Can Our Civilization Shed Its Skin?
Can we wriggle out of Capitalism to reveal a regenerative alternative?
A reader inspired me to respond at length to comments he made on my last essay about politics and current events, rather than pursue the more esoteric ideas that fascinate me at the moment. KS writes:
I know you have spent much effort working on this issue [of social transformation] and searching for solutions. My question is where would you begin? How would you start to transform us from a capitalist society to something that would rejuvenate our planet rather than tear it apart. I don't have much hope in a world where even talk of getting the ultra Rich to cut back on their private jet use is met with ridicule and derision. I don't think the powers that be have our best interests at heart.
There's quite a bit of evidence to show that covid-19 and the MRNA vaccine were both weaponized and subsequently used to eliminate personal freedoms through the use of lockdowns and strict government controls similar to what we see in China. These kinds of controversial discussions were once part of your repertoire and you wrote about them eloquently and extensively providing both sides of the story on difficult subjects like Bill Gates The WHO and vaccinations. You seem to have gotten much more conservative in your outlook after recent events.
I will attempt to respond to all of this, but in reverse order.
1. Did I Become More Conservative?
I don't think I have gotten more conservative: I am still an anarchist. I support many of social ecologist Murray Bookchin’s ideas for how we can reorganize society. Bookchin believed that any authentic liberatory movement must challenge hierarchy on every level. He developed a model of “libertarian1 municipalism”: Local communities would be organized as direct, participatory, nonhierarchical democracies. These communities would work together and seek to mesh harmonically with nature and their local environment.
Let me start by unpacking my views on the war in Ukraine. I disagree with the standard Leftist/Chomsky (and RFK / Joe Rogan / Russell Brand) perspective: I think the US is doing the right thing to arm Ukraine. This is for multiple reasons. Putin's Russia is a gangster autocracy ruled by pure domination. If Russia is allowed to conquer and assimilate Ukraine, Putin would have the resources to become a global power on par with the US and China. Putin also has expressed his intention to push deeper and re-take Poland, etc. The world is in a very precarious situation now where autocracy is in danger of triumphing over (admittedly very flawed) liberal Democracies. Despite all of our other concerns and despite the rotten situation of common people in the US (where a shocking 25% of the population experiences some degree of food insecurity), I still think the triumph of autocracy would be a far worse fate.
I understand the analysis that considers the Ukraine war to be a “proxy war,” where the US and NATO strategically used Ukraine to force a military showdown with Russia. There may be some truth to this. There are probably different factions within the military and intelligence communities who pursue different goals. Certainly, from a military contractor perspective, the war is a bonanza, allowing them to use all of their stockpiled weapons in actual conflict and build and design new ones. Of course, Russia also had an enormous stockpile of ancient, obsolete weapons it has been able to use up in this conflict.
However, Chomsky-ish Leftists and the Rogan/RFK/Matt Taibbi/Glenn Greenwald types seem unable to recognize that Russia is also a very evil imperialist power, ignoring massive historical evidence for this. Taibbi, for example, had to make a retraction of a very confident statement he made just before the war, when Putin was amassing troops along the border, that Russia was not about to launch a full-scale invasion. Taibbi thought he understood Putin. He did not.
I think these critics developed — for good reason — so much contempt for liberal and mainstream progressive hypocrisy over the last decades that they can no longer evaluate new situations with clarity. They have turned things around to the point where the Democrats — instead of craven, self-serving hypocrites, which they often are — become the ultimate evil. This means even a demagogue like Trump might seem a better option. I consider this a disastrous error, even if it is understandable.
As for the vaccines and technocratic control, that is still part of my "repertoire" (whatever that means)! I think it is hard for people to handle complexity / ambiguity very well, particularly when our deepest emotions are engaged.
While I would happily support Bernie Sanders again, I do not trust RFK's perspective. I will explore this in greater depth in a future essay. I am open to changing my mind, of course. I recommend the just-released Reason Magazine interview with RKF. I found this section telling:
RFK simply ignores or dismisses any data that conflicts with his thesis. Whether or not we think that COVID vaccines should have been mandatory, the data that the vaccines did prevent many deaths does seem a bit overwhelming. At the same time, the vaccines did cause other problems like heart problems in a small subset of the population. Unfortunately, public health often involves making exactly these kinds of difficult tradeoffs.
With Covid-19, it does seem that we chose to protect the old while we sacrificed the young and healthy, with no public referendum about this. In fact, the same could be said about the last decades of inaction on climate change. Our inaction allowed the baby boomers to continue their voracious consumption habits while passing the agony to future generations. This is because the older generation still wields much greater economic and political power, unfortunately.
RFK maintains he is not “anti-vax,” yet he is even suspicious of the polio vaccine and other vaccines (like measles) which are generally considered triumphs of modern medicine. I just don't see evidence that supports his position, which seems biased and emotionally driven. At the same time, I agree, of course, that corporations are often crooked and evil. Phillip Morris and Exxon, for example, knew about the massive harm they were causing for decades, but stalled and spread disinformation to increase their profits.
The pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies reap huge rewards from enforced vaccines. At the same time, the mandating of a vaccine passport is a fantastic tool for global monitoring and control. And it is true that Neoliberal technocracy is moving toward increasing censorship and manipulation, including subliminal nudges, as Byung-Chul Han explores in Psychopolitics.
While one can isolate particular bad actors, this is, more truly, the inevitable outcome of a particular systemic logic. Martin Heidegger called it the technological “enframing,” which conceives of the world as a “standing reserve” to be used for humanity’s utilitarian aims. Ultimately, this can only be addressed — out-competed — by a new paradigm proposing a different systemic, mythological level. We need a different model of reality. This is why I keep returning to Bernardo Kastrup’s analytic idealism, Bookchin’s social ecology, and so on: The new paradigm is ready. More people just have to know about it. This means we must keep talking and writing about it.
2. What’s My Plan for Rapid Social Change?
Now, to address the first comment about social change:
Ideally, we want to find a juncture between indigenous forms of social organization (the Iroquois Confederacy is a great model) and the reality of being in a vast post-industrial civilization that must, out of compassion, seek to sustain the lives of the eight billion people currently with us. (Personally I tend to think we should be tapering down the population at this point; I would rather this happened intentionally instead of catastrophically, but catastrophe seems far more likely).
I still believe we must use social networks and mass media to build a decentralized, authentic, eventually anarchist alternative to Capitalism, if we want humanity to survive. I presented my plan for transforming society in my book How Soon Is Now and in my actual efforts to build the Evolver Network. At its zenith in 2011 - 12, the Evolver Network had 60+ local groups using a decentralized "hub and spoke" model. We had our own media platform and our own, somewhat rudimentary, social network.
One helpful metaphor is a snake shedding its skin: A snake can only shed its skin when the new skin has formed beneath the old skin, otherwise all of its organs would flop out and it would die. Similarly, our social and technical infrastructure is the old “skin.” We have outgrown it and it is now holding us back. But we don’t have a new skin ready yet, so we are trapped in the old one.
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