezing, starving or homeless. But that may be only a couple of years away anyhow, we always need to have hope NOT from the political class, who provide little beyond a boot to the face.

The change that everyone (who isn’t insane) either knows or senses but can’t face is: that everything we do affects everyone and everything else. Mostly in small ways (or really big, if one is insane). We are at 8 billion people now, so the combined effect is huge.

There’s a reason the fake narrative about “pulling yourself up by your own bootstraps” remains alive and well. It’s designed specifically to insist that this idea that we are all connected isn’t true, so the insane can do as they please. They are literally affecting billions now, mostly negatively, and loving it (because they are insane).

If there was one thing that could change the world for the better, it would be a deepened understanding that none of us operate in a vacuum. Every decision we make has an effect, however small. Every word we speak or write has an effect, Every poor homeless person living on the street weakens us all, as a city, as a state or province, as a nation, as a planet. Every child who goes hungry … well, you get the idea.

Posts like this I think reveal how shitty an experience Welsh specifically had with school more than anything else. Your anecdote is far from universal. There’s been a tension in Western education between actual nurturing of curiosity and intellect and merely preparing peons to be cogs in the capitalist machine for at least a couple hundred years.