Our Insane Society
My Brazilian friends Ronald and Tatiana recently returned home to Porto Alegre, armed with their fresh PhDs from the University of Southampton. Their four-year-old daughter, Isabela, has already made lots of new friends, and awaits with some excitement the arrival of a new sibling this June.
At the end of January, just as the World Social Forum meeting began, Ronald emailed to tell me that Noam Chomsky was about to open the debates. Ronald and his wife were looking forward to the many workshops and parallel debates. "We will try to do as many as we can", he pledged.
I was pleased for them, but also somewhat envious. Despite an open invitation to visit my friends, pressing commitments here meant that I wouldn't be able to attend. Just a few months previously, I'd sat having a coffee with Ronald in the canteen of Southampton Oceanography Centre where we were colleagues, both using satellites to study ocean circulation. We looked out towards Empress dock where a research vessel was berthed, and beyond across Southampton Water to the New Forest, the Exxon Fawley oil refinery and Dibden Bay, the possible future site of a massive new deep-water container terminal, despite considerable local opposition.
'I've enjoyed my time in the UK, and made lots of good friends', Ronald said, 'but so many people here seem to accept the status quo - a rich West at the expense of injustice, poverty and violence abroad'. I agreed, reminding him that here at home there were great inequalities and poverty too; some of the poorest communities in England are to be found here in Southampton: St. Mary's, Weston, Thornhill. They too are victims of the policies of successive British governments that have hacked away at the values of compassion, welfare and solidarity while building a permanent war economy for the benefit of wealthy corporate interests.
But don't expect such analysis from our honest, free media - even from the so-called 'liberal' press. Go to The Guardian's website and search for "World Economic Forum", the corporate jamboree that moved this year from Davos to New York. In mid-February, I found a generous 21 hits for this year's WEF meeting. Search for "World Social Forum", the huge gathering in Porto Alegre instead and find a paltry two hits. The contrast reflects mainstream media priorities: corporate interests over participatory democracy.
But look closely too at the content. Beneath the nervy headline, '12,000 police aim to ensure peace', The Guardian's Oliver Burkeman reported on February 1 that: "As New York waited on high alert for anticipated violence surrounding the 32nd World Economic Forum, every branch of Starbucks north of 40th Street boasted its own detail of four or five armed police." Burkeman added: " Buying a coffee in midtown Manhattan was never safer."
That other major broadsheet bastion of 'liberal' comment and analysis, The Independent, reported that: "The message from New York to anyone who wants to disrupt the World Economic Forum that opens here tomorrow, perhaps by smashing a few windows at Starbucks in the name of social justice, is emphatic: just try it." Reporter David Usborne told us under the provocative headline "Go on, punks, make our day…" that New York was just "a city that wants a break from violence", and that security precautions had been taken "just in case blood does run hot."
There was scant mention anywhere in the mainstream of the considered rejections of global capitalism by the negatively-dubbed 'anti-globalisation' protesters, or of alternative ways of building a genuinely democratic society. (By the way, let us call ourselves 'pro-democracy' or 'pro-justice' protesters, rather than accept the pejorative 'anti-' labels of the mainstream).
We are living in an insane society in which the free press never questions the narrow parameters of its 'freedom'; where elite propaganda declares that democracy and human rights are built upon a global capitalist system that, in reality, is founded on greed, hatred and ignorance; where, as the respected liberal journalist Walter Lippman put it in the early twentieth century, the general public are "ignorant and meddlesome outsiders" who should be mere "spectators of action", apart from periodic choice among the "responsible men".
The late German psychologist Erich Fromm, author of The Sane Society, once explained: "Modern capitalism, then, needs men [sic] who cooperate smoothly and in large numbers, who want to consume ever more, and whose tastes are standardised and can be easily influenced and anticipated; men who feel free and independent - not subject to any authority or principle or conscience - yet willing to be commanded to do what is expected of them, to fit into the social machine without friction; to be guided without force, led without leader, prompted without aim."
To remain neutral, impartial and apolitical in this insane society is impossible. Not to challenge the status quo is to countenance the misery of fellow human beings in Afghanistan, Iraq, Palestine and here at home in our poorest, neglected neighbourhoods. To ignore the might of the military establishment is to accept wholesale terror at home and abroad. To remain silent in the face of the corporate hijacking of the energy economy is to acquiesce in the likelihood of climate catastrophe.
'None but the dead', warned Mark Twain, 'are permitted to speak truth.' It's time for the living to speak out for once.
Dr David Cromwell
-medialens-