The End of Our Complicity

The oligarchy and their elite minions (who make up about 0.01 percent and 1 percent of world population, respectively) own a full forty percent of the world’s wealth.[i] Clearly, they cannot maintain such inequality by themselves. There are simply too few of them. With their wealth and power and the promise of a better life, they buy off the middle class (the world’s financially top twenty percent) to do their bidding.[ii] In Africa, the Middle East, and Latin America, regional oligarchs have given away their country’s natural resources to nourish First World affluence, leaving their own citizens scrounging for essentials.[iii] In the United States, Europe, and the wealthy Asian-Pacific countries, a huge middle class has wed their interests to those of the wealthiest. As long as they have jobs, plenty of meat and entertainment, a car and at least the illusion of upward mobility, these hundreds of millions have quietly accepted the outrages of the ruling classes.

Fifth week of 2019 protests in Russia for fair elections.

The complicity of this middle class in planetary-wide suffering is not wholly unlike the role of poor non-slaveholding farmers (who were a majority) in the Southern slavery states. Too poor to own slaves, they were nevertheless willing to be complicit with the practice and, indeed, to fight in a brutal war and even sacrifice their lives for the rich plantation owners’ right to own slaves.[iv] Through a reading of thousands of letters of American Civil War soldiers, the historian Chandra Manning suggests that a partial explanation for such seemingly irrational convictions and behaviors goes beyond simple economics: it can be found in the socio-psychological depths of slavery and racism, wherein one’s sense of self-esteem and status was—no matter how poor the white person—supported by being regarded, at the very least, theoretically equal to all other whites, and superior to the black slave.[v] There was the hope instilled by the aristocracy and the Confederate government that non-slaveholders could one day become fortunate enough to become a slaveholder, made more likely through one’s merit as a soldier. Lastly, and perhaps most importantly, the dominant paradigm engendered a fear in all whites that ending slavery would result in the destruction of Southern society—a highly advanced civilization of great sophistication, in their minds—followed by terrible chaos.[vi] The historian Jeffrey Winters found nearly identical psycho-social explanations—sans the racism—for the bond between the lower classes and the oligarchs against the slaves in democratic BCE Athens.[vii]

Brazil, 2020: Protesting Police Violence in Favelas.

Similarly, we have accepted our leaders perpetrating coup d’états and illegitimate wars in weaker countries; the use of torture; the theft of others’ oil, minerals, and forests; the degradation of the biosphere; the pilfering of trillions of dollars from our own citizens through all sorts of clever financial shenanigans; billions of tons of carbon emissions; racism, sexism and ageism, implicit and explicit, personal and institutional; the takeover of the ballot box and of the government legislature, oversight, and judiciary.[viii] We have accepted all this because we live well enough to leave well enough alone. We may have protested in letters to the editor and even collectively on the streets, but, afterward, at the end of the day, we met with our comrades for dinner and drinks and went home sated. For the most part, it was only when the issues affected us directly that we took over the streets day after day, as millions did in the Arab Spring of 2011 and in the “Autumn of Nations” in 1989 Eastern Europe.

Likely, we will continue to accept our leaders’ excesses until our conditions deteriorate beyond some unacceptable and as yet undetermined limit. When that threshold is crossed—and it surely will in many countries this century—and the social contract between citizen and government is considered null and void, it is then that all the other stressors that brought the states to that point will strain them beyond their breaking point, and they will fall apart. Numerous dynamic conditions are bringing us to this threshold—the sheer number of impoverished and hungry, the rapidly increasing population, especially of the poor and the young, the deteriorating environmental conditions, the quickly rising expectations of the middle half of the world’s population, the oligarchy’s insistence on taking ever more for themselves, and, most powerfully, the synergistic effect of these and innumerable other stressors.

Causing further strain, social media makes us instantaneously aware of oppression throughout the world, of elite misbehavior and intransigence, and of their ruthlessness in quelling opposition and dissent. The media, in general, gifts us—through a lifetime inundation of images and sometimes contrary to their own intentions—with a growing awareness of our commonality, encouraging a sense of solidarity that bridges race, class, gender, and culture.

Logan Riely/The Seattle Times): Black Lives Matter, 2020.

We “get,” deeply and profoundly, the universal values that bind us. And mediated by the internet and social media, there is a gathering cognizance of a global village. We identify with virtual communities made of people from all over the world who share specific interests and ideologies and who otherwise may share little else. And we feel the internal tug of Martin Luther King Jr.’s prophetic words in his 1963 Letter from Birmingham City Jail: “Moreover, I am cognizant of the interrelatedness of all communities and states. I cannot sit idly by in Atlanta and not be concerned about what happens in Birmingham. Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly. Never again can we afford to live with the narrow, provincial "outside agitator" idea.”

The archaeologist Fakri Hassan who asserted, “If history is construed as the continued monopoly and social control by an elite to their own advantage with disregard to the suffering of others who are entrusted to their care, perhaps history is coming to an end.”[ix] Perhaps. The unending succession of demonstrations, protests, and riots that have been popping up all over the world in the opening two decades of this century may be signaling that we are entering a new phase of Civilization. The almost four weeks—as of this post—of worldwide protests against systemic racism, police brutality, and white silence (read complicity) suggests strongly that some substantial part of the population is no longer willing to adhere to the narrow, provincial roles their parents were taught to play. They are breaking free of the chains of ignorance and indifference. They understand in their bones that whatever affects one affects all. It may not truly matter whether this latest uproar from the bowels of our collective subconscious causes deep and lasting changes or whether, as Richard Cloward and Francis Fox Piven found in their 1977 book Poor People’s Movements, the system reverts to its old ways once the streets are quiet again. It may likely be that the contradictions of Civilization—its inharmonious exploitation of nature, its absurd insistence on inequity, its existential need for divisiveness among our human family and indifference to our extended family of all living creatures—spell its end. Perhaps this is why The Second Coming by William Butler Yeats has become if not the anthem of our times (“Surely, some revelation is at hand”) then the prescient keen for a world six thousand years in the making that is about to crumble (“Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold”).

The end of history and the end of Civilization do not mean the end of culture, of our species, or of a flourishing civilization. It refers to the end of the type of civilization that has been constructed in most every society since the birth of large-scale agriculture, societies based on the institutionalized preservation of unequal status, wealth, and power. It does imply a rocky transition. Revolution is the term commonly used, as often to frighten away potential sympathizers as to motivate believers. The unpredictable nature of transitions is the main reason that it will be the youth who leads them. Not yet fully incorporated into the system, they have the least to lose. They hold little property and have little money in the bank; they have not yet acquired the jobs and titles that confer status, wealth and power; they do not yet have children for their biology to prioritize above all else—they have the least invested in the status quo, in the way things are. The motivating power of self-evident truths have not yet been quashed by these “realities.”

Many of us can remember a time when we felt that our generation might lead the world to meaningful change. Clearly, we did not succeed. Along the way we became complicit. We went from railing against the system to becoming the system. It is a sad truth that, by our complicity, we have placed today’s youth—our children and grand-children—on the front lines to face the many existential challenges of nature and civilization. Tear gas cannisters are burning their lungs and batons are cracking their skulls while the specter of a heating planet looms over them, along with the military drones and the doomsday clock and the latest version of the speculators’ bubble. I feel great admiration and respect for these generations, for their courageous attempts to simultaneously solve multiple social injustices—of race, class, sex, gender, age, disability—as well as the rushing tsunami of climate change, for their sanguinity and utter lack of self-pity about their predicament, for their insight into the systemic nature and therefore complexity of what they face, and for the clarity in which they express themselves. Many of them are in the streets and organizing for action not for reasons of narrow self-interest but because they have evolved a far grander understanding of enlightened one-interest, of all-inclusiveness, of ubuntu, “I am because we are.” They inspire hope in even the most skeptical of us. Hopefully, we will all be inspired to work with them, shoulder to shoulder, to conceive and create a new paradigm and become allied in this radical project rooted in compassion and love.

ENDNOTES

[i] Davies, Sandström, Shorrocks, and Wolff (2006, 2007, 2008).

Davies, J., Sandström, S., Shorrocks, A., and Wolff, E. (2006) The World Distribution of Household Wealth. World Institute for Development Economics Research. Unu-Wider, United Nations University.

Davies, J., Sandström, S., Shorrocks, A., and Wolff, E. (2007) Estimating the Level and Distribution of Global Household Wealth. Research Paper No. 2007/77. World Institute for Development Economics Research. Unu-Wider, United Nations University.

Davies, J., Sandström, S., Shorrocks, A., and Wolff, E. (2008) The World Distribution of Household Wealth, Discussion Paper 2008/03. World Institute for Development Economics Research. Unu-Wider, United Nations University.

[ii] For historical examples, see Winters, J.A. (2011) Oligarchy. Cambridge University Press, New York.

[iii] See for example, Galeano (1973/1997), Chomsky (1989), Perkins (2004, 2007), Palast (2007:152-153), Maathai (2009), Skidmore, Smith, and Green (2010), Acemoglu and Robinson (2012).

Galeano, E. (1973/1997) Open Veins of Latin America: Five Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent. Monthly Review Press, New York.

Chomsky, N. (1989) Necessary Illusions: Thought Control in Democratic Societies, Second End Press, Boston, MA.

Perkins, J. (2004) Confessions of an Economic Hit Man. Barrett-Koehler Publishers, Inc., San Francisco, CA.

Perkins, J. (2007) The Secret History of the American Empire. Dutton, New York.

Palast, G. (2007) Armed Madhouse. Plume Books, New York.

Maathai (2009). Maathai, W. (2009) The Challenge for Africa. Anchor Books, New York.

Skidmore, T.E., Smith, P.H., and Green, J.N. (2010) Modern Latin America, Seventh Edition. Oxford University Press, Oxford, UK.

Acemoglu, D., and Robinson, J.A. (2012a) Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty, Crown Business, New York.

[iv] Gutman, H.G., director (1989) Who Built America? Working People and the Nation’s Economy, Politics, Culture and Society. American Social History Project, Pantheon Books, New York.

[v] Manning, C. (2007) What This Cruel War Was Over: Soldiers, Slavery and the Civil War. Vintage Books, NY.

[vi] Manning (2007).

[vii] Winters, J.A. (2011) Oligarchy. Cambridge University Press, New York.

[viii] That there has been increasing opposition through the decades, organized and otherwise, to all these ruling class behaviors (as Noam Chomsky has often noted) only underscores the apathy and compliance of the media and much of the American public.

[ix] Hassan, F.A. (2007) The Lie of History: Nation-States and the Contradictions of Complex Societies, pp. 169-196, in Constanza, R., Graumlich, L.J., and Steffen, W. (Editors), Sustainability or Collapse: An Integrated History and Future of People on Earth. The MIT Press, Cambridge, MA.

ENDNOTES

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