Do the Right Thing

Our modern world is built upon selfishness, and greed. We live in the Age of Scrooge, all the while yearning for Utopia, a world of goodness and of hope, a world from which suffering and pain have been banished. We long for a just and equitable world, a world in which each gives “according to her ability, and each receives according to her need”, where “all men are created equal”, and all live decent, hopeful, wholesome lives.

But Utopia is a fiction; and, in this world, Greed is God.

We humans wish for, and will demand in its absence, a social hierarchy in which a few have all too much while others, many others, have little, or next to nothing. How odd! Our closest relatives in the animal kingdom, the bonobo chimps of the African Congo, are so decidedly, so firmly, egalitarian. They live as though they belong to some great ape commune, a sort of kibbutz in the trees. Why can we not do the same, with a few reasonable substitutions, of course?

Many have tried. The Second Great Awakening of the early 19th century, for example, spawned any number of Utopian movements in the United States, concurrent, perhaps not coincidentally, to the initial development of Marxist theory in Western Europe. The early followers of Joseph Smith, for example, the Mormons who trekked westward across the grassland deserts of the American Midwest, arguably attempted to create a quasi-socialist, egalitarian city-upon-a-hill in their Great Basin paradise of Deseret, though their idea of “equality” didn’t include anyone other than white, Mormon males. And not just the Mormons, but many other religious and ideological communities of the time attempted to create such egalitarian societies only to see their experiments degenerate into rigid status hierarchies over time. Given a few generations, most human communities end up with a King or some other form of Grand Poobah.

Basely, we crave grossly unequal, hierarchical societies, anti- societies to which we return, time and again, in which some have more than they need, or even want, while others have far too little, and die early deaths of hardship and privation. Human nature is just ugly. We rape and murder, start wars, drop bombs, lie, cheat, steal, and otherwise lay waste to our planet. We are far from angels.

To be human is not, necessarily, to be good.

But there’s more to humanity than darkness and greed, and for all the ugliness we inflict upon our world, we are equally capable of astonishing acts of kindness and love. We ache for a world that’s fair and just. This fundamental division in our nature, the deep rift between dark and light, good and evil, a sort of constitutional and inherent dualism, is what drives us forward, ever forward, separating us from the rest of the animal kingdom. We are separated from our fellow animals by our very ability to recognize our divided nature, and by our ability to question our own actions.

So we are divided against ourselves. Longing to soar, we crawl the sewers, tasting the mud and bitter soil of the underworld from which so many of our actions spring. Only we, of all the creatures on Earth, are capable of self-reflection, of recognizing the basic division of our nature, and of asking, upon acting, whether we have done the right thing.

And now, here we are. The time has come. We must ask. Have we done the right thing?

Forty years ago, we embarked upon a massive, global program of social engineering in which the magical forces of “The Market” were unleashed upon us. These forty years have been characterized by rising poverty, precarity, and no small dose of misery among the 99%. Early on, Margaret Thatcher proclaimed that “there is no such thing as society!” In this brave new world of ours, as ushered in by Mrs Thatcher and her American partner, Ronald Reagan, there is no wider society to which The Market must be held to account. And without society and its collective sense of morality, we are only just individuals struggling against each other for survival in an atomized world.

Is this what we want? Is this a world we would wish for anyone other than our very worst enemy? Is this the legacy we wish to bestow upon our children and grandchildren, a world in which the mantra of “dog eat dog – NO QUARTER!” is scrawled in cheap, red paint upon the cathedral door? Is this the best we can do for ourselves?

We have become grossly accustomed to seeing men, women, and sometimes whole families, sleeping rough beneath bridges and highway overpasses. Poverty surrounds us, to the point where people living on the streets of the city do their “business” on city sidewalks, and office workers take great care to avoid soiling their shoes with shit and piss as they hurry to their high cubicles in glass towers where they write code to “Change the World!”, or plan exotic vacations for the well-to- do. We are so accustomed to this that we scarcely give it a second thought, but had we woken up one morning in the early days of the Age of Reagan and seen such scenes as these, we’d have been catatonically shocked at the horrid spectacle of it all.

We created this world.

We are responsible for this, even if just by way of passivity and acquiescence.

Have we done the right thing?

Our modern-day global excuse for religion, neoliberalism, the cult of the “free market”, preaches that poverty is natural, inequality good, and, this above all, “Greed is God!” It’s only natural, we are told, that humans should be unequal in their circumstances, as some are more worthy, talented, and cunning than others. These ubermensch deserve far better lives than those of us down below. Such is the dogma of meritocracy. Day after day, on television and in the press, the gospel of greed and  self-interest is tirelessly pushed.

Greed, my friend! Greed is God!

How terribly inhumane.

But we don’t inhabit a humane world. We inhabit “The Market”. And the thing about The Market is that it’s inherently unequal. In The Market, human suffering and inequality are natural conditions, like sunshine, rain and wind, with which we should not, and cannot, interfere.

Markets know best, they say, so when markets create misery, well, not to worry because this is good and natural, the best of all possible worlds! Suffering is inevitable because The Market creates privation and poverty as a natural consequence of its efficiency! This world that we now inhabit, a world that’s been stripped of community, and of public compassion and charity, a world in which there is “no such thing as society” to rectify the ugliness with which we are now surrounded, why, this world of opulence and tent cities, of abundance and abject destitution is the best of all possible worlds!

And so we have created yet another bulletproof hierarchy for ourselves to dwell within. The swelling egalitarianism of the mid-twentieth century has been done away with, relegated to the scrap heap of foolish, discarded ideas. The Market will decide which of us is meant to prosper, and which is meant to die. Hierarchy is Inevitable; Long Live The Market!

Or so we are told.

This world of suffering and inequality is a choice we have made. Whether we, you and I, are actively its architects, or have simply acquiesced to it by way of our collective silence, we are all of us complicit in the neoliberal nightmare. The human world is a human creation, and the way in which we organize our world is a choice we have made, and continue to make, on a day-to-day basis. We choose to allow this gross and immoral world, and, in my view, we can just as easily choose otherwise.

The neoliberal experiment began as a reaction to what seemed like the inevitability of socialism in the wake of the Russian Revolution and the horrible privations of the Great Depression. The project was actively formulated and developed, following very logical steps from gestation to implementation, with each opportunity for advance having been earnestly taken where possible. Think tanks were formed, disciples recruited, coups d’état carried out. In short, neoliberalism was no accident, and neither must its replacement be.

To create a new, more equitable and fair world, a world in which all of us might thrive, we must first envision that world. Just as the nascent neoliberals once did, in the 1940s and ‘50s, we must put our heads together and formulate a theory, nurture a philosophy, build a network of like-minded souls. We must envision, and design, a social- economic theory, and system, that can compete with, surpass, and ultimately render the neoliberal nightmare obsolete.

Can we imagine and create such a system?

This is our challenge, and I’m not so sure the challenge can be met.

We mammals adore a hierarchy, with alphas and betas and deltas all existing in the space allowed their kind. After the Fall of the USSR, for example, Russia quickly returned to what it had always been, a up- and-down hierarchy with a ‘Tsar’ and a small ‘aristocracy’ atop a mass of peons below. One might think that after 70 years of socialist ideology and Utopian dreams of a perfect world, however imperfectly implemented, Russia would have recoiled at the return of its ancien regime, the ludicrously unfair world of Tsarist Russia. But rather than revolt, they seem to have settled-in, as if settling -down to doze in an old and comfortable, though badly worn, armchair.

I’m not sure it’s possible that we might create a better, fairer system because we are divided against ourselves, divided between the dark and the light, and more often than not, it seems the dark side takes the day. Nonetheless, I insist that we have a responsibility to try! Knowing better, knowing that a better world is possible, that its creation is always within our grasp because We Make Our World means that we have a responsibility to do our best to create something better than the nightmare, neoliberal world. We have a duty to try, even if we should fail, because we know better, and this duty cannot be discharged with a shrug and a wank just because the cynics and naysayers insist it cannot be done, that we must give in to the baseness of our nature, that we must live like animals in a zoo enclosure, with our noses up the backside of the Dominant Alpha Chimp.

We are responsible for the world in which we live. We cannot complain that this world is unfair and ugly without attempting to change it for the better because we determine the shape and form of our world, and if that world is ugly and unfair then we need only look in the mirror to see the reason why it might be so. We, you and I, are responsible.

Now we must Do the Right Thing.