We are not disturbed by what is. We are disturbed by our opinions about what is
By Charles Jeanes
“There is necessity and order, immune to my idea of what should be – or what ought to be if only humans were better.” – Charles Jeanes, in my last column.
I fully intend to quit my negative habits of criticizing and judging. This column may start in the old vein, but trust me, by the end it is not a rant against capitalism, however it may seem from the start – honest! I start with the trajectory of human history and end with uplift and cheer. Read on.
The human project is in motion, as always, and its direction and destiny are unknown – as always. As I wrote last column, it is not facts which distress a person, it is reactions to facts that make one miserable. Whatever is the meaning of this era, “The Sixth Great Extinction” in the categories of bio-history, a human mind is not able to grasp it. Our minds assign meaning, but humans do not ever know if the significance they give to a symbol has any truth or reality outside the human mind.
Humans do not have to feel that our lives are a crime against nature, though I hear that opinion a lot.
The changes our species have wrought upon the planet, the manner in which we have altered the climate and engineered the environment to our purposes – while extinguishing other species – or caused death for millions of our fellows in the normal functioning of our economies and politics, are part of the order of what is. Only the meaning we assign to symbols can make us react with feelings.
Does the way we organize our lives mean anything? We have a system called capitalism. Is capitalism meaningful to us? Does it tell us why we are alive.
I start with a problem capitalism poses to people.
Psychology has a useful term for holding contradictory pieces of knowledge in one’s consciousness – “cognitive dissonance.” An example: You know you earn your money and an affluent lifestyle by working for a capitalist corporation and still you promote socialist political ideals in your words.
It is not consonant to take your income from an employer whose existence depends on the inequities of a system you personally find ethically insupportable. Yet this is not difficult to do, as we all know. Our one-time socialist premier Glen Clark has made a fine career in the employ of Jimmy Pattison, BC’s best-known billionaire. We know capitalism breeds inequality as a premise of its functioning. Yet we are born to a system we did not create and we live inside it by accepting its fundamentals for order.
The theory is that individuals do not tolerate cognitive dissonance well, and will try to reduce their disharmony in some manner. So: how do progressives in politics harmonize their socialism with their material contribution to the advancement of capitalism, to its debt-money system, its investments that demand constant growth in an economy, and to its laying waste to the planetary habitat we live in?
I do not know. I know affluent people. They do not agree that they are part of the problem not part of the solution. Because they uphold capitalism in their actual work, they serve the order of the men who own the capitalist system. They take loans and credit, they consume large resources in their middle-class fashion of life, and they deny they are part of the reason the planet is in peril.
They laugh at the “trickle-down” theories of capitalism, yet they profit from that system. Their prosperous lives are possible by wealth shared with them by the capitalist ruling class. The ruling class requires a layer of professionals, technicians, bureaucrats, politicians, cultural creatives, civil servants, and executive officers to operate the systems. These receive material affluence, trickling from the top.
I say humans know capitalism manipulates our consciousness. Why do we? I cannot, nor can anyone I have met or heard or seen, or whose work I have read, understand why. Accept it. We have allowed it. Capitalism is destructive and creative, it has claimed our loyalty and held our voluntary participation for a very long time, through war and peace, ecological ruin, social decay, and through wonderful advances in medicine, health, nutrition, technology, and discovery.
Proof that humans have a unique species consciousness is found in the fact that we use symbols. As I say, capitalism uses symbol in ways that alter the human mind. Indisputably. Absolutely. Powerfully. Capitalist symbolism is called advertising, the generation of demand by orienting minds to desire.
TV advertising makes brilliant use of symbol. Car ads tell me that one (Nissan) will express my values, a truck (Ram) says I’m virile, or the Mini makes my life creatively superior to mere normal: “Who wants normal?” A truck ad even waxes spiritual while selling a vehicle: “God made a Farmer.” (Google that one, it deserves a viewing.)
Cars and trucks are outstanding examples of material objects made to stand for intangible qualities like independence, reliability, charisma, sex appeal, intelligence, caring, courage, and/ or “class.” Examples of such transference in advertising, from material possession to a personal quality, can be multiplied with ease. The alcohol you drink, the clothes you wear, your deodorant or diaper, says you are special.
Symbolism is meaningful only to the human; it sets us apart from other sentient beings, though a dog or cat surely understand the “symbol” of their food dish, they cannot see that a picture of their dish means food. It is the capacity to comprehend symbol that marks us as human. Symbols can massage our consciousness in profound ways, and it takes awareness to perceive when symbols are being applied to manipulate our consciousness, our attitudes, emotions, and motivations. Awareness can be learned.
Now ask, does “the news” have meaning? You’ve seen TV news images. You’ve seen the latest outbursts of violent street activism from the East, I’m sure. First it was Arab Spring, then Greek insurrection, then Spanish protests, and now mass Turkish mobilization against a government. China simmers quietly; the 24th anniversary of Tiananmen in Beijing has just occurred, another mass cry for liberty. Tanks crushed that one, but in 1992 the Soviet system dissolved in mass refusal of obedience, and no military solution could rescue the empire.
One poster in English among the Turkish placards fairly jumped out at me: “This is All About Capitalism.” The angry hordes of street protests, everywhere I see them on newscasts, agreed on this point. Since 2008, it is hard to find people enthusiastic about capitalism. But we know no alternative.
Adbusters magazine seems to know what recent revolts all mean: “The future is being built as we speak. What will it be? Singularity, or Nightfall? A sane sustainable future or a 1000 year Dark Age culminating in some kind of global big bang? The world as we know it must burst. The call is out for a new way of being… and it is being heard. A chain reaction of refusal against corpo-capitalism is underway.”
Personally, I am less sure than the editors of Adbusters about the meaning of all this political street activity. Now I shall set about proving that this column is not a rant of negativity, a Jeremiad, nor a lament of Eeyore-ish whining about the human condition under the rule of a few evil men in capitalism.
Change the instrument of symbol to a person, the Queen. She is a model of service, and her crown, faith, and church, the Church of England, form a cornerstone of her (our) people’s national historic identity. She earns respect for self-sacrifice and for the symbolism of continuous, unbroken, ancient traditions. Her actual being and acting, not the property she owns, define her. She symbolizes Duty.
My conclusion from these reflections is this: the most wonderful choice each of us has, is to choose which symbols will have power over our consciousness, and which we will free ourselves from.
A couple billion years ago on Earth, our atmosphere was altered by aerobic micro-organisms, to become the oxygen-rich air we now breathe. That new atmosphere led to the extinction of anaerobic life forms. No one feels anything about that ancient change rendered by one life form upon others. I am saying we aren’t forced to have feelings about what human history has been and where it is going. As I do not bemoan the fact that gravity is an inescapable force, that the sun must rise and set, or that my body must age, I can accept that humanity is doing what is necessary in an order (tao) no human can comprehend. Our species is not a symbol, it is an event. It needs no meaning. It just is.
I have changed my negativity channel and I try to embrace the mystery of not knowing answers to why questions. In Taoist terms, humans are being – just exactly what our being must be within the Tao.
Charles Jeanes is a Nelson-based writer. The last edition of The Arc of the Cognizant can be found here.
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