To Be or Not To Be ... Anthropocentric

Are we for or against ourselves? 

Perhaps the better question is: If we are for us, when will we start acting like it?

If the questions above seem outrageous, out there, or confusing, let me pause for a moment to offer some brief foundation on which to pin these questions.

I was born in 1961, in Berkeley, CA, a city known for radicalism and protest, then and now. My parents took us on marches. We belonged to the Co-Op. We participated in early ecological efforts. (If anyone can now remember the 1971 oil spill on San Francisco Bay, my mother took my sister and me on AC Transit to San Francisco, so we could all help in the rescue of birds and beach cleanup. This was a very low-tech process at the time. I remember lots of hay being spread about, to absorb the oil. While the beaches and bay were eventually cleaned, despite the efforts of hundreds of people, many birds perished.) We had family friends who had opted out and gone “off grid” by retreating to communes. My parents were more on the side of opting in.

Being a child of the television era, I was acutely aware of the news. Among my very earliest memories is of watching the funeral of JFK on our small, black and white Motorola portable TV. Time inched forward through strikes, assassinations, War, famine in India and Ethiopia. I knew that a war had been declared, by our President, on poverty in our nation. I knew that the Peace Corps, Red Cross and other groups were actively working to help people in other nations stricken by illness and famine. I knew there was war against illiteracy. Unrest was all around. Sometimes, I did not feel safe, but I always felt that most people were working to make the world a better place for everyone. That is a little about my background and those events that informed my understanding of the world.

Today, I look back and see that the Progressive ideas, which had their roots in three and more generations before my birth, have largely failed. We can look at the history that has been written since and find a few overarching reasons for these failures: Military Industrial Complex and rampant, unregulated Capitalism. Progressivism and citizen activism have been undermined by those moneyed interests that prefer maintaining hegemony over influence and power to partaking of an equal share in human rights and justice.

War to bolster hegemony and claim on resources has cost more lives and more money than could ever be imagined. Unrelenting capitalism has enslaved entire populaces to create and exchange worthless junk, designed for rapid failure, that quickly becomes refuse, littering our world with toxicity that threatens to endanger the health and safety of all living beings.

What few people seem to realize, here in 2018, is that the world economies are no longer tied to nations, but to corporations that wield enough wealth and power to actively avoid the attempts of any governmental body that would control them. My proof of this lies in the movement toward privatization of the security sector, and to some extent in the numerous recent wars/conflicts that seem to have been unilateral manipulations by certain governments, but which have profited corporations engaged in “rebuilding efforts”.

It is apparent to me that nationalities and governments no longer hold the keys to human destiny, and this is why terror organizations and nefarious cyber disruptors are currently so successful.

It is also apparent to me that no one at the top is interested in civilization or social wellbeing.

What shocking things to say!

If only humans could be accused of being anthropocentric! But, alas, we cannot.

If we were truly anthropocentric, we would realize that anthropocentrism is a state that must be cultivated. The principal flaw of capitalism is that it can only survive when people buy. But if the world is populated by a few haves, the rest being have-nots, ultimately means that that having is an endgame. If the captains of capitalism don’t get to work cultivating larger groups of haves (people who will be capable of buying because they have knowledge, jobs and health, affordable housing, adequate access to food and water), the “free-for-all” marketplace will die, along with great swaths of the world’s population.

After that, all that is left is warlord military might à la Mad Max. And then, you capitalists, watch out!

The solution, to my mind, lies in a benevolent anthropocentrism, one that buys into a central notion that to keep the world going, you need smart, cultured, engaged, and empathetic people of all shapes, sizes, colors, ages, genders and cultural affiliations; caring people. Such people know that the earth and all life must be stewarded, and that this cannot be accomplished by stealing, cheating, lying or bullying, but by cooperation toward a common good for everyone and everything. We need to demilitarize the populace. We need to find the root causes of violence, isolation, depression, misanthropy; we need to weed them out by healing, hybridizing and nurturing wellbeing, by loving. We need to dismantle predatory thinking and practices, and replacing them with innovation that breeds life and purpose. We need to cultivate citizenship and personal responsibility that is manifest in every action built from the bottom up, and (as business consultants never tire in speaking of) resonated in the tone from the top.

Evolution, that is I am talking about, folks. We need to evolve. We desperately need to become something we clearly right now are not. We need to become truly human and anthropocentric in the sense that being good to the world around us is the path toward both meeting all our basic needs and providing spiritual fulfillment.

It is a simple idea, in the words of T.S. Eliot, “costing not less than everything.”

Or, as Voltaire has his eponymous hero ultimately declare, “repondit Candide, ‘Oui, mais il faut cultiver notre jardin.’”

Business As Usual: When Public Goes Private, Non-Profit Becomes For-Profit

We are living in a world that should be getting smaller in all the good ways (e.g., labor-saving devices that will allow people more free time, improvements in public health delivery, less pollution, organic food, longevity ensuring pharmaceuticals, access to all that is needed, work that is suitable and sustaining, the list is endless) as a result of something called progress. Things are supposed to be getting better for everyone.

[I hesitate to begin this next paragraph with the bubble-bursting word instead, but there it is, and there is nothing for it.]

Instead, what is really happening, and this becomes clearer as the days go by, is that human mentality seems to get smaller and more isolationist and mean. To match that, the hubris of the entitled is becoming daily more brazen and daring in its agenda of owning as much of the world as possible before it all falls apart.

In the 1990s, there was a lot of talk in the United States about the Global Village and hope that there would be a renaissance of cultures that would make us all be friends. After September 11^th 2001, however, we have heard very little about that, while much about the necessity of defense spending, about decentralization of government, lowering of taxes and the impossibility of maintaining any public programs, ostensibly because they are too expensive.

Let me unpackage some of this for us.

The “necessity” of defense spending means that most of our tax dollars are being spent on weapons of mass destruction, whose sole purpose is to intimidate, kill and destroy. The United States has had, for more than 50 years, a stockpile of weapons and artillery that could destroy the planet more than a hundred times over, and so it is hard to believe that anyone could need more of the stuff, much less the very latest in death and destruction technology. And yet, the generals want more, and so do the private defense contractors, who rake in billions of dollars by manufacturing death. The budget for upkeep of existing nuclear weapons in the U.S. arsenal alone has been reckoned enough to provide every person on the planet with food, safe drinking water and shelter, annually. Think about it.

Decentralization of government means that the bureaucracy is being transferred from the public to the private sector. This move is touted as a cost savings to government, but this cannot not possibly prove true in financial analysis. It may save the government money, but it doesn’t save you or me anything! The money still comes from our pockets. When we move from public to private, we move from a non-profit situation to a for-profit situation. Our rights then have a retail cost. If we cannot meet that for-profit cost in the marketplace, then we are out in the cold. Alarmist, you say? Well, if the Governor of the State of Arizona can take people off waitlists for organ transplants because their economic condition will not allow them to pay for the procedure, and if firefighters in Tennessee can standby and watch someone’s home burn to the ground because the member of the public that owns that dwelling allegedly did not pay some very small local fee, then what do we have, here? Think about it.

Voters are asked to vote for candidates based on candidates’ promises of “no new taxes”. This happens first, of course, at the federal level. Responsibility for the public welfare is then removed from the federal level to the state level, where voters are asked to vote for candidates based on the candidates’ promises of “no new taxes”. Responsibility for the public welfare is then removed from the state level to the local level, where voters are asked to vote for candidates based on the candidates’ promises of “no new taxes”. But, then, of course, local officials, once in office, say, “shucks, darn it! We have to raise taxes so that we can uphold the public welfare and basic infrastructure!” And the only way the local yokels have to do this is by having the community vote to mandate a parcel tax premium over the regular property tax. Moreover, the people and businesses with the most money do not contribute according to what they have. The burden falls on the average tax payer, trying to make it in a wavering economy. Think about it.

“Citizen’s Initiatives” are placed on local and state level ballots by big businesses and special interest groups funded by big business, not just your everyday citizen, to get voters to mandate what is good for big business: guaranteed jobs and tax payer money to pay for these jobs. The average person cannot manipulate the system in this way to get a job. What is an example of such a program? Well, the voters of the State of California mandated R&D for stem cell research. Instead of funding public schools (public education is mandated by the State, you know), the State of California is funding stem cell research with taxpayer dollars. To date, this program has sucked in billions in public funds, but has been a complete bust as a business enterprise—while, of course, a few people have been making a lot of money. Meanwhile, who does this publicly mandated program benefit? This public program does not benefit the average Californian as much as it benefits Big Business Pharma Industry. This public program has not created a whole lot of jobs, because it is a highly scientific specialty. Look up the articles on the internet. Think about it.

Such maneuvers have become commonplace, to the extent that I wonder how the average person can possibly be surprised by them. But we are.

I assert that we are being sold into a kind of slavery, and we don’t even realize it.

This is unthinkable, but I want you to think on it.

When your local police and fire departments become privatized, who will be in charge of them? Will your local government have oversight? If you have not paid your local taxes, will the firefighters park across the street from your burning house and watch you and your home go up in flames, while carefully monitoring that it does not spread next door, where they did pay the local tax? Think about it.

Since when did government have to turn a profit to be successful? What happened to By the People, for the People? Think about it.

Since when did big business know better how to run government agencies, hospitals, schools and prisons? Did you know that Dick Cheney owns prisons? Look up the articles on the internet. Think about it.

This is, Dear Reader, all food for thought. I do not have answers. Obviously, more examples could be brought into this discussion; space here is limited. But I can say this: if our government and business leaders had not been gambling and losing with public tax funds and your pension and everyone’s real estate, and if our government agencies hadn’t bonded us all into indebtedness on the basis of future tax earnings that would often (particularly in the case of redevelopment, but probably elsewhere, also) not be realized until 40 years into the future, the world would not be experiencing the dreadful financial collapse that now imperils the lives of so many.

This has not been progress, People. This has been, and continues to be, business as usual. Moreover, it has been and continues to be robbery. Think about it.