We’ve lived so long under the spell of hierarchy—from god-kings to feudal lords to party bosses—that only recently have we awakened to see not only that “regular” citizens have the capacity for self-governance, but that without their engagement our huge global crises cannot be addressed. The changes needed for human society simply to survive, let alone thrive, are so profound that the only way we will move toward them is if we ourselves, regular citizens, feel meaningful ownership of solutions through direct engagement. Our problems are too big, interrelated, and pervasive to yield to directives from on high.
—Frances Moore Lappé, excerpt from Time for Progressives to Grow Up

Saturday, September 5, 2015

Capitalism—a love story

Click here to access article by Lynn Stuart Parramore from Reuters.
Can something as basic as love become an addiction? Artists have always said so. Now, scientific researchers find that intense preoccupation with a love object lights up the brain with chemicals in ways that can be as compelling as shooting up. But unlike the pipe, the blackjack table or the online escort service, intense romantic attachments are a culturally sanctioned mode of escape.
I would express the last sentence even stronger by writing that romantic love in a capitalist society is promoted to fill the alienated lives of workers, to encourage isolated nuclear families so that ordinary people will look to capitalist designated authorities for guidance on all matters instead of their friends and neighbors, to pass on the accumulated wealth of the capitalist class to heirs which contributes to the concentration of wealth and power, to sell all the accouterments necessary to make one an attractive love object, among a number of other reasons. Thus we ordinary people are all strongly induced to become addicts to romantic love as the ruling capitalist class are encouraged to become addicts to wealth and power.
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