Part One: The Game is On
It seems fitting to be talking about playing the race card, the gender card, and the more insidious age card and elite card as we head into the Nevada presidential caucus. What puzzles me is that, after all this time, and after a year of campaigning, most of the discussion seems stuck in a tribal mentality. Why are we so stuck in tribalism?
David Korten’s latest book (He wrote the best seller "When Corporations Rule the World") is called "The Great Turning; From Empire to Earth Community." He says we are at a Great Turning and we can choose to be connected to each other or at war with each other; to be dominated or to partner up. It’s a book about how we all together can swing things around from gated communities to integrated communities.
"Job insecurity, severe weather events, and terrorist threats favored Empire because fear causes a regression to a more primitive consciousness and increases susceptibility to manipulation by advertisers and demagogues who seem instinctively to speak to our fears and insecurities." "Buy my product and it will bring you beauty and love". "Elect me and I will make you prosperous and protect you from evil enemies."
"Believe in my God and he will grant you salvation for your sins and eternal bliss in the afterlife." "Trust in the magic of the unregulated market to convert your unrestrained greed and self-indulgence into a better life for all."
In Korten’s book the pathway to maturity of a society mimics the pathway to maturity in individuals; from what he calls "Magical Consciousness to Imperial to Socialized to Cultural to Spiritual Consciousness. Those who do not evolve or don’t grow get stuck in what Korten calls "the Magical Consciousness" of the small child (magical beings like tooth fairies and white bearded gods i.e. the Other World) and the "Imperial Consciousness" of the six or seven year old (Power Seekers who live in "My World playing up to the powerful & exploiting the oppressed" or whoever you can as far as I can tell from listening to folks like Tony Snow and Grover Norquist). They are firmly rooted and root for the Culture of Empire.
And they play on our "fears and fantasies".
However most of us move on to the Socialized Consciousness stage where you identify "through a primary reference group as defined by gender, age, race, ethnicity, religion, nationality, class, political party, occupation, employer, and perhaps a favored sports team." This mind set kicks in around 12 years old and folks begin to feel a bit of empathy for others in their group. And they will sometimes put aside their own self interest for their tribe's benefit. These "Good Citizens live in a Small World, play by the rules of their identity group, expect a fair reward and comprise the swing voters." They straddle the area between the Culture of Empire and the Culture of Earth Community.
As we move up the ladder into earth community and usually after the age of 30, some of us move into the Cultural Consciousness. "Cultural Creatives live in an Inclusive World and see the possibility of creating inclusive, life-affirming societies that work for all." [As a side note, Carl Jung who I admire greatly, said that it's just fine to work on your preferences i.e. your strengths up to the age of around 30. After that, he thinks you should start in earnest on what he called the path of individuation i.e. maturity by working on your less preferred functions e.g. A logical thinker type would work on his/her less developed feeling function.]
Very few people move to the next level which is the Spiritual Consciousness. "Spiritual Creatives live in a complex, evolving Integral World, which they engage as evolutionary co-creators." (Jesus, Buddha, Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Jr. spring to mind). And I don't know what that means because I'm not there yet. But it's another reason not to kick our elders to the curb because they just might be our spiritual guides.
Faking concern:
Empire seems to have the distinct advantage right now as most of our candidates play to our fears and also to our fantasies. And "Although, persons of a mature consciousness are generally averse to the competitive struggle for dominator power, they are strongly attracted to leadership roles in social movements engaged in challenging Empire's dominion." So we see more mature individuals taking on the problems of global warming, poverty, and justice mostly outside the political arena. And we see a whole lot of faking concern for community, family, equality, liberty, and Mother Earth in those seeking to "align the electorate behind imperial agendas favoring elite power and privilege..." Korten says they resort to "stealth tactics that hide their true aims and values."
This is where we on the internets, the tubes, come in. We need to separate the sheep from the goats and have a vigilant meerkat eye. Who are the users? Who is preying on our trust? Who is a false god or goddess?
They are all salesmen, but it is what they are selling that is vital. Is it something tangible like making me healthy, wealthy, and wise? Or is it a promise like many of the broken promises I've seen in my lifetime.
When I look at the candidates who employed "the ends justify the means" strategies to get the people on their side, I thought of the rulers of Cloud Cukoo Land in Aristophanes' play "The Birds" who dreamed of Utopia and ended up just as tyrannical as the tyrants they were escaping.
Korten isn't talking about some pure state or Utopia. He's talking about getting to a place in our heads where we put aside our tribes and start really integrating based on what's best for the future or our families, communities and the earth.
Maybe that's why I gravitated towards John Edwards in 2003 and his commitment to returning the perspective that work has virtue and that we should reward work over wealth. It's why the people that I've met who are his supporters are, by and large, a pretty smart, mature bunch of folks no matter what their age. It's why I get frustrated when the talk has turned to gender and race even from icons like Gloria Stenheim. What John's campaign is about is trying to let each gender and each race and each age have a shot at the American dream. It's about that old chestnut "power to the people" or "workers of the world get it on." And the culprits are the corporations that want to deny health care, pollute the skies, poison the drinking water, and steal people's stuff.
Playing the gender, race or age card in order to divide us is an old old trick. If John Edwards had bought into the political game, he'd be playing any or all of those cards. But it's just not in him. He's a cultural creative and he can't go back to being an imperial lackey. That's why the imperial toadies hate him. Anybody who is more comfortable in a dominator system than a partnership system, doesn't even get his ideas. Most folks caught in the Imperial consciousness of "me, me, me" really get annoyed at people who are "do gooders". It just points a finger at them as the ultimate do-badders.
Part Two: Politics Shouldn't be a Game.
Edwards is playing his cards right because, ironically, he's not treating this as a game. "Everyone loses when politics is a game" is the subtitle to Garret Keizer's essay "Crap Shoot" in the February 2006 Harper's Magazine.(I can't seem to find a link. I'm a Harper's subscriber so i can read it on line.) Keizer says:
People who say, "America is now a deeply divided country are either facetious or naive. It has always been a deeply divided country. Plantations and factories and every town and city that ever boasted a railroad track have always been deeply divided places. People who ask 'How can we defeat the Republicans in 2008?' are asking a secondary question. The primary question is whether we ought to try. That is the question that must be answered first...
If we sink into cynicism then we have to buy into the notion that being a player is much more worthy than being a worker. But Keizer sees the aspiration to be a player as not "worthy of a grown man or woman". In Korten's terms, a player is caught in the imperial consciousness of a 9 year old who steals from people who trust him because it's easy.
Margaret Kimberley in Wednesday's blackagendareport.com has an essay in which she too asks us to look beyond race and gender or region.:
Citizens should identify with politicians who believe as they do. Acting otherwise is to be in a constant state of bamboozlement. Neither the nonsense spread by hack pundits nor the grotesque smears of politicians should play a role in our decision making. Simply put, voting for someone who acts in opposition to our interests makes us dupes, chumps to be quickly disposed of after the inaugural ball. They are already prepared to send us to the political garbage dump. We shouldn't make it easier for them.
http://www.blackagendareport.com/...
The discussions here for the last couple days about the remark by Senator Obama that "Ronald Reagan changed the trajectory of America in a way that Richard Nixon did not and in a way that Bill Clinton did not", got people's dander up.
And trajectory is sure the right word. Reagan ejected the air traffic controllers out of the cockpit and into oblivion. Reagan hurtled us towards oligarchy. With all the cunning and guile of a child actor, Reagan put this country on a downward trajectory into moral and economic oblivion. Reagan was a "player". And players don't fight, they use others to fight their fights and they give huge chunks of money to their cronies to make toys of destruction so they can play.
Keizer says that workers are more interesting. They actually do the fighting themselves and they include not exclude others because "many hands make light work."
At his most militant, the worker insists on participation. That is because the worker senses that justice is only possible, and work bearable, when everybody works. As long as there are both workers and players, the worker is going to get screwed.
So workers fight.
The worker's approach to fighting is, like his approach to everything else, decidedly workmanlike. The worker's way of war is to bust heads and get back to work.
My favorite part of Keizer's essay is his description then of a plumber attacking a drain trap. This is "the image of the worker at war."
He is not interested in having
"his name on the pipes or changing the gravitational direction of water. The plumber is interested in taking a shit in peace. In the case of his particular vocation, that greatly depends on helping his neighbor do the same thing. He accepts the contract. He depresses the flush handle and watches the whirlpool with a face like God's on the seventh day of creation. He sees that it is good. He says so with the most exalted verb in his vocabulary: "It works."
It works. If only we could stick to that simple idea. How do we make it work for everybody. Keizer doesn't believe it will come with yet another crop of Skull and Bones members with their smug faces trying
"to drape the coffin of American labor with the stars and stripes. Change will come only when people who work, who love work, whose conception of the world is of a work in progress, come to realize they have no choice but to fight. Fight, or accept a world in which a shrinking pool of players lords it over a multiplying pool of slaves.
After God worked, he rested. Players can't rest. And that is not sacred. Again Keizer says that the player "knows nothing of the sancitfying rhythms of work and rest. Playing is about compulsion...The trajectory of his so-called evolution is the airborne arc of a lemming."
Decades of struggle finally got all of us workers an 8 hour day and vacation time. FDR came along at the right time to get it put down on paper. He honored the rhythms of work and rest. Reagan ruined and defiled those rhythms by disrespecting work and making a virtue of being a wise guy, a gangster, a predator, a player.
Workers unite. Take off your chains. Stop marching to the sea, you lemmings. Don't follow the herd with your nose up some other buffalo's butt until you get herded off that buffalo jump.
Join us, the feral cats of freedom, who still have our claws. Join us in coughing up hairballs of truth from all the crap that we've had to digest from the Fat Cats and their fat cat news. Join the resistance and cut to the revolution. Leave your tribe behind. Time to act like grownups.