Surviving Capitalism (Not) : US Foreign Policy Is A War On Disobedience

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

Sunday, July 7, 2019

US Foreign Policy Is A War On Disobedience

Click here to access article by Caitlin Johnstone (Australian) from her weblog.

Johnstone's concern about the continuation of human species is very much appreciated, but I think she fails to diagnose the problem.

... we’ve all got some important questions to ask ourselves, haven’t we? Do we desire to stay in the familiar US-controlled world order at the price of omnicide and ecocide, or do we wish to roll the dice and bet on humanity instead? Do we wish to stay the course because it preserves a status quo that is all we’ve ever known, or do we take a leap of faith on the possibility that we can de-escalate all geopolitical enmity and move into collaboration with each other and with our ecosystem?

This choice right here is why I write so much about mankind’s need to transcend its old conditioning patterns and move into something wildly unprecedented. Our current fear-based mentality makes a populism-driven leap of faith into transcendence impossible and ensures that we remain on an oligarch-driven trajectory toward extinction. I firmly believe that we have the freedom to either pass or fail this test, but we don’t have the freedom not to take it. We’ll transcend our old conditioning patterns which we inherited from our evolutionary ancestors who lived in a wildly different world from the one we’ve created, or we will perish. It’s an A or B choice, but the choice is ours.

I argue that it is not our inherited "fear-based mentality" from our evolutionary ancestors so much as it is the addiction to power which concentrated wealth delivers in abundance. Thus, aggression in the form of imperialism is necessary to preserve the system of capitalism and makes imperialism a necessity for the continuance of this system.

If "fear-based mentality" is at the root of the problem, I think it may be a result of our conscious awareness of death because power creates the illusion of omnipotence. To survive as a species, we humans must outgrow this fear of death by recognizing the reality that our evolved species is only an infinitesimal and fragile part of the web of life that continually tries to renew itself on a tiny planet within a vast universe. We must grow out of the immature delusions spread by the old religions that we must ...

have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth [including other humans]. (Gen. 1:26)