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The United States, a global superpower after two hundred years of democratic independence, invents itself as the country that designed the modern world through industrial innovation. Its people believe they won both World Wars in single handed interventions to make the Western Hemisphere (and Japan) safe for Freedom and Democracy.
America's World War warriors dare to call themselves the Greatest Generation, and Hollywood movies of those wars give the impression that America did it all alone. That never played too well in the theaters of our Allies, especially those that hosted that theater of war, that suffered the cataclysms of death and destruction on their soil.
And so by nineteen fifty three, the year of my birth, the U.S. government, under the influence of the Dulles brothers, used the fear of communism to invent the Domino Theory (or Principle) as the official excuse for two decades of undemocratic violation of the sovereignty of foreign nations. (After the 'Fall of Communism' and its amnesia towards China, they would need another excuse, and chose Terrorism.)
American interests overthrew the government of Iran in 1953, a nation with a culture that existed for thousands of years as the Persian empire. The next year, they overthrew the government of Guatemala, a Hispanic country three hundred years older than the United States, with a Meso-American culture with roots that extend back three thousand years to a millennium before Christ.
The need to avoid public scrutiny and criticism of the CIA and its covert exercises of power that destroy democracies to install dictators, created a need for a way to control, or spin, information and public opinion. That need birthed the field of Public Relations, and brought into the fold of the United States intelligence community the innovation and vision of a man named Seyferth, who would preside over an American association of Public Relations firms for decades.
His lovely big eyed daughter Ginny, owner of her own Public Relations firm in Grand Rapids, Michigan in the early nineteen eighties, would serve developers who built the tallest buildings in town, taller than the Amway Grand Plaza hotel, on the West Bank of the Grand River. She kept it secret that the developers refused to acquiesce to Amway corporation's friendly offer to buy the top three floors of the new buildings, to avoid the need to build them. That way, Amway would ensure that the Amway Grand Plaza Hotel would maintain its dominance as the tallest building.
Maybe we should thank the entire field of Public Relations that it didn't happen. The developers rejected Amway's plot for skyline dominance, the three floors got built, and the Amway Grand lost its symbolic stature as a one fingered salute to Amway's international policy of Free Enterprise. Two decades later, accused of tax evasion and outlawed as a pyramid scheme in many countries, Amway sold out and the new owners changed its name.
No one ever found out about their plot to maintain that one fingered salute to pyramid marketing, until now.
Most of what I heard from all those crazy third world intellectuals, those rabid anti-Americans and hateful, jealous little nitwits that I characterized as Latin American closet Commies, resembled a reputable version of historical truth.
I couldn't understand why so few in my America, the portion north of Mexico and south of Canada, ever bothered to look.
Worse, few of those who look, see, and understand, ever give a damn. They ignore anyone who fights for social justice. That ignorance often frightens and sucks all the optimism out of those who care about other people's lives and deaths, about the quality of human life, about human rights, about the human right of each family, tribe, and nation to self determination as long as they guaranteed those same rights for others.
Most people would admit competition for money becomes the fertilizer for both the flowers of human progress and the root of all evil.
Like super pathogens, the affluent citizens of societies steeped in Consumerist Capitalism and the irrefutable Logic of Competition as the motor of progress close their eyes and relish with smug satisfaction their own personal triumphs, even if due to chance, or to compromised scruples, or to the distortion of flexible or secret rules. They sit protected in their castles, deaf to any cries of need, irresponsive to the desperation of the hungry. They smile at the "perhaps unethical, but not illegal" methods of their success. They ensure that their environment remains cleansed of the hungry, the poor, the infirm and maimed, the crippled, while they pollute everyone else's environment with their industrious and amoebic excesses, symbolized by their vehicles and golf courses. They pay lobbyists to help write laws that keep these personality disorders in power, while the rest of us feel hospitalized, trapped in debt. There mottos of bloated self assurance become the songs of Social Darwinism, that their monetary rewards prove their worth, that only the strong survive, that laws of nature dictate the survival of the fittest. They remain happily insulated, safe and beyond contact with those unfortunates with fewer resources, without self remedy, and don't care about those imprisoned without cause, without legal recourse. Most believe it the natural order of things, even if similar misfortune happens to their own children.
This Logic of Self cannot see, or understand, the social problems of unfettered self interest, because it cannot comprehend or value neither social interconnectedness nor our dependence on a clean biosphere.
Capitalism believes in the virtue of competition, which implies the existence of losers and the defeated, and in a world of the needy and disadvantaged, must, as a psychological self defense, undervalue compassion, cheapen empathy, belittle vulnerability and sensitivity, and instead relish the uneven advantage and create unethical strategies to control outcomes.
My own Capitalist logician's future appeared to me in a dream, where an unwelcome holier-than-Thou burned and sputtered near the end, a lone candle in a vast empty platinum cathedral of diamond ice, a shell around an obsidian black cross between two tree trunk pillars of jade that flowered in gold. I melted into a corruption of worms and slime that slid through the sewer grates and disappeared down the dark tunnels of forgetfulness.
Death passed me by once, and I resolved that the next time Death comes for me, if given the time for a last request, I would to sign up with any or all of numerous faith based cosmologies as final insurance, just in case one should prove correct.
Easier for death to prove the secular unbeliever wrong as he enters heaven or hell, than for the pious and faithful when their life goes out like a light bulb.
After generations with their thirst for knowledge blocked by marginalization, institutional ignorance, and religious superstition, the impoverished exist as a validation of the Social Darwinists' mean spirited meritocracy, where rewards go only to the worthy. This nightmarish fantasy allows them to ignore their own responsibility for the welfare of others. Instead of an open eyed appreciation of the reality of unfair privilege, nepotism, and protection of socioeconomic stratification, the super rich exist in a rarified stratosphere separated from the concerns of those people still connected to a biosphere contaminated by excess almost without notice.
America's consumerist Capitalist society believes itself a meritocracy of lone rangers in a system that rewards ambition. We believe in self made people, who bootstrap their way from poverty to personal success, and search out their stories as anecdotal evidence to support the myth of rugged individualism.
Simple and exclusive economic competition advantages those personality types who enjoy themselves when others fail, who aspire to dominate others, who do not value win/win situations, nor do they respect the peace-keeper philosophies devoted to the common good. Economic Competition favors individuals who form groups, powerful socioeconomic tribes, that conspire against social justice and excuse environmental contamination.
American schools, and media's, greatest success lies in how it instills in us the values of democracy, justice, and competition through a value system based on the dollar, with the theory that the cream will rise to the top.
The cream may rise to the top, but when it drags rot and corruption up from the bottom, it spoils everything.
This work is licensed under a Creative
Commons Developing Nations license.
E-mail: Mark Plimsoll