We must end neoliberal capitalism before it ends us

"... the corporate power elite and the governments that do their bidding implicitly understood that there would no longer be any toleration for political ideologies whose goal was to brutally repress human beings. So, the question for the latter was always how to ensure that the right class continued to be in a position of control and dominance, while at least providing the appearance of freedom and democracy for everyone else." 

Fred Guerin, 

Truthout

Socialism and Capitalism

"The "American Dream" was all about class mobility." writes political economist and scientist, C. J. Polychroniou in the truth-out interview with Chomsky. 

If you were born poor you could study and work your way out of poverty, and with sustained effort could provide a better future for your children. You could find a home, buy a car and send a child to university. The city and town was based on those expectations. Jobs, malls, institutions, education - was built on the principle that we live in a civil society and a life without fear and anxiety - was attainable.

TV dramas were based also on a set of ethics around how to sustain the family, community and the work place. Then entertainments became more sensational - violence, sex, deal-making and power struggles became the meat of the story, where the winner was the one who had access to the most force.  The theme of ethics became pablum for the good old days. Societies where these programs became a steady diet put social justice issues off the radar.  

People who don't experience justice in their lives and who don't think about what a just society is, may look on their life as a personal inventory of win or lose. Parents who want to bring back social responsibility looked to discipline as reward and punishment (for other people's kids but not theirs). Equality became a struggle to keep up with the Jones's.  When dishwashers came out in different colours one had to get rid of the old sage green model for a more fashionable one. 

And then our worth was displayed on social media with the latest selfie. As if unexamined consumerism is not pornographic enough, the bullying and hate fills the air with a new fear: had we become so estranged from who we are we have to find it in public media? Have we become vacuous inflatable robots looking for the next definition to fill us up? 

No but that is how we are presented as a whole. What we need more than anything is to find hope in our work together. To establish what is good for most if not all through getting reacquainted with who we are. To work on our capacities together and not disrupt community work with bids for power.

Which means we need to move deeper into ourselves to check that which is ego and that which is integrity. "A genuine independent left party" says Chomsky.

Naming the Disease - Social Atomization

Henry Giroux writes in his recent Truthout article titled "Donald Trump and the Plague of Atomization in a Neoliberal Age" of Leo Lowenthal who warned back in the forties about the atomization of human beings under a state of fear. "What he understood with great insight, even in 1946, is that democracy cannot exist without the educational political and formative cultures and institutions that make it possible."

This confirms my sense that we are trying to fight a social disease with rational arguments while the supporters of fascist movements just want a messiah who will deal with the big problems so we don't have to, but who have no idea of the danger in giving unconditional power to a single ego. A functioning democratic society can be annoying and tiresome but it has many conditions that challenge power.

In a free and democratic society that pays taxes for education, justice, and social protections for the most vulnerable - we are continually being updated with facts that challenge assumptions of how we can instinctively know the leaders we pick will protect us. That we have social standards that can't be broken. Or that we will be okay as long as the economy is okay. Or, even that we have progressed and would never push a woman in front of a train because she was wearing a headscarf.

In the fifties and sixties I was given an education based on social justice. It wasn't in headlines but it underscored all that I learned. It didn't guarantee fairness or security but assumed we had a responsibility to care about one another. We didn't read Giroux, Lowenthal or Arendt, but we knew of Socrates and Orwell.

Yet many who graduated from this era were quite happy to throw it away because it wasn't perfect.

Now we are at such a stage of civil entropy we shrug while finance capital rules and public benefits are eroded. Those at the bottom are left without a means of earning a living wage, without hope, continually ground down by endless poverty and denied human dignity.

"Mass fear is normalized as violence increasingly becomes the default logic for handling social problems." Giroux writes.

If we stop to read this age and condense all the hostility around us, we will see that life itself is the enemy of fascism. Fascism silences conversation, it wants unquestioned obedience, human sacrifices, the glorious sunset, robotic armies.

Totalitarianism wants power without the human stain, without competing organisms, without reflection or question or thought. It is the muscle without a brain, The sperm without the egg. The knife without flesh. The future without compassion. The masculine without the feminine.

The corporate media keeps telling us this over and over again, in a thousand different scenes and sound bites.

Dysbiosis

Dysbiosis is a term for microbial imbalance, most commonly reported as a condition in the digestive tract, associated with illnesses such as inflammatory bowel disease, says Wikipedia.

What if we extended this definition to include the system we call society? Is there an imbalance within our society which is causing a social disease.  Clearly there are many signs of our species being in trouble when we are affected by extreme weather conditions on this planet, in this post modern age known as the anthropocene.

More than just factory chimneys spewing pollution into the air, theories have been developed that affect human behaviour. Religious fundamentalism that twists the teachings of the original prophets into austere practices and hatred towards the other to deflect attention away from political abuse. Economic systems that funnel the wealth away from the majority towards a malfunctioning minority. Dystopian narratives and stories written by popular writers such as Margaret Atwood, George Orwell, Aldous Huxley and many others, also dire warnings written by non-fiction writers such as Chris Hedges, Noam Chomsky, Naomi Klein -- reveal that we need to address that larger organism called the world.

More than this, the tendency for most people who live and work together to avoid talking about politics, religion and money, because it is deemed 'bad manners', when in fact these are the most important influences in our society -- indicates a dissociative disorder.

Let's start with money. Lynn Parramore interviewed Orsola Costantini, Senior Economist at the Institute for New Economic Thinking, on her paper "The Cyclically Adjusted Budget: History and Exegesis of a Fateful Estimate" which exposes the history of how a budget approach manipulates public opinion to serve the interests of the powerful. We have heard of austerity measures which tells people to expect less in pay, services and social justice to serve an ideal that appears to have no benefit to them.

The mantra of right wing parties and politicians is to take care of the economy first without explaining how they will do that.  Experience tells us that services needed to keep our society well loses funding while the mainstream media sends stories of the danger that terrorism poses.  In this way we are lead away from the connections of cause and effect. As a society we cannot connect our work, our efforts, our plans are disconnected to the system that controls and influences us.  We are suffering from social dysbiosis which affects the health of our minds, bodies, communities and future.  But this is not new. We have suffered unconsciously from the abuses of power-over from the beginning of social history.