Are human beings incurably depraved? Our masters talent for continuing to fuck things up for their inferiors is to be expected, even if it is genocidal. But our own talent as slaves for being so gullible, so lazy, so narcissist, so dis-empowered, so depressed to do any meaningful thing for our own good or the good of the whole should make us all despair not only for succeeding generations but for our present, toxic, death-laden one.
Since as long as I remember, it was conventional wisdom that pedophiles/child molesters were also incurably depraved. This was alleged because the trauma they faced themselves as children - defiled and deflowered more than we defile and deflower most other children - was so great, so severe, that it had done irreparable harm: the wound had cut too deep to heal.
Anyone who is immediately unsettled by my drawing an analogy between ourselves and pedophiles does not know, fundamentally, what we do in the names of God and Commerce - to children: it is just a glimpse to what we do otherwise and elsewhere.
Arguably, after white slave trafficking, the subjugation of women, Jewish holocausts, economic-induced famines, nuclear detonations on civilians, bombing ancient civilizations back into the Stone Age, court-sanctioned wife beatings, the forced migration of millions of nameless Africans from their homeland and their new Christian governments turning the other cheek to lynching, the extermination campaigns against Amerindians, Native Hawaiians, Aboriginals, and the forced relocation of the survivors, a Holy Inquisition against earth-based religious followers - not to forget the State Inquisitions against labor and human-rights activists: it's probably fair to say we've all been a bit defiled and deflowered and traumatized.
But have the wounds run too deep for us to stop the bleeding?
Watching reality shows, like Gordon Ramsay's "Master Chef" the one thing I take away is that there are countless people out there - many gainfully employed in revered professions - who despise their lives because they are unfulfilled by their work, which, if you include getting dressed, commutes, and actual eight-nine hours workday, consumes the vast part of our time in the sun and our youth and our energies. Time, keep in mind, we will never get back.
These people are ready to chuck it all away in a tantrum of hopefulness for the chance in a 1,000 to be the selected 100, to compete to do something meaningful and creative with their lives, like being a cook.
And yet, for all their supposed job status in the twin towers, they have no power over their lives to make themselves better, or make anything better. All they are empowered to do is work harder or displace themselves from the machine and win a lottery.
Why not chuck the system away? Why not destroy the machine itself? But are we, as I originally asked, too traumatized to do even that?
The trauma is often intentional and meant to instruct deliberately. In that way it is different than the abuse we do to children. Or is it? Beating up, deporting, and shooting labor activists can have a very sobering effect on other workers who will think twice about speaking up; and they won't think once about befriending that brash coworker who is always causing problems.
So many classrooms to this alleged "service-oriented" economy are still arranged with the factory system in mind. Rows of desks, all facing the head, the teacher, whose instructions must be followed to the letter or you are singled out to stand in a corner, after school detention, or to the principal's office for worse punishment. This is as it was intended, then and now: a model workplace. The good students raise their hands, are otherwise quiet, faces down in their books; the bad kids won't follow direction.
Assigning various hash tags to our economy is a bullshit enterprise that may only interest the cottage industry of Economics Departments. Industrial. Post-Industrial. Service Oriented. Capitalist ... and my favorite blooper: the mixed economy. These all hide the reality of a slave system that demands obedience to the ruling order, the chain of command, the titans of industry. Our way of life [which even in the loosest sense of the meaning of the word civilization: it is not].
If I did join the bullshitters, the economics departments, and the spinning talking heads the better tag for our system is a European system. But even this is sloppy.
To the extent we have a memory, it is to Europe [which in itself shows we have no memory]. To the extent we relate to an institutional history it is to that horrid little boil on the planet, with its kings and queens, its hollow liberty, equality, fraternity, which managed by fault of geography to be a war-loving, savage, greedy monstrosity
You can go back to the Greeks and Romans for equally heinous civilizations, and study, for example, how the aggregation of Roman civilization directly contributed to the clear-cutting of the old growth forests of Northern Africa: to build Roman ships to conquer new lands, to subdue Egypt for grain needed to feed Roman citizens. This produced an arid desert, perfect for David Lean to film on for his "Lawrence of Arabia."
But to the average American - by design - Greece connotes exotic food and a pantheon of human gods. Rome is pretty much reduced to a list of emperors we know nothing about, and it imploded ... because it violated some prohibitions of the Old Testament. Something like that, right?
Our history books falsely delineate Ancient Greece and Rome from Modern Industrial Europe, but it is actually the same creature in different advanced stages of ... decay. Yes, the mightier its sword the worse its consequences to the ecosystem.
Europe, imperial, majestic, and bloodthirsty, is to the ancients not what humans are to their ape predecessors: not an evolution backwards. Europe is the prince of Wales, the first born, the male heir to the ancient civilization.
As one German expatriate friend noted, the European landscape is a barren wasteland unfit for human life, let alone our monuments to their plunder, and undeserving the huge concentrations of wealth and power. This runs exactly counter to what we are carefully taught about Europe's genetic and racial superiority contrasted with the inferiors of the global South, so it needs some careful unpacking.
In other words, they had to search outside for development.
The wealth of the world, the riches, lie in the soil and sweat of the global South, which is poor and despised and maligned for its laziness and backwardness. That's why Europe has been so obsessed with the global South, scrambling for them, with how its states are drawn up, who rules them and how, and making sure any nationalists, labor activists, communists, anarchists - anyone who will rock the boat is exterminated quickly, often with European weapons: this is called "stability".
And this is why the global South is poor and despised and maligned.
The real impoverishment lies in the global North, which has few resources, what arable land it has is quickly turned into a dust-bowls by backward farming practices, yet it is praised for its advanced civilization.
The religion of Europe - Christianity - is a wonder of the world, but not really. What predatory society has not had a corresponding philosophy, which would allow - say, in keeping with my earlier allusion - the persistent abuse of children in a Roman Catholic Church and not be shut down, taken over, disbanded?
In other, more brutal, words, Europe's incurably depravity is rooted in the values it had to cultivate ... and teach, enforce, justifying mediocrity for superiority; wealth from conquest and theft; and for calling any man or woman who refused to turn their other cheek a criminal terrorist. Do not, an English historian in not a too dissimilar context alerted, "let too much daylight in on the magic."
Europe's barrenness and its needs not only to breed wars within its region for survival - and to develop in the peculiar way it did, militaristically, because of its needs for war - but also to spread these wars of conquest to any corner of the world.
Frontiers always close down at some point, and a people whose civilization is parasitic from the genesis must always find another route to India.
Presently, Europe is going through yet another upheaval. Its civilization was always precariously placed on the backs of the global South, it bribed wider and wider sectors of its population with higher wages and social benefits - meaning: greater access to the pillage of the global South - and now it has collided with yet another frontier closure. It is not going peacefully into its twilight: 19th century style colonial wars are becoming the norm, even if our teachers won't call our adventures in Afghanistan and the other Stans, Yemen, the Sudan and AfriComm, Iraq, ad nauseum, just what they are.
The world is not their oyster; a quarter of the globe will not be painted red to represent the British Empire. Other empires are rising from the East, which promise to bring more problems - not just competing and outbidding with our traditional masters in Europe, which I could care less about - but mimicking the European civilization and decimating the ecosystem still further.
This is after all how the West was won - the West being a vast, right-wing conspiracy of merchants and slave traders who cut off the heads of the feudal regimes to burn villages to save them and construct monuments.
The global hedge funds, billionaires, and emerging global governments of India and the People's Republic of China are scrambling to buy the best arable land in Africa, leaving the worst lands for the Africans, who face displacement, famine, disease, and of course being called lazy and unable to govern themselves by Western commentators.
More Christian missionaries cannot be far off.
This is the European system. It is, as the rightwing Economist Magazine once headlined "the Anglo-Saxon system." It is incapable of correcting its wrongs and brought us up - its slaves, its Eichmanns, its paper pushers, its mediocre managers - to believe in the utter perfection of the system, to dissociate the carnage, the collateral damage, the suffering, the polluting to air, water, land, and spirit.
Philosopher George Draffan is easily right: sooner or later we will revisit the Stone Age. How we get there, what becomes of humanity and the ecosystem cannot be left in the hands of pirates, even and especially the pirates in our own heads, put their by a carefully constructed indoctrination system.
The pirate instead of preparing for a long, cold winter want to expend huge amounts of energy to extract the last drops of petroleum from the earth.
This is bad religion.
Still, worst there is something else we can learn from those reality shows I referred to. What they demonstrate is not only our unhappiness of the state of things, our visceral reaction to a slave system, but they also sadly show our inclination to seek mystical solutions to real social problems. Lotteries and gambling casinos will neither end poverty, reverse disturbing social trends, or dismantle genocidal paradigms. These games are a form of magical thinking.
"It is now time for a destructive order to be reversed, and it is well to inform other races that the aboriginal cultures of North America were not devoid of beauty. Furthermore, in denying the Indian his ancestral rights and heritages the white race is but robbing itself. America can be revived, rejuvenated, by recognizing a Native School of thought" Chief Luther Standing Bear [Lakota Sioux].
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