Economic Aspects of "Love"

[American Dream]

[American Dream]

emphasis on the

http://mysticbourgeoisie.blogspot.com/2 ... scism.html

PURITY / INTERIORS / RACE / CLEANSING / FASCISM

...There's also Moral Purity and Persecution in History by Barrington Moore Jr., and it looks as if he has some insightful (inciteful? I always forget) things to say about purity. However, the reviews seem to indicate that he blames monotheistic religions for too much. Me, I think it's a crime to leave out The Mystic East in a work of this type. I mean, can you spell P-U-J-A? Not to mention, more generally, purification rites.

Ritual purification is a feature of many religions. The aim of these rituals is to remove specifically defined uncleanliness prior to a particular type of activity, and especially prior to the worship of a deity. This ritual uncleanliness is not however identical with ordinary physical impurity, such as dirt stains; nevertheless, all body fluids are generally considered ritually unclean, and some religions have special treatment of semen and menses, which are viewed as particularly unclean.

America has a deep Puritan heritage, but few have Clue One what that means. I don't. Despite any number of books by Perry Miller and Sacvan Berkovitch lying about the place. I'm not sure, but I think it might have something to do with the odd fraction in this...



It might also have something to do with The White American: Racial Purity is America's Security, an "official publication" of the National White Americans Party in Birmingham, Alabama (where the skies are so blue).

However, by far the greatest invocation of purity involves the spiritual risks and dangers of sex (Lord, I'm coming home to you). For one example among thousands, see And the Bride Wore White: Seven Secrets to Sexual Purity.





...Here the author is discussing Lester F. Ward (1841 - 1913), who, as Wikipedia helpfully informs us, was no less than the first president of the American Sociological Association. Just imagine! The author notes Ward's view that...

White racial purity was an impossibility; miscegenation a social inevitability. Yet Ward wrote in support of whites' double standard with regard to miscegenation, condoning sexual intercourse between white men and black women as advantageous to blacks, while castigating and forbidding sexual intercourse between black men and white women. For the purposes of evolutionary progress, according to Ward, sexual intercourse need only occur between men of the conquering race (white men) and women of the conquered race (black women).

Ain't science wonderful?

And of course there are all sorts of books like Better for All the World: The Secret History of Forced Sterilization and America's Quest for Racial Purity.

Yeah well, I suppose this must all seem totally arbitrary, huh? But here's how I got to those books... Pay close attention here, OK? First, here's an equally white cover, wherein we return from simple and possibly ideology-free interior decorating to something more spiritualized. Note, for instance, the carefully chosen title term "sanctuary."

Your Home As a Sanctuary




Then note that Josephine Collins, who wrote the above, also wrote



And lest you still doubt the deep spiritual purity dimension of detoxification, try The Tao of Detox: The Natural Way to Purify Your Body for Health and Longevity






Get rid of the the dirt, the pollution, the poisons, the toxins, the horrid and unforgivable blackness of racial and sexual sin! Another popular term for this sort of detox is "cleansing," as in...




Of course, it would be utterly wrongheaded to associate this sort of cleansing -- ridding the pristine Godly self of invisible sub-molecular dangers and unspeakably spiritual quantum risks -- with the completely unrelated idea of ethnic cleansing.

Yes, it would be wholly irresponsible to suggest such a relationship. Even despite books like Purify and Destroy: The Political Uses of Massacre and Genocide (Columbia University Press, 2009)...


...from which, boys being boys and all, let's crib a couple quotes anyway. Just for the hell of it.

p. 33:

This search for 'oneness' also very often goes along with a headlong quest for 'purity'. This is another theme of the imaginaire that 'toughens' the identitarian process and impels it more inexorably toward an episode of mass violence. To define oneself as 'pure' in fact implies categorizing some 'other' as impure. The accusation of impurity constitutes a universal accusation against the population one is going to massacre. Purity already implies a requirement of cleanliness as opposed to another catalogued as 'dirty', perceived as rubbish. Purity also contains an appeal to the sacred: the need for purification falls within the province of religion, and constitutes a powerful springboard for unleashing a purgative violence. These clichés -- pure-impure, cleanliness-dirtiness, whiteness-blackness -- seem terribly crude to us. Their binary structures mirror however the elementary functioning of the human psyche in times of crisis.

p. 56:

In the 1920s [Alfred] Rosenberg became a kind of guardian of the general doctrine (Weltanschauung) of National-Socialism, propagating through his writings profound personal convictions about the reality of a Judeo-Masonic world conspiracy. His masterwork, The Myth of the Twentieth Century [: An Evaluation of the Spiritual-Intellectual Confrontations of Our Age], published in 1930 (thus three years before Hitler came to power), was to become the second Nazi 'bible' after Mein Kampf. This book, which had taken him years to prepare, is deeply inspired by the racist theories of the Count of Gobineau and Houston Chamberlain. The myths of Rosenberg are based above all else on the mystique of the purity of Aryan blood which, under the sign of the Swastika, sparked off a worldwide spiritual revolution: that of 'the awakening of the Aryan soul'.


And so in closing let me say: Axe not for whom de tocsin toll. It Tolle for thee, Eckhart.





Yo G, now we Donne.

[American Dream]

emphasis on the

[American Dream]

http://www.salon.com/life/feature/2007/03/05/the_secret

MONDAY, MAR 5, 2007

Oprah's ugly secret

By continuing to hawk "The Secret," a mishmash of offensive self-help cliches, Oprah Winfrey is squandering her goodwill and influence, and preaching to the world that mammon is queen.

BY PETER BIRKENHEAD


Steve Martin used to do a routine that went like this: "You too can be a millionaire! It's easy: First, get a million dollars. Now..."

If you put that routine between hard covers, you'd have "The Secret," the self-help manifesto and bottle of minty-fresh snake oil currently topping the bestseller lists. "The Secret" espouses a "philosophy" patched together by an Australian talk-show producer named Rhonda Byrne. Though "The Secret" unabashedly appropriates and mishmashes familiar self-help clichés, it was still the subject of two recent episodes of "The Oprah Winfrey Show" featuring a dream team of self-help gurus, all of whom contributed to the project.

The main idea of "The Secret" is that people need only visualize what they want in order to get it -- and the book certainly has created instant wealth, at least for Rhonda Byrne and her partners-in-con. And the marketing idea behind it -- the enlisting of that dream team, in what is essentially a massive, cross-promotional pyramid scheme -- is brilliant. But what really makes "The Secret" more than a variation on an old theme is the involvement of Oprah Winfrey, who lends the whole enterprise more prestige, and, because of that prestige, more venality, than any previous self-help scam. Oprah hasn't just endorsed "The Secret"; she's championed it, put herself at the apex of its pyramid, and helped create a symbiotic economy of New Age quacks that almost puts OPEC to shame.

Why "venality"? Because, with survivors of Auschwitz still alive, Oprah writes this about "The Secret" on her Web site, "the energy you put into the world -- both good and bad -- is exactly what comes back to you. This means you create the circumstances of your life with the choices you make every day." "Venality," because Oprah, in the age of AIDS, is advertising a book that says, "You cannot 'catch' anything unless you think you can, and thinking you can is inviting it to you with your thought." "Venality," because Oprah, from a studio within walking distance of Chicago's notorious Cabrini Green Projects, pitches a book that says, "The only reason any person does not have enough money is because they are blocking money from coming to them with their thoughts."

Worse than "The Secret's" blame-the-victim idiocy is its baldfaced bullshitting. The titular "secret" of the book is something the authors call the Law of Attraction. They maintain that the universe is governed by the principle that "like attracts like" and that our thoughts are like magnets: Positive thoughts attract positive events and negative thoughts attract negative events. Of course, magnets do exactly the opposite -- positively charged magnets attract negatively charged particles -- and the rest of "The Secret" has a similar relationship to the truth. Here it is on biblical history: "Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Joseph, Moses, and Jesus were not only prosperity teachers, but also millionaires themselves, with more affluent lifestyles than many present-day millionaires could conceive of." And worse than the idiocy and the bullshitting is its anti-intellectualism, because that's at the root of the other two. Here's "The Secret" on reading and, um, electricity: "When I discovered 'The Secret' I made a decision that I would not watch the news or read newspapers anymore, because it did not make me feel good," and, "How does it work? Nobody knows. Just like nobody knows how electricity works. I don't, do you?" And worst of all is the craven consumerist worldview at the heart of "The Secret," because it's why the book exists: "[The Secret] is like having the Universe as your catalogue. You flip through it and say, 'I'd like to have this experience and I'd like to have that product and I'd like to have a person like that.' It is you placing your order with the Universe. It's really that easy." That's from Dr. Joe Vitale, former Amway executive and contributor to "The Secret," on Oprah.com.

Oprah Winfrey is one of the richest women in the world, and one of the most influential. Her imprimatur has helped the authors of "The Secret" sell 2 million books (and 1 million DVDs), putting it ahead of the new Harry Potter book on the Amazon bestseller list. In the time Oprah spent advertising the lies in "The Secret," she could have been exposing them to an audience that otherwise might have believed them. So why didn't she? If James Frey deserved to be raked over the coals for lying about how drunk he was, doesn't Oprah deserve some scrutiny for pitching the meretricious nonsense in "The Secret"?

Oprah has a reputation for doing good -- she probably has more perceived moral authority than anyone in this country -- and she has done a lot of good. But in light of her zealous support of a book that says, in this time of entrenched, systemic, institutionalized poverty, this time of no-bid contracts for war profiteers and heckuva-job governance, that "you can have, be, or do anything," isn't it reasonable to ask about why she does what she does, and the way she does it?

Oprah recently opened, with much fanfare, the Oprah Winfrey Leadership Academy in South Africa, and as I watched the network news stories about it, I couldn't get "The Secret" out of my mind. I kept wondering what would happen if professor Sam Mhlongo, South Africa's chief family practitioner who famously said that HIV doesn't cause AIDS, read about Oprah's connection to "The Secret" and found support there for his claim. I wondered if the students of the academy would read "The Secret" and start to believe that their parents deserved to be poor, or that the people of Darfur summoned the Janjaweed with "bad thoughts." Will the heavier girls be told, as readers of "The Secret" are, that food doesn't cause weight gain -- thinking about weight gain does? Will they be told to not even look at fat people, as "The Secret" advises? Oprah is already promoting these ideas to her television audience. Why wouldn't she espouse them to her students?

In many ways the Leadership Academy is a wonderful project, a school that will provide impoverished girls an education they otherwise might not have gotten. But it also seems to be the product, unavoidably, of the faux-spiritual, anti-intellectual, hyper-materialistic worldview expressed in "The Secret," the book that the school's founder has called "life changing."

The academy is a controversial enough project in South Africa that the government withdrew its support, because of the amount of money that's been spent on its well-reported, lavish design -- money that could have gone instead to creating perfectly fine schools that served many, many more students than the 350 who will be making use of spa facilities at the academy. But, when I watched Oprah's prime-time special about interviewing candidates for the school, it seemed to me that she wasn't nearly as excited about providing an education to the girls as she was about providing a "Secret"-like "transformative experience." (And not just for the girls, for herself; the first thing she said to the family members at the opening ceremony wasn't, "Welcome to a great moment in your daughters' lives," it was, "Welcome to the proudest moment of my life.")

On the special, Oprah talked far more about what the school would do for the girls' self-esteem and material lives than what it would do for their intellects -- sometimes sounding as if she was reading directly from "The Secret." And in discussing what she was looking for in prospective students, she didn't talk about finding the next Eleanor Roosevelt or Sally Ride or Jane Smiley. Instead she used "Entertainment Tonight" language like "It Girl" to describe her ideal candidate. She praised the girls for their spirit, for how much they "shined" and "glowed," but never for their ideas or insights. Oprah puts a lot of energy and money into aesthetics -- on her show, in her magazine, at her school. The publishers of "The Secret" have learned well from their sponsor and are just as visually savvy. They have created a look for their books, DVDs, CDs and marketing materials that conjures a "Da Vinci Code" aesthetic, full of pretty faux parchment, quill-and-ink fonts and wax seals.

Oprah's TV special about the Leadership Academy, essentially an hourlong infomercial, was just as well-coiffed and "visuals"-heavy. In fact, when Oprah was choosing her students, her important criteria must have included their television interview skills. On-camera interviews with the girls were the centerpiece of the special, but as one spunky, telegenic candidate after another beamed her smile at the camera, I couldn't help wondering how Joyce Carol Oates or Gertrude Stein or Madame Curie would have fared -- would they have "shined" and "glowed," or more likely talked in non-sound-bite-friendly paragraphs and maybe even, God forbid, the sometimes "dark" tones of authentic people, and been rejected. Sadly, the girls themselves (and who can blame them, desperate 12-year-olds trying to flatter their potential benefactor) parroted banal Oprah-isms, like "I want to be the best me I can be," and "Be a leader not a follower" and "Don't blend in, blend out," with smiley gusto.

When the special was over, I found myself equally impressed and queasy, one part hopeful, one part worried. I was happy the school was there, but disturbed by the way it created an instant upper class out of the students, in a country that doesn't exactly need any more segregation into haves and have-nots. I was hopeful for the students but nervous about what, exactly, they will be taught in a place called the Oprah Winfrey Leadership Academy. Will it be more "best me I can be" bromides? Will "The Secret" be on the syllabus? Oprah herself is going to teach "leadership classes" at the school, after all.

Has Oprah ever done anything that didn't leave people with mixed feelings?

And at what point do we stop feeling like we have to take the good with the craven when it comes to Oprah, and the culture she's helped to create? I get nauseated when I think of people in South Africa being taught they don't have enough money because they're "blocking it with their thoughts." I'm already sickened by an American culture that teaches people, as "The Secret" does, that they "create the circumstances of their lives with the choices they make every day," a culture that elected a president who cried tears of self-congratulation at his inauguration, rejects intellectualism, and believes he can intuit the trustworthiness of world leaders by looking into their eyes. I'm sickened by a culture in which the tenets of the Oprah philosophy have become conventional wisdom, in which genuine self-actualization has been confused with self-aggrandizement, reality is whatever you want it to be, and mammon is queen.

One of Oprah's signature gimmicks has been giving stuff away to her audience ("giving" here means announcing the passing of stuff from corporate sponsors to audience members), most notably in a popular segment called "My Favorite Things." These bits have revealed an Oprah who truly revels in consumer culture, and who can seem astonishingly oblivious to the way most people live and what they can afford. She seems to celebrate every event and milestone with extravagant stuff, indeed to not know how to celebrate without it. Oprah has explained the expensive appointments of her Leadership Academy by saying, "Beauty inspires." True enough. But hasn't the lack of beauty inspired some pretty great work? And aren't there are all kinds of beauty?

You might expect a powerful person who thinks of herself as "deeply spiritual" to have a less worldly conception of it, and you might hope that she would encourage her followers to do the same, instead of urging them to buy books that call Jesus a "prosperity teacher."

But, far more than "spiritual growth" or "empowerment," Oprah and the authors of "The Secret" focus on imparting the message of getting rich. Even the biographies of the authors of "The Secret" on Oprah's Web site are revealingly fixated on their rags-to-riches stories. James Arthur Ray is described as someone who was "almost going bankrupt, [which] forced him to focus on the life he truly wanted. Now he runs a multimillion-dollar corporation dedicated to teaching people how to create wealth in all areas of their lives." The bio for Lisa Nichols says, "After hitting rock bottom at age 19, Lisa prayed for a better life. Now, she has made her fortune by motivating more than 60,000 teenagers to make better choices in their own lives." And the one for "Chicken Soup for the Soul" creator Jack Canfield reads, he "was deep in debt before he made it big. Now his best-selling books have sold more than 100 million copies worldwide, and Jack travels the country teaching 'The Secret' of his success."

There's no doubt that Oprah's doing a lot of good with her South African project, and with many other charitable works. And yeah, I know, her book club "gets people to read," and yadda yadda yadda. But there's also no doubt that a lot of us have been making forgiving disclaimers like that about Oprah for years. And that maybe they amount to trains-running-on-time arguments. Maybe it's time to stop. After reading "The Secret," it seemed to me that there were basically three possibilities: 1) Oprah really believes this stuff, and we should be very worried about her opening a school for anyone. 2) Oprah doesn't believe this stuff and we should be very, very worried about her opening a school for anyone. 3) Oprah doesn't know that any of this stuff is in the book or on her Web site and in a perfect world she wouldn't be allowed to open a school for anyone.

The things that Oprah does, like promoting "The Secret," can seem deceptively trivial, but it's precisely because they're silly that we should be concerned about their promotion by someone who is deadly earnest and deeply trusted by millions of people. It's important to start taking a look at Oprah because her philosophy has in many ways become the dominant one in our culture, even for people who would never consider themselves disciples. Somebody is buying enough copies of "The Secret" to make it No. 1 on the Amazon bestseller list. Those somebodies may be religious zealots or atheists, Republicans or Democrats, but they are all believers, to one degree or another, and, perhaps unwittingly, in aspects of the Oprah/"Secret" culture. And yes, sure, a lot of the believing they do is harmless fun -- everybody's got some kind of rabbit's foot in his pocket -- but we're not talking about rabbits' feet here, we're talking about whole, live rabbits pulled out of hats, and an audience that doesn't think it's being tricked.

"Secret"-style belief is a perfect product. Like Coca-Cola, it goes down easy and makes the consumer thirsty for more. It's unthreateningly simple, and a lot more facile, sentimental and, perhaps paradoxically, intractable than the old-fashioned kind of belief. Like Amway, it enlists its consumers as unofficial salespeople, and the people who constitute its market feel like they're part of a fold. It's indistinguishable from, and inextricably bound up in, the Oprah idea of self-esteem, the kind of confidence you get not from testing yourself, but from "believing" in yourself. This modern idea of faith isn't arrived at the old-fashioned way, by asking questions, but by getting answers. Instead of inquiry we have born-again epiphanies and cheesy self-help books -- we have excuses for not engaging in inquiry at all. Let other people schlep down the road to Damascus; we'll have Amazon send Damascus to us.

That "Secret"-style faith, whether it's in God, or in one's own preordained destiny to be an "American Idol," which takes all of a moment to achieve, is perhaps its most important selling point. Here's "The Secret" on arriving at faith: "Ask once, believe you have received, and all you have to do to receive is feel good." The kind of faith that couldn't be reached by shortcut, the confidence of the great doubters and worriers, of Moses and Abraham Lincoln and Jesus Christ, has been replaced by the insta-certainty and inflated "self-esteem" of "The Secret's" believers.

Books like "The Secret" have created, and are feeding, an enormously diverse market of disciples, and they're thriving in every corner of the culture, in megachurches and movies, politics and pop music, in sports arenas and state boards of education. Oprah has far more in common with George Bush than either would like to admit, and so do the psychics of Marin County, Calif., and the creationists of Kansas. The believers come from all walks of life, but they work the same way -- mostly by bastardizing and warping source materials, from the Bible to the Bhagavad Gita, to make them fit their worldview. On Page 23 of "The Secret" you'll find this revealing doozy: "Meditation quiets the mind, helps you control your thoughts." Of course, the goal of meditation is precisely the opposite -- it is to be conscious, to observe your thoughts honestly and clearly. But that's the last thing the believers want to encourage. The authors of "The Secret" sell "control" in the form of "empowerment" and "quiet" in the form of belief, not consciousness.

The promises of Oprah culture can seem irresistible, and its hallmarks are becoming ubiquitous. Believers may be separated into tribes according to what they believe, but they do it in pretty much the same way, relying on a "Secret"-style conception of "intuition" --- which seems to amount to the sneaking suspicion that they're always right -- to arrive at their tenets. Instead of the world as it is, constantly changing and full of contradiction, they see a fixed and fantastical place, where good things come to those who believe, whether it's belief in a diet, a God, or a Habit of Successful People. These believers may believe in the healing power of homeopathy, or Scripture or organizational skills -- in intelligent design, astrology or privatization. They all trust that their devotion will be rewarded with money and boyfriends and job promotions, with hockey championships and apartments. And most of all they believe -- they really, really believe -- in themselves.

For these believers, self-knowledge is much less important than self-"love." But the question they never seem to ask themselves is: If you wouldn't tell another person you loved her before you got to know her, why would you do that to yourself? Skipping the getting-to-know-you part has given us what we deserve: the Oprah culture. It's a culture where superstition is "spirituality," illiteracy is "authenticity," and schoolmarm moralism is "character." It's a culture where people apologize by saying, "I'm sorry you took offense at what I said," and forgive by saying, "I'm not angry at you anymore, I'm grateful to you for teaching me not to trust shitheads like you." And that's the part that should bother us most: the diminishing, even implicit mocking, of genuine goodness, and of authentic spiritual concerns and practices. Engagement, curiosity and active awe are in short supply these days, and it's sickening to see them devalued and misrepresented.

Not that any of this is new. Aimee Semple McPherson, "The Power of Positive Thinking," Father Coughlin, est, James Van Praagh -- pick your influential snake-oil salesman or snake oil. They were all cut from the same cloth as Oprah and "The Secret." The big, big difference is, well, the bigness. The infinitely bigger reach of the Oprah empire and its emissaries. They make their predecessors look like kids with lemonade stands. It would be stupidly dangerous to dismiss Oprah and "The Secret" as silly, or ultimately meaningless. They're reaching more people than Harry Potter, for God-force's sake. That's why what Oprah does matters, and stinks. If you reach more people than Bill O'Reilly, if you have better name recognition than Nelson Mandela, if the books you endorse sell more than Stephen King's, you should take some responsibility for your effect on the culture. The most powerful woman in the world is taking advantage of people who are desperate for meaning, by passionately championing a product that mocks the very idea of a meaningful life.

That means something.

[American Dream]

http://sexinthepublicsquare.org/Elizabe ... ement-fail

Ad Placement Fail?

From page A18 of the May 24 edition of the New York Times







What do you think? This Bloomingdales ad for Rag & Bone Jeans ($165.00) and silk Equipment top ($178.00) contains the tag line "MEET YOUR NEW MUST-HAVE" and depicts an Asian model staring into the camera with her lips parted. It accompanies an article with the headline "In Oakland, Redefining Sex Trade Workers as Abuse Victims" which, among many things, criticizes the 'exoticization' of Asian women in the US.

The article can be found online at: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/24/us/24oakland.html

[American Dream]

[norton ash]

^^ 'Meet Your New Must-Have'... an underfed Asian adolescent girl.

Like the ones for sale down the street from Bloomie's, or the ones who sew the expensive jeans.

Sometimes juxtaposition can reveal bigger pictures.

[American Dream]

http://www.open.salon.com/blog/stuartbr ... ed/comment

JULY 1, 2011

Can Human Nature be Repaired?




Anti-capitalist John Strachey touches briefly on the Human Nature debate in his 1933 Coming Struggle for Power (see “Is Capitalism Doomed?” http://stuartbramhall.aegauthorblogs.co ... sm-doomed/). He makes the observation that despite unimaginable technological advances in all other fields of endeavor, man has been totally unsuccessful in improving his own nature. He, Marx and Engels blame capitalist oppression for this. Marxist psychiatrist Wilhelm Reich enlarges on this perspective. He places most of the blame on the refusal of the intellectual elite to acknowledge the fundamental animal (biologic) nature of human beings.

Informed by nearly eighty years of behavioral research, I’m most swayed by Reich’s arguments. Farmers and horse trainers wouldn’t dream of subjecting the animals they depend on for their livelihood (they would be prosecuted under animal cruelty laws) to the horrendous conditions most of humanity are forced to live under.


The End of Capitalism and Class Society

There is compelling evidence in current behavioral research that ending capitalism and class society will improve the so-called “flaws” in human nature in five basic ways:

1. More equitable distribution of food and clean drinking water will ensure that more, if not all, of presently “disadvantaged” populations are guaranteed access to basic nutrients that are the essential building blocks for normal child development and optimal physical, psychological and emotional functioning in adults.

2. Extreme stress levels that aggravate impulsive and aggressive behavior will be reduced, by ending excessively long work hours and arbitrary and abusive treatment by employers and supervisors, as well as by improving pay and working conditions.

3. Extended family and community networks, essential in the self-regulation of all primate behavior, will be restored. Human beings are a social species, owing to their biological programming, and function best in groups. Over the past four decades, extreme work pressures (long hours and high stress) have led to the widespread breakdown of extended families and traditional community and civic groups.

4. A reduction in work stress and restoration of social networks will facilitate a return to a more “naturalistic” communal childrearing environment. This model, according to cross cultural studies, is most conducive to optimal child development.

5. Hierarchal, coercive power relations that breed aggression, violence and sadism will be replaced – in government, schools and the work place – with cooperative, consensus driven models of governance.


The Scars Left by Capitalism

In view of the extensive research evidence, “liberal” human behavior experts (psychologists, sociologists, criminologists, social workers, etc) are slowly coming around to the view that the ravages of capitalist society, rather than “human nature” itself are responsible for the wanton cruelty and “inhumanity” that characterize industrialized society. Yet most them still argue that socialism and participatory democracy are impossible, claiming that it will take generations to undo the damage capitalism has inflicted on the human species.

From their perspective, 21st century men and women commit theft, murder, rape, domestic violence, child abuse and wanton terrorism on the battlefield are due to faulty childrearing. Maltreatment of their children leads them to acquire similar character defects, which they, in turn, pass on to their grandchildren. Thus even if capitalism were to end tomorrow, we would be left with a society of defective human beings, prevented by major emotional and behavior problems, from governing themselves.

Does this argument have merit?

To be continued.

[American Dream]

[rose.irene]

American Dream, I am curious as to the "lesson" you glean from this cartoon, or what about it specifically piqued your interest.

[American Dream]

Disney's 1934 rendering of the fable of The Grasshopper and the Ants, with its version of "The World Owes Me a Living" takes on more meaning as considered in this context:

Disney animators' strike
(From Wikipedia)

History

The 1930s led to a rise of labor unions in motion pictures as in other industries. The Screen Actors Guild was formed in 1933. Animators struck Max Fleischer's New York studios in 1937. The Screen Cartoonists' Guild was formed in 1938. In 1941, they began a push and obtained contracts with Terrytoons, Walter Lantz Productions, Screen Gems, George Pal and MGM. Leon Schlesinger, whose Leon Schlesinger Productions produced the popular Looney Tunes/Merrie Melodies cartoons for Warner Bros., attempted a lockout, but soon gave in to the union and then asked, "What about Disney?"[1]

Although Disney artists were the best paid and worked under the best conditions in the industry, there was discontent.[2] In The Disney Version, Richard Schickel writes, "Many of the employees had given Disney large quantities of free overtime during the drive to complete the 1937 Snow White", and despite the fact that Snow White was an enormous success, "instead of getting the bonuses they had been vaguely promised, they were faced with a string of layoffs... The salary structure remained crazy-quilt, and the only general wage increase Disney granted in those years was self-serving: he brought a number of workers up over the forty-dollar-a-week level, at which point, under the Wagner Labor Relations Act, they ceased being entitled to time-and-a-half for overtime."

Schickel says that Disney "responded gracelessly to the pressures of his increasingly difficult economic situation". Story conferences became brutal. "An animator working on Fantasia took piano lessons at his own expense" to increase his understanding of music, and when Disney found out about it, he snarled "What are you, some kind of fag?". According to other sources, more sympathetic than Schickel, Disney did appreciate his artist's interest in art forms other than animation. In Bob Thomas' biography, Disney is quoted as saying: "What young artists need is a school where they can learn a variety of skills, a place where there is cross-pollination." In 1961, Disney founded the interdisciplinary Cal Arts school.[3]

As the biggest and most successful animation studio, Disney was an obvious target for the Screen Cartoonists' Guild. There was a layoff which seemed to target members of the Guild selectively, and things reached a boiling point when Disney fired animator Art Babbitt, whom Disney regarded as a "troublemaker".[1] Three days later, on May 29, 1941, the strike began, instigated by union organizer Herb Sorrell, described as a "tough left-winger". Archives of the Soviet Union released by the Russian government implicate Sorrell as a Communist spy.[4] Thomas relates that Disney had insisted on a vote among his employees, but Sorrel feared he would lose the vote, and decided to strike without a vote. Sorrel also used outside people, "sluggers", in the picket lines.[2]

The strike occurred during the making of the animated feature Dumbo, and a number of strikers are caricatured in the feature as clowns who go to "hit the big boss for a raise".

The strike lasted five weeks. Toward the end, Disney accepted a suggestion by Nelson Rockefeller, then head of the Latin American Affairs office in the State department, that he make a tour of Latin America as a goodwill ambassador. His removal from the scene enabled passions to cool, and in his absence the strike was settled with the help of a federal mediator, who found in the Guild's favor on every issue. The Disney studio signed a contract and has been a union shop ever since.[1]

Aftermath and notable departures

Following the strike, irreparable damage to the psychology and mood of the studio had, nevertheless, been done. Schickel quotes a letter in which Disney said that "it cleaned house at our studio" and got rid of "the chip-on-the-shoulder boys and the world-owes-me-a-living lads".

.

[American Dream]

http://politicalleft.blog-city.com/disn ... symbol.htm

Disney Corporation: Capitalism's 'Magic' Symbol

posted Wednesday, 22 July 2009


[Casino] capitalism may be getting a bad rap in the mainstream media, but the values that nourish it are alive and well in the world of Disney. It's in the forefront of finding ways to capitalize on the $50 billion dollars spent by boys from 6 to 14.

As part of such efforts, Disney has enlisted the help of educators, anthropologists and a former researcher with "a background in the casino industry."

They will not only study all aspects of the culture and intimate lives of young boys, but to do so in a way that allows Disney to produce "emotional hooks" that lure young boys into the wonderful world of corporate Disney in order to turn them into enthusiastic consumers.

The potential for lucrative profits to be made off the spending habits and economic influence of kids has certainly not been lost on Disney and a number of other mega corporations, which under the deregulated, privatized, no-holds-barred world of the free market have set out to embed the dynamics of commerce, exchange value and commercial transactions into every aspect of personal and daily life.

If Disney had its way, kids' culture would become not merely a new market for the accumulation of capital but a petri dish for producing new commodified subjects.

As a group, young people are vulnerable to corporate giants such as Disney, who make every effort "to expand inwardly into the psyche and emotional life of the individual in order to utilize human potential" in the service of a market society.

Since children's identities have to be actively directed toward the role of consumers, knowledge, information, entertainment and cultural pedagogy become central in shaping and influencing every waking moment of children's daily lives.

In this instance, Disney, with its legion of media holdings, armies of marketers and omnipresent advertisers, set out not to just exploit young boys and other youth for profit; they are actually constructing them as commodities and promoting the concept of childhood as a saleable commodity.

Marketing Methods - More Camouflaged, Seductive & Successful

What is particularly disturbing in this scenario is that Disney and a growing number of marketers and advertisers now work with child psychologists and other experts who study young people in order to better understand children's culture so as to develop marketing methods that are more camouflaged, seductive and successful.

For example, Disney's recent attempts to "figure out the boys' entertainment market," includes the services of Kelly Pena, described as "the kid whisperer."

In an attempt to understand what makes young boys tick, she uses her anthropological skills to convince young boys and their parents to allow her to look into the kids' closets, go shopping with young boys and pay them $75 to be interviewed. Ms. Pena, with no irony intended, prides herself on the fact that "Children ... open up to her."

Disingenuously wrapping itself in the discourse of innocence and family-oriented amusement in order to camouflage the mechanisms and deployment of corporate power, Disney's use of its various entertainment platforms, which cuts across all forms of traditional and new media, is relentless in its search for younger customers and its bombarding of young people incessantly with the pedagogy of commerce.

A Captive Audience

Under the tutelage of Disney and other mega corporations, children have become a captive audience to traditional forms of media, such as television and print.

Even more so, to new media such as mobile phones, MP3 players, the Internet, computers, and other forms of electronic culture that now seem to provide the latest products at the speed of light.

Kids can download enormous amounts of media in seconds and carry around such information, images and videos in a device the size of a thin cigarette lighter.

Moreover, "[media] technologies themselves are morphing and merging, forming an ever-expanding presence throughout our daily environment."[8] Mobile phones alone have grown "to include video game platforms, e-mail devices, digital cameras, and Internet connections," making it easier for marketers and advertisers to reach young people.

A "Marketing Ecosystem"

Kids of all ages now find themselves in what the Berkeley Media Studies Group and the Center for Digital Democracy call "a new 'marketing ecosystem' that encompasses cell phones, mobile music devices, broadband video, instant messaging, video games, and virtual three-dimensional worlds," all of which provide the knowledge and information that young people use to navigate the consumer society.

Disney along with its researchers, marketing departments and purveyors of commerce largely control and services this massive virtual entertainment complex, spending vast amounts of time trying to understand the needs, desires, tastes, preferences, social relations and networks that define youth as a potential market.

Disney's recent attempt to corner the young male market through the use of sophisticated research models, ethnographic tools and the expertise of academics to win over the hearts and minds of young people.

This is to develop strategies to deliver them to the market as both loyal consumers and commodities indicates the degree to which the language of the market has disengaged itself from either moral considerations or the social good.

Disney claims this kind of intensive research pays off in lucrative dividends and reinforces the Disney motto that in order to be a successful company "You have to start with the kids themselves."

Members of a Consumer Society

Children are increasingly exposed to a marketing and advertising pedagogical machinery eager and ready to transform them into full-fledged members of the consumer society.

And the amount of time they spend in this commercial world defined by Disney and a few other corporations is as breathtaking as it is disturbing.
For instance, "It has been estimated that the typical child sees about 40,000 ads a year on TV alone,"[ and that by the time they enter the fourth grade they have "memorized 300-400 brands."

In 2005, the Kaiser Family Foundation reported that young people are "exposed to the equivalent of 8 hours a day of media content ... [and that] the typical 8-18 year-old lives in a home with an average of 3.6 CD or tape players, 3.5 TVs, 3.3 radios, 2.0VCRs/DVD players, 2.1 video game consoles and 1.5 computers."

In the synoptic world of ads and marketing practices, the project of commercializing and commodifying children is ubiquitous and can be found wherever a previously noncommodified space existed.

Hence, it comes as no surprise to find ads, logos, and other products of the marketing juggernaut pasted on school walls, public buildings, public transportation systems, textbooks, public washrooms and even on baseball diamonds.

Spreading the Disney Ideology

Given its powerful role in monopolizing all modes of communication, especially those that are media driven, Disney exercises a highly disproportionate concentration of control over the means of producing, circulating and exchanging information, especially to kids.

By spreading its ideology all over the globe through film, television, satellite broadcasting technologies, the Internet, posters, magazines, billboards, newspapers, videos, and other media forms and technologies, Disney has transformed culture into a pivotal educational force.

Through this insidious form of public pedagogy, Disney not only commercializes and infantilizes most of what it touches, it also shuts down those public spaces where kids can learn noncommodified values.

Pixie-dust magic may appeal to the world of fantasy, but it offers no language for defining vital social institutions as a public good, links all dreams to the logic of the market and harnesses the imagination to forces of unfettered consumerism.

Inculcating Consumer 'Values'

Whether talking about United States or other parts of the globe, it is fair to argue that for the first time in human history, centralized commercially-driven conglomerates hold sway over the stories and narratives that shape children's lives.

Unfortunately, this rather sublime education often derived from unethical modes of research is absorbed by kids as entertainment and often escapes any critical or self-reflection.

The disconnect between market values and ethical considerations is on full display in Disney's almost boastful use of research to mine the inner lives and experiences of young children.

That such an admission both receives front page coverage in The New York Times and is presented without critical commentary is a testament to how commercial values have numbed the public's ability to recognize the danger such values often present to children.

Free-Market Fundamentalism

Challenging the meaning, legacy and ideology of the Disney empire is part of a larger challenge to the emergence of free-market fundamentalism as an economic model and a form of public pedagogy and its implications for disavowing both public life and any democratic notion of young people.

Getting beyond Disney means, in part, theorizing children as a social investment and democracy as a process and a promise rather than a fantasy world in which pixie dust and mass entertainment cover up the swindle of fulfillment and joy that Disney offers in its endless appeal to consumerism.

As citizenship becomes increasingly privatized and youth are increasingly educated to become consuming subjects rather than civic minded and critical citizens, it becomes all the more imperative for people everywhere to develop a critical language in which notions of the public good, public issues and public life become central to overcoming the privatizing and depoliticizing language of the market.

Disney, like many corporations, trades in sound bytes and the result is that the choices, exclusions and values that inform its narratives about joy, pleasure, living and existing in a global world are often difficult to discern.

Disney needs to be addressed within a widening circle of awareness, so we can place the history, meaning and influence of the Disney empire outside of enforced horizons and confinements that often shut down critique and critical engagement with Disney's commercial carpet bombing of children.

Disney's Commodification of Culture

All of us who participate in the Disneyfication of culture need to excavate the silences, memories and exclusions that challenge the identities offered to young people by Disney under the name of the innocence, nationalism and entertainment.

As one of the most influential corporations in the world, Disney does more than provide entertainment, it also shapes in very powerful ways how young people understand themselves, relate to others and experience the larger society.

It is not difficult to recognize a certain tragedy in the fact that because of a lack of resources, kids disappear literally in foster care institutions, teachers are overwhelmed in overcrowded classrooms, state services drained of funds cannot provide basic food and shelter to a growing army of kids who now inhabit rapidly emerging tent cities.

Yet, corporations such as Disney have ample funds to hire a battalion of highly educated and specialized experts to infiltrate the most intimate spaces of children and family life. All the better to colonize and commodify the netherworld of childhood, their fears, aspirations and their future.

Disney's commodification of childhood is neither innocent nor simply entertaining and the values it produces, as it attempts to commandeer children's desires and hopes, may offer us one of the most important clues about the nature and destructive forces behind the current economic and financial crisis. But don't expect a Congressional hearing soon on this issue.


[Original by Henry Giroux, with footnotes, available at: http://archive.truthout.org/041509J ]







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[American Dream]

[American Dream]

Disneyland, Social Media & Hyper-Reality




Hyperreality: What's Real? What's Fantasy?


Jean Baudrillard suggests that hyper-reality is where the world we live in has been replaced by a copy world, where we seek simulated stimuli and nothing more. Hyperreality exists in a state where chosen symbols of reality mask our surroundings, thus producing unreality.

Jean Baudrillard noted that with Disneyland, “everyday life has been captured by the signs and sign systems generated to represent it. We relate to the models as if they were reality.

In his argument, California's Disneyland functions as ‘an imaginary effect concealing that reality no more exists outside than inside the bounds of the artificial perimeter.’”

Disneyland attendance is much like that of modern-day social media use. Virtual reality provides the same type of hyper-realistic world that was detailed above. In effect, it replaces a reality—social interaction, with another seeming reality—virtual interaction, which creates an element of unreality.



American idealism is forever branded in the American dream: The belief that with some hard work and clever thought, one can achieve his or her utopian world—a world where happiness abounds among equal opportunity, capitalism, consumerism, and industrialism.

Conversely, postmodernism has no such grandiose ambitions. Postmodernism might be considered the satirical twist of the American dream. It objects to objectivity; rather than searching for answers, postmodernism makes a parody of presupposed truths and juxtaposes seemingly unrelated pieces of culture together.

Many meanings can be derived in Disneyland—especially with the larger, capitalist, American culture as the context.

Disneyland exhibits signifiers of each aspect of early American capitalism. “Frontierland can be interpreted as a reference to the stage of predatory capitalism; Adventureland, as a representation of colonialism/imperialism.

Tomorrowland, as state-financed capitalism, or the military-industrial complex; New Orleans Square as a signifier for venture capital; and lastly, Main Street as the period of family and mercantile capitalism.

Hyper-Reality

A discussion on hyperreality is important as it is one key component of the Disney parks. Hyperreality exists in a state where chosen symbols of reality mask our surroundings, thus producing unreality.

Jean Baudrillard, one of the leaders of postmodernism and proponent of hyperreality noted that with Disneyland, “everyday life has been captured by the signs and sign systems generated to represent it.

"We relate to the models as if they were reality. In his argument, California's Disneyland functions as ‘an imaginary effect concealing that reality no more exists outside than inside the bounds of the artificial perimeter.’”

Just as Disney sought to control his company environment, Disneyland, like American colonialism, controls its natural environment.

Rather than allowing nature to be “natural,” Disneyland restrains every aspect its guests’ environment, from the sights and sounds to the available directions guests may go.

Furthermore, “there is no sign of decay, crime, confusion, discontent, pain, poverty, or struggle.” According to one scholar, this cultural interpretation of nature can have negative effects:

“There is a strong presumption that Disney closely records the real thing out there in mountain meadow, prairie and pound. If our first introduction to the natural world is via ‘Disneyvision’ -- and for virtually all of us, it is -- then we cannot help being disappointed by the real thing. Documentary is a dramatic form. Nature is hard put to compete with art.”

Disneyland embodies the presence of an idealized world in which Americans, bred from a culture of idealizing, find comfort in the safe and happy confines of a park where nothing goes wrong.

Continues at: http://web-prowler.blogspot.com/2010/04 ... eality.htm

[American Dream]

http://ratical.org/many_worlds/6Nations ... tml#part1a


SPIRITUALISM

THE HIGHEST FORM OF POLITICAL CONSCIOUSNESS


THE HAU DE NO SAU NEE MESSAGE TO THE WESTERN WORLD



The Hau de no sau nee, or the Six Nations Iroquois Confederacy, has existed on this land since the beginning of human memory. Our culture is among the most ancient continuously existing cultures in the world. We still remember the earliest doings of human beings. We remember the original instructions of the Creators of Life on this place we call Etenoha -- Mother Earth. We are the spiritual guardians of this place. We are the Ongwhehonwhe -- the Real People.

In the beginning, we were told that the human beings who walk about the Earth have been provided with all the things necessary for life. We were instructed to carry a love for one another, and to show a great respect for all the beings of this Earth. We are shown that our life exists with the tree life, that our well-being depends on the well-being of the Vegetable Life, that we are close relatives of the four-legged beings. In our ways, spiritual consciousness is the highest form of politics.

Ours is a Way of Life. We believe that all living things are spiritual beings. Spirits can be expressed as energy forms manifested in matter. A blade of grass is an energy form manifested in matter -- grass matter. The spirit of the grass is that unseen force which produces the species of grass, and it is manifest to us in the form of real grass.

All things of the world are real, material things. The Creation is a true, material phenomenon, and the Creation manifests itself to us through reality. The spiritual universe, then, is manifest to Man as the Creation, the Creation which supports life. We believe that man is real, a part of the Creation, and that his duty is to support Life in conjunction with the other beings. That is why we call ourselves Ongwhehonwhe -- Real People.

The original instructions direct that we who walk about on the Earth are to express a great respect, an affection, and a gratitude toward all the spirits which create and support Life. We give a greeting and thanksgiving to the many supporters of our own lives -- the corn, beans, squash, the winds, the sun. When people cease to respect and express gratitude for these many things, then all life will be destroyed, and human life on this planet will come to an end.

Our roots are deep in the lands where we live. We have great love for our country, for our birthplace is there. The soil is rich from the bones of thousands of our generations. Each of us were created in those lands, and it is our duty to take great care of them, because from these lands will spring the future generations of the Ongwhehonwhe. We walk about with a great respect, for the Earth is a very sacred place.

We are not a people who demand, or ask anything of the Creators of Life, but instead, we give greetings and thanksgiving that all the forces of Life are still at work. We deeply understand our relationship to all living things. To this day, the territories we still hold are filled with trees, animals, and the other gifts of the Creation. In these places we still receive our nourishment from our Mother Earth.

We have seen that not all people of the Earth show the same kind of respect for this world and its beings. The Indo-European people who have colonized our lands have shown very little respect for the things that create and support Life. We believe that these people ceased their respect for the world a long time ago. Many thousands of years ago, all the people of the world believed in the same Way of Life, that of harmony with the universe. All lived according to the Natural Ways.

Around ten thousand years ago, peoples who spoke Indo-European languages lived in the area which today we know as the Steppes of Russia. At that time, they were a Natural World people who lived off the land. They had developed agriculture, and it is said that they had begun the practice of animal domestication. It is not known that they were the first people in the world to practice animal domestication. The hunters and gatherers who roamed the area probably acquired animals from the agricultural people, and adopted an economy, based on the herding and breeding of animals.

Herding and breeding of animals signaled a basic alteration in the relationship of humans to other life forms. It set into motion one of the true revolutions in human history. Until herding, humans depended on nature for the reproductive powers of the animal world. With the advent of herding, humans assumed the functions which had for all time been the functions of the spirits of the animals. Sometime after this happened, history records the first appearance of the social organization known as "patriarchy."

The area between the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers was the homeland, in ancient times, of various peoples, many of whom spoke Semitic languages. The Semitic people were among the first in the world to develop irrigation technology. This development led to the early development of towns, and eventually cities. The manipulation of the waters, another form of spirit life, represented another way in which humans developed a technology which reproduced a function of Nature.

Within these cultures, stratified hierarchical social organization crystallized. The ancient civilizations developed imperialism, partly because of the very nature of cities. Cities are obviously population concentrations. Most importantly though, they are places which must import the material needs of this concentration from the countryside. This means that the Natural World must be subjugated, extracted from, and exploited in the interest of the city. To give order to this process, the Semitic world developed early codes of law. They also developed the idea of monotheism to serve as a spiritual model for their material and political organization.

Much of the history of the ancient world recounts the struggles between the Indo-Europeans and the Semitic peoples. Over a period of several millenia, the two cultures clashed and blended. By the second millenia B.C., some Indo-Europeans, most specifically the Greeks, had adopted the practice of building cities, thus becoming involved in the process which they named "Civilization."

Both cultures developed technologies peculiar to civilizations. The Semitic peoples invented kilns which enabled the creation of pottery for trade, and storage of surpluses. These early kilns eventually evolved into ovens which could generate enough heat to smelt metals, notably copper, tin and bronze. The Indo-Europeans developed a way of smelting iron.

Rome fell heir to these two cultures, and became the place where the final meshing occurs. Rome is also the true birthplace of Christianity. The process that has become the culture of the West is historically and linguistically a Semitic/Indo-European culture, but has been commonly termed the Judeo-Christian tradition.

Christianity was an absolutely essential element in the early development of this kind of technology. Christianity advocated only one God. It was a religion which imposed itself exclusively of all other beliefs. The local people of the European forests were a people who believed in the spirits of the forests, waters, hills and the land; Christianity attacked those beliefs, and effectively de-spiritualized the European world. The Christian peoples, who possessed superior weaponry and a need for expansion, were able to militarily subjugate the tribal peoples of Europe.

The availability of iron led to the development of tools which could cut down the forest, the source of charcoal to make more tools. The newly cleared land was then turned by the newly developed iron plow, which was, for the first time, pulled by horses. With that technology many fewer people would work much more land, and many other people were effectively displaced to become soldiers and landless peasants. The rise of that technology ushered in the Feudal Age and made possible, eventually, the rise of new cities and growing trade. It also spelled the beginning of the end of the European forest, although that process took a long time to complete.

The eventual rise of cities and the concurrent rise of the European state created the thrust of expansion and search for markets which led men, such as Columbus, to set sail across the Atlantic. The development of sailing vessels and navigation technologies made the European "discovery" of the Americas inevitable.

The Americas provided Europeans a vast new area for expansion and material exploitation. Initially, the Americas provided new materials and even finished materials for the developing world economy which was based on the Indo-European technologies. European civilization has a history of rising and falling as its technologies reach their material and cultural limits. The finite Natural world has always provided a kind of built-in contradiction to Western expansion.

The Indo-Europeans attacked every aspect of North America with unparalleled zeal. The Native people were ruthlessly destroyed because they were an unassimilable element to the civilizations of the West. The forests provided materials for larger ships, and some areas provided sources of slave labor for the conquering invaders. By the time of the Industrial Revolution in the mid-Nineteenth Century, North America was already a leader in the area of the development of extractive technology.

The hardwood forests of the Northeast were not cleared for the purpose of providing farmlands. Those forests were destroyed to create charcoal for the forges of the iron smelters and blacksmiths. By the 1890's, the West had turned to coal, a fossil fuel, to provide the energy necessary for the many new forms of machinery which had been developed. During the first half of the Twentieth Century, oil had replaced coal as a source of energy.

The Western culture has been horribly exploitative and destructive of the Natural World. Over 140 species of birds and animals were utterly destroyed since the European arrival in the Americas, largely because they were unusable in the eyes of the invaders. The forests were leveled, the waters polluted, the Native people subjected to genocide. The vast herds of herbivores were reduced to mere handfuls, the buffalo nearly became extinct. Western technology and the people who have employed it have been the most amazingly destructive forces in all of human history. No natural disaster has ever destroyed as much. Not even the Ice Ages counted as many victims.

But like the hardwood forests, the fossil fuels are also finite resources. As the second half of the Twentieth Century has progressed, the people of the West have begun looking to other forms of energy to motivate their technology. Their eyes have settled on atomic energy, a form of energy production which has by-products which are the most poisonous substances ever known to Man.

Today the species of Man is facing a question of the very survival of the species. The way of life known as Western Civilization is on a death path on which their own culture has no viable answers. When faced with the reality of their own destructiveness, they can only go forward into areas of more efficient destruction. The appearance of Plutonium on this planet is the clearest of signals that our species is in trouble. It is a signal which most Westerners have chosen to ignore.

The air is foul, the waters poisoned, the trees dying, the animals are disappearing. We think even the systems of weather are changing. Our ancient teaching warned us that if Man interfered with the Natural Laws, these things would come to be. When the last of the Natural Way of Life is gone, all hope for human survival will be gone with it. And our Way of Life is fast disappearing, a victim of the destructive processes.

The other position papers of the Hau de no sau nee have outlined our analysis of economic and legal oppression. But our essential message to the world is a basic call to consciousness. The destruction of the Native cultures and people is the same process which has destroyed and is destroying life on this planet. The technologies and social systems which have destroyed the animal and plant life are also destroying the Native people. And that process is Western Civilization.

We know that there are many people in the world who can quickly grasp the intent of our message. But experience has taught us that there are few who are willing to seek out a method for moving toward any real change. But, if there is to be a future for all beings on this planet, we must begin to seek the avenues of change.

The processes of colonialism and imperialism which have affected the Hau de no sau nee are but a microcosm of the processes affecting the world. The system of reservations employed against our people is a microcosm of the system of exploitation used against the whole world. Since the time of Marco Polo, the West has been refining a process that mystified the peoples of the Earth.

The majority of the world does not find its roots in Western culture or traditions. The majority of the world finds its roots in the Natural World, and it is the Natural World, and the traditions of the Natural World, which must prevail if we are to develop truly free and egalitarian societies.

It is necessary, at this time, that we begin a process of critical analysis of the West's historical processes, to seek out the actual nature of the roots of the exploitative and oppressive conditions which are forced upon humanity. At the same time, as we gain understanding of those processes, we must reinterpret that history to the people of the world. It is the people of the West, ultimately, who are the most oppressed and exploited. They are burdened by the weight of centuries of racism, sexism, and ignorance which has rendered their people insensitive to the true nature of their lives.

We must all consciously and continuously challenge every model, every program, and every process that the West tries to force upon us. Paulo Friere wrote, in his book, the "Pedagogy of the Oppressed," that it is the nature of the oppressed to imitate the oppressor, and by such actions try to gain relief from the oppressive condition. We must learn to resist that response to oppression.

The people who are living on this planet need to break with the narrow concept of human liberation, and begin to see liberation as something which needs to be extended to the whole of the Natural World. What is needed is the liberation of all the things that support Life -- the air, the waters, the trees -- all the things which support the sacred web of Life.

We feel that the Native peoples of the Western Hemisphere can continue to contribute to the survival potential of the human species. The majority of our peoples still live in accordance with the traditions which find their roots in the Mother Earth. But the Native peoples have need of a forum in which our voice can be heard. And we need alliances with the other peoples of the world to assist in our struggle to regain and maintain our ancestral lands and to protect the Way of Life we follow.

We know that this is a very difficult task. Many nation states may feel threatened by the position that the protection and liberation of Natural World peoples and cultures represents, a progressive direction which must be integrated into the political strategies of people who seek to uphold the dignity of Man. But that position is growing in strength, and it represents a necessary strategy in the evolution of progressive thought.

The traditional Native peoples hold the key to the reversal of the processes in Western Civilization which hold the promise of unimaginable future suffering and destruction. Spiritualism is the highest form of political consciousness. And we, the native peoples of the Western Hemisphere, are among the world's surviving proprietors of that kind of consciousness. We are here to impart that message.