Here is an example of that: If you get caught up in the question of whether or not a certain person is a “terrorist,” it might never occur to you to ask how the word “terrorist” came to have its present meaning. What assumptions are implicit in that usage? Whose purposes are served by dividing “terrorists” from “non-terrorists” in that particular fashion? How does the word differ from “freedom fighter,” “resistance,” or “militarist”? I don’t know the answers to those questions, but I feel the word “terrorist” is being used in a way that distorts our perception of reality in a way that is detrimental to the goals and values I believe in. Whenever I hear anyone using that word, I ask them to restate their idea using other words.

We humans are not very imaginative, and it is seldom that any of us discovers or invents a new way of seeing things, a new word or concept, a new model or part of a model. The models presented in a college course in philosophy may not be sufficient for the needs of our present world, and at any rate most of us have never taken such a course. And our corporate communications media offer us only a very narrow range of interpretations of events — more about that in the next section.

Because we humans can only see reality through our imperfect models, we can be sure that none of us (not even me) is seeing things exactly as they are. Nevertheless, despite the incompleteness of our knowledge, we have a duty to act upon whatever we are reasonably certain of. And yet, the more we act on our beliefs, the more we feel committed to them, and the more readily we blind ourselves to other views. Thus, one of our duties is to constantly struggle for self-awareness, to be aware of our feeling of commitment and how it may be biasing us. We are less objective than most of us realize. Chris Mooney wrote:

… when we think we’re reasoning, we may instead be rationalizing. Or to use an analogy offered by University of Virginia psychologist Jonathan Haidt: We may think we’re being scientists, but we’re actually being lawyers. Our “reasoning” is a means to a predetermined end—winning our “case”—and is shot through with biases. They include “confirmation bias,” in which we give greater heed to evidence and arguments that bolster our beliefs, and “disconfirmation bias,” in which we expend disproportionate energy trying to debunk or refute views and arguments that we find uncongenial.

Modern technology is making it increasingly easy for us to live in an echo chamber, to mainly have conversations with people who already agree with us (see Bill Bishop and Eli Pariser on this). We all have different trusted sources for what we believe to be factual information and meaningful models, and our trust cannot be won through debate. (Nevertheless, I will recommend my own favorite sources: Alternet, Common Dreams, and Democracy Now!.)

No one has a complete answer to all the world’s problems. Not even me. For instance, consider the most important question of all:

How can we all learn to live together in peace?

“if only everyone would listen to my answer, we’d have peace!”

It would be nice to find a magic phrase that would switch on a light in people’s heads, and then they’d tell their friends, who would then tell their friends, and so on, and by next morning the whole world would be enlightened. But none of us has found that phrase yet. Even Buddha and Jesus never found a way to spread their teachings to everyone. (And I haven’t found a way to get everyone to read this essay — but if you like it, please recommend it to other people!)

to them more. The knowledge that we are all seeking includes an understanding of each other, and that can only be found in conversation; perhaps that is the most important kind of action. And a new vision is always longer and more difficult to explain than the status quo; we must struggle to find the words. We must dig deeper than mere issues and policies — we must become aware of our own values, and the values of those around us. Be patient in conversation — after all,

what is obvious to one person is not obvious to another,

and even that fact is not obvious to some people! Mary Doria Russell said

“Wisdom begins when you discover the difference between ‘that doesn’t make sense’ and ‘I don’t understand.’.”

DELUSION (everything you know is wrong)

The science fiction film THE MATRIX is primarily entertainment, but the premise with which it begins is a great metaphor for our era. In the world depicted by the film, nearly all of humanity is asleep, and plugged into a great computer that — for purposes of its own — manufactures a shared dreamed reality. That dream is called “The Matrix” by the few people who are awake and rebelling against the computer. Early in the film, a young sleeper called “Neo” takes the red pill and is thereby awakened, and it is a tremendously wrenching experience: the real world is vastly different from the dream.

Somewhat analogously, most of the “common knowledge” of most people in our own society is wrong. We are surrounded by misconceptions.

Some misconceptions are intentional. For instance, we now know that:

• for many years the cigarette companies knew but denied that research had proven that cigarettes were carcinogenic.
• the Jessica Lynch rescue story was a complete fabrication.
• the “errors” in the story of the death of Bin Laden cannot have been accidental.
• when Bush, Cheney, et al. said that they had indisputable proof of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, they knew quite well that their only “evidence” was false testimony extracted by torture.

Some misconceptions are unintentional — i.e., our newscasters and some of our other public figures may simply be passing along their own erroneous beliefs. They may dismiss and omit other ideas because they honestly believe those other ideas to be false or nonsensical.

• In Neo’s world, the dreaming is altogether involuntary. But in our own world, the sleepers are collaborators in perpetuating the delusion, and so it has been called the consensus trance by some activists. Many of our sleepers are in denial, and do not want to be awakened, both because awakening would confront them with problems that are too great and terrifying, and because awakening would set them apart from their friends. They would rather believe that “everything is fine.”
• Our consensus trance alters history. For instance, many people in our society still believe that nuking Hiroshima and Nagasaki brought World War II to a close sooner, that the Gulf of Tonkin Incident actually happened, and that Saddam Hussein actually had weapons of mass destruction. The mainstream media makes major omissions.
• More subtly, but perhaps more importantly, our consensus trance misdirects our interpretation of the significance of events — i.e., the models through which we interpret the subjective parts of reality, as discussed in the previous section. In more detail:

Our corporate communications media are consolidated into ever fewer hands, particularly ever since the Powell Memorandum in 1971. Thus the media offer us only a very narrow range of interpretations of events, and only a very narrow range of models of how we might understand our lives, how we might relate to each other, and how we might choose to live.

For instance, the following assumptions are often implicit in the way that both news stories and entertainment stories are presented to us:

• our soldiers have only fought in wars that were unavoidable and noble.

Have you accepted those assumptions without being consciously aware of them? They are as invisible, unnoticed, and unquestioned as the air we breathe. A chief strength of the grand deception is its misdirection. As Thomas Pynchon said,

If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don’t have to worry about the answers.

At right is a diagram from Daniel C. Hallin’s 1986 book, The Uncensored War: The Media and Vietnam. Hallin described three categories of concepts:

• the intermediate zone of “legitimate controversy” contains those issues that the newscasters actually consider to be worth discussing.

Perhaps even more important than the media, the marketplace itself habituates us to seeing everything in our lives in terms of the marketplace.

RESOURCE EXHAUSTION AND ECOCIDE

Our way of life is dependent on resources that are disappearing, much faster than most people realize.

We need major retooling of all our technologies: solar and wind power, mass transportation, bio-recyclable everything. That cannot be done instantly — it will require some research and development, which we should now be encouraging through subsidies. But nothing like that is going on right now. Unfortunately, the corporate media are paying little attention to the problems involved, the major corporations are actively denying that any change is needed in their present methods of reaping big profits, and our government has been captured by those corporations because winning elections requires expensive advertisements.

suburbia. How will we manage when the price of gasoline climbs higher? The demand for gas is climbing: now India and China are getting cars too. The world is now reaching peak oil: The easy-to-get oil is nearly all gone; we’re turning to the hard-to-get oil and to other risky energy sources such as nuclear power plants. This is resulting in environmental disasters.

And our entire ecosphere — including our food, water, and air — is being destroyed by global warming. This is controversial: Most scientists say global warming is real, but most conservative politicians say it’s a hoax. Whose “facts” are you going to trust? Personally, I trust the scientists, but I doubt that I’m going to change anyone’s mind about this. And I see many reasons for disbelief.

Perhaps the biggest reason is political. Naomi Klein has explained that if global warming is accepted as real, then it will require public policies contrary to everything the political right wing believes about the proper role of government in society.

Here are some other reasons that some people deny global warming:

• Big oil and other beneficiaries of the status quo have hired people to spread disinformation.
• Some people claim that we will adapt to the new environment. Perhaps they have not understood how slowly evolution works. Or perhaps they envision moving us all, along with our farms and factories, into airtight underground bunkers for the next million years. I don’t think we have the time and resources to do that.
• Each part of The Matrix reinforces the other parts: “If warming were a real threat, wouldn’t the government be doing something about it?”

Another obstacle to understanding stems from the fact that we evolved as hunter-gatherers in a world that changed only slowly, in a mathematically linear fashion — i.e., changes were mostly at a constant rate, so the graph is a straight line. That is the only kind of change we can understand on a visceral level. It is only on an abstract level, if at all, that we can understand the mathematical nonlinearities in global warming:

• Delay effects: Even after we reduce or stop carbon emissions, our past carbon emissions will continue to warm the planet.
• * Indeed, when the melting of Greenland’s glaciers lowers the salinity of the nearby parts of the ocean a bit more, the North Atlantic Current may halt, resulting in the sudden arrival of an ICE AGE in Europe (as in the film The Day After Tomorrow). And that would be devastating for the rest of the world too, since all the national economies have become deeply interdependent. But it would only mean a redistribution, not a reduction, of the heat within the ecosphere. It would do nothing to alleviate the long-term problem of the planet’s overheating trend, which would reach Europe within a few more years even without the North Atlantic Current.
  Inhomogeneity (unevenness and irregularity): Even while the average temperature — over the entire planet and the entire year — is rising, some places* may get colder for a while, especially during the winter. Climatologists, exasperated at trying to explain this, have accepted the euphemism of climate change.

Many people in our society will take warming seriously only after it becomes blatantly obvious, without the use of scientific models and measuring instruments. But by then it will be too late. They are like the man who fell off the top of a 100-story building, and who said, as he passed the 50th floor, “hmm, no serious problem so far.”

I view warming as a MUCH MORE URGENT problem than most climate scientists have wanted to say publicly, because they don’t want to look like sensationalists or alarmists. Climate scientists keep revising their models upward, and yet they still keep getting surprised by changes outpacing their models. (It makes me wonder if even some of the climate scientists, not being mathematicians, have failed to fully grasp the significance of exponential growth.) Scientists warn us that if we don’t soon halt the present trends, we will get into “runaway warming.” I don’t know why they’re describing things that way — we ALREADY have “runaway warming”!! Stopping it is going to be difficult.

earthquakes too. Wet places will get wetter; dry places, drier. Arable land and sources of fresh water are diminishing. If any of us survive the resulting resource wars, those few will perish in a general collapse of the ecosystem by the time the planet’s average temperature has risen by 6°C / 10°F (at the latest).

Unlike most of my fellow eco-activists, I do not believe that the answer is simply for us to get ourselves back to the garden. I think it’s already too late for that — the damage that has already been done is so great that, left to itself, it will kill us all through the delay effects. Our only hope is to use science-fictionish geo-engineering to make further artificial changes in the climate and the ecosystem, but this time to help Gaia — e.g., float trillions of tiny mirrors in the sky, or design a new microbe to transform the ocean, or something like that. But it must be planned carefully — as we’ve heard in so many apocalyptic science fiction movies, “we’ll only get one shot at this.” And it must be done soon, for with each passing day the problem becomes worse while the resources available for dealing with it become fewer. And it must be planned and carried out by a worldwide consortium of scientists who are not in the employ of for-profit contractors — we’ve already seen that “the market” cannot be entrusted with the health of the planet.

We need a re-tooling of all our technology, and that will require cooperation on a huge scale. But that will not happen as long as our society’s movers and shakers continue to be motivated solely by profit. Indeed, the widespread philosophy of separateness leads “entrepreneurs” to privatize and plunder the commons, rather than protect it. So re-tooling will require revolutionary change in our socio-economic system.

PERPETUAL WAR

far away, so it’s easy to forget what a hell we’re making of other people’s lives. (It’s the “third world war” — i.e., a war upon the third world.) But I can argue against our wars on selfish grounds too: Our wars are bankrupting us while making us less safe.

WAR IS A LIE. (That includes our proxy wars — e.g., the occupation and apartheid in Palestine that our taxes pay for.) Our nation was founded on genocidal theft. And have you noticed that the USA’s military “humanitarian interventions” occur only in countries that are commercially valuable — e.g., countries that have oil, or countries that sit on a major oil pipeline route?

But actually the callous brutality of the US military, then and now, rivals that of the Nazis. We’ve got our own list of war crimes, which I won’t bother to recount here.

Like Obama, I’m “not opposed to all wars, just stupid wars,” but apparently he finds fewer of them to be stupid than I do. I’m not certain whether World War II falls into that category. But at any rate, whether or not the USA had a good reason for entering World War II, the public was not given a good reason.

Why did the USA enter World War II? It wasn’t primarily to fight the Nazis, though the history has been repainted that way. Indeed, until shortly before the USA’s entry into the war, American feelings were mixed: fight against the Germans, fight against the Russians, or stay out of it altogether. Indeed, many Americans felt more closely allied with the capitalist Germans than with the socialist Russians. Franklin Roosevelt wanted to enter the war on the side of the Allies, and so he goaded the Japanese in various ways — aiding Japan’s enemies, conducting naval maneuvers near Japan, setting up an economic embargo of Japan — until Japan finally was provoked into attacking, giving FDR the excuse he was looking for.

When Truman nuked Japan, the excuse given was that this would bring the war to a close more quickly, and thus save many lives. That was not true. Through the indirect diplomatic channels that they had to use, the Japanese had already asked to surrender. They stopped short of unconditional surrender — they asked that their emperor be permitted to continue to live, as a powerless figurehead. But Truman used that exception as an excuse. Apparently his real reason for wanting to nuke two Japanese cities was to demonstrate his new weapon to Stalin.

But I truly believe that the wars would end if more people knew the truth about them. You and I and other working people have more in common with the peasants we’ve been bombing than with the fat cats in Washington and Wall Street who profit from the wars.

(Many people in our society are reluctant to believe that our own political “leaders” could lie to us about such matters. Let me just remind you that we are not a different species from Hitler and other tyrants.)

(Despite their lies, I cannot be sure about the motivations of the makers of war. Perhaps they are psychopaths who enjoy killing large numbers of people — or perhaps they are misguided but well-intentioned people who really do believe they are working for some noble cause that justifies their lies. However, my preference is for democracy, not rule by an elite that keeps secrets from us and claims to know what is best for us.)

Some of the U.S. military’s current actions make no sense whatsoever — I cannot even imagine lies that would justify them.

• The use of depleted uranium in weapons — which will permanently raise the frequency of birth defects in a nation that we are supposedly “liberating” — shows a psychopathic lack of concern about the well being of others.

Or maybe it’s just stupidity? In any case, through these actions and others the US government has forfeited any claim to legitimacy.

Oh, and let’s not forget that a moment of madness or error could produce nuclear war and end the whole world. (Indeed, it would have happened in 1983 if Stanislav Petrov had followed orders!) Fortunately, of all the nations that have ever had nuclear weapons, so far only one has ever been insane enough to use those weapons against humans.

Many people have been persuaded that 9/11 somehow justifies, or even necessitates, one or more of our current wars. But I draw just the opposite conclusion. Indeed, we are told the 19 hijackers were armed only with cheap box-cutters and determination — no nukes, tasers, etc. And even if we bomb their country and several neighboring countries back to the stone age, they’ll still be able to get their hands on box-cutters or other cheap, low-tech weapons. Thus, our wars do nothing to prevent future attacks like that of 9/11/01.

In fact, our wars are making us less safe. Our so-called “smart bombs” aren’t actually smart — they’re killing far more noncombatants than enemies, and so we’re making new enemies faster than we kill old ones. Every innocent bystander who we deprive of a home, a limb, or a loved one thereby gains a reason to pick up a box-cutter. Moreover, it will just get worse — it becomes ever easier for a few angry people to find ways to make terrible weapons, as knowledge continues to grow and spread. I expect that germ warfare soon will be cheap and easy, and it will not be preventable through surveillance. As long as a few people hate us, they will find ways to hurt us.

Evidently, we must stop giving other people reasons to hate us. Bush’s claim that “they hate us for our freedoms” was a lot of nonsense. History did not begin on 9/11/01. The attacks of that day, if not an inside job, were blowback — i.e., retaliation for past crimes by our military-industrial complex. For many years, while most Americans weren’t paying attention, we’ve permitted our government to prop up dictators and overthrow democracies whenever that has served the interests of a few large multinational corporations that have befriended a few politicians. We need to stop that sh*t.

“Kill them all. God will know which ones are his.”

We’re not making any friends that way. People don’t drop bombs on their friends.

I want people to be free, but that means I accept the possibility that they may do something I don’t like. I hope to reduce the likelihood of that, not through control — which is both unethical and unreliable — but through friendship. Only friendship can make us safe.

I wear a big conspicuous peace symbol, everywhere I go. I keep hoping that it will become a fad, a fashion, that nearly everyone will start doing it. That hasn’t happened yet, but I’ll continue wearing it and hoping. For me the symbol has come to represent far more than just the ending of bombs and bullets. Wars will continue as long as a few people can profit from them, and as long as people see their own interests as separate from the interests of other people. The ending of that attitude, and the spread of a worldwide caring community, is what I now see in the symbol.

JOBS AND THE DEFICIT HOAX

(The photo at right shows a bread and soup line from the first great depression.)

Lately there’s been a lot of noise about the deficit, and very little understanding. But any honest economist will tell you that during this time of high unemployment, increased stimulus spending, not a balanced budget, should be our primary concern, if we want to preserve our economic system. That may surprise some people, and needs to be explained:

An economy should not be viewed simply as a “zero-sum game,” an unchanging pie that is to be divided. Rather, it is an organism that is always changing and moving, and the sum is rarely zero. While the economy is healthy, it produces more than it consumes, and so people can pay taxes and the government can pay down some of its debt.

solve each other if our distribution system were more rational. Likewise, homeless people not far from empty houses. We have increased poverty, and in some places increased hunger.

Clearly, if we wish to preserve our current economic system, the most urgent task is to get people working again.

Lakoff says — and I agree — that many of them don’t really care about ending the depression or even understanding it. They’re giving huge tax breaks to the wealthy friends who helped get them elected, and then using the resulting increased deficit as an excuse for austerity measures that they wanted to impose anyway, because of their philosophies of elitism and/or separateness, both discussed elsewhere in this essay.

They claim that tax breaks for the rich will stimulate the economy, but that claim is simply false, as a study of our economic history easily reveals. Trickle-down economics doesn’t work. The market, growing ever more “efficient,” permits ever fewer crumbs to fall.

For instance, right now the government could be hiring people to build public transportation systems and to install solar panels. After enough people regain employment, the economy will get moving at its proper speed, and then we can resume balancing the budget and paying off the debt.

(Fans of the New Deal have made a hero of FDR, who is perhaps the only president to have ever helped the middle class in a big way. But we cannot be sure where FDR’s loyalties really were. In his time, the labor movement was quite strong, and without the New Deal there might have been a socialist revolution. In other words, he used a little bit of socialism to bail out capitalism and to prevent a greater amount of socialism.)

ERIC SCHECHTER is a searcher of answers to the current global crisis.  His philosophy comprises “born-again eco-anarcho-socialist-Buddhist” aspects, plus “Imagine” AND “Internationale.”

Version 5.43 by Eric Schechter 2011 June 26. Underlined magenta phrases are links. Your feedback is welcome. There is also a much shorter version.
Summary: Increasing war, unemployment, sweatshops, ecocide, extinction — only an enormous cultural revolution can save us.
Jump to sections: Intro • Subjectivity • Delusion • Ecocide • War • Jobs • Robots • Plutocracy • Elitism • Alienation • Awakening

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