Modern Success vol. II by Michael Wilson

odern Success Issue #2 Spring 2013

Considerations for UW-Madison Students

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HOBBES-EAT-HOBBES WORLD // A kind of letter of introduction from the editor //

Dear Students, Let’s face it. Life is getting a bit nuts. It seems like everyday we read about someone shooting kids or being shot by kids, or another al-Qaeda terrorist found in one of our cities, or entire shorelines being wiped out by unheard-of storms. The headlines read like a cavalcade of tragedy, one spectacular horror-show after another in a daily succession that is both disturbing as well as numbing for all it’s repetition. To ask how all these things might be connected is a project we generally don’t undertake. We’d rather chat with friends on Facebook, go get blitzed at the bar with our buddies, talk about sports and the latest television sitcoms. We go shopping. We watch multi-million dollar movies stuffed with greater and greater visual effects. We eat our frozen pizza. And all the while we look at each other without really saying what we desperately want to say: What the fuck is going on here? And everyday, with all these technicolor tragedies emblazoned upon our minds, we have our own private lives in which we struggle and fight. In which we are constantly told we must compete to succeed. To fight for the prize. To fight for our relationships. Fight to get a boyfriend. Fight for freedom. Fight for love. Why all the fighting? Why so much competition and intra-human struggle? From all these images of humans killing and fighting each other — especially as television now seems to have a cornucopia of shows on rapists, murderers, and serial killers — an idea has taken hold of our collective consciousness: that our neighbor is a potential adversary. It is so instilled in us that we can barely look each other in the eye without the feeling that the other person might suddenly mug or shoot us. Worse, friendly gestures

are translated as having hidden sinister agendas since it is impossible for strangers (aka humans) to be generous and kind to each other. No longer do we work with our colleagues, we now compete against them for a better position, more hours on the clock, more attention from the boss, more money in the bank. At every turn, we are forced into another struggle, another competition, another fight. Let’s step back for a moment and try to get a hold of the big picture. To do so, most people look at philosophy (religious or secular) as a way to articulate some of the over-arching themes within a culture, to attempt to make sense out of all the various phenomena that occur within society on our streets where we live. In a sense, one can reasonably argue that the last several hundred years of ‘Western Culture’ has been dominated by the ideas of one Sir Thomas Hobbes.

is that individuals within a species work together to pass on favorable or “survivable” genes to the next generation. For example, if my species has a slightly better ability to reach some berries, there’s a greater possibility that my species — not the shorter species — will survive and pass on their genetic information. Darwin observed over and over again that individuals within a species cooperate in order to help the species survive as a whole and pass on their genes. He further concluded that a species which competes with itself is a self-destructive and unsustainable one with a very limited biological future. Success then, as far as biology is concerned, is defined as humans assisting each other not only to survive their current situation, but working to insure that the next generation survives, and the generation after that, and so on.

Working in the late 1600s, Hobbes argued — by reading Darwin incorrectly (or reading others who incorrectly read Darwin) — that the human ‘struggle to survive’ is based on competition for limited resources.

It should be clear how the Hobbesian philosophy links directly to our modern culture constructs, particularly capitalism and it’s usual luggage of patriarchy and dominance. Capitalism is all about competition for ‘limited’ resources (though they are only limited because one individual within our species has strangely claimed ownership over the rights to those resources). Capitalism teaches us to compete and fight for resources, for money, for wealth and fame. Fight for what’s yours. Struggle to get to the top of the heap. Ruthlessly take out anyone that gets in your way. If you don’t believe these are the general mores spread through our culture, watch any big-budget action movie and the message becomes crystal clear: if someone takes what’s yours, you blow that person away.

However, Darwin was talking about competition for resources between species, not between individuals within that species. The big idea behind genetics

Ultimately, capitalism feeds the desire for competition, for dog-eat-dog struggle and dominance; it supports the structures in America (and elsewhere) that lead to

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violence, police oppression, generalized global war, torture, the highest rates of incarceration in the world, and the laissez faire attitude of the business class and their wanna-bes as they terrorize nature and push humanity toward cataclysm. Every action we take today is the outcome of dealing with these inhuman Hobbesian-capitalist values. We work in order to be granted a wage which will allow us to pay rent so we don’t get kicked out on the street by the cops; and we hope we’ll have enough money left over to buy food and maybe get those drinks at the sports show. We work for corporations, eat their Sysco food, drink their sugar-water sodas and signature lattes, and turn ourselves into their willing billboards as we fight to be the first to wear their logo-splashed clothes. Million-dollar advertisements for their products are forced upon us from every direction hundreds of times each day. We go to bed at night dreaming of when we’ll have all those wonderful products and be able to buy those fancy lattes ... a better tomorrow in which our problems will be solved. Or we dream of finally get that career going after college to get that real job and start making real money to buy a real house and a real car and find a real boyfriend and so on. Of course our dreams (and college recruitment advertisements and sitcoms and movies) generally fail to note that getting those things is nearly impossible for the great majority of us who are not privy to deep progenitorial pockets; nor that

the struggle to ‘reach the top’ is illusive, riddled with injustice and denigrating servitude, and brings with it a lot of boredom, stress, anxiety, depression, illness and general rip-your-hair-out frustration. Some, seeing all their hard work and years of struggle ‘getting to the top’ suddenly turn to dust, even take their own lives. But despite all of this, we still dream. We dream of the easy life. A life on Easy Street. A life that looks a lot like tv. To wish for these things is not perverted, it is what is culturally normative and generally proscribed as ‘healthy’ in our society. However, there remains that very important disconnect which we generally overlook — that whole stressed-out thing, the whole feeling in the pit of your gut telling you something’s wrong, the feeling of being trapped in something that’s not really you — that could, if we took note of it, teach us something about what we really desire. That disconnect is a great tell about our actual, real values regarding success. The reason we want money, wealth, fame, etc, is not to attain those things per se, but because of what we are promised that comes with those things: happiness, security, a sense of pride and well-being, maybe some peace of mind. These are the things that we really want: to be secure and not have to fear losing our job or being kicked out of our apartment, to not have to worry about AR-15s being used on us as we head to the Quick Stop on State Street, to not worry that when we come home

to our partner they won’t beat us half to death. We want to have that happy tranquility and sense of well-being that actors portray in the fictional world of television and movies… one that seems forever beyond the screen’s pale, just out of reach.

Exposure to new perspectives will allow you to pursue your goals more effectively, whether you agree with those perspectives or not. People do all sorts of things to find that tranquility. Some people drink day and night. Others throw their bodies into brutal athleticism such as Iron Man races. Some take dangerous chemicals, legal or illegal. Some become the best church-goers in the world. But yet no matter what we do, we still run up against this dead end where our actions, no matter how good or meaningful they might be, turn to meaningless ash. I posit that we are not able to secure this happiness and tranquility we strive for because we live in a world designed to bring about brutality, violence, and dehumanizing competition. You

can’t escape the capitalist-Hobbesian construct no matter how much you practice yoga and meditate. It will always be there when you open your eyes. In this issue of Modern Success, we will deconstruct the rationale of this Hobbesian-capitalist valuation system by reducing it to the mythological status of leprechauns and faeries. We begin at the psychological level with an article by Dr. Alfred Ellis and Robert Harper (“Moving Past Approval”) which shows that our sometimes intense desire for approval from others like coaches and bosses and lovers can, if given too much power, turn us into unthinking robots and tools to be used by advertising and the corporate state. Next, Victor Trayway (“The Man Is Inside Your Head”) discusses the concept of ‘decolonizing the mind’ and getting rid of the selfoppressive thoughts that hold us down. Bill McKibben (“Money ≠ Happiness. QED.”) then neatly lays out the heart of the capitalist value-construct to show how accumulating money and power in order to gain happiness is a falselogic conclusion. From there, Donald Rushkoff (“And They Called It ‘The Economy’”) elucidates how the entire financial system known as The Economy is, for all intents and purposes, another mythological god for which we toil day after day, a system that is as substantial as a shadow. Having deconstructed some of the core structures of the capitalist system, we will offer an alternative social organization system based on observations of nature, one which aligns itself more closely to our actual values — happiness, security, equality, freedom, democracy, well-being, etc. Though it is a highly significant social methodology, it has been greatly maligned by those in power, distorted and disfigured by the mainstream media, misunderstood by the general public, and effectively eliminated from everyday American discourse. And that social organization method is called ‘Anarchy’. To that end we are pleased to have interviewed one of the intellectual giants of our time, M. I. T. Professor Emeritus Noam Chomsky (“Everyday Anarchist”), who shares some of his ideas on Anarchy

and why it is a beneficial perspective for society and students, as well as the reason why the current fasco-capitalist construct is so persistent. Next, thinker Dmitry Orlov (“Anarchy: A Four-Letter Word for Peace”) will describe where the idea of Anarchy came from and generally fleshes out Anarchy’s concepts more fully. Because everything you think you know about Anarchy is probably wrong. We have also put together a special section on climate change — “Skeleton Closet in the Sky” — which attempts to show in some detail why we should be urgently listening to what climate scientists are telling us. The article also explores how the current air of ‘climate science skepticism’ is even given the time of day when it has been shown to be promoted and funded by the billionaires who invest in fossil fuels and keep us trapped in the coal-burning scheme. We will also present some authentic solutions in which students can become directly involved right on campus to make climate change the number one priority on everyone’s mind. To wrap up the section, deep green ecology writer and author Derrick Jensen will share some of his thoughts about his motivation to keep working to halt fossil fuel and greenhouse gas emissions (“To Live, Or Not To Live”). And to wrap up everything as neatly as any good anarchist would, Eugene Debacles (“Success Within Failure”) discusses the oft-misunderstood and ever-maligned phenomena of failure, and how we can learn to accept failure gracefully and even willingly, knowing that it is pushing us to be a more successful human being. This magazine is meant to be read like a book, taking the articles as ‘chapters’. If you read the magazine this way, you will have a sense of how these articles are connected and build upon each others’ ideas. At Modern Success we are attempting to offer the reader viewpoints on life that aren’t usually discussed. We hope you will keep in mind that often the best ideas are the ones that the powerful want us to ignore or forget. And though uncomfortable at first, exposure to new perspectives will allow you to pursue

your goals more effectively, whether you agree with those perspectives or not. In fact, many of us at the magazine don’t even agree with every single perspective offered in this magazine. But that is the point: we want to create dialogue and discussion. For it is our hope that out of these discussions between your friends and family, a meaningful way of expressing your life will emerge. But you must first take the risk of being uncomfortable with new information; you must take life by the reigns and wrestle-out why all these things are happening and how you can not only negotiate them, but maybe as you struggle, become an agent for positive change in others and the world. — Michael S. Wilson Editor We welcome any and all comments, questions, rants, opinions, and corrections. Please send to: editor@modernsuccess.org. Issue #2. April 2013, Focal Point Media Group, LLC. This magazine and it’s contents are released to the public under general Creative Commons attribution laws (creativecommons. org). All material in the magazine may be copied and distributed freely. The only restriction is that some articles and images may be copyrighted, which means you must ask the author’s, original publisher’s, or artist’s permission to reprint more than 250 words of text or any part of an image when used for commercial business purposes, including but not limited to print journals, newspapers, magazines, zines, and online news blogs. In other words, if you plan on making money off the article or image, ask permission. Otherwise we encourage free distribution of the material in this magazine for use in art projects and educational purposes (i.e. letting your friends and family know about information you feel is important). The work of the writers presented in the magazine refers to the body text of the articles only. Imagery and outside quotes are often added to the article by the editor and should not be understood as necessarily representative of the author’s and original publisher’s opinions, beliefs, intentions, or ideas. As one example, although the street artist known as “Banksy” has given us permission to use one of his pieces in the Chomsky article, it should not be understood that Banksy necessarily supports Chomsky’s work or ideas, nor that Chomsky supports Banksy’s. Though if the two were ever to meet and chat, it would no doubt be an enlightening experience. Modern Success magazine is made and printed in Madison, Wisconsin and distributed freely to the students of the University of Wisconsin - Madison. It is printed on recycled paper at Sherwood Press (www.sherwoodpress.com) in Madison. Funding for the magazine comes from private donations and crowd-funding.

CONTENT 8 9 12 22 M oving P ast A pproval

Drs. Albert Ellis and Robert Harper

If you are feeling trapped by your need to be approved and loved, this article will help you find a way out and get you back to feeling good again about your relationships.

T he M an I s I n Y our H ead Victor Trayway

Indoctrination by power starts early in life and shapes everything we do. Mr. Trayway helps the reader find ways to cleanse their mind of the corporate-state brainwash.

M oney ≠ H appiness . QED. Bill McKibben

Gaining wealth to gain happiness has always been the mantra of America. So when did this all change? And why?

A nd T hey C alled I t ‘T he E conomy ’

28 36 44 63 66

feature

Douglas Rushkoff

Everyday we wake up to interact with this Thing called The Economy. The economy is up. It’s down. It’s growing. It’s collapsing. Come to find out, it’s all a bunch of hooey.

Everyday Anarchist: The Noam Chomsky Interview Michael S. Wilson

He’s considered one of the greatest minds of our time. And he’s an anarchist. Modern Success talks to Professor Chomsky about why he feels anarchy is a valid social construct, the coercive powers of advertising, and skyrocketing student debt.

A narchy : A F our -L etter W ord F or P eace Dmitry Orlov Because everything you know about Anarchy is (probably) wrong.

S kelton C loset I n T he S ky Michael S. Wilson Like it or not, climate change will be the defining reality of your life after school. We look at the facts, the smoke-screens, the smoke stacks, and the ways to engage in positive change.

S chool

of the

R eal

Put down those school books! And pick up these instead ...

S uccess I n F ailure Eugene Debacles With wit and sincerity, Mr. Debacles shows us how to view failure as the trajectory for success.

Moving Past Approval Cute boy in class ignoring you? Coach wonâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t let up on the criticism? Boss dragging your motivation down? Hereâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s how to get back in the game. By Drs. Albert Ellis and Robert Harper People strongly desire approval and would be much less happy if they received none. Nonetheless, adults do not need approval. The word need derives from the Middle English work nede, the Anglo-Saxon nead, and the Indo-European term nauto, which mean to collapse with weariness. In English it mainly means necessity; compulsion; obligation; something utterly required for life and happiness. Wants, preferences, and desires are not needs or necessities. When you insist that you absolutely must have approval, you self-sabotage yourself for several reasons: Your demand that every important person love you creates a perfectionist, unattainable goal. If you could get ninety-nine people to love you, you will always encounter the hundredth that doesn't. Even if you demand love from a limited number of people, you cannot usually win the approval of all of them. Some, because of their own limitations, will have little ability to love anyone. Others will disapprove of you for reasons entirely beyond your control. Still others will despise you forever because of some prejudice against you. Once you absolutely "need" love, you will worry how much and how long you will be approved. Do others really care enough? And if they do, will they continue to care tomorrow and the year after? With thoughts like these, you will feel endless panic. If you always need love, you must always be distinctly lovable. But who is? Even when you have lovable traits, how can you display them at all times for all people? If you could always win the approval

of those you "need" you would have to spend so much time and energy doing so that you would have no time for other pursuits. Constantly striving for approval means living mainly for what others want you to do rather than for your own goals. It often means playing the patsy and buying others' approval. Ironically enough, the greater your need for love, the less people will tend to respect and care for you. Even though they like your catering to them, they may despise your neediness and see you as a weak person. Also, by desperately trying to win people's approval, you may easily annoy them, bore them to distractions, and again be less desirable. Feeling loved, once you achieve it, may be boring and bothersome, as people who love you often make inroads on your time and energy. Actively loving someone else is a creative and absorbing act. But the dire need for love easily blocks ardor. Perversely, it sabotages loving, because when you demand intense affection, you have little time and energy to devote to the growth and development of those on whom you make your demands. The dire need for love frequently encourages your own feelings of worthlessness: "I must have love, because I am a lowly incompetent individual who cannot possibly get along without it. Therefore, I must have, I need, devotion from others." By desperately seeking love in this manner, you frequently cover up your own feelings of worthlessness and thereby do nothing to tackle them and overcome them. The more you "succeed" in being greatly loved, the more you may inflate this goal and continue to indoctrinate yourself with the idea that you cannot regulate your own life.

and remain vitally absorbed in people, things and ideas outside yourself. For paradoxically, you usually find yourself by losing yourself in outside pursuits and not be merely contemplating your own navel. If you actually have a dire need for love; if you accept the fact that you have it; and if you keep challenging, questioning, and disputing it, it will ultimately and often quickly, decrease. For remember: It is your need; and you keep sustaining it. Other methods to combat and minimize your overwhelming love needs include: 1. Ask yourself what you really want to do, rather than what others would like you to do. And keep asking yourself, from time to time: "Do I keep doing this or refusing to do that because I really want it that way? Or do I, once again, unthinkingly insist on trying to please others?" In going after what you really want, take risks, commit yourself, and don't desperately avoid making mistakes. Do not be needlessly foolhardy. But convince yourself that if you fail to get something you want and people laugh at or criticize you, and not merely show you how you failed, they may have a problem. As long as you learn by your errors, does it make that much difference what they think? 2. Focus

Realize that vital living hardly consists of passive receiving but of doing, acting, reaching out. And just as you can force yourself to play the piano, do yoga exercises, or go to work every day, you can also often commit yourself to loving others. In so doing, your dire needs for their love will probably decrease. 3. Don't

For these reasons, you can rationally forgo the goal of gaining undying love. Instead, you'd better accept yourself

on loving more than on

winning love.

confuse getting love with

having personal worth.

If you rate yourself as having intrinsic worth or value as a human, you'd better claim to

have it by virtue of your mere existence, your aliveness -- and not because of anything you do to "earn" it. No matter how much others approve you, or how much they may value you for their own benefit, they can only give you extrinsic value or worth to them. They cannot, by loving you, give you intrinsic value or self-worth. If intrinsic value exits at all (which we seriously doubt, since it seems an undefinable thing in itself), you get it because you choose, you decide to have it. It exists because of your own definitions. You are "good" or "deserving" because you think you are and not because anyone awards you this kind of an "inherent value". If you can really believe these very important points — that you need not rate yourself, your essence at all, and that you can choose to call yourself "worthwhile" just because you decide to do so- you will tend to lose your desperate need for others' approval. For you need- or think you need- their acceptance not because of the practical advantages it may bring, but because you foolishly define your worth as a human in terms of receiving it. Once you stop this kind of self- defeating defining, your dire need for their approval tends to diminish. Similarly, if you reduce your dire need for others' esteem, you will find it relatively easy to stop rating yourself as a person, even though you continue to rate many of your traits. You will create unconditional self-acceptance, will value yourself merely because you are alive and kicking, and for that reason alone "deserve" to have an enjoyable life.

_____________________

Albert Ellis, Ph.D., was an author and psychologist who developed Rational Emotive Behavioral Therapy (REBT). In 1955, Ellis gave up psychoanalysis entirely and instead concentrated on changing people’s behavior by persuading them to confront their irrational beliefs and adopt rational ones. He wrote approximately 800 articles and 75 books on REBT, sex, and marriage. This excerpt was taken from the chapter, ‘Tackling Your Dire Need for Approval,’ in his popular book, A Guide To Rational Living. Reprinted with kind permission from the publisher, Melvin Powers. (www.mpowers.com)

The Man Is IN Your Head // Stephen: (Points to his brow.) “It is here that I must kill the priest and the king.” — Ulysses, James Joyce // by Victor Trayway

Any human being can be manipulated into believing any fallacy (no matter how absurd) as long as that belief is inculcated and cultivated within them at a very young age. We know that, the younger an individual should be, the more susceptible he is to mental manipulation. We grow up in a society from birth that relates to us (conspicuously and subtly) that an individual’s worth is determined by how much power and capital he possesses (i.e. he’s the President, she’s a millionaire, he’s a celebrity); or, in our ‘hoods’ (he’s a big-time drug dealer, she’s got the jewelry, he’s ridin’ on twenty-fours). In this respect we become programed to value our own self-worth by what we own, or how much money we make, determining our level of success and self-worth by materials, inanimate objects. Is the amount of love and happiness we bring to our intimate companions comparable to the cost of mansions? This defective and anti-social valuing system has been crammed in our heads from the school books we’re forced to read, our own parents, our peers, television, until our everyday thoughts, our passions, our dreams, our desires become fixed to circulate around nothing but “how we can get more money,” or, “our next come-up.” We see how luxuries and easy life is for those at “the top,” the wealthy of society who do nothing but pose for cameras and sign autographs. And being that we’ve been programed to value an individual’s worth by what he has, or by how much he owns, we see those at the top as the best that life gets, a destination we ourselves must strive to get to. We end up internalizing those we and our society have deemed successful and note-worthy, common “household” names and/ or titles. Internally our very desires and morals become a replication of our exploiters (i.e. those at the top). We desire to become masters, failing to recognize that currently we are slaves. We internally imitate our oppressors! Paulo Freire acutely depicted this when he said, “Thus, the behavior of the oppressed is prescribed behavior, following as it does the guidelines of the oppressor. The oppressed, having internalized the image, are fearful of freedom. Freedom would require them to eject this image and replace it with autonomy and responsibility.” And also: “The oppressed find in the oppressor their model of manhood.” By internalizing our oppressor and the very system used to exploit us, we become accustomed to it and seek out no other ways of living outside its

confines. Any radical or unconventional modes of living are deemed by society “unorthodox” or “impractical” even if those modes of living bring us substance and tranquility. How many times have we desired to stop working; to leave our mortgages and rent unpaid; journey across the world, allowing ourselves to drift wherever life’s intricacies should take us? Many of us can definitely attest to that. But instead of embracing those desires we’ve allowed ourselves to be ensnared by a system that demands we settle for temporary vacations, sick days and virtual reality; consequently all at the benefit of the very system which holds us back. Once we come to realize that we’ve internalized our oppressor — his morals, his desires, his system, his laws, laws that impose upon use, “if we do not work, we do not eat”, consequently forcing us to work and sell “our” labor (i.e. wageslave) — we understand that the very system under which we chafe can never benefit everybody [be]cause without subordinates (the governed masses) it could not function… Our forced labor is sucked out of us by the capitalist vacuum and the governmental laws which dictate our existence. And we falsely perceive that the only way to get out of this socio-entrapment, is to become a co-owner of it; to become one of the masters and owner of wage-slaves ourselves. Therefore, it becomes explicitly clear that capitalism and government can only benefit a minority few, and is the … reason why our neighborhoods become ghettos and slums, riddled with crime, poverty, and violence, all at the glamorization and exploitation of the fascist state and their capitalist companions who build the prisons to be filled (don’t work, don’t eat). “For if you refuse to feed a man, for whatever cause, you drive him to theft and other crimes; and thus you yourself create the necessity for courts, lawyers, judges, jails, and wardens, the upkeep of whom is far more burdensome than to feed the offenders. And these you have to feed anyhow, even if you put them in prison.” (Alexander Berkman) So it comes down to a forking in the mental road of which we stand: either we continue to support the system which plagues our existence with poverty, crime

and violence, or withdraw our support and destroy the system, domestic[ally] and globally freeing all those who have felt the burn of its incinerating breath. … Currently, while top corporate executives collect salaries that give them five-hundred dollars ($500) to every one dollar ($1) earned by the average worker,1 over forty-four million Americans (44,000,000) live below the poverty line2; while fifty-million (50,000,000) cannot eat without food stamps3. And if we view the global front, the wages of the 75 wealthiest Americans increased from $91.7 million to $518.8 million at the end of 20084, while at the same time 6,750,000 children under the age of 5 died around the world due to lack of food5. Furthermore, since the U. S. owns roughly 188,500 territories around the world6, it’s not too far-fetched for those of us who reason to assume that the U. S. government’s imperialist occupations played a significant role in all those children dying; all in the name of capitalist expansion. To live comfortably and without hardship is an innate human desire within us all, but to do so in our current capitalist society [means that] others are forced to suffer at the expense of our internalized avarice. … Capitalism is a contagious disease which deteriorates the society of any it infests. Therefore, it’s within our best interests (individually and collectively) to purge the capitalist roots that have been subserviently sowed within our nature. The purging of the internalized oppressor … a purifying and revivification of our innermost self … a journey into our most unfettered and unexplored desires! The exploiters of humanity (the state and their capitalist[s]) would like us to believe that our ultimate goal in life should be to ascend to their position, the king’s seat; our reason inclines we torch the entire place … “The laboratories of capital have done an exemplary job in this sense. School, factory, culture and sport have united to produce individuals who are domesticated in every respect, incapable of suffering or knowing their enemies, unable to dream, desire, struggle or act to transform reality.” (Alfredo M. Bonanno)

NOTES [All references added as none were provided by the author. —ed.] I// Kwoh, Leslie. ‘Firms Resist New EquityPay Rules’, Wall Street Journal, 26 June 2012. 2// Morello, Carol. ‘About 44 Million In U. S. Lived Below Poverty Line In 2009, Data Show’, The Washington Post, 16 September 2010 3// Luhby, Tammy. ‘Nearly 15 Million Households on Foodstamps’ CNNMoney (money.cnn.com), 28 November 2012. Luhby’s article cites 47.7 million, which is highest number I could find in recent statistics — ed 4// Unable to determine the veracity of this statement. However there is ample evidence in the mainstream press that the gap between the very wealthiest Americans — currently around 400 people according to some reports — and the tens of millions of American poor has widened drastically over the past several decades and continues to do so at unprecedented rates. — ed 5// World Bank Millennium Development Goals; Goal 4: Reduce Child Mortality by 2015; as reported on www.worldbank.org. 6// I could find no information that supported this number; I found that there around 190 U. S. military bases around the globe. (Perhaps the number was a typo? Zines are known to have them. It’s possible he meant 188.) Some writers define ‘territories’ as the dominance of American and corporate surveillance on the streets, in buildings, in space, and as provided by drones. Otherwise I’m not sure where this assertion comes from. — ed Excerpt from “Part II - Internal Limitation” in Deliberately I Defy, a zine publication. Mr. Trayway wrote this zine while doing time in the Illinois State Correctional System. It is not clear if Mr. Trayway is currently free or still incarcerated. His zine was given to me at the Dane County Print Explosion in Madison on November 10th, 2012, by a gentleman named Anthony who was representing the South Chicago ABC Zine Distro (P. O. Box 721, Homewood, IL 60430). I attempted to reach Anthony several times by email and regular mail to request Mr. Trayway’s consent to publish his material, (the zine offers no way to contact Mr. Trayway directly). I did not receive a response from Anthony to my queries. As zines are generally understood to contain ‘free-distribution information,’ I decided to publish some of Mr. Trayway’s important work here. It is not my intent to steal this publication, and should the opportunity to reach Mr. Trayway arise, I will endeavor to compensate him accordingly. — ed

For if you refuse to feed a man, for whatever cause, you drive him to theft and other crimes; and thus you yourself create the necessity for courts, lawyers, judges, jails, and wardens, the upkeep of whom is far more burdensome than to feed the offenders. And these you have to feed anyhow, even if you put them in prison. — Alexander Berkman

ARTISTIC CREDITS for MS2 Minka Stoyanova: SkiiZo:

Back Cover, “Flag: An Experiment In Self-Branding” Page 43, “It’s Complicated”. Both works copyright of the artist. www.minka-art.net Cover, layout design and artwork except where noted. SkiiZo uses public domain imagery harvested from Wikimedia Commons. Works released to the public. 11

Money ≠ Happiness. QED. The formula for human well-being used to be simple: Make money, get happy. So why is the old axiom suddenly turning on us? by Bill McKibben

For most of human history, the two birds More and Better roosted on the same branch. You could toss one stone and hope to hit them both. That's why the centuries since Adam Smith launched modern economics with his book The Wealth of Nations have been so single-mindedly devoted to the dogged pursuit of maximum economic production. Smith's core ideas—that individuals pursuing their own interests in a market society end up making each other richer; and that increasing efficiency, usually by increasing scale, is the key to increasing wealth—have indisputably worked. They've produced more More than he could ever have imagined. They've built the unprecedented prosperity and ease that distinguish the lives of most of the people reading these words. It is no wonder and no accident that Smith's ideas still dominate our politics, our outlook, even our personalities. But the distinguishing feature of our moment is this: Better has flown a few trees over to make her nest. And that changes everything. Now, with the stone of your life or your society gripped in your hand, you have to choose. It's More or Better. Which means, according to new research emerging from many quarters, that our continued devotion to growth above all is, on balance, making our lives worse, both collectively and individually. Growth no longer makes most people wealthier, but instead generates inequality and insecurity. Growth is bumping up against physical limits so profound—like climate change and peak oil—that trying to keep expanding the economy may be not just impossible but also dangerous. And perhaps most surprisingly, growth no longer makes us happier. Given our current dogma, that's as bizarre an idea as proposing that gravity pushes apples skyward. But then, even Newtonian physics eventually shifted to acknowledge Einstein's more complicated universe.

1. “We can do it if we believe it”: FDR, LBJ, and the invention of growth. It was the great economist John Maynard Keynes who pointed out that until very recently, "there was no very great change in the standard of life of the average man living in the civilized centers of the earth." At the utmost, Keynes calculated, the standard of living roughly doubled between 2000 B.C. and the dawn of the 18th century—four millennia during which we basically didn't learn to do much of anything new. Before history began, we had already figured out fire, language, cattle, the wheel, the plow, the sail, the pot. We had banks and governments and mathematics and religion. And then, something new finally did happen. In 1712, a British inventor named Thomas Newcomen created the first practical steam engine. Over the centuries that followed, fossil fuels helped create everything we consider normal and obvious about the modern world, from electricity to steel to fertilizer; now, a 100 percent jump in the standard of living could suddenly be accomplished in a few decades, not a few millennia. In some ways, the invention of the idea of economic growth was almost as significant as the invention of fossil-fuel power. But it took a little longer to take hold. During the Depression, even FDR routinely spoke of America's economy as mature, with no further expansion anticipated. Then came World War II and the postwar boom—by the time Lyndon Johnson moved into the White House in 1963, he said things like: "I'm sick of all the people who talk about the things we can't do. Hell, we're the richest country in the world, the most powerful. We can do it all.... We can do it if we believe it." He wasn't alone in thinking this way. From Moscow, Nikita Khrushchev thundered, "Growth of industrial and agricultural production is the battering ram with which we shall smash the capitalist system." Yet the bad news was already apparent, if you cared to look. Burning rivers and

Even though the economy continues to grow, most of us are no longer getting wealthier. smoggy cities demonstrated the dark side of industrial expansion. In 1972, a trio of MIT researchers released a series of computer forecasts they called Limits To Growth, which showed that unbridled expansion would eventually deplete our resource base. A year later the British economist E.F. Schumacher wrote the best-selling Small Is Beautiful. (Soon after, when Schumacher came to the United States on a speaking tour, Jimmy Carter actually received him at the White House—imagine the current president making time for any economist.) By 1979, the sociologist Amitai Etzioni reported to President Carter that only 30 percent of Americans were "progrowth," 31 percent were "anti-growth," and 39 percent were "highly uncertain." Such ambivalence, Etzioni predicted, "is too stressful for societies to endure," and Ronald Reagan proved his point. He convinced us it was "Morning in America"—out with limits, in with Trump. Today, mainstream liberals and conservatives compete mainly on the question of who can flog the economy harder. Larry Summers, who served as Bill Clinton's secretary of the treasury, at one point declared that the Clinton administration "cannot and will not accept any 'speed limit' on American economic growth. It is the task of economic policy to grow the economy as rapidly, sustainably, and inclusively as possible." It's the economy, stupid.

2. Oil bingeing, Chinese cars, and the end of the easy fix. Except there are three small things. The first I'll mention mostly in passing: Even though the economy continues to grow, most of us are no longer getting wealthier. The average wage in the United States is less now, in real dollars, than it was 30

years ago. Even for those with college degrees, and although productivity was growing faster than it had for decades, between 2000 and 2004 earnings fell 5.2 percent when adjusted for inflation, according to the most recent data from White House economists. Much the same thing has happened across most of the globe. More than 60 countries around the world, in fact, have seen incomes per capita fall in the past decade. For the second point, it's useful to remember what Thomas Newcomen was up to when he helped launch the Industrial Revolution—burning coal to pump water out of a coal mine. This revolution both depended on, and revolved around, fossil fuels. "Before coal," writes the economist Jeffrey Sachs, "economic production was limited by energy inputs, almost all of which depended on the production of biomass: food for humans and farm animals, and fuel wood for heating and certain industrial processes." That is, energy depended on how much you could grow. But fossil energy depended on how much had grown eons before—all those billions of tons of ancient biology squashed by the weight of time till they'd turned into strata and pools and seams of hydrocarbons, waiting for us to discover them. To understand how valuable, and irreplaceable, that lake of fuel was, consider a few other forms of creating usable energy. Ethanol can perfectly well replace gasoline in a tank; like petroleum, it's a way of using biology to create energy, and right now it's a hot commodity, backed with billions of dollars of government subsidies. But ethanol relies on plants that grow anew each year, most often corn; by the time you've driven your tractor to tend the

E c onom ists c a l l t he id e a “ut i l it y ma xi m i z at ion ,” t he t he or y t hat e ver y t i me a p e rs on buy s s ome t hing he is ma k ing a r at iona l d e cis ion. .. . Yet e c onomists have l ong k now n t hat p e opl e’s br ains d on’t work qu ite t hat w ay.

fields, and your truck to carry the crop to the refinery, and powered your refinery, the best-case "energy output-to-input ratio" is something like 1.34-to-1. You've spent 100 Btu of fossil energy to get 134 Btu. Perhaps that's worth doing, but as Kamyar Enshayan of the University of Northern Iowa points out, "it's not impressive" compared to the ratio for oil, which ranges from 30-to-1 to 200-to-1, depending on where you drill it. To go from our fossil-fuel world to a biomass world would be a little like leaving the Garden of Eden for the land where bread must be earned by "the sweat of your brow." And east of Eden is precisely where we may be headed. As everyone knows, the past three years have seen a spate of reports and books and documentaries suggesting that humanity may have neared or passed its oil peak—that is, the point at which those pools of primeval plankton are half used up, where each new year brings us closer to the bottom

of the barrel. The major oil companies report that they can't find enough new wells most years to offset the depletion in the old ones; rumors circulate that the giant Saudi fields are dwindling faster than expected; and, of course, all this is reflected in the cost of oil. The doctrinaire economist's answer is that no particular commodity matters all that much, because if we run short of something, it will pay for someone to develop a substitute. In general this has proved true in the past: Run short of nice big sawlogs and someone invents plywood. But it's far from clear that the same precept applies to coal, oil, and natural gas. This time, there is no easy substitute: I like the solar panels on my roof, but they're collecting diffuse daily energy, not using up eons of accumulated power. Fossil fuel was an exception to the rule, a one-time gift that underwrote a one-time binge of growth. This brings us to the third point: If we

do try to keep going, with the entire world aiming for an economy structured like America's, it won't be just oil that we'll run short of. Here are the numbers we have to contend with: Given current rates of growth in the Chinese economy, the 1.3 billion residents of that nation alone will, by 2031, be about as rich as we are. If they then eat meat, milk, and eggs at the rate that we do, calculates eco-statistician Lester Brown, they will consume 1,352 million tons of grain each year—equal to two-thirds of the world's entire 2004 grain harvest. They will use 99 million barrels of oil a day, 15 million more than the entire world consumes at present. They will use more steel than all the West combined, double the world's production of paper, and drive 1.1 billion cars—1.5 times as many as the current world total. And that's just China; by then, India will have a bigger population, and its economy is growing almost as fast. And then there's the rest of the world. Trying to meet that kind of demand will stress the earth past its breaking point in an almost endless number of ways, but let's take just one. When Thomas Newcomen fired up his pump on that morning in 1712, the atmosphere contained 275 parts per million of carbon dioxide. We're now up to 380 parts per million, a level higher than the earth has seen for many millions of years, and climate change has only just begun. The median predictions of the world's climatologists—by no means the worst-case scenario—show that unless we take truly enormous steps to rein in our use of fossil fuels, we can expect average temperatures to rise another four or five degrees before the century is out, making the globe warmer than it's been since long before primates appeared. We might as well stop calling it earth and have a contest to pick some new name, because it will be a different planet. Humans have never done anything more profound, not even when we invented nuclear weapons. How does this tie in with economic growth? Clearly, getting rich means getting dirty—that's why, when I was in Beijing recently, I could stare straight at the sun (once I actually figured out where in the smoggy sky it was). But eventually, getting rich also means

wanting the "luxury" of clean air and finding the technological means to achieve it. Which is why you can once again see the mountains around Los Angeles; why more of our rivers are swimmable every year. And economists have figured out clever ways to speed this renewal: Creating markets for trading pollution credits, for instance, helped cut those sulfur and nitrogen clouds more rapidly and cheaply than almost anyone had imagined. But getting richer doesn't lead to producing less carbon dioxide in the same way that it does to less smog— in fact, so far it's mostly the reverse. Environmental destruction of the oldfashioned kind—dirty air, dirty water— results from something going wrong. You haven't bothered to stick the necessary filter on your pipes, and so the crud washes into the stream; a little regulation, and a little money, and the problem disappears. But the second, deeper form of environmental degradation comes from things operating exactly as they're supposed to, just too much so. Carbon dioxide is an inevitable byproduct of burning coal or gas or oil— not something going wrong. Researchers are struggling to figure out costly and complicated methods to trap some CO2 and inject it into underground mines— but for all practical purposes, the vast majority of the world's cars and factories and furnaces will keep belching more and more of it into the atmosphere as long as we burn more and more fossil fuels. True, as companies and countries get richer, they can afford more efficient machinery that makes better use of fossil fuel, like the hybrid Honda Civic I drive. But if your appliances have gotten more efficient, there are also far more of them: The furnace is better than it used to be, but the average size of the house it heats has doubled since 1950. The 60-inch TV? The always-on cable modem? No need for you to do the math—the electric company does it for you, every month. Between 1990 and 2003, precisely the years in which we learned about the peril presented by global warming, the United States' annual carbon dioxide emissions increased by 16 percent. And the momentum to keep going in that

direction is enormous. For most of us, growth has become synonymous with the economy's "health," which in turn seems far more palpable than the health of the planet. Think of the terms we use—the economy, whose temperature we take at every newscast via the Dow Jones average, is "ailing" or it's "on the mend." It's "slumping" or it's "in recovery." We cosset and succor its every sniffle with enormous devotion, even as we more or less ignore the increasingly urgent fever that the globe is now running. The ecological economists have an enormous task ahead of them—a nearly insurmountable task, if it were "merely" the environment that is in peril. But here is where things get really interesting. It turns out that the economics of environmental destruction are closely linked to another set of leading indicators—ones that most humans happen to care a great deal about.

3. "It seems that well-being is a real phenomenon": Economists discover Hedonics Traditionally, happiness and satisfaction are the sort of notions that economists wave aside as poetic irrelevance, the kind of questions that occupy people with no head for numbers who had to major in liberal arts. An orthodox economist

has a simple happiness formula: If you buy a Ford Expedition, then ipso facto a Ford Expedition is what makes you happy. That's all we need to know. The economist would call this idea "utility maximization," and in the words of the economic historian Gordon Bigelow, "the theory holds that every time a person buys something, sells something, quits a job, or invests, he is making a rational decision about what will...provide him 'maximum utility.' If you bought a Ginsu knife at 3 a.m. a neoclassical economist will tell you that, at that time, you calculated that this purchase would optimize your resources." The beauty of this principle lies in its simplicity. It is perhaps the central assumption of the world we live in: You can tell who I really am by what I buy. Yet economists have long known that people's brains don't work quite the way the model suggests. When Bob Costanza, one of the fathers of ecological economics and now head of the Gund Institute at the University of Vermont, was first edging into economics in the early 1980s, he had a fellowship to study "social traps"—the nuclear arms race, say—in which "short-term behavior can get out of kilter with longer broad-term goals." It didn't take long for Costanza to demonstrate, as others had before him,

We have all sorts of other new delights and powers—we can send email from our cars, watch 200 channels, consume food from ever y corner of the world. All of us in the West are living lives materially more abundant than most people a generation ago. What’s odd is, none of it appears to have made us happier.

that, if you set up an auction in a certain way, people will end up bidding $1.50 to take home a dollar. Other economists have shown that people give too much weight to "sunk costs"—that they're too willing to throw good money after bad, or that they value items more highly if they already own them than if they are considering acquiring them. Building on such insights, a school of "behavioral economics" has emerged in recent years and begun plumbing how we really behave. The wonder is that it took so long. We all know in our own lives how irrationally we are capable of acting, and how unconnected those actions are to any real sense of joy. (I mean, there you are at 3 a.m. thinking about the Ginsu knife.) But until fairly recently, we had no alternatives to relying on Ginsu knife and Ford Expedition purchases as the sole measures of our satisfaction. How else would we know what made people happy? That's where things are now changing dramatically: Researchers from a wide variety of disciplines have started to figure out how to assess satisfaction, and economists have begun to explore the implications. In 2002 Princeton's Daniel Kahneman won the Nobel Prize in economics even though he is trained as a psychologist. In the book Well-Being, he and a pair of coauthors announce a new field called "hedonics," defined as "the study of what makes experiences and life pleasant or unpleasant.… It is also concerned with the whole range of circumstances, from the biological to the societal, that occasion suffering and enjoyment." If you are worried that there might be something altogether too airy about this, be reassured— Kahneman thinks like an economist. In the book's very first chapter, "Objective Happiness," he describes an experiment that compares "records of the pain reported by two patients undergoing colonoscopy," wherein every 60 seconds he insists they rate their pain on a scale of 1 to 10 and eventually forces them to make "a hypothetical choice between a repeat colonoscopy and a barium enema." Dismal science indeed. As more scientists have turned their attention to the field, researchers have

studied everything from "biases in recall of menstrual symptoms" to "fearlessness and courage in novice paratroopers." Subjects have had to choose between getting an "attractive candy bar" and learning the answers to geography questions; they've been made to wear devices that measured their blood pressure at regular intervals; their brains have been scanned. And by now that's been enough to convince most observers that saying "I'm happy" is more than just a subjective statement. In the words of the economist Richard Layard, "We now know that what people say about how they feel corresponds closely to the actual levels of activity in different parts of the brain, which can be measured in standard scientific ways." Indeed, people who call themselves happy, or who have relatively high levels of electrical activity in the left prefrontal region of the brain, are also "more likely to be rated as happy by friends," "more likely to respond to requests for help," "less likely to be involved in disputes at work," and even "less likely to die prematurely." In other words, conceded one economist, "it seems that what the psychologists call subjective well-being is a real phenomenon. The various empirical measures of it have high consistency, reliability, and validity." The idea that there is a state called happiness, and that we can dependably figure out what it feels like and how to measure it, is extremely subversive. It allows economists to start thinking about life in richer (indeed) terms, to stop asking "What did you buy?" and to start asking "Is your life good?" And if you can ask someone "Is your life good?" and count on the answer to mean something, then you'll be able to move to the real heart of the matter, the question haunting our moment on the earth: Is more better?

4. If we're so rich, how come we're so damn miserable? In some sense, you could say that the years since World War II in America have been a loosely controlled experiment designed to answer this very question. The environmentalist Alan Durning found that in 1991 the average American family owned twice as many cars as it did in 1950, drove 2.5 times as far, used 21 times as much plastic, and traveled

25 times farther by air. Gross national product per capita tripled during that period. Our houses are bigger than ever and stuffed to the rafters with belongings (which is why the storage-locker industry has doubled in size in the past decade). We have all sorts of other new delights and powers—we can send email from our cars, watch 200 channels, consume food from every corner of the world. Some people have taken much more than their share, but on average, all of us in the West are living lives materially more abundant than most people a generation ago. What's odd is, none of it appears to have made us happier. Throughout the postwar years, even as the GNP curve has steadily climbed, the "life satisfaction" index has stayed exactly the same. Since 1972, the National Opinion Research Center has surveyed Americans on the question: "Taking all things together, how would you say things are these days—would you say that you are very happy, pretty happy, or not too happy?" The "very happy" number peaked at 38 percent in the 1974 poll, amid oil shock and economic malaise; it now hovers right around 33 percent. And it's not that we're simply recalibrating our sense of what happiness means—we are actively experiencing life as grimmer. In the winter of 2006 the National Opinion Research Center published data about "negative life events" comparing 1991 and 2004, two

“You r g re at-g re at-g re at-g randmot he r ha d one d re ss for chu rch and one for t he we ek , if she we re not in rags . He r ch i ld re n d id not atte nd s cho ol, and prob ably c ou l d not re a d. She and he r husb and worke d e ig ht y hours a we ek for a d i et of bre a d and m i l k —t he y we re four i nches shor te r t han you.” Eve n in 1900, t he ave r age Ame r ic an l ive d in a hous e t he si z e of to d ay ’s t y pic a l garage.

data points bracketing an economic boom. "The anticipation would have been that problems would have been down," the study's author said. Instead it showed a rise in problems—for instance, the percentage who reported breaking up with a steady partner almost doubled. As one reporter summarized the findings, "There's more misery in people's lives today." This decline in the happiness index is not confined to the United States; as other nations have followed us into mass affluence, their experiences have begun to yield similar results. In the United Kingdom, real gross domestic product per capita grew two-thirds between 1973 and 2001, but people's satisfaction with their lives changed not one whit. Japan saw a fourfold increase in real income per capita between 1958 and 1986 without any reported increase in satisfaction. In one place after another, rates of alcoholism, suicide, and depression have gone up dramatically, even as we keep accumulating more stuff. Indeed, one report in 2000 found that the average American child reported higher levels of anxiety than the average child under psychiatric care in the 1950s—our new normal is the old disturbed. If happiness was our goal, then the unbelievable amount of effort and resources expended in its pursuit since 1950 has been largely a waste. One study of life satisfaction and mental health by Emory University professor Corey Keyes

found just 17 percent of Americans "flourishing," in mental health terms, and 26 percent either "languishing" or out-and-out depressed.

5. Danes (and Mexicans, the Amish, and the Masai) just want to have fun. How is it, then, that we became so totally, and apparently wrongly, fixated on the idea that our main goal, as individuals and as nations, should be the accumulation of more wealth? The answer is interesting for what it says about human nature. Up to a certain point, more really does equal better. Imagine briefly your life as a poor person in a poor society—say, a peasant farmer in China. ( China has one-fourth of the world's farmers, but one-fourteenth of its arable land; the average farm in the southern part of the country is about half an acre, or barely more than the standard lot for a new American home.) You likely have the benefits of a close and connected family, and a village environment where your place is clear. But you lack any modicum of security for when you get sick or old or your back simply gives out. Your diet is unvaried and nutritionally lacking; you're almost always cold in winter. In a world like that, a boost in income delivers tangible benefits. In general, researchers report that money consistently buys happiness right up

to about $10,000 income per capita. That's a useful number to keep in the back of your head—it's like the freezing point of water, one of those random figures that just happens to define a crucial phenomenon on our planet. "As poor countries like India, Mexico, the Philippines, Brazil, and South Korea have experienced economic growth, there is some evidence that their average happiness has risen," the economist Layard reports. Past $10,000 (per capita, mind you—that is, the average for each man, woman, and child), there's a complete scattering: When the Irish were making two-thirds as much as Americans they were reporting higher levels of satisfaction, as were the Swedes, the Danes, the Dutch. Mexicans score higher than the Japanese; the French are about as satisfied with their lives as the Venezuelans. In fact, once basic needs are met, the "satisfaction" data scrambles in mind-bending [sic] ways. A sampling of Forbes magazine's "richest Americans" have identical happiness scores with Pennsylvania Amish, and are only a whisker above Swedes taken as a whole, not to mention the Masai. The "life satisfaction" of pavement dwellers —homeless people—in Calcutta is among the lowest recorded, but it almost doubles when they move into a slum, at which point they are basically as satisfied with their lives as a sample of college students drawn from 47 nations. And so on. On the list of major mistakes we've made as a species, this one seems pretty high up. Our singleminded focus on increasing wealth has succeeded in driving the planet's ecological systems to the brink of failure, even as it's failed to make us happier. How did we screw up? The answer is pretty obvious—we kept doing something past the point that it worked. Since happiness had increased with income in the past, we assumed it would inevitably do so in the future. We make these kinds of mistakes regularly: Two beers made me feel good, so ten will make me feel five times better. But this case was particularly extreme—in part because as a species, we've spent so much time simply trying to survive. As the researchers Ed Diener and Martin Seligman—both psychologists—observe, "At the time of Adam Smith, a concern

Because traditional economists think of human beings primarily as individuals and not as members of a community, they miss out on a major part of the satisfaction index.

with economic issues was understandably primary. Meeting simple human needs for food, shelter and clothing was not assured, and satisfying these needs moved in lockstep with better economics." Freeing people to build a more dynamic economy was radical and altruistic. Consider Americans in 1820, two generations after Adam Smith. The average citizen earned, in current dollars, less than $1,500 a year, which is somewhere near the current average for all of Africa. As the economist Deirdre McCloskey explains in a 2004 article in the magazine Christian Century, "Your great-great-great-grandmother had one dress for church and one for the week, if she were not in rags. Her children did not attend school, and probably could not read. She and her husband worked eighty hours a week for a diet of bread and milk—they were four inches shorter than you." Even in 1900, the average American lived in a house the size of today's typical garage. Is it any wonder that we built up considerable velocity trying to escape the gravitational pull of that kind of poverty? An object in motion stays in motion, and our economy—with the built-up individual expectations that drive it—is a mighty object indeed. You could call it, I think, the Laura Ingall Wilder effect. I grew up reading her books—Little House on the Prairie, Little House in the Big Woods—and my daughter

grew up listening to me read them to her, and no doubt she will read them to her children. They are the ur-American story. And what do they tell? Of a life rich in family, rich in connection to the natural world, rich in adventure—but materially deprived. That one dress, that same bland dinner. At Christmastime, a penny—a penny! And a stick of candy, and the awful deliberation about whether to stretch it out with tiny licks or devour it in an orgy of happy greed. A rag doll was the zenith of aspiration. My daughter likes dolls too, but her bedroom boasts a density of Beanie Babies that mimics the manic biodiversity of the deep rainforest. Another one? Really, so what? Its marginal utility, as an economist might say, is low. And so it is with all of us. We just haven't figured that out because the momentum of the past is still with us—we still imagine we're in that little house on the big prairie.

6. This year's model home: "Good for the dysfunctional family". That great momentum has carried us away from something valuable, something priceless: It has allowed us to become (very nearly forced us to become) more thoroughly individualistic than we really wanted to be. We left behind hundreds of thousands of years of human community for the excitement,

and the isolation, of "making something of ourselves," an idea that would not have made sense for 99.9 percent of human history. Adam Smith's insight was that the interests of each of our individual selves could add up, almost in spite of themselves, to social good—to longer lives, fuller tables, warmer houses. Suddenly the community was no longer necessary to provide these things; they would happen as if by magic. And they did happen. And in many ways it was good. But this process of liberation seems to have come close to running its course. Study after study shows Americans spending less time with friends and family, either working longer hours, or hunched over their computers at night. And each year, as our population grows by 1 percent we manage to spread ourselves out over 6 to 8 percent more land. Simple mathematics says that we're less and less likely to bump into the other inhabitants of our neighborhood, or indeed of our own homes. As the Wall Street Journal reported recently, "Major builders and top architects are walling people off. They're touting oneperson 'Internet alcoves,' locked-door 'away rooms,' and his-and-her offices on opposite ends of the house. The new floor plans offer so much seclusion, they're 'good for the dysfunctional family,' says Gopal Ahluwahlia, director of research for the National Association of Home Builders." At the building industry's annual Las Vegas trade show, the "showcase 'Ultimate Family Home' hardly had a family room," noted the Journal. Instead, the boy's personal playroom had its own 42-inch plasma TV, and the girl's bedroom had a secret mirrored door leading to a "hideaway karaoke room." "We call this the ultimate home for families who don't want anything to do with one another," said Mike McGee, chief executive of Pardee Homes of Los Angeles, builder of the model. This transition from individualism to hyper-individualism also made its presence felt in politics. In the 1980s, British prime minister Margaret Thatcher asked, "Who is society? There is no such thing. There are individual men and women, and there are families." Talk about everything solid melting into air—

Thatcher's maxim would have spooked Adam Smith himself. The "public realm"—things like parks and schools and Social Security, the last reminders of the communities from which we came— is under steady and increasing attack. Instead of contributing to the shared risk of health insurance, Americans are encouraged to go it alone with "health savings accounts." Hell, even the nation's most collectivist institution, the U.S. military, until recently recruited under the slogan an "Army of One." No wonder the show that changed television more than any other in the past decade was Survivor, where the goal is to end up alone on the island, to manipulate and scheme until everyone is banished and leaves you by yourself with your money. It's not so hard, then, to figure out why happiness has declined here even as wealth has grown. During the same decades when our lives grew busier and more isolated, we've gone from having three confidants on average to only two, and the number of people saying they have no one to discuss important matters with has nearly tripled. Between 1974 and 1994, the percentage of Americans who said they visited with their neighbors at least once a month fell from almost two-thirds to less than half, a number that has continued to fall in the past decade. We simply worked too many hours earning, we commuted too far to our too-isolated homes, and there was always the blue glow of the tube shining through the curtains.

7. New friend or coffeemaker? Pick one

new

Because traditional economists think of human beings primarily as individuals and not as members of a community, they miss out on a major part of the satisfaction index. Economists lay it out almost as a mathematical equation: Overall, "evidence shows that companionship...contributes more to well-being than does income," writes Robert E. Lane, a Yale political science professor who is the author of The Loss of Happiness in Market Democracies. But there is a notable difference between poor and wealthy countries: When people have lots of companionship but not much money, income "makes more of

a contribution to subjective well-being." By contrast, "where money is relatively plentiful and companionship relatively scarce, companionship will add more to subjective well-being." If you are a poor person in China, you have plenty of friends and family around all the time— perhaps there are four other people living in your room. Adding a sixth doesn't make you happier. But adding enough money so that all five of you can eat some meat from time to time pleases you greatly. By contrast, if you live in a suburban American home, buying another coffeemaker adds very little to your quantity of happiness—trying to figure out where to store it, or wondering if you picked the perfect model, may in fact decrease your total pleasure. But a new friend, a new connection, is a big deal. We have a surplus of individualism and a deficit of companionship, and so the second becomes more valuable. Indeed, we seem to be genetically wired for community. As biologist Edward O. Wilson found, most primates live in groups and get sad when they're separated—"an isolated individual will repeatedly pull a lever with no reward other than the glimpse of another monkey." Why do people so often look back on their college days as the best years of their lives? Because their classes were so fascinating? Or because in college, we live more closely and intensely with a community than most of us ever do before or after? Every measure of psychological health points to the same conclusion: People who "are married, who have good friends, and who are close to their families are happier than those who do not," says Swarthmore psychologist Barry Schwartz. "People who participate in religious communities are happier than those who are not." Which is striking, Schwartz adds, because social ties "actually decrease freedom of choice"—being a good friend involves sacrifice. Do we just think we're happier in communities? Is it merely some sentimental good-night-John-Boy affectation? No—our bodies react in measurable ways. According to research cited by Harvard professor Robert Putnam in his classic book Bowling Alone, if you do not belong to any group at present, joining a club or a society of

some kind cuts in half the risk that you will die in the next year. Check this out: When researchers at Carnegie Mellon (somewhat disgustingly) dropped samples of cold virus directly into subjects' nostrils, those with rich social networks were four times less likely to get sick. An economy that produces only individualism undermines us in the most basic ways. Here's another statistic worth keeping in mind: Consumers have 10 times as many conversations at farmers' markets as they do at supermarkets—an order of magnitude difference. By itself, that's hardly life-changing, but it points at something that could be: living in an economy where you are participant as well as consumer, where you have a sense of who's in your universe and how it fits together. At the same time, some studies show local agriculture using less energy (also by an order of magnitude) than the "it's always summer somewhere" system we operate on now. Those are big numbers, and it's worth thinking about what they suggest—especially since, between peak oil and climate change, there's no longer really a question that we'll have to wean ourselves of the current model. So as a mental experiment, imagine how we might shift to a more sustainable kind of economy. You could use government policy to nudge the change—remove subsidies from agribusiness and use them instead to promote farmerentrepreneurs; underwrite the cost of windmills with even a fraction of the money that's now going to protect oil flows. You could put tariffs on goods that travel long distances, shift highway spending to projects that make it easier to live near where you work (and, by cutting down on commutes, leave some time to see the kids). And, of course, you can exploit the Net to connect a lot of this highly localized stuff into something larger. By way of example, a few of us are coordinating the first nationwide global warming demonstration—but instead of marching on Washington, we're rallying in our local areas, and then fusing our efforts, via the website 350. org, into a national message. It's easy to dismiss such ideas as sentimental or nostalgic. In fact,

economies can be localized as easily in cities and suburbs as rural villages (maybe more easily), and in ways that look as much to the future as the past, that rely more on the solar panel and the Internet than the white picket fence. In fact, given the trend lines for phenomena such as global warming and oil supply, what's nostalgic and sentimental is to keep doing what we're doing simply because it's familiar.

8. The oil-for-people paradox: Why small farms produce more food. To understand the importance of this last point, consider the book American Mania by the neuroscientist Peter Whybrow. Whybrow argues that many of us in this country are predisposed to a kind of dynamic individualism—our gene pool includes an inordinate number of people who risked everything to start over. This served us well in settling a continent and building our prosperity. But it never got completely out of control, says Whybrow, because "the marketplace has always had its natural constraints. For the first two centuries of the nation's existence, even the most insatiable American citizen was significantly leashed by the checks and balances inherent in a closely knit community, by geography, by the elements of weather, or, in some cases, by religious practice." You lived in a society—a habitat—that kept your impulses in some kind of check. But that changed in the past few decades as the economy nationalized and then globalized. As we met fewer actual neighbors in the course of a day, those checks and balances fell away. "Operating in a world of instant communication with minimal social tethers," Whybrow observes, "America's

engines of commerce and desire became turbocharged." Adam Smith himself had worried that too much envy and avarice would destroy "the empathic feeling and neighborly concerns that are essential to his economic model," says Whybrow, but he "took comfort in the fellowship and social constraint that he considered inherent in the tightly knit communities characteristic of the 18th century." Businesses were built on local capital investment, and "to be solicitous of one's neighbor was prudent insurance against future personal need." For the most part, people felt a little constrained about showing off wealth; indeed, until fairly recently in American history, someone who was making tons of money was often viewed with mixed emotions, at least if he wasn't giving back to the community. "For the rich," Whybrow notes, "the reward system would be balanced between the pleasure of self-gain and the civic pride of serving others. By these mechanisms the most powerful citizens would be limited in their greed." Once economies grow past a certain point, however, "the behavioral contingencies essential to promoting social stability in a market-regulated society—close personal relationships, tightly knit communities, local capital investment, and so on—are quickly eroded." So relocalizing economies offers one possible way around the gross inequalities that have come to mark our societies. Instead of aiming for growth at all costs and hoping it will trickle down, we may be better off living in enough contact with each other for the affluent to once again feel some sense of responsibility for their neighbors. This doesn't mean relying on noblesse oblige; it means taking seriously

the idea that people, and their politics, can be changed by their experiences. It's a hopeful sign that more and more local and state governments across the country have enacted "living wage" laws. It's harder to pretend that the people you see around you every day should live and die by the dictates of the market. Right around this time, an obvious question is doubtless occurring to you. Is it foolish to propose that a modern global economy of 6 (soon to be 9) billion people should rely on more localized economies? To put it more bluntly, since for most people "the economy" is just a fancy way of saying "What's for dinner?" and "Am I having any?," doesn't our survival depend on economies that function on a massive scale—such as highly industrialized agriculture? Turns out the answer is no—and the reasons why offer a template for rethinking the rest of the economy as well. We assume, because it makes a certain kind of intuitive sense, that industrialized farming is the most productive farming. A vast Midwestern field filled with hightech equipment ought to produce more food than someone with a hoe in a small garden. Yet the opposite is true. If you are after getting the greatest yield from the land, then smaller farms in fact produce more food. If you are one guy on a tractor responsible for thousands of acres, you grow your corn and that's all you can do—make pass after pass with the gargantuan machine across a sea of crop. But if you're working 10 acres, then you have time to really know the land, and to make it work harder. You can intercrop all kinds of plants—their roots will go to different depths, or they'll thrive in each other's shade, or they'll make use of different nutrients in the soil. You can also walk your fields, over and over, noticing. According to the government's most recent agricultural census, smaller farms produce far more food per acre, whether you measure in tons, calories, or dollars. In the process, they use land, water, and oil much more efficiently; if they have animals, the manure is a gift, not a threat to public health. To feed the world, we may actually need lots more small farms.

But if this is true, then why do we have large farms? Why the relentless consolidation? There are many reasons, including the way farm subsidies have been structured, the easier access to bank loans (and politicians) for the big guys, and the convenience for foodprocessing companies of dealing with a few big suppliers. But the basic reason is this: We substituted oil for people. Tractors and synthetic fertilizer instead of farmers and animals. Could we take away the fossil fuel, put people back on the land in larger numbers, and have enough to eat? The best data to answer that question comes from an English agronomist named Jules Pretty, who has studied nearly 300 sustainable agriculture projects in 57 countries around the world. They might not pass the U.S. standards for organic certification, but they're all what he calls "low-input." Pretty found that over the past decade, almost 12 million farmers had begun using sustainable practices on about 90 million acres. Even more remarkably, sustainable agriculture increased food production by 79 percent per acre. These were not tiny isolated demonstration farms—Pretty studied 14 projects where 146,000 farmers across a broad swath of the developing world were raising potatoes, sweet potatoes, and cassava, and he found that practices such as cover-cropping and fighting pests with natural adversaries had increased production 150 percent—17 tons per household. With 4.5 million small Asian grain farmers, average yields rose 73 percent. When Indonesian rice farmers got rid of pesticides, their yields stayed the same but their costs fell sharply. "I acknowledge," says Pretty, "that all this may sound too good to be true for those who would disbelieve these advances. Many still believe that food production and nature must be separated, that 'agro-ecological' approaches offer only marginal opportunities to increase food production, and that industrialized approaches represent the best, and perhaps only, way forward. However, prevailing views have changed substantially in just the last decade."

I've seen dozens of people and communities working on regional-scale sustainable timber projects, on building energy networks that work like the Internet by connecting solar rooftops and backyard windmills in robust minigrids. That such things can begin to emerge even in the face of the political power of our reigning economic model is remarkable; as we confront significant change in the climate, they could speed along the same kind of learning curve as Pretty's rice farmers and wheat growers. And they would not only use less energy; they'd create more community. They'd start to reverse the very trends I've been describing, and in so doing rebuild the kind of scale at which Adam Smith's economics would help instead of hurt. In the 20th century, two completely different models of how to run an economy battled for supremacy. Ours won, and not only because it produced more goods than socialized state economies. It also produced far more freedom, far less horror. But now that victory is starting to look Pyrrhic; in our overheated and under-happy state, we need some new ideas. We've gone too far down the road we're traveling. The time has come to search the map, to strike off in new directions. Inertia is a powerful force; marriages and corporations and nations continue in motion until something big diverts them. But in our new world we have much to fear, and also much to desire, and together they can set us on a new, more promising course. ___________________ Want to see how the "satisfaction index" has changed over your lifetime? Find some of the data mentioned in this article—and a few other numbers that will surprise you—at: www.motherjones.com/happiness.

Article originally published 1 March 2007 in Mother Jones, “America's leading investigative journalism organization, featuring groundbreaking reports on politics, the environment, culture, health, and human rights.” (Phrasing by Mother Jones media department. --ed.)

And they will change just as profoundly in the decades to come across a wide range of other commodities. Already

AND THEY CALLED IT ‘THE ECONOMY’

by Douglas Rushkoff

The marketplace in which most commerce takes place today is not a pre-existing condition of the universe. It's not nature. It's a game, with very particular rules, set in motion by real people with real purposes. That's why it's so amazing to me that scientists, and people calling themselves scientists, would propose to study the market as if it were some natural system — like the weather, or a coral reef. It's not. It's a product not of nature but of engineering. And to treat the market as nature, as some product of purely evolutionary forces, is to deny ourselves access to its ongoing redesign. It's as if we woke up in a world where just one operating system was running on all our computers and, worse, we didn't realize that any other operating system ever did or could ever exist. We would simply accept Windows as a given circumstance, and look for ways to adjust our society to its needs rather than the other way around. It is up to our most rigorous thinkers and writers not to base their work on widely accepted but largely artificial constructs. It is their job to differentiate between the map and the territory — to recognize when a series of false assumptions is corrupting their observations and conclusions. As the great interest in the arguments of Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Sam Harris, and Christopher Hitchens shows us, there is a growing acceptance and hunger for thinkers who dare to challenge the widespread belief in creation mythologies. That it has become easier to challenge the supremacy of God than to question the supremacy of the market testifies to the way any group can fall victim to a creation myth — especially when they are rewarded to do so.

Too many technologists, scientists, writers and theorists accept the underlying premise of our corporatedriven marketplace as a precondition of the universe or, worse, as the ultimate beneficiary of their findings. If a "free" economy of the sort depicted by Chris Anderson or Clay Shirky is really on its way, then books themselves are soon to be little more than loss leaders for highpriced corporate lecturing. In such a scheme how could professional writers and theorists possibly escape biasing their works towards the needs of the corporate lecture market? It's as if the value of a theory or perspective rests solely in its applicability to the business sector. Whether it's being done in honest ignorance, blind obedience, or cynical exploitation of the market, the result is the same: our ability to envision new solutions to the latest challenges is stunted by a dependence on marketdriven and market-compatible answers. Instead, we are encouraged to apply the rules of genetics, neuroscience, or systems theory to the economy, and to do so in a dangerously determinist fashion. In their ongoing effort to define and defend the functioning of the market through science and systems theory, some of today's brightest thinkers have, perhaps inadvertently, promoted a mythology about commerce, culture, and competition. And it is a mythology as false, dangerous, and ultimately deadly as any religion. The trend began on the pages of the digital business magazine, Wired, which served to reframe new tech innovations and science discoveries in terms friendly to disoriented speculators. Wired would not fundamentally challenge the market; it would provide bankers and investors with a map to the new territory, including the consultants they'd need to maintain their authority over the economy.

Hélène’s [professorial] interest in economics had waned considerably over the years. More and more, the theories that tried to explain economic phenomena, to predict their developments, appeared almost equally inconsistent and random. She was more and more tempted to liken them to pure and simple charlatanism; it was even surprising, she occasionally thought, that they gave a Nobel Prize for economics, as if this discipline could boast of the same methodological seriousness, the same intellectual rigor as chemistry, or physics. … The economy was linked to almost nothing … Not only was [economics] not a science, but it wasn’t an art. It was, after all is said and done, almost nothing at all. — Michel Houellebecq, The Map And The Territory The first and probably most influential among them was Peter Schwartz, who, in 1997, with Peter Leyden, forecast a "long boom" of at least 25 years of prosperity and environmental health fueled by digital technology and, most importantly, the maintenance of open markets. Kevin Kelly foresaw the way digital abundance would challenge scarce markets, and offered clear rules through which the largest companies could still thrive on the phenomenon. Stewart Brand joined Schwartz and others in co-founding GBN, a futurist consulting firm whose very name Global Business Network, seemed to cast the emergence of a web economy in a new light. What did it mean that everyone from William Gibson to Brian Eno to Marvin Minsky would now be consulting to the biggest corporations on earth? Would they even be able to control their own messages? Brand did famously say in 1984 that "information wants to be free." But, much less publicized and remembered, he did so only after explaining that "information wants to be expensive, because it's so valuable." Would his and others' work now be parsed for the tidbits most effective at promoting a skewed vision of the new economy? Would the counterculture be able to use its newfound access to the board rooms of the Fortune 500 to hack the business landscape, or had they simply surrendered to the eventual absorption of everything and everyone to an eternal primacy of corporate capitalism? The "scenario plans" that resulted from this work, through which corporations could envision continued domination of their industries, appeared to indicate the latter.

Chris Anderson has analyzed where all this is going, and — rather than offering up a vision of a post-scarcity economy — advised companies to simply leverage the abundant to sell whatever they can keep scarce. Likewise, Tim O'Reilly and John Batelle's new, highly dimensional conception of the net — Web Squared— ultimately offers itself up as a template through which companies can make money by controlling the indexes people use to navigate information space. Both science and technology are challenging long-held assumptions about top-down control, competition, and scarcity. But our leading thinkers are less likely to provide us with genuinely revolutionary axioms for a more highly evolved marketplace than reactionary responses to the networks, technologies, and discoveries that threaten to expose the marketplace for the arbitrarily designed poker game it is. They are not new rules for a new economy, but new rules for propping up old economic interests in the face of massive decentralization. While we can find evidence of the corporate marketplace biasing the application of any field of inquiry, it is our limited economic perspective that prevents us from supporting work that serves values external to the market. This is why it is particularly treacherous to limit economic thought to the game as it is currently played, and to present these arguments with near-scientific certainty. The sense of inevitability and pre-destiny shaping these narratives, as well as their ultimate obedience to market dogma, is most dangerous, however, for the way it trickles down to writers and theorists less directly or consciously concerned with

market forces. It fosters, both directly and by example, a willingness to apply genetics, neuroscience, or systems theory to the economy, and of doing so in a decidedly determinist and often sloppy fashion. Then, the pull of the market itself does the rest of the work, tilting the ideas of many of today's best minds toward the agenda of the highest bidder. So Steven Johnson ends up leaning, perhaps more than he should, on the corporate-friendly evidence that commercial TV and video games are actually healthy. (Think of how many corporations would hire a speaker who argued that everything bad — like marketing and media — is actually bad for you.) Likewise, Malcolm Gladwell finds himself repeatedly using recent discoveries from neuroscience to argue that higher human cognition is more than trumped by reptilian impulse; we may as well be guided by advertising professionals, since we're just acting mindlessly in response to crude stimuli, anyway. Everything becomes about business — and that's more than okay. This widespread acceptance of the current economic order as a fact of nature ends up compromising the impact of new findings, and changing the public's relationship to the science going on around them. These authors do not chronicle (or celebrate) the full frontal assault that new technologies and scientific discoveries pose to, say, the monopolization of value creation or the centralization of currency. Instead, they sell corporations a new, science-based algorithm for strategic investing on the new landscape. Higher sales reports and lecture fees serve as positive reinforcement for authors to incorporate the market's

bias even more enthusiastically the next time out. Write books that business likes, and you do better business. The cycle is self-perpetuating. But just because it pays the mortgage doesn't make it true. In fact, thanks to their blind acceptance of a particular theory of the market, most of these concepts end up failing to accurately predict the future. Instead of 25 years of prosperity and eco-health, we got the dotcom bust and global warming. Immersion in media is not really good for us. People are capable of responding to a more complex call to action than the oversimplified and emotional rants of rightwing ideologues. The decentralizing effect of new media has been met by an overwhelming concentration of corporate conglomeration. These theories fail not because the math or science underlying them is false, but rather because it is being inappropriately applied. Yet too many theorists keep buying into them, desperate for some logical flourish through which the premise of scarcity can somehow fit in, and business audiences won. In the process, they ignore the genuinely relevant question: whether the economic model, the game rules set in place half a millennium ago by kings with armies, can continue to hold back the genuine market activity of people enabled by computers. People are beginning to create and exchange value again, and they are coming to realize the market they have taken for granted is not a condition of nature. This is the threat — and no amount of theoretical recontextualization is going to change that — or successfully prevent it. Making Markets: From Abundance To Artificial Scarcity The economy in which we operate is not a natural system, but a set of rules developed in the Late Middle Ages in order to prevent the unchecked rise of a merchant class that was creating and exchanging value with impunity. This was what we might today call a peerto-peer economy, and did not depend on central employers or even central currency.

Economic theorists ignore the relevant question: whether the economic rules set in place half a millennium ago by kings with armies, can continue to hold back the genuine market activity of people enabled by computers.

People brought grain in from the fields, had it weighed at a grain store, and left with a receipt — usually stamped into a thin piece of foil. The foil could be torn into smaller pieces and used as currency in town. Each piece represented a specific amount of grain. The money was quite literally earned into existence — and the total amount in circulation reflected the abundance of the crop. Now the interesting thing about this money is that it lost value over time. The grain store had to be paid, some of the grain was lost to rats and spoilage. So each year, the grain store would reissue the money for any grain that hadn't actually been claimed. This meant that the money was biased towards transactions — towards circulation, rather than hoarding. People wanted to spend it. And the more money [that]* circulates (to a point) the better and more bountiful the economy. Preventative maintenance on machinery, research and development on new windmills and water wheels, was at a high. Many towns became so prosperous that they invested in long-term projects, like cathedrals. The "Age of Cathedrals" of this pre-Renaissance period was not funded by the Vatican, but by the bottom-up activity of vibrant local economies. The work week got shorter, people got taller, and life expectancy increased. (Were the Late Middle Ages perfect? No — not by any means. I am not in any way calling for a return to the Middle Ages. But an honest appraisal of the economic mechanisms in place before our own is required if we are ever going to contend with the biases of the system we are currently mistaking for the way it has always and must always be.)

Feudal lords, early kings, and the aristocracy were not participating in this wealth creation. Their families hadn't created value in centuries, and they needed a mechanism through which to maintain their own stature in the face of a rising middle class. The two ideas they came up with are still with us today in essentially the same form, and have become so embedded in commerce that we mistake them for pre-existing laws of economic activity. The first innovation was to centralize currency. What better way for the already rich to maintain their wealth than to make money scarce? Monarchs forcibly made abundant local currencies illegal, and required people to exchange value through artificially scarce central currencies, instead. Not only was centrally issued money easier to tax, but it gave central banks an easy way to extract value through debasement (removing gold content). The bias of scarce currency, however, was towards hoarding. Those with access to the treasury could accrue wealth by lending or investing passively in value creation [made] by others. Prosperity on the periphery quickly diminished as value was drawn toward the center. Within a few decades of the establishment of central currency in France came local poverty, an end to subsistence farming, and the plague. (The economy we now celebrate as the happy result of these Renaissance innovations only took effect after Europe had lost half of its population.) As it's currently practiced, the issuance of currency — a public utility, really — is still controlled in much the same manner by central banks. They issue

It is won by applying insights to the techniques through which their patrons can better play the game. This has biased their observations and their conclusions. Like John Nash, who carried out game theory experiments for RAND in the 1950's, these business consultants see competition and selfinterest where there is none, and reject all evidence to the contrary. Although he later recanted his conclusions, Nash and his colleagues couldn't believe that their subjects would choose a collaborative course of action when presented with the "prisoner's dilemma," and simply ignored their initial results.

the currency in the form of a loan to a bank, which in turn loans it [to] a business. Each borrower must pay back more then he has acquired, necessitating competition — and more borrowing. An economy with a strictly enforced central currency must expand at the rate of debt; it is no longer ruled principally by the laws of supply and demand, but the debt structures of its lenders and borrowers. Those who can't grow organically must acquire businesses in order to grow artificially. Even though nearly 80% of mergers and acquisitions fail to create value for either party, the rules of a debt-based economy — and the shareholders it was developed to favor — insist on growth at the expense of long-term value. The second great innovation was the chartered monopoly, through which kings could grant exclusive control over a sector or region to a favored company in return for an investment in the enterprise. This gave rise to monopoly markets, such as the British East India Trading Company's exclusive right to trade in the American Colonies. Colonists who grew cotton were not permitted to sell it to other people or, worse, fabricate clothes. These activities would have generated value from the bottom up, in a way that could not have been extracted by a central authority. Instead, colonists were required to sell cotton to the Company, at fixed prices, who shipped it back to England where it was fabricated into clothes by another chartered monopoly, and then shipped to back to America

for sale to the colonists. It was not more efficient; it was simply more extractive. The resulting economy encouraged — and often forced — people to accept employment from chartered corporations rather than create value for themselves. When natives of the Indies began making rope to sell to the Dutch East India Trading Company, the Company sought and won laws making rope fabrication in the Indies illegal for anyone except the Company itself. Former rope-makers had to close their workshops, and work instead for lower wages as employees of the company. We ended up with an economy based in scarcity and competition rather than abundance and collaboration; an economy that requires growth and eschews sustainable business models. It may or may not better reflect the laws of nature — and that it is a conversation we really should have — but it is certainly not the result of entirely natural set of principles in action. It is a system designed by certain people at a certain moment in history, with very specific interests. Like artists of the Renaissance, who were required to find patrons to support their work, most scientists, mathematicians, theorists, and technologists today must find support from either the public or private sectors to carry on their work. This support is not won by calling attention to the Monopoly board most of us mistake for the real economy.

Likewise, the proponents of today's digital libertarianism exploit any evidence they can find of evolutionary principles that reflect the fundamental competitiveness of human beings and other life forms, while ignoring the much more rigorously gathered evidence of cooperation as a primary human social skill. The late archeologist Glynn Isaac, for one, demonstrated how food sharing, labor distribution, social networking and other collaborative activities are what gave our evolutionary forefathers the ability to survive. Harvard biologist Ian Gilby's research on hunting among bats and chimps demonstrates advanced forms of cooperation, collective action, and sharing of meat disproportional to the risks taken to kill it. Instead, it is more popular to focus on the self-interested battle for survival of the fittest. Whether or not he intends his work to be used this way, Steven Pinker's arguments about decreasing violence among humans over time are employed by others as evidence of the free market's peaceful influence on civilization. Ray Kurzweil relegates the entire human race to a subordinate role in the much more significant evolution of machines — a dehumanizing stance that dovetails all too well with an industrial marketplace in which most human beings are now relegated to the reactive role of consumers. In Chris Anderson's vision of the coming "Petabyte Age," no human scientists are even required. That's because the structures that emerge from multi-dimensional data sets will

be self-organizing and self-apparent. The emergent properties of natural systems and artificial markets are treated interchangeably. Like Adam Smith's "invisible hand," or Austrian economist Friedrich Hayek's notion of "catallaxy," markets are predestined to reach equilibrium by their very nature. Just like any other complex, natural system. In short, these economic theories are selecting examples from nature to confirm the properties of a wholly designed marketplace: self-interested actors, inevitable equilibrium, a scarcity of resources, competition for survival. In doing so, they confirm — or at the very least, reinforce — the false idea that the laws of an artificially scarce fiscal scheme are a species' inheritance rather than a social construction enforced with gunpowder. At the very least, the language of science confers undeserved authority on these blindly accepted economic assumptions. The Net Effect Worst of all, when a potentially destabilizing and decentralizing medium such as the Internet comes along, this half-true and half-hearted style of inquiry follows the story only until a means to arrest its development is discovered and new strategies may be offered. The open source ethos, through which anyone who understands the code can effectively redesign a program to his own liking, is repackaged by Jeff Howe as "crowdsourcing" through which corporations can once again harness the tremendous potential of real people acting in concert, for free. Viral media is reinvented by Malcolm Gladwell as "social contagion," or Tim Draper as "viral marketing" — techniques through which mass marketers can once again define human choice as a series of consumer decisions. The decentralizing bias of new media is thus accepted and interpolated only until the market's intellectual guard can devise a new countermeasure for their patrons to employ on behalf of preserving business as usual. Meanwhile, the same corporate libertarian think tanks using Richard Dawkins' theories of evolution to falsely justify the chaotic logic of capitalism

through their white papers also advise politicians how to exploit the beliefs of fundamentalist Christian creationists in order to garner public support for selfsufficiency as a state of personal grace, and to galvanize suspicion of a welfare state. This is cynical at best. It doesn't take a genius or a scientist to understand how the rules of the economic game as it is currently played reflect neither human values nor the laws of physics. The market cannot expand infinitely like the redshifts in Hubble's universe. How many other species attempt to store up enough fat during their productive years so that they can simply "retire" on their hoarded resources? How could a metric like the GNP accurately reflect the health of the real economy when toxic spills and disease epidemics alike actually count as short-term booms? The Internet may be very much like a rhizome, but it is still energized by a currency that is anything but a neutral player. Most Internet business enthusiasts applaud Google's efforts to build open systems the same way their predecessors applauded the World Bank's gift of open markets to developing nations around the world — utterly unaware of (or unwilling to look at) what exactly we are opening our world to. The net (whether we're talking Web 2.0, Wikipedia, social networks or laptops) offers people the opportunity to build economies based on different rules — commerce that exists outside the economic map we have mistaken for the territory of human interaction. We can startup and even scale companies with little or no money, making the banks and investment capital on which business once depended obsolete. That's the real reason for the so-called economic crisis: there is less of a market for the debt on which the top-heavy game is based. We can develop local and complementary currencies, barter networks, and other exchange systems independently of a central bank, and carry out secure transactions with our cell phones. In doing so, we become capable of imagining a marketplace based in something other than scarcity — a

requirement if we're ever going to find a way to employ an abundant energy supply. It's not that we don't have the technological means to source renewable energy; it's that we don't have a market concept capable of contending with abundance. As Buckminster Fuller would remind us: these are not problems of nature, they are problems of design. If science can take on God, it should not fear the market. Both are, after all, creations of man. We must stop perpetuating the fiction that existence itself is dictated by the immutable laws of economics. These socalled laws are, in actuality, the economic mechanisms of 13th Century monarchs. Some of us analyzing digital culture and its impact on business must reveal economics as the artificial construction it really is. Although it may be subjected to the scientific method and mathematical scrutiny, it is not a natural science; it is game theory, with a set of underlying assumptions that have little to do with anything resembling genetics, neurology, evolution, or natural systems. The scientific tradition exposed the unpopular astronomical fact that the earth was not at the center of the universe. This stance challenged the social order, and its proponents were met with less than a welcoming reception. Today, science has a similar opportunity: to expose the fallacies underlying our economic model instead of producing short-term strategies for mitigating the effects of inventions and discoveries that threaten this inherited market hallucination. The economic model has broken, for good. It's time to stop pretending it describes our world. _______ *Words in brackets added by the editor for clarity. — ed. Text originally published in Edge magazine (www.edge.com) as “Economics Is Not Natural Science” (8 Nov 2009). Donald Rushkoff is a media analyst; documentary filmmaker, and author. His latest books are Life Inc.: How the World Became a Corporation and How to Take It Back, and Present Shock.

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THE NOAM CHOMSKY INTERVIEW by Michael S. Wilson

veryone knows what one looks like. They’ve got the

leather boots. Maybe some chains. Trench-coats. They wait in dark alleys with perfectly-spherical bombs. A lot of ‘em like to spike up their hair, or shave the side of their head, or do weird things like that to their appearance. You know what I mean. Everyone knows. That’s what an anarchist looks like.

But the man I’m talking to today, albeit by voice-over-internet, doesn’t have a shaved head. No Mohawk that I’m aware of. He doesn’t carry any bombs. Especially not behind any dark alleys wearing a trench-coat. In fact, when he was in college he tended to wear a nerdy short-sleeved collared shirt and necktie and those glasses with the Buddy Holly rims. And the few times I’ve had the opportunity to hear him speak in person, he seemed very … average. Almost disappointingly so. He was more the mild-mannered Clark Kent than the brazen anarchist Superman. His manner of speaking was almost mesmerizingly professorial — he rarely changed his cadence or pitch, except perhaps to deliver a satirical remark, and then he only used pause, not inflection.

Author’s note: This interview took place 23 Jan 2013. This is the first time the full interview has been published. One excerpt was previously published online at www.modernsuccess.org.

If you are absolutely not familiar with who Noam Chomsky is, you are not alone. He almost never appears in the mainstream media, due to the fact that they consider many of his ideas outragous and beyond consideration. The few times he has been interviewed by mainstream tv journalists, his time on air was suddenly cut short, often in mid-sentence. And yet his intellectual stature is undeniable: The New Yorker has ... termed Chomsky "one of the greatest minds of the 20th Century", while the New York Times has him as "arguably the most important intellectual alive." But judged by the range, influence and novelty of his ideas, many argue that Chomsky is, in fact, the owner of one of the greatest minds in the history of our species. There is barely a domain of human understanding that has not been touched in some way by his thought. In the half-century since the 1960s, reverberations from his work have shaken the foundations of cognitive science, epistemology, media studies, psychobiology, computer science (to name but a few). Alongside Marx and Shakespeare, he ranks among the ten most-quoted writers in history. — Matt Kenard, Financial Times

I remember how shocked people were when I told them I was going to interview M. I. T. Professor Emeritus Noam Chomsky. I remember how shocked I was when he agreed to a brief interview. But I also know Professor Chomsky to be a very down-to-earth man, very approachable, someone who seems to draw from a vast pool of inner strength to be able to speak not only to large crowds in Universities around the world, but also to respond to endless individual emails and letters, while continuing with all his other work of research. (He is said to read an average of twelve scholarly journals per week, among dozens of other periodicals and newspapers.) With all the work the man generates, one begins to wonder if Noam Chomsky, now at the youthful age of eighty-four, weren’t cloned at some point. Whatever the case, I had the pleasure of interviewing him as I sat in Memorial Union and he in his university office in Boston. So many things have been written about, and discussed by, Professor Chomsky, it was a challenge to think of anything new to ask him: much like the grandparent you can’t think of what to get for Christmas because they already have everything. So I chose to be a bit selfish and ask him what I’ve always wanted to ask him. He being an actual living-and-breathing anarchist, I wanted to know what factors had influenced his decision to align himself with such a controversial and marginal position.

Image used with permission.

Modern Success: You are, among many other things, a self-described anarchist — an anarcho-syndicalist, specifically. Most people think of anarchists as disenfranchised punks throwing rocks at store windows, or masked men tossing bombs at fat industrialists. Is this an accurate view? What is anarchy to you? Noam Chomsky: Well, anarchism is, in my view, basically a kind of tendency in human thought which shows up in different forms in different circumstances, and has some leading characteristics. Primarily it is a tendency that is suspicious and skeptical of domination, authority, and hierarchy. It seeks structures of hierarchy and domination in human life over the whole range, extending from, say, patriarchal families to, say, imperial systems, and it asks whether those systems are justified. It assumes that the burden of proof for anyone in a position of power and authority lies on them. Their authority is not selfjustifying. They have to give a reason for it, a justification. And if they can’t justify that authority and power and control, which is the usual case, then the authority ought to be dismantled and replaced by something more free and just. And, as I understand it, anarchy is just that tendency. It takes different forms at different times. Anarcho-syndicalism is a particular variety of anarchism which was concerned primarily, though not solely, but primarily with control over work, over the work place, over production. It took for granted that working people ought to control their own work, its conditions, [that] they ought to control the enterprises in which they work, along with communities, so they should be associated with one another in free associations, and … democracy of that kind should be the foundational elements of a more general free society. And then, you know, ideas are worked out about how exactly that should manifest itself, but I think that is the core of anarchosyndicalist thinking. I mean it’s not at all the general image that you

Why should we prefer [anarchy]? Well I think because freedom is better than subordination. It’s better to be free than to be a slave.

described — people running around the streets, you know, breaking store windows — but [anarcho-syndicalism] is a conception of a very organized society, but organized from below by direct participation at every level, with as little control and domination as is feasible, maybe none. MS: With the apparent ongoing demise of the capitalist state, many people are looking at other ways to be successful, to run their lives, and I’m wondering what you would say anarchy and syndicalism have to offer, things that others ideas — say, for example, state-run socialism — have failed to offer? Why should we choose anarchy, as opposed to, say, libertarianism? NC: Well what’s called libertarian in the United States, which is a special U.S. phenomenon, it doesn’t really exist anywhere else — a little bit in England — permits a very high level of authority and domination but in the hands of private power: so private power should be unleashed to do whatever it likes. The assumption is that by some kind of magic, concentrated private power will lead to a more free and just society. Actually that has been believed in the past. Adam Smith for example, one of his main arguments for markets was the claim that under conditions of perfect liberty, markets would lead to perfect equality. Well, we don’t have to talk about that! That kind of — MS: It seems to be a continuing contention today. NC: Yes, and so well that kind of libertarianism, in my view, in the current world, is just a call for some

of the worst kinds of tyranny, namely unaccountable private tyranny. Anarchism is quite different from that. It calls for an elimination to tyranny, all kinds of tyranny. Including the kind of tyranny that’s internal to private power concentrations. So why should we prefer it? Well I think because freedom is better than subordination. It’s better to be free than to be a slave. Its’ better to be able to make your own decisions than to have someone else make decisions and force you to observe them. I mean, I don’t think you really need an argument for that. It seems like … transparent. The thing you need an argument for, and should give an argument for, is, How can we best proceed in that direction? And there are lots of ways within the current society. One way, incidentally, is through use of the state, to the extent that it is democratically controlled. I mean in the long run, anarchists would like to see the state eliminated. But it exists, alongside of private power, and the state is, at least to a certain extent, under public influence and control — could be much more so. And it provides devices to constrain the much more dangerous forces of private power. Rules for safety and health in the workplace for example. Or insuring that people have decent health care, let’s say. Many other things like that. They’re not going to come about through private power. Quite the contrary. But they can come about through the use of the state system under limited democratic control ... to carry forward reformist measures. I think those are fine

things to do. they should be looking forward to something much more, much beyond, — namely actual, much larger-scale democratization. And that’s possible to not only think about, but to work on. So one of the leading anarchist thinkers, Bakunin in the 19th cent, pointed out that it’s quite possible to build the institutions of a future society within the present one. And he was thinking about far more autocratic societies than ours. And that’s being done. So for example, worker- and community- controlled enterprises are germs of a future society within the present one. And those not only can be developed, but are being developed. There’s some important work on this by Gar Alperovitz who’s involved in the enterprise systems around the Cleveland area which are worker and community controlled. There’s a lot of theoretical discussion of how it might work out, from various sources. Some of the most worked out ideas are in what’s called the “parecon” — participatory economics — literature and discussions. And there are others. These are at the planning and thinking level. And at the practical implementation level, there are steps that can be taken, while also pressing to overcome the worst … the major harms … caused by … concentration of private power through the use of state system, as long as the current system exists. So there’s no shortage of means to pursue. As for state socialism, depends what one means by the term. If it's tyranny of the Bolshevik variety (and its descendants), we need not tarry on it. If it's a more expanded social democratic state, then the comments above apply. If something else, then what? Will it place decision-making in the hands of working people and communities, or in hands of some authority? If the latter, then — once again — freedom is better than subjugation, and the latter carries a very heavy burden of justification. MS: Many people know you because of your and Edward Herman's development of the Propaganda Model. Could you briefly describe that model and why it might be important to the students at the UW-Madison?

NC: Well first look back a bit — a little historical framework — back in the late 19th-, early 20th century, a good deal of freedom had been won in some societies. At the peak of this were in fact the United States and Britain. By no means free societies, but by comparative standards quite advanced in this respect. In fact so advanced, that power systems — state and private — began to recognize that things were getting to a point where they can’t control the population by force as easily as before, so they are going to have to turn to other means of control. And the other means of control are control of beliefs and attitudes. And out of that grew the public relations industry, which in those days described itself honestly as an industry of propaganda. The guru of the PR industry, Edward Bernays — incidentally, not a reactionary, but a Wilson-RooseveltKennedy liberal — the maiden handbook of the PR industry which he wrote back in the 1920s was called Propaganda. And in it he described, correctly, the goal of the industry. He said our goal is to insure that the “intelligent minority” — and of course anyone who writes about these things is part of that intelligent minority by definition, by stipulation, so we, the intelligent minority, are the only people capable of running things, and there’s that great population out there, the “unwashed masses,” who, if they’re left alone will just get into trouble: so we have to, as he put it, “engineer their consent,” figure out ways to insure they consent to our rule and domination. And that’s the goal of the PR industry. And it works in many ways. It’s primary commitment is commercial advertising. In fact, Bernays made his name right at that time — late 20s — by running an advertising campaign to convince women to smoke cigarettes: women weren’t smoking cigarettes, this big group of people who the tobacco industry isn’t able to kill, so we’ve got to do something about that. And he very successfully ran campaigns that induced women to smoke cigarettes: that [smoking] would be, in modern terms, the cool thing to do, you know, that’s the way you get to be a modern, liberated woman. It was very

successful — MS: Is there a correlation between that campaign and what’s happening with the big oil industry right now and climate change? NC: These are just a few examples. These are the origins of what became a huge industry of controlling attitudes and opinions. Now the oil industry today, and in fact the business world generally, are engaged in comparable campaigns to try to undermine efforts to deal with a problem that’s even greater than the mass murder that was caused by the tobacco industry; and it was mass murder. We are facing a threat, a serious threat, of catastrophic climate change. And it’s no joke. And [the oil industry is] trying to impede measures to deal with it for their own short-term profit interests. And that includes not only the petroleum industry, but the American Chamber of Commerce — the leading business lobby — and others, who’ve stated quite openly that they’re conducting … they don’t call it propaganda … but what would amount to propaganda campaigns to convince people that there’s no real danger and we shouldn’t really do much about it, and that we should concentrate on really important things like the deficit and economic growth — what they call ‘growth’ — and not worry about the fact that the human species is marching over a cliff which could be something like [human] species destruction; or at least the destruction of the possibility of a decent life for huge numbers of people. And there are many other correlations. In fact quite generally, commercial advertising is fundamentally an effort to undermine markets. We should recognize that. If you’ve taken an economics course, you know that markets are supposed to be based on informed consumers making rational choices. You take a look at the first ad you see on television and ask yourself … is that it’s purpose? No it’s not. It’s to create uninformed consumers making irrational choices. And these same institutions run political campaigns. It’s pretty much the same: you have to undermine democracy by trying to get

uninformed people to make irrational choices. And so this is only one aspect of the PR industry. What Herman and I were discussing was another aspect of the whole propaganda system that developed roughly at that period, and that’s “manufacture of consent,” as it was called, [consent] to the decisions of our political leaders, or the leaders of the private economy, to try to insure that people have the right beliefs and don’t try to comprehend the way decisions are being made, [decisions] that may not only harm them, but harm many others. That’s propaganda in the normal sense. And so we were talking about mass media, and the intellectual community of the world in general, which is to a large extent dedicated to this. Not that people see themselves as propagandists, but … that they are themselves deeply indoctrinated into the principles of the system, which prevent them from perceiving many things that are really right on the surface, [things] that would be subversive to power if understood. We give plenty of examples there and there’s plenty more you can mention up to the present moment, crucial ones in fact. That’s a large part of a general system of indoctrination and control that runs parallel to controlling attitudes and … consumeristic commitments, and other devices to control people. You mentioned students before. Well one of the main problems for students today — a huge problem — is sky-rocketing tuitions. Why do we have tuitions that are completely out-of-line with other countries, even with our own history? In the 1950s the United States was a much poorer country than it is today, and yet higher education was … pretty much free, or low fees or no fees for huge numbers of people. There hasn’t been an economic change that’s made it necessary, now, to have very high tuitions, far more than when we were a poor country. And to drive the point home even more clearly, if we look just across the borders, Mexico is a poor country yet has a good educational system with free tuition. There was an effort by the Mexican state to raise tuition, maybe some 15 years ago or so, and there was a national student strike which had a lot of popular support, and the government backed down. Now that’s just happened recently in Quebec, on our other border. Go across the ocean: Germany is a rich country. Free tuition. Finland has the highestranked education system in the world. Free … virtually free. So I don’t think you can give an argument that there are economic necessities behind the incredibly high increase in tuition. I think these are social and economic decisions made by the people who set policy. And [these hikes] are part of, in my view, part of a backlash that developed in the 1970s against the liberatory tendencies of the 1960s. Students became much freer, more open, they were pressing for opposition to the war, for civil rights, women’s rights … and the country just got too free. In fact, liberal intellectuals condemned this, called it a “crisis of democracy:” we’ve got to have more moderation of democracy. They called, literally, for more

TYPICAL ANARCHIST DISGUISES or, ‘How To Identify Your Local Anarchist’

Baker

Libriarian

Teacher

Iron Worker

Waiter

Student

We are facing a threat, a serious threat, of catastrophic climate change. And it’s no joke. And the oil industry is trying to impede measures to deal with it for their own short-term profit interests.

student insecurity, for similar reasons. I think all of these things line up together as part of a general reaction — a bipartisan reaction, incidentally — against liberatory tendencies which manifested themselves in the 60s and have continued since. MS: With the few remaining minutes we have left, I’m wondering if you could leave the students with one thing you’d like to say to them about how they can be successful in the future. NC: There are plenty of problems in the world today, and students face a number of them, including the ones I mentioned — the joblessness, insecurity and so on. Yet on the other hand, there has been progress. In a lot of respects things are a lot more free and advanced than they were … not many years ago. So many things that were really matters of struggle, in fact even some barely even mentionable, say, in the 1960s, are now … partially resolved. Things like women’s rights. Gay rights. Opposition to aggression. Concern for the environment — which is nowhere near where it ought to be, but far beyond the 1960s. These victories for freedom didn’t come from gifts from above. They came from people struggling under conditions that are harsher than they are now. There is state repression now. But it doesn’t begin to compare with, say, Cointelpro in the 1960s. People that don’t know about that ought to read and think to find out. [sic] And that leaves lots of opportunities. Students, you know, are relatively privileged as compared with the rest of the population. They are also in a period of their lives where

they are relatively free. Well that provides for all sorts of opportunities. In the past, such opportunities have been taken by students who have often been in the forefront of progressive change, and they have many more opportunities now. It’s never going to be easy. There’s going to be repression. There’s going to be backlash. But that’s the way society moves forward. ______________ To read more about Chomsky’s ideas, there are literally hundreds of places to do so. He has written dozens of books about American military imperialism, the hegemony of the poor, the advertising and PR industry and their connection to news media in particular, and … The list goes on. Most of his books can be found in Madison at Rainbow Bookstore. To search through subjects about which he has written, you can visit his website at Chomsky.info, where you will find thousands of articles, interviews, and outside news commentary about him. My personal favorite introduction to Chomsky is the film, Manufacturing Consent: Chomsky and the Media, still considered one of the top-ten documentaries of all time.

Donna Coveney

commitment to indoctrination of the young, their phrase … we have to make sure that the institutions responsible for the indoctrination of the young do their work, so we don’t have all this freedom and independence. And many developments took place after that. I don’t think we have enough direct documentation to prove causal relations, but you can see what happened. One of the things that happened was controlling students — in fact, controlling students for the rest of their lives, by simply trapping them in debt. That’s a very effective technique of control and indoctrination. And I suspect — I can’t prove — but I suspect that that’s a large part of the reason behind [high tuitions]. Many other parallel things happened. The whole economy changed in significant ways to concentrate power, to undermine workers’ rights and freedom. In fact the economist who chaired the Federal Reserve around the Clinton years, Alan Greenspan — St. Alan as he was called then, the great genius of the economics profession who was running the economy, highly honored — he testified proudly before congress that the basis for the great economy that he was running was what he called “growing worker insecurity.” If workers are more insecure, they won’t do things, like asking for better wages and better benefits. And that’s healthy for the economy from a certain point of view, a point of view that says workers ought to be oppressed and controlled, and that wealth ought to be concentrated in a very few pockets. So yeah, that’s a healthy economy, and we need growing worker insecurity, and we need growing

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n a r c h y

A Four Letter Word For Peace by Dmitry Orlov

Once upon a time there lived a prince.

Not a fairytale prince, but a real one, his bloodline extending back to the founder of Russia's first dynasty. It was his bad luck that his mother died when he was young and his father, a military officer who paid little attention to his children, remarried a woman who also took no interest in him or his brother. And so our prince was brought up by the peasants attached to his father's estate (he was born 20 years before Russia abolished serfdom). The peasants were the only ones who took an interest in him or showed him affection, and so he bonded with them as with his family. And so our prince became a traitor to his own class.

Peter Alexeyevich Kropotkin is our prince's name, and he eventually became a renowned scientist who advanced the understanding of the history of glaciers, an historian of revolutionary movements, foremost theoretician of anarchism, and, because of his lifelong burning desire to do something to help the plight of the common man, something of a revolutionary himself. His memory has not fared well over the 90 years that have passed since his death. On the one hand, he suffered from being associated with the Bolsheviks, although he never spoke out in favor of state communism or dictatorship of the proletariat. On the other hand, a major effort has been made by Western capitalist rĂŠgimes to denigrate anarchism and equate it with terrorism. I would like to rehabilitate both Kropotkin and anarchy. People who bother to read Kropotkin's lucid and unpretentious writings quickly realize that he is first of all a natural scientist, who approached the study of both nature and human nature using the same scientific method. He was also a great humanist, and chose the path of anarchy because, as a scientist, he saw it as the best way to improve society based on successful patterns of cooperation he observed in nature. He had no use at all for the vague metaphysics of Hegel, Kant or Marx. He also had no use at all for the imperial state, be it communist or capitalist.

Ever since 1840, when Pierre-Joseph Proudhon used “anarchy” for the first time to denote a positive social doctrine, the term has been so consistently misrepresented that its meaning has been almost completely lost. To most, “anarchism” speaks more of a dystopian nightmare than the utopian philosophy it actually is, and, as a result, the ideology has largely been denied the attention it deserves as a political and economic theory. Far from being the advocacy of disorder many believe it to be, anarchism is … based on the belief that hierarchical forms of politics are both undesirable and unnecessary, [and] it proposes the dismantling of all authoritarian, coercive and exploitative institutions within society and advocates their replacement with alternative institutions of voluntary, non-governmental cooperation. Whereas state-socialism seeks to impose a traditionally hierarchical social order by means of centralized, top-down political and economic structures and processes, anarchism starts out from the assumption that people are capable of governing themselves without such institutions of voluntary, non-governmental cooperation. By “ruling from below,” anarchists believe, at the level of localised, self-governing communities, society will be able to transform itself into a self-managed, directly democratic and ecoologically sustainable system, devoid of the exploitation and inequality intrinsic in the statesocialist model found in the former USSR and contemporary China…” — James Horrox, A Living Revolution: Anarchism in the Kibbutz Movement

Kropotkin was an advocate of communism at the level of the commune, and based his advocacy on its demonstrated superior effectiveness in organizing both production and consumption. His examples of communist production were the numerous communist communities that were all the rage in the United States at the time, where the numbers showed that they produced far better results with less effort and in less time than individuals or family farms. His examples of communist consumption included various clubs, all-inclusive resorts and hotels and various other formal and informal associations where a single admission or membership fee gave you full access to whatever was on offer to everyone. Again, the numbers showed that such communist patterns of organization produced far better results at a much lower overall expense than various capitalist pay-as-you-go schemes.

Kropotkin, in his usual data-driven way, was definitely in favor of grass roots communism, but I could not find any statements that he had made in favor of communist governance. He spoke of the revolutionary change—change that required a break with the past—as necessary in order to improve society, but he wished that it would be a spontaneous process that unleashed the creative energies of the people at the local level, not a process that could be controlled from the top. He wrote: “The rebuilding [perestroika] of society requires the collective wisdom of multitudes of people working on specific things: a cultivated field, an inhabited house, a running factory, a railroad, a ship, and so on.” Another of his more memorable quotes is: “The future cannot be legislated. All that can be done is to anticipate its most important movements and to clear the path for them. That is exactly what we try to do.” (Here and elsewhere the translations from Russian are my own.)

Kropotkin's approach to the approaching revolution was also as a scientist, similar to that of a seismologist predicting an earthquake based on tremors: “Hundreds of revolts preceded each revolution... There are limits to all patience.” Participating in the many revolutionary movements in Western Europe during his long exile, he monitored the increasing incidence of such tremors. (He spent a long time living in Switzerland, before the Swiss government asked him to leave, during which time he radicalized a large number of Swiss watchmakers, turning them into anarchists who, we must assume, practiced their anarchy with great precision.) Based on his observations, he came to see revolution as rather likely. Again, he wished for it to be an anarchic phenomenon: “We... understand revolution as a popular movement which will become widespread, and during which in each town and in each village

“Slavery?—-certainly not, we are against it! That we should be forced to establish it at home or in our factories—-well, that’s natural …”

— The Fall, Albert Camus

within a rebellious region multitudes of people will themselves take up the task of rebuilding [perestroika again] society.” But he put absolutely no faith in revolutionary governance: “As far as the government, whether it seized power by force or through elections... we pin absolutely no hopes on it. We say that it will be unable to do anything, not because these are our sympathies, but because our entire history tells us that never have the people whom a revolutionary wave pushed into government turned out to be up to the task.” Based on this, I feel it safe to conclude that Kropotkin was not exactly a revolutionary but more of a scientific observer and predictor of revolutions who saw them as increasingly likely (and in this he was not wrong) and kept hoping for the best as long as he could. It also bears noting that he declined to accept every leadership role that was ever offered to him, and that his participation in the Bolshevik revolution in Russia was nil: he returned to Russia from exile as soon as he could, after the revolution of February 1917, but quickly removed himself to his home town of Dmitrov, north of Moscow, where he died in 1921. He wasn't exactly popular with the Bolshevik leadership, but they could not touch him because he was so popular with the common people. Leaving aside the notion that Kropotkin was a Communist with a capital ‘C’ it remains for us to show that he was not an Anarchist with a capital ‘A’ either. My own personal working definition of anarchy, which has served me well, is “absence of hierarchy.” The etymology

of the word is ν (not, without) + ρχός (ruler). Kropotkin's own definition is as follows: “Anarchy represents an attempt to apply results achieved using the scientific method within the natural sciences to the evaluation of human institutions.” You see, there are no Commie subversives here, no bombthrowing Anarchists with a capital ‘A’— just some scientists doing some science and then attempting to apply their very interesting results to the scientific study of human social institutions. Will the Real Definition Please Stand Up?

Anarchy

When confronted with an increasingly despotic régime, the good people of almost any nation will cower in their homes and, once they are flushed out, will allow themselves to be herded like domesticated animals. They will gladly take orders from whoever gives them, because their worst fear is not despotism—it is anarchy. Anarchy! Are you afraid of anarchy? Or are you more afraid of hierarchy? Color me strange, but I am much more afraid of being subjected to a chain of command than of anarchy (which is a lack of hierarchy). Mind you, this is not an irrational fear, but comes from a lifetime of studying nature, human as well as the regular kind, and of working within hierarchically organized organizations as well as some anarchically organized ones. The anarchically organized ones work better. I have worked in a number of start-up companies, which were quite anarchic, in a good way, and were therefore able to invent and to innovate. I have also worked in a number of big, established

companies, with many hierarchies of management, and a laborious approval process for any new proposal. These companies couldn't invent or innovate worth a damn, and only continue to exist because the system favors big companies. When faced with the need to do something new, they always tried to buy a smaller, innovative company. This is because in a hierarchical organization people who know more are inevitably forced to take orders from people who know less, and often know nothing at all beyond knowing how to get promoted. The result is that in hierarchical organizations—and I have seen this over and over again—the smart people sit around and do nothing (or as little as possible) because following stupid orders is a waste of time, while the stupid people run around like chickens trying to get themselves promoted. This is not a matter of scale, but of organization: I have worked in just one (but it was quite educational) start-up that was organized as a rigid hierarchy and had a laborious approval process for any new proposal. This abnormal, dysfunctional situation came about because one of the founders was cognitively impaired, and the company did not get very far at all. Thus, I may be persuaded to accede to the specific and temporary authority of a superior (superior at a given task) but I find it problematic to blindly accept the authority of my superior's superior. It does happen that a competent person gets kicked upstairs into management. This has happened to the best of us, and has even happened to me. But to keep climbing up the hierarchy after that is to prove that the promotion wasn't an error, and that the person in question really is management material, i.e., a bit dumb, not particularly scrupulous, but very obedient. I am definitely not management material: I seem to be missing a gene that allows middlemanagement types to automatically look up to their superiors and look down on their inferiors. I could never get past the thought that this hierarchy thing is all a big mistake. If anarchy works so well for the birds, the bees, the dolphins and the wildebeest—why can't it work for us? There are many things that deserve be feared in the world, but a pleasantly, congenially, efficiently organized lack of

hierarchy is definitely not one of them. But before we go any further, we need to address this irrational fear of anarchy that has been whipped up in the general public by the propaganda arms of various hierarchical organizations (governments, churches, universities and so forth). The term “anarchy” is commonly used as a slur against things that are thought to be disorganized because it is incorrectly thought to imply a lack of organization. Anarchists are also confused with communist revolutionaries, and the typical anarchist is imagined to be an antisocial and violent terrorist who wishes for the violent overthrow of the established order. Anarchy is also incorrectly conceived to represent the embodiment of a coherent ideology of Anarchism, making the argument against anarchy is a straw man argument based on a false choice between an implied yet manifestly nonexistent system and a very real oppressively huge hierarchically organized régime. The only grain of truth visible in all of this is that Anarchism as a political ideology or a political movement is, and has been for centuries now, rather beside the point.

within such a political climate, where the rewards of submitting to an official hierarchy were so compelling. But now the industrial experiment is nearing its end: trade union participation is falling; companies routinely practice labor arbitrage, exporting work to lowest-wage countries; retirement schemes are failing everywhere; public education fails to educate and even a college degree is no longer any sort of guarantee of gainful employment; health care costs are out of control (in the US especially). We can only hope that, with the waning of the industrial age, anarchism is poised for a rebirth, gaining relevance and acceptance among those wishing to

sufficiently cohesive and egalitarian community can be self-governing? All of these questions demand accurate and reasoned answers. If we find ourselves unable to provide these answers, but nevertheless demand that our young people participate in the failing program of industrial employment, then we won't have them as friends for very long. The best angle from which to approach the subject of anarchy is from the vantage point of a student of nature. Observe that, in nature, anarchy is the prevalent form of cooperation among animals, whereas hierarchical organization is relatively rare and limited in scope and duration. Kropotkin wrote convincingly on this subject. He was a scientist, and having a scientist's eye for hard data allowed him to make a series of key observations. First, he observed the vast majority of animal species, and virtually all of the more successful animals, are social. There are animals that lead solitary lives, but they are the exception rather than the rule, which is to live as cooperating groups. It is the degree and the success of cooperation that is the most important determinant of the success of any given species; the gregarious, cooperative animals thrive while the selfish loners are left behind. The striking success of the human species has everything to do with our superior abilities to communicate, cooperate, organize spontaneously and act creatively in concert, while the equally glaring, horrific, monstrous failures of our species have everything to do with our unwelcome ability to submit to authority, to tolerate class distinctions and to blindly follow orders and rigid systems of rules.

A major effort has been made by Western capitalist régimes to denigrate anarchism and equate it with terrorism.

Glimmers of anarchism could be discerned going as far back as the Reformation, in movements seeking autonomy, decentralization, and independence from central governments. But eventually virtually all of them were drowned out by socialist and communist revolutionary movements, which strove to renegotiate the social contract so as to distribute the fruits of industrial production more equitably among the working class. In all the developed countries, the working class was eventually able to secure gains such as the right to unionize, strike and bargain collectively, public education, a regulated work-week, government-guaranteed pensions and disability compensation schemes, government-provided health care and so on—all in exchange for submitting to the hierarchical control system of a centralized industrial state. Anarchist thought could gain no purchase

opt out of the industrial scheme ahead of time instead of finding themselves pinned down under its wreckage. From the point of view of a young person seeking to join the labor force but facing a decrepit and dysfunctional system of industrial employment that holds scant promise of a prosperous future, opting out of the industrialized scheme and embracing the anarchic approach seems like a rational choice. Why toil at some specific, circumscribed set of repetitive tasks within a job if that job, and the entire career path it is part of, could disappear out from under you at any moment? Why not enter into informal associations with friends and neighbors and divide your time between growing food, making and mending things and helping others within the immediate community, with the balance of free time spent on art, music, reading and other cultural and intellectual pursuits? Why bend to the will of self-interested strangers who have so little to offer when you can do better by freely cooperating with your equals? Why submit to an arbitrary external authority when a

Which leads us to Kropotkin's second observation, which is that animal societies can be quite highly and intricately organized, but their organization is anarchic, lacking any deep hierarchy: there are no privates, corporals, sergeants, lieutenants, captains, majors or generals among any of the species that evolved on planet Earth with the exception of the gun-toting jackbooted baboon (whenever you see an animal

wearing jackboots and carrying a rifle— run!). When animals organize, they organize for a purpose: birds form up to fly north or south, and spontaneously come together in colonies to rear their chicks; grazing animals gather together to ford rivers; prairie dogs post sentries that whistle their alarms for the entire town whenever any one of them spots a predator; even birds of different species cooperate to repel and harass predators, with the biggest birds taking the lead while the smaller ones assist. Some groups of animals do explicitly sort themselves out into an order, such as a pecking order among chickens or an eating order in a pride of lions, but these are sorting orders that do not create entire privileged classes or ranks or a chain of command. Consequently, animal societies are egalitarian. Even the queen bee or the termite queen does not hold a position of command: she is simply the reproductive organ of the colony and neither gives orders nor follows anyone else's. Because animal societies are egalitarian, they do not require any explicit code of justice or process of adjudication to maintain peace, since among equals the simple golden rule— do unto others as you want others to do unto you—corresponding to the innate, instinctual sense of fairness, provides sufficient guidance in most situations. A second instinct, of putting the interests of the group before one's own, assures group cohesion and provides a source of immense power. We humans have this instinct in abundance, perhaps to a fault: other animals follow it as a matter of course and do not decorate those who follow it with medals or cast them in bronze and put them on pedestals. Don’t Call My Wife An Ox This clear understanding of cooperation, peace and justice springing forth through instinct in egalitarian, anarchic societies that are found throughout nature casts an unflattering light on written law. Kropotkin observes that systems of written law always start out as gratuitous, self-important exercises in writing down the unwritten rules that everyone follows anyway, but then sneak in a new element or two for the benefit of the emerging ruling class that is doing the writing. He

REAL LIFE ANARCHY PAST & PRESENT

singles out the Tenth Commandment of Moses. The commandment states: “Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor's house, wife, manservant, maidservant, ox, ass, nor any thing that is thy neighbor's.” Now, pre-literate societies, with their systems of unwritten, oral law, may vary, but all of them recognize that a wife is not at all like an ox, and all of them would recognize someone who tries to treat them as being the same before the law as a subversive or an imbecile. Recognizing that a wife and an ox are different, some societies may choose to let oxen wander about the community grazing where they may, so that they can be pressed into service as need by anyone who wishes to do so, while stealing someone's wife may be a life-ending event for both the thief and the wife, causing the rest of the society to look away in shame. Other societies may regard borrowing an ox without permission as grand larceny, and borrowing someone's wife as legitimate love sport as long as the wife consents, but the jealous husband who then kills the two is charged with two counts of second-degree murder. The Tenth Commandment erases such distinctions and treats both the wife and the ox as individual property. Furthermore, it makes it a sin to regard the property of another with anything other than indifference, enshrining the right to own abstract individual property without limitation as a key moral principle. This, in turn, makes it antithetical to maintaining an egalitarian society of a sort that can remain anarchic and self-governing, making it necessary to introduce police, the courts and jails in order to keep the peace in a society characterized by inequality and class conflict. Moses smashed the tablets once when he saw the Israelites worshiping the golden calf; he should have smashed them a second time when he saw them worshiping the idol of private property.

Kropotkin's third, and perhaps most significant observation addresses a common misunderstanding of Darwinian evolution. You see, when most people say “Darwinian” it turns out that they actually mean to say “Hobbesian.” Kropotkin pointed out that the term “survival of the fittest” has been misinterpreted to mean that animals compete against other animals of their own species, whereas that just happens to be the shortest path to extinction. This misinterpretation of facts directly observable from nature has led to the faulty Hobbesian justification of the economic appetite as something natural and evolved, and therefore inevitable, giving rise to the conjectured laws of the marketplace, which in turn favor nonempathic, exclusionary, brutal, possessive individualists. The result has been to enshrine mental illness—primitive, pathological, degenerate narcissism—as the ultimate evolutionary adaptation and the basis of the laws of economics. Thus, an entire edifice of economic theory has been erected atop a foundation of delusion borne of a misunderstanding of the patterns present in nature. Kropotkin provides numerous examples of what allows animal societies to survive and thrive, and it is almost always cooperation with their own species, and sometimes with other species as well, but there is almost never any overt competition. He mentions that wild Siberian horses, which usually graze in small herds, overcome their natural aloofness to gather in large numbers and crowd together into gullies to share bodily warmth when facing a blizzard; those who do not do so often freeze to death. Animals do fight for survival, but their fight is against forces of nature: inclement weather and climactic fluctuations that cause floods, droughts, cold spells and

GREAT HISTORICAL ANARCHIST SETTLEMENTS AND MOVEMENTS -Libertatia (1670s to 1690s) -Whiteway Colony (1898-present) -Spanish revolution (1936-1939) -The Makhnovist Movement, Ukraine(1918-1921) -The Autonomous Shinmin Region, China (1929-1931) -Italian Factory Occupations and Councils (1919) -Hungarian Revolution (1956) -Kwangju Uprising, South Korea (May, 1980) -Situationist and Worker/Student Occupation Movement, France (May, 1968) -Icelandic Commonwealth (930-1262) -Holy Experiment of the Quakers, Pennsylvania (1681-1690) -Fatsa, Turkey (1979 to 1980) -Cascadia Free State 1996 (US)

CURRENT MOVEMENTS w/ ANARCHIST FEATURES - Argentina (2001- ) - Christiania, Copenhagen, Denmark (1970's- ) - Zapatista Autonomous Municipalities, Chiapas, Mexico (1994- ) - Jewish Kibbutz Movement, (1946- ) Palestine - /b/ and Anonymous - Squatter Movements - Free Software Movement - Galt's Gulch (Frontierist) Movements - Agorist Economics - Data Havens, Cyberspace, and Permanent Travelers - Occupy Find out more at Anarchopedia.org

heat waves, and diseases and predators that reduce their numbers. They do not compete against members of their own species except in one respect: those who win the genetic lottery by generating or inheriting a lucky genetic mutation are more likely to survive and to reproduce. Thus, it is possible to say that genomes compete, but this use of the term “competition” is purely metaphorical, while the dominant pattern, and the greatest determinant of success of a species as a whole, is its ability to communicate and to cooperate.

is actually in charge. As I sit here concentrating on this, my right hand picks up a cup of tea and raises it to my lips without the rest of me having to pay any attention; another part of me thinks that I should take a break and visit the shops before it starts raining. If I do, then the decision will have been reached cooperatively because there is nobody to give the order and nobody to give the order to.

Thus, all living, biological systems are anarchically organized. They are highly scalable—from a single-celled amoeba to the blue whale—but the organizational principle remains the same: an anarchically organized cooperating group of cells. Biological systems exhibit a fractal-like property: you can zoom in on a detail and observe that its organization is similar to what you saw when looking at the whole. They are sustainable, each organism exhibiting bounded growth up to an optimum size. (Yes, yeast can't handle vats of concentrated sugar-water without a population explosion followed by collapse, but then vats of concentrated sugar-water are not their natural habitat—or anyone else's!)

If all life on Earth follows this pattern, then what about our current socioeconomic systems? What about huge nation-states and giant mega-cities? What about the global economy? The short answer is that they are all hierarchically organized systems, and that this makes them scale badly: the increase in their metabolic cost always outpaces their growth rate, plus their growth is unbounded, so they always collapse.

Biological systems exhibit all sorts of complex behaviors, sometimes leading us to believe that they possess intelligence and free will. But there is no command structure to intelligence or free will. Even consciousness has no specific command structure; the complex behaviors that make us think that there are such things as consciousness and free will are emergent behaviors of cooperating brain cells; nobody

Oh, Goody! Math! Kropotkin worked within the framework of 19th century natural science, but his results are just as relevant today as they were then. Moreover, the accuracy of his insights is vindicated by the latest research into complexity theory. Geoffrey West, who was a practicing particle physicist for forty years and is now distinguished professor at the Santa Fe Institute, has achieved some stunning

breakthroughs in complexity theory and the mathematical characterization of scaling of biological systems. Looking at animals big and small, from the tiny shrew to the gigantic blue whale, he and his collaborators were able to determine that all these animals obey a certain power law: their metabolic cost scales with their mass, and the scaling factor is less than one, meaning that the larger the animal, the more effective its resource use and, in essence, the more effective the animal—up to a certain optimum size for each animal. The growth of every animal is characterized by a bounded, sigmoidal curve: growth accelerates at first, then slows down, reaching a steady state as the animal matures. What Prof. West was able to discover is a small set of general laws—formulated as algebraic equations about as simple and general as the laws of Newtonian mechanics—that have been validated using data on trees, animals, colonies of bacteria—all manner of living things, and that provide amazingly precise predictions. As the size of the organism increases, its metabolic cost, heart rate and so on scales as m-1/4 while its lifetime scales as m1/4 (where m is the animal's mass). The 1/4-power comes from the three dimensions plus a third fractal dimension. This is because all living systems are fractal-like, and all networks, from the nervous system to the circulatory system, to the system of tunnels in a termite colony, exhibit fractal-like properties where a similarly organized subsystem can be found by zooming in to a smaller scale. That is, within any fractal network there are four degrees of freedom: up/down, left/ right, forward/back and zoom in/zoom out. Prof. West then turned his attention to cities, and discovered that they can be characterized by similar power laws by which they too accrue greater benefits from increased size, through increased economies of scale, up to a point, but with two very important caveats. First, whereas with living systems an increase in size causes the internal clock to slow down—the larger the size the slower the metabolism, the slower the heart rate and the longer the lifespan—with cities the effect of greater size is the opposite: the

larger the city, the larger is the metabolic cost and the energy expenditure per unit size, and the more hectic is the pace of life. To keep pace with the metabolic requirements of a growing socioeconomic system, socioeconomic time must continuously accelerate. Second, whereas all living systems exhibit bounded growth up to an optimum size, socioeconomic systems such as cities exhibit unbounded, super-exponential growth. These two differences added together imply that cities must reach a point where they must move infinitely fast in order to maintain their homeostatic equilibrium: a singularity. But it is inevitable that they reach natural limits well before they reach the singularity, and collapse. In short, large-scale socioeconomic systems are not sustainable. There is a crisp difference between natural, biological, anarchic systems that exhibit bounded growth up to a steady state and artificial, hierarchical, socioeconomic systems that show super-exponential growth almost up to a singularity and then collapse. Prof. West was able to formalize this difference using a single parameter, β. In biology, β is less than 1, resulting in bounded growth; in socioeconomics, β is greater than 1, resulting in explosive growth almost up to a singularity, followed by collapse. The key difference between a living organism and a city is that while a living organism is organized anarchically, a city is organized hierarchically. A living organism is a sustainable, egalitarian community of cooperating cells, which leverages the economies of scale of a larger size to let it move more slowly and to live longer. A socioeconomic system is organized into various classes, some more privileged than others, and is controlled through formal systems of governance based on written law and explicit chains of command. The larger it becomes, the greater becomes the relative burden of police, the courts, regulation and bureaucracy, and other systems of overt monitoring, surveillance and control. Faced with these ever increasing internal maintenance requirements, it can only achieve economies of scale by moving faster and faster, and eventually it has to collapse.

There are many conclusions that can be drawn from all this, but perhaps the most important is that collapse is not an accident; collapse is an engineered product. It is being engineered by those who think that a higher level of authority, coordination, harmonization and unity is always a net benefit at any scale. The engineers of collapse include political scientists, who seek universal peace, through ever-greater military expenditure and dominance, in place of many small-scale, limited wars, but drive the world toward world wars and a global conflagration. It includes economists who pursue stability and growth at all costs instead of allowing for natural fluctuations, including a natural levelingoff of growth at an optimum level, first creating a global economy, then driving it into a black hole of debt. It includes financiers, who seek uniformity and transparency of global finance and universal mobility of capital instead of allowing pyramid schemes to collapse as they always do and allowing productive capital to settle where it should—in communities and in human relationships based on personal trust. Last but not least, collapse is being engineered by theologians who have fixed and absolute notions of morality based on long-obsolete written texts which ignore known facts about human nature. All of these people are hopeless utopians attempting to base society on idealistic principles. Such utopian societies inevitably fail, while those that are cognizant of human weakness and are able to compensate for it can go on for ages. The greatest weakness we have in our nature is our propensity for forming hierarchies, for following formal systems of rules and laws that attempt to defy natural laws, and for listening to utopians.

___________ Originally published as “In Praise of Anarchy” at the writer’s blogsite, www. cluborlov.com. Liberties were also taken with the subject headings. Reprinted with the author’s permission.

Sk e l et o n c l o set Sk y in the

Humanity’s dirty little secret is coming out of the closet… with a vengence. It will shape all your opportunities when you graduate. It will define your life in the years to come. And if that isn’t upsetting enough, there won’t be any more BEER! A Modern Success Special Report on Climate Change By Michael S. Wilson

It used to be that talking about the weather was about as boring and apolitical as

talking about how lint moves across the floor. Today it is perhaps the most political topic of our time.

Not only that, climate change hits us at the heart of where we all live: the earth. It is an issue that goes beyond the usual dynamics of political discourse, one that surpasses all other debates and makes everything else pale in comparison. Climate change doesn’t care what you think about abortion, gun control, God or what sort of ethnic food you like. It doesn’t care if you are black or white or purple. It doesn’t care if you are a human or a shrew. It doesn’t care if you are Republican, Democrat, Libertarian or Communist. It doesn’t care if you are smart or stupid. It doesn’t care how much money you have or if you can afford nice clothes or if you’re pretty enough to make the cheerleading squad. It just doesn’t give a flying fudge about any of our paltry little needs and squabbles. Climate change will wipe away all our petty fights and arguments. It will change our mental (and physical) landscape. You will wonder why you ever cared about such things as ‘American Idol’ or how the Badgers are doing this season. Climate change is nature’s grand insurrection against us. Imagine: this is the one apolitical cause that all of humanity can get together and fight against. All of humanity. There has never been such a grand and singular threat to our survival as a species before now. Now is our chance to come together as a species to fight against this threat — a threat that we ourselves have created … and to which we daily contribute our share in everything we do.

PART I. MUCH ADO ABOUT NOTHING //

N O T H I N G A- D O N E A B O U T M U C H

Climate change is surrounded by more and more heated debate as the days pass, it seems. A kind of ‘skeptical background noise’ has filled the air. After all, if there were no debate we would have already started putting up panels and immediately stopped the extraction, production, and use of fossil fuels. Yet, these so-called ‘debates’ persist, more so in America than in any other country on the planet; almost all other countries are moving ahead in some way to fight greenhouse gas emissions and support infrastructure for drastic fossilfuel-use reduction. Yet here in our ‘democracy,’ where despite signs that upwards of 78% of the population believe that climate change is a serious problem and something needs to be done about it, the government does nothing.1 Why is this happening? How have these debates come to be seen as valid? Recently the UK newspaper, The Independent, published an article that offers direct evidence that millions of dollars are pouring into various charity coffers which are used to publish articles, run websites and tv ads, all aimed at creating ‘skepticism and controversy’ about the science of climate change.2 During further investigation into the secretive hedge fund, Donors Trust — along with their partner groups such as ALEC (American Legislative Exchange Council) who are currently attempting to force three state school systems to teach so-called climate skepticism by pushing various forms of local legislation, the same group that has attempted to force schools to teach creationism as ‘science’3) — Suzanne Goldberg of The Guardian stated how this funding works in a recent interview with Amy Goodman on the news program, DemocracyNow!: “Over the last decade or so, you see a concerted effort by wealthy conservatives, conservative billionaires, to fund up and prop up a whole series of institutions that could work to undermine the science behind climate change and also work to undermine any kind of effort to pass legislation to deal with climate change. This money is going to think tanks. It’s going to [conservative] activist groups. It’s going to so-called ‘scholars.’ It’s going to a wide range of individuals ... more than a hundred different organizations.”4

In addition to the continuing Donors debacle, there is also growing evidence

that some of this skeptic-money is coming directly from the oil industry itself, particularly ExxonMobile.5 These smoke-and-mirror efforts thwart the efforts of sincere scientists to inform the public of the “real and present dangers” confronting them. While there are a handful of honest scientists who state that the future might not be quite as bad or might be much much worse than the IPCC predictions, since all predictive models have their degree of variability as time moves forward — like predicted hurricane trajectories on the weather maps which start out narrow and, as time moves forward, their likely trajectory widens — the most vocal and visible ‘skeptics’ are sowing unnecessary debate among the public for a very simple reason: money. After all, if America and the world move away from fossil fuels, well, these unfortunate rich people making money off the oil industry might have to get their billions somewhere else. More than anything else, what these sloven oligarchs really fear is the threat of free energy for all humanity, available to everyone as it pours from a generous sky. And well they should be. Recent research by the University of Delaware has shown that the U. S. can indeed produce 99.9% of the power America needs with a network of solar and wind energy, and that this infrastructure could be built using abandoned factories

converted to the task, all of which could be accomplished in less than a decade.6 It is fairly self-evident that those with wealth and power enjoy resources and connections that allow them to easily disseminate their misinformation and outright lies throughout society, be it on Fox News or CNN or a host of websites like Climate Depot run by Marc Morano who appears quite frequently in the mainstream news. The arguments of the fossil-fuel industry and their paid-off ilk are pervasive in our culture. It is for this reason that I will begin by dismantling the positions that these fossil-fuel-billionaire-fundedskeptics try to force upon the public. These four arguments by no means represent all the arguments posed by the skeptics. However, by looking through a variety of websites and journal articles decrying climate science, I found that these four seem to represent the main ‘pillars’ of the skeptics’ arguments and are used most frequently to befuddle the public and cause unnecessary (and potentially genocidal) debate. Billionaire-Funded Smoke Screen #1: Climate Change is Natural This is actually true, as with most of the arguments you will come across against climate change. This is a common tactic of those trying to derail a host of evidence: they pick out the few pieces of data which don’t agree or which suggest

another phenomena and say, “Ha! The evidence proves it false!” As an example of this sort of reasoning, let’s say we go outside on a snowy day. The group can see that the evidence leads to the claim, “The ground is covered with snow.” Then let’s say someone in the group doesn’t like snow or doesn’t believe that snow could possible cover the ground. They find a small patch of dry ground, point to it, and say: “Look at the evidence! There is no snow on the ground!” The skeptics’ arguments are much the same. So, if we look at the evidence as a whole, we find that, yes, climate change is natural in that there have been variations of mean temperature and CO2 and aerosol concentrations over the life of the planet. In fact, at one point in history, sometime around the middle ages, there was a fairly large warming trend in Europe. All of this evidence comes from, mainly, tree ring and ice core samples. Tree rings show rates of accelerated or decelerated growth, depending on atmospheric conditions, giving scientists clues about the air’s constituency at that time. Ice cores are several-meters-long columns of ice extracted from the Arctic and Antarctic. Tiny pockets of gas like CO2 and methane are trapped within the ice’s crystaline structure. Scientists measure these gasses to get a time-line picture of the earth’s overall atmosphere. And indeed, these ice cores show variations of mean temperature and gas concentrations over the last 1,500 years or so. And just recently, scientists have extended that picture back around 11,000 years. (See ‘Serendipitous Evidence’ below.) However, this is where the skeptics stop. This is the edge of their non-snowy patch of dry earth. While it is true that temperature variations have occurred throughout earth’s history, these variations have been caused by natural phenomena, such as the general level of volcanic activity across the globe or the relative position of the earth to the sun. (More on this below.) The variations of temperature and other greenhouse gases rise and fall within a certain range and tend to do so over huge time scales of thousands of

years. In general, these fluctuations are relatively slow: relative to what we are seeing over the last one hundred years of our history. In less than a century, the temperature deviations and gas concentrations are heading off the charts and still accelerating at a rate unknown to our planet’s history.7,8 An analogy might be helpful. Think of a lie-detector test. The subject is hooked up to a bunch of sensors that read the subject’s level of stress as they are asked questions. Even the when the subject is at rest or answering obvious questions like, “Is your name Michael?” or “Are you a male?”, the needle on the graph still moves up-and-down, though gently and calmly. It is when the subject lies that their stress is revealed and the polygraph needle starts to jump all over the place. Much the same is happening to our climate. Our test subject — the earth — has been humming along nicely over the last several thousand years revealing a baseline that gradually moves up and down over long periods of time. But in just a few decades — a hiccup from the viewpoint of geological time — that picture has decidedly changed for the worse. The gradual slopes have turned into erratically shifting spikes. The planet is revealing her stress. And it looks like her stress is growing. If this, then, is true, then the question becomes: what is causing this sudden dramatic change in the planet’s stress levels? Why is she so ‘stressed out’? Billionaire-Funded Smoke Screen #2: Data on Climate Change Only Goes Back About 160 Years This, again, is true. Sort of. If you look at the graphs below you can see that around 1850 there are a lot more lines of data on the charts and graphs. That’s because this is when thermometers became widely available. Therefore, this argument appears to have some validity since the window of time that we are looking at isn’t very big. However, two problems arise. First, there seems to be an overall disconnect in the skeptics’ logic. Their first objection (‘climate change is natural’) negates

this objection. That is, if they believe climate change is natural, then there is no need to whine that the data does not reach back far enough since, in order to come to the ‘natural’ conclusion, they must rely on data that is much older than 160 years — data that comes from ice cores, geological records, and arboreal historical markers. Secondly, while it is true that the most accurate data has come to us over the last one-and-a-half centuries from global temperature readings done both on the ground and, later, via satellite, one can note by comparing the graphs (see ‘Hockey Stick Graph’, p. 50) that these recent data sets only intensify the evidence that the earth’s atmosphere is holding more and more heat leading to greater stress in the atmospheric system. Furthermore, the window of time scientists use for their conclusions gets wider everyday as more data comes in from even deeper ice cores, terrestrial samples, and exotic things like seashell composition (see ‘Serendipitous Evidence’ below). And though the window is expanding, the evidence again and again points to the same conclusion that our modern phase of climate change is nothing close to what one could call ‘normal’ or ‘average’. And so we are led back to our original question: what is causing this sudden extreme rise in temperature? Billionaire-Funded Smoke Screen #3: Climate Change is a Hoax Perpetrated by the Left One would expect that if people are going to present an argument against something, their arguments would have a sense of congruity: one argument wouldn’t continually contradict another. Strangely enough though, the funded skeptics use these contradictory arguments within a few breaths of each other, as if firing them off fast enough will give their position more credence. This third argument goes along the same contradictory lines. First, the skeptics claim that climate change is natural (because of thousands-yearold measures), then that the data is too recent, negating their first claim, then

that climate change is a hoax, which negates their first two claims. At this point, most people would see that the skeptics are not at all standing on solid ground and would walk away. However, we will entertain this notion to see if there is any validity to it; because, after all, if climate change really is a hoax and conspiracy being perpetrated upon the global populace, then tens of thousands of research scientists, journalists and everyone else (including yours truly) are wasting our time and energy on a bunch of bs. And speaking for myself personally, I really don’t like doing that. Much of this ‘hoax’ claim is based on the fact that the political left has taken up climate change as part of their environmental activism; or, if you like, environmental activism has historically been a concern of those associated with the left. Most skeptics tend to lean right9,10, so it is natural that when one’s political ‘enemy’ says something is so and so, one will reasonably tend to question the validity of that statement, given the source. This is something we all do: it is natural and normal to question the validity of statements made by those outside your group. It helps us define our values and who we are. However, it’s also important to recognize that groupthink can befuddle even the most erudite of analyses. Furthermore, it has become clear to most of the population that mainstream politics is largely the outcome of corporate interests. And those interests infest both sides of the current government.11 Hence it shouldn’t be much of a surprise that left-wing politicians are influenced by corporate values as much as the right are influenced by those same values. As a shining example we have the hypocritical actions of Al Gore, who, though he brought climate change to the forefront of popular consciousness with the movie The Day After Tomorrow (Emmerich: 2004), he recently turned around and sold his news media company to Al Jazeera which is owned by one of the oil Sheikdoms. Or we get the example of a president who tells the public during his State of the Union address that he will make climate change a top priority; and then less than two weeks later, he

plays golf with an oil magnate. These personality examples would make anyone question the validity of claims made by those from the left crying about climate change. Further, it leaves many people with the impression that these politicians are simply trying to cash-in on ‘apparent’ climate change. These are good and valid critiques of the corporate Democratic Party, which no longer really serves the interests of the people (if it ever did), but the narrow interests of the corporate business class. So you will have politicians on the left doing stupid things like decrying climate change while making money off it. And this leads many to conclude that it is a scheme or hoax to put money in the pockets of the left and ‘ruin the economy.’ But we have to step back for a moment. Politicians are the not the authors of our reality, as much as they would like to think they are. The reality is much bigger than politics, left or right. While members of the corporatist left may be cashing in on climate change wherever they can, this phenomena does not logically lead to the conclusion that climate change is not real and not man-made. Politics is politics. Climate change is a reality beyond politics, religion, and culture. Climate change is physics. Also, consider the fact that the real solutions to climate change — the consensus seeming to grow toward solar and wind energy grids — benefit everyone equally, left or right or whatever. That is, free energy is … well, free! And that certainly sounds like ‘foreign independence from oil’ to me. At any rate, while certain political or even private figures may benefit politically or may make money off the construction of the grid itself, in the end it will all be free for everyone. So the argument that this is just a plot to make money doesn’t make sense if the ultimate goal is to free the populace from paying for their dependance on limited oil reserves. A life without utility bills sounds pretty alright with me. Further, while there is no real evidence that an actual hoax is being perpetrated upon the populace by the ‘scary left’ —

at least nothing substantial that I could find in my research or those who have done extensive research on the subject12 — one can never prove that a conspiracy does not exist. This is why conspiracy theories are so mesmerizing and popular. There is just enough evidence to tantalize one into thinking that a conspiracy exists, but never enough evidence to prove that it actually does. In this case it is much the same: one must choose if they are going to look at the smattering of evidence here and there — the dry patches on the snowy ground — and be caught up in such distractions, or one can look at the massive, overwhelming evidence that shows there is something happening and it has nothing to do with conspiracies. And, again, there really is an actual hoax (I prefer the term ‘misinformation campaign’) being perpetrated upon the populace for which there is quite a bit of evidence. For more on this topic, check out the movie Everything’s Cool (Gold: 2007. everythingscool.org), which shows the various attitudes of Americans toward climate change (from positive to negative to outright bizarre), and how many of those attitudes have entered the populace through large-scale media campaigns, while also introducing us to some of the men who help write the legislation making action on climate change nearly impossible. Billionaire-Funded Smoke Screen #4: Most Meteorologists Don’t Believe In Human-Made Climate Change This is an argument used to show that, really, there are not as many people that believe in climate change as we are told — that, to the contrary, a lot of ‘experts’ don’t even believe in climate change! So how can it be true? The argument seems to stem from certain polls and other indicators, primarily a survey which shows that nearly 7 out of 10 television meteorologists don’t believe in climate change as man-made (or some variation on that belief).13 However, one must understand what this study is saying. They are talking about television personalities, people who stand in front of the t.v. and tell us what the weather will be like for the next few days. For in reality the majority of television

‘meteorologists’ don’t know squat about climate science, and sometimes very little about meteorology. According to a recent article by Katherine Bagley of Inside Climate News, many of the local and national ‘meteorologists’ we see are not much more than … journalists.14 In the very worst scenarios, they are simply actors paid to read a teleprompter. Bagley goes on to write that the wide majority of television meteorologists don’t have anything close to a degree in meteorology. And while many must take a short week-long course on general meteorological methods, this is nothing like dedicating years and years of one’s life to research on these topics. In short, television meteorologists are rarely experts on these subjects. The minority that are agree with the science. In fact, world-wide, if we look at the consensus among climate scientists and meteorologists who are actively researching the subject, we find that 97% of them agree that climate change is occurring and that this is due to humans burning fossil fuels and releasing other greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere.15 In short, the experts couldn’t agree more. Moving Forward … Towards A 2°C Tipping Point There are many ways to show how climate change is affecting us and what sorts of forces (scientists call them “engines”) are causing these changes. I will here focus on just a few of them. I strongly urge the reader to carry out their own research. Around six months ago, Bill McKibben came out with an article in Rolling Stone entitled “Global Warming’s Terrifying New Math”.16 From figures and research taken from a variety of scientists, including James Hansen of NASA’s Goddard Institute who famously brought global warming to the attention of congress in the late ‘80s, McKibben attempted to translate a lot of the science-speak into some simple figures the general public could clearly understand as warning signs of a looming tipping point — a point in the future in which climate change will be

When I turn on a lightbulb, I don’t think, Well here I go burning fossil fuels again.

largely irreversible for tens of thousands of years. The article’s conclusion, in short, was that human life will likely not survive if we surpass this tipping point. The article went viral. McKibben noted that we’ve already surpassed a 1ºC increase in planet-wide warming. Some of the consequences of just this one degree increase are such phenomena as half the arctic icecap melting away this summer17; or that seawater is now 30% more acidic than it was just thirty years ago, leading to such phenomena as sea-snail shells dissolving and sea level rise18; there is a greater amount of warm air in the upper atmosphere which has led to greater amounts of humidity being trapped in the atmosphere, a large factor in creating extremes of drought and flooding (and less ‘normal’ rainfall)19; and Superstorm Sandy has blown away almost all of the previous record-setting data for hurricanes since record-keeping began.20 The tipping point idea comes from the fact that climate change is a result of a variety of engines that are pressuring the atmosphere into unstable cycles and phenomena. These engines are highly entangled and one engine often creates greater effects in another, which feeds more energy into the first engine, and so on, so that a feedback-loop of increasing ‘engine power’ is created. One such feedback loop that is currently happening is the melting of permafrost exposed to sunlight from receding glaciers. The permafrost has huge amounts of CO2 trapped inside of it. Upon release, it will of course lead to an acceleration of global warming. The accelerated warming will melt more ice sheets, exposing even more permafrost, releasing more CO2, which leads to an even greater acceleration of warming trends.

These feedback loops become stronger as we continue to blow fossil-fuels into the atmosphere. At some point — somewhere around a 2ºC increase in average global surface temperatures — scientists expect the atmosphere to become overburdened by these various pressures. The models reveal that this will cause a runaway cascade of atmospheric and biospheric collapses.21 Much as there is a point in which an avalanche becomes slightly unstable, begins moving just a few inches, and then in the next instant becomes a white world of deadly force, so will the effects be if we reach this tipping point. For more information on how these engines work and how they are entangled and lead to biospheric collapse, I encourage you to review Debora MacKenzie’s article, “Boom And Doom: Revisiting Prophecies Of Collapse” in New Scientist (January 2012) where she reviews the literature in the 1970s landmark work, Limits To Growth, which had already predicted major engine interference and biospheric collapse. That means the collapse not only of general infrastructure like the ability to produce life-saving medicines, but most importantly it means the collapse of agriculture. This is how one comes to the conclusion that there won’t be any more beer — if the climate continues to go berserk, our crops will die: and it’s really hard to make beer without any wheat or hops or barley. Also helpful is the article, “Evidence Of An Impending Tipping Point for Earth” in Science Daily (6 June 2012), which sites the work of twentytwo international scientists who review several models and research to come to a ‘statistically significant’ conclusion that, unless something is done to completely halt greenhouse gas emissions, humanity is on the path to extinction.

to verify the data, and as they continued to add more data and compare that to older data sets — the evidence became quite convincing that the world is warming. And rapidly. As you can see, in a way that’s much more dramatic and accelerated than what we’ve seen over the past fifteen hundred years.”

Cambridge University Press

Though it was very clear that the rapid upward trend in warming began to emerge right around the time of the industrial revolution, it seemed to me that this line of reasoning might not be convincing enough to show that humans were causing this current wave of climate change. “Also,” I asked Dr. Lazzara, “how do we know the spike won’t just drop back? What shows us that this trend will continue and that it is directly linked to human activity?”

Beating Us With A Hockey Stick Here we begin to breakdown how scientists know that climate change is caused by humans extracting fossil fuels from the ground and spraying them into the air, not by some other natural phenomenon. Our first example of data which shows human causation is the infamous ‘hockey stick graph.’ In order to get some clarification on what this graph is revealing, I asked Dr. Mathew Lazzara of the Space Science and Engineering Center at the University of Wisconsin Madison to help me explain it. “Essentially,” he told me, “these graphs show the data points of all the temperature measurements taken around the globe, starting on the ground

in the 1850s, and later sets of data where introduced as we gained the ability to send up weather balloons and satellites and attain greater accuracy. It shows how the temperature has changed from the average, which is the 0 line on the graph. As we move closer to the present, all those temperature data sets, represented by the various lines on the graphs, are averaged out to give us the dark black line you see. Overall, one can see that the temperature is rising upward away from the average.” “Now, this graph has been met with some controversy. For example, why is the ‘average’ temperature set where it is? Also critics pointed out that the data only goes back about fifteen hundred years. But in general — and as Dr. Michael Mann and Dr. S. Solomon as well as a many other scientists worked

Dr. Lazzara became very animated and began flipping through a book he had brought with him. “I use this in my classes,” he explained. The book was entitled, Dire Predictions: Understanding Global Warming: The Illustrated Guide to the Findings of the IPCC, by Dr. Michael Mann and Dr. Lee R. Kump (Prentice Hall/DK Publishing, July 2008). Dr. Mann is the same gentleman who first generated the much-debated hockey stick graph we were discussing. The book was filled with bright color photograph montages that graphically represented the points made in the IPCC report. “And remember that the IPCC report,” he said, “is considered by many scientists to be a very conservative estimation of what is happening, that the actual situation is much worse.” He stopped on a page which showed several graphs. “These graphs show that the ratio of carbon-13 isotopes to carbon-12 in the atmosphere is dropping. This is because plants take up more carbon-12 into their tissues than carbon-13. Hence, in dead plant matter underground, that is, fossil fuels, we find a very low c-13 to c-12 ratio.” He paused for a moment. “In the atmosphere, we have noted that the ratio of c-13 to c-12 is dropping, since we are putting more and more of the low-ratio fossil fuel carbon signature into the air; a ratio which used to be relatively high when that dead plant matter was still in the

Representation of a copyrighted graph in Dire Predictions (DK Publishing).

Carbon Dioxide (ppm)

350

300

250 10000 7500 Years Before Present

5000

ground before the industrial revolution took hold.”22 He began rapidly flipping back and forth through the book again. He stopped on a page that showed three small graphs (one shown above; the other two graphs showing methane and nitrous oxide look almost identical). He beamed a bit as he said, “Further, you can see this fairly dramatic representation of how the main greenhouse gasses have looked for the majority of the past millennia. This really shows, at least to me, how we are the cause of this phenomena, that it is not something natural.” Serendipitous Evidence The next day as I wrote up some of Dr. Lazzara’s comments and considered the various things he had told me, I felt quite secure that these arguments would convince most readers that humans are, indeed, the causers of global climate change. That it is we who are creating the stressors on our ‘earth subject’. And yet … something was still troubling at me. I thought about some of my friends and family who are very hardnosed about their beliefs, especially when it comes to human-induced climate change. I wondered if they would consider these arguments convincing enough As I slogged about doing further research, I came across an article that was published on March 8th in Science entitled, “A Reconstruction of Regional and Global Temperature for the Past 11,300 Years”.23 (The report was widely

2500

0 (2005)

circulated and cited in the mainstream press such as The New York Times.) A team of researchers from Harvard and Oregon put together a large set of data from a wide variety of ice cores as well as crossreferencing those against the chemical and physical structures of “fossils from ocean sediment cores and terrestrial archives.”24 By comparing the data, they felt confident enough to lengthen the hockey stick another 10,000 years or so. According to the study, the data reveals that the earth has recently passed through a long period of general warmth during the Holocene Period, and which began to decline around 5,000 B.C. The article lends credence to the theory that what really determines our global average temperature is our position relative to the sun, known as Milankovic Cycles.25 Hence, the period of warming shown in the graph corresponds directly to the

time the earth was closer to the sun, with some minor variations. However, the fact of the matter is that we have begun to move away from the sun, as the graph shows just before the industrial age spike. And since we are moving away from the sun, we should be in a global cooling phase, not a warming phase. The report stated that our recent warming trends are exceedingly rapid when looked at over huge geological timescales, and are not explicable in any way by natural phenomena; that something outside of naturally-produced phenomena are pushing earth to extremes. Returning to our analogy … it is fairly clear that we are significantly stressing out our test subject by exposing it to more and more fossil fuel emissions. In our analogy, the testors have worked to find out if these stressors might be due to natural factors such as diet, drug or alcohol abuse or what-have-you. However, testors have made sure that the subject suffers from none of these imbalances. The only possible solution to the subject’s stressed responses is that they are caused by the very things the testers are doing directly to the subject. In effect, we are pushing and pushing and pushing our ‘earth subject’ to levels of stress never-before seen. Scientists are trying to let us know that soon the subject will have a complete nervous breakdown and go schizo on us unless we stop bugging it by blowing fossil fuels in its face.

Oregon State University; Harvard University

Carbon Dioxide 400

PART II. C O N F E S S I O N S O F A D A I LY S M O K E S T A C K U S E R

NASA

Having shown some fairly incontrovertible evidence that humancreated greenhouse gas emissions are behind current climate change phenomena, there are still other problems to confront. One such problem is the fact that greenhouse gasses are invisible. This seems like an intellectually dull statement, but it presents a psychological difficulty: because the gasses are building up invisibly, we literally can’t ‘see’ a threat coming from anywhere — so why worry? But like radiation or x-rays, greenhouse gasses are very real and their cumulative effects are very deadly.

NASA has done much to change that through their program called “The Vulcan Project.” If you watch the videos online (see images here), you can easily see the CO2 gasses billowing into the sky and blowing eastward. It is a stunning visualization of the enormous densities of CO2 disgorged into the air every single day. Keep in mind, too, that this image does not represent all greenhouse gasses, such as methane and nitrous oxide. So where, really, do these gasses come from? Factories and refineries, sure. Cars, sure. But how does all that play out in our daily life? How do I have any connection to that factory? That refinery? And I’m only one person. It’s not like I’m using a large fleet of cars and planes everyday. Or am I? In fact, almost every single action you and I make has some sort of greenhouse gas emissions impact. I don’t say this to make the reader feel overwhelmed or guilty, only to enforce the idea of how entangled we are to our biosphere. We are a society that has largely mythologized nature. By this I mean that nature has become abstracted and marginalized in the modern world, a thing ‘out there’ that has very little to do with me here in the city, in this stupid traffic, at my dumb

Images from NASA’s “Vulcan Project”. Liquid-like areas are CO2 gasses moving generally ENE. Images are shown at around 6:00pm EST in early May (upper) and late August (lower).

job. You’d think taking a shower, having breakfast, grilling up some sausages, putting on some clothes, and maybe later having a beer wouldn’t effect the planet much. But it does. And how. Before continuing, one more note. Obviously, we make choices from various necessities. Many times price is a necessity. Or time. Or availability. Or ease. There are many pressures. It is also clear that we are a culture drowning in advertising since many of us are exposed to over 3,000 ads/day, and advertising presents limited choices and even less information about what those choices may mean to the environment or the people that have to manufacture or extract those products.26 We are not told, for example, that our jeans were made in some terrible window-less factory by some half-starved teenager in some faroff place called Indonesia; instead we get to see a beautiful starving model having fun and living care-free in her new jeans. When we turn on a light, we don’t think, “Well here I go burning fossil fuels again,” since most of our electricity comes from burning coal and natural gas;27 instead we are told GE ‘brings good things to life,’ or that electricity isn’t really ‘dirty energy.’ When we watch commercials for shiny new cars — whether hybrids or Hummers — we get to see them race around a sunset-lit track, or help us out of a dangerous (or even comic!) situation;

we aren’t presented with long panoramic vistas of treeless strip-mines (the world’s largest is being proposed for right here in northern Wisconsin), where forests and animals and everything natural is simply wiped out; nor are we shown the amount of fossil fuels we have to burn to extract the iron ore to make the cars, nor the amount we have to burn further to smelt that ore, nor the further amount we have to burn while actually manufacturing the darn thing, nor the further further amount we have to burn to get them to your local car dealership. All in order to burn more fossil fuels with that very vehicle. It is obvious our media and print culture doesn’t present us with the full picture. The pie chart on the next page presents a general breakdown of greenhouse gas emissions as percentages from each sector as reported by the EPA. This breakdown is for the U. S. only, so one must keep in mind that much more energy is spent overseas where the mines are and where much of the manufacturing for U. S. products often happens. On any typical day, each of us personally burn fossil fuels from all of those sectors in addition to industry sectors outside the U. S.. So let’s look at all this from ground level and see how we each get our piece of the pie -- or rather, help make it.

So you wake up to your alarm, possibly a cell or smart-phone. Smart phones and cells and alarm clocks all need electricity to run or charge. They are made of components that come from mining, smelting, and manufacturing which was probably done over-seas. We’ve only just woken up. And already we are polluting. Next we hit the shower. The hot water is heated by either electricity or natural gas, both of which release CO2 and methane into the atmosphere. As you can see from the chart ‘How Much Electricity Do Applieances Use?’, hot water use is one the single largest contributors to greenhouse gasses inside homes and businesses (other than straight-up burning fire wood). Heating up water, no matter how it’s done, takes a lot of energy. Think of how much hot water we each daily use when we take long leisurely showers, or when we fill cavernous washing machines with gallons and gallons and gallons of emissions-intensive hot water. Think of how big that water boiler is in our basement and how much energy it takes to keep all that water hot and ready for your next shower or to be pumped into your dishwasher. Before it all goes down the drain.

is terribly emissions-intensive — the nitrous fertilizes used for any cotton or natural fibers release nitrous oxide, and there is obvious gasoline use from the farm machinery, from transport of the fiber to a manufacturing plant (probably overseas) where more fossil fuels are used to run the machines and keep the lights burning, and then more fossil fuels are burned when the product is brought back to the States and shipped off to your local store. Now let’s brush those teeth. Oops. More petroleum products in the tooth paste, not to mention all the highenergy-processing of various natural and synthetic chemicals as well as the manufacture of the tube the paste goes in. And one must consider how much energy was used to get all those chemicals to the place where they all get blended into paste. And the amount of energy to package and label it, and transport it to the thousands of stores around the country. All this. And you haven’t even had breakfast yet. You haven’t even gotten to your car. And we haven’t even talked about how many appliances you have on right this very moment: lights, computers, speakers, fans, refrigerators, televisions, 24/7 wi-fi ports, smart phones, and so on. Four of those things are turned on in my own apartment as I write this. It is a maddening mess, at

US EPA

Greenhouse Gas Emissions Are My New Shadow

least for those of us wishing to reduce our emissions output. And extremely over-taxing to consider every single one of our actions. One may begin to ask why their life is filled, quite literally, with so much fossil fuel. We rub fossil fuel into our skin, swallow it in vitamin and supplement capsules, consume it in microwave and frozen dinners, brush our teeth with it, drive on its combustion … Petroleum is infused into our very culture and way of life. The problem is not so much the choices that we make; it is more that we now have such limited choice when it comes to not assisting in the destruction of the planet. It is a problem at the very core of our cultural infrastructure. How did we get into such a mess?

Another similar consideration is when you heat or cool your apartment or house. You are probably using electricity and/or natural gas for the hear or a/c. Air conditioning, in particular, is quite emissions-intensive as it uses massive amounts of electricity to compress the air, and there is also the usual leakage of greenhouse gas-containing coolants. Also of very high energy use (and therefore greater emissions output) are the clothes dryer, refrigerator/freezer, television, and desktop computer.

Ok, so we get out of the shower. Use a towel. The towel probably has synthetic fibers which were made with petroleum (see ‘A Few Things Made With Gas’, next page).28 The process to make the towels

US DOE

The smokestacks are building up all around us.

A FEW THINGS MADE WITH

GAS

About half of each barrel of crude oil is used to make things like:

Perfumes Mascara Trash Bags Aspirin Shaving cream Toothpaste Soap Tampons Ammonia Soft contacts Vaseline Pillows Balloons Body lotion Sunscreen Shampoo Conditioner Hair gel Hair Spray Towels Clothing Fertilizers Deoderant Carpet Personal lubricants Antihistamines Shower curtains Breath mints Lipstick Cell and smart phones Household cleaners Paint Yarn Footballs Incecticides

From Ranken Energy (www.ranken-energy.com). This is only a partial listing of the thousands of products made with petroleum.

Kicking the Smokestack Habit Let’s put that pernicious question aside for now and look at a few things we can do to effect positive change. The best thing to do when dealing with something as overwhelming as negotiating your carbon footprint in a culture where every step you take only makes that footprint bigger is to break the problem up into smaller, manageable parts. For example, we can develop small habits like turning off extra lights around the apartment, dorm or fraternity, as ways of making a difference. I started really thinking about my own electricity use when I saw people in the office working with most of their lights turned off. There was plenty of natural light, enough to see by, and those who needed to read paperwork more closely had tiny desk lamps. They didn’t need to make mention of their actions, they just did it. These wordless and simple actions deeply impacted me. Now I too have begun turning off lights at the office in rooms and hallways that are not being used. I like to think of it as shutting down little coal-burning smokestacks everywhere I go. Such a small and seemingly insignificant habit can make a huge impact when practiced daily, not to mention that it will make an impression on people.

Another small way to reduce energy consumption is asking yourself: Do your really need to be online all the time, especially now that smart phones allow us that capability? Keep in mind that the web isn’t magical, it is made of infrastructure: wires and satellites and computer terminals, all of which have to hum along and use up more energy every time you go to a new website page. Every time you check your friends’ Facebook updates. Every time you use Google and other search engines. And all that infrastructure has to be maintained with new metals mined from far-away places and transported thousands of miles to be made in a factory where it’s shipped to another factory, etc. It might be good to give yourself a break from going online. The world won’t stop and your friends won’t abandon you if you do. I promise. Also get informed about how purchasing brand new products every time you shop just feeds the environmental stressors. When you buy previously-used goods, it completely wipes out the miningprocessing-transportation-manufacture chain that is invested within every single new product we purchase. Do you really need to go buy a new pair of jeans or jewelry or whatever when you could get a pair of jeans at a second-hand or charity shop, get your jewelry from the pawn? This line of thinking goes for appliances, smart phones, stereo systems, and other stuff as well. (OK — maybe not underwear.) Anytime you can get it

used, or have someone repair something like your computer or toaster, instead of trashing it and getting a new one, you’ve made a huge difference. Besides: there exists the horrifying possibility that you actually don’t need that new gadget or pant style at all (especially if you stop watching so many commercials). Further, learn about how the foods you eat can have such a large impact on climate change. For example, meat has a devastating ecological impact. Globally all livestock, including pork and poultry, contribute to about 9% of total carbon dioxide emissions, 37% of methane emissions and 65% of nitrous oxide emissions.29 And that’s just from the livestock themselves. The amount of energy we use to maintain livestock, the amount of grain we have to grow in order to feed them (1 pound of beef requires 6-20 pounds of grain),30 the amount of energy used to grow and distribute that grain, the energy we use for processing and refrigeration, and again transport … well, you can see that energy-investmentchain starts to loop on multiple levels and the smokestack hidden inside our steak gets bigger and bigger. So maybe eat a little less meat. Or go vegan. At the very least, try to eat organic and local food. The reason organics are important is not so much the nutrition benefits, but the ecological benefits. Organics use very low-energy farming methods such as spreading compost as a natural, recycled fertilizer instead of applying heavy fertilizer salts that can damage the soil and lead to various nasty things like leaching and run-off into drinking water and fish stocks; not to mention the use, again, of all the fossil fuels and electricity to make those non-organic fertilizers. And organic farmers don’t make use of traditional pesticides, another destructive and energy-intensive product used in high-density farming. Another high-energy example is the gym. Gyms are just huge smokestacks in the guise of clean and scrubbed workout rooms. Think about how much energy was used to construct all the workout machines made of iron and steel and foam rubber, how much coal was burned to bring those machines to the gym, the energy the machines consume when you use them, not to mention the heated pool and Jacuzzi which, as we have seen,

have huge energy-consumption needs. Your great grand-children will thank you for jogging outside and doing pushups at home instead of driving to the smokestack gym. Hopefully, one can see a pattern emerging. When you think about your everyday choices, from eating to clothing to getting to work (and what you do while you are there), go with products and choices which are less emissionsintensive, which have a smaller smokestack. Instead of eating highly processed food and food products (think of those big factories and the energy they use to make the food, the refrigeration, chemicals, packaging, and on and on), try learning to cook using natural foods with unusual names like ‘potato’ and ‘bean’ and ‘carrot’ and ‘garlic’. If

you’re in a hurry, at least try to go for the product of least harm, like the frozen pizza with just cheese instead of the one with seventeen kinds of meat. Better yet, stay away from the frozen food section all together. And make ordering to-go and delivery a thing of the past as the emissions profile for that habit is massive. In general, simply do less things that require energy external to your own. Like reading a book instead of watching t.v. (no, reading a book on your Kindle doesn’t count), or playing chess and other card and board games with friends instead of gaming online or playing video games. Dry your clothes in the sunlight instead of an electric dryer that burns tons of electricity. Hand-wash dishes and clothes instead of using machines, and do so using less hot water. Stop putting

things in plastic or paper bags when you shop, bring your own instead. Stop using Zip-Locs and plasticware for food storage. Besides, the fossil fuel synthetics from plastic containers leach into food and wait there for us to consume them. Until we seek as a human culture to change the ways we produce and use the billions of products and services in our lives that are completely invested in fossil fuels, we will have to be satisfied with knowing that we are doing what little we individually can to make a difference. In the meantime, it might behoove us to work toward changing that cultural infrastructure. The next section will introduce you to a few ways that you can do so.

In [the] future, historians (if there are any) will look back on this curious spectacle taking shape in the early 21st century. For the first time in human history, humans are facing the significant prospect of severe calamity as a result of their actions – actions that are battering our prospects of decent survival. Those historians will observe that the richest and most powerful country in history, which enjoys incomparable advantages, is leading the effort to intensify the likely disaster. Leading the effort to preserve conditions in which our immediate descendants might have a decent life are the so-called “primitive” societies: First Nations, tribal, indigenous, aboriginal. The countries with large and influential indigenous populations are well in the lead in seeking to preserve the planet. The countries that have driven indigenous populations to extinction or extreme marginalization are racing toward destruction. Thus Ecuador, with its large indigenous population, is seeking aid from the rich countries to allow it to keep its substantial oil reserves underground, where they should be. Meanwhile the U.S. and Canada are seeking to burn fossil fuels, including the extremely dangerous Canadian tar sands, and to do so as quickly and fully as possible, while they hail the wonders of a century of (largely meaningless) energy independence without a side glance at what the world might look like after this extravagant commitment to self-destruction. This observation generalizes: throughout the world, indigenous societies are struggling to protect what they sometimes call “the rights of nature,” while the civilized and sophisticated scoff at this silliness.

— Noam Chomsky, Alternet.org, 5 March 2013 55

PART III. S T R AT E G I C P O S I T I O N I N G

Obviously our complete way of life and every nook and cranny of our culture has been infiltrated with fossil fuels in one form or another. But there are ways to tackle this issue and help change the cultural infrastructure. And we have always been a country proud of our ability to make things happen using our innovation and ingenuity. And we should tap into some of that pride to help us deal with this issue.

But personal pride isn’t enough. We will also require the humble ability to reach out to others for assistance. This project is too big for any one person, no matter how much they might be able to extract themselves from the fossil fuel culture. It will take some courage and perspectiveshifting about everything from how we accomplish our daily tasks to how we look upon one another (as colleagues and helpful equals with differing opinions, instead of strangers of whom we should be wary). Here are a few examples of direct ways you can help to “git ‘er done.” Obviously your level of comfort will determine some of the ways you approach this. But don’t completely trust in your comfort level. You will have to push the envelope a bit, as we all do when we attempt or start something new and unique. For most people, the first step involves simply going to a meeting where people are talking about these issues and working on ways to alter society’s ideas about fossil fuels. 1. Citizen’s Climate Lobby // The Carbon Tax Method Citizen’s Climate Lobby (cclmadison. org) is a national organization with a local Madison chapter that has monthly meetings which educate people about the science of climate change, it’s potential effects, and so on. Each meeting features a guest speaker who is an authority on some aspect of climate change. After the talk, there is a short discussion and the group uses ‘laser talks’ — short, succinct paragraphs — to train people on how to talk to their friends and colleagues and, yes, even

their congresspersons about climate change. Members practice the talks with each other and then discuss various methods to disseminate the information. Sometimes people make direct phone calls to their congressperson. Sometimes they will send a letter. Others will write to the editor of various newspapers and television stations explaining why political action is desperately needed to halt climate change. In general, the group is pushing for legislation that will enact a carbon tax — a fee on emitting greenhouse gasses. This will include everything from turning on your electrical appliances to how much you drive and fly. But the tax for the general population will stay extremely low. The idea is to force the large industrial polluters to move away from that behavior as it will be very costly to them and to equate ecological costs with an economic cost. Because right now, only nature is paying the taxes and costburdens for pollution.

Think you don’t have a voice? Actually you have about ONE THOUSAND. Legislators do listen to their constituency. Many congress persons and senators have been quoted as saying that for every letter or call they get, they assume about 1,000 people feel the same way. CALL. EMAIL. TWEET. Because you can make a difference. Multiplied by a thousand.

2. 350 // The Divestment Method 350, and it’s fast-growing local Madison chapter (350madison.org), recently spearheaded the initiative to gather busloads of people from around the country and from various environmental action groups to send them to Washington D. C. in order to protest the Keystone Pipeline. 350, in unanimous consensus with hundreds of other action groups and organizations,36 as well as the backing of large numbers of scientists, believe that if the Keystone Pipeline is built and the Canadian tar sands are piped to Texas for refining, it’s game over for the climate and everything we know on earth.

While some 350-members and persons from other groups have begun direct resistance to the pipeline by chaining themselves to it or disrupting the investors’ meetings of TransCanada, builder of the pipeline, the group largely focuses on the idea of divestment as a method of moving the country away from fossil fuel use. Historically, we know divestment works. It was used in the 1980s to help end apartheid. Investors who held stocks in South African companies or companies working there — like Coke — were told that consumers and other lenders would stop putting money into their coffers as long as they were involved

// A Militant Word \\ As of 2006, the DoD was the largest single consumer of energy in the United States.31 The military daily consumes fossil fuels at a rate rivaling entire nation-states like Sweden and Syria.32 However, unlike the rest of the federal government, the military is already investing in green technologies. According to an article in New Scientist, the military realizes that relying on a dwindling fossil-fuel stock is counter-productive and manifests an “Achilles' heal” in their defense strategy since units would be extremely vulnerable without their constant fossil fuel supply. 33 The first question one might want to ask after reading these facts is: How come the military gets it and our government doesn’t? It’s a very good question. It’s a question that needs to be put in front of every stock broker and investor, every CEO and small business owner. If the military and DoD — one of the most conservative and powerful industries we have — understand that they need to move away from fossil fuels, why is it so hard for us to understand that we, too, have an Achilles’ heal, one that will certainly make us topple if we keep running on it the way we are? Another question is raised as well from reviewing this. Why is our military so huge? Do we need all those bases out there around the world “protecting our interests”? Because after all, it’s not our interests they are protecting, it’s the interests of large multi-nationals and those in power, those who want to continue obliterating landscapes in order to harvest more resources for their factories at the expense of the environment and the local population, a population which must suffer the terrible consequences of ‘American interests’ or face the even more terrible consequences of another U. S. military incursion and occupation (which we call “military presence to assure security,” or even more oddly, “spreading democracy”). Certainly we have to help defend our embassies and ambassadors. Sure we are after “terrorists” (the definition of which has not ever been made clear to us and is growing to encompass more and more of the international and domestic population, including you and I). But a military that overwhelmingly covers the earth and pumps out emissions at nearly the daily rate of the entire population of several New York Cities seems like a non-sustainable effort if there ever was one. One must also keep in mind that we, the citizens of the United States, are the ones paying for the military to do all these things and burn emissions through the roof, as it were. Of our income taxes that we pay to the government, over fifty percent goes directly to the military in one form or another.34 Education get’s about fifteen percent of all distributed funds. Health care around the same. You can see where our priorities lie. Obviously it’s more important for us to kill and maim tens of thousands of innocent people around the world, to torture civilians, to let our soldiers go on “civilian hunts,”35 to decimate other’s private and public property including their places of heritage … all these things are more important to us than making sure our kids can go to college and our sick are taken care of. Consider this: what need would we have for such a large, barbarous military, if we all got our energy freely from the air? That would certainly cut back on the number of wars we’d “have to” wage in order to gain access to oil reserves, as we have done so many times before from Iraq to Yemen to Afghanistan. We could bring almost all our troops home. Instead of the Permanent-War-America we now have, we could have a taste of what a Peace-TimeAmerica is like, something we haven’t known since … well pretty much all two hundred years of our proud history. To help change this situation, consider supporting anti-war efforts like Veterans for Peace or the Madison Area Peace Coalition; also helpful is boycotting electronics and other products made by military contractors like Honeywell, GE and Lockheed-Martin. 57

in South Africa. Locally, 350-Madison and it’s UW student chapter are working hard to encourage the UW Foundation to stop investing in companies that process or extract fossil fuels. The idea is to inform the UW (and eventually other institutions) that donations and funding will be withheld until the Foundation changes their portfolio to one that is ecologically sound and is congruent with the UW’s own stated mission: The primary purpose of the University of Wisconsin-Madison is to … discover, examine critically, preserve and transmit the knowledge, wisdom and values that will help ensure the survival of this and future generations and improve the quality of life for all. (Italics mine.)

It is illogical, then, for the UW to invest in companies which produce fossil fuels since doing so will undermine it’s own raison d’être, leading to questions about the University’s legitimacy as an institution. 3. Deep Green Ecology // The Direct Resistance Method For those of you ready for a lot more excitement, I give you Deep Green Resistance movement (deepgreenresistancewisconsin. org). This movement comes out of a large number of ideas and concepts about the environment, nature, and our interactions with them. These concepts are generally organized under the rubric ‘Deep Green Ecology.’ The concept separates itself from mainstream environmentalism in three distinct ways: it believes that living beings have inherent worth irregardless of their utility to humans; that the current environmental movement is largely ineffective; and it calls for direct and immediate action to

stop ecological decimation by any and all means necessary. Further, it is the Deep Greens’ belief that the land in the United States belongs to the indigenous groups here who are currently colonized by western Europeans. Hence, Deep Greens have a strong connection to indigenous groups who are working to decolonize land-bases and emancipate them from industrialist domination. This often takes the form of occupying areas of forest land, digging deep trenches across logging roads, tree-top camping, putting sugar in the tanks of bulldozers, dismantling logging infrastructure, and a whole list of creative tactics to halt any and all destruction of nature. Obviously, this group is very controversial, even with many liberal greens. Some peaceniks decry the group’s methods which they see as violent. Further, it is many peoples’ contention that the groups aligned with Deep Ecology commit acts of terrorism (certainly vandalism, by today’s legal definitions) and are therefore a domestic terrorist group and should be treated as such. For example, the group Earth First! has been known to follow some of the Deep Ecology ideas and was severely criticized by many environmentalists when certain EF members began setting U. S. Forestry buildings on fire ... before moving on to local logging companies’ on-site equipment and offices. No one was ever hurt in any of the arson incidents, and it should be kept in mind that these acts were committed by a small circle of people within the larger group who had reservations about committing such acts. The award-winning documentary,

If A Tree Falls (Curry: 2011. www. ifatreefallsfilm.com), details the events leading to the arsons and the lives and opinions of several of the actors who took part, most of whom are now in jail. Another documentary about Deep Green Resistance is the underground film, End:Civ — Resist or Die (Lopez: 2010. www.submedia.tv/endciv-2011). It lays out in some detail the reasoning for the groups’ ideas. The film is narrated by Derrick Jensen (see essay below) who is considered the ‘leader’ of the movement, though he rigorously denies this since the movement is technically leaderless. Both movies can be watched for free online. While many may disagree with the particular tactics of the group, their ideas are nonetheless worth pursuing as they tend to follow a very graceful and self-evident logic. While it is true that some people in the group see ‘violent acts’ as the only meaningful way to engage in resistance, it is also true that many many others are participating in non-violent acts, such as chaining themselves to intensive tree-harvesting equipment. The true value of this ‘group of ideas’ is that Deep Green Ecology immediately links one’s self to nature, which helps one gain cognizance of the interactions one constantly has with their natural surrounds. And if one closely follows the logic of these ideas while remaining critically aware, one can soon understand an indigenous woman’s words when she was asked how she could partake in vandalism and the destruction of industrial infrastructure: “They are raping our mother. What would you do if your mother was being raped?”

M o d e r n S u c c e ss For Reals.

To Live, Or Not To Live by Derrick Jensen

HAVE YOU EVER NOTICED how many excuses we all find to not act in defense of the planet? Sure, we all have errands to run and e-mails to answer and we all need down time and the problems are so big and [insert your best excuse here]. But lately I’ve been encountering a particularly frustrating excuse that a lot of people seem to be giving for not acting: they say it’s too late, that various tipping points have been reached in terms of runaway global warming, and that especially because of the lag time between carbon emissions and increased temperature, we’re already doomed, so what’s the point of fighting back? This faux-tragedian posturing infuriates me. What infuriates me even more is that this reasoning has become so familiar. I encounter it all the time. Literally the moment I finished typing the above — and I’m not making this up — I received an e-mail that said, “Solutions are inadequate, futile, and too late. I wish people would admit this, rather than scramble for last ditch efforts. . . . Just as people speak of peak oil and peak civilization, we’re peak life. Three billion years of cyanobacteria, 500 million years of increasingly complex life forms, and a cherry topping of too-intelligent human beings. Humans are demonstrating that intelligent life is unsustainable, perhaps triggering the downward slope of life complexity and returning the planet to its microbial past.” And as I finished pasting that quote into this column I received yet another such e-mail. The notion that humans are the peak form of life (and everyone else is just background) leads to a sense of entitlement, which leads to atrocities against those who (or, in this formulation, that) are seen as less-than-peak forms of life. And anyway, what kind of peak life form would knowingly degrade its landbase and then throw up its hands when action is most needed to counteract the destruction? I’m not convinced that humans are particularly more intelligent than parrots, octopi, salmon, trees, rivers, stones, and so on, but even if you did believe that humans were more intelligent, it wouldn’t alter the fact that the Tolowa Indians lived where I live for 12,500 years and did so without destroying the place. I’d hate to try to make the argument that the Tolowa didn’t destroy the land because they weren’t intelligent enough to do so. But there’s another point I want to make here, which has to do with the tragic posturing. In his book The Comedy of Survival, Joseph Meeker points out that human cultures through the ages have created comedies, but only civilization has created the genre of the tragedy. In fact, you could easily say that tragedy is this culture’s tragic flaw. A tragic flaw, you probably recall, is a flaw in the protagonist’s character that brings him or her to ruin. The flaw could be indecision, hubris, jealousy, etc. The point is that the character is unable or unwilling to examine and overcome this flaw, and, in my perspective at least, it is this, and not the flaw itself, that leads to the downfall. Tragedies presume inevitability, which presumes an inability to choose. As one definition puts it, “Tragic behavior assumes change is not possible and will defend this assumption to the death.”

I’ve always found classic tragedies such as Hamlet or Othello to be more frustrating than cathartic. I mean, if your behavior is leading you and those around you to ruin, why not just change your behavior? Why hold tight to a character flaw that’s killing you and those you love? The tragic “hero” only becomes aware of his or her fatal flaw once it is too late. I’m far more interested in stopping the tragedy before it’s too late than I am in feeling sorrow or empathy for those who cannot or will not change their destructive behavior. What’s worse is that in this human-culture-as-tragic-hero narrative, the flaw is nothing so ignoble as greed, lust, jealousy, or even indecision. Rather, the tragic flaw this culture ascribes to itself is intelligence. We’re simply too smart to allow life on the planet to continue. And of course we are unable to change, so there is nothing to be done. Cue the tears, drop the curtain. I’m not interested. First, the premise that intelligence is behind the murder of the planet is both inaccurate and absurd. Second, the murder of the planet is the result of behaviors — which can be changed — and infrastructures — which can be destroyed. There’s nothing inevitable about it. Nor do I believe that global warming has reached a final tipping point. There are plenty of options to try first, like de-industrializing. People like James Lovelock (who predicts that by the end of the twenty-first century, “billions of us will die and the few breeding pairs of people that [who] survive will be in the Arctic where the climate remains tolerable”) are already acknowledging that this culture, if left unchecked, will essentially kill the planet. Well, if this culture will kill the planet, then it looks like it’s time to roll up our sleeves and do what’s necessary — not stick our heads in the sand. The best way to guarantee that it is too late is by saying it is too late and not acting to help the world as we know it survive, a world with goblin sharks and pencil fish, where bats flutter by at night and butterflies and bumblebees light up the days. My friend the great Dakota activist Waziyatawin once said, “That defeatist attitude makes me want to scream. The battles we’re fighting are overwhelming, but we know things won’t get better if we do nothing. Our only hope is enough people intervening and taking action, people willing to risk something now so we all don’t lose everything later. The only sense of empowerment I feel is by taking some kind of action, whether it’s writing, working to undermine the existing structures, or sitting on the open prairie in December with a Dakota man trying to save our landbase.” She went on: “If our actions will do nothing, why would anyone even want to live anymore? That kind of hopelessness, in the defeatist sense, means an embracing of victimage [sic] and complete powerlessness. Here the salmon have much to teach: either they make it upriver to spawn, or they die trying.” If our actions make it so there is even a one-thousandth of 1 percent chance that things will work out better for ourselves and the planet, then it is our moral duty to act and act and act. Before it’s too late. Am I optimistic? Not in the slightest. Am I going to quit? Not on your fucking life. // Originally published in Orion magazine (May/June 2011). Used with permission.

Notes and Research: “Skelton Closet In The Sky” was reviewed for scientific accuracy by Dr. Matthew Lazzara. Dr. Lazzara is an associate scientist and research meteorologist at the Space Science and Engineering Center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison where he conducts observational research in the polar regions, especially the Antarctic. Additionally, he is adjunct faculty at Madison Area Technical College where he teaches courses in Weather & Climate and Climate & Climate Change. 1 “Climate Change Poll: 4 out of 5 Americans See Global Warming As Serious Problem.” AP Associated Press Poll. 14 Dec 2012. Of particularly interesting note: “Within [the] highly skeptical group, 61 percent now say temperatures have been rising over the past 100 years. That's a substantial increase from 2009, when the AP-GfK poll found that only 47 percent of those with little or no trust in scientists believed the world was getting warmer.” 2 Connor, Steve. “Billionaires Secretly Fund Attacks On Climate Science.” The Independent. 24 Jan 2013 3 Horn, Steve. “Three States Pushing ALEC Bill To Require Teaching Climate Change Denial In Public Schools.” Huffington Post. 1 Feb 2013. 4 Goodman, A. and Maté, A. “The ATM For Climate Denial: Secretive Donors Trust Funds Vast Network of Global Warming Skeptics.” Democracynow.org. 19 Feb 2013. 5 DeMelle, Brendon. “Climate Skeptic Pat Michaels Admits 40 Percent Of His Funding Comes From Big Oil.” Huffington Post. 16 Aug 2010. 6 Budishak et al. “Solar and Wind Power Paired With Storage Could Power Grid 99.9% Of The Time.” ScienceDaily.com. 10 Dec 2012 7 Australian Bureau of Meteorology (BOM and CSIRO, State of the Climate: 2012. 14 March 2012 8 Pachauri, R.K. and Reisinger, A. (Eds.) Climate Change 2007: Synthesis Report. Contribution of Working Groups I, II and III to the Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. 9 Dunlap, Riley E. “Climate-Change Views: Republican-Democratic Gaps Expand.” Gallup Poll. 29 May 2008 10 Gronowald, N. and Marchall, C. “Rising Partisanship Sharply Erodes U.S. Public's Belief in Global Warming.” The New York Times via ClimateWire.net. 3 December 2009 11 We are not a diverse government, it seems, as we can only see in two colors: red or blue. 12 Much of the climate change hoax idea came from the Climate Research Unit Emails Controversy, or ‘Climategate,’ around November 2009. Eight separate and independent committees researched the claim that data was being manipulated by a group of climate scientists. All eight of the

committees found absolutely no wrong-doing and no evidence of a conspiracy or dataforcing by the scientists. For more information on this topic, read the informative page about it on Wikipedia. 13 “A National Survey of Television Meteorologists About Climate Change Education.” George Mason Center For Climate Change Communication. June 2011 14 Bagley, Katherine. “Why Don't TV Meteorologists Believe in Climate Change?” Inside Climate News. 7 May 2012 15 Doran, P. and Zimmerman, M. (2009), “Examining the Scientific Consensus on Climate Change.” Eos Trans. AGU, 90(3); Anderegg, W., Prall, J., Harold, J. and Schneider, S. (2010), “Expert credibility in climate change.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 107(27):12107-12109 16 McKibben, Bill. “Global Warming’s Terrifying New Math.” Rolling Stone. 19 July 2012 17 Vidal J. and Vaughan A. “Arctic Sea Ice Shrinks to Smallest Extent Ever Recorded.” The Guardian. 14 September 2012 18 Mullen, Jethro. “Sea Snails' Shells Dissolving in Earth's Increasingly Acidic Oceans, Study Says.” CNN.com. 26 November 2012 19 Keim, Brandon. “U.S. Drought and Climate Change: Science Points to Link.” Wired. 31 July 2012 20 Duke, Alan. “Superstorm Sandy Breaks Records.” CNN.com. 31 October 2012 21 Cardinale, et al. “Biodiversity Loss and It’s Impact on Humanity.” Nature. 7 June 2012 22 An explanation of how carbon isotope ratios confirm fossil fuel burning as the source of climate change can be found at www. skepticalscience.com/human-fingerprint-inglobal-warming There are a large number of scholarly and layman articles on this topic as well. 23 Marcott, Shaun A., et. al. “A Reconstruction of Regional and Global Temperature for the Past 11,300 Years.” Science. 8 March 2013 24 “Earth Warmer Today Than During 70 to 80 Percent of the Past 11,300 Years.” Science Daily. 8 March 2013. 25 “Milankovitch theory describes the collective effects of changes in the Earth’s movements upon its climate, named after Serbian Geophysicist and astronomer, Milutin Milankovitch, who worked on it during First World War internment. Milankovitch mathematically theorized that variations in eccentricity, axial tilt and precession of the Earth's orbit determined climatic patterns on Earth through orbital forcing.” Wikipedia 26 See the interview with Noam Chomsky in this issue for more on the topic of advertising and consumer manipulation. 27 Electricity Sector Emissions, U. S. EPA Report On Environmental Climate Change,

epa.gov 28 See all the things in our life that contain petroleum. From dresses and plastic bags to antihistamines, it can all be found at RankenEnergy.com’s “Products from Petroleum”. 29 Steinfeld, H. et al. “Livestock's Long Shadow: Environmental Issues and Options”, Livestock, Environment and Development. FAO, Rome. 2006 30 National Research Council. “Nutrient Requirements of Beef Cattle.” National Academy Press. 2000 31 Andrews, A. Department of Defense Facilities: Energy Conservation Policies and Spending. DIANE Publishing. 2011 32 Lengyel, Colonel G. J., USAF. Department of Defense Energy Strategy. The Brookings Institution. August 2007 33 Reardon, S., “Eco-Warriors: The Next Wave.” New Scientist. 3-9 November 2012 34 The statement comes from a variety of sources, including Wikipedia, Friends Committee on National Legislation and Tables of Congressional Discretionary Spending. Figuring out the amount of taxes the public pays, understanding the federal budget and congressional discretionary spending, is all extremely complex. Some will argue that only 20% of our taxes go to the military, but this does not include Homeland Security, the FBI and CIA, interest on debt paid to countries we’ve invaded, nor does it take into account any Congressional discretionary spending, of which 60% goes to the military, with that spending expected to raise over the next decade, according to the Congressional budget report. 35 Graham-Harrison, E. “Afghanistan killings: gunman hunted families as if they were military targets.” The Guardian. 12 March 2012. The report states that the killing of innocent civilians in their homes by U. S. soldiers, or ‘hunting,’ is quite common in Afghanistan. The article, and others related to this story, detail how U. S. soldiers will commit such atrocities as beheading or holding up the dead victim’s head to pose for a photo and show off their kill in much the same way that wild game hunters do. 36 We should note that, in the last issue, we disparaged the Sierra Club and Greenpeace for their lack of action on climate change, as well as bureaucratic complacency. Recently, both groups have suddenly arisen and begun participating in much greater direct action and protest. For doing so, we would like to retract some of our previous remarks. It is our general feeling that the growing excitement around the environmental movement is coming from hundreds of small, independent, local action groups, which is what has roused the Sierra Club and Greenpeace from their co-opting complacency. We will watch these groups closely to see if they will continue to do what is right, or capitulate to business interests as they have done so many times in the past.

The questions are simple. Why does a small group of humanity reap the efforts of billions? Why can this elite group poison the planet to further enrich themselves? Why do we accept a soulless social order built around the concept of people staying in line? Why do we allow armed police to beat and cage us if we step off that line?

One might answer, “because we allow it, and because we are content with the beggar’s portion,” but this is uncharitable. Forging unity among ourselves to resist, to act, is hard. It must be built personby-person by engaging with each other, believing that each of us has value, that if we learn the trick of working together we will change the world. We must unplug ourselves from the bloviating network of the banal and talk with someone. We must nurture the habit of thinking for ourselves. We have surrendered most of the space we should occupy to others, and we have accepted a sliver in return. This pattern has become so established that, when we attempt to assert otherwise, we will be attacked and jailed. When we live and think independently, we lessen our dependence on institutions we can’t control. Their strength depends entirely upon our relative ignorance and powerlessness, our willingness to acquiesce. We can develop the skills needed to live together as a human race that might actually be able to share the planet without destroying it.

--Communique #2, Tidal: Occupy Theory, Occupy Strategy

SCHOOL OF THE REAL

“Get Yourself a Real Education”

So you have a million books to read and study for classes. Big deal. Blow off your classes -- read these books and watch these movies instead. It’ll probably be a lot more interesting than your textbooks. And you might end up learning something helpful. BOOK Infinitely Demanding: Ethics of Commitment, Politics of Resistance Simon Critchley Verso, New York: 2007. 168 pages. “Philosophy begins in disappointment.” Thus opens Simon Critchley’s energetic evaluation of modern philosophy and how this struggle with disappointment and failure, this sense that Something Is Missing, is, as Rousseau has written, our “cruel hunger that drives [us] on.” And it is from this lack that Critchley begins to build his philosophy, one which seeks to understand and alleviate that disappointment gnawing at us. He first reveals the great inadequacies of the modern philosophical tradition: la que falta. In particular, he shows how much of modern philosophy has only left us with a bitter taste in our mouth, ever since nihilism pointed us to meaningless despair and left us there on a great shapeless landscape. Critchley quickly draws out the silver linings from these philosophies to reveal something both sublime and liberating. In short, Critchley’s book leaves one … happy. For it is happiness, however we wish to define it, that is for Critchley the true end of philosophy (and psychoanalysis, upon which he draws heavily). Especially important to Critchley is laughter and humor and the ability to laugh at oneself: to laugh at our humanity, our failings, our limitations, all the things that we try so desperately to overcome or suppress out of shame. Critchley takes the idea of laughing at the self as a method to dismantle the ‘autonomy orthodoxy’ in modern philosophy, which states that self-direction and self-mastery are the pinnacle of human realization and enlightenment. To facilitate such a deconstruction, he finds the following quote from Freud particularly helpful: “Look! Here is the world, which seems so dangerous! It is nothing but a game for children, just worth making a jest about.” Critchley then goes on to shrewdly reveal how it is, in fact, ‘the demand of the other’ which truly motivates us and “binds us to a good” (i.e. brings us awareness of a value we each determine to be good, where one might define ‘the good’ as a lifetime dedicated to helping the homeless, another may define it as surrendering their rationality to the Christian mysteries). Critchley shows how it is in the face of the other — my friends, my family, my lover — where one is able to find a more satisfying way of securing motivation to action. It is here, Critchley rightly shows, that true anarchy reveals itself: in the moment when the subject realizes their own humorous short-comings and, because of that, frees themselves from self-importance. And having relieved themselves of such burdens, are able to begin the important work of repairing and rebuilding society.

JOURNALISM Truthdig.com Robert Scheer, Editor-In-Chief Founded 2007

The Baffler John Summers, Editor-In-Chief Founded 1988

Their motto is “digging beneath the headlines,” and that is exactly what their great investigative reporters do as they reveal the current crimes of the government and the corporate über-archy. One of their weekly contributors, Chris Hedges, is a pulitzer-prize winning journalist who formerly worked for The New York Times as an international correspondent in the middle-east. Hedges lost his job at the Times when he refused to retract an open letter he had written to the Bush II administration criticizing the Iraq war. This anecdote is a small example of the character of the journalists working at Truthdig. It is refreshing to know that there are still some journalists standing up for what is right and just.

If there ever was a magazine that harasses ‘The Left’ to no end, this is the one. The Baffler loves to hold a mirror up to the left and ask, “Are you sure you want to look this way?” The articles go into critical areas of thought, political and psychological, that are often not asked or considered by the left. In other words, The Baffler continues to beg the question: Where has the left gone? Are the ‘hipster-cool’ politics of the liberal class really working? Are they making a difference? Sure, they got a good-looking black president. Twice. But meanwhile, while everyone was excited about Obama and/or the Occupy movement, the conservative right and the “laughable” Tea Party were quietly maneuvering on the political ground floor and getting far-right politicians into state congressional seats and governorships (such as our buddies Paul Ryan and Scott Walker here in Wisconsin): a maneuver which has had a much greater impact on most of the country than, some at The Baffler would argue, the Occupy Movement. In short, the right has taken the carpet out from under the left. And the spoils for the left aren’t much more than a liberal-wet-dream president who rides the center-right and carries out the policies of Bush I & II with more imperial vigor than either of them could have imagined. The Baffler doesn’t ask, “WTF, GOP?” Instead it calls out, “Get your shit together, liberals!”

FILM We Are Legion: The Story of the Hacktivists Knappenberger: 2012 wearelegionthedocumentary.com Here, finally, is the full story of the secretive group Anonymous and how it came to be such a large player in the cyber-world as well as the real. The movie begins by exploring the origins of the group and interviews one of the original creators, a teenage girl (at the time) who one day found her house being invaded action-movie-style by the FBI. From there, the directors show the growth of the group from small-time harassers of online gamers to harassers of large corporations and banks. Legion interviews a wide range of Anonymous participants, some wearing the famous Guy Fawkes mask, some not. But it is the film’s focus on the group’s transformation — from being a sort of punk/bully group into one who’s desire is to fight for the oppressed and, ironically, harassed — which makes it such a compulsive watch.

Recently the news carried a story of this new ethic exemplified when Anonymous attacked an ex-girlfriend-revenge website which encouraged users to post exploitive pics, videos, and private information like home addresses and cell phone numbers of their former girlfriends on the site. Anonymous threatened to release the site creator’s own personal and exploitable information online. No one has heard from that asshole since. Anonymous continues to be a force to be reckoned with, like them or not. Watching the film you can decide whether or not you agree with their methods, but you will at least understand why the U. S. government is so desperately trying to track them down and shut them up.

The Take: Occupy. Resist. Produce. Lewis & Klein: 2004 www.thetake.org So ya think anarchy doesn’t exist as a real, viable solution? Think it isn’t working working right now somewhere in the world? Lewis & Klein’s The Take brings us to a place where anarchy is being played out on a daily basis. The film takes place in Beunos Aires from 2001 until about 2003 and follows a group of auto-parts workers who return to the abandoned factory where they were laid-off after Argentina’s economic collapse. The workers brought sleeping mats with them. They refused to leave. Shortly thereafter, workers cleaned up the factory and began producing goods again, seeking out buyers and paying themselves equally from the profits. All decisions were made through a council meeting open to all workers at the factory. The factory ran and hummed along just fine without any owners, bosses, or managers. Film-makers Lewis and Klein follow all the legal and rational decisions made by the workers. It also reveals the turbulent period that followed the elections of Carlos Menem. The business class was promised swift action against “those illegally occupying and producing goods in factories” across the country. And that is just what Menem did. Weeks after the election took place and Menem won, the police and military re-enforcements were deployed to route the workers from their factories. The workers resisted with persistence and pride, often against brutal oppression and gunfire. The film-makers themselves were sometimes caught in the crossfire and forced to run for shelter. Everywhere there was smoke and chaos ... You’ll have to watch the movie to find out if the workers were defeated and anarchy has to chalk up another to ‘We Tried’, or if something else completely unexpected happened ...

BBC’s “Hot Planet” Evans: 2009 www.bbc.co.uk There are a lot of films out there about climate change. Yet many of them can come off whiny or melodramatic for a lot of people. For it’s balance and no-nonsense reserved British style, we recommend BBC’s “Hot Planet.” The film’s quixotically excited narrator, Iain Stewart, sounds more like a nature show host a la The Crocodile Hunter’s

Steve Irwin, not someone discussing the sobering realities of anthropomorphic climate change. Perhaps this style was chosen so the audience could remain objective while moving through the various truths that show the planet to be on a dire path.

many scientists really honestly believed we were heading into a global cooling period, not a warming period. The cries were of an ice age, not a muggy furnace. So why the big flip-flop? And how can we be sure those scientists have it right this time?

One thing that we much appreciate about the movie is it’s honesty in looking at ‘both sides’ of the issue. In fact, it begins by showing that in the 1970s

We don’t want to give away the ending, so we’ll leave it at that. Check it out. It’s a nail-biter.

F S A U I C C L E U S R S E//

success in failure / / by Eugene Debacles

Ours is a civilization of losers.

DEFEAT // THE GREATEST OF FEATS True failure, tragic and heartbreaking as it is, is proof that you’ve reached beyond yourself, that you are pushing at your own limits and at the limits of the world. The one who fails in the course of really trying needn’t fear she is failing to live life for all it’s worth. Heroic failure is greatness that does not depend on success or approval— not just greatness, but inalienable greatness, the greatest greatness of all. Here we are speaking of good old-fashioned failure, such as can be experienced by those trying hard to achieve something worthwhile: in failing to achieve their goals, they achieve something even more valuable, the experience of giving all. But there are other ways to define failure. Failure is relative, according to the standards by which one judges success: and woe to him who does not judge for himself what is success and what is failure, but unquestioningly receives his standards from others.

FAILURE AS EXERCISE // SUCCESS AS OBSTACLE Let’s look at failure in a vacuum, if such a thing is possible, to see what associations it carries today. If you want to subject yourself to a real test of mettle, try failing. Struggling to succeed can be really trying, it’s true—but failure is trying, too. Attempt an impossible task everyone around you considers senseless and stupid—you’ll be surprised at what a challenge it is to exist in exile from the world in which people can make sense of one another. Commit yourself to a project you know to be beyond your powers; note how hard it is to bear your own hurt pride when things go awry, even if you knew from the start they were bound to. Failing that, start out small: make a habit of telling jokes that fall so flat people flee your company, announce in a public square that you are a juggler of great expertise and then try to juggle for the very first time before the crowd that gathers. Even frivolous exercises like these, which seem mere child’s play from a distance, can be excruciating in practice. This seems sens-less—failing should not be difficult, unless one is invested in success. That it is so hard for most of us to fail in even meaningless ways reveals how much we pursue success for its own sake. Being able to fail fearlessly before others is one of the hardest skills to master; being able to fail before yourself without shame is harder still.

Faced with the impossible ideals of beauty and perfection set for us, we fail without fail. But readiness to fail is a prerequisite for being able to do anything great. Pride, self-consciousness, insecurity, cowardice, the qualities which demand triumph after triumph and nothing else—these are the same qualities that impede the total freedom of action needed to achieve any genuine triumph. Artists, for example, must be prepared to abandon everything they have learned to do well and begin failing again, and repeat this process over and over, if they are to evade stagnation. Fearing to fail, one cannot accomplish anything—not even failure. Too much success makes you weak, anyway. As a success, how can you know how you stand up under the ultimate duress of disaster, or for that matter what your motivations are in the first place? Failure, for the one who needs to think of himself as successful, is truly an enemy to be feared. But a person familiar with misfortune and disappointment is less likely to be unnaturally afraid of failing; if she has not yet given up, she is stronger and knows both life and herself better than the protagonist of any success story. Fail once, and it feels like the end of the world; live through the end of the world a few times, and you’ll learn how much more durable you are than it is. Some of us have spent years, lifetimes, whole generations in failure and disappointment. We know exactly how much poverty, humiliation, suffering we can take—we’re well-versed in these things, we’ve been getting plenty of practice. We’re not easily intimidated— we have nothing to lose. We persist with a patience that is inconceivable to celebrities, star athletes, spelling bee winners. Just as the homeless man who greets the dawn with his will to live intact after walking around all night to keep from freezing to death is tougher than the most high-powered corporate financial officer, we failures are better equipped than any other class to take the risks one must take to work miracles

. SUCCESS AS FAILURE // FAILURE AS SUCCESS In this world turned upside down, in which misery masquerades as happiness and truth is simply falsehood with powerful friends, the right kind of failure can protect you from that most insidious danger of all—capital-S Success. It is important to know what battles not to win, what callings not to excel in; some victories are more humiliating than any defeats, some fiascos are triumphs in disguise. The miserable waitress who is promoted to manager and stays at the restaurant long after she had planned to quit might have been better off getting fired, after all, just as the Russian working class could have given themselves a better shot at liberation by losing the revolution of 1917; likewise, it was for the best that Allen Ginsberg didn’t make a well adjusted stockbroker. This kind of failure is a blessing in disguise. Even when suffered by one who desires so-called success, it can be an antechamber of transformation. In failing at an enterprise of questionable value, the individual’s condition and activity already diverge from the norms set out for her; it only remains for her values and standards to cross that fissure and join her on the other side, in the new world. When this happens, she can redefine success and failure for herself, so she will not be so busy succeeding that her hands are tied when she has the chance to try them at something that really matters. SUCCESS AS IMPOSSIBILITY // FAILURE AS RESISTANCE It is ironic enough that so many dedicate their lives to succeeding at projects that fail to fulfill their dreams; more ironic still is that it is impossible to succeed at these projects in the first place. Still worse is that, living in denial of this failure, they are not even able to learn from it.

Ours is a civilization of losers. Faced with the impossible ideals of beauty and perfection set for us, we fail without fail. This is an open secret, the open secret of our era: no one, but no one, is a winner. The faster we run to catch up to these standards, the faster they recede from our grasp. That’s why body-builders and models are more insecure about their bodies than we are about ours, why millionaires read books about how to be more efficient. If you’re so successful, what’s with the antidepressants? Even someone like Madonna, who presumably represents the pinnacle of status in our society, has in common with all of us that she is not actually Madonna, not the two-dimensional caricature of success and sex appeal that saturates the airwaves. At the end of the day, lines on her face and doubt in her gut, she too turns on the television and feels her heart drop at seeing that flawless superstar cavorting through a digital paradise. In fact, she is worse off than the rest of us: for not only is she not Madonna, but she is also nothing else besides. Face it—you’re never going to look like the models in the magazines, no matter how much skin cream and lip gloss you apply. Hell, without airbrushing, even they don’t look like that! Once you embrace this failure, you’ll be free to excel at becoming something else. A new revolutionary class, the proletariat of failures, could count even members of the ruling class in its ranks, were they able to own up to the hard truth that they are no more like the satisfied, svelte executives in Wall Street Journal commercials than we are like the brainless, well-adjusted working families next door on Channel 11. Having sought and failed to find happiness according to their prescriptions, having sincerely given it our best shot, we all have something at stake in making it possible to live differently. All that is needed is for

If you’re so successful, what’s with all the anti-depressants? us to come out of the closet, to come to terms with what we are and begin to fail at these roles deliberately, to explore the forbidden territory we already occupy. Of course, there are safeguards in place to discourage us from doing this. In this civilization, failure is the ultimate abomination. Obscenity, drug use, sexual and religious heresy, these may become acceptable—but in our hierarchical society, failure itself will always be anathema. Under capitalism, failure to compete is punished by the severest measures: for if people are to keep on capitulating, non-participation must look utterly undesirable, must be associated with the worst dregs of society and the most unendurable tribulations. The homeless and chronically unemployed play as fundamental a role in our economy as bosses and bureaucrats do: they teach us to equate life off the treadmill with alcoholism and mental illness, they are visual cues reminding us that annihilation is the only alternative to wage slavery. But this intimidation tactic can only succeed so long as the unemployed cooperate by accepting their misery, and the miserable cooperate by accepting employment. As soon as a new class of self-proclaimed failures appears, visibly finding happiness by rejecting both options and making a joyous catastrophe of their lives, the jig will be up. Pride would hold us forever in no-win situations, insisting we are happy and everything is going according to plan, struggling to prove we are “good enough” to make them work somehow. This is not even tragedy—it’s just foolishness. We’re good enough to deserve to be happy, for once, whether that be called winning or losing. Enough of being successful failures—let us finally succeed in our failure! From failure to mutiny!

CERTAIN FAILURE IMPOSED BY FEAR OF FAILURE If a person’s dearest dreams can come true, then real failure, too, is possible. As failure is the most feared of misfortunes, being responsible for pursuing and perhaps failing to achieve precious dreams is everyone’s ultimate terror. On the other hand, if the realization of such dreams is impossible, then we are free of this terrible responsibility: many people find it easier to endure the idea that everything they want is impossible than to face down their terror of being responsible for attaining it. And once they decide that what they really want is impossible, from that moment on they are invested in that being the truth—otherwise they are fools who have thrown away their lives for nothing. They may even work, subconsciously, to prevent their dreams from coming true, to prevent the things they long for from becoming possible. Imagine that, a planet of six billion people working around the clock to push what they want out of reach! It must require that much work—what most of us want is not really all that difficult or complex. It takes a Disaster of billions to hold us back!

BEYOND SUCCESS AND FAILURE Here’s an exercise, then, for the impetuous young freedom fighter: try failing at the duties you are most afraid to, and struggling with all your heart to succeed at the challenges you never dared undertake. What doesn’t kill you can only make you stronger, whether it be the mortification of not being able to explain to your parents what you’re doing with your life or the utter heartbreak of giving everything to follow a dream only to see it burnt to ashes. Such a practice sharpens and strengthens, but it also can reveal just how arbitrary most of our deep-seated values are. Ultimately, liberation is not a question of succeeding or failing, but of moving beyond such binary ways of thinking. Our pathological fear of failure exists only by virtue of our superstitions about success; to emancipate ourselves from the former, we must forgive ourselves enough to stop pining for the latter. The mystique of victory gives rise to the fiction of defeat. To be free of internal as well as external pressures to achieve, to cease to judge oneself by any one-dimensional yardstick of value or success, to be able to do and live anything and appreciate it for what it is, itself, without imposing systems of evaluation—that would be a triumph sweeter than any victory.

Selections from Mr. Debacle’s unpublishable* novel, Invincible Defeat. Originally published in Harbinger, 5th Communique. The full free pdf download of the journal is available at www. crimethInc.com *This phrasing is by the author. —Ed.

THE PERFECT ONES. The beautiful ones. The right ones, the just ones, the noble ones. The ones who never break down crying in restaurants, who never do anything in secret they would be ashamed of. The normal ones. The content ones.

The healthy ones.

The ones who always plan ahead.

The happy ones.

The ones who work hard and reap the benefits, who brush and f loss after every single meal. The well-adjusted ones.

The popular ones.

The ones who never disappoint, the little boys who do grow up to be president. The l u c k y ones. The ones with perfect skin and perfect teeth and perfect figures.

They don’t exist. The ones posing as them are even more fucked-up than you. — crimethInc.

I have succeeded I won't compete for long — Interpol, ‘Success’