Towering economic separation erodes the effectiveness of public opinion activism

By Denis Rancourt

A good street demonstration is not what it use to be, in terms of its impact. Likewise, petitions and letters to politicians just don't cut it any more. A YouTube video can, in rare cases, get a cop investigated and put on paid leave, but that is about as far as it goes. Don't think about systemic changes.

There is tremendous opinion opposition to injustices of all kinds but none of it seems to matter.

When the wealthy are so wealthy that they live in separate realities, completely disconnected from the middle and lower classes, and even from the upper middle class, then there is no vehicle of social pressure to be equitable towards others. The wealthy become untouchable and buy political power to serve their own desires.

There is undoubtedly a causal link between towering mega-salaries and mega-profits of international entities and their top managers and overseers, on the one hand, and the ineffectiveness of public opinion activism, on the other hand.

The more the elite are financially able to live in a separate and independent universe, the more this elite is indifferent to the howlings of the lower strata of the economic pyramid.

In any plutocracy such as ours, the ratio between the wealth of the elite and the economic means of the average worker is the best indicator of the extent to which complaints and opinions from the basement can have any influence at all in the penthouse. The higher the ratio of, say, executive salaries to worker salaries, the greater the mistreatment and dissatisfaction of ordinary people, and the more stunning the examples of individual injustices.

One might have the impression that public opinion activism boosted by mainstream media coverage can be somewhat effective, but this is merely an impression. The mainstream media is entirely a management tool of the elite. Allowed stories are approved messages to the managers, who know to apply cosmetic methods while preserving and strengthening the status of the elite. A particular incident of injustice may be treated, but without in any way threatening business as usual. The opinion fire is put out in such a way as to apply a chill on any more demands.

The single most effective financial policy change to increase democracy and justice in our society, would be to roll back the obscene salaries and bonuses of the elite, and the obscene profits and capital mobilities of their corporations. The more the ruling (real and corporate) persons are connected to others, the more fairness becomes a norm.

This is because economic isolation breeds contempt. The more the wealthy are wealthy, the more they can buy out, directly and indirectly, all the players in the institutions, that might otherwise create some equity in following public pressures. The more the wealthy are wealthy, and the more managers' salaries are high, the less public pressures are pressures at all.

There is a direct and causal link between towering economic separation and social and civil injustice. If the mayor of the town and the town councilors do not live in the town, then the townsfolk cannot expect to have much say in municipal management policies. Wealth gaps and towering wealth disparities are poison. Extreme class separation enables extreme class oppression.

Self-Image as Primary Concern and the Road to Good

[Photo: Former Canadian federal Minister of Justice, former Canadian Ambassador to the United Nations, and University of Ottawa’s President Allan Rock in a Gee-Geez (university sports team) costume developing a healthy body and mind.]

“Thou shall not kill” but you can pay taxes to a government whose main expenditure is geopolitical war of aggression.

This contradiction is nothing that a glib self-justification cannot fix. Sophism is alive and well in our collective self-image narrative of righteousness. It doesn’t matter that wars, genocides, and continental-scale exploitations are thereby enabled as the dominant features of “international aid and collaboration.”

In the fed and sheltered human, the main impetus not to be a killer of one’s own kind is one’s self-image that one is a “good person,” arising from one’s desire to be seen as a “good person” by one’s community. The latter individual self-image derives completely from a community culture which valorizes “virtue”; from a community culture which maintains a collective self-image narrative of righteousness.

The fabric of societal control is the collective self-image narrative of righteousness. This collective self-image narrative is constantly reinforced both by individual and mass (e.g., media) communications and by our laws, charters, constitutions, covenants, conventions, and international agreements and treaties, and by their constant re-interpretations through practice and legal precedents.

On the one hand we have the fundamental principles such as “thou shall not kill” and the “rights to life and freedom” and, on the other hand, we have the interpretations, practices, and legal precedents, which “harmonize” these principles with the murderous and predatory impulses of our hierarchical bosses. This is not an easy task and much energy must be expended to maintain the collective self-image narrative of righteousness; just as much energy is expended by the individual to maintain her individual self-image in the face of her collaboration in hierarchy.

The latter energies are the energies needed to maintain slavery and to make the slaves and slave masters individually self-sustainable in the face of their intrinsic human desires to “live and let live.”

Consider a canonical example of such sophism energetically manufactured in the service of maintaining the fabric. On the one hand the fundamental principles assert that individuals have rights. On the other hand these individuals' rights are sand in the gears of hierarchical structures of control and dominance. The solution is the brilliant sophism that one individual’s rights cannot infringe on the rights of another individual. In a world where legal precedent has established the corporation as a person, this is perfect!

The created notion that an individual’s rights could infringe on the rights of other individuals is absurd. It is a sophistic fabrication intended to cloud hierarchical power’s infringements on individual rights.

For example, we individually have the right to life. How can this right limit the right to life of others? To kill is to violate another’s right to life. To live is to live. To live cannot be a violation of another’s right to life. For a state to claim self-defence in a war of invasion and occupation of another state’s territory is logically equivalent to breaking into a neighbour’s house to kill the occupants and then installing some of your friends to squat the premises on the pretext that you believe the husband intends to harm you. Try that defence in criminal court! (It may work in Canada if the neighbours are aboriginals.)

I have a right to free expression. How can this limit the right to free expression of another? To block another from free expression is to violate her right to free expression. But one does not have a “right to not be disturbed” by another’s free expression. And to invoke such a ludicrous “right” is to block the free expressions of others. One has the right to not be intimidated or coerced but not the right to not be disturbed by another’s expression. Words are words. Power-based coercion is power-based coercion.

There are as many examples as there are pretexts for limiting and violating the fundamental rights of individuals.

Hierarchies and illegitimate concentrated power are the violators of all individual rights. We all contribute to violating the rights of others to the extent that we permit, reinforce, and do not resist hierarchy, especially the hierarchical plutocracies of the most powerful First World which are responsible for exploiting and suppressing far beyond national borders.

Therefore any analysis of human rights must first posit the actual power structures and power asymmetries. In this context, the artificial edifice of corporations and nations and econo-military regional blocks as “persons” protected by trade and monetary agreements is an abomination. And this monstrous and immoral edifice is supported by the mother of all collective self-image narratives of righteousness, with virtually all service intellectuals in its employ.

The good news is twofold. First, every individual can resist by directly foiling the hierarchy at the individual’s local point of attachment to the hierarchy, at work for workers, at school for students. Second, every individual in the chain of command is embedded into society and is therefore vulnerable via self-image.

Every supervisor and boss is subservient to the collective self-image narrative of righteousness. And the higher up the hierarchical ladder one sits, the more vulnerable one is to the perils of image and reputation. This is because the security of the bosses depends on the gullibility of the masses underneath.

This is why there is a veritable legal industry regarding defamation and libel. Libel a powerful person and you will be sued to pay huge damages because that person’s reputation is worth a lot of money, given that the person’s power largely depends on the reputation. Think of the dirt-finding efforts of powerful political opponents…

Admittedly the collective self-image narrative of righteousness has a class structure such that basement rumours mostly have little impact, yet breaches in the upper-class self-image narrative are disproportionately more “news worthy” (unless the potential damage to the ruling elite is too widespread or fundamental to be reported). There is structure, there are accidents, and there is opportunity. The collective self-image narrative of righteousness is expensive and complex to manage and, despite globalization, its control cannot be centralized. As soon as one branch is controlled, it is dead. Witness the collapse of corporate media: Zero investigative content equals zero utility equals zero interest and no advertising revenues.

Think of all the ways that a “captain of industry” or any unelected manager of human lives can be levelled via vulnerability to the collective self-image narrative of righteousness… This is why corporate executives and board members do not have addresses or emails. This is why there are ombudspersons and equity offices. This is why there is an industry of “they’re just like you and I”, “just dealing with life’s challenges.”

Let’s abstract away that they run our lives and were never elected. Or were elected but were never chosen. Or are running the show but are not liable. Let’s buy into murder because it’s a good investment to have strong thugs as appreciative bosses.

Or let’s hold them accountable, starting where we can have an impact, starting with those immediate bosses that we have dirt on. And there’s a lot of dirt because they shit on us all the time. If you haven’t noticed, then try exercising your natural rights. Don’t let the Xmas party and token gifts fool you.

Rejoice in the new self-image that you are an independent thinker, a whistleblower, a trouble maker, an anarchist, a rebel; that you are disruptive. Get out of the lie and find your self-respect. Find your personal power to fight the oppression and join those who have found meaning. Step out, expose them, and never back down again.

***

NOTE on limits to free expression: Individual free expression of racist opinions is only harmful in an oppressive hierarchical environment where structural racism exists and where psychological mobbing mechanisms can spontaneously develop. The best antidote to both is to allow and encourage individual free expression so that racism can be exposed and challenged along with the oppressive overriding power structures. To participate in the suppression of any individual expression, including an expression correctly characterized as “hate speech,” is to violate the individual’s right to free expression. Such systemic discriminatory suppression is a sign of societal feebleness where paternalistic control is sought as protection in lieu of independent thought. To insist on such state “protection” is to assume the victim stance for some and for others it is to refuse the personal day to day political responsibility to stand for the rights of all individuals. It is to legitimize the state in violating individual freedom.

Mainstream mindfuck as radical agitator’s protection from self

The reason power does not need to actually kill North American radical agitators is twofold.

First, the agitators themselves have been trained by the system’s brutality: Force will be met with disproportionate and lethal counter force. Ask the summarily executed Black Panther leaders or aboriginal warriors who dare to practice road blocks and land protection.

Second, agitation itself no longer resonates with the victims of the system’s oppression (i.e., with any of us) because the manufactured mental environment that manages collective consciousness and self-image is so completely effective.

The population and mainstream activists have been zombified and channelled towards irrelevant pursuits. Masses, encouraged by corporate media, are asking governments to save us from CO2. Or improve the laws to protect whistleblowers. Or provide Medicare. Or protect us from the next flue epidemic. Or give us a fair competitive environment. Or protect us from foreign economic or terrorist enemies. Or find the cure to cancer (why not death?) And so on.

The problems that attack body and soul are deflected, channelled, and re-cast, or substitute problems are simply fabricated; and we are encouraged to focus on the thus defined “attainable goals,” and we are rewarded for doing so by an also fabricated sense of “community.”

Every class is disconnected from its own oppression and cannot see where it has power and where it can act directly.

Instead, we accommodate ourselves to “the hand that feeds us.”

Instead, we are diverted towards windmills (literally), atmospheric chemistry, the imperceptible effects of environmental toxins (except if you live from poisoned land in which case the problem is your alcoholism), impending epidemics, impending terrorist attacks, impending economic collapse, the crushing public debt, and so on.

The radical agitator has no hold. Nothing she can say, if it does not follow the mainstream, can perturb the victim away from his false perception. There are only the right and left shades of delusion. Nothing else exists. Which side are you on? The anarchist has no moves.

Maybe an example is in order.

Whose problem is an overly large public debt? Simply zero the debt. Or if the lender is the public purse then zero the interest on the public part of the debt. If the result is that private banks will refuse to lend more then the result is that private banks will have lost their instrument of extortion. The state can print its own public money and lend it where needed on a basis of trust. The money will make itself from the labour of the borrower. Money as private debt in a fractional reserve private-bank-run system is the single greatest extortion game on the planet. Kill the banks. Take back and create human-need-based zero-profit public banking. Simple rules suffice: Can’t fund takeovers; can’t fund war; can’t fund non-democratic power grabs. The system can’t push out the individual. Pure and simple.

What does this mean in practice? Don’t pay back your loans and don’t let them repo. Cheer on those who have the guts and be there to protect them. Don’t pay your rent and don’t let them turf you. Don’t take any “money rules” bullshit. You work to live. You don’t live to be enslaved by some illegitimate debt or illegitimate ownership. You own the space that you live in. You own the place where you work. We all do. You are nobody’s slave.

The latter radical idea (especially regarding implementation) mostly has no chance. The reader’s allergic reaction to it proves my point.

Even most who agree with the economic analysis will vehemently insist on impossible implementation models: They will recommend either lobbying government to change monetary policy or escape into a fairytale alternative community of alternative currency, like one would escape into a hobby or volunteer work. Those who understand by necessity will steal from the system and use the black market – sane and healthy modes of self-defence.

There are as many examples as there are systems and circumstances of exploitation.

The answer is always to fight back directly where one is personally exploited and oppressed – and that is the most radical idea in the First World middle class, which is why it is never heard and cannot be heard.

When there is a chance it can be heard there is only one response: Kill the messenger.


RELATED LINK:
Academic execution of Denis Rancourt: Kill him!

When I says 'plutocracy'...

When I says 'plutocracy' I means this:
http://goldenruledocumentary.blogspot.com/

"9 out of 10 elected politicians had more funding than their rivals..."
-Noam Chomsky

A remarkable documentary film.