By Joe Bageant
As most of the world has noticed by now, very few Americans are critical thinkers. Most suffer from a collective learning disability based on the complete commodification of our consciousness by consumerism and electronic media. In this case, learning disability is a nice way of saying that we have become collectively stupid, muchless capable of insight.
Insight is scary to Americans so conditioned to rote consumption and substituting entertainment and illusion for actual involvement. When they realize something, and I mean genuine higher understanding of what the sum of the parts mean, not simply what they appear to be, their consciousness is altered and they become different inside. Suddenly the world is no longer the solid consumer state sonambulation they are accustomed to. They have no tools to deal with it. Beyond that least half of us are so conditioned we are incapable of human insight at all. We have the past two elections as proof.
But for artists and creative people not hammered down by our national self-projections, new insights are merciful release from the stage managed totalitarian consumer experience. Alcohol and drugs can also help break free of this iron theater, which is why one is highly taxed, the other illegal and both made artificially expensive. Prolonged and concentrated Artistic exploration is another way out. But most are happily subdued by the smell of a new car, televised sports or movie tickets.
Meanwhile, here we are, you and I, prowling the archaic text-based "information community" of the internet where we will find only what we are looking for and what we more or less know. The internet is a non-place where information is invited to be filtered through an already developed set of perceptions governing what we think we know, believe or want to believe. I am participating in it right now, even though I haven't the slightest idea why. But it probably has something to do with the neuro-psychology of a genetically determined "symbols dissemination" biocaste. Our species produces writers and journalists in the same manner bee and ant societies produce hive members whose sole purpose is to run between all other members, issuing a group security signal: "I'm OK. Are you OK? Or the hive is in danger. The queen bee is dead. Terrorists are inside the hive." Etc.
I am convinced that much of our predisposition toward certain perception filters and community (hive) roles is hardwired into us. Even at age six I could read well and had the compulsion to write down what I saw around me, or memorize it in the form of a story, then deliver it to others. Minstrels and troubadors and nomadic story tellers of the dark ages did the same, and I consider it sort of a bardic hardwiring. (My family simply attributed it to "bad nerves." They may prove right.)
The only difference 60 years later is that I have added a comedy routine to offset the increasingly bad news. You cannot keep pointing out to fellow travelers in your cybernetic affinity group the obvious signs of increasing doom whizzing by without at least saying: "Hey guys, let's stop for a beer and a few jokes along the way." Nevertheless the cybernetic bundling of perception groups on the Internet may be leading to insight of the aggregated information sort, if not observable human progress -- yet. Here's hoping.
At the same time, a financial, military, governmental entity drives for ultimate propertization and monetization of civilization and life itself. What or who is behind this seemingly unstopable totalism? Although anti-monolith leftists and eco-realists want to find bad guys and evil manipulators behind the curtain -- and certainly there are candidates enough -- it is the inevitable outcome of the Newtonian World Machine. It has now propertized, financialized genes, the songs from our mouths, ideas, inspiration, the forests, the fish beneath the seas, all of nature and even images of nature, atomizing them into millions of moving parts, profit units.
With the entire world sold and mostly devoured, and six billion folks in a Darwinian death match for what's left —- half of them drinking sewerage and the other half living for the new xBox to come out -- I'll make a wild guess here and say it's a helluva long way "back to the garden." Things are not going to turn around, Fritjof Capra be damned. You can't turn a battleship around in a shrinking mud puddle.
