There have always been peace activists, I’m sure, for as long as there have been wars.  Jesus said, “Turn the other cheek,” and wars are really nothing but a whole bunch of people trying to get what they want through violence.  Moses said, “Justice shall be an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth,” and by that he was trying to teach people not to resort to violence for retribution, which a lot of people were doing at the time.  Like I said, war is a whole lot of people resorting to violence.  So that makes Moses a peace activist, and that takes us all the way back to the beginning of recorded history.

I don’t think you can say that peace activism became a peace movement until Mahatma Gandhi led the Indian Revolution.  He used peace instead of war to make something happen that wouldn’t’ve happened otherwise.  In his case, he literally used peace to move the British government out of his country.  He didn’t use peace to stop a war, but he did use peace to prevent a war from starting in the first place.

Here in America a few decades later, Dr. King used peace to wage a revolution that traditionally would’ve been waged with violence.  Once again, he used peace to prevent a war from starting in the first place.

The peace movement became known as such during the Vietnam War when people all over America actively  pitted peace against war, and succeeded in using peace to move enough things around in the world to make the war stop happening.  I’m sure everyone has heard all about that.

The peace movement since the Vietnam War and up to the present is what I came here to tell you about.  Ever since Vietnam, every time the United States has engaged in military action against anyone, peace protestors immediately take to the streets.

Some people protest because they don’t want to have to fight and risk getting killed.  A lot of other people protest because they don’t want anyone to have to fight.  And when a large number of people fight, we aren’t talking about the risk of anyone getting killed anymore, we’re talking about the inevitability that some people are going to get killed.

These people play their part as a sociological force, but they don’t play it all that well.  So far, all you have is a peace movement made up of bleeding heart liberals, who keep whining and complaining that we ought to feel sorry for everyone, including the terrorists.

Right now we’re in the biggest war we’ve been in since Vietnam.  But Vietnam was way bigger than the war we’re in right now, especially in terms of American casualties.  So one argument I’ve heard against the current peace movement is that it’s just a bunch of bleeding heart liberals overreacting every time the U.S. gets into a military conflict, and saying that every military conflict is going to be the next Vietnam.

Well a big reason the Vietnam War got to be so big was because people didn’t start protesting until it got that big.  Ever since then, the peace movement has been a threat to politicians’ careers every time they start a war.   Vietnam isn’t going to happen again precisely because peace protestors say that every military conflict could turn into the next Vietnam and they react as if it’s going to be the next Vietnam.

A lot of people who oppose the peace movement say that it’s disrespectful to our military personnel who are risking everything for our country.  A lot of people who oppose the peace movement love to ask demonstrators, “If you think we should pull out of Iraq immediately, what’s your exit strategy?”  Then they assume that the fact the demonstrators don’t have an exit strategy proves they don’t know what they’re talking about.  A lot of people who oppose the peace movement say, “Support our troops!”  And a lot of peace protestors say, “What do you think we’re doing?”

Peace protestors are supporting our troops by protesting for peace specifically so that politicians can’t get away with using military action to help them win elections, and inevitably sacrificing the lives of military personnel in the process.  The peace protestors’ exit strategy is:  Make war more costly to politicians’ careers than peace, so they will figure out an exit strategy ASAP and won’t be so quick to start the next military engagement.

Now here’s where the peace movement shifts from touchy-feely superficial appearances to cold hard science.  Making people feel like wars aren’t necessary is a good start, but the only way it can succeed in the long run is if people also solve the problems that make people feel like fighting wars in the first place.

Flower power worked in the Vietnam War because our economic systems were so far removed from each other.  We were one of the superpowers in the world, and they were a little country of rice farmers.  The supposed value of the war to us was completely psychological—to help stop the spread of Communism.  But apart from that, what effect could the form of government practiced by a few rice farmers on the other side of the world, ever possibly have on us?  We sacrificed 58,000 American lives for an ideal that had no practical value at all.  There really wasn’t a whole lot anyone had to do, or think about, or figure out, to make that war seem like a bad idea to a lot of people.

Now, to be fair, I should say that the politicians who were calling the shots in America during the Vietnam War mostly had been service age during World War II and the Korean War.  We got involved in World War II when the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, so we can say we were fighting in self-defense.  Korea happened less than ten years after the end of World War II, and China sided with the North Koreans, so even though that was a war against Communism, we can say it was similar enough to World War II and that World War II had been recent enough that the people calling the shots and a lot of the voters misinterpreted it and overreacted.  It could be argued that the Americans were trying to prevent Korea from becoming the next Japan, especially since the Communists in Korea had China on their side. The politicians might’ve thought they were waging a war against Communism to prevent Vietnam from becoming the next Japan—or some general purpose along those lines—but a lot of the service-age Americans at the time could only see the United States waging a war against a bunch of poor rice farmers for the sake of a political ideal that served no practical purpose.

But that was then.  This is now.  As I showed you in the last book, peace depends on environmental sustainability.  In the first book I showed you how the three motives for violence create the Hobbesian cycle of aggression.  But what creates the three motives for violence?
When you choose to start a war, you choose to risk your life. (Or at least, the lives of some of your people, and for the time being let’s pretend that you give a f*ck about the lives of your people.)  So why does risking your life suddenly seem like a good idea?

The motive for fighting in self-defense is obvious.  But it takes two sides to have a war.  If neither side started the war, the other side wouldn’t need to fight in self-defense.

If you’re fighting for profit, it means you’re not leading an environmentally sustainable lifestyle.  There are two ways that can happen.  The first is obvious:  You’ve already pushed yourselves beyond the physical limitations of your environment and you need what the other people have to stay alive. In that case, your people are faced with famine, so instead of fighting each other over food you all decide to work together and fight someone else.  You’re choosing to risk your lives by starting a war, because not starting the war poses an even bigger risk to your lives.

The other is the way the Europeans conquered the world.  If you can imagine what you could do if you had what the other people have in addition to what you already have, and you don’t perceive the other people to pose that much of a threat to you, then the profit you stand to gain in the war could seem to be worth the risk.  That’s still environmental unsustainability though, because instead of learning to live within the physical limitations of your environment, you’re not learning to live within the physical limitations of your environment.  It could be argued that conquering other people is not synonymous with trying to live beyond the physical limitations of the Earth.  But we’re not talking about just any old species living on the Earth; we’re talking about our own species living on the Earth.  Once you define environmental sustainability as learning to live within the physical limitations of your environmental economy, if you imagine a way you and your people could live if you had your own environmental economy plus someone else’s environmental economy, and then take action accordingly, you obviously have not learned to live within the physical limitations of your environmental economy.

Violence for reputation is pretty simple.  Violence for reputation is pre-emptive violence for self-defense or for profit, so that no one will dare to threaten you with violence in the first place, or so that no one will dare to try to defend themselves against your violence.  But if no one attacks anyone else, you don’t need violence for pre-emptive self-defense any more than you need it for direct self-defense.  And if everyone learns to live within the physical limitations of their environments, then no one needs violence for direct profit or for a reputation to discourage anyone else from fighting in self-defense against violence for profit.  And if no one needs a reputation, then no one needs a reputation to compete against anyone else’s reputation.
So as you can see, the peace movement and the environmental movement are inseparable.  Everyone working on Globalization 4.0 already knows that.    A lot of other people don’t.  That includes a lot of people who consider themselves peace activists.

Of course, in a world with an increasing population and diminishing resources, peace through Capitalism isn’t possible.  Capital-ism depends on the control of capital, and capital depends on natural resources.  It isn’t physically possible for anyone to control ever-increasing supplies of capital on a finite-sized planet.  You might say that Capitalism could be used as a stepping stone between the Globalization 3.0 economy and the Globalization 4.0 economy.  But that would require people to stop measuring their economic success in terms of how much capital they control, and start measuring it in terms of how the capital was being used to make the physical economy of the world work in a way that can keep everyone alive.  But that would be so fundamentally different from the economy we have now that it would no longer be Capitalism.

That economic system has already been thought of.  It’s called the Use-Value economic system.
It could be argued that Capitalists should control how their capital is used to make the chemical reaction of the world work in a way that can keep everyone alive, just to make sure their investments aren’t going to waste.  But that won’t work, because there’s at least one, and more likely two, parts of the chemical reaction of the world that you haven’t fixed yet.  If you control something that’s critical to making the chemical reaction of the world work in a way that can keep everyone alive, then you control the people who depend on that part of the chemical reaction to stay alive, because you could choose to stop making that part of the chemical reaction keep those people alive.  That isn’t peace, that’s slavery.  People always fight back against people who try to enslave them.  You should know that already.

The other problem it creates is that it gives you the opportunity to control those people.  If you have that opportunity and never use it, you can’t expect those people to trust you anyway.  But if you have that power over people and you do use it, they’ll fight back even harder.  And even if you don’t do that personally, it’s inevitable that other people will.  And if you (or someone else) can control whether or not part of the chemical reaction of the environment can keep certain people alive, and you choose to use that to control the people, to what end could you possibly control those people but to your own benefit?  And if you had to force the people to act to your benefit upon threat of death, then it’s a pretty safe bet that you aren’t forcing them to act toward their own benefit.

The only way to solve that problem is to relinquish control of the capital and of the authority it gives you over the people who need it.  Making sure the capital won’t go to waste depends on educating the people who are going to be using it how to use it sustainably.

Next we have violence among religious fundamentalists.  That is, violence among people for imaginary reasons that have nothing to do with the physical economy of the world.

This seems pretty simple at first glance.  If you can make people believe there’s a prophet—oops, I mean, profit—to be gained or there’s a threat to defend themselves against, you can make violence seem like a good idea to them.  That includes real profits to gain and real threats to defend themselves from for which you tell the people imaginary reasons.  Manifest Destiny was an imaginary reason.  Supposedly, the European Americans were conquering America because the Christian god willed it to be so.   In reality, the European Americans conquered America because they inherited the most favorable combination of material resources from the Mesopotamians.  The profit that Manifest Destiny produced was real, even though the reasons the European Americans believed it produced results were completely imaginary.

On the other hand, if you can make your people believe that if they kill Americans they’ll live forever in eternal paradise and get 72 virgins out of the deal, then you’re offering your followers a completely imaginary profit.  But if they believe this thing you’re talking about to be real, then it’s still a profit as far as they can tell, so they’ll act upon that belief accordingly.  If Americans really did pose some threat to them, you can combine a real self-defense for real or imaginary reasons with a completely imaginary profit. On the other hand, if you belong to the Ku Klux Klan and you convince your followers that Blacks and homosexuals are a threat to them and that if they murder them they’ll be rewarded in the afterlife, now you’ve combined an imaginary threat with an imaginary profit.

For religious fundamentalists, reputation is real.  If your neighbors learn that you kill people for doing certain things, they’ll try to avoid doing those things to protect themselves, even if your reasons for killing people for them are completely insane—oops, I mean imaginary.

For some religious fundamentalists there’s an imaginary part to reputation also.  If you kill people to prove your worthiness to your god, then you’re building an imaginary reputation for yourself.
You could build an imaginary reputation for yourself if you believed that acting in certain ways was supposed to make your evil enemies fear you.  This is rather complicated and, I must admit, rather pointless, but it’s pretty easy to see how some people could believe in it.  You could believe that acting in a certain way will prove your loyalty to your god and that he will strike fear into the hearts of your enemies, or that your enemies are supposed to know that you’re proving your loyalty to your god and fear you for that.  Basically, you’re using a fear ritual and then expecting your enemies to participate in your ritual.  If you actually did something fearsome, then you might strike fear into the hearts of your enemies, but not for the imaginary reasons you believed.  If you don’t strike fear into the hearts of your enemies, then that must prove how wicked, or stupid, your enemies are, because they weren’t affected by your ritual and they weren’t affected by your god.

Now here’s the catch to violence being used by religious fundamentalists.  As I explain in the Atheism chapter, when it comes to religion, there are only two kinds of people:  Atheists and religious fundamentalists.  That might seem awfully absolute of me to say, but consider this:  An Atheist doesn’t depend on any supernatural forces at all to act on his behalf.  That means he takes 100% responsibility for his actions.  If you believe that you can get away with taking less than 100% responsibility for your actions because some supernatural force is going to intervene on your behalf and make up the difference, then you’re a religious fundamentalist.  You believe something to be true about the world that has no observable evidence to support it, and you are acting upon that belief expecting your actions to succeed, in spite of the fact that they contradict the observable evidence.  The results of your actions will comply with the observable evidence, but won’t make sense to you because the observable evidence plus the things you were imagining plus your actions should’ve resulted in something else.  And now that they haven’t, you have to imagine a reason for that.  Now you’ve turned your entire life into a fairy tale.  And now that we’re stretching the global environment to its limits, your fairytale life can only turn into a downward spiral that ends in disaster.  All the things you thought were supposed to work ended up not working, and the results were always bad, because war, famine, death, and pestilence, not to mention hurricanes, kept ravaging the world more and more.  And the only way you can explain why the things that you imagined were supposed to work resulted in disaster is because the force of good that you imagine you serve wills it to be so for some imaginary reason.  In a world where we’re stretching our environment to its breaking point, if you don’t take 100% responsibility for your actions, the results won’t be better than you expected them to be, they’ll be worse.  So why would the force of good that you believe yourself to serve make that happen to you?  Now you have to imagine a reason for that, because that’s the only way you can keep your imaginary forces in your perception of the world.

Now here’s the next twist.  Some people who call themselves Atheists are religious fundamentalists, and some people who consider themselves religious people are Atheists for all intents and purposes.

In the first book I told you about the Intangible Mass of Cosmic Grooviness.  That’s a supernatural force that works perfectly Atheistically.  That is, the only way to invoke it is by taking 100% responsibility for your actions.  It might help you if you help yourself.  But if you believe that taking 100% responsibility for your actions will make the IMCG help you, it won’t help you, because now you aren’t taking 100% responsibility for your actions.  Now you’re depending on supernatural forces to intervene on your behalf and make you succeed.  That’s the definition of not taking 100% responsibility for your actions.

If you are a religious person and whatever supernatural force you follow works exactly the same way the IMCG works, then for all intents and purposes, you’re an Atheist.  You practice your religion for the same reason I practice Paganism—because it’s a cool tradition that your ancestors practiced and that gives you a sense of history.

I’ve met people who consider themselves Atheists but who still depended on supernatural powers to make their actions succeed.  The results were the same:  Things went wrong and then they had to invent reasons why so that they could go on believing that what they thought was supposed to work should’ve worked.

I’ve known people who believe in what they call Evolutionary Law, or Social Darwinism.  It could also go by Libertarianism or Anarcho-Capitalism.  The basic idea is survival of the fittest.  Supposedly, we should disband all government and labor unions and then let everyone fend for themselves and see what happens.  Supposedly, the strong will survive.

The only problem with that is that every single thing people do in life is a product of evolution, including building governments and trade unions through which they can band together for their mutual protection from others.  If you want to talk about survival of the fittest, you have to talk about people’s ability to band together with others for their mutual interests as a form of fitness, not to mention every other ability people have.

This is an ideology practiced by a lot of Capitalist pigs to justify their positioning in the economic hierarchy.  They then turn around and accuse all the people who are complaining about their place in the economic hierarchy of not knowing their place in the world, and of hanging onto superstitions that said they were supposed to be somewhere else.  But if we were to disband all government and trade unions and then turn everyone loose to fend for themselves, all we would get for it would be to relive the past 10,000 years all over again—only this time with assault rifles and nuclear weapons.

Literally, these people who call themselves Atheists are trying to invoke the Theory of Evolution as a supernatural force.  What a bunch of morons.  The Theory of Evolution does not say that the world works in a certain way and that everyone else is supposed to learn to accept it.  The Theory of Evolution says that the world works in a certain way and you better learn to accept it.  All human behavior is the product of the attempt by the individual to preserve the survival of his or her DNA by the most effective means perceivable to them.  It is not the product of the attempt by the individual to preserve the survival of your DNA by the most effective means perceivable to them, or to you, or to anyone else.  If you believe that it should be, and that there must be something wrong with anyone who doesn’t agree with you, you’re just making sh*t up.  And that means you’ve ceased to be an Atheist.

Next we have war for political reasons.  I’ve already talked about wars being used to win elections for politicians.  Everyone knows that story.

Now consider this:  Fighting a war requires capital.  The Capitalists are the ones who control capital.  If you’ve ever heard of the military industrial complex, you know that companies like Halliburton are war profiteers, who make tons of money manufacturing military equipment.  War creates a demand for military equipment, so war is profitable for the military industrial complex.
But that’s still too obvious.  Consider this:

Being a politician is a full-time occupation, and running successful political campaigns requires capital.  For those two big reasons, people who actually have to work for a living don’t get elected to government offices.  That means that, here in America at least, the people who decide to start wars are all Capitalists.

Fighting wars creates a job market.  And who do you suppose the Capitalists get to fill that job market beside people who make their livings by selling their labor?  So wars are started by Capitalists, but they’re fought by Labor.

But that’s still too obvious.  Consider this:

As I’ve said, global environmental unsustainability makes World War III inescapable.  If we break the global environment to the point that we no longer have enough material resources to keep everyone alive, people are going to have to start fighting each other for them to stay alive.  That could make World War III a global civil war between Labor and Capital.  But that would take an awful lot of organizing among Labor that doesn’t currently exist.

If people get desperate enough for material resources that they’re willing to fight wars for them, most likely people are going to use the political structures they already have in place to do it.  That means countries fighting countries.   That means Labor fighting Labor.  If you want to keep Labor all over the world from joining together for their common goals and starting a global civil war against the Capitalists, what better way to do that than to start wars ahead of time to kill off some Labor and make Labor from different countries hate each other?  If they hate each other, they won’t trust each other and won’t be able to work together.

Now here’s where the bad takes a turn for the even worse.  If I was to line a bunch of people up against a wall and put a pistol in your hand, how many of those people would you be willing to kill for a tank of gas for your SUV?  If the fate of the world comes down to people fighting wars over resources, who the f*ck do you think is going to get most of those resources but the Capitalists who don’t fight the wars?   If the Capitalists can use their capital to fund political races and spread propaganda to Labor to make Labor think the people in another country are a threat to them and that Labor has something to gain by fighting a war against them, the Capitalists get to keep their economic system without having to do the dirty work that has to be done to make it happen, they can get rid of some Labor, and they can make Labor in their own country hate Labor in the other country, all at the same time!  As in, the rich get richer and the poor get drafted.

All of this is elementary to the Globalization 4.0 side of the peace movement.  Ending war is a lot harder now than it was back in Vietnam.  I know Bill Gates seems awfully generous, but there’s a good reason he doesn’t aspire to be lower class.

As I said, if you want to defeat the enemy, identify his weakest points and attack.

You know how military recruiters go into high schools to recruit kids to join the military when they graduate?   They have a well-developed strategy for recruiting kids as efficiently as possible, which starts with going into high schools in poor areas where people don’t have many prospects for the future.  To kids who live in trailer parks, tours of duty in the military sound a lot more appealing than they do to kids who live in suburbs.  Then the military recruiters basically sell the military recruitment to the kids by telling them just about anything they want to hear.  These military recruiters are sales people, plain and simply.  Their goal is to get you to sign your name on the dotted line.  They don’t give a f*ck about you—but they’re really good at acting like they do, at least long enough to get you to sign your name.

Some friends of mine figured out a good way to oppose this.  They call it the Arizona Counter Recruitment Coalition.  They print up fliers and some other things and go into the same high schools military recruiters go to.  My friends get permission from the high school administrators, which is never difficult.  And if possible, they visit on the same day military recruiters are going to be there and they set up tables right beside the military recruiters, or do whatever the military recruiters are doing.

There my friends recruit kids not to join the military, by telling them all the things about the military that military recruiters don’t tell them.  Military recruiters use a lot of dirty tricks to get kids to join, like promising them they can get into certain occupations, only to let the kids discover that when they join they get sent wherever their superiors want them.  Telling them that military vets have better job prospects when they get out, even though they don’t.  Telling them that after they sign their enlistment papers it’s too late to change their minds, which is a lie.

A lot of kids at poor high schools join the military because that’s the only way they can see out of their poor neighborhoods.  The military recruiters know that, which is why they go those high schools.  So my friends asked the kids what they wanted at their high schools.  They said they wished some college recruiters would come to their schools.  College recruiters hardly ever came to their schools, because just like the military recruiters, they went to the schools where they were going to have the best chances at recruiting people.  So my friends started calling up some colleges and telling their recruiters that they knew some high schools where the kids wished someone would come try to recruit them for something besides combat duty in Iraq…

The Counter Recruitment Coalition had a membership of about 8 people at its high water mark, and by the end it was down to 3.  But by that point President Bush had f*cked everything up so badly that he was pretty much doing my friends’ job for them, because nobody  wanted to join the military anymore. But in the 2 or 3 years they were active, 8 people handed out about 15,000 counter-recruitment fliers.  And they met an awful lot of kids who were glad they were there.
Wars are fought because people choose to fight them.  If Capitalists want to fight wars, whether to support their economy, or for their direct profit, or for religious beliefs veiled as cultural values, or for ideological goals that serve no practical purpose, or for political goals they keep secret from everyone else, the only way they can do it is by recruiting Labor to go fight for them.  Since the things they want they don’t need desperately enough to go fight for themselves, the only way war can prove profitable to them is if they can get someone else to risk their lives.  At every poor high school in the United States there are military recruiters.  And there are a lot more parents than there are military recruiters.  Two or three people visiting a high school once every month or two is all it takes to practically cripple the military recruiters there.  If you hand out controversial information about something to rebellious teenagers, a lot of them are going to talk about it.  If you give them web addresses they can visit to learn more, a lot of them will do that.  Then who knows what will happen next?  Maybe some of those kids will take matters into their own hands and start handing out your fliers for you.

This is another example of the plague-of-locusts economic system.  If the enemy is doing one thing and you give everyone involved a choice between doing that or doing something that serves their interests better, you put events into motion that nobody needs to control.  Everyone is going to attempt to preserve the survival of their DNA no matter what they do.  If you offer them a more effective means of preserving the survival of their DNA than anything the enemy is offering, you change their perception of the situation.  The rest is inevitable.  If you equalize everyone’s perception of the situation, the political system that results will truly be a political system of the people, by the people, and for the people.

The one thing I had to suggest to my friends that could make their counter-recruitment drive even more successful was to recruit people not merely to not join the military, but to join the Earth’s Army of Peace.  Not that the Earth’s Army of Peace is an actual military or a collective entity of any sort.  My point was, two big tactics I can remember military recruiters using on teenagers from my high school days was offering them the feeling of belonging to a group, and offering the feeling of being men who face challenges and take risks.  So by recruiting teenagers to join the Earth’s Army of Peace, they would be counteracting both of those tactics by giving the teenagers the sense that by not joining the military they were joining something even bigger, and they were facing even more important challenges.

My friends didn’t like the idea, mainly because I couldn’t figure out how to explain it in terms they could understand.  They told me all the same things limp-wristed bleeding heart liberals always tell me, which is that I can’t tell people what to do, I have to let people figure out life on their own, and if they offered kids a membership in some big group that was supposed to protect them the kids wouldn’t learn how to be independent.

That’s a great ideal, but it doesn’t change the fundamental fact that the military recruiters are still using highly developed psychological tactics to lure kids into joining the military and then shipping them off to fight a war.  If you want to defeat the military recruiters, you have to actively and effectively counteract their tactics.  If you don’t feel like doing that, then obviously your primary goal is not to defeat the military recruiters, it’s something else.  Here they’d gone to such great lengths to outwit the military recruiters, but when it came down to human psychology, they weren’t willing to believe that the recruiters’ highly developed psychological tactics actually worked, because it conflicted with they way their political ideology said the world was supposed to work. All I can say is:  if the success of your political ideology depends on abandoning people to their deaths, don’t accuse me of trying to be Chairman Mao.

The Earth’s Army of Peace movement is simple.  It’s just four words that express a basic idea.  With just a few more words, you can explain a lot more about it.  It’s active conscientious objector status.  It doesn’t depend on the military to make it official.  In fact, you don’t even have to belong to the military to claim active conscientious objector status.  For that matter, it isn’t official with anyone else either, except whoever collectively agrees that they belong to this idea called the Earth’s Army of Peace.

The way conscientious objector status works now, either you belong to the military, or you belong to nothing.  The way the Earth’s Army of Peace works, either you belong to the military, or you belong to something else that’s actively  opposed  to war.  All you have to do is to make that one slight adjustment to people’s perception of what not joining the military means, and then leave it up to them to do whatever they think is best.

This is why I can say that the military of the Kingdom of Earth is completely invisible, because all you have to do to join is to choose to join.  But there’s no one to sign up with, so there’s no way for anyone to keep track of where our military is or how big it is.

Like I’ve said, all this is elementary to the Globalization 4.0 movement.

Filed under: y: 42 Vol. III by Ezra
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Iraq Veterans Against the War is a group of Iraq vets who… well, I guess the name pretty much says it all.  It’s a national organization, they have a website with all kinds of information for active duty service men and women and veterans on everything from how to file for conscientious objector status to how to get medical treatment.  They have speaking tours and events, and at one point they were getting so many requests for guest speakers that they couldn’t cover them all.

So here’s another group of Homo sapiens who are attempting to preserve the survival of their DNA by the most effective means perceivable to them. I don’t think it requires a whole lot of explanation.  War is a pretty obvious threat to people’s survival, safety, reproduction, and communities, so they put their abilities to use in solving the problem, and that feels good to them.

And with that, here’s their story in their own words.  You can find this on their website, along with a bunch of links to find out more about any of these topics.

First of all, 10 reasons they oppose the war:

1.  The Iraq war is based on lies and deception.

The Bush Administration planned for an attack against Iraq before September 11th, 2001. They used the false pretense of an imminent nuclear, chemical and biological weapons threat to deceive Congress into rationalizing this unnecessary conflict. They hide our casualties of war by banning the filming of our fallen’s caskets when they arrive home, and when they refuse to allow the media into Walter Reed Hospital and other Veterans Administration facilities which are overflowing with maimed and traumatized veterans.

2. The Iraq war violates international law.

The United States assaulted and occupied Iraq without the consent of the UN Security Council. In doing so they violated the same body of laws they accused Iraq of breaching.

3. Corporate profiteering is driving the war in Iraq.

From privately contracted soldiers and linguists to no-bid reconstruction contracts and multinational oil negotiations, those who benefit the most in this conflict are those who suffer the least. The United States has chosen a path that directly contradicts President Eisenhower’s farewell warning regarding the military industrial complex. As long as those in power are not held accountable, they will continue…

4. Overwhelming civilian casualties are a daily occurrence in Iraq.

Despite attempts in training and technological sophistication, large-scale civilian death is both a direct and indirect result of United States aggression in Iraq.  Even the most conservative estimates of Iraqi civilian deaths number over 100,000. Currently over 100 civilians die every day in Baghdad alone.

5. Soldiers have the right to refuse illegal war.

All in service to this country swear an oath to protect and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, both foreign and domestic. However, they are prosecuted if they object to serve in a war they see as illegal under our Constitution. As such, our brothers and sisters are paying the price for political incompetence, forced to fight in a war instead of having been sufficiently trained to carry out the task of nation-building.

6. Service members are facing serious health consequences due to our Government’s negligence.

Many of our troops have already been deployed to Iraq for two, three, and even four tours of duty averaging eleven months each.  Combat stress, exhaustion, and bearing witness to the horrors of war contribute to Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), a serious set of symptoms that can lead to depression, illness, violent behavior, and even suicide. Additionally, depleted uranium, Lariam, insufficient body armor and infectious diseases are just a few of the health risks which accompany an immorally planned and incompetently executed war. Finally, upon a soldier’s release, the Veterans Administration is far too under-funded to fully deal with the magnitude of veterans in need.

7. The war in Iraq is tearing our families apart.

The use of stop-loss on active duty troops and the unnecessarily lengthy and repeat active tours by Guard and Reserve troops place enough strain on our military families, even without being forced to sacrifice their loved ones for this ongoing political experiment in the Middle East

8. The Iraq war is robbing us of funding sorely needed here at home.

$5.8 billion per month is spent on a war which could have aided the victims of Hurricane Katrina, gone to impoverished schools, the construction of hospitals and health care systems, tax cut initiatives, and a host of domestic programs that have all been gutted in the wake of the war in Iraq.

9. The war dehumanizes Iraqis and denies them their right to self-determination.

Iraqis are subjected to humiliating and violent checkpoints, searches and home raids on a daily basis.  The current Iraqi government is in place solely because of the U.S. military occupation.  The Iraqi government doesn’t have the popular support of the Iraqi people, nor does it have power or authority.  For many Iraqis the current government is seen as a puppet regime for the U.S. occupation.  It is undemocratic and in violation of Iraq’s own right to self-governance.

10. Our military is being exhausted by repeated deployments, involuntary extensions, and activations of the Reserve and National Guard.

The majority of troops in Iraq right now are there for at least their second tour.  Deployments to Iraq are becoming longer and many of our service members are facing involuntary extensions and recalls to active duty.  Longstanding policies to limit the duration and frequency of deployments for our part-time National Guard troops are now being overturned to allow for repeated, back-to-back tours in Iraq.  These repeated, extended combat tours are taking a huge toll on our troops, their families, and their communities.

And now, their reasons for calling for an immediate withdrawal from Iraq:

1. The reasons and rationale given for the invasion were fraudulent.

There were no Weapons of Mass Destruction in Iraq during the time of the invasion according to US officials and former chief UN weapons inspector Hans Blix. The idea that Al Qaeda and the 9/11 terrorist attacks were connected to Saddam Hussein and the Baath party were proven false in the 9/11 Commission Report. Members of the Bush Administration have admitted that they “misspoke” in the run up to the war.

2. The presence of the US military is not preventing sectarian violence.

The US occupation of Iraq has proven to be unable to prevent sectarian violence and halt an escalation towards a civil war. Despite having an average of 140,000 troops in country since the occupation began, internal violence and attacks against civilians and Iraqi security forces have been on a steady incline.

3. The occupation is a primary motivation for the insurgency and global religious extremism.

The insurgency can be broken down into many individually named factions with various goals, beliefs, and techniques. However, our membership of veterans believe that the occupation of Iraq is the primary thing encouraging the insurgency and giving it legitimacy in the eyes of many Iraqis. Likewise, other people of the Islamic faith are encouraged to resist America ’s policies internationally based on how they perceive our military operations in the Middle East.

4. We can no longer afford to fight this war of choice.

The financial burden is destroying our domestic programs that could be used to protect us from natural disasters, provide medical programs, or help improve education. We are jeopardizing the US economy and putting strains on the budgets of important government agencies like the Veterans Affairs Department.

5. National security is compromised.

Funds that could be used to protect our ports and transportation are being stripped away while our National Guard units are on constant deployments instead of being used to protect and defend us here at home.

6. The world is becoming more dangerous.

International terrorist attacks have increased and it has become more dangerous for Americans to travel abroad. Approval for US policy has decreased and the dislike of Americans has increased.

7. Our national “moral authority” is being undermined.

The US has lost credibility to much of the world as the defender of liberty and freedom and our national identity is eroding. We can no longer deploy our armed forces for peace keeping measures with the good faith of the international community. We need to regain the respect and faith of the global community. This begins by withdrawing our troops from Iraq and helping the Iraqi people rebuild their country and society.

8. The majority of American citizens, Iraqi citizens and US military would like to see an immediate end to the war in Iraq.

If we are truly a democracy and we aim to create a democracy in Iraq our leaders will represent the will of the citizens and lead according to their wishes.

9. The military is broken.

We are abusing the small population of armed service members with multiple deployments while using inadequate vehicles and equipment. Less than one half of a percent of the American population is serving in the active armed forces, which is the least amount in the last century. Only 25% of the troops in Iraq are there for their first tour, while 50% are there on their second tour, and the remaining 25% are there three times or more. We continue to involuntarily extend soldiers with Stop-Loss, recall them repeatedly for additional service using the Individual Ready Reserve, and send soldiers with diagnosed medical problems into combat.

Sergeant Kevin Benderman served one tour of duty in Iraq and when he came home he filed for conscientious objector status and refused to return.  He ended up doing 15 months in prison.
Now Sergeant Benderman has a book and a DVD out.  Here’s the beginning of his story, as told by his wife.  They’re Christians, obviously, but when it comes to things like “Thou Shalt Not Kill”, really what is there for anyone to argue about?  I don’t know what they think about evolution or what I’m doing, but for whatever it’s worth, the Bendermans are such good Christians that they earned their place in a book called The Third Testament© not by believing in evolution, but by practicing Christianity in way that’s helping everyone—and consequently themselves—survive and reproduce.

(I think Ms. Benderman made a few typos here, but I left everything as she wrote it.)

One Soldier’s Fight to Legalize Morality

by Monica Benderman

Hinesville, Georgia, Thursday, July 7, 2005–On July 28, 2005, in a small non-descript courtroom on Ft. Stewart, Georgia, a Court Martial is scheduled to begin. Again. One Army NCO who decided that he had no choice but to make a conscious choice NOT to return to war is being put on trial for caring about humanity.

This soldier fulfilled his commitment, he kept his promise to his enlisted contract, and when ordered to deploy to Iraq at the start of the invasion, he went, not because he wanted to “kill Iraqis” or “destroy terrorist cells,” but because he wanted the soldiers he served with to come home safely.

He returned knowing that war is wrong, the most dehumanizing creation of humanity that exists. He saw war destroy civilians, innocent men, women and children. He saw war destroy homes, relationships and a country. He saw this not only in the country that was invaded, but he saw this happening to the invading country as well – and he knew that the only way to save those soldiers was for people to no longer participate in war. Sgt. Kevin Benderman is a Conscientious Objector to war, and the Army is mad.

Sgt. Kevin Benderman, after serving one tour of duty in Iraq, filed for Conscientious Objector status, his Constitutional right. His commander refused to accept his application and one called him a coward. One chaplain was ashamed of his lack of moral fortitude, another, of higher rank, testified to the true sincerity of Sgt. Benderman’s beliefs, in writing. A military intelligence officer decided that he knew matters of the soul better than a man of God, and recommended to deny the CO claim. Five commissioned officers who had never met Sgt. Benderman agreed with the “intelligent officer” and the claim was denied, twice.

More than two weeks after my husband was placed in the Rear Detachment unit here at Ft. Stewart, charges of Missing Movement and Desertion were filed against him, even though he has never missed a single day of duty in almost ten years. At the first Courts Martial proceedings, the investigative hearing was over turned. According to the judge’s decision, the presiding officer had shown implied bias toward Sgt. Benderman, and a new hearing was ordered. As the session adjourned, the same command that brought the first charges were marching up the aisle in the courtroom to file a new charge, Larceny, against Sgt. Benderman.

The command that brought the charge, had erroneously ordered combat pay to be paid to Sgt. Benderman, along with 7 other soldiers in their unit. Rather than accept their responsibility for the error, these leaders chose to punish Sgt. Benderman for the mistake, and have yet to discipline any of the remaining soldiers for the officers’ gaffe.

The new investigating officer strongly recommended dismissing this larceny charge, but the convening authority, Ft. Stewart’s garrison commander, pressed on and filed the charges anyway, along with desertion and missing movement. The Courts Martial is scheduled to begin on July 28. The games began in January.

At the conclusion of the first hearing, I returned to the courtroom briefly for some things I had forgotten. The lights were dimmed, and no one was there. This small dark room, vintage WW II, had a reverent calm. Desks and chairs sat waiting, slightly turned, empty jurist panel, attorney’s podium – the stage had been set. I look back on it now, and the feeling is strangely surreal.
Last week we learned that the United States Supreme Court allows itself to keep the Ten Commandments hanging on the walls of its chambers, as a testimony to another form of law. The guardian of the Constitution of our country, presiding over the human rights of our people, maintains that the Ten Commandments, religious context aside, represent a form of law that is powerful enough to occupy a place in its chambers.

In a small, quiet courtroom, on the Ft. Stewart military installation, the stage is set. One soldier who, after firsthand experience with the destructive force of war, decided to take the Ten Commandments at their word – “Thou Shall Not Kill” – and use the rights given to him to declare his conscious objection to war, to no longer be in a position to voluntarily have to kill another human being, is now on trial for not wanting to kill.

The Army has removed itself so completely from its moral responsibility, that its representatives are willing to openly demand, in a court of law, that they be allowed to regain “positive control over this soldier” by finding him guilty of crimes he did not commit, and put him in jail – a prisoner of conscience, for daring to obey a moral law.

It is “hard work” to face the truth, and it is scary when people who are not afraid to face it begin to speak out. Someone once said that my husband’s case is a question of morality over legality. I pray that this country has not gone so far over the edge that the two are so distinctly different that we can tell them apart.

A sixteen year old in New York, was charged with involuntary manslaughter yesterday for stabbing another teen in the chest twice, over a computer game. There is no question of why. He broke a law – a legal, MORAL law – “Thou Shall Not Kill.”

After seeing war firsthand, Sgt. Kevin Benderman chose to follow a legal, MORAL law – “Thou Shall Not Kill.” A form of law significant enough to be represented on the walls of our Supreme Court. The US Army cannot let him go. I have to ask – “WHY?”

Lieutenant Ehren Watada served in the army, and was the first commissioned officer to refuse deployment.  He was trained for combat duty in Iraq, and in preparation for deployment he started studying the area, its people, their history, their culture, and the history of the war, in order to prepare himself and the men he would be leading as best he could for the mission they were going to be carrying out.

Over the course of researching all this, he discovered pretty much what everyone else I’ve talked about here has said:  that the war was started on false accusations.  That was a serious problem to him, because when he joined the military, he, like everyone else who joins the military, swore to uphold the Constitution.  By starting an illegal war, President Bush was violating the Constitution.  That meant that if Lt. Watadah carried out his orders, he too would be violating the Constitution.

Lt. Watadah tells most of his story on his website in audio and video files.  But here’s the timeline of his story surrounding his attempt to refuse duty in Iraq:

Jan 2006     Lt. Watada submits a letter of resignation to his battalion commander.  He is told he will be transferred out of the unit but then ordered to deploy with the unit on its 30-day Mission Readiness Exercise.  Initially told to reconsider his decision, he is informed in April, 2006 of procedural mistakes in the resignation.

Lt. Watada is offered a “safe” position within the Battalion HQ, one recently vacated by a lieutenant allowed to leave the unit.  Having never claimed CO – conscientious objector — status, he declines the offer.   Lt. Watada is then ordered to move immediately to that position.  He is denied a 2-week leave granted to all others within his unit and informed that he will face legal proceedings if he does not change his decision by the time the unit returns from leave.

May 2006     A second letter is submitted, and the resignation is denied due to the unit’s “stop-loss” designation, which requires all members to remain on active duty for the full duration of the unit’s deployment.  Lt. Watada offers to deploy to Afghanistan; the request is denied.

Jun 7, 2006     At a press conference held in a church near Ft. Lewis, Watada announces he will not comply with deployment orders to Iraq.

Jun 22, 2006     Lt. Watada fails to board the plane for Iraq with the Third Stryker Brigade of the U.S. Army’s 2nd Infantry Division.  He is confined temporarily to base quarters, officially counseled, and notified of a pending investigation.

Lt. Watada faced 6 years in prison—2 for failing to deploy and 4 for speaking out against the war while serving in the military.  But his trial was a tricky business for a lot of people, because by going to trial for refusing to deploy in order to uphold his sworn duty to defend the U.S. Constitution, he was putting the war itself on trial.  There were only two ways the trial could be ruled:  either the war was constitutional and he was breaking his orders, or he was upholding his sworn duty to defend the Constitution and the war was illegal.  And he had all the evidence he needed to prove that he was right.

So it came as no surprise when the army prosecutors made their own procedural errors and a mistrial was declared.  Lt. Watada was let off of his charges and discharged from the military.

Pat Tillman played football for Arizona State University, so his story has been big news where I live.  After he graduated, he went to play in the NFL for the Arizona Cardinals.  But he left his football career to volunteer for the army in 2002, along with his brother Kevin, who gave up his chances at a career in professional baseball.

They served together in the rangers in the Iraq invasion.  Later Pat was redeployed to Afghanistan.

Like everyone else whose story I’m relaying here, Pat was critical of the Iraq war and the Bush administration.  He’d made plans with Dr. Noam Chomsky to meet after he got back from Afghanistan.  If you’ve never heard of him, Dr. Chomsky is an author who’s critical of just about everything.  So for anyone who has heard of Noam Chomsky, it’s pretty obvious where that was headed…

But then on April 22, 2004, while out on patrol, Pat’s unit got in a firefight.  Pat got killed by friendly fire.

This is where his story started getting really controversial.  As it turns out, the whole battle was friendly fire, because Pat’s unit had engaged an allied unit.  Evidently, a roadside bomb… or some kind of bomb… went off between them and they each though they were under attack by the other.  So the story goes, anyway.

Then Pat was shot by someone from his own unit.  Three times in the head.

Then his comrades burned his uniform and body armor to try to keep anyone from finding out he’d been killed by an American.

Then the military officials involved all started covering everything up.  Within days his commanding officers knew he’d been killed by friendly fire.  But his citation for the Silver Star, Purple Heart, and posthumous promotion to Corporal reported that he’d been killed in a battle everyone knew never took place, and the report was approved by his commanding officers. His death by friendly fire wasn’t revealed to his family until weeks after his memorial service.
So at best Corporal Tillman was a celebrity serving in the military, who was critical of the military and had big plans to become a lot more critical as soon as he got out, who was killed by someone on his own side, in a battle that was started by accident, and whose death was immediately covered up.  The other possibility, which no one can prove, but that depends on a lot less coincidences and mistakes all happening at the same time, was that it was murder.

And with that, here’s what his brother Kevin had to say about it when he got out of the military:

After Pat’s Birthday

By Kevin Tillman

It is Pat’s birthday on Nov. 6, and elections are the day after. It gets me thinking about a conversation I had with Pat before we joined the military. He spoke about the risks with signing the papers. How, once we committed, we were at the mercy of the American leadership and the American people. How we could be thrown in a direction not of our volition. How fighting as a soldier would leave us without a voice … until we got out.

Much has happened since we handed over our voice:

Somehow we were sent to invade a nation because it was a direct threat to the American people, or to the world, or harbored terrorists, or was involved in the Sept. 11 attacks, or received weapons-grade uranium from Niger, or had mobile weapons labs, or WMD, or had a need to be liberated, or we needed to establish a democracy, or stop an insurgency, or stop a civil war we created that can’t be called a civil war even though it is. Something like that.

Somehow our elected leaders were subverting international law and humanity by setting up secret prisons around the world, secretly kidnapping people, secretly holding them indefinitely, secretly not charging them with anything, secretly torturing them. Somehow that overt policy of torture became the fault of a few “bad apples” in the military.

Somehow back at home, support for the soldiers meant having a 5-year-old kindergartener scribble a picture with crayons and send it overseas, or slapping bumper stickers on cars, or lobbying Congress for an extra pad in a helmet. It’s interesting that a soldier on his third or fourth tour should care about a drawing from a 5-year-old; or a faded sticker on a car as his friends die around him; or an extra pad in a helmet, as if it will protect him when an IED throws his vehicle 50 feet into the air as his body comes apart and his skin melts to the seat.

Somehow the more soldiers that die, the more legitimate the illegal invasion becomes.

Somehow American leadership, whose only credit is lying to its people and illegally invading a nation, has been allowed to steal the courage, virtue and honor of its soldiers on the ground.

Somehow those afraid to fight an illegal invasion decades ago are allowed to send soldiers to die for an illegal invasion they started.

Somehow faking character, virtue and strength is tolerated.

Somehow profiting from tragedy and horror is tolerated.

Somehow the death of tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of people is tolerated.

Somehow subversion of the Bill of Rights and the U.S. Constitution is tolerated.

Somehow suspension of habeas corpus is supposed to keep this country safe.

Somehow torture is tolerated.

Somehow lying is tolerated.

Somehow reason is being discarded for faith, dogma and nonsense.

Somehow American leadership managed to create a more dangerous world.

Somehow a narrative is more important than reality.

Somehow America has become a country that projects everything that it is not and condemns everything that it is.

Somehow the most reasonable, trusted and respected country in the world has become one of the most irrational, belligerent, feared and distrusted countries in the world.

Somehow being politically informed, diligent and skeptical has been replaced by apathy through active ignorance.

Somehow the same incompetent, narcissistic, virtueless, vacuous, malicious criminals are still in charge of this country.

Somehow this is tolerated.

Somehow nobody is accountable for this.

In a democracy, the policy of the leaders is the policy of the people. So don’t be shocked when our grandkids bury much of this generation as traitors to the nation, to the world and to humanity.

Most likely, they will come to know that “somehow” was nurtured by fear, insecurity and indifference, leaving the country vulnerable to unchecked, unchallenged parasites.

Luckily this country is still a democracy. People still have a voice. People still can take action. It can start after Pat’s birthday.

I know I’ve said it before, but it’s worth repeating.  A war of ideas can’t be won by bullets; it can only be won by weaponized education.  I’ve said that the military of the Kingdom of Earth is completely invisible.  But I’ve also said that no one has ever won a war without infantry, and that revolutions are illegal, which is why the success of the revolution depends on people like the Animal Liberation Front who dump tea in Boston Harbor—oops, I mean liberate animals—without killing or injuring anyone, who are not only willing to break the laws of mortal men, but to be branded as terrorists, to turn ideas into actions, in order to make the ideas personally meaningful to the enemy.

But something else that’s critical to the success of the revolution are people who know first hand why we’re fighting a war of ideas with ideas, because they’ve seen first hand what happens when you fight wars with bullets.  These people understand better than anyone else why fighting with anything other than ideas doesn’t work.  And in their own ways, they all took risks and made sacrifices to defend what they stood for.  All of these veterans swore to defend Americans from those who threaten us.  But the people who are threatening us didn’t turn out to be who we thought they were going to be.

After September 11th, I considered joining the military too.  I figured I was too old, but maybe if I volunteered for something really complicated—namely helicopter pilot—and did well enough on the entrance exams, they’d take me anyway.  But considering the way I get along with authority, I figured I’d be a Second Lieutenant for the rest of my life.  And most importantly, ever since Vietnam politicians have been calling the shots and winning elections, and I really didn’t want to spend eight years being President Bush’s pawn.  So I tried volunteering to fight the terrorists as a civilian, since that was who the terrorists were attacking anyway.  And you know how well that worked out for me.

But there is one thing I can still do.  These people whose stories I’ve relayed here all volunteered to defend my right to free speech, so the least I can do is to use my right to free speech to help them tell their own stories.  Ideas can’t be communicated without speech, and a war of ideas can’t be waged without free speech—at least, not by civilians it can’t.  So all these people who have done all they can to defend everyone’s free speech are the people who make it possible for anyone  to win a war of ideas.

You can’t win a war without infantry, but you can’t win a war without officers either.  The military of the Kingdom of Earth is completely invisible, so how officers are appointed is anyone’s guess.  But for my own part, I refer to any military vets who are participating in the war of ideas by using ideas against our current government by their military ranks, whether anyone is officially supposed to do that or not.  The way I see it, if you had to leave a military run by mortal men to defend higher laws that those mortal men weren’t defending, all that proves is that you’re part of a more important army than anything your mortal commanders could think of.   What the world really needs is an Army of Peace.  And that’s exactly what the army of the Kingdom of Earth is.

I think this would be a good time to remind everyone that the Kingdom of Earth isn’t anything of my creation, it’s a thing that people all over the world have been trying to create in various ways, without realizing that other people were also trying to create it in other ways, or how all their efforts fit together.  I call it Globalization 4.0, or a global revolution, or a war of ideas, or world conquest, or whatever fits best with whatever I’ve been talking about, but really all it is a bunch of people who are each doing what they can to try to create a world where people don’t have to fight each other anymore.

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I’m sure we all know the basic background to the Civil Rights Movement.  First we had slavery, then we had the Civil War, then we had Reconstruction, then we had sharecropping and segregation, then we had the desegregation of schools, the bus boycott, the Civil Rights Movement, the Black Panthers, Dr. King and Malcolm X’s assassinations, and then a whole bunch of people trying to following Dr. King and Malcolm X’s footsteps, but none able to fill their shoes.  Now we have Jesse Jackson.

Now here are some details that most people haven’t heard about…

The Abolition of White Democracy  by Professor Joel Olson is a good book on the history of race relations in America since the end of the Civil War.    It’s basically a real-life version of my story of Rex and his toy empire, and it shows a lot of patterns that apply to the relations between any two groups when one is a majority and the other a minority.

First of all, slavery was an 8,000-year old tradition by the time the Europeans came to the Americas.  Slavery in the Americas began with indentured servitude, under which materially wealthy Americans would pay for the ocean passage for Irish peasants.  Then the Irish would have to work for the Americans for three years to pay them back.  Naturally, these materially wealthy Americans were doing this to make a profit, so the amount of work they were getting out of their indentured servants was way the hell more than their passage aboard the ship had cost.

There was just one problem.  The Irish looked just like all the other White settlers, so it was really easy for them to run away.  So those materially wealthy Americans looked for another way to get a lot of work out of people as cheaply as they could.

These materially wealthy Americans tried enslaving Native Americans.  They were conquering the people’s lands after all, so they needed something to do with all the Native Americans.  But that didn’t work because the Native Americans were never very cooperative.  I’m guessing maybe they hated the White conquerors too much to be willing to work for them, or maybe they had too much of a problem being forced to work on the land they used to live on, or maybe they were too familiar with local geography so they could escape really easily, or maybe they had too much practice at fighting Whites already and were able to organize escapes too easily, or maybe all of the above.  Whatever the case, enslaving Native Americans just didn’t work very well.

So the slave owners tried something else.  They started buying their slaves from African slave traders.  That gave them something no one had ever had before in European history.  They racialized slavery.  Now they made one race the slaves and another race the slave owners, so now you could tell who was supposed to be a slave and who wasn’t just by looking at them.

Racializing slavery also created something else new.  Not all Whites owned slaves.  Now that slavery had been racialized, the materially wealthy White slave owners had created something completely artificial that White workers could earn without the slave owners having to pay them for.  Now the White workers could work for the sake of proving that they weren’t slaves.  By creating a racial social tier of slaves, they also created a racial social tier of non-slaves.  Membership in the White workers’ tier meant that no matter what, there would always be someone below you that you could look down upon, but there would also be people above you that you could look up to.

This created a sensory illusion that the slave-owners took advantage of.  The White workers and the Black workers were all workers, which meant they had a lot in common.  But the White slave-owners looked  more like the White workers.   Out of the three groups, two were mortal enemies.  Karl Marx and Fredreich Engles published The Communist Manifesto just 13 years before the American Civil War started.  If the White workers had banded together with the Black workers, the workers could’ve won.

Instead, the White workers fell for the sensory illusion.  The easiest way for them to identify with people from another group was the same way it’s been easiest for anyone to identify with anyone for all of human evolution—by who looked  like them.  That solidified the Whites as one group and the Blacks as another group.  That made it really easy to tell who was crossing over to collaborate with the other group.  And that made it really easy to expose that person as a traitor to their side.  So that discouraged anyone from collaborating with the other side in a big way.

Despite what they teach you in history class, the 13th Amendment didn’t free a single slave.  It specified that all the slaves in states that were in open rebellion against the United States were freed.  But at the time the 13th Amendment was written, those states all belonged to a different country, so the U.S. Constitution didn’t apply to them, and neither did Amendments to the U.S. Constitution.  Maryland and Delaware were also slave states, but they stayed with the Union.  So Abraham Lincoln didn’t free their slaves with the 13th Amendment, for fear he’d drive them over to the Confederates’ side.  Washington D.C. is bordered by Virginia to the south and Maryland to the north, and General Lee had been trying to capture Washington ever since the war began.  If Maryland had joined the Confederates, Washington D.C. would’ve been surrounded by the Confederates automatically.

My point is, the 13th Amendment illustrates all too clearly that President Lincoln faced the same basic problem that General Lee faced.   General Lee was smart enough to figure out what an advantage rifles gave to defenders, but he knew that most of his men weren’t, so in order to keep his army functioning, he had to try winning with the old battlefield tactics.  If he’d told them to fight defensively only, the Confederate soldiers would’ve felt like he was a coward.  They wouldn’t’ve felt like cowards, and they wouldn’t’ve wanted to fight like cowards, so morale would’ve suffered, there would’ve been a lot of conflict within the ranks, people would’ve disobeyed orders, and sooner or later someone would try to replace him or get him replaced.  So General Lee had to fight in a way that his men felt would succeed.

President Lincoln’s version of this problem was that no matter how kind-hearted he was, he obviously had good reason to believe that the slave owners in Delaware and Maryland cared more about owning slaves, and therefore owning cheap labor, than they cared about the Union.  This makes it pretty clear that it was President Lincoln, and not the Northerners as a whole, who cared so much about freeing the slaves.  The Capitalist aristocrats cared about what Capitalists have always cared about—the control of Capital.  Even when it’s human capital, and even when it means joining an armed rebellion against their own country.  How else can it be that President Lincoln, who we all remember so well for having freed the slaves, in his historical act of freeing all the slaves, didn’t actually dare to free a single one of them?

(And that raises the further question:  Why don’t they teach anyone about this in public school?  Maybe because our politicians don’t want our kids to learn about this historical proof that Capitalists are a threat to national security?)

Even after the Civil War, slavery was only nominally ended. Now the Blacks had to rent their farmland from White landowners and pay for it out of their crops—hence the term sharecropping.  They weren’t slaves anymore, now they were serfs with a few more token rights than serfs had in Medieval Europe.  They could go to school and learn how to read now, but thanks to segregation they couldn’t go to as good of schools as the Whites did.  And of course, the Whites did all they could to prevent them from voting, like trying to reserve the right to vote for property owners, giving people literacy tests, and making them pay voting fees.  (When things like that happen to Black voters in the old Confederacy today, it’s called “voter disenfranchisement”.)
So Blacks were legally free now but they still lived in forced poverty.  You saw what happened in the African village when it took all the work energy the people had just to survive from one day to the next.  Now the Whites were forcing the Blacks to expend all the work energy they had just to stay alive from one day to the next.  If the Whites could keep the Blacks underrepresented in elections, they could keep them politically powerless, or close to it.  If they could prevent them from getting good educations they could keep most of them from ever learning how to do anything but farm.  Then they would never be a match for the Whites politically or economically, so they could never threaten their cultural and societal dominance.

The cultural tradition of Whites hating Blacks wasn’t something that could be outlawed.  Sociologically it was the Whites’ cultural background by now, and as individuals it was their personal belief.  So now our political system said that Blacks were equal to Whites, but the Whites themselves still said Blacks were inferior.

Before the Civil War, White workers were separated from the Black workers by that line of slavery.  The White workers could identify themselves as non-slaves, and therefore had two things in common with the Capitalists just by virtue of their membership in the White race: their skin color and their free status.  That guaranteed them that no matter what, there would always be another group below them in the social hierarchy.  So given the choice, which other group did they want to make the best impression on?  The one below them?  Or the one above them?

The emancipation of the slaves did nothing to change that.  There were still the same three groups in the south: the White land owners, the White workers, and the Black workers.  They still had the same social hierarchy.  The White landowners still thought themselves superior and thought the Blacks a threat, and the White workers were still trying to make the best impression on the White landowners.  Depending on how you want to look at it—and I’m sure it affected some people one way and some the other—being a White worker gave you one of two things.  Either it gave you the chance to work for the sake of earning the completely artificial, imaginary currency of proving you weren’t an untrustworthy Black worker, or it gave you the chance to prove your loyalty to the White land owners.  But in order to prove your loyalty to the White land owners, you had to work extra hard, and you had to help oppress the Blacks.  After the war, White slave-owners racializing slavery so long ago still created an artificial motivation for the White workers to work harder, not for the sake of earning more money, but for the sake of earning the artificial currency of membership in the non-slave—now non-Black-worker—group.

The forced poverty and political marginalization of the Blacks reinforced this, in spite of what the Constitution said.  The Whites perceived the Blacks as a threat and acted accordingly, so the Blacks perceived the Whites as a threat.  That only made the Whites continue to perceive the Blacks as a threat, and the cycle continued.  The Blacks were uneducated, that that made them seem dumber and less cultured than the Whites—also known as “less human”.

This is yet another example of Capitalists using divide and conquer tactics against Labor to eliminate Labor as competition before they even get the chance to compete.  To paraphrase Professor Olson:  Black is a culture.  White is an economic system.

This racialized economic system still exists today.  It’s particularly noticeable in the old Confederacy, but you can find it all over America.  And Capitalists are still profiting from it.  If Whites still see Blacks as dumb, uncultured criminals, and the people who own media outlets help to propagate that stereotype, then Whites are going to continue to feel threatened by Blacks, and are going to continue to keep themselves safe from them.  In so doing, they’re going to act just the same way the White slave owners of centuries past wanted them to act, to oppress the Blacks.  And if the Whites continue to oppress Blacks with their actions, even if they don’t mean to and don’t realize they’re doing it, then the Blacks will still perceive the Whites as a threat and will act accordingly.

Here in the desert, this is exactly what’s happening now between Whites and Mexicans.
This racialized three-tier socio-economic hierarchy is a lot more than skin deep now.  Now Blackness has become not just a race but a culture.  Now everyone is free (but some more than others) to try to move up in the socio-economic hierarchy.  All over America now, the White landowner, White worker, and Black worker tiers are pretty much synonymous with upper class, middle class, and lower class.  If you act Black, everyone in America is pretty well guaranteed to see you as lower class.  And if you act Black, it’s a pretty safe bet that there’s a reason you’re trying to fit in with what everyone perceives to be the lower class.  There are any number of ways that people can act upon their perceptions of someone else as lower class, and there are any number of reasons people can want to identify with what everyone else perceives to be the lower class.  But I think Tom Friedman put it best in The World Is Flat.  He said something along the lines of:  “Class isn’t an economic level, but a state of mind.  The biggest difference between lower class and middle class is not their income.  The biggest difference is that middle class people have hope for the future and lower class people don’t.”

I think there’s something to be said for that, although not quite in the way he meant it.  A lot of lower class people are lower class because they’ve given up.  That would explain why a lot of people act Black because they want to identify with what everyone else perceives to be the lower class.  But in the town I grew up in, most people were lower class according to the IRS, but none of them acted Black.  Granted, we didn’t have MTV back then, so nobody had any exposure to Black culture.  But that’s not the point. The point is, they acted like White workers who were trying to make the best impressions on White landowners.  Some were trying harder than other, and some weren’t trying very hard at all.  But the crucial part was:  Maintaining their cultural identity did not depend on maintaining hostility toward the White landowner culture.

In other places people define cultural boundaries in other ways.  In England they use accents:  Queen’s English versus Cockney.  Which group do you try to sound more like?

Anyway, here in America, everyone is free (more or less) to try to climb up the socio-economic hierarchy.  But if you want to do it, you have to act White.  If you act Black, a lot of people are going to think a whole lot less of you and not offer you jobs and call the police when they see you walking down their street, or whatever.  That’s even true for White people who act Black now, but it’s even more true for Black people who act Black.  Also for non-White and non-Black people who act Black.  White skin still helps you act White without your doing anything; Black skin helps keep you Black without your doing anything.  Of course, the clothing style and hairstyle you pick out for yourself contributes to other people’s perception of your cultural group also.  And if you’re dark-skinned but not Black, then you’re somewhere in between White and Black.  You’re not automatically White or automatically Black, but you’re somewhere on the continuum between the two.  You can act like a White worker or you can act like a Black worker or you can act like a White landowner.  Here in America those are your choices.

Whichever one you act most like will determine the information package you pull out of the subconsciousness of the people you meet.  That will determine what they expect you to act like, and what they’ll notice most about you.  If you confirm their expectations about you, they’ll remember that strongly, and if you don’t confirm their expectations, they won’t remember that as strongly.  Of course, these cultural traits aren’t determined by skin color anymore; now skin color is just one trait among many—but a very important trait for some people.

Finally we get to the life of Dr. King.  There are two important things that few people ever learn about him because they aren’t taught in public school and the mainstream media never mentions them.

The first is that Dr. King was the good cop of the Civil Rights Movement.  Malcolm X was the bad cop.  The Civil Rights Movement as we’ve known it owes a lot to Malcolm X, because he offered Blacks a choice.  If Dr. King had been in it on his own, the Civil Rights Movement wouldn’t be what we remember it as.  By himself he would’ve just been some guy who had a lot of opinions that a lot of people agreed with.  In strictly Capitalistic terms, he was creating a demand for something, so the sensible Capitalist thing to do would’ve been to cash in on it and offer people what they wanted.  But if that was all the Civil Rights Movement had behind it, it would still be owned by the Capitalists, because its success still would’ve depended on Capitalists offering everyone else what they were demanding.  If their demands became more than the Capitalists were willing to part with, the Capitalists could still defeat them by refusing to supply for their demands.  Meanwhile, the Capitalists could also undercut the Civil Rights Movement by offering people the superficial appearance of supplying for their demands, even though they had divorced that appearance from its original content.  Go to any mall in America now and you’ll see what I mean.  Capitalists buy and sell Blackness now, along with every other symbol of rebelliousness that’s ever been invented.

Now enter Malcolm X.  Malcolm X, to a large extent, took the decision of whether or not to cooperate with Dr. King out of the Whites’ hands.  Between Dr. King and Malcolm X, the Whites were now trapped between a rock and a hard place.  Malcolm X gave the Blacks another choice in how to empower themselves to get what they wanted, and forced the Whites to realize the Blacks had another choice—just like the No Borders movement is giving Mexicans an alternative to the die-in-the-desert economy and the Arizona Counter Recruitment Coalition offers kids alternatives to joining the military.  Now that Blacks had the choice between Dr. King’s version of Civil Rights and Malcolm X’s version, the Whites no longer had the choice of whether to help Dr. King or not to help him.  Now their choice had been reduced to giving Dr. King what he wanted, or take their chances on Malcolm X taking what he wanted.  Once again, by giving everyone a choice, and everyone then making a choice, Malcolm X created a political system that was truly of the people.  Everyone involved was attempting to preserve the survival of their DNA by the most effective means perceivable to them.  When Malcolm X joined the Civil Rights Movement in his own way, he made the Blacks perceive a backup plan for preserving the survival of their DNA, and he made the Whites perceive that the Blacks perceived that they now had a back-up plan.  By giving the Blacks more choices in ways to preserve the survival of their DNA, he gave their oppressors fewer choices.  When the Blacks acted within their new range of possibilities and the Whites acted within their new range of possibilities, the Blacks won more than they would’ve if both sides had acted within their previous ranges of possibilities.

The other important thing that few people know about the life of Dr. King was that toward the end he was becoming a Socialist.  Everyone in America has heard his I Have a Dream speech, and considers that the high point of his life.  Then James Earl Ray shot him.  But that wasn’t until five years later.

Before he died, Dr. King started drafting what he called the Economic Bill of Rights.  He intended that to be a step taken by the government to guarantee an acceptable minimum standard of living for Americans.  And as we all know, our government is the embodiment of the agreement made among the people to work together to provide for their common interests and to work together to protect themselves from those who would harm them.  That makes a government of, by, and for the people the foundation of any socialist society.

There are two important lessons that can be learned from the history of the Civil Rights Movement before I move on to the Civil Rights Movement of today.

The first is that Blacks won the right to vote before women did.  When women were struggling for the right to vote, a big argument they made was that letting women vote would give White voters a big advantage over Black voters.  If the women really wanted to challenge White male dominance, they could’ve joined forces with the Blacks instead.  But instead they broke their potential big revolution into a bunch of small revolutions competing with each other.  Naturally, the people of the Globalization 4.0 movement have learned from this mistake—or at least, are trying to—and develop a political ideology that’s universally inclusive so they can work together, or at the very least, keep from working against each other.

The second is:  Watch how conservatives talk about Dr. King today, and it’s a perfect lesson in how childhood development and cultural background shape information and anti-information packages.  On Dr. King Day of 2007, I remember hearing or reading something about how much President Bush was praising Dr. King’s contributions to America.  President Bush, as you will recall, is a conservative.  That means he prefers hanging onto old ideas over adapting to new ideas.  40 years ago, conservatives, especially ones from southern states like Texas, thought all them damn niggers marching down their streets must be a sign of the end of the world.  So what did they do?  They fought tooth and nail to make them stop, so they could make their society continue to function the way they were used to it functioning.  They called out the riot police and brought out their attack dogs and turned on their fire hoses.

But it didn’t work.  So now something new was happening in society, despite the best efforts of the conservatives to prevent it.

That was then.  This is now.   If President Bush had been governor of Texas 40 years ago, what do you think he would’ve done if Dr. King came to Austin and given a speech in front of the state capitol building?  Called out the National Guard?

But if you asked President Bush about it now, what would he say?  Well first of all he’d never admit to the possibility that he, as a conservative, would’ve been a racist back when the south was still segregated and the majority of voters were White racists.  But would he even realize the contradiction in what he was saying?  Of course not, because he believes that evolution is bullsh*t, which includes evolutionary mechanisms of childhood development, and for that matter, the anti-information package he would be using right then and there while he was talking to you.  He would assure you that his god would’ve guided him to do the right thing then as now.
Even if he was willing to admit that he would’ve been a racist, and even if he could imagine the possibility that he could be a racist if he had been born in another time, his biggest blind spot of all would be his not noticing that conservativism itself is a gigantic anti-information package.  Forty years ago, President Bush would’ve fought Dr. King tooth and nail because he was trying to preserve the conservative values Dr. King was threatening.  Now he’s conserving cultural values today by praising Dr. King because Dr. King created the cultural values we have now.

So my question is:  Why the f*ck did anyone ever elect President Bush to be the leader of our country when he’s nothing but a f*cking follower?

And of course, the same goes for all conservatives.  If it didn’t apply to them, they wouldn’t be conservatives, would they?

And by the way, do you think President Bush ever praised Dr. King’s Socialist values, or said anything about his Economic Bill of Rights?  Of course not.

Today, the Civil Rights Movement has split into two main branches.

The first is what looks at first glance to be the direct descendant of Dr. King’s movement.  And the reason it looks that way is because it’s made up of conservative followers of Dr. King, still trying to follow where he had led them as of 40 years ago, and making a few minor improvements of their own.  I must say, it’s sad to see.

In 2006, before the elections, I was walking out of a grocery story one day when a Black guy who was standing outside asked me if I would like to sign some petitions he had.  He had about a dozen, for all kinds of different things, from smokers’ rights to the environment.  I signed them all… until I got to the last one.  That one was for a state constitutional amendment banning gay marriage.  I just about threw that one back in his face.

So there he was, a Black man trying to prevent other people’s civil rights from being recognized.
The conservative side of the modern Civil Rights Movement isn’t going to get much further.  I can say that because they’re trying to act like Whites so they can get ahead in a civilization that isn’t going to get much further.

Blacks as a culture aren’t so much “progressive” as they are “a different culture from the Whites, who are trying to get ahead in the world”.  They’re conservatives for the same reason any group of materially poor people is more conservative than people who have more material wealth: because as individuals or as groups, the less economic safety net you have, the fewer chances you can afford to take.  With all their Black soul I’m sure they can win a lot of popular support by making people feel like they’re right.  But no matter how far they get this way, they’re still opposing fundamental laws of the universe.  A suicidal economic system is still a suicidal economic system, no matter what group of people are using it.

It doesn’t help that the Civil Rights Movement began in Black churches.   The conservative followers of Dr. King still depend on religion to give them their sense of how the world works.  That means they’re still trying to pit religious faith against religious faith.  They can win simple emotional aikido duels that way, and they can even attract enough followers to win victories by plain old might-makes-right.   But they still aren’t fighting in a way that’s ever going to let them win, because victory through might-makes-right can only be maintained through a constant input of energy from the victors.  As long as your enemies believe they’re right, they’ll never stop looking for a way to fight back.  So even if the conservative Civil Rights activists were using an economic system that could survive the laws of physics, they still couldn’t get very far, because the further they push, the harder their opponents will push back.

That brings me to the Globalization 4.0 side of the Civil Rights Movement…

Anarchism is the embodiment of the Civil Rights Movement.  One of the highest priorities of the Anarchist movement is to systematically seek and destroy all forms of authoritarianism.

Anarchism had been around for a century before Dr. King got his start.  So if he’d lived, there were a lot more ideas he could’ve found out about and put to use, or at the very least, a lot more ideas he could’ve rediscovered on his own.

Anarchism is different from the conservative Civil Rights Movement in two main ways.  First of all, it’s the Civil Rights Movement applied to everyone in the entire world.  Second, it doesn’t depend on any governmental apparatus at all for its success.

Anyone’s lack of civil rights is caused by someone else wielding the power, in one way or another, to prevent that person from exercising their civil rights.  So if you eliminate the source of that person’s power, what will remain are the other person’s civil rights.

The Globalization 4.0 Civil Rights Movement doesn’t depend on governmental apparatus for its success for the simple reason that any people’s movement that depends on governmental apparatus for its success is not a people’s movement.  If your civil rights depend on the government to protect them, what you have are not civil rights, they’re governmental rights, or something like that.  Or you could say that you don’t have civil rights, the government  has your civil rights.  And that’s still a form of authoritarianism, because you’re giving government officials the choice in whether or not to protect your civil rights.

The Globalization 4.0 Civil Rights Movement is waged in two main directions.  First of all, education of both the oppressors and the oppressed.  As Prof. Olson points out in his book, democracy all by itself is not an end to oppression; it’s just the concealment of oppression.  If a majority of voters believes themselves to be superior to the minority and votes accordingly, all you’ve done is to democratize your oppression.  Now you can say that the government isn’t oppressing the minority people anymore, because they’ve given them the right to vote.  And if their problems still aren’t getting solved, it must be the people’s fault—because they really are inferior just like the majority said all along.

Solving that problem depends on educating everyone about the situation and how it affects them.  Things like human equality and why the two groups seem so different from each other.  I’ve written almost a million words on the topic of human equality by now, so let’s just pretend I’ve got this one covered.

Second, the empowerment of the oppressed.  I’ve given you three examples of that in this chapter so far.  That means giving the people choices, or helping them find choices, or whatever, as long as they end up with a choice of actions they can pursue to benefit themselves in the end.  A lot of times oppressed people need help getting started, but once you show them one way out of their situation, they’ll start thinking of lots more.  Oppressed people aren’t stupid, but it’s really easy for people who are stuck in a seemingly hopeless situation to get so focused on doing what they have to do to survive that they miss out on opportunities to break out of their ruts.

Empowering oppressed people says nothing what so ever about empowering them in a way their oppressors will approve of.  If you are empowering the oppressed people in any meaningful way at all, their oppressors are guaranteed not to approve of it.  If their oppressors do approve of it, you’re not empowering the oppressed people; you’re only giving them the feeling of empowerment, while obviously leaving the oppressors in control of the situation. If you don’t threaten the oppressors, you aren’t truly empowering the oppressed.

Hence my reason for saying earlier in this chapter that solving problems facing the world is almost guaranteed to require breaking a lot of laws.  The laws are written by the oppressors, after all, so you can assume they’re written to help propagate their oppression.

The Globalization 4.0 Civil Rights Movement is a movement for racial equality, gender equality, sexuality equality, economic equality, religious equality, and political equality.  Anything that makes people unequal is a valid target.

Well guess what.  Capitalism depends on inequality.  Capitalism is inherently authoritarian.  I’ve already told you this part.  Once you define a certain thing as your “own”, you give yourself control over how the thing can and can’t be used, and you prevent anyone else from deciding how the thing will or won’t be used.  You can then use your control of the thing to control the actions of the people who need it.

Maintaining an economic system built on inequality depends on supporting a lot of non-food producing people who can devote all their labor to enforcing that inequality.  Namely, police. I’ve already told you that part too.

In a world with an increasing population, diminishing material resources, and a suicidal economic system, which is what we have now, anyone who controls material resources that other people need to live can be expected to use the material resources for their own benefit.  Likewise, they can be expected to use the control those material resources give them over other people for their own benefit.  And if you control other people, you eliminate their civil rights.

So consider this alternative:  If you teach everyone how to be economically self sufficient, which I talked about in the last book, you solve the problem of people being able to control other people through their control of material resources.  If you make everyone economically independent, then you make everyone an economic system of one.  You then empower everyone to join in whatever larger economic group they perceive best benefits them.  I laid out that basic idea with my consumer-driven serfdom economy of my mythical town of the Empire of Niesen in the first book.  This isn’t perfect, because farmers depend on their land for their economic security, so they can’t move anywhere that suits them, and labor learns certain job skills and not other job skills, so they can’t just choose to do any job.  But to the extent that it is possible to make everyone economically independent, that’s the basic idea.  If everyone is economically independent, you can’t have an oppressive economic system, because people aren’t going to choose to oppress themselves.

Also, if you teach everyone why our current economic system can’t possibly survive—namely, because it defies the laws of physics—and you teach everyone how to build an economic system that can physically survive, you’ve solved the problem of our suicidal economic system.  Or at least, you’ve taken the first step toward solving it.  Because guess what:  Nobody participates in a suicidal economic system that requires them to kill themselves!  Think about it.  The only reason anyone would want to participate in a suicidal economic system is because they have the power to make that economic system work in a way that will make other people die, not themselves.  So when I compare Capitalism to Fascism, I hope you can see why I’m not exaggerating.

Solving the problem of our suicidal economy depends on everyone learning how to be economically self-sufficient.  Until then, workers won’t wield enough power to solve it, and the Capitalists who do wield enough power to solve it won’t have any reason to solve it.  They’ll just go right on doing what they’ve always done, and try to get ahead in their competitive economy by competing against the people who are easiest to beat.

It’s inconceivable that global environmental sustainability can be achieved literally Anarchistically, because making the chemical reaction of the global environment work in a way that can keep everyone alive will depend on a lot of worldwide coordination.  That will depend on a decision-making body that can make the necessary decisions fast enough.  But that decision-making body can never be built without everyone learning to be economically self-sufficient, and learning enough about how the physical world works to understand why this decision-making body is being created, after you’ve done so much to systematically seek and destroy authoritarian power structures.  The Communists in the Soviet Union tried appointing a centralized decision-making body, and that failed for a lot of reasons.  The decision-making body would have to understand how the physical world actually works, which the Communists didn’t.  The people who made up the decision-making body would also have to know how to be Anarchists, so they would know how to wield the power they needed  to be entrusted with without using it to oppress anyone.  The Communists obviously didn’t do that.  The people of the decision-making body would have to educate everyone about everything they were doing, if that hadn’t been done already.  They would have to make all of their work available to the public, and they would have to teach everyone a working understanding of what they were doing and how they were doing it.  The goal of this decision-making body would be to coordinate everyone’s cooperation.  In all likelihood they would wield some amount of authoritarian power as a byproduct  of their need to coordinate people’s cooperation as efficiently as it needed  to be coordinated to prevent global environmental catastrophe.  Once again, the Communists didn’t do this.  Finally, the decision-making body would need to make accurate predictions in solving the problem.  If the decision-making body can’t make accurate predictions, then there’s no point in having it.  The Communists didn’t do this either.  Neither did the Capitalists, for that matter.  We already have a decision-making body that can’t make accurate predictions.  It’s called the U.S. government.

As you can see, the Civil Rights Movement is inseparable from the environmental and peace movements.  If you have a war, you violate people’s civil rights by definition.  If you practice a suicidal economy, it’s inevitable that people’s civil rights are going to be violated.

All of this is elementary to the Globalization 4.0 movement.

Before I end this section, here’s an update on the Civil Rights Movement in South Africa—also known as the anti-apartheid movement.  Courtesy of my South African friends.

The White apartheid was a racialized economic system, which worked pretty much the same as the racialized economic system of the old Confederacy during segregation.  The Whites maintained their political power by enforcing poverty on the Blacks.

Now that apartheid has ended in South Africa, according to my friends, the only thing that’s changed is the color of the managers.  Blacks have the same legal rights as Whites now, but the economic system as it existed under apartheid was left intact.  That is, Blacks have the right to own businesses or whatever now, but there was no redistribution of resources.  They kept their definition of “rightful ownership”, so the Whites still control the economy, and by extension, the political system—only unofficially now.

They’ve done this by putting a wall of Black people who are really good at PR between themselves and the rest of the Blacks—just like Capitalist pigs here in America hire phone operators who are really good at being polite to answer all your phone calls and make you feel like everything that’s gone wrong with your internet service is your fault.  The end result is that they still have economic apartheid at least, but the Blacks can’t call it that anymore, because now it’s being enforced by other Blacks who work for the Whites, not by the Whites themselves.

So there’s yet another example of Capitalists who aren’t competing for the sake of encouraging innovation but for the sake of winning the competition and eliminating their competitors.

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The anti-corporate movement is different from the anti-Capitalist movement in one specific way.  The anti-corporate movement is a part of the anti-Capitalist movement that focuses on one specific cause of problems and other problems closely related to that.

You remember what I said back in the first book about how corporations fulfill all five of the criteria necessary to qualify as a life form?  In order to qualify as a life form, a thing must: behave in a manner conducive to self-preservation; grow and reproduce; transfer energy systematically; react to stimuli; and be distinctly different from its surrounding environment. If you consider the artificial environment of the marketplace to be the natural environment of the corporation, then a corporation does all of these things.

If you prefer a different definition of life, evolution depends on variation, replication, and selection.  That’s how the genes that create us evolve, so by extension, anything that does all of those things creates a life form.  As Dr. Richard Dawkins discovered back in 1976, ideas are transmitted from person to person, change over time, and adapt to new situations.  That means that ideas fulfill the variation, replication, and selection qualifications, and that makes ideas a life form whose environment is our brains.  I’ll talk more about that later in the book.  For now my point is, that definition of life also proves that a corporation is a life form, because a corporation is a collection of ideas that are really good at helping to propagate each other.

As corporations are recognized by the American legal system, a corporation is nothing but an agreement among people, but it’s granted independent entity-hood by the government.  Then, as each person who works for the corporation acts to preserve the survival of their DNA by the most effective means perceivable to them—by going to work every morning and doing their jobs—they make the corporation function.  And by each of them contributing their part to it, collectively they make the corporation function as an artificial life form whose goal is to make profits.  Not to serve people but to make profits.  The corporation is not capable of recognizing people as anything other than a means to move money from one place to another, because in creating this artificial life form, nobody thought—or even knew how—to write in a definition of how to serve the needs of humanity.

Well guess what. Article 6 of the U.S. Constitution deals with how corporations are to be set up.  It states, “corporations are entitled to all the rights of people…” and then spells out some more rights corporations are entitled to.  So under the U.S. Constitution, corporations have more rights than people do.  They say we have a government of, by, and for the people, but if corporations have more rights than people do, is it any surprise that corporations are taking over?

You just might say that the Founding Fathers f*cked up in a big way here.  This is what happens when people who believe in supernatural forces try to set up secular governments.  The Founding Fathers were using a fictitious history of the world to give them their sense of cause and effect that led from the beginning of the world up the present day, and then they tried to use that imaginary chain of cause and effect to predict how events were going to unfold in the future.  And it didn’t f*ckin’ work, did it?

To be fair, the Founding Fathers wrote the Constitution long before the Theory of Evolution, the Laws of Thermodynamics, or the Big Bang were discovered, so they had no way of knowing in secular terms how the world began and how it got from there to the present day.  So they did what everyone has always done and tried to figure it out themselves.  But now that we can recognize that they had fundamental errors in their understanding of how the world worked, and we can see that those fairly simple mistakes they made in the past are causing big problems for us now, we can choose to take action to solve the problem.

The words “government of the people, by the people, and for the people”, and “corporations are entitled to all the same rights as people plus…” cannot possibly both exist in the same document and make that document self-consistent.  It’s pretty obvious the Founding Fathers intended us to have a government of, by, and for the people.  But it’s also pretty obvious that they believed in a Christian version of human behavior, that everyone is inherently good and is only tempted to commit evil, or something along those lines.

Well people aren’t inherently good.  And the Founding Fathers accidentally wrote a gigantic loophole into the Constitution that self-interested people are taking advantage of now.  The result is that America does not work the way the Founding Fathers intended it, because we’ve become a corporate aristocracy.  The Founding Fathers spent eight years waging a war against invisible decision-making forces that ruled their lives and that they had no control over, and what do we have now but a bunch of new invisible decision-making forces that rule our lives and that we have no control over?

The Founding Fathers wrote the Second Amendment to give Americans the right to keep and maintain firearms to defend themselves, their families, and their property against thieves and corrupt governments.  But there is no bullet that can kill a corporation.  If you walked into a corporation’s shareholder’s meeting with an Uzi and mowed every last one of them down, the corporation would still exist.  All the people who made the corporation function would be dead, but the corporation would survive.  More people would come along and take the places of the old shareholders and executives and would pick up right where they left off.
It is true that people make the decisions for corporations.  Hypothetically, those people can make any decisions they want.  But the goal of a corporation is not to serve humanity; the goal of a corporation is to make a profit.  If the corporation makes a profit, it succeeds.  If it doesn’t make a profit, it fails, by the very definition of “corporation”.

Since a corporation is an entity that possesses more rights than a person, and it functions by the collective input of different people, there is no real-life person who can possibly oversee all of the actions of the corporation.  That’s especially true in the case of multinational mega-corporations, which work by the collective input of a whole lot of different people.  The result of each person performing their stated job can only be expected to be that the corporation makes as much profit as possible—which is the goal of the corporation in the first place—regardless of what any individual feels the artificial entity should do.

Since the corporation’s goal is defined as the making of profit, naturally all the rules that govern the corporation are written for the sake of the achievement of that goal.  It could be assumed that everyone in the corporation meant well, but then the people who wrote the rules for the corporation would be making the same mistakes the Founding Fathers did.  If each person performs their stated job, under the rules that were written for the sake of the corporation making as much profit as possible, what you end up with is an artificial entity that makes as much profit as possible—not one that serves humanity.

Within the corporation’s rules that are written for the sake of the corporation making as much profit as possible, there are rules governing what people can do, or are supposed to do, if the corporation isn’t making as much profit as possible.  So once again, if the self-interested, not-inherently-good-after-all people who make the decisions for the corporation each act according to what they perceive to be the most effective means available to them—namely, doing their jobs, as opposed to not doing them—what you end up with is, once again, an independent entity that acts to make as much profit as possible.

The rights of citizens are protected by governments, not by corporations.  Environmental laws are enforced by governments, not by corporations.  Any law that limits that activity of a corporation is an obstacle to the artificial entity making as much profit as possible, by definition.

This means that anyone who works for a corporation and acts in a way that protects citizens’ rights and the environment is not doing so because of anything that exists within the corporation, but because of the external threat posed by the government.  Since the goal of the corporation is to make as much profit as possible and the external laws of the government are an impediment to that, for each person to perform their job and make as much profit as possible for the corporation puts them into conflict with the law.  The laws that limit a corporation’s actions don’t exist to facilitate the corporation’s service to humanity, by definition.  Well as we all know, anyone’s goal in a conflict is to win the conflict, not to cooperate with your opponent.  So corporations that exist to make profits and governments that exist to serve the needs of their people are continuously pitted against each other, by definition.

And now multi-national corporations are moving capital across international borders ever more efficiently, and thereby dissolving the power of governments, but the borders aren’t being opened to let the workers who sell their labor move freely across the borders.  So in the endless struggle between corporations that exist to make profits and governments that exist to serve the interests of their people, who’s winning?

Evolution is defined as the adaptation to environmental pressures.  Genetic evolution, technological evolution, and social evolution all work by adaptation to environmental pressure.  Genetic evolution is always governed by ever-greater energy efficiency within the organism’s living conditions.  That ever-greater efficiency results in ever-more-effective preservation of the organism’s DNA, simply because the equipment the organism uses to preserve the survival of his DNA requires energy to operate.  I’ve said all this before.

Traditionally, technological evolution has always moved in the direction of ever-greater personal energy efficiency.  Ever-greater personal energy efficiency naturally seems to us to be the most effective means of preserving the survival of our DNA, and traditionally, it has been.  But ever-more-efficient use of personal energy through the development of technology has always depended on ever-greater use of environmental energy.  Using ever-more-advanced technology requires us to make ever more chemical reactions happen.  And thanks to the Laws of Thermodynamics, that always means more energy radiating off the Earth and being lost to our planetary environment forever.

Now that we’re moving from our species’ colonization phase to its sustainability phase, the most effective means of preserving the survival of our DNA is no longer synonymous with personal energy efficiency.  But we still naturally perceive it to be.  Now the most effective means for us to preserve the survival of our DNA is to use our environmental energy ever more efficiently.  That necessarily means depending on environmental energy ever less.  And that necessarily means making the transition back to a localized organic agricultural economy.

Social evolution is basically a form of technological evolution, with the one difference being that the “technology” is invisible, because it’s an agreement or other type of collective behavior among a group of people.  But it follows the same pattern of ever-greater personal energy efficiency leading to ever-more-effective preservation of people’s DNA.  But that still only applies to life in the colonization phase of our species, which is where our perceptions of the world evolved.  Now that we’re moving into our species’ sustainability phase, the ever-greater preservation of our DNA necessarily means ever less dependence on environmental energy.  And that means ever-greater use of personal energy.  But once again, making this transition depends on educating people to make them perceive the new discrepancy between personal energy efficiency and the effective preservation of their DNA.

Human behavior itself is a constant adaptation to environmental pressures.  Every decision you ever make in your life you make for the sake of preserving the survival of your DNA by the most effective means perceivable to you.  As your situation changes, your perception of your situation changes—that is, provided you’re perceiving the situation correctly.  And as your perception of the situation changes, your perception of the most effective means of preserving the survival of your DNA in that situation also changes.

When the Founding Fathers wrote the Constitution and the laws governing the operation of corporations, they lived in different conditions than we do. First of all, they still seemed to have an infinite supply of material resources available, because they didn’t anticipate the effects of exponential population growth or industrialization.  Back when they wrote the Constitution, they were still living in our species’ colonization phase, which meant that ever greater personal energy efficiency was still synonymous with ever more effective means for people to preserve the survival of their DNA.  Also, they perceived the operation of the world itself differently than we do now—namely, incorrectly—because they lacked the science we have now.

So here’s what all that means for corporations:  When the Founding Fathers wrote the laws governing the operation of corporations, they wrote them according to their living conditions at the time and their faulty understanding of how the world worked.  Part of the Founding Fathers’ living conditions, which created part of their understanding of how the world worked, was how people acted at the time.  In the late 18th century, everyone who owned a corporation also had Christian values and various other background values.  These values affected their decision-making, which limited them to making certain choices.  But those values were external to both the structure of a corporation and the political system the Founding Fathers founded.  Quite simply, there were certain things people could do that the Founding Fathers had no way of outlawing, because nobody had thought of doing those things yet.  People who own corporations today, however, have different cultural values and 200 more years of practice at cheating and finding loopholes in the laws the Founding Fathers wrote.

When the Founding Fathers wrote the laws governing corporations, they created an environmental pressure by creating an agreement among people.  Now, as people adapt to the environmental pressure the Founding Fathers created based on their faulty understanding of the world and their living conditions at the time, when people who work for corporations adapt their behavior to their environmental pressures (meaning act to preserve the survival of their DNA by the most effective means perceivable to them by doing their jobs according to the laws that govern corporations), they are not acting in ways that are compatible with the world we actually live in.

And here’s why:  Corporations are a vehicle of Capitalism.  The making of “profit” means the control of an increased amount of energy and material resources.  That means that the success of a corporation, and Capitalism itself, depends on sustained economic growth.  But sustained economic growth isn’t sustainable on a finite-sized planet.  Endless economic growth would depend on an infinite supply of resources, and it isn’t physically possible for an infinite supply of resource to exist.  When the Founding Fathers wrote the Constitution, they assumed that the world’s resources were infinite, and they were wrong.  So when they laid the foundation for an economic system they thought would serve people well, it turned out not to work nearly as well as they thought it would.

Then the Founding Fathers went so far as to write laws for creating independent entities that would serve as vehicles for their imaginary economic system.  And then they imbued those independent entities with more rights than people had.

Since our economic system was founded on beliefs about the world that were faulty in a number of ways, the vehicles of that economic system can’t possibly function in a way that’s consistent with physical reality.  The survival of these vehicles—these artificial non-human entities—depends on an infinite supply of resources that can’t physically exist, because one way or another making profits always depends on combining matter and energy to turn things that aren’t useful to people into things that are useful to people, by definition.  If these artificial entities cease to generate profits, they cease to fulfill their purpose for existing.  That makes them failures, by definition.  That creates a new environmental pressure for the people who each make part of the decisions that make the artificial entity function.  Now the most effective means for them to preserve the survival of their DNA is to operate the bureaucratic apparatus that was built into the artificial entity to be used in the event that the artificial entity ceased to make a profit, to make it start generating profit again.

But feeding resources into the artificial entity simply for the sake of keeping it alive necessarily means taking those resources either from the environment or from people—neither of which we can afford any longer.  That necessarily pits the survival of the corporation against the survival of the people who need the resources.  That causes two big problems:

First of all, processing the resources through the corporate machinery just to keep the corporation alive, and then selling them back to the people, would add additional chemical reactions to the process— additional steps to the food chain, in other words, or you could say trickle-through economics.  The Laws of Thermodynamics will make energy radiate off the Earth forever at every step of the way.  Adding in more steps just to keep the artificial entity alive leaves less resources for the real-life people to use.

Second, as I’ve said before, if you put the control of resources that people need to live in the hands of someone else, then for all intents and purposes you’re turned the people who need those resources into slaves.  The person who controls the resources may or may not use them to force the people who need them into slavery.  But if a lot of people are put in control of resources that other people need to live, it is inevitable that some people will use their control of the resources to manipulate the people who need them.  In addition, the very act of putting someone in control of the resources other people need to live creates the master-slave relationship, and the people who are being turned into slaves can be expected to fight back, regardless of whether the master-figure tried to use them as slaves or even intended to use them as slaves.
The Founding Fathers created a monster.  And the Capitalists are choosing to serve it.

Corporations as they exist now are a relic left over from our species’ colonization phase.  As we move into our sustainability phase we will move into a new environmental economy, by definition.  That new environmental economy will create a new human economy.  That new human economy will necessarily create a new political system.

Corporations in their current form can be considered as nothing other than artificial life forms that prey on humans.  They must be exterminated.

It could be said that the people who operate corporations could choose to operate them differently now.  There are four components involved here:  the environmental economy, the Homo sapiens who operate the corporations, those people’s perception of the world, and the laws that govern the operation of the corporations.

The environmental economy of the world is non-negotiable.  The laws of physics are merciless and remorseless.  There is nothing we can change about the environmental economy that will make corporations function differently.

The Homo sapiens who control the corporations are a constant.  They will always act to preserve the survival of their DNA by the most effective means perceivable to them.  That fundamental law of human behavior can’t be changed to make corporations function differently.

The people who control the corporations could be educated in how the world works, how the global environment is changing, and how people will have to start acting differently to live within the physical limitations of the world.

And of course, the laws governing the operation of corporations could be rewritten.

It could be said that all people need to do is to educate the people who operate the corporations to make them perceive the world correctly.  That would change one environmental pressure, that necessarily would change the behavior of the people who make the decisions for the corporation, and that would change the actions of the corporation itself.  This is how Frank Robinson wrote his own set of standards—voluntarily—for how pilots would be certified to fly his helicopters.  Mr. Friedman’s book is full of examples of people who operate corporations doing this also.

The problems with depending exclusively on people who make decisions for corporations to control their own behavior voluntarily, is that if they’re controlling their behavior voluntarily, they still control how they behave.  If they can choose to act in a way that benefits humanity and there’s nothing else in the situation that affects them, then they can still choose not to benefit humanity, just as easily.

The man-made laws that govern the operation of corporations are another environmental pressure.  This one is controlled by the people that a valid government serves.  That government is the embodiment of the agreement made among the people to work together to protect their mutual interests from those who would threaten them.  Since the goals of a corporation contradict the goals of government (which is why governmental laws limit corporate behavior instead of facilitate it—or at least, are supposed to), to the people a government protects, a corporation is a threat.  So by the people changing the laws that govern the operation of a corporation, the people would be creating a second environmental pressure.

You could just as easily call the federal government the People’s Corporation.  The People’s Corporation defines its economy as the entire global environment, including the entire realm of human behavior.  It defines its economic success by its maintenance of the well being of society.   That means that the People’s Corporation is competition to all other corporations.  And as every Capitalist knows, competition is good for the economy because it drives innovation.  So innovate motherf*cker, innovate!

It could be said that people who control corporations could change the goals of their corporations to suit the needs of the changing environmental economy.  And hypothetically that’s possible.  There’s just one catch.  In order for a corporation to serve people’s needs in the new environmental economy, its owners would have to redefine their economy to include the global environment itself, including the entire realm of human behavior and the effects of the Laws of Thermodynamics.  They would have to redefine economic success by making society function better than it does now.  That would necessarily mean taking action to make empirical improvements on people’s ability to preserve the survival of their DNA. And that would necessarily mean taking specific and decisive action to help make our transition to a global localized organic agricultural economy.

So here’s the catch:  If you do all that to your corporation, you’ll no longer be practicing Capitalism.  You’ll be practicing a Use-Value economic system.  Capitalists define their economic success by their ability to combine matter and energy to turn things that aren’t useful to people into things that are useful to people, according to the laws of supply and demand.  We define our economic success by our ability to combine matter and energy to turn things that aren’t useful to people into things that are useful to people according to the physical limitations of the Earth.  Then we define our personal demand accordingly.  Capitalists measure their economic success by having more.  We measure our economic success by needing less.  The entire global environment is useful to people just the way it is.  In fact, if we had less of a human economy and more of a global environment, the global environment probably would be even more useful to us.  But people don’t naturally perceive that.  We’ve learned  to perceive it.  Capitalists combine matter and energy to turn things that aren’t useful to people into things that are useful to people by extracting resources from the environment.  We combine matter and energy to turn thing that aren’t useful to people into things that are useful to people by moving things around in our own brains, to make our brains more useful to us, by making ourselves perceive the importance of not extracting resources from the global environment.

And like everything else I talk about in this chapter, all this is elementary to Globalization 4.0.
Geez, and you thought we were just a bunch of Anarchists kicking and screaming and complaining that the world ain’t fair?

Pathetic.

Filed under: y: 42 Vol. III by Ezra
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Labor unions are supposed to be the same basic thing a government is, applied to a specific situation.  That is, an agreement among workers to join together to protect their mutual interests against those who would threaten them—namely, their employers.

Labor unions create competition between workers and employers.  And as we all know, Capitalism works so well as an economic system because competition drives innovation.  Gee, so I wonder why so many Capitalists work so hard to prevent their workers from forming unions, and to break up unions that their workers form?  Since every red-blooded Capitalist knows how much Capitalism benefits from competition, you’d think they would encourage their workers to unionize.  Instead, they consistently act as the though their goal in the competition was to win the competition and eliminate their competitors.  Gosh, that’s turning into such a recurring theme.  I wonder why Capitalism doesn’t work as well as everyone thought it would…

Anyway, most labor unions are a joke.  There are a number of reasons for that.  For one, they have professional union organizers.  For another, companies the unions work for have professional union liaisons.

The problem with that is that if the union organizer doesn’t have the same job as the workers, he obviously doesn’t have the same goals as the workers, and therefore, he can’t adequately represent them.  A professional union organizer is paid from the workers’ union dues.  That means that the most effective means a professional union organizer can perceive of preserving the survival of his DNA is to get the workers to keep paying their dues.  The most effective means a worker can perceive of preserving the survival of his DNA is to work at his job and pay his dues in the hopes that his union will actually do something.

That might not seem like much of a discrepancy.  It could be argued that a professional union organizer has more time to devote to organizing and that he keeps his job and keeps getting paid from the workers’ dues by actually accomplishing what the workers want him to accomplish.
However, as a lot of workers have discovered, professional union organizers end up occupying a different tier of the social hierarchy from the workers they’re supposed to be representing.  Since they don’t work in the conditions of the workers, the workers’ problems are not personally meaningful to them.  So professional union organizers have more time to organize, but union organizers who work alongside the rest of the workers fight a lot harder for the workers’ cause.  So what do professional union organizers do with all that extra time they have to organize?  Well as it turns out, basically, nothing.  And people who make their livings on the sweat and blood of the workers and who don’t actually contribute anything useful to anyone else is exactly what the workers formed their union to protect themselves from in the first place!

That brings me to the problem of company-employed union liaisons.  The goal of the company-employed union liaison is to facilitate relations between the company and the union.  Well there’s just one problem with that.  If you facilitate your relations with another group of people, you’re no longer competing  against them.

So now you have professional union organizers for whom the struggles of the workers are not personally meaningful, working with a company-employed union representative to facilitate the relations between the company and the labor union.  At this point, you’ve completely defeated the whole purpose for having a labor union in the first place!

The professional union organizer’s goal is to preserve the survival of his DNA by the most effective means perceivable to him.  On one side he has a labor union.  On the other side he has a company-employed union liaison.  He gets paid from the workers’ union dues.  So what do you think will be the most effective means he can perceive of preserving the survival of his DNA?  He’s going to defend the workers just enough to make them feel like the union is doing something for them, so they will feel like continuing to pay their union dues.  Then he’s going to get together with the company liaison to facilitate the relations between the company and the workers’ union.  That means that the professional union organizer and the company-employed union liaison are going to get together and agree on a bunch of stuff.  Those agreements are always going to benefit the company, because that’s the only thing a company employee would ever agree to.  But people who come to agreements are not competing against each other.  So now the professional union organizer has done enough to make the workers feel like there’s a point to belonging to the union and paying their union dues to support the professional union organizer, and the professional union organizer has come to an agreement with the company-employed union liaison.  The end result of that is that the professional union organizer doesn’t have to struggle against anything, so he doesn’t have to organize any struggle, so he makes his own life as simple as possible, and keeps getting paid from the workers’ union dues.

This experiment has been conducted numerous times by numerous people.

Enter the Industrial Workers of the World.

The Industrial Workers of the World are Anarchists.  They don’t pay professional union organizers, and they don’t work with union liaisons.  They do what labor unions are supposed to do, which is to compete against their employers.

Their goal in the competition is very simple: Destroy Capitalism.  Hey, all you Capitalists out there, this competitive economic system was your idea.  So don’t sit around feeling sorry for yourselves now.  Innovate motherf*cker, innovate.

Of course, innovating is what the Capitalists have been doing all along.  And how have they been innovating?  The same way they always innovate, of course.  And is that by encouraging the competition that drives their economy?  No, it’s by finding ever more efficient and productive ways to win the competition by eliminating their competitors.  In this case, that means breaking up labor unions, preventing workers from forming labor unions, and commandeering the idea of the labor union, appearing to agree with it, stripping it of its content, and selling a hollow replica of it back to the workers to make them feel like they have a labor union on their side.  So if Capitalists are working so hard to destroy labor unions, how else did you expect a labor union to compete against that but to try to destroy Capitalism?

The IWW’s mission statement begins with one very unambiguous sentence:  Labor has nothing in common with Capital.

(Technically they’re mistaken, because Labor and Capital are both Homo sapiens, which is a lot for any two groups of people to have in common.  Their perceptions of the world are different because of their differences in abilities, skills, resources, personal history, and cultural background.  My dad alternated several times between working for someone else and going into business for himself, which meant he was alternating between being Labor and Capital, but he didn’t turn into a different person each time, and he certainly didn’t become a member of a different species.  But if you take the statement to mean “Labor and Capital tend to have different characteristics that have nothing to do with each other”, as opposed to a literal division of everyone into one group or another, then the statement is true.  And from a literary and artistic standpoint, it makes a very unambiguous opening line.)

Another of the IWW’s founding principles is: Labor is entitled to all it produces.  Think about it.  Why should people spend their lives creating things they aren’t allowed to use?
The argument against that is:  Not allowed to use in what sense?  There’s no law against people buying the things they produce.

There isn’t a formal law against people buying things they produce.  But if the people aren’t paid enough to buy the things they produce, what else do you call that beside not being allowed to use something?  Because their only alternative would be to steal it, and that is against the law.  This commodification of people’s time is precisely where Capitalism began.

I think people have heard enough about what labor unions are supposed to do that I don’t need to spell it out any further.  The Industrial Workers of the World have a website and a newspaper where you can find out more, if you’re interested.  Since an industrialized technological level isn’t environmentally sustainable, the IWW isn’t a solution to all the world’s problems, but it is at least a step in the right direction.  The chemical reaction of the global environment can’t possibly work in a way that can keep everyone alive as long as we don’t have a more equitable economic system, and a more equitable economic system is exactly what the IWW is struggling toward.  Although that equitable economic system can’t be an industrialized economic system, doing something is better than doing nothing.  People who have no control over their futures are slaves, and slavery is an oppressive and inequitable economic system by definition.  Since all human behavior is the product of the attempt by the individual to preserve the survival of their DNA by the most effective means perceivable to them, anyone who makes decisions that affect people who have no control over their futures can’t be trusted not to make their decisions for their own benefit, and at the other person’s expense.  So the IWW is struggling to give workers more control over their futures.  Basically, it’s the No Borders movement applied to all aspects of workers’ lives.

There are a couple other evolutionary factors the IWW has discovered and are putting to good use to make labor unions function the way they’re intended to function, which is what makes the IWW such a good example.

First of all, they’ve discovered the Hobbesian cycle of aggression.  Economic and political power are meaningless unless you use them against the enemy.  If you have them but don’t use them, the enemy will continue to act to advance his interests at the expense of yours, which negates your economic and political power.  So to prevent that from happening, you have to use your economic and political power to push your enemy back and advance your interests, just to make sure he remembers that you can.  You don’t necessarily have to harm his interests in the process of benefiting yours, but if his interests are mutually exclusive of yours, harming his interests is unavoidable.

They tell stories about these things on their website and in their newspaper all the time.  A lot of their actions are pretty straightforward—striking and picketing and things like that.  But they also use their worker solidarity in simpler ways, for more day-to-day purposes.

One story that sticks in my mind is of a Wiccan lady who worked at a Starbuck’s getting in trouble for wearing her Pentacle openly.  Her manager told her to take it off for all the usual reasons employers tell their employees to take off their Pentacles—mainly because they offend a lot of customers.  But then those same managers don’t say anything to employees who wear crosses openly, because if they did, they’d piss off about 70% of Americans or something like that.  So people’s rights to observe their religions are being governed according the effects they’re having on Capitalists’ profits.

The Wiccan lady wouldn’t back down and refused to take off her Pentacle.  So her manager sent her home a couple of times.  Then the Wiccan brought up the problem at her next IWW meeting, and she and her Fellow Workers came up with a plan.

The next time the Wiccan’s manager told her to take off her Pentacle, she refused again.  So the manager sent her home again.  But this time the Wiccan took off her Pentacle and handed it to one of her Fellow Workers, and he put it on.  So then the manager backed down, because she couldn’t afford to send him home too.  That was the last time she told the Wiccan to take off her Pentacle.

With that simple of an act of workers cooperating to protect themselves against their Capitalist employers, the Capitalists were forced to yield, and the workers won.  As we all know, Capitalism is a competitive economic system, and competition drives innovation.  Innovation is not the goal of Capitalist competition; the goal of Capitalist competition is to defeat the opposition.

Innovation is just the byproduct, so it does nothing to change the fact that Capitalism is inherently oppressive.  The easiest way to win at competitions is to compete against people you know you can beat.  And that’s exactly what this manager was doing.  But then the workers innovated and found a more effective and more productive way to compete against the Capitalists.  And the workers won.

The other big evolutionary factor IWW members are putting to use doesn’t seem like much at first glance, but it has monumental effects on people’s perceptions of their situation.  You know how people use titles like Doctor or Senator or Admiral to address people who have accomplished something important in life?  Within the IWW, everyone addresses each other as Fellow Worker.  In print, the title is always capitalized.  Because really, everyone who works for a living, or even tries to work for a living, is accomplishing something important in life.

This is just the Australian mate tradition applied specifically to an economic system.  It’s similar to the Communist tradition of addressing each other as Comrade, and the tradition a few American presidents have used of addressing voters as My Fellow Americans, but it’s different in two important ways.

Like the Australian mate tradition, the Fellow Worker title calls a social status truce.  That means any time one IWW member addresses another, with the first two words out of their mouth they’ve called a social status truce—which means that IWW members can’t talk to each other without calling a social status truce.  Where Australians use their social status truce tradition with anyone, IWW members use it for people who play a specific role in an economic system.  If you don’t play that role, they don’t offer you the truce, because they already know that your goals are mutually exclusive to theirs.

After the words Fellow Worker leave your mouth, you will hold yourself responsible for living up to your own ideals with your own actions.  If you address someone as Fellow Worker and then don’t treat him like an equal, it’s going to be obvious that you were lying when you addressed him as Fellow Worker.  So if he doesn’t cooperate with you, you have no one to blame for it but yourself.

At the same time, if you address him as Fellow Worker and he doesn’t treat you like an equal, that will make it obvious that he’s not interested in a social status truce, so he’s absolved you of cooperating with him.  You began the conversation by attempting to call a social status truce with him, and he chose not to accept it, which means that he chose to free you from any obligation you might’ve felt to act in his interests.

The Fellow Worker title is different from the Comrade or Fellow American titles because it doesn’t imply that the other person should feel any emotional attachment to you as a result of belonging to the same group as you.  Consequently, you won’t evoke that feeling from the other person.  It is true that an IWW member might try to use the words that way, but if they do it will be less effective, because the words themselves don’t imply that meaning.

Calling someone your Comrade implies that he already belongs to some group with you, and therefore he should cooperate with you for that reason alone.  Calling someone Fellow American is a direct reference to the group the two of you belong to, and just as with the Comrade title it carries with it the implication that you should cooperate with each other just because you’re members of the same group.

The Fellow Workers title is a title of respect that refers to the fact that the other person is trying to make a living just like you are.  It also refers to the fact that as two workers, the two of you have a lot of interests in common.  But it does all of this in a way that leaves the two of you as independent entities, who can each choose to cooperate with the other or not to cooperate with each other as you see fit.  It is fairly likely that you will choose to cooperate with each other, but if you do make that choice, you will make it as a result of the situation that affects you.  And as a result, that cooperation doesn’t need to be enforced upon either of you artificially.

The other big difference between the Fellow Workers and the Fellow Americans and Comrade titles is that the Fellow Americans and Comrade titles were used by people who practiced coercive governments.  If your president addresses you as “My Fellow Americans” or “Comrades”, he is trying to get you to attach emotional meaning to your membership in a group that he has the power to force you to cooperate with.   That renders both of those terms basically meaningless, because everyone who hears them knows they’re lies.  If the other person attempts to invoke your loyalty to a group when he addresses you, but you know, and he knows, and you know that he knows, that you have no choice but to belong to that group, and that he has the ability to punish you if you don’t cooperate with the group, then you know that he isn’t really addressing you that way because he needs to.  The only reason he’s addressing you that way is to save himself the trouble of punishing you.  So why should you think of him as anything other than a politician who’s trying to maintain a good public image and who doesn’t really give a f*ck about you?

Since the Industrial Workers of the World are Anarchists, nobody wields any power over anyone else.  Or even if they do, as a result of a majority of workers electing certain people to be the representatives of their local chapter or whatever, it is still the goal of Anarchism that no one should wield any power over anyone else.  So first of all, whatever power anyone wields over anyone else is minimized.  Then, if you do wield power over someone else and choose to wield it for your benefit at their expense, you prove yourself not to be an Anarchist, and therefore not qualified for your position.  Whatever amount of power you wield over anyone else is going to be less than the amount of power all the other group member working together will wield over you.  And if you prove yourself not to be an Anarchist, you can be sure that the other group members will wield that power against you.  So regardless of any superficial inequalities in decision-making power that exist within the group, the simple fact that all the members of the group have agreed to define the success of the group by the mutual benefit of all the members in the group, renders those discrepancies in decision-making power meaningless.

By contrast, here in America, we have a competitive economy and inevitably that competition has spilled over into what was originally intended to be a cooperative political system in which civilized men would resolve their disagreements without resorting to bloodshed.  Now our political system has become a competitive political system where two sides battle each other every other year for who gets to make the economy work the way they want it to work.  And that necessarily means which of two scientifically invalid economic ideologies our politicians are going to put into practice.  If you participate willingly in the American political system as it stands now, you are no longer agreeing to participate in a cooperative political system.  Now you’re agreeing to take your chances on winning the elections, along with everyone else.  If you win, you win the right to force the losing side to cooperate with you at gunpoint.  And you agree that if you lose, the other side has the right to force you to cooperate with them at gunpoint.

IWW members don’t recognize national boundaries as legitimate obstacles to control the movement of workers looking for work.  I’ve talked about this already.  Now when you add in the Fellow Worker title, it takes that idea to a whole new level.  If an American IWW member talks about Mexican IWW members, he refers to them as Fellow Workers.  If those Mexican IWW members then cross the U.S. border looking for work, he still refers to them as Fellow Workers, as opposed to illegal immigrants.  Even if they take his job, the American IWW member still refers to them as Fellow Workers.  That is, he actively recognizes them as workers trying to earn a living, just like he’s doing.  The fact that they crossed the border illegally doesn’t make them illegal immigrants—meaning “bad people”—it just makes them workers who crossed the border illegally to look for work.  Another person’s belief of who should be allowed to work where has no effect on the respect the IWW member holds for other workers.  So in this way, the Fellow Worker title directly counteracts the illegal immigrant label.

The goal of the IWW, and Anarcho-Socialists in general, is for labor unions to take over the companies, so that the workers can control their working conditions directly, without having to go through their Capitalist employers.  Hey, we all live in a Capitalist economy, where competition is rewarded.  So what else do you call the IWW trying to take over all the companies in the world but competition?  If you suddenly don’t like the idea of competition so much anymore, all I can say to that is, innovate motherf*cker, innovate.

Dr. McNally has quite a bit to say about the importance of labor unions to the anti-Capitalist revolution, all of which either applies to the IWW, or could be added to what they’re already doing easily.  Of course, any other group of people could do these things too.

First of all, an additional problem that traditional American labor unions suffer from is that of being too conservative.  In general, White men are well represented in traditional unions while women and minorities aren’t.  Traditional unions try to use general business professionalism etiquette.  In various other ways, labor union members try to mimic the culture of their employers in the hopes that their employers will relate well to them, sympathize with them, and be more willing to give them what they want.  In other words, traditional labor unions have the completely counterproductive goal of trying to get ahead in the economic system of the people who are oppressing them.  Here we can see another danger of basing your perception of the world on ancient religious beliefs.  If you believe that people—of your own cultural background at least—are inherently good and are only tempted to commit evil, instead of believing people to be inherently self-interested, you’ll completely underestimate just how evil people of your own cultural background can be.

It is virtually inescapable that defeating Capitalism will depend on a lot of widespread, coordinated labor strikes in America and the rest of the industrialized world.  After all, Capitalism is powered by people working at their jobs.  As long as people keep working at their jobs, Capitalism survives, because the Capitalists keep making their profits.

One good place some people in Los Angeles found to recruit for labor unions was on city buses.  City buses in L.A. are constantly being ridden by factory workers, housekeepers, landscapers, construction workers, and all kinds of other people with low-paying jobs who the economy depends upon.  The Bus Riders’ Union is a broad-based labor union, which isn’t specific to any industry, and which brings together a lot of people who have the same basic interests.  The organizers of the BRU started with the most obvious:  the condition of the buses.  At the time the BRU was founded, the L.A. public transportation commission was spending a hugely disproportional amount of its budget on the light rail system that ran through a few upper class neighborhoods—it was public transportation racism.  So they got a lot of bus riders to help make a lot of noise about that, and the problem was solved.  Another common interest of the Bus Riders Union was coming out in support of the bus drivers’ union when they went on strike for higher wages.  From there, the founders of the BRU showed a lot of workers just how much they could do if they worked together, and got a lot of workers used to the idea of being able to make things happen.

Another way people in numerous cities have found to build broad-based worker’s political movements is to set up labor union centers in lower class neighborhoods, where people with some experience in organization can set up a basic structure of support for workers.  Setting up labor unions in working-class neighborhoods, as opposed to at places of employment, gives workers the opportunity to come join a union without their employers knowing about it.  But the real strength of this strategy is that by giving workers a place to come learn how labor unions work and what they can accomplish, these workers have the opportunity to meet up with each other.  From that and from learning the basic background of how labor unions work and what they can accomplish, they can build upon that to figure out how to work together to solve problems they face on their own.  And because these unions aren’t being founded by occupation but by neighborhood (where a lot of people in the same occupations live anyway), the workers aren’t limited to working together to solve problems they face at their jobs, but can work together to solve problems they face in any aspect of their lives.  So it’s not so much a labor union as it is a labor movement.

As you may have noticed, these basic approaches to setting up broad-based workers’ movements doesn’t result in labor unions dominated by White men, but in labor movements everyone gets to be a part of.  Then you really do pit Labor against Capital.  Otherwise, all you end up with is Labor trying to imitate Capital.

Filed under: y: 42 Vol. III by Ezra
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I’m sure just about everyone in America has seen the video of Rodney King getting beaten by the police.  Oh, wait, that was like, 15 years ago or something.  Never mind…

I’m sure a few people in America have seen the video of Rodney King getting beaten by the police.  So guess what arose out of that but a movement of citizens who patrol the streets with video cameras, keeping their eyes out for anyone being confronted by the police.

Cop Watch is basically a citizens’ vigilante group that polices the police.  They make their own uniforms and go out patrolling the streets with video cameras to make sure the police don’t forget that they’re being watched.  (In the same basic way that the IWW strikes every once in a while just to make sure their employers don’t forget they’re dealing with a labor union.)  Some Cop Watch volunteers also carry video cameras around with them whenever they go out, in case they see any cops confronting anyone.  They also hand out information about what to do when you’re confronted by police, they maintain websites with information and links, and they hold teach-ins, show documentary movies, hold public protests, and all the usual things activists do.

In the first book I talked about how police brutality is an inevitable result of cops being stuck on the front lines of an inequitable economic system.  On one side is group of people who value profits over all else, and then leave it up to the cops to clean up the messes they make and otherwise defend their inequitable economy.  On the other side are people who are trying to make it in an economic system run by materially wealthy people who don’t give a f*ck about them, and who resort to breaking the law to try to get ahead.  When the cops get desperate to try to enforce laws nobody wants to follow, they resort to the reputation part of the Hobbesian cycle of aggression and try to beat people into submission to make them not dare to break the law.

In the second book I showed you how our inequitable economy colliding with the physical limitations of the world is going to make more and more police brutality inevitable.  In a world with an increasing population and diminishing resources, in order for the materially rich to stay rich, the materially poor are going to have to become increasingly poor.  But that means the police are going to have to fight harder and harder to get everyone to obey the law.  And in the end it won’t do anyone any good; it’s just another symptom of our suicidal economy.

It could be argued that the Capitalists might one day hire so many police that they won’t have any trouble enforcing the law, without resorting to police brutality.  That isn’t likely, because sometime before that they’re going to reach a point where the number of police they’ve hired has reduced police brutality to a level that the public finds acceptable.  At that point the laws will be enforced adequately in practice, even though the result won’t be brought about perfectly legally.  The Capitalists will do this because that will be the balancing point among number of police hired, public acceptance, and practical enforcement of the law that will yield the most profits.  Police brutality will then be a component of the Capitalists’ law enforcement system, in the same way that 4,000 Mexicans dying in the desert trying to sneak around the walls is a part of the Capitalists’ anti-immigration policy.

But for the sake of argument, let’s just say that happens anyway, that the Capitalists hire enough police to make police brutality completely unnecessary.  Whether it’s legalized or not, the fact remains that an increasingly inequitable economy can only be maintained by an increasing amount of coercive force.  On our present course, in 20 years from now, whatever amount of coercive force the police will be using will be greater than what it is now.  That might not legally qualify as police brutality then, but compared to what we have now it will be police brutality, regardless of what it’s called.

Now in this book I’ll raise the stakes in the police brutality controversy even further.  As I’ve shown you already in this chapter, right now some people who are struggling against our political and economic systems are being labeled terrorists, some are being labeled traitors, and some are being labeled illegal immigrants.  Those negative terms are being used intentionally to make the public think those are all bad people and to get the public not to care what happens to them.

Now what effect do you suppose those labels have on police?

And what effect do you suppose those labels have on the public’s perception of how the police treat those people?

If the police hear people referring to other people as terrorists or illegal immigrants, how do you think that’s going to affect the way they’re going to treat those people if they confront them?  And how much do you think the public is going to care how the police treat those people?  If the police catch terrorists or illegal immigrants, why shouldn’t they beat them up?  They are bad people after all.  If they weren’t, they wouldn’t be called terrorists or illegal immigrants, would they?  And if the police realize that the public doesn’t care about people who are called terrorists or illegal immigrants getting beaten up, they won’t have to worry about the public complaining very much, will they?

Now what do you suppose would happen if those labels were attached to people by politically powerful and materially wealthy people the police looked up to?

And what do you suppose would happen if those labels were attached to people by the police’s own leaders?

If the police, through their own life experience, through the labeling of people by political and social leaders, or through the labeling of people by their own leaders, perceive certain people to be bad, they necessarily perceive those people to be less human than themselves.  If the people were equal to the police, they would be smart enough to obey the law, wouldn’t they?  If the police also perceive that the public perceives that a certain group of people are bad, then the police perceive that the public also perceives the people to be less human than themselves.  So as far as the police and the public are concerned, the social consequence for beating up one of these inferior people is less than the social consequence of one of their own getting beaten up.

You already know how Capitalists are using negative terms to refer to people who oppose them.  I’ve shown you how police brutality could be used in the future by Capitalists the same way the vast stretches of desert between the walls on the Mexican border are being used, to unofficially help enforce laws in practice, without their having to go to the trouble of enforcing the laws in the conventional way.

So what makes you think they aren’t doing this already?

But don’t take my word for it.  Go to any Cop Watch website and find out for yourself.
The simplest defense against police brutality is obvious:  Don’t break the law.  Don’t speed, don’t drink and drive, don’t shoplift, don’t sell hard drugs, none of that.  If you don’t give the police an excuse to beat you up, you’re off to a good start.

The next best defense against police brutality is for police not to intimidate people unnecessarily.  If, for instance, they’re dealing with a person who comes from a bad part of town where everyone who pushes people around like a thug is a thug, and the police start pushing that person around like thugs, should it be any surprise if the person suddenly feels like he has to fight for his life?  The Cripps and the Bloods wear gang colors, carry guns, push people around, and don’t give a f*ck about your Constitutional rights, your Miranda rights, or your human rights.  If another bunch of people who wear colors and carry guns push people around and don’t seem to give a f*ck about peoples’ Constitutional, Miranda, or human rights, as far as the people on the receiving end of the incident are concerned, that isn’t a police action at all, it’s a showdown with a rival gang.

One night I was out walking around when I saw a Black kid handcuffed and sitting on a curb surrounded by four police.  He’d been pulled over while stopped at a traffic light by a couple police on bicycles.  I didn’t see that part of it, but from everything I heard them talking about, after they flashed their lights, he tried to pull away.  He said that he was trying to get out of the street and pull over to the side of the road like people are supposed to do when they get pulled over by the police.

The police said that people in cars who get pulled over by bicycle police drive off all the time, and there’s no way police on bicycles can catch a car that tries to get away from them.  After they flashed their lights, one of the officers walked up on each side of the car and demanded the idents from the driver and the passenger.  The driver didn’t hand his over (because, as he said, he wanted to pull off to the side of the road first), so the officer demanded it again, threatened to drag him out of the car, and then did drag him out of the car, in very rapid succession, from what I heard.

I think they were both full of sh*t.  First of all, when the officer demanded the kid’s ident, the kid tried to roll up his window.  If that wasn’t a dead giveaway of somebody not intending to cooperate with the police, I don’t know what is.  But on the other hand, the police said they stopped him for playing his stereo too loud in the middle of a commercial district on a Saturday night.  Would they have been so quick to pull over a couple of well-groomed White kids in a more expensive car for something so trivial?   If the kids looked like their parents had good lawyers, would the police have bothered?  Or were they just making a routine stop to try to catch DUIs?  The kid looked drunk and he did get stopped, so were the police just doing their jobs fair and square?  That would explain why the kid wanted to get away from them.

On the other hand, if the officer wasn’t just a well-dressed thug throwing his weight around, why would the kid driving off have been a problem?  After he flashed his lights, he would’ve radioed the license plate number into the dispatcher, and by the time he got to the driver’s door, the dispatcher would’ve known where the owner of the car lived.  If the kid drove off, the dispatcher could’ve just radioed all the police cars in the area, and a car could’ve caught him.

One other thing was obvious.  The kid did not trust the police in the least.  Even if their reasons for pulling him over were completely justified, and even if their reasons for confronting him in the way they did was completely justified, it meant absolutely nothing to the kid.  That kid understood only one thing:  that his survival was being threatened.  He put up a lot of reasonable-sounding arguments in very impassioned tones of voice.  Was he trying to reason with the officers because he had no alternative left, and was growing more frustrated because it was getting him nowhere?  Or was it all an act and he wanted to accuse them of brutality just so he could get off his drunk driving charge?  I have no idea, but it doesn’t really matter.  Whatever his reasons for saying the things he said, he was obviously saying them because no matter how slim his chances were of talking his way out of an arrest, he believed that whatever chances he might have after he got arrested would be even worse.

The kid started arguing more and more desperately, and finally got to his feet and started insulting the police and spitting at them.  His hands were cuffed behind his back, but he was putting up a fight the best way he could, because by that point that was the only hope he saw.  It didn’t work of course; three officers wrestled him down and held him face down on the ground.  If he was in trouble before, now he’d added resisting arrest to his charges.

Was it a perfectly legitimate traffic stop in all regards?  Was it police brutality?  Does it matter?  The one constant that existed in any possibility was: the kid felt his survival being threatened in a very profound way, and he had no idea what to do about it.  If it didn’t start out as police brutality, it looked an awful lot like police brutality by the end, because the kid tried every way he knew to protect himself, and he got beaten to the ground for it.  Even if he was a DUI, why would he think that trying to fight off four police officers all by himself with his hands cuffed behind his back was his most promising course of action?

So here’s my ultimate defense against police brutality.  If you’re getting physically assaulted by the police, or feel like you’re in immanent danger of getting assaulted by the police, don’t fight back physically.  Do whatever you can to try to keep from getting hurt, but here’s what you do to fight back instead.

Start chanting, “My name is…” and your name, loud enough so witnesses can hear you.  So if the police seem like they’re about to beat you up, and your name was, for instance, Robert Paulson, you just start chanting, “My name is Robert Paulson!  My name is Robert Paulson!  My name is Robert Paulson!”

That will do four things.  First of all, it will be an alarm to anyone nearby that someone is getting beaten up by the police.  Second, you’ll make sure the people who hear you remember your name.  Third, you’ll be warning the police to back down, unless they’ve got a reason for beating you up that will hold up in court.  And fourth, it will help make the police recognize you as a human being, and (hopefully) will get them to stop beating you up.

If you’re witnessing a police brutality and you can’t think of anything else to do, you can help spread the alarm by joining in the chant.  “His name is Robert Paulson!  His name is Robert Paulson! His name is Robert Paulson!”  But if there are a lot of people around already, you might be better off to keep your mouth shut so everyone can hear what’s going on.  And if you’re chanting and people start showing up, keep your eyes out for anyone with a video camera, so you don’t drown out what the police and suspect are saying.  After all, the video camera is a much better defense than the chant.

If you’re the police and a suspect starts chanting his name, you’d better let him do it, because he is trying to defuse the situation.  He feels threatened by you, and he’s trying to defend himself in a way that’s personally meaningful to him.  It doesn’t matter what rights he has, or even what rights you tell him about.  If those rights aren’t personally meaningful to him, he isn’t going to perceive them to be of any use to him.  If he starts chanting it means he feels threatened, so now he’s fighting back to try to keep himself safe from you without trying to fight you physically.

It’s inevitable that people are going to abuse this idea and start chanting their name to draw a crowd whenever they’re confronted by police, even if they weren’t in any immediate danger of police brutality.  That’s what always happens whenever anyone comes up with a good new idea.  But there are a few factors in the surrounding situation that I think will keep abuse of this idea under control.

First, any witnesses will be able to hear how loud the person is yelling and how much emotional communication he’s using in his voice—meaning how desperate he sounds.  If witnesses come running and don’t find the police trying to beat him up, a lot of them are going to drift away.  Now you’re the little boy who cried wolf.  And if the police start beating you up after all the witnesses have left, that’s your own fault.  So don’t use this defense unless it’s a real emergency.

Second, if people over-use this collectively, everyone’s chant is going to draw fewer witnesses.  That won’t prevent anyone from doing it all by itself, but anyone who’s spreading the idea to other people to try to counter-act police brutality will be sure to tell them.

Third, if the police aren’t threatening the suspect, how likely is it that the suspect is going to start chanting anyway?    That would just make the situation more complicated and drag out the time the suspect had to deal with the police.  Some people will start chanting for no real reason anyway, but a lot of people won’t.  Especially if they realize that when the witnesses show up they’re going to see there’s nothing going on and wander off anyway.

Finally, if people start chanting as soon as the police approach them, you can be sure the police are going to pass some new law against it, or call it obstruction of justice or failure to cooperate with an officer or something.  Then they’re just going to add on more charges.  If you’re about to get beaten up, then anything you try to do could be considered obstruction of justice, so you’ve got nothing to lose at that point.  But if you’re just doing it for the sake of obstructing justice, don’t be surprised if you get charged for it.

It is true that some people will use this in conditions that other people wouldn’t.  It’s also true that some people will use this in conditions where the police don’t think it’s necessary.  But if the person starts chanting, they’re doing it because they feel threatened and they’re trying to keep themselves safe.  Nobody else’s opinion is relevant.  So if the police in some neighborhoods find that every time they approach anyone the people start chanting, maybe that ought to tell you something about how much the people in the neighborhood trust the police.

And that would just be a symptom of a much larger problem.  So that would be a sign that there’s a problem that needs to be solved in that neighborhood.

But don’t worry.  If government officials weren’t willing to solve the problem, I know of a lot of Anarchists would be glad to help solve it.

Filed under: y: 42 Vol. III by Ezra
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The anti-nuclear movement opposes nuclear weapons and nuclear reactors.  I’m sure we’ve all heard about that.

As you’ll recall from the Thermodynamics chapter, nuclear power is the least efficient and most environmentally destructive form of energy ever harnessed, simply because turning nuclear energy into a form that’s useful to us involves more steps—meaning more chemical reactions, or a longer food chain—than any other form of energy.  And in the end you have to find some way to dispose of it that will keep it safely contained for something on the order of a quarter of a million years.  Nuclear power just seems powerful because you can concentrate more nuclear power into a smaller space than you can any other form of power—which is what makes atomic bombs so powerful.  But that’s a complete sensory illusion, because when you look at a nuclear power plant you have no way of seeing how much energy had to be burned to build the plant, and how much energy it takes to operate it now.  In terms of calories of energy produced versus calories of energy expended in the production, chopping firewood will always be the most efficient way to harness energy.

Nuclear weapons are the key ingredient that make nuclear war possible, and that doesn’t do anyone any good.  As Albert Einstein once said, “If the only tool you have to work with is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail.”  He was referring to the way available resources affect your perception of the world, by the way.

I’m sure everyone has heard about these two parts to the anti-nuke movement already.  Now here’s something you probably didn’t know:

First of all, here we are, poised to invade Iran to stop them from building nuclear weapons.  The funny thing about that is, we’re already waging a nuclear war in Iraq.  Yeah, you heard me.
Beginning with the U.S. military involvement in the breakup of Yugoslavia, the U.S. military has been using depleted uranium ammunition.  Depleted uranium makes for heavier projectiles, which makes them penetrate armored vehicles and fortifications more easily.  It’s a great idea at first glance.

Unfortunately, depleted uranium is still radioactive.  A lot of U.S. military personnel who’ve been exposed to a lot of depleted uranium ammunition can’t have children when they come home after the war, or else they have horribly deformed children.

Now here’s the even bigger problem:  Everyone else who is exposed to depleted uranium ammunition is affected in the same way.  And whenever the U.S. military uses depleted uranium ammunition in a country, after the war there’s still a whole bunch of depleted uranium lying all over the place!  So anywhere the U.S. military has fought a large battle using depleted uranium ammo, the whole section of land can be rendered uninhabitable for a quarter of a million years or something like that.  That means no one can live on that land or grow food on it.  Leaving the land to regrow wild doesn’t solve the problem because anything else that lives on the land will be exposed to the radiation also, so you can just imagine what that’s going to mean for the environment there.  And anyone, at any time now or in the future, who unwittingly moves onto the land, or eats food grown out of it, or eats wild animals that lived on it, is going to get radiation poisoning, which is going to destroy their DNA and prevent them from reproducing.

One way to look at it is that everywhere the U.S. military fights a battle with depleted uranium ammunition, that piece of land is being permanently removed from the country’s total land area—the geographical size of the country is being reduced without their borders officially being changed, in other words.  Another way to look at it is that the U.S. military is killing not only the people who fought in the battle itself, but also anyone who comes to the battlefield in the future.
That means depleted uranium weapons kill indiscriminately.  And that makes them weapons of mass destruction.

That means that before we invaded Iraq there weren’t any weapons of mass destruction in the country, but now there are—because we put them there.

Here’s what the Iraq Veterans Against the War have to say about depleted uranium.  Who better to ask than the people who have lived through it, right?  You can find out more about it on their website—and lots of other people’s websites too.

What Is Depleted Uranium?

Depleted Uranium (DU) is a toxic, radioactive, heavy metal that is the waste byproduct of the uranium enrichment process when producing nuclear weapons and uranium for nuclear reactors. Because this radioactive waste is plentiful and 1.7 times more dense than lead, the United States government uses DU in munitions/ammunition which are extremely effective at piercing armored vehicles. However, every round of DU ammunition leaves a residue of DU dust on everything it hits, contaminating the surrounding area with toxic waste that has a half-life of 4.5 billion years, the age of our solar system, and turns every battlefield and firing range into a toxic waste site that poisons everyone in such areas. DU dust can be inhaled, ingested or absorbed through scratches in the skin. DU is linked to DNA damage, cancer, birth defects and multiple health problems. The United Nations classifies depleted-uranium ammunition as illegal weapons of mass destruction because of their long-term impacts on the land over which they used and the long-term health problems they cause when people are exposed to them.

How Do I Know If Have Been Exposed to DU?

DU is used throughout Afghanistan and Iraq, mostly in aircraft, tank and Bradley Fighting Vehicle ammunition. You can be exposed to DU by coming into contact with any area that has been fired upon by DU munitions, any equipment that has been exposed to DU dust or anywhere DU dust has settled.

What Are The Symptoms of DU Exposure?

Depleted uranium has two different effects on the body, chemical poisoning and radiation poisoning. Symptoms are similar to those described as Gulf War Syndrome. DU may also cause respiratory problems and is known to elevate the risk of lung cancer and leukemia.

* Chronic Fatigue
* Neurological signs or symptoms
* Signs or symptoms involving upper or lower respiratory system
* Menstrual disorders
* Kidney problems

How Do I get Tested For DU Contamination?

As of now only a few states in the USA care enough to provide soldiers with DU testing. Connecticut and Louisiana have passed such legislation. However, you should keep a detailed set of records on when and where you may have been exposed, report symptoms and information to a physician and get them on record. If they persist, do not be discouraged by military doctors who seem to brush them off.  If you are still on active duty, you should immediately register with DOD by calling 1-800-796-9699. Those who have left active military service should call the Veterans Administration at 1-800-PGW-VETS.

As for the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.  A lot of people are still debating whether it was right or not.  On the one side, the Japanese did start a war against the United States, and if they lost the war they started, whose fault was that?

On the other side, the Japanese had been trying to surrender for 3 for months, but the United States government didn’t accept it until after they’d dropped the atom bombs.   The Japanese had been offering to surrender on the one condition that they would be allowed to keep their emperor.  The Americans refused.  After Hiroshima and Nagasaki were bombed, the Japanese offered to surrender unconditionally.  The Americans accepted it, and let the Japanese keep their emperor.  I must say, that looks suspiciously like the Americans prolonged the war for the extra three months not because they had a problem with the Japanese keeping their emperor after all, but because they wanted guinea pigs for their experiment in dropping atom bombs on cities.
And of course, as we all know, killing civilians to drive a country’s political decision-making through fear is called terrorism.

But regardless of the motivation or intentions of the American politicians, to be fair, let’s consider what happened as a result of Hiroshima and Nagasaki being bombed.

First of all, quite simply, the physicists who built the atom bomb fell into the trap that I am very consciously avoiding and that the rest of the evolutionary psychology movement has fallen into.  That is, those physicists understood how horrific of a weapon they built, but the politicians who made the decision on whether or not to use didn’t.  So some of the greatest scientific minds in the world stretched their abilities to their limits for years in the biggest scientific endeavor that had ever been undertaken in history, and then left their discoveries in the hands of a bunch of stupid monkeys.  Disaster was inevitable.

(That’s why I produce all of my work in terms everyone can understand—or I try to anyway.  If official scientists don’t want to recognize me for my work, oh well, f*ck ‘em.  If that’s the price of preventing my work from being turned into the next atom bomb, I’ll be glad to pay it.)
With the exception of the physicists who built the atom bomb, nobody on Earth had any way of understanding what the atom bomb was or what it could mean for their futures.  People had been building ever more powerful weapons since the dawn of warfare.   So why should anyone suspect this would be any different?   The development of the atom bomb was just like the development of agriculture in a lot of ways—a new development that seemed to people to work better than what they’d been doing before, but no one had any way of knowing how it would turn out.

So American political leaders had no way of comprehending how powerful, and how dangerous, atom bombs were.  Neither did American citizens.  Neither did Soviet political leaders.  Neither did Soviet citizens.

The Americans and the Soviets were using two political systems that were completely incompatible, which meant their goals were mutually exclusive.  That meant that each posed a permanent threat to the other.

Now the Americans had built a huge new type of bomb.  The American political system was a threat to the Soviet political system.  The Soviets knew that their political system was a threat to the American political system, and they knew that the Americans knew that too.  So to keep themselves safe from the Americans, the Soviets had to start building these new super-powerful bombs too.

So my question is:  If two superpowers whose political systems made them mortal enemies had gone into their political conflict both armed with lots of atom bombs and no politicians or citizens on either side had any way of knowing what an atom bomb would do to a city, what do you think would’ve happened?

I think it’s safe to say that the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki didn’t end World War II so much as they prevented World War III.  (Or at least, they prevented the Americans and the Soviets from fighting it with nuclear weapons.)

So despite the fact that the people of Hiroshima and Nagasaki didn’t make their sacrifices willingly, we owe it to them, more than to anyone else, that World War III wasn’t fought between the Americans and Soviets with nuclear weapons.

Filed under: y: 42 Vol. III by Ezra
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Poverty and homelessness are serious problems in America.  In the last book I showed you how Capitalism depends on unemployment.  You might say that unemployment is an inescapable product of a competitive economic system.  But inescapable how, exactly?  Is it because the unemployed are the ones who are losing at the competition?  Or is it because Capital is competing not for the sake of driving innovation but for the sake of eliminating competition, as usual, by forcing Labor to compete against each other so they can’t compete against Capital?  Does our competitive economic system really depend on filthy people pushing shopping carts around town, digging through garbage dumpsters looking for aluminum cans to drive innovation?

But then, finding ever more efficient ways to oppress people is a form of innovation.  See what happens when we build an economic system that depends on some abstract side effect that’s produced by individual people’s collective pursuit of tangible goals?  Should it come as any surprise that the individual people should succeed at what they set out to do?   And should it come as any surprise that the abstract side effect you were hoping for ends up getting overshadowed by the results of the people succeeding at their actual goals?  What the f*ck did you expect?

That brings me to the serious problem of poverty and homelessness in America.  To say that we have a government of, by, and for the people, where some people are left to wander the streets looking for something to eat and somewhere to sleep implies that anyone ever asked those people if they wanted to participate in a competitive economic system.  If you asked any of them, I’m willing to bet they would say no.  I’m willing to bet they would say they’d rather have an economic system where they could have a job.

It is true that a competitive economic system drives innovation.  Homeless people innovate just like everyone else.  They innovate more efficient and productive ways to pick cans out of garbage dumpsters, they innovate more efficient and productive ways to transport their cans and the rest   of their belongings, they innovate more efficient and productive ways to pan handle, and they innovate more efficient and productive ways to build shelters or find park benches to sleep on.  If you ever take a few moments to watch what a homeless person is doing as a person, to try to survive, be safe, feel safe, make friends, be respected, feel good, and use their abilities to make lives for themselves, considering they have virtually no resources to work with, it’s not hard to see that they work for their livings just like everyone else.  I had to leave out having relationships, having sex, having families, and using their abilities as much as possible to make lives for themselves, because when you have barely enough to survive, reproduction and higher levels of survival just fall off your list of priorities.

As for unemployed people who aren’t homeless, they innovate too.  A lot of them innovate ever more efficient and productive ways to cheat the welfare system.  I know I’ve spent a lot of time innovating ever more efficient and productive ways to collect unemployment.  If there aren’t any jobs to apply for that you’d be good at, the unemployment systems in every state I’ve ever had to collect unemployment in basically force you to stay unemployed.  If you take a sh*tty job to try to support yourself while you wait for a better job to come along, you can very well get trapped there.  First you probably aren’t going to have any time to go apply for other jobs, because at all the jobs I work at anyway, the work hours are the same as the hours other employers take job applications, because all the companies have the same hours.  And second, you can only collect unemployment if you get laid off.  If you’re collecting unemployment and you take a sh*tty job to try to support yourself, and then you get fired or you quit after a week, you’re unemployed again and now you can’t collect unemployment.

Food sovereignty is a movement that addresses this basic problem on a large scale.  Everything I just said about homeless people in America also applied to Native Americans being forced into the reservation system, and applies to entire countries around the world now.  Any person, or group of people, who can’t provide enough food for themselves is the slave of whoever they depend on for their food.  For Native American nations that means our federal government.  For countries it means other countries or whoever else is bringing the food into their countries.  For homeless Americans it means the welfare system, the unemployment system, or whoever else they as individuals can get their money from.

Food sovereignty is a challenge and an obstacle to a competitive economic system.  People who are food sovereign are independent.  People who aren’t food sovereign can be controlled.  Food sovereign and independent is exactly what the Mexican subsistence farmers were before they got driven off their land as I’ve told you about in this chapter, and it’s what the farmers in La Parota river valley are, and will cease to be, if their river is dammed, as I told you about in the last book.  Food sovereign people have the choice whether or not to participate in your competitive economic system.  And if they can already produce everything they need for themselves, don’t expect them to be very interested in competing in your economic system if you already control all the capital.  You can call them peasants, you can call them savages, you can call them old fashioned, uncultured, uncivilized, whatever.  But the fact remains that they’re Homo sapiens who can provide for themselves now, so why should they give that up just so they can live up to your idea of the right way for people to live?

So bringing this back to the streets of America now, during the Great Depression the government funded the Hoover Dam, created the California Conservation Corp and the National Park Service and a lot of other things like that, and created a lot of work for people to get people off unemployment.  Well we still have unemployed people, so obviously that job isn’t finished yet.  I’ve heard a lot of different stories of people making the transition from being unemployed to being employed, but they all end pretty much the same way:  That having somewhere to sleep, decent food, and a job to do gave them not just their basic physiological necessities, but also a sense of self-worth.

Now, I had to live at a homeless shelter briefly, so I know there is a minimum standard of living that people can expect here in America; that if they sink that low they can expect that someone will help them out.  And having lived through it, I also know that if you forced a dog to live that way, it would probably qualify as animal cruelty.

The problem we always had at the homeless shelter was getting all the things we needed together in one place at the same time.  We could sleep there, get two meals a day, or three if we had a job to go to, take showers, get our laundry done, get new clothes if we needed them, look through newspapers, and use the phone to call for job openings.  But you could never sleep well, the food was never enough, there were only four showers, and there was only one phone.  So the amount of sleep you could get there was never enough, the amount of food you could get there was never enough, you had to stand in line for f*cking ever to use the phone or take a shower, and they served the last meal of the day at about 3 in the afternoon.  So we constantly had to make choices about whether to spend our time walking to another homeless services place to get more food there, or going somewhere else where we could sleep some more, or standing in line to take a shower, or standing in line to use the phone, or going somewhere to look for a job.  On the surface it appeared that the people who ran the homeless shelter were making all the things we needed available to us, but in practice they weren’t, because there was not enough time in the day for us to get to them all.  The economy we had there at the homeless shelter didn’t work for sh*t because it was managed by people who had homes.

It wouldn’t be that difficult for a government organization to set up the same basic thing except in a way that could actually help get people off the streets.  All you’d need would be a barracks with bunks where people could sleep, shower, brush their teeth, get three decent meals a day, do their laundry, get bus passes, and use phones, that also had a day labor service attached to it, so employers could come there looking for temporary help, and people could get temporary government-sponsored employment helping to pick up litter at city parks or whatever other simple jobs needed to be done.  The living conditions there wouldn’t be great, in fact they shouldn’t be great, because you do still need an incentive for people to get jobs to support themselves and get themselves out of there—otherwise lots of people would abuse the system.  On the other hand, if your homeless support system only provides for people’s basic needs if they devote all their time to trying to navigate their way through it, they won’t have time to get jobs.

The most important part of making this program work would be treating the people who were in it like men and women who were just down on their luck, not like criminals or prison inmates.  If you don’t respect the people you’re trying to help, they aren’t going to trust you.  That’s going to create conflict.  And that’s going to divert their energy away from trying to help themselves and toward trying to keep themselves safe from you.

It is true that if we provided a stronger social safety net to help keep everyone employed, it would directly undermine the economic competition that Capitalism depends on.  The less severe the consequences for losing at the economic competition, the less motivated people would be to compete.  That means the less hard they would be willing to work.  That means the less people would care about finding more efficient ways of doing things.  But we are quickly approaching the physical limitations of the Earth—if we haven’t passed them already—so that fundamental change in our relationship to the environment is going to bring with it fundamental changes in our economic system anyway.

The problem with using the threat of homelessness as the driving force for your economic system is that in order to get people to take the threat seriously, you have to deliver on it.  That means you need to keep  some people unemployed all the time in order to motivate everyone else to compete.  But if you have to sacrifice their sense of self-worth to make your economic system function, you can plan on them doing whatever they have to do to maintain their sense of self worth.  And if they realize what you’re doing, then you can plan on them propping up their sense of self worth by hating you.  I’ve heard the same thing plenty of times from plenty of different people.  Older people who have spent their whole lives struggling to make it in the world, only to realize finally that the deck was stacked against them from the very beginning, trying to help younger people maintain their sense of self worth, when they’re falling into the same trap.  So what do the older people tell them?  Something like, “It’s not your fault you’re having so much trouble getting along in life.  It’s the White man trying to keep you down.”  Or whatever.

Result?  A lot of people fighting to maintain their sense of self worth by dreaming that some day they’re going to get the chance to kill  you.  Hey, you’re the one who wanted a competitive economy so badly.  Violence is competition.  Be careful what you wish for.

Oh, and by the way, what the f*ck else do you think a street gang is, besides a self-worth support group for young men who live in impoverished neighborhoods and who have realized they can get make better lives for themselves by breaking the law than they can by obeying it?

Here in the Phoenix area a couple dozen homeless people die from the heat every summer.  When you’re homeless, there’s nowhere for you to go to get out of the heat.  A couple years ago, some city planning commission thing had a big new homeless shelter built, and supposedly that’s going to solve all our homeless problems now.  Or is it?

Around that same time we passed a bunch of new laws here that basically outlaw homelessness.  Laws against loitering, sitting on the sidewalk, and urban camping.  That sounds harmless enough, until you consider those are all the main things homeless people do to stay out of the sun.  Urban camping means lying down to sleep anywhere.  In most parts of the country that mainly refers to sleeping in a park overnight.  But here in the desert that also means lying down in a city park to sleep in the shade in the middle of the day.  And here in the desert, people have been lying down to sleep in the shade in the middle of the day for as long as people have lived here.  The Mexicans call it a siesta.  And you know why?  Because when it’s 120º outside, taking a nap in the shade is the best way to stay cool.  You can be sure those laws were dreamed up by people who work in air-conditioned offices.

So when these anti-homeless laws were being passed, a bunch of reporters interviewed people on both sides of the argument.  And you know what the people who favored the new laws said?  A whole bunch of stuff like, “Well, there’s a park near my house, and I don’t want my kids to be exposed to homeless people, because I don’t think it’s healthy for them to have to see things like that.”

What can I say?  Capitalist pigs preying on other people and then expecting someone else to clean up their mess.  What did you expect?

One friend of mine helps run a local Anarchist magazine called Upheaval.  So he decided to start asking some questions and do a little poking around of his own.  He reviewed the minutes of the city council meeting in which the anti-homeless laws were voted on, and then he went to city hall and looked up some property tax records.  And you know what he discovered?  All the city council members who voted in favor of the laws that govern what homeless people should and shouldn’t be allowed to do, own their own houses!  Does that tell you anything?

That brings me to Food Not Bombs.  Food Not Bombs is a homeless support network that’s trying to do all the things I’ve outlined, but doesn’t have the resources a governmental agency would have at its disposal, because they’re Anarchists.

As I told you in the Inefficiency  of  Capitalism section of the Economics chapter, for business owners to throw away unsold food is more profitable than for them to give it away, because giving it away would cut into the demand that they depend on to keep their prices up.  So the entire food service industry in America is horrifically wasteful of food.  They’re so wasteful of food in fact, that all the food that gets thrown away in America would be enough to end hunger in America.  The one problem with that is that our economic system is driven by profits, not by human needs.  Having enough food for everyone in America is not the problem, but it’s not sufficient to solve the problem either.  The food also needs to be distributed according to who needs it, not according to who can pay the most for it.

So the people in the Food Not Bombs movement collect donations of unsold food from business owners who work in food services.  Some business owners throw their unsold food away intentionally, like the Capitalist pigs I accuse them of being.  But some food services business owners are basically Labor who own their own business.  (I use the terms Capital and Labor mainly in relation to people’s attitudes about who should control resources, not in relation to who actually does control the resources, as most people use the terms.)  They don’t have a problem with giving away the food they don’t sell, because they’re in business to make a living, not to prevent people from getting enough to eat.  There are probably a lot more business owners who would donate their unsold food, if only they had an effective way to get it to the people who need it.  Something like a governmental anti-poverty program, that could come around and pick up unsold food from stores and restaurants at the end of the day.  But we don’t have one of those, so these food service business owners donate it to the Anarchist anti-poverty program instead.
Food Not Bombs volunteers collect books and clothes and things like that too—anything that’s useful to people and easy to carry.   Some groups also collect bigger things, like used furniture or other household goods.  So they’re basically the Anarchist version of the Salvation Army.

Then the Food Not Bombs volunteers cook up a meal in someone’s kitchen (or multiple kitchens) and take it out to city parks or other public places to serve it.  So they are simultaneously saving food that would otherwise go to waste, feeding the homeless, publicly protesting the fact that throwing food away is more profitable than giving it to people who need it, and taking direct action to solve the problem themselves instead of complaining and waiting around for someone else to solve it.

There’s a saying among activists that the best measurement of your success is what your enemies do to try to stop you.  In numerous cities around the U.S., citizens, business people, and politicians have passed a lot of laws and arrested a lot of volunteers to try to make the problem go away.  A lot of FNB volunteers have been arrested for things like violating food codes and serving food to the public without a food service license—as though government officials are really that concerned about the health of people who don’t have enough to eat.  A lot of other volunteers have been bullied by the police.  In some cities, laws have been passed banning feeding the homeless in public.

Recently, feeding the homeless in Las Vegas was outlawed.  I used to hang out near the park where the FNB volunteers served food when I lived in Vegas, but they only served on Sunday afternoons. When I first got into town, I asked a homeless guy at the park if he knew of anywhere I could get something to eat.  He told me about a group that just been feeding people right there in the park but they’d just packed up and left a few minutes ago.   I’d never heard of Food Not Bombs before then, and I never crossed paths with them again.  But when I heard the Las Vegas chapter had just been outlawed, well, that was personal.

The people who pass these laws give a lot of different reasons for them, but it’s pretty obvious that there are just a few main reasons.  Homeless people make neighborhoods and business districts look bad, and everyone says they want to help the homeless, just not in their neighborhoods.  Another is that bringing that many homeless people together increases crime rates and causes health hazards.

Basically, the Capitalists are trying to fix the problems their inequitable economic system is creating by outlawing homelessness.  That is, punishing people for being defeated by the Capitalists.  Punishing people for losing at the Capitalists’ competition.  If you try to ban homeless people from congregating in public parks, you’re controlling who is and isn’t allowed to use public parks based on how much money they make, or how they dress, or whatever.

And that’s exactly what FNB volunteers go to public parks to protest.

I must say, that recently I heard that FNB in Prescott, Arizona (just up the road from here) has been using a tactic that’s proven to be an effective political aikido technique.  They don’t “serve food to the homeless”; they just have a picnic in the park across the street from city hall three times a week, which is open to the public, which includes homeless people.  So three times a week, lots of homeless people show up and eat salvaged food that was prepared by Anarchists, right across the street from city hall.  That might seem to be a form of resistance that’s more passive than actively drawing attention to the fact that they’re doing a job the government is failing to do, but turning your opponent’s own force against him—not winning a head-on collision against him—is exactly how aikido works.  I’m sure anyone who wanted to could go to FNB’s public picnic, whether they’re homeless or not.  But if you do, you’re still going to eat salvaged vegetarian food that was prepared by Anarchists, and you’re going to eat it in the company of homeless people that nobody is going to treat any differently than they treat you.  Then on election day you’re going to vote for whoever you feel is best suited to work in the big impressive-looking building across the street from the park where the Anarchists and the homeless people have their free public picnics three times a week.

Here’s the story of the Food Not Bombs movement that they post on their website.  They also have a book you can order to find out how to set up an FNB chapter in your area.   It includes everything from how to organize the group, how to get food donations, legal advice, and vegetarian recipes.

The Story of the Food Not Bombs

The first twenty-six years of the Food Not Bombs movement.

Food Not Bombs is one of the fastest growing revolutionary movements and is gaining momentum throughout the world. There are hundreds of autonomous chapters sharing free vegetarian food with hungry people and protesting war and poverty. Food Not Bombs is not a charity. This energetic grassroots movement is active throughout the Americas, Europe, Africa, the Middle East, Asia and Australia. Food Not Bombs is organizing for peace and an end to the occupations of Iraq, Afghanistan and Palestine. For over 25 years the movement has worked to end hunger and has supported actions to stop the globalization of the economy, restrictions to the movements of people, end exploitation and the destruction of the earth.
The first group was formed in Cambridge, Massachusetts in 1980 by anti-nuclear activists. Food Not Bombs is an all-volunteer organization dedicated to nonviolent social change. Food Not Bombs has no formal leaders and strives to include everyone in its decision-making process. Each group recovers food that would otherwise be thrown out and makes fresh hot vegetarian meals that are served in outside in public spaces to anyone without restriction. Each independent group also serves free vegetarian meals at protests and other events. The San Francisco chapter has been arrested over 1,000 times in government’s effort to silence its protest against the city’s anti- homeless policies. Amnesty International states it will adopt those Food Not Bombs volunteers that are convicted as “Prisoners of Conscience” and will work for their unconditional release. Even though we are dedicated to nonviolence Food Not Bombs activists in the United States have been under investigation by the FBI Joint Terrorism Task Force, Pentagon and other intelligence agencies. A number of Food Not Bombs volunteers have been arrested on terrorism charges but there has never been a conviction.

Food Not Bombs is often the first to provide food and supplies to the survivors of natural disasters and terrorist attacks. During the first three days after the 1989 Earthquake, Food Not Bombs was the only organization in San Francisco providing hot meals to the survivors and the Long Beach chapter provided food after the North Ridge Earthquake. Food Not Bombs was also the first to provide hot meals to the rescue workers responding to September 11th World Trade Center attacks. Food Not Bombs volunteers were among the first to provide food and help to the survivors of the Asian Tsunami and Hurricane Katrina. Our volunteers organized a national collection program and delivered bus and truckloads of food and supplies to the gulf region. We have been one of the only organizations sharing daily meals in New Orleans since Katrina. You can rely on Food Not Bombs in a disaster and we are ready to help in the future.

Food Not Bombs works in coalition with groups like Earth First!, The Leonard Peltier Defense Committee, Anarchist Black Cross, the IWW, Homes Not Jails, Anti Racist Action, In Defense of Animals, the Free Radio Movement and other organizations on the cutting edge of positive social change and resistance to the new global austerity program. One collective publishes a movement wide newsletter called A Food Not Bombs Menu. Another hosts FNB News where you can learn more about the Food Not Bombs community. Food Not Bombs Publishing in Takoma Park, Maryland publishes books like On Conflict and Consensus, which has been an important guide for group democracy. We hope you will join us in taking direct action towards creating a world free from domination, coercion and violence. Food is a right, not a privilege.

Now here’s a news article from their website about legal challenges they face:

Another U.S. City Outlaws Feeding Homeless People

Mayor Buddy Dyer supported the ordinance.

Last week, Las Vegas outlawed feeding homeless people at city parks. Now, Orlando is following suit. Orlando is trying to keep charitable groups from feeding the homeless in downtown parks. Officials said transients gathering for weekly meals create safety and sanitary problems for businesses. The City Council voted to prohibit serving meals to groups of 25 or more people in parks and other public property within two miles of City Hall without a special permit. A group called Food Not Bombs, which has served weekly vegetarian meals for the homeless for more than a year, said it will continue illegally. The American Civil Liberties Union vows to sue, saying it’s a superficial fix that ignores the city’s homeless problem. Two of the city’s five commissioners voted against the ordinance, including Commissioners Robert Stuart, who runs the homeless shelter Christian Service Center, and Sam Ings, a retired police officer. Stuart told The Orlando Sentinel that Orlando is taking a step to ‘criminalize good-hearted people’ who he says are trying to help. He went on to tell the paper that group feedings in the parks had not become unwieldy to the city, as some had claimed. He said the ordinance says, ‘Orlando doesn’t care,’ the Sentinel reported. Ings said that although the commissioners are casting the ordinance as a public-safety issue, it is really an issue of the city wanting to ‘cover up’ the homeless problem. “We’re putting a Band-Aid on a critical problem,” he said. The commissioner who pushed for the ordinance, Patty Sheehan, said it was not an ‘easy day’ for her at all. She said the new ordinance against feeding homeless people has been ‘wrongly cast’ as anti-homeless. ‘I’ve been an advocate [for the homeless],’ she said. ‘Even though you’ll call me an enemy, I’ll still be your friend.” The Sentinel reported that about a dozen downtown residents and business owners spoke in favor of the rule. But more than three times that amount of people spoke against it. There were 45 speakers from various groups, including a formal declaration from the University of Central Florida’s student senate, who opposed outlawing feeding homeless people. Mayor Buddy Dyer supported the ordinance. Food Not Bombs said on its Web site that chapters in Venice, Calif.; Las Vegas, Nev.; Orlando, and Fredericton, New Brunswick, Canada have been told that their programs should stop or move out of sight.

This might sound like a dumb question, but how are we supposed to put an end to poverty without putting an end to the economic system that depends on it?

Filed under: y: 42 Vol. III by Ezra
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Somebody in or around Food Not Bombs is going to invent a new movement called Schools Not Prisons, just because this idea is too cool to ignore.

You know how a lot of times kids who get convicted of crimes and sentenced to prison get sent to prisons for young first-time offenders to teach them their lessons, in a way that keeps them separated from hardened criminals?  They do that because evidently somebody discovered something that’s not so hard to imagine:  If you send young first-time offenders to prison with hardened criminals, the kids may learn something from the prison administrators about why they shouldn’t break the law, but they’re going to learn a lot more from their fellow inmates about being criminals.  That means that the net result of the young first-time offenders’ incarceration among hardened criminals is going to be a decreased sense of respect for the law, instead of an increased sense of respect for the law, which was supposed to be the point of punishing them for their crimes in the first place.

A lot of people have been wondering a lot lately how to get vagrant kids off the street.  Speaking as someone who had to spend a few weeks at a homeless shelter once, and who’s known a lot of street kids in my life, let me tell you something about being homeless…

There are two basic communities of homeless people.  One group is the older people who have had a run of bad luck and lost everything.  A lot of times it’s their own fault.  Even if it’s not entirely their own fault, there isn’t a whole lot anyone else can do about it, because these people are mentally disabled, crazy, alcoholics, drug addicts, or whatever.  Those are the people most people think of when they think of homeless people, and those are the kinds of people that most homeless programs are set up to “help”.  The best help you can give these people is to give them somewhere to sleep, something to eat, an address where they can receive mail, access to help wanted ads and a telephone, somewhere to take a shower, somewhere to get their clothes washed, and so on.  In other words, they provide for their basic human biological needs, and a little help getting themselves out of the situation, for anyone who cares to take advantage of it.

Living at a homeless shelter has to be one of the most spirit crushing, soul-destroying things anyone can possibly experience in the free adult world.   Sure, they provide you with basic biological needs and the chance for a future as a functional human being, but at what cost?  At the Salvation Army where I stayed, they fed us food that wasn’t fit for a dog.  Their idea of giving us somewhere to sleep was a 1/2” foam camping pad, a blanket, and a few square feet of hard tile floor.  They turned out the lights at 9:00 and woke us up at 4:00 in the morning, so we could get an early start on looking for a job.  I say “woke us up” mostly as a euphemism—that is, they “woke us up” in the sense that you need to wake a person up after he’s spent a night lying on a hard floor surrounded by 50 snoring, coughing, farting men.  And even to get that for a place to sleep, you had to sit through an hour-long nightly sermon in the chapel.  Their idea of a shower was a tile-lined room with four shower-heads running constantly, a long line of naked men standing outside the door, and a staff member sitting outside the door watching to make sure nobody got beaten up or anything.  Their idea of “a telephone” was literally a telephone, and 20 or 30 or 40 people standing in line to use it. And their idea of giving you something to do for the day was to separate the men from the women into two different rooms and turn on a big TV in each room playing football games or reruns or whatever was on that appealed to the largest demographic in the room.  I think they had a few newspapers and magazines and paperbacks lying around too.  In other words, if your goal in life was to live like barnyard livestock, the homeless shelter offered you everything you could ever ask for.  But if that’s not your goal, and you spend a few weeks living like this, how long can you really hold on to any sense of hope for the future?

The other group of homeless people are kids mostly in their teens and early 20s. Some of them have problems with no easy solution, but I’d have to bet those kids are in the minority.  A lot of street kids have set out to make a life for themselves but took a wrong turn somewhere.  A lot of them set out to make a life for themselves and had basically nothing to start with. A lot of them are trying to figure out what they want in life and where to look for it, and so far they’ve figured out that devoting their lives to working at pointless jobs just so they can earn meager paychecks isn’t what they’re looking for.  If the only place they have to go is somewhere like the Salvation Army where I stayed, are their problems ever going to be solved?  Or are they going to get worse?   If your idea of helping these kids is to give them the choice between providing for their biological needs or preserving their human dignity, how exactly are you solving anything?  That’s why most street kids prefer to take their chances on the street.  If you try to solve their problems by teaching these kids (either intentionally or unintentionally) that trying to get anywhere in life is a waste of time, just like so many of the 50-year-old alcoholics they have to eat and sleep and shower next to think it is—and seem to be proving by the fact that they’re 30 years older than these kids and are still living like human livestock—do you think that’s going to encourage kids to try to get off the street, or discourage them?  If they do get off the streets, is it going to be as a result of anything you did?  If homeless street kids are a burden to society, and you have the resources they need to start making a life for themselves on their own, but you offer them those resources in a way that makes the kids not want your help, is that going to decrease, or increase, the length of time each of these kids are going to place a burden on society?

So here’s my solution:

Schools Not Prisons is an auxiliary movement to Food Not Bombs.  (I can say this even though I don’t have any official authority among Food Not Bombs, because Food Not Bombs is not an official organization, it’s an Anarchistic movement, where nobody has any official authority over anybody.  They are organized by ideas that work so well that lots of people join in, turn those ideas into reality, and make those ideas keep happening, without anyone needing to control those ideas.  You’re more than welcome to try to invent new auxiliary movements to Food Not Bombs if you like, but, ah, don’t be surprised if you discover that I’m a lot better than you are at coming up with new ideas that Anarchistically-minded people pay attention to.  Anyway…)

A Schools Not Prisons house needs three large main rooms, separated from each other.  It can have more rooms, and obviously needs a few essential rooms, like a bathroom and a kitchen, but these three main rooms are critical.

One of the main rooms is the barracks.  The barracks is full of bunk beds with thick mattresses.  You can build bunk beds yourself, and you can buy good foam mattresses pretty cheaply at an army surplus store.  The barracks also has lockers in it, for people to lock up their things.  The barracks is kept quiet and is reserved for sleeping, so anybody can get good rest any time of the night or day.  It isn’t segregated between men and women, and couples are allowed to sleep together, provided they can fit into a bed together.  That is, their ability to sleep together isn’t going to be controlled by anyone else, but it might be controlled by physical space limitations.
One of the main rooms is the library.  That’s another quiet room, provided for the sake of anyone who wants to spend their waking hours doing quiet things in a quiet environment.  The room will have books in it, and whatever other resources are available that lend themselves to quiet activities.

The third main room is the common room.  The common room is for any activities that don’t fit into the barracks or library.  It will have tables and chairs, because this is where meals will be served and eaten.  The common room will also have a stage at one end, for the sake of whoever wants to put on any kind of a presentation.   This is a room where people can socialize and do whatever else they want.  Most importantly, it doesn’t have a TV!

The rules of the Schools Not Prisons house are pretty simple:

1:  We’re all friends here, or at least we act like we’re friends, even if you don’t personally like each other.  Respect people, settle your differences peacefully, don’t insult people, threaten them, steal from them, fight with them, or anything else like that.  If you’ve ever watched Sesame Street, you know everything you need to know about how to get along with people here.

2:  Don’t break the law here, because if you do, we can get into trouble.  Don’t do drugs or sell drugs, no prostitution, and no alcohol, even if you’re a legal age.

3:  If you cause trouble for anybody, we throw you out.  This isn’t a crack house; this is a place for people who don’t want to live in a crack house.

4:  This is a shelter for people under the age of 30.  If you’re over the age of 30 and have something to contribute to the environment, we’ll let you stay here.  If not, we won’t.

(Despite what a lot of people might think, among people who have spent much time among street kids, it’s not terribly difficult to differentiate between older street people who help watch out for younger street people and older street people who see younger street people as prey.  The easiest way to tell the difference is: Do street kids look up to these older people, or avoid them?)

Staffing the place shouldn’t be too hard.  There are plenty of baby boomers in America who are hurtling toward retirement age, who are going to have a lot of free time on their hands pretty soon.  They’re the ones who lit this particular torch; so I bet a lot of them would love do something to help out the kids who are carrying it now.  There are also plenty of street kids who aren’t homeless but would probably love to help create an environment to help out other street kids.  If any street kids wanted to live at a Schools Not Prisons house very long, they could help out by doing chores around the place.  If they contributed half an hour’s work every day, and they were being paid minimum wage for it, that would work out to about $2 a day, after taxes.  That would work out to about $60 a month in rent.  That’s not a bad deal at all.

The social and economic structure I’m suggesting here is the way most street kids I’ve known live already.  Contrary to what the mainstream media would like you to believe, these kids aren’t just a bunch of good-for-nothing troublemakers.  They all understand Sesame Street etiquette, and they practice it amongst themselves.  When you all live outside the law, business owners and politicians see you as a plague infesting the streets, because you don’t live your life around earning and spending money, you don’t pay any taxes, you own extremely few possessions, and you participate in the financial economic system of the world as little as possible.  That makes you a threat to these people, because they have very little control over the way you live your life, which means it’s extremely difficult for them to control your life in a way that will benefit them.  I’m sure most business owners and politicians don’t carry their line of reasoning that far, at least, not consciously, but I am pretty sure they carry it as far as seeing that they do own a lot of property and they do pay a lot of taxes, and if they don’t want street kids infesting their neighborhoods, guess who the police are going to listen to.  Anyway, my point is, when you live out on the streets, and especially if you live out on the streets by choice, you can’t expect the police to give a f*ck about you, so you have to solve your own problems within your own community.

More importantly though, I think, most street kids understand Sesame Street etiquette a lot better than most so-called “responsible” adults, which is why they don’t want to participate in the world of “responsible” adults.  Most of these kids are so nice to each other just because they feel that’s how people should be, and most “responsible” adults aren’t nearly that nice to each other.  So these kids set out to make their own world for themselves in their own way.  “Responsible” adults compete against each other for everything in sight, from jobs to houses to social status to material possessions.  If you try to participate in the “responsible” adult world, but you don’t feel like competing against people every minute of your life, you’re f*cked, which is why these kids don’t bother.  And I must say, there seems to be something to be said for people living this way.  After all, no Al-Queda terrorist has ever crashed an airliner into a homeless shelter, have they?

A lot of people say that street kids are a burden to society, that they’re leeches or parasites or whatever.  Like I said, they don’t pay taxes but they use the streets and the sidewalks and everything else that other people pay taxes for.  Sometimes they collect food stamps and welfare checks or whatever, which means the tax money other people paid is being given away to them.   And if paying money was the only way for people to contribute to their society, well I guess you’d be right.  But, ah, let me tell you something about economics of a much larger scale…

The Use Value economy recognizes the entire global environment and the entire realm of human behavior as an economic system.  Remember what I’ve said in the first two books about every other culture in the world valuing work for material reward less than Western culture does, because Western culture has always been the most materially prosperous, and therefore has attached the strongest cultural values to working for material reward?  And you remember what I said about it being impossible to construct a functional global economic system that doesn’t recognize the good qualities that other people have to offer?

If some kid is willing to sleep under a bridge and scavenge food out of a dumpster behind a restaurant when it closes, in what meaningful way is that different from someone else at some other point in history sleeping under a tree and picking wild fruit to eat?  So what else do you call these kids beside modern urban nomadic hunter-gatherers?   So guess what:  Street kids’ social and economic structures and values work the same way that nomadic hunter-gatherer’s social and economic structures have always worked.  I’m sure they didn’t do this intentionally, but they figured it out on their own, and they adapted it to fit their living conditions.

As a modern urban nomadic hunter-gatherer, just as for nomadic hunter-gatherers at any other time or place, you can only own as many possessions as you can carry.  (You can try leaving some stuff somewhere you think it will be safe, but if you do, you’re taking a big risk on it being stolen, which is why you don’t do it with anything you value greatly and can’t replace easily.)  A lot of homeless people use shopping carts to let them carry a lot of possessions with them when they move around, but street kids don’t do that.  Why would they?  Pushing a shopping cart full of your worldly possessions down the street makes you look homeless!  Street kids still have enough sense of dignity left not to sink to that.

The fact that older homeless people push their worldly possessions around in shopping carts and street kids don’t ought to be any anthropologist’s first clue that they are two distinctly different groups of people.  The older homeless people with their shopping carts are people who are still trying to make it in our materialistic economy, which is why they’ve found the most effective way to own material possessions given their living conditions.  The street kids don’t care as much about material possessions, which must mean that they’re satisfying themselves with their lives in some other way.  These kids are so uninterested in participating in a materialistic economy that collectively they’ve invented (or, reinvented) their own economic system.

What takes the place of material possessions in any non-Western economic system?  Cultural values.  Where do cultural values come from?  From enough individuals figuring out these values that collectively they become the cultural values of that group of people.  Once those cultural values are established, other people can join the culture either by figuring out those values on their own and merging themselves into the greater culture, or by learning the cultural values that other people figured out in order to be able to join the existing culture.

As a modern urban nomadic hunter-gatherer, one way or another, you learn to make your life complete with the material possessions you can carry with you.  The modern urban nomadic hunter-gatherer economic system is not one where people own property, it works the same way any nomadic hunter-gatherer economic system has ever worked:  Material goods move from place to place, and if they move through your possession, you get to make use of them for a while.  If you own something particularly cool, like a portable mp3 player, sooner or later, somebody’s probably going to steal it.  That’s low when people do it, but it does happen, and there’s nothing you can do to prevent it.  Luckily, however, someone stealing your mp3 player will not ruin your life.  If it does ruin your life, you won’t survive on the streets very long.  On the other hand, if you don’t own anything particularly valuable, you’re basically immune to theft.  Whatever possessions you call your own are yours free and clear.  Material goods necessary to maintain biological survival obviously move through the modern urban hunter-gatherer community at a rate sufficient to maintain everyone’s biological survival, because if they didn’t, the culture couldn’t survive.  If these kids live this way by choice, and they find enough material resources to maintain their biological survival, what else are they supposed to need to make their lives complete?

Of course, I said, “if they live this way by choice.”   As it concerns most people who succeed to some degree in the “responsible” adult world, that statement rather implies that these kids had the choice between living on the street or living in some other way that offered them benefits that were somehow equitable.  If your choices are between living on the street or living with abusive parents that’s not much of a choice, the only choice you have is how to make the best of a bad situation.  Neither of your choices was particularly good.

That’s where Schools Not Prisons comes in.  Quite simply, you take the social and economic structure that already exists among street kids, and you put into a building.  You give these kids decent beds to sleep in, and give them lockers to put their few worldly possessions in.  (Although I bet you’d be surprised how little use the locks on the lockers would get—I’m willing to bet a lot of street kids would feel like saving themselves the risk of their stuff getting stolen wasn’t even worth the hassle of locking and unlocking their lockers.  You’d just have to put locks on the lockers for the sake of anyone who did want to use them, and for the sake of keeping Schools Not Prisons from seeming like a den of thieves.)

Then you add some more material goods into the economic system that wouldn’t’ve gotten there otherwise.  First of all, you feed the kids the same way Food Not Bombs feeds anyone.  Vegetarian food is cheap—especially when it’s donated for free from restaurants or grocery stores whose managers were just going to throw it away, which is where Food Not Bombs gets most of their food.  With vegetarian ingredients, you can make healthy, substantial, appetizing, non-personally-insulting food. (I swear, I’d rather starve to death than eat another meal at that Salvation Army!)

Now that you’ve created an environment where the social and economic system of the modern urban nomadic hunter-gatherers functions and their immediate survival needs are met, you’ve created an environment where the kids are going to feel comfortable, where they feel like they fit in, where they feel like they belong, and where they find the experience of living there personally meaningful.  You give them some books to read and a place to read them where they feel like the world makes sense, and you just might be surprised by how much more they could learn from those books than they could otherwise.  You give them some books, a room, some tables and chairs, and a place to meet other people who might know more than they do about something they want to learn more about, and you just might be surprised by how much more they could learn from each other than they could’ve learned in school.  Sure, books would be bound to disappear out of the library from time to time, but I’m willing to bet that books would appear in the library just about as frequently.

A lot street kids have a lot of artistic or other creative talents, which would’ve gone to waste working at a pointless minimum wage job.  So what do these kids do?  The exact same thing my brother and I and all of our relatives have always done, which is to try to find a way to use their creative talents to create a life for themselves they can be satisfied with.  That’s why you put a stage in the common room, and you could also put some scrap paper, pencils, erasers, and a few other basic art supplies in there too.  Any time nobody was on the stage, anybody would be free to get up there and do anything they wanted.  You’d probably end up with an open mike night (assuming you had a microphone) every night of the week, where kids would get up to read their poetry, sing, play instruments, or whatever.

Street kids are street kids because they don’t give a f*ck about money or material goods in any sense that most “responsible” adults do.  Our Western Capitalist economy revolves around money and material goods, so if your life doesn’t, you’re left out in the cold—literally.  The way the social, economic, and educational systems that America is founded upon function, if you don’t live your life around money, material goods, and competing against other people every minute of your life, everything you are and everything you could be gets thrown right in garbage.  So all you have to do to solve that problem is to create a social, economic, and educational system that doesn’t revolve around money, material goods, and constant competition.

In summary, a Schools Not Prisons house is a building where street kids get:

A roof over their heads, somewhere to sleep, something to eat, and somewhere to keep their few worldly possessions safe;

An environment where they feel like the world makes sense;

An environment where they can work to earn their keep in a way they find personally meaningful and that produces tangible results;

An opportunity to learn things in a way they find personally meaningful; and

An outlet for their creative talents.

In other words, you create a social and economic system where people can satisfy their immediate survival needs, find spiritual meaning in their lives, learn, work, socialize, and enjoy themselves.  In other words, all the things that make the “responsible” adult world function.  Or to look at it another way, a Schools Not Prisons house is an environment where people get to survive, be safe, feel safe, reproduce (or at least, meet up with potential romantic partners), make friends, be respected, feel good, and put their abilities to use—in other words, where they get to fulfill all of their needs as human beings.  Every culture, society, and civilization that has ever succeeded has succeeded by offering these things to its people, so I’d have to say that Schools Not Prisons is already off to a good start, and it doesn’t even officially exist yet!

On a larger scope, the Schools Not Prisons movement is, in effect, my mythical town of the Empire of Niesen made up of buildings spread all over the world.  That is, it’s an opportunity to build cultural values based on something other than material wealth.  As I’m sure you recall from the Thermodynamics chapter, “our” Western cultural values of the pursuit of happiness through the pursuit of ever more material goods can’t possibly endure indefinitely—or even, for very much longer—so the sooner we start looking for another way to make our civilization function, the better.  The inevitable result of our self-destructive social and economic systems is going to be more and more people not being able to survive in our economic system by competing against everyone else constantly.  That means more homeless people, including more street kids.  If the Schools Not Prisons movement is successful, then as the number of street kids grows, the number of Schools Not Prisons houses is sure to grow.  Even if the only thing the Schools Not Prisons movement can do is to stay out of the way and help get other people out of the way while the rest of our economy collapses around it, then once again, my mythical town of the Empire of Niesen, embodied here in the Schools Not Prisons movement, will take over the world for no other reason than because it will be the only social and economic system left standing.  It will do that because its social and economic systems are constructed on human evolution itself, which means that as a social and economic system, it can survive for as long as the human race survives.

Would street kids who wanted to go roam the country take advantage of a free youth hostel network like this?  Of course they would.  But then, a lot of those kids do it anyway, even though a network of free hostels like this doesn’t exist.  Would a network of free youth hostels encourage a lot of kids to go out roaming the country who wouldn’t’ve done it otherwise?  Of course it would.  Some street kids set out on the streets by choice because that’s the only way they can find to learn the things they’re interested in learning about.  Some street kids don’t end up on the streets by choice, and have to learn those things in order to survive.  Whether they end up on the streets by choice or not, street kids try to make the best of their situation just like everyone else in the world does.  If you have to pursue your education by living outside the law and constantly trying to stay a step ahead of the law, what kind of an education do you think that’s going to turn out to be?
That’s why I call this movement Schools Not Prisons.

Of course, every Schools Not Prisons house would have to keep on hand lots of information about teen pregnancy, STDs, drug abuse, depression, suicide, runaway hotlines, gang violence, domestic violence, etc., etc..  The goal is not to help kids run away from their problems, the goal is to help kids face their problems.

Oh, one other thing.  You remember what I said in the Democracy 2.0 section of the Generation of Heroes chapter, about how Americans who haven’t seen much of America can’t possibly be expected to offer very well-informed input into the collective decision-making process of our country?

Heh, heh, heh…

I’m sure that most “responsible” adults think this is all just a bunch of wishful thinking and are certain something like this could never work.  I’m equally sure that most street kids in America who hear about this are going to be certain that this could work and they would have joined the Schools Not Prisons movement long ago, if only it existed.

Well, I guess that just illustrates all too clearly the whole reason “responsible” adults can’t figure out how to get street kids off the streets, doesn’t it?

Filed under: y: 42 Vol. III by Ezra
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The Roswell Conspiracy movement isn’t a part of Globalization 4.0, but it is a good illustration of the role of conspiracies and conspiracy theorists in society.

First, let’s talk a little about my own background in conspiracies.  I work in theatre, remember?  Theatre turns conspiracy into a fine art.  First, psychological thrillers are a major style of storytelling, in movies, plays, and novels.  And that’s my favorite thing to write.  Then there’s acting, which is the manipulation of people’s perceptions through the presentation style of the information you give them.  And that’s what all these books have been about.  Then there’s technical theatre, which is not merely the art of creating what the audience sees, but also the art of creating what the audience believes  they see.   And that’s what I do for a living right now.  So let’s just say that I’ve got a certain perspective on conspiracies that most people don’t share.

Then there’s my scientific background and, more importantly, my basic ability to understand how science works, which means my ability to separate myself from a situation and look at the information that actually exists.  Basically, my ability to look at the sun and at the stars but then, upon learning that they’re the same thing, to realize that the fact that they look different to me doesn’t prove anything, and neither does the fact that we use two different words to refer to them.

You remember what I said back in the Methodology chapter, how I grew up believing that anything could be real, but trying to figure out how to prove that anything was real?  What the f*ck do you think science is?  Well, that was about how my parents saw the world while I was growing up, and one way or another it’s probably how they grew up, and that’s basically the net result of how my grandparents on my dad’s side lived, when my artist grandmother and my engineer grandfather would get into the discussions about the nature of reality.

I’ve told you all about how child development shapes people’s perceptions of the world.  Now a lot of people, including Tom Friedman, are wondering why American kids are growing up with cotton candy for brains, and what to do about it.  Well it’s not simply a matter of what you teach kids, or even how badly they want to learn it, but also of when you teach it to them and how.

One night when I was about four, I was outside with my dad and we were looking up at the stars. He said something like, “You see all those stars up there?  They’re all just like the sun.”
To which I said something like, “No, the sun is a lot bigger and brighter.”  (Or however I would’ve said that when I was four years old.)

And he said something like, “Ah!  No, that’s just how the sun looks to us.  The sun is a lot closer to us than the other stars, which is why it looks so big and bright.”  Then I think he pointed over to the house and said, “You know how big the house really is.  From here it looks smaller than it does when you’re standing on the front porch.”

I’ve known a lot of people who would’ve told their four-year-olds that stars are the spirits of all the people who have gone up to Heaven, and their god put them there so everyone will remember he’s watching over them so they won’t feel afraid in the dark of the night, or something like that.  Rather than try to explain to their kids what stars really are, these parents would fill their kids’ brains up misinformation.  Then when the kids finally learned about stars in third or fourth or fifth or sixth grade or whenever, they’d have strong emotional attachments to what their parents told them, and now they’d be learning something completely different from their teachers, so their heads would be filled with all kinds of conflicting information, with the end result that they’d never really understand what stars were.  But what difference does it really make anyway, right?  Stars are really far away.  It doesn’t really matter what stars are, does it?

But now you’ve taught your kid that when life gets too confusing he can just make something up and act as if it was real.  Now he’s discovered—or at least, thinks he’s discovered—that all reality is subjective.

I’ve known a lot of other people who wouldn’t’ve told their kids anything about stars.  They would’ve just told them they were stars and then said something about, “Look how pretty they are.”  These people say that children should just be allowed to enjoy being children while they have the chance.   What these people don’t realize is that learning how the world works is a critical part of childhood development.  The moment that your child first becomes aware of stars and asks what they are is the moment of his life that he’s most receptive to learning about them—or one of a few moments, maybe.  If you make him wait four or five more years for someone else to teach him about them by showing him pictures of them in a book during the daytime—which is how children learn about stars in school—then all they’re going to be to him are pretty things up in the sky that are kind of like the sun but really far away.  His teacher will never be able to make stars as personally meaningful to him as you could’ve on the night he first asked you about them.
So if all you teach your children about is how to be children, just because you wish you could be a child again, or because you want to protect them from the emotional stress of growing up, then when they grow up to be adults, all they’re going to know how to do is how to be children.  And then they’re going to kick and scream and say that life ain’t fair when hard-working Chinese come to America and take all the good jobs.

Anyway, my dad taught me the importance of perspective in observation by giving me this introduction to basic astrophysics at the age of four.  Many years later I was engaged to my fiancée the wealthy heiress convicted felon, who grew up surrounded by people who wanted to manipulate everyone else’s perception of reality and had tons of material resources available to help them do it.  And I’ve had a few friends who’ve worked in military intelligence who’ve told me what they think about it.  So here’s all of that applied to the Roswell incident…

The first problem with figuring out what happened in Roswell is that there are no reliable reference sources.  There’s a whole bunch of civilians who say one thing, and there’s a whole bunch of government officials who say the complete opposite, and there’s no physical proof to back up anything anyone says.  So let’s all put our on deerstalker caps and use the Sherlock Holmes approach on the stories themselves.

I’ve been to the UFO Museum in Roswell, where they have a very detailed account of the civilian version of the story.  That was years ago, and I can’t remember all of details, but I can remember the basic outline of the story, anyway.

One night in the summer of 1947, a rancher saw something that looked like a bright shooting star.  It was awfully low though—so low that it looked like it landed somewhere out on his ranch.  He thought it might’ve been a plane crash.  So he saddled up a horse and rode out to where he saw it go down.

There, he found a crashed flying saucer made of some strange metal he’d never seen before, and five dead aliens.

So he went back to the house and called the sheriff.  The sheriff came and looked at it, and then he called someone on the nearby air force base.

The air force officials sent a salvage team out to the site.  They closed it off, wouldn’t let anyone near it, and carted everything off, leaving not a scrap of wreckage.

They also ordered five child-sized hermetically sealed caskets from the local mortuary.

Over the next week, they flew nine cargo planes into the airforce base, loaded them up with debris, and flew them out again.

They brought the five dead aliens into the town coroner.  Air force doctors and nurses performed autopsies on them, trying to figure out what exactly they were.

Everyone in the military was sworn to secrecy.  But two or three of the nurses told some friends or family anyway.  They all died in accidents soon afterwards.

Later, the rancher retracted his story, and said he was just imagining it.

The official military report said it was a weather balloon.

About 30 years after the event, the town coroner said that he’d helped with the autopsies on the aliens.

Around that same time, a bunch of physicists who’d worked in top-secret government labs started coming forward and saying they’d examined the wreckage of an alien spacecraft that had been recovered.

I think that pretty well covers the basic Roswell story.

I have one friend who served in the Navy long after the Roswell incident.  He’d recently abandoned Christianity.  Now he felt like there was something missing from his life.  So he went looking around for something else to think about now, and he came upon the general UFO mystery—the Roswell incident and other UFO sightings.  He was stationed in San Diego at the time.  He found out about a UFO group in the area, where a bunch of people would get together and go out at night with their telescopes looking for UFOs, and get together to talk about UFOs, and stuff like that.

As it turned out, a lot of people in the UFO group were ex-Christians like him.  They all felt that leaving Christianity had left them with an empty feeling, and that looking for UFOs filled it up again.

One night in 1997, a really weird flying-saucer-looking thing covered in lights came swooping out of the sky and hovered over Phoenix for several minutes, hovering around in circles and side to side, before it flew off again.  It didn’t move like any kind of aircraft that exists on Earth.  Air force spokespersons later said that they’d been testing some new kinds of flares.  But the thing moved as a solid unit.  And it although it didn’t look like an aircraft, it looked even less like flares.  Some of my friends here saw it, and so did thousands of other people.

All the pieces fit together to make a tidy little story.  We keep having these encounters with UFOs, the government keeps trying to cover them up, they keep coming up with absurd explanations for what people saw, they keep leaving a lot of loose ends, and people keep tugging on those loose ends trying to piece together an explanation for what’s going on.  When you look at all the clues people have discovered by now, it looks pretty convincing that the government is trying to keep us from finding out about something.

So the questions are:  Is there alien life out there in the universe somewhere?  Are they studying us?  Are they trying to contact us?  And to what end?

Now let’s look at the story in relation to the rest of the world.

First of all, I’ve heard a lot of Christians talk about how the conditions of the Earth make the evolution of life here so improbable that it must prove their god created the Earth specifically for us to live on.  If the Earth was a few miles closer or further away from the sun, life as we know it could never have existed here.  There’s a bunch of other characteristics they point to that I won’t bother going into here but that you can Google search for easily enough.  The point is, they’re trying to use science to prove divine intervention in the lifecycles of our planet.

There are just two problems with that argument.  First of all, supernatural powers are unobservable, by definition.  That means their existence or non-existence is impossible to prove scientifically, by definition.

The other problem is that they’re trying to use circumstantial evidence to prove a pre-conceived belief, and they’re rejecting the possibility that the circumstantial evidence could indicate anything else.  The Theory of Relativity and the Theory of Evolution were both discovered using circumstantial evidence, and for the sake of argument let’s say that Albert Einstein and Charles Darwin both had ideas ahead of time of what all the evidence was going to prove.  But even if that is true, I think it’s rather self-evident that Albert Einstein believed in Relativity a lot less than Christians believe in their god, for the simple reason that belief in the Christian god is a pre-requisite for being a Christian; his existence or non-existence is not open to debate or question among Christians.

Charles Darwin didn’t believe in evolution before he discovered the Theory of Evolution; he believed there had to be a connection between the way children inherit characteristics from their parents, and the way closely related species of animals who have lived in different environments for long periods of time have different characteristics.  So he looked around for all the circumstantial evidence he could find, and then figured out how all the pieces fit together to explain how the parts of the world people could observe directly worked.  If anyone else could fit the circumstantial evidence together to explain more accurately how the world worked, they were welcome to try.  And that’s exactly what people have been doing ever since.  But no one has ever disproven the connection between children inheriting their characteristics from their parents and species of animals who have lived in different conditions for many, many generations having different characteristics.  Instead, the continuing search for evidence has only resulted in the continuing refinement of our understanding of how that basic process works.

Anyway, since Christians were trying to use science to prove the existence of their god, some scientists accepted the challenge and started looking for more evidence, trying to find other ways the circumstantial evidence could fit together, and seeing what it indicated.  And doing all of that took them probably, oh, about thirty seconds.

The body of evidence the Christians had compiled about the relationship between the characteristics of the Earth and our dependence on them was extensive and it was accurate.  They just left out one thing:  They didn’t compare it to the number of planets in the universe.  There are hundreds of billions of stars in each of billions of galaxies.  Astronomers have discovered they can detect planets orbiting stars according to the motion of the star—whether or not the star moves like it’s being affected by the gravity pull of something nearby.  So even though they can’t count how many planets there are in the universe exactly, they can get a rough idea.  Even if we assume that each of the hundreds of billions of stars in each of the billions of galaxies has one planet orbiting it on the average, that means there are hundreds of billions of billions of planets in the galaxy.

So the scientists took the Christians’ astronomically small probability of life evolving on Earth and compared it to the even more astronomically large number of planets in the universe, and came up with something on the order of 10,000 planets where life had evolved.

Now we have to ask some more questions.  How many of those planets have life living on them right now?   Eventually our planet is going to be destroyed when our sun/star/whatever starts to burn out and turns into a red giant.  And on how many of that statistical number of planets has life yet to evolve?

On how many of those planets has intelligent life evolved?  And on how many of those planets is there intelligent life living right now?  And on how many of those planets has the intelligent life reached a level of technological development that allows them to travel into space?  Our own species has been able to travel into space for about 50 of the 7,000,000 years of our history.

How many intelligent species have even developed to a technological level that let them discover radio waves?  We could at least communicate with intelligent life on other planets, even if we couldn’t travel to the other planets.  But radio waves only travel at the speed of light.  If we had discovered radio waves, built a radio, and sent a message into space immediately, we couldn’t possibly get a response from another planet more than about 50 light years away, because you have to account for the time it would take the radio waves to cover that distance.  And we are still talking about 10,000 possible species that could answer us, spread out over billions of galaxies.

The next problem is that discovering radio waves was a major step along the road to discovering the Theory of Relativity.  That means that any species that developed a technological level to let them discover radio waves would discover how to annihilate themselves with nuclear weapons soon afterwards.  So you can bet that at least a few of them made that mistake.

The next thing you have to consider is the size of the universe, which is incomprehensibly large compared to the way we naturally perceive the world.  Obviously, there is nothing here on Earth we can compare to the size of the entire universe.  It’s about ten trillion light years in diameter.  Understanding what that means would require you to understand how big a trillion was, and how big a light year was.  Mathematicians and astronomers can figure it out easily enough, but it’s just one of those things that is never going to become personally meaningful to people over the course of their everyday lives.

Basically, ten thousand species of intelligent life spread out throughout the universe would be the equivalent of ten thousand single celled organisms swimming in the Pacific Ocean.  Like, there’s one microscopic organism swimming off the coast of Alaska, another off the coast of California, another over by Japan, another down by Australia, and so on.  What do you think the odds are any of them are ever going to find each other?

The next thing you have to consider is that we’ve basically exhausted the energy resources of our planet and we still haven’t figured out how to break the light barrier.  And not only that, we haven’t even figured out any conceivable way anyone else could break the light barrier.  So now we’re talking about 10,000 microscopic organisms swimming in the Pacific Ocean, none of which will swim more than 10 feet from the place of their birth ever in their lives.  If some aliens could figure out a way to do it, they would have to live on a planet that for some reason had vastly greater energy resources than our own does.  I’m pretty sure that no physicists or geologists have ever figured out what that form of energy could be, or how that much of it could be concentrated on one planet.  The Second Law of Thermodynamics affects them the same way it affects us, and I’ve already told you enough about that.  A star has an infinite supply of energy, as far as we’re concerned, and if we could find a way to extract it directly from the star/sun/whatever, we wouldn’t have to wait for it to shine on the Earth in the form of sunlight.  But the temperature of a star/sun/whatever is, like, 2 million degrees or something, which is hot enough to vaporize anything in the solar system.  So you can’t just land a bunch of mining equipment on the sun and dig up some sunlight to put in your spaceship’s fuel tank.

So to summarize to this point, if we assume there are 10,000 Earth-like planets in the universe, and we assume that life on those planets evolved pretty much the same way it did here, which is not a bad guess (for reasons I’ll explain more about in the next chapter), in order for us to be able to contact alien life:

An intelligent species would’ve had to evolve,

And live on that planet now,

And have developed to a space-age technological level,

At the same time we did,

Without wiping themselves out in a nuclear war,

And live on a planet that orbited one of the nearest few dozen of the hundreds of billions of billions of stars in the universe.

Basically, our chances of discovering intelligent alien life are worse than the chances of everyone on Earth winning the lottery and getting struck by lightning at the exact same instant.

So why do so many people feel like we must be able to find intelligent life in the universe anyway?
Do the words sensory  illusion ring a bell?

Let’s go back to my friend the ex-Christian UFO watcher and all his ex-Christian UFO watcher friends.  What psychological effect does religion have on people that the idea of contacting space-traveling aliens would also give them?  How about the feeling of being connected to someone else out there in the universe somewhere?  And the feeling of being connected to someone more powerful than themselves?

Next, how has the prospects of finding alien life shaped American’s cultural background over the course of the 20th century?

The first story about intelligent alien life, or at least, the first well-known story, was The War of the Worlds, by H.G. Wells.  From the moment people discovered other planets and discovered aviation, it was inevitable that someone was going to imagine intelligent life on another planet and imagine a way for one or the other to travel to the other planet.  And a new genre of science fiction was born.

Then, during the Kennedy administration, we landed a manned spacecraft on the moon.  Now the possibility that we could travel into space became personally meaningful to a hell of a lot of people.  So a lot more people began imagining a lot more possibilities.  You can just imagine what that did to the science fiction industry.  Within a few years, Gene Roddenberry was filming the original Star Trek series. Captain Kirk, Mr. Spock, and Dr. McCoy were beaming up to the starship Enterprise every week.  And a lot of anonymous crewmembers in red shirts were getting their faces eaten by aliens.

That was about 20 years after the Roswell incident, but you can see how the progression of scientific developments contributed to people’s ever-expanding imagination of what those scientific developments could lead to.  You remember what I said in the last book, about movie directors using establishing shots to plant an idea in your consciousness that they’re going to build upon later on?  If the heroine in a movie walks past a blender in a horror movie, the villain is probably about to cut her face off with it.  But if you’re watching a romantic comedy, it probably means her cute little four-year-old is about to splatter tomatoes all over the kitchen with it.
In 1947, even a rancher in New Mexico would’ve heard of the idea of intelligent space-traveling aliens.  His cultural background had already planted the original idea in his consciousness, or at least, not far down into his subconsciousness.  All there was left was for someone to build upon that original idea.

Have you ever noticed that all the UFOs in America are always sighted near top-secret military bases?  Does that seem at all strange to anyone?

So who do you suppose would want to build upon the ideas that had already been planted in people’s minds?

But why the f*ck would the military want to go to all this hassle to fool one rancher?

Let’s go back to the civilian version of the story now…

The next thing we can look at is how information flowed among the people in the story.  Who told what to who when?  And what did each of those people do with the information they got?
In the entire story, there are only two people who got anywhere near the aliens who didn’t work directly for the government:  The rancher and the coroner.  The rancher had a wife and two children, and there might’ve been a few other people working at the coroner’s office who saw something.  So we’re talking about maybe 8 people in all.

It’s virtually inevitable that air force engineers could manufacture some materials that a rancher had never seen before, and use them to build a type of aircraft he’d never seen before—even if they put a lot of research and development into these things specifically for this purpose.  Working as a theatrical set carpenter I make stuff no one has ever seen before every day of the week, so I’m sure air force engineers could figure out that trick too.  I also make simple things look like much more complicated things—like, making a water pump and some styrofoam look like a lovely waterfall trickling down over some rocks.  So again, I’m sure that air force engineers working on a top-secret base could figure out how to do my job.

Fooling one rancher who discovered a crash site in the middle of the night should not have been difficult.  Fooling him and his family and the town sheriff when they went back the next morning shouldn’t even have been terribly difficult.  But the people who staged this ruse couldn’t keep it up forever.  But they didn’t have to.  They convinced a few people they’d seen something—that is, built upon the pre-existing ideas in the people’s minds, showed them something tangible to reinforce those ideas, and got them to make strong emotional connections to them.  Then they disposed of all the evidence.  But they kept up the act of trying to hide something extremely important.  They gave everyone a lot of circumstantial evidence to go with the ideas that were being spread from a few people who had made strong emotional attachments to the idea that they’d seen a certain thing, and then they stood back and let the public try to fit the pieces together.

The fact that the air force doctors ordered five child-sized hermetically sealed caskets from the town mortuary doesn’t indicate anything.  It seems to indicate that the military doctors wanted to preserve the bodies of five child-sized dead people, because those are the first ideas that doctors ordering five child-sized hermetically sealed caskets pulls out of people’s subconsciousness.  In the same way, if you see a gray rock-shaped thing, the idea it pulls out of your subconsciousness is “a rock”, not “a carved piece of styrofoam”.  “Someone ordered five child-sized hermetically sealed caskets” pulls the “five dead child-sized people that he wants to preserve” idea out of your subconsciousness.  So you combine that with the “mysterious crash site nearby” idea that you already have in your consciousness, and the “they don’t want us to know what’s going on” idea.  That creates a “must be important” idea, followed by a “I wonder what it is” idea.  And then you try to fit all those ideas together to create an understanding of the situation.  At no point does the “he’s going to stick them in his basement and let them gather dust for the rest of his life” idea ever enter your consciousness.

Likewise for nine cargo planes landing in the airforce base, being loaded with cargo no one was allowed to see, and then taking off again.  That doesn’t prove anything either.  All they did was to give you some more circumstantial evidence to try to combine with everything else you thought you’d seen.

Did all of those air force nurses who said they’d conducted autopsies on aliens really get killed in suspicious accidents soon afterwards?  Or did they just spread some more information that suspicious people believed and gobbled up and then got put in some kind of witness protection program?  For that matter, were they really nurses at all, or were they CIA agents?

You remember what I said about space-travel science fiction taking off in the ‘60s, after John Glenn landed on the moon?  By the early ‘80s we were watching Star Trek movies.  Then people started coming out with investigative books about the Roswell conspiracy.  Then there were TV shows, movies, fictionalized TV shows, fictionalized movies…  And all these commercialized media accounts are made for the purpose of making as much money as possible, by appealing emotionally to the people with the most money.  We’re no longer talking about science.  Now we’re talking about art.  The Roswell conspiracy was once a conspiracy, but now it’s just a legend.  A demand was created to feel like all the events there fit together somehow, and now lots of people are making lots of money by supplying for that demand.  The air force officials gave everyone a little bit of circumstantial evidence to start with, and the public did the rest.

By 1997, a lot of people felt like their must be aliens out there in the universe somewhere.  They felt a connection to something greater and more powerful than themselves that lived somewhere far away.  Most of these people didn’t understand the vastness of universe, how long it takes to travel through that vastness even at the speed of light, or how thinly intelligent space traveling alien life must be spread.  And even if you tried to explain this to them, what do you think they would’ve said?  “Well, that’s what you think, but I feel it must be true.”   A few people have even told me that.

Basically, by this point the Roswell legend had become a religion.

So what more could anyone add to it?  How about something that looked like a spacecraft that thousands of people would see?  If you could fly a space-ship-looking thing over a major city without it crashing, you wouldn’t have to dispose of any debris or prevent anyone from visiting the crash site or offer them any explanation at all.  At this point, all you have to do is to show them some fake rocks carved out of styrofoam—oops, I mean, something that looks like a spacecraft—and all the beliefs people have built up around the original myth will take care of the rest.

So now that we’ve seen how information has flowed among people and shaped their perceptions of the situation, now let’s look at how people are acting upon that information.

What are people doing now?  Looking for UFOs.  Putting Roswell aliens on T-shirts and coffee mugs and refrigerator magnets and bumper stickers.  In short, so many people believe that aliens exist that they react emotionally to the idea that they exist out there somewhere as if they really did exist out there somewhere.  We have a whole culture of people who believe in aliens without any physical evidence to prove they exist, who read meaning into circumstantial evidence, and who ignore the physical evidence we do have about the universe in favor of the emotional attachments they’ve made to something they imagine.  It’s as if the director of the CIA collaborated with Walt Disney to invent a new religion.

And what else is happening now as a result of the Roswell incident?  Every top secret military base in the desert has a psychological wall around it now, where anyone who sees anything strange flying through the air automatically assumes it’s an alien spacecraft and goes spreading disinformation everywhere they go.  Either that, or when they start asking what’s going on the military officials make a bunch of flimsy excuses about weather balloons, and lots of other people assume that must prove it was a UFO. Then when people try to fit all the pieces of information together to understand the situation, the understanding they arrive at has nothing at all to do with top secret military experiments, in spite of the fact that all of these UFOs have been sighted above top secret military bases!  For all intents and purposes, the military’s top-secret research has been rendered completely invisible.

Admittedly, there are a lot of people who have researched the Roswell incident a lot more thoroughly than I have, and the story of what happened varies according to whose website you visit. But no matter which version of the story you read, they all have the same fundamental things in common:  A few people saw something, they didn’t get to keep any physical evidence of it, and a whole lot of people who work for the government gave people various pieces of circumstantial or unverifiable evidence.   Just look at how the story stacks up against what we know about the universe, and then compare that to who was involved in the event, how information flowed among them, how that information shaped their perception of the situation, how they acted upon their perceptions, and who benefited as a result.  It doesn’t matter what version of the story you read.  They’re all just variations on the same theme.

When you assemble all of the evidence—not just the evidence that seems directly related—see how it all fits together, and then look at what it indicates, what it indicates is that a lot of people have gone looking for a Roswell conspiracy, and walked into a trap.  They only found the conspiracy the conspirators wanted them to find.  The real conspiracy was the military acting like they were conspiring to cover up an event, and letting the public feel like they’d outsmarted the conspirators, so the public would never notice what the conspirators were really trying to keep secret.  The conspirators wove some basic elements of psychology together and manufactured an illusion.

I don’t mean to be a drag.  I don’t really give a f*ck what happened at Roswell.  I was getting you warmed up for the next section…

Filed under: y: 42 Vol. III by Ezra
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