Go Local, Go Sustainable, Now

This article resulted from an online suggestion that nonviolence was unlikely to be successful when those in power lack the capacity to feel shame and empathy.  A fair case could be made that there are plenty of dictators and far too many executives incapable of shame and empathy. Here’s what Hyperion1144 said, in a discussion about Martin Luther King Jrs views on rioting and in the context of the riots in the UK:

The problem with non-violent resistance is that your opponents must be capable of both shame and empathy.

The financial elite of this world have neither.

So, without rioting or non-violence, what is left?

In my view, this is quite an interesting point when it comes to how we fix the corruption that has infected the highest levels, from greedy CEOs to the crooked politicians they buy. If the people at the top truly have a different morality – perhaps due to their inability or unwillingness to feel certain human emotions – then how do we defend ourselves and restore civil society?

Because they don’t care if you die. They are indifferent to it, as long as their position is maintained. Given this, nonviolence could still work but would require most of us working together and still a lot of people would die. I say it would work because I believe there are not enough sociopathic individuals to run any sort of economy (i.e., they need us or no food, never mind yachts or butlers), and they would constantly be trying to steal each other’s stuff. They’re sociopaths.

At the same time, to defeat them nonviolently we would have to shut down the means of production. It’s a reverse John Galt: Let the Job Creators flip their own burgers, make their own cars, pick their own fruit, put out their own house fires. Clearly it would never work; they need people to willingly or otherwise do all these things for them.

If we’re no longer willing, then conscienceless people must force us by any means necessary – they’re not concerned about the morality of their means. So nonviolent protests of any sort – mass demonstrations, strikes, rallies – would be put down. Lots of people would be killed, unless they could hide.

At what point would these sociopaths stop? I’m sure many in Syria and Egypt are wondering the same thing. You might as well ask the greedy man, How much is enough?

Given this, how do we right the ship? Because sociopaths can’t stop themselves.

Much ado is being made of the rioting in England, and for good reason: it’s massively destructive and is scaring the bejeezus out of those of us who enjoy and understand the benefits of civilized, lawful society.

Much blame is being placed on the thugs doing the damage. Fair enough; the idiots are wrecking things that others spent their lives building. That said, the rest of us have to recognize that when people grow up as self-entitled prats with very little hope of achieving a better future (social mobility is quite low in England), well, they may ‘act out.’

Some commentators have complained that these thugs have “weak moral fibre,” or are otherwise fundamentally defective. They may well have weak moral fibre, but moral fibre is something you develop over time by doing things that require moral fibre, and by observing that being honest, hard-working, and contributing to society is valued. It is quite clear by the behaviour of those at the top that this is not how you get ahead in our society; the ethic of those in power is “If you can get away with it, it’s okay.”

These low-level thugs are simply showing the brutish, crude manifestation of the same behaviour their ‘betters’ have been exhibiting for years.

Here’s a decent description of why this is happening, courtesy of strongmince on Reddit:

The looting, attacks on property and police are an entirely predictable and to an extent justifiable reaction to decades of rising deprivation, poverty, unemployment, lack or very poorly maintained social housing, police brutality, racial profiling and shit schools in many deprived areas in London with variable amounts of “regeneration” (read gentrification) there to attempt to fix these problems. In general the governments attacks on the youth in England (abolishment of education maintenance allowance, absurd rise in tuition fees) and attacks on the working class (harsh austerity measures finishing off what Thatcher started including privitisation of large chunks of the public sector, continual erosion of any remaining labour movements, erosion of labour rights, casualisation of work, underemployment, unemployment, the near constant spectre of crisis, poorly defined class enemies who seem immune to any attack, huge rises in energy prices, increase in VAT etc…..) need to also be considered. All coupled together, a disaffected youth with little to no future prospects, brought up in poverty living in supposedly one of the most prosperous areas of western Europe were given an opportunity to air their rage with little to lose.

Putting innocent people in danger is a big fucking no-no in my book (sorry insurrectionists.. j/k), but what I’ve seen seems to corroborate with my friends and others accounts of events that these fuckers are a minority. This is not a homogenous group of people with one motive, its a mixture of motives, opportunities and emotions. Denouncing all as acting like one generic “criminal” ignores the very reasons that will cause this to flare up again. Stating that these kids are “politically unaware” is ridiculous when you consider the items in the list above are all fucking political, they exist and are real things being felt directly by human beings.

Anyway, living in an area thats been under attack tonight, I’ve been running around helping friends and family who have been stuck getting home from work, scared etc.. so apologies for any incoherence.

The Guardian has some good background, too. A key quote:

Those condemning the events of the past couple of nights in north London and elsewhere would do well to take a step back and consider the bigger picture: a country in which the richest 10% are now 100 times better off than the poorest, where consumerism predicated on personal debt has been pushed for years as the solution to a faltering economy, and where, according to the OECD, social mobility is worse than any other developed country.

The middle class is the foundation of economic and political stability. The extremes of rich and poor are both destabilizing, the former because their greed is limitless and the latter because they have no hope.

UPDATE:

Interesting the online response. Lots of people saying that the rioters are ‘yobs’ and essentially unredeemable. They don’t suggest a solution, but presumably it would be extermination or walling them off so they don’t harm the rest of us. I wonder if they feel the same about the bank CEOs who crashed the world economy in 2008? It would be easy to make the same argument that some of those banksters are irredeemable sociopaths.  In fact, as much damage as these ‘yobs’ are doing, the yobs running the world economy into the ground have done far more by many orders of magnitude.

The US ‘debt ceiling deal’ simply reinforces that, for sensible people, Obama is definitely not ‘the guy’ we hoped he would be. And never was. Way back when first elected, he appointed Steven Chu as his Energy Secretary, and one of the first things Chu said was that California was running out of water and agriculture there couldn’t last much longer – and the cities were in big trouble, too. He was muzzled after that. That was an ominous sign that Obama was not much more tolerant of truth than Bush II.

Since then, of course, Obama has greatly expanded the unconstitutional presidential powers that Bush II had no right taking in the first place, and it’s been one cave-in after another. In fact, it seems clear to me that Obama is not so much caving in to the radical right but seems…fine with much of what they propose. How else to describe all his pre-emptive capitulations?

Obama started with health care, which was a huge and, to me anyway, obvious blunder. In the middle of the worst recession since the Great Depression, after the Clintons failed with their health care initiative, Obama goes with health care instead of jobs. The ultimate bill ended up being virtually identical to one proposed by Republicans some years earlier.

He should have started with jobs and cleaning up Wall Street and lobbying in general, but instead appointed half of Goldman Sachs as his financial advisors. It’s no surprise the US in in big fiscal shit now; he didn’t plunge the toilet first. He should have started with energy independence, which would have put people back to work and spent taxpayer dollars on green energy projects that reduced US dependence on foreign oil.

Definitely things are coming to a head. This latest US debt ceiling deal just punts the problem down the road a few months. I think we’re going to see a realignment of world power as companies and countries try to decouple themselves from the US, which is now more clearly than ever headed toward fiscal disaster. It probably won’t be immediate, and a lot of countries are much more heavily tied to the US than they would like to be, but you can see it coming when the ratings agencies are seriously threatening to downgrade the US credit rating. There must be enormous pressure on them NOT to do so, but they’re talking openly about it as if the US were Greece. And it has actually been happening, as companies relocate head offices and assets overseas, as are the rich.

The crises are coming so thick and fast that there is no time to deal with one before the next hits, from the Murdoch scandals to the US debt issue, from climate change to  oil depletion, from middle eastern uprisings to continuing recession in the US. The problems are systemic, and I can’t see a change until people in the developed countries take serious action against the powers-that-be. The super-rich have forgotten, don’t realise, or most likely don’t care that the middle class is the foundation of a stable society. At some point, enough Americans will be reduced to poverty with no hope of returning to the middle class, and when people lose hope, leaders lose their heads.

There are two options open to clean up the ‘leader of the free world’: nonviolent protest on the scale of the Civil Rights movement, or…. The super-rich are doing everything they can to destroy any possibility of nonviolent systemic change; they have corrupted the political process through lobbying, they have corrupted the media via Fox News, they have corrupted the public discourse via libertarian/extremist right-wing ‘think tanks’ like the Heritage Foundation and and other lying trash, and they have worked very hard to ensure that alternate loci of power – like unions – are destroyed. No matter what you think of unions, point me to a country with a high standard of living that does not also have a high degree of unionisation – they are few. Especially in the absence of a strong and honest government, unions are a necessary counterbalance to global corporations.

No conspiracy theory is required, although quite obviously scum like the Koch brothers and Murdoch are doing their best to control things. All it requires is many people voting or otherwise putting their short-term self-interest before that of everyone else and you get where the US is now.

I see no possibility of change until a serious crisis comes, and unfortunately that means much worse than the current recession. And when crisis hits and the old ways of organization are questioned and assaulted, the leaders who rise up will determine whether we end up with a better democracy, a more stable society, and a sustainable way of living – or whether things get exponentially worse.

We are nearing a tipping point, I believe, but it is impossible to predict what will be the trigger. It may seem to be something minor, but that’s only because we studiously ignored all the straw previously piled on the camel’s back.

That should be enough, but the pro-nukers are just not going away. Why should it be enough of a dismissal? Well, if Japan can’t be trusted to safely do nuclear, who the hell can?

Think about it: One of the most technologically advanced countries in the world had a nuclear disaster. If a serious accident like that could happen in Japan, it could happen anywhere. In fact, it already did.*

So why won’t the pro-nukers accept that nuclear power is dangerous and we can’t handle it safely? This seems to be a common progression in discussions with pro-nukers, or as I am coming to think of them, dumbasses:

ME: Because Fukushima, that’s why.

Pro-nuker: It was a perfect storm: an earthquake and a tsunami.

ME: Which you’re saying will never happen again, ever? In earthquake and tsunami-prone Japan? You know, the country that invented the word tsunami?

DA: The design of the reactor was inadequate. Newer models would not have these problems.

~Note the change of argument? DA couldn’t answer so abandoned that argument, though not the belief; he’ll continue to throw it out in future discussions. The problem is that DA holds to nuclear power like a Holy Grail, and he (almost always men) simply ignores contrary evidence.

ME: So you’re guaranteeing that these new designs will never have a dangerous radioactive release? Never, ever, ever? Ever?

DA: No, they can’t. Decent maintenance, proper siting – not close to the coast, for example, and Bob’s your uncle. Never a problem.

ME: Never.

DA: Well, statistically, of course, something could happen, but the possibility is remote.

ME: How remote?

DA: Not worth worrying about.

ME: I’m worried. What’s my risk.

DA: Infitesimal. It’s not even measurable.

ME: So, for example, Pakistan, which has nuclear power plants – let’s say Al-Qaeda launches a terrorist assault on one, packs it with fertilizer and blows it to smithereens, steals all the fuel and waste and runs off with it – there’s no risk to anyone from the nuclear part of that? I’m not saying count the people killed in the battle or the explosion, just people endangered from the nuclear material.

DA: Well, that’s a ridiculous scenario.

ME: Have you been following the news on Pakistan?

DA: Well, okay, it’s possible, but that’s in Pakistan and that has nothing to do with developed countries. Politically unstable countries shouldn’t have nuclear energy or weapons.

ME: But they do, dumbass, because people like you seem to think that nuclear energy is the bomb. So to speak.

DA: I don’t agree with selling nuclear technology to politically unstable countries.

ME: [sigh] You do realise that Pakistan was fairly stable when we sold them the nukes? Political situations change. Terrorists and wars happen. And you do agree that such a terrorist action, followed by what they could do now that they have all this extremely dangerous material – could potentially expose millions of people to dangerous, probably toxic levels of radiation?

DA: Look, it’s far-fetched, and it doesn’t really affect us.

ME: Al-Qaeda having radioactive material doesn’t potentially affect “us”?

DA: It’s too late now, anyway. There are plenty of stable countries that can use the new technology safely.

ME: And how long must those countries remain politically stable, free from the danger of terrorist attacks, and safe from wars? Doesn’t the waste remain radioactive for rather a long time? Like, longer than all of human civilization has been around so far?

DA: It’s safe if stored safely. Yucca mountain…

ME: So you can guarantee that all developed countries that have or will have nuclear power will remain politically stable, free of wars or serious internal problems, for the next 10,000+ years.

DA: Well, of course nobody can guarantee that. That’s a ridiculous requirement.

ME: Why?

Responses vary at this point, but most of them come down to either:

• I don’t want to think about that (there’s wilful ignorance kicking in to protect the belief system), or
• I don’t really care about the people who will live here in the future. It’s their problem – we told them it was radioactive. It’s their responsibility to keep the nation and its toxic waste secure, not our responsibility to not produce it in the first place.

And that latter argument, frankly, is pretty damn selfish and a damn poor justification.

So the next time some pro-nuker zealot tries to proselytize the infallible need for nuclear energy, tell him no, because you’re not thoughtful enough or not mature enough to be making those kinds of decisions. Or just say, “Because Fukushima, that’s why.”

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* Did you forget about Three Mile Island?

Still not convinced? Need more data? Nuclear delusions: Why nuclear power is not a solution to our energy challenge is an excellent, concise critique of nuclear power.