Peter J. Bearse
and Carmine Gorga
The converse of the delusion of self-power
by actual or potential tyrants is the disempowerment of the many through
illusion. As long as the illusion affects only a relatively small group of people,
the negative effects remain largely private and personal. When illusion
permeates culture and community, the result may be the collapse of both.
The investigation of human illusion by way
of self-delusion is rich and varied. One can go all the way back to Don Quixote by Cervantes, the first modern novel.
One can also recall Middlemarch:
A Study of Provincial Life, by
George Eliot. Characters in these novels and many others build castles in the
air and attempt to live in them. Idealistic and out of touch with reality, they
make mistakes that cause them great unhappiness. Eventually their illusions are
shattered. Why do people persist in hugging their untenable illusions?
Dorothea, the central character of Middlemarch, wants nothing more in life than to do
good, but she does not know how to do good. Reality eventually shatters her
idealism but still does not show her how to do good. Eliot’s Dorothea becomes
Disney’s Dorothy in The Wizard
of Oz, who follows the “yellow brick road” and discovers that idealism
never dies. So, the problem of how to do good has been chronic through
centuries. And yet, notwithstanding centuries of progress in science,
technology and prosperity, the socio-economic forces that dominate our own,
most advanced century seem all the more directed towards the destruction of
idealism and idealists.
A short-cut of more recent years has been:
“Do well while doing good.” Yet, this is also an illusion that can lead to many
other problems. Why? Because the focus is still on the pursuit of self-interest
rather than the building of community. This leads to “other problems” by
denying both the “other” and “problems,” and/or vitiating our ability to deal
with either. For we can no longer count on Adam Smith’s “invisible hand,”
whereby the pursuit of self-interest automatically leads to net benefits for
others. The essential foundations of an ethical and well-performing market
economy -- basic values and vibrant competition -- have been substantially
weakened.
Many forces tend to make us weak as we
bend to the wind of the last words whispered in our ears. These are the forces
of illusion. The fundamental reason is lack of personal empowerment. The
antidote, easy to state but hard to effect, is empowerment, not just personal
or individual but of “We the People.” As Benjamin Franklin said during the
American Revolution, “We can either hang together or hang separately.”
It’s too easy to blame others for the
adverse situation(s) we now face. Some oft-cited include “the system”,
“financial capitalism”, the President, Congress, the other (political) Party,
et al. All of these figure in an overall indictment, but the first source of
illusion we need to face is ourselves. We need to look in the mirror like Pogo
and say: “We have met the enemy; he is us”. For among its other qualities, the
human mind is a bulwark against uncertainty and a filter to cut information
overload. We live in a world of increasing uncertainty and analysis paralysis.
What do we do in response? We seek easy
answers to complex questions. These support illusions. We tend to filter out
contrary opinions. These are primarily those that don’t support our illusions.
Some that can afford the privilege build “castles” in the form of “McMansions”
in gated communities. Others huddle together with similarly situated and
like-minded neighbors. Thus, politics, instead of arising out of a community
organized for social problem solving, becomes a game of “us” vs. “them”.
These human tendencies, the problems we
face, and our inabilities to resolve them by ourselves, however, are aggravated
by those who should know better. These more powerful, better established others
use their favored positions to foster illusions, and to mis- or under-inform,
de-skill, dis-empower and depreciate whatever we might do or try to do to get
control over our own lives, “make a difference” and produce a better world for
our children and grandchildren. Who are they? They include CEOs of:
·
Big, Mainstream Corporate Media that, as Mitroff and Bennis, and
Boorstin revealed, are into the “manufacture of unreality” and “pseudo events,”
respectively.
·
Large, multinational corporations, especially those with
significant market power, and including those who think that adoption of
“Corporate Social Responsibility Programs” lets them off the hook.
·
Candidates for state and national office who confuse “self” with
“public” interest and who use the big-money driven political system to advance
their own careers.
·
Political parties who emphasize fund-raising from big donors over
people-raising / people’s activism empowerment activities.
·
Major advertising firms, who help their big-corporate clients to
increase their market power and maintain their brands and profits but whose
“public service advertising” does nothing to empower people to become effective
producers in what should be their politics and their government.
·
Financial firms and back holding companies that are “too big to
fail” yet, along with their enablers in big government, bear major
responsibility for the Great Recession, financial crisis and immiseration of
the American Middle Class.
·
The biggest foundations and other “not-for-profit” members of the
powerful “3rd sector”
of our economy, which fancy themselves as the safety valves for poverty and
other socio-economic problems, while officially downplaying their political
roles and downgrading ours.
·
And so forth.
The illusions that these forces have
fostered and in which we and our “Go-Along/Get-along” neighbors have been
complicit include those that lead us to believe that we can have a prosperous
economy and a democratic society driven by:
·
Consumerism and “keeping up with the Jones”;
·
A big-money politics that is a pretense of a democratic republic,
effectively acing most of “We the People” out of the game.
·
Large, well-established corporations which pretend to be serving
Americans while moving jobs out of the country.
·
A desiccated, textbook, Economics 101 “free enterprise” version of
economics that maximizes a narrow, desiccated version of “self” interest and
amplifies the power of big government by minimizing community and the ability
of people to self-govern and help themselves.
·
A “We are the Greatest Nation in the Word” mentality that ignores
the fact that we have much to learn from others around the world, while relying
too much on American power and not enough on the influence of American values.
·
An assumption that “We the People” are best served by “The Best
and the Brightest,” a more than century old canard that has long-since been
disproved by Vietnam
There is too little space to do justice to
these highlights or even the overall theme of this piece. Suffice to say that
in a democratic Republic with a sound Constitution, “We the People” can still
hold sway, reinvent ourselves and take charge of what, after all, should be OUR
politics and OUR government -- IF We choose to. We can, like so many of the Tea
Partiers have done, for example, rise up off our couches, turn off our TVs, get
out into our communities, organize, learn the political ropes and begin to take
charge of political party committees and local and/or state governing bodies.
For what all the other “forces” a.k.a.
“powers that be” fear most of all is the power of people -- attentive,
well-informed, involved in electoral politics and well-armed with all the tools
of the political trade -- determined to “take back” THEIR politics and THEIR
government. Then, the old political aphorism that “money talks” would be
replaced by “people decide, and government listens.” A government cannot be FOR
the people if it is not first OF and BY the people. Happy Independence
So that the goal of “Power to the People“
– especially the readers of this piece -- can be advanced, comments and
feedback are welcomed by the authors:
Peter Bearse, Ph.D. [pjbearse@gmail.com]
and
Carmine Gorga, Ph.D.
[cgorga@jhu.edu]
The authors wish to thank David S. Wise
for his invaluable editorial contributions.
Originally published at http://www.spectacle.org/0711/bearse.html
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