Permission or Forgiveness?

Today in my American History class Professor McCardell talked about American History up through the civil war to be an effort to define America and an American Identity. A lot of the things he said echoed what Sam Huntington says in his book "Who Are We?" Professor McCardell defined the four prevalent themes of the time period to be: individual v. community, states v. nation, loose v. strict construction, altruism v. self-interest. These themes seem to echo each other in many ways. What he said that really struck me is that, in its essence these themes all come back to the question of asking permission or seeking forgiveness.

Permission versus forgiveness. It struck me a very poetic way of saying something that has been on my mind for awhile. American politics, American identity, and to a greater extent international politics and interpersonal relationships are defined by this distinction. Every person makes this choice daily and many people can be in large part defined by their tendencies to ask permission or seek forgiveness. It seems that too much of either is a dangerous thing. For example: a person who is always asking permission will inevitably breed and propagate bureaucracy in all they do. They will also be less willing to take the risks often prerequisite to true breakthroughs. On the other hand, a person constantly seeking forgiveness will step on a lot of toes and may set in motion actions or ideas that grow beyond their control before anyone is able to say stop. When a loud enough voice is raised in opposition the reaction will be far more severe than it would be for the person asking permission, but not nearly as much would have transpired in the meantime.

Based on the first lecture, the course looks to be a good one. I'm excited to have such an eloquent way of phrasing something that has been on my mind recently, and applicable to many aspects of humanity and their actions.

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Who's afraid of China?

The question alone betrays the failing of our world system. In an age when so much attention and resources are being paid to democracy building, development, and third-world outreach, shouldn't the idea that another country as historically underdeveloped as China would be rising into their own be a cause for celebration? After all, their "development" is a textbook example of what all the experts are praising: they are consuming more and more, giving rise to new employment and a population that is quickly entering the world of consumerism as their lifestyles improve. Herein lies the problem. The form of development that has been encouraged for so long...capitalism and consumerism, has finally reached the tipping point. The rest of the world is figuring it out and we will all be soon forced to acknowledge that consumerism is not how the world should be run. After all, as matter is neither created nor destroyed, there is an obvious limit that will one day be reached as we continue to flaunt that which we create and hide the destruction left in its wake. If our philosophy to support the growing need for employment the world round is to increase consumption to counteract the "gains" made by more efficient means of production, there will be a limit at which there is nothing left to consume and billions of people will be forced to realize that all those zeros in their bank accounts were never worth anything outside of the fraudulent credit system that was created to support consumption beyond our means. Consumption is not the answer. There are too many people vying for too few jobs already. Allowing them to make more money and thereby consume more will only aggravate the problem.

This is the underlying paradox of almost all development programs. They rely on the assumption that by creating consumers of the world's impoverished masses, these people will in turn live better lives. The truth is the vast majority of people don't actually want the rest of the world to be better off. Most people would want the rest of the world's population to live more comfortably, up to the point at which they begin to compete for our limited resources, when their development will be fought to protect our interests. In the end, our development programs, and the attitudes that created these flawed programs, which we still cling to are inherently flawed themselves. Integrating the rest of the world to participate in our consumer society will not solve anyone’s problems, it will only aggravate the problems that have plagued our system since it was created, but have lain dormant due to the relatively small number of consumers whose wealth and comfort was buoyed up by those supplying the inputs who were not allowed to participate in the system they supported. These flaws are becoming more and more obvious thanks in large part to the voices of those who participated in the international developments and financial systems that have left angered by all of its flaws. Voices like Joseph Stiglitz and David C. Korten are making known the changes we must all want to occur in order to save the world from our own greed and consumption, and save those who are being enlisted into the capitalist ranks as we speak.

To get back to my first point, who's afraid of china, I answer that there would be nothing to fear if we were living in a people-centered society where the better lives of all would be something to be celebrated. The secret is, that more consumption and the greater comfort it affords do not equal a better life. Shocking, right? If I were a western policy maker I would fear China for two reasons: Patience and knowledge of self.

Patience: an example. A friend of my parents owns a beautiful antique jade disc that measures about a half meter in diameter. It is said that this disc was carved hundreds and hundreds of years ago using a string to saw the jade, grains of sand for added friction and water for lubrication. They imagine it took years of patient, rhythmic sawing. You can be sure that this individual was not sawing jade with a string just to create a disc. He understood the value of patience and the wisdom that can come from centering yourself on a slow, simple task. Which brings me to my next point: Knowledge of self.

The eastern religious tradition is one that in its purest form has not changed in thousands of years. Unlike the western judeo-islamic-christian traditions that are constantly evolving and changing with the times to try and maintain their influence over society, the eastern traditions remain unchanged. It is because they do not focus on the transformation of their societies to fit their moral mold, rather they focus on the individual and cultivating the inner-self to conform to the spirit of the universe: the common essence that is present in all things. There seems to be an underlying understanding that all that which surrounds us is ephemeral and passing and to understand life, self, and god all one has to do is to look inside to the purest essence of our self, that which transcends even the human to achieve the universal. And because of its simplicity, this tradition and those who practice it have never had to change, despite all that has occurred around them.

So yes, I fear China. Not because they will rise to dominate us in a nuclear firefight that will destroy the planet, but because if we were to destroy the world and any people were to survive, many of the Chinese, not the government types but rather the ascetics, would be able to continue on as they always had, searching inside themselves for the truth, while the rest of us will be totally devastated and lost as to how to carry on.

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A Plan of Action

Another amazing thing happened to me at the festival this past weekend. I spent a fair amount of time talking politics and the state of the world with two guys I was camped near. The first was named Sly. He is a carpenter most of the year who spends the summers touring festivals. He and I had read some similar stuff and started off on the same page and through separate paths of mental wandering and reasoning we were able to arrive the same conclusion on a lot of things; a kind of mental state function. The other guy involved in our shit-shooting circles was a kid named Dewey, hailing from Ann Arbor Michigan. I guess our conversations weren't so much circles where we gathered to shoot the shit but more along the lines of happenstance situations where one of us, often unwittingly and inebriated, fell into a rant on one topic or another and from there we fell into discussion.

It was talking to Dewey and his two friends that I realized that the radicalism growing in the religious right of America that I, and they, so much fear is not without its equaling force on the left. Some of the people I met this past weekend were as, if not more, radical than the loonies banging bibles against their tear-covered faces in evangelical mass, the difference is that the lefties target their radical hatred against those in power rather than some socio-cultural other. Both are manifestations of a feeling of ones comfort being threatened. The right is allying with those they see as more economically powerful to protect them from invasion by the "other." While the left is uniting with those fighting the powers that be to protect the comfort they find in being a free-spirited individual, able to do as they please. I always ally myself with the left however, as I witnessed this past weekend, what a large number of these left radicals dedicate their freedom and liberty to is drugs, and occasionally music.

The beauty of radicalism is that is shows people cares. It shows that complacency is passé and people are again willing to stand up for what they believe in. The rise in radicalism also shows that for one reason or another, this growing desire is not being met with a growing capacity of the society at large to funnel it towards constructive use. There are many causes, including, from my point of view: a lack of good public education, a growing feeling of powerlessness, and a growing access to information.

The lack of good public education is the most important from my point of view. The radicals on both sides are generally not coming from well-educated or wealthy backgrounds. These are the people who feel disenfranchised from the system. They are the ones whose chance at feeling a desire to learn and contribute to society was oftentimes hurt at a young age by a broken home, a lack of education, and often compounded by poverty. If children are not taught to learn and to appreciate learning as an act whose doing is not justified by some airy goal or end, but by the action itself, they will most likely never learn to dedicate themselves to any intellectual pursuit. A lack of childhood education oftentimes cannot be remedied later on in life. The brain and its patterns are in a large part trained by childhood actions and habits. If one's childhood doesn't include intellectual stimulus, reading, constructive games, social interactions, etc. the child in question will have a damn hard time dedicating themselves to an ideal so lofty and esoteric and politics. A much more likely pursuit will be survival and basic creature comfort.

The three root causes of radicalism are all intertwined and any combination of them can lead to similar results. The sense of powerlessness comes in part from a lack of education and a life of poverty. A very important factor, that I believe is becoming more and more important as America continues down the path we are on is that of income distribution. People are much more likely to feel united behind a cause or ideal if they see that cause or ideal representing them and being represented by them as equally as their neighbor. Thus democracy is based a platform of egalitarian principles. When the income gap between the rich and poor begins to grow, and this income gap proves to be self-perpetuating, increasing with each generation as nepotism and favors trump the idealized meritocracy of "The American Dream", which incidentally never existed. As this gap grows, those who are increasingly obviously left out of the upper-echelons will become increasing discontent and begin to do something about their anger at some point. This point will be by my reckoning some point in the near future.

The increased access to information. The internet has changed everything. Now a coal miner in the Pocono Mountains no longer has to accept to his lot in life and tell his son that he damn well better do the same. That same miner can now go online and see that other miners around the country have organized, unionized and mobilized and because of this are now receiving higher pay, better conditions and shorter hours. Whereas before the internet this presumably uneducated man would have to keep toiling away just to bread on the table day after day, he now has options as a result of his increased access to information. He now has the choice to inform others and organize those around him, or to go to where the better employment is. Knowledge is power, but there is no moral filter on this knowledge. That is to say, just by informing the masses our world is not going to improve. Not all information is good, and that information that tends to draw the most attention and be the most influential is that which is most corrupt or harmful. Either way, the access to information changes everything. It allows even the most geographically isolated to take center stage in online debates about what is happening halfway around the world. It allows an inner-city kid with no money for books to read great poetry and discover her love of writing. The examples are endless, as are the possibilities when the masses start getting informed.

Dewey helped me to realize this. He is one of the warmer, more giving, and interested individuals I've met recently. He was content to sit down and listen to people talk for hours just to learn what they had to say. He was a victim of a broken home, a bad public education and is now experiencing an increased access to information. He told me that is why he loves festivals; they are diverse gatherings of people and music from around the country that come together to share thoughts, songs, ideas, drugs, food and love. The drug scene is out of control, but there will always be the minority of people in any group who take what they do to an unhealthy extreme (see opening paragraphs for reasons why). One time after Dewey and I had been talking for hours he stopped mid-sentence and said,

"That's it. I need a plan! We're all so angry about this fucked-up government and our fucked-up world but no one has a plan. Of course! All I need to start is a plan."
It seemed obvious, but no. Up until that point he had been content just being angry about the situation. He saw his role in the scheme of things to be effective only to a certain point and being angry was good enough. Why try to make a change in something you can't even touch? Dewey told me what a huge breakthrough this was. He had a simultaneous realization that money is the root of all evil, and this was to form the basis for his plan, last time we spoke. Just by talking - by offering him another perspective on things he was already thinking about - he was able to realize more of his own potential within the system he feels so distant from. By increasing his access to "good" information he was able to step back from a sword-waving blind brand of anger, to a more constructive brand of anger, focused towards changing the system. The information is out there, the problem in the days ahead will be figuring out how to assure that information meant to inform, and not to influence, is distributed equally and fully among the population, especially the children.

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Balloons

I've just returned from a weekend at the 10,000 Lakes Festival in Northern Minnesota. The music was phenomenal. The best show I saw was the Jacob Fred Jazz Odyssey. Their bass player did things I still can't understand. The Everyone Orquestra, Cyro Baptista & Beat the Donkey, Les Claypool, Gabby La La, and Buckethead were some of the craziest and most fun sets I've ever seen, while parts of Trey's second set, MOFRO, and parts of Widespread Panic were pretty mind blowing.

There was a beautiful moment during Trey's first set when people from the back of the standing area pushed a few hundred balloons into the crowd. The rainbow of balloons bounced slowly towards the front of the crowd and then were moved off to the sides naturally where they were bounced by and floated over the crowd. The sun was just about to set and the day was cooling off. Eventually the balloons encountered some of the more aggressive assholes in the crowd and were popped, much to my dismay. While the balloons were aloft, however, not only was the crowd's energy lifted, but the band's increased noticeably as well. During this whole event Trey was soloing and it seemed that the solo would never end, nor would the energy abate. Of course, with the fisrt round of audible "pops" people were brought back to reality, the solo ended and the concert went on.

I was struck by the gesture. Someone went through the effort to blow up all of those balloons, coordinate their release and watch them go. To my understanding, there was no other motivation than to create this experience for everyone there. It seemed a sort of selfless act of theater or art.

During the second set the act was in a way repeated. There was a group of people waling around throwing handfuls of glow sticks into the crowd. Again, the effect of dozens of glowing sticks flying over the heads of thousands of people with the stage as the backdrop was spectacular. I was struck by the amount of selflessness that abounded at the festival, despite the relative poverty of most of the people there. What there was, was to be shared.

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Social Commentary

Grafitti from Santiago thanks to Alexi.

"In this cold winter it is everyone for them$elve$ :(!!!"

"Nothing"

"My life is a boring waste."

"Love without rules"

"Work denegrates, kill the boss"

"Capitalism Kills"

"Nothing"

"Capitalism"

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