W.J. Astore
In my latest article for TomDispatch.com, I look afresh at the many reasons why America’s wars persist — and why the “war train” is soundin’ ever louder across America and indeed much of the world.
Here’s an excerpt; please read the entire article at TomDispatch.
Think of this as the new American exceptionalism. In Washington, war is now the predictable (and even desirable) way of life, while peace is the unpredictable (and unwise) path to follow. In this context, the U.S. must continue to be the most powerful nation in the world by a country mile in all death-dealing realms and its wars must be fought, generation after generation, even when victory is never in sight. And if that isn’t an “exceptional” belief system, what is?
If we’re ever to put an end to our country’s endless twenty-first-century wars, that mindset will have to be changed. But to do that, we would first have to recognize and confront war’s many uses in American life and culture.
War, Its Uses (and Abuses)
A partial list of war’s many uses might go something like this: war is profitable, most notably for America’s vast military-industrial complex; war is sold as being necessary for America’s safety, especially to prevent terrorist attacks; and for many Americans, war is seen as a measure of national fitness and worthiness, a reminder that “freedom isn’t free.” In our politics today, it’s far better to be seen as strong and wrong than meek and right.
As the title of a book by former war reporter Chris Hedges so aptly put it, war is a force that gives us meaning. And let’s face it, a significant part of America’s meaning in this century has involved pride in having the toughest military on the planet, even as trillions of tax dollars went into a misguided attempt to maintain bragging rights to being the world’s sole superpower.
And keep in mind as well that, among other things, never-ending war weakens democracy while strengthening authoritarian tendencies in politics and society. In an age of gaping inequality, using up the country’s resources in such profligate and destructive ways offers a striking exercise in consumption that profits the few at the expense of the many.
In other words, for a select few, war pays dividends in ways that peace doesn’t. In a nutshell, or perhaps an artillery shell, war is anti-democratic, anti-progressive, anti-intellectual, and anti-human. Yet, as we know, history makes heroes out of its participants and celebrates mass murderers like Napoleon as “great captains.”
What the United States needs today is a new strategy of containment — not against communist expansion, as in the Cold War, but against war itself. What’s stopping us from containing war? You might say that, in some sense, we’ve grown addicted to it, which is true enough, but here are five additional reasons for war’s enduring presence in American life:
- The delusional idea that Americans are, by nature, winners and that our wars are therefore winnable: No American leader wants to be labeled a “loser.” Meanwhile, such dubious conflicts — see: the Afghan War, now in its 18th year, with several more years, or even generations, to go — continue to be treated by the military as if they were indeed winnable, even though they visibly aren’t. No president, Republican or Democrat, not even Donald J. Trump, despite his promises that American soldiers will be coming home from such fiascos, has successfully resisted the Pentagon’s siren call for patience (and for yet more trillions of dollars) in the cause of ultimate victory, however poorly defined, farfetched, or far-off.
- American society’s almost complete isolation from war’s deadly effects: We’re not being droned (yet). Our cities are not yet lying in ruins (though they’re certainly suffering from a lack of funding, as is our most essential infrastructure, thanks in part to the cost of those overseas wars). It’s nonetheless remarkable how little attention, either in the media or elsewhere, this country’s never-ending war-making gets here.
- Unnecessary and sweeping secrecy: How can you resist what you essentially don’t know about? Learning its lesson from the Vietnam War, the Pentagon now classifies (in plain speak: covers up) the worst aspects of its disastrous wars. This isn’t because the enemy could exploit such details — the enemy already knows! — but because the American people might be roused to something like anger and action by it. Principled whistleblowers like Chelsea Manning have been imprisoned or otherwise dismissed or, in the case of Edward Snowden, pursued and indicted for sharing honest details about the calamitous Iraq War and America’s invasive and intrusive surveillance state. In the process, a clear message of intimidation has been sent to other would-be truth-tellers.
- An unrepresentative government: Long ago, of course, Congress ceded to the presidency most of its constitutional powers when it comes to making war. Still, despite recent attempts to end America’s arms-dealing role in the genocidal Saudi war in Yemen (overridden by Donald Trump’s veto power), America’s duly elected representatives generally don’t represent the people when it comes to this country’s disastrous wars. They are, to put it bluntly, largely captives of (and sometimes on leaving politics quite literally go to work for) the military-industrial complex. As long as money is speech (thank you, Supreme Court!), the weapons makers are always likely to be able to shout louder in Congress than you and I ever will.
- America’s persistent empathy gap. Despite our size, we are a remarkably insular nation and suffer from a serious empathy gap when it comes to understanding foreign cultures and peoples or what we’re actually doing to them. Even our globetrotting troops, when not fighting and killing foreigners in battle, often stay on vast bases, referred to in the military as “Little Americas,” complete with familiar stores, fast food, you name it. Wherever we go, there we are, eating our big burgers, driving our big trucks, wielding our big guns, and dropping our very big bombs. But what those bombs do, whom they hurt or kill, whom they displace from their homes and lives, these are things that Americans turn out to care remarkably little about.
All this puts me sadly in mind of a song popular in my youth, a time when Cat Stevens sang of a “peace train” that was “soundin’ louder” in America. Today, that peace train’s been derailed and replaced by an armed and armored one eternally prepared for perpetual war — and that train is indeed soundin’ louder to the great peril of us all.
Please read the rest of the article here at TomDispatch.com.
Bracing Views 
I would only quibble with one word in this article, and that is your use of the word “powerful” in the 7th line. This is not power. – Nicolas
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Yes. “Powerful” by their definition — judged by weaponry. The old “arsenal of democracy” idea, except we’re no longer a democracy. We just have the arsenal.
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I just read your article in TD. In my opinion you buried the reason for never ending wars. You mention exceptionalism. I call that concept preeminence. With it is one of the few ways we try to fill the void, or as you said in fewer words, try to give meaning to life. There can be no doubt our lives are becoming increasingly meaningless so we double down and double down again with what we know despite the self-destruction. https://thelastwhy.ca/poems/2015/6/25/life-a-reaction-to-the-void
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Yes. “War is a force that gives us meaning,” as Chris Hedges wrote. It provides (false) meaning and purpose. It’s an amazingly powerful force, which is one reason why only Congress should declare war.
And the last time that happened in the USA was December of 1941.
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Abraham Lincoln did say “A house divided against itself cannot stand,” but he was just quoting Jesus. (Matthew 12:25)
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Yes. Lincoln was deeply read in the Bible and quoted it often, though he was not a conventional Christian.
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Doug Barr–It appears to me you are trying to blur some lines, or perhaps you are confused about, what one might call general human psychology and the official policies of a specific government, that of the USA. [As a student of Anthropology, I point out that though our primate ancestors are prone to outbursts of violence, there is no evidence that making war, especially in the contemporary phase of human society, fulfills an innate “need.”] Yes, the US seeks to be “pre-eminent”–or to be blunter, DOMINANT–over the rest of the globe. Where “exceptionalism”–which I have designated the American Disease–enters the picture is the attempt to justify military aggression by suggesting (some are less subtle and openly assert) that the US somehow has been granted a “right” to do this by “a higher power.” (Apparently God Himself revealed to George W. Bush that he was born to be “a war president” and the genius Rick Perry asserted recently that Donald Trump was put in the presidency by direct Divine action.) A “right” to send assassin drones anywhere, anytime, to target anyone who’s been designated a Bad Guy. This is absurd, if not insane, on the face of it. (In olden times, Rudyard Kipling called it “the white man’s burden” to bring civilization to less “enlightened” peoples.) If there was an international court that had some teeth, the US would be vigorously swatted down, ordered to cease and desist. But one of the greatest tragedies of our time is that there is no power on Earth that could stand up to this Monster (as John Kay and his band Steppenwolf rightly identified the US 50 years ago) even if it could find the backbone to make the attempt.
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Good point, Greg. It’s the idea “might makes right” — when it’s America’s might. Because we’re exceptional and see further and fight noble causes and so on …
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I think that the main reason of the current level of militarism in the USA foreign policy is that after dissolution of the USSR neo-conservatives were allowed to capture the State Department and foreign policy establishment. This process actually started under Reagan. During Bush II administration those “crazies from the basement” fully controlled the US foreign policy and paradoxically they continued to dominate in Obama administration too.
They preach “Full Spectrum Dominance” (Wolfowitz doctrine) and are not shy to unleash the wars to enhance the USA strategic position in particular region (color revolution can be used instead of war, like they in 2014 did in Ukraine). Of course, being chichenhawks, neither they nor members of their families fight in those wars.
For some reason despite his election platform Trump also populated his administration with neoconservatives. So it might be that maintaining the USA centered global neoliberal empire is the real reason and the leitmotiv of the USA foreign policy. that’s why it does not change with the change of Administration: any government that does not play well with the neoliberal empire gets in the hairlines.
Which also means that the USA foreign policy is not controlled by the elected officials but by the “DeepState” (look at Vindman and Fiona Hill testimonies for the proof). So this is kind of Catch 22 in this the USA have found itself. We will be bankrupted by our neoconservative foreign establishment (which self-reproduce in each and every administration). and we can do nothing to avoid it.
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Good point. But why the rise of the neocons? Why did they prosper? I’d say because of the military-industrial complex. Or you might say they feed each other, but the Complex came first. And of course the Complex is a dominant part of the Deep State. How could it not be? Add in 17 intelligence agencies, Homeland Security, the Energy Dept’s nukes, and you have a dominant DoD that swallows up more than half of federal discretionary spending each year.
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I agree, but it is a little bit more complex. You need an ideology to promote the interests of MIC. You can’t just say — let’s spend more than a half of federal discretionary spending each year..
That’s where neo-conservatism comes into play. So they are not only lobbyists for MIC, but they also serve as “ideological support”, trying to manipulate public opinion in favor of militarism.
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Yes. Ideology is vital. During the Cold War it was all about containing/resisting/defeating the godless Communists. Once they were defeated, what then? We heard brief talk about a “peace dividend,” but then the neocons came along, selling full-spectrum dominance and America as the sole superpower.
The neocons were truly unleashed by the 9/11 attacks, which they exploited to put their vision in motion. The Complex was only too happy to oblige, fed as it was by massive resources.
Think about how no one was punished for the colossal intelligence failure of 9/11. Instead, all the intel agencies were rewarded with more money and authority via the PATRIOT Act.
The Afghan war is an ongoing disaster, the Iraq war a huge misstep, Libya a total failure, yet the Complex has even more Teflon than Ronald Reagan. All failures slide off of it.
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There is a still bigger picture to consider in all this. I don’t want to open the door to conspiracy theory–personally, I find the claim that explosives were placed inside the World Trade Center prior to the strikes by aircraft on 9/11 risible–but it certainly was convenient for the Regime Change Gang that the Saudi operatives were able to get away with what they did on that day, and in preparations leading up to it. Leaving that specific incident aside, the bigger picture is that the brains behind the Deep State understand that global capitalism is running out of new resources (which includes human labor) to exploit. Why is the US so concerned with Africa right now, with spies and Special Forces operatives all over that continent? Africa is the final frontier for development/exploitation. (The US is also deeply concerned about China’s setting down business roots there, and wants to counterbalance their activities.) Once the great majority of folks in Africa have cellphones and subscriptions to Netflix…whither capitalism? Trump denies the severity of the climate crisis because that is part of the ideology/theology of the GOP. The brains in the US Ruling Class know full well that natural resources will become ever more valuable moving forward, as weather disasters make it harder to access them. Thus, the Neo-Cons (you thought I’d never get around to them, right?) came to the fore because they advocate the unbridled use of brute military force to obtain what they want from the world. Or, to use their own terminology, the US “must have the capability to project force anywhere on the planet” at a moment’s notice. President Obama was fully in agreement with that concept. Beware the wolf masquerading as a peaceable sheep!
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Good point, Greg. Trump is more than obvious about his desire for oil, though that’s a bit old fashioned. Shouldn’t we be more concerned about lithium, which Bolivia seems to have in abundance?
https://news.yahoo.com/bolivia-huge-untapped-reserves-gears-soaring-lithium-demand-013650510.html
Hmm, I wonder why there was a coup in Bolivia, with a new, corporate-friendly, leader garnering instant U.S. support?
Our leaders like to say we value human rights around the world, but what they really manifest is greed. It all makes sense in a Gekko- or Machiavellian kind of way.
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Bill, “if there was a just God in Heaven,” words about human rights would turn to ashes in the mouths of the hypocritical politicians spouting them!!
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Well, God’s not in heaven; He’s in our genes and in the laws of physics. He’s also a concept in our psyches that we seek to emulate, or to actually become…We want to be God…Remember the Genesis story?
Leaving aside theology though…For me, Jay Hanson has nailed it:
http://www.jayhanson.org/loop.htm
The thing in which he erred, and a whole of other people aren’t getting right either, however, was his belief that we are now at ultimate limits on exosomatic energy, that renewables can’t ever deliver as much energy as fossils have, but truth is they have potential to deliver a lot more, and then too we might even get a controlled nuclear fusion breakthrough.
The situation now is that we have next-paradigm techs that require extremely large investments to implement and at the same time we are running on the status quo totally unsustainable energy-and-everything- else paradigm and expecting continued economic growth. We are in a super hi-stress transition period and will be so for another few generations. The instinctive pressures to continue increasing power and competing for it combined with our Tower-of-Babel divisiveness of cultures and all kinds of -isms are setting us up for continued and intensifying warfare. Moreover, even IF, a mighty big IF, we make it through this dangerous period without self-/ecosystem-destruction/totally unrecoverable modern economic collapse, what next?
My view is that it would probably be better that we undergo modern economic collapse so that we lose the power to destroy our species, a lot of others, and make the earth unlivable. That may just happen but in the meantime, here we are, each parts of amoral amoebae (hierarchical mega social entities) in the transition danger zone with the same genes we’ve always had driving us along.
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I’m not a “fan” of NY Times columnist Thomas Friedman, but he “hit it out of the park” many years ago (could even be about 20, given how time flies for me) when he wrote that what’s needed is a “Manhattan Project level” undertaking to accelerate transition to renewable energy sources. Surprise, surprise, “the political will” was lacking. And clearly still is. Global warming is an irreversible catastrophe, but only part of what we might call Planetary Suicide Syndrome. While some scientists continue to pursue the Magic Bullet to finally vanquish cancer (think of the profit margin on THAT product!), the mechanism of the status quo continues to pump the environment full of horrid poisons, deplete the ocean fisheries, dump the waste from factory farming on us, etc. This will not end prettily, fellow humans.
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There have been a couple of proposals for such a Manhattan- or Apollo-like renewable energy projects and they didn’t fly. Now, there’s the GND and we’ll see how that flies. There is a huge amount of investment in renewable energy happening now, in the private sector: https://www.globalresearch.ca/climate-money-trail/5690209.
As I see it, the financialplex (our amoeba’s brain) is well-aware of the need to transition to non-fossil energy sources, and I say non-fossil because, unfortunately, nuclear energy (especially nexgen nuclear fission, thorium and liquid salt reactor techs) that’s touted as virtually inexhaustible and perfectly safe is bound to be pushed, as it is perceived as zero-carbon, and carbon is perceived as the enemy.
There is however a split in the brain: a group that’s seeking to become the owners/the controllers of non-fossil energy and another group that wants to stay focused on fossils because it’s their business model that’s still making them lots of profits. There is some overlap between them, some hedging of bets, or trying to assure a good position for their future beyond fossils. Right now, the fossil-fuel pushers are still throttle-up and it’s not certain if the transition to non-fossil will be made smoothly due to the need to make the gigantic investments as we seek to maintain economic growth and face tightening supplies + dropping EROEI.
I speculate that a lot of the effort (financial backing behind the activists) is to use climate change/AGW concerns to accelerate the transition, to put the green investors in the driver’s seat for the next-paradigm in energy…to get the next energy profits flowing to them ASAP. They don’t really care about climate change but just want to be in control of next energy and get it going as soon as they can, and there’s also a lot of profit in being the ones who control games like carbon trading.
As to climate change/AGW concern, I personally remain a bit agnostic, knowing how uncertain the science really is, especially on earth-atmosphere-biosphere system complexity, non-anthro causation mechanisms, and net negativity of effects. I know too how abused such matters can be as drivers for research funding that scientists must have . Nevertheless, I’d rather err on the safe side…We don’t really know what we’re doing with our CO2 injection mega experiment…best we put an end to it ASAP, but no nukes!
The deeper problem, the true root, is that we humans, lifeforms that we are, continue to seek growth, ever-increasing resource control, power. That’s a basic life-driving instinct. We do also have instincts that can lead us toward steady-state, non-growth economics, but those instincts only kick-in when we’ve exhausted our economy’s resources under its status quo tech+resource paradigm…almost always when it’s too late to make a smooth transition. Unfortunately we moderns are not like the folks on Tikopia who long ago were forced by their geographical circumstance and tech limits to shift into no-growth mode.
Don’t forget too that there’s a lot more than energy tightening-up in supply. There are even scarier threats, likely harder to handle too, in the realm of food production (topsoil loss and mineral depletion) and fresh water supplies:
Click to access PopulationCrash_ProspectsForFamineInTheTwenty-FirstCentury.pdf
Yes, and lots of minerals are hitting limits, and with our current Li battery tech we are also creating whole new issues of resource scarcity and control even within a renewable energy framework (Bolivia). One good thing on the battery tech front though is that numerous non-Li, non-rare-mineral battery types are being researched…so we might dodge the Li supply bullet, but there’ll be other things too not so easily averted, and we still have huge amounts of work to do on getting up to speed on recycling.
The way it is:
Everything in our current economy is not sustainable, be it sources or sinks. We are at or beyond limits on many life-critical resources. We continue expecting growth. As larger and larger social entities we behave more and more amorally. We have instincts for warfare, and always come up with rationalizations for it.
Maybe we’ll get lucky and just mush-in while our economies weaken so much that we can’t afford all-out global war?
Maybe the awareness of spaceship earth and common humanity will become strong enough to make us go Tikopian before it’s too late?
Probabilities on those “maybes”?
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Greg Horrall — Why do consumers make purchase decisions that will ultimately destroy the biosphere on which all life depends? 1.) They have been programmed to do so by the magic of marketing; 2.) they are sadly ignorant of the consequences of their actions (this is obviously especially true of the US consumer–ignorance is bliss!!). I think you are confusing the status quo of out of control Capitalism with basic human needs and desires. Do we, as individuals, really hanker for “unlimited” economic expansion? Will our lives really be improved if Corporation XYZ gains monopoly control of the cellphone market in Country ABC? Look at how many Americans are working more than one job and still falling behind. “Oh, there’s no other way, stay on that treadmill, you’ll get pie in the sky when you die!” As a revolutionist, I maintain that it didn’t have to be this way and that “the Conventional Wisdom” should have been discarded long ago. “I heard the news today, oh boy…” The news is that 1300 square miles–not acres, square miles–in Australia are currently burning and 75-foot-tall waves appeared off the California coast last week. Perhaps you should abandon your stance of “agnosticism” on climate change? The planet crossed the Rubicon on this many years ago, and we are only starting to pay the price for the masses accepting the “wisdom” spewed by the Ruling Class. As Marx observed, the prevailing ideas in a society are none other than those advanced by, to the benefit of, the Ruling Class.
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First off, Greg, I highly recommend that you read and try to fully digest the info at http://www.jayhanson.org/loop.htm. Understand what lifeforms are and what drives our behavior as the lifeforms that we are.
Another thing I’d recommend: http://thesimplerway.info/TRANSITION.htm
I’m on board with Trainer’s thinking and it’s essentially what I’m trying to actualize in my own family’s life.
Next, in answer to your question: I think it’s actually both 1 and 2. Yes, we are programmed by the marketing phallanx , and Yes, we are also ignorant of the full effects of our consumerism on the ecosphere and earth resource depletion. Don’t forget that all of us moderns, living in the so-called developed techno-industrial nations, owe our very livelihoods to this whole system, its marketing media, its consumerism, its corporations, and its MIC, its banking elite, the whole mess… We are the amoeba.
We moderns are not in a geographical situation like the Tikopian islanders who’ve been living sustainably for 2000 years. Yes, we have our Earthrise photo from Apollo 8 and we know the earth is really a Tikopia in the vast ocean of space, but maybe that knowledge is just too abstract? To most of us, I guess there is no direct sense of eco-biosphere limits and as long as we keep getting our physical needs adequately met by our current tech+resource paradigm, we just don’t have a strong drive to transition to a sustainable tech+ resource paradigm…The overall amoebic sense seems to be that GDP’s still positive and corporations are making profits, we’re growing, and so all’s OK. Thankfully, that sense is changing, but is it changing fast enough? It doesn’t look like it is, at least not fast enough to avert Malthusian-style collapse with all the ugliness and suffering that entails.
Speaking metaphorically, but it’s a very real metaphor, we are individually small components in a mega-amoeba that’s amoral in its behavior and acts as all lifeforms do to maximize its growth and power as far as it can, as long as there are energy and material resources to support it and as long as it can out-compete other amoebae by whatever means, including violence. That we may behave morally as individuals in relation to other individuals within our amoeba is just our social instinct at work to support the social entities (various amoebic organelles) to which we belong…to keep the amoeba healthy, functional, growing. We are social animals, political animals…That’s a very big part of humanity’s evolutionary success formula in becoming the gods of the earth…unfortunately, very hubristic gods.
As far as AGW, as I said, I do think that we should end our fossil carbon re-injection mega-experiment ASAP, because we don’t know what we are doing (what the full outcomes will be from this experiment)…but Yes we do know it might be overall very negative. It’s just that I do not find it scientifically true to view AGW as more than a theory. The quantity and quality of data needed to fully prove it does not yet exist. Furthermore, we don’t know how strongly negative it may be overall, and it may have some benefits we don’t yet see. Predicting these things is not trivial, not really possible at the current state of science. The system is extremely complex, nonlinear, and dependent on many things that are not anthropogenic. Instead of AGW, I’d rather see us stay focused on the certainty that we are daily closer to fossil fuel exhaustion and we cannot continue with a modern economy if we do not transition soon enough to be shifted over to a renewable energy paradigm before fossil reserves are too scarce for enough of them to be available for the transition investments (The farmer can’t eat all his seeds if wants to plant a crop next season.) The uncertainty on how long those reserves will last should be driving us to act more quickly than we are now, and our continuing dependency on them as they get ever closer to empty also means higher probability of continuing warfare.
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Greg Horrall — As a courtesy to you, I followed the Jay Hanson link. I can’t spare the time to analyze this person’s ideas at length, but here are my immediate reactions to some of the upfront claims on the website. “[S]ince our thoughts are subject to physical law, we do not have the free-will to either think or behave autonomously.” If this was true, there could be no innovation, discovery or invention. There’d be no literature, either, for want of creativity. “Only physical hardship can force us to rewire our collective-political agendas.” This I DO pretty much agree with. “The MPP [Maximum Power Principle] states that biological systems will organize to increase power generation, by degrading more energy, whenever systemic constraints [rather, lack thereof, yes?–GL] allow it.” The environment places restraints on the population sizes of given species; when their population outstrips resources, it crashes. Only humans have the ability to find TEMPORARY means to stretch the limits on population size. I have long sided with the much-maligned Malthus on this issue. And a lot of people have swallowed the nonsense that human ingenuity will find technological means to extend our stay on this planet indefinitely. Sixteen billion, 20 billion humans on Earth? Sure, no problem! Uh-huh.
I think the nub of our disagreement is pretty straightforward: I am an “old school” Socialist, and I believe firmly things COULD have worked out differently, ever so much better, for humans and our non-human fellow Earthlings. Warning flags about climate and other approaching environmental catastrophes were flying literally a half-century and longer ago. But “the political will,” as they say, to address the problems was lacking. Why? Because of dear old Capitalism. The problem is not the failings of individual human beings, though we know these are legion, but the manner in which human society has been organized since the Industrial Revolution. “Profits Before People” (and by extension, all other forms of life on the planet) has been the organizing principle. And we have barely, slightly, very mildly only begun to scratch the surface of the coming misery, which will continue to accelerate faster than even the most “realistic” scientists are saying. You read it here, write it down and attribute it to me, thank you!!
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Greg Horrall — Okay, I took a look at the other website, re: the Simpler Way. The lifestyle changes prescribed there will be FORCED upon us by the collapse of the global ecosphere. The American consumer will not be happy with a 90% (!!) reduction in his/her wasteful (mis-)use of resources. But again, it is the Magic of Marketing that has persuaded consumers that they can’t live without their SUVs, their red meat, their gasoline-powered leaf blowers (oh, how I hate those accursed things!), etc. George Pal’s movie of H.G. Wells’s “The Time Machine” came to mind, with future humanity having decayed into a race of illiterate simpletons. And I guess the Morlocks are the last of the Capitalist exploiters!
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Yes, Greg, we humans do not have a history of collapse prevention…Easter Island is our baseline. Trainer’s right, and he too recognizes that there’s not much probability of success with the path of anarchism that he sees, even though it’s really the only way to keep at least some semblance of modernity intact (unless we do make the full transition to ER sustainable economics). Being the only way doesn’t mean it’ll happen. We can only give it a try, and meanwhile. well, it may put those who adopt it in a better position just to at least survive in the current ongoing and increasingly chaotic maelstrom.
By the way: I’m not sure if Trainer has realized it, but most people on this planet, those living in the ‘developing world” already by default live a version of the “Simpler Way”. Where I live, in Indonesia, we have less than 10% of the GDP/capita. The problem of course is that these people also want to live like Americans and idolize growth. China is the scariest case of this…1 billion + people wanting to live at the same material SOL as Westerners.
As to how we got into our morass of consumerism and the marketing media programming paradigm: Besides the drive to grow, there were other dimensions, technological and psychological (behavioral genetics)…See:
https://cassandralegacy.blogspot.com/2017/11/why-do-we-need-jobs-if-we-can-have.html
Consumerism really took off when agriculture was mechanized.
And I’d be remiss not to throw in the ideas of Ted Kaczynski as well:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/national/longterm/unabomber/manifesto.text.htm
The amoeba of modernity is a techno-industrial one, and it’s dehumanizing us as well as destroying the earth.
It’s all a super complicated “subconscious conspiracy” that’s determined by geographical, technological, and genetic forces…DNA interacting with environment…that’s the history of life. We’re now in a chapter predetermined by all the ones before, and we’ll see how it all comes out. Modernity, a good name for the current chapter of ongoing growth via “progress” (See John Gray’s thoughts on that.), may not make it, and that may be a very good thing indeed.
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Jimmy Carter was right with his so-called malaise speech. Just think if we had listened to him. But along came Reagan and there went the solar panels off of the White House …
Carter was probably the last president we had who understood science.
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Not to nitpick, but…’Big Dog’ Clinton was no dummy. Reagan, of course, genuinely was. Publicly declared that trees “cause air pollution.” Trump is also not a dummy, at bottom. But as we know, all he cares about is the Trump brand and Trump name. Which he has deluded himself into believing will be a shining beacon throughout US history. Hard to believe sometimes what’s happening around us is real!!
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Yes Greg, Clinton definitely wasn’t a dummy in the academic sense — he was a Rhodes scholar who went to Oxford or Cambridge (too busy to look it up) which IS impressive (at first glance at least… recall that ‘W’ went to Yale & Harvard, ‘nuff said) — but how f*****g smart is a guy who’s a married POTUS, with an adversarial Republican Party in Congress (who had already accused him of numerous extra-marital trysts — probably accurately in at least some instances) and 24/7 media always looking for sex-stories to tittilate the public with, who has sexual relations with an unmarried, low-level employee?? WTF would she have to lose in telling the world about it? Maybe he thought he could operate like JFK, but if so, he wasn’t paying attention to the cultural changes during the 30+ intervening years.
And I voted for Clinton in ‘92 & 96, so it’s not like I was an anti-Clinton person (though I’vet evolved into one), but that was such a MAJOR political mistake, that I could no longer think of him as ‘smart’ in the general sense of the term.
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Big Bill’s actions are easily explained: 1.) he’s a sex addict; and 2.) he thought Office of the President would shield him. Just like a certain incumbent feels the Impeachment provisions in Constitution simply don’t apply to him. Anyhow, we were talking about Science in general, and though Clinton may not have studied that in any great depth he certainly would not have been a climate change denier. Sadly, his VP boasted of his environmental awareness and concern, but left office with pretty much ZERO accomplished in that arena. In fact, he had to be “outed” in the media before he undertook a “greening” of his big mansion in Tennessee!!
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Excellent article WJA! You really hit the nail on the head! It’s heartening to read such logical, humanitarian arguments, since those sentiments are so rarely found in the mainstream media.
Thank you!
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