>So, you don't think that even in America in, say, 1980, that...
>people had some kind of shelter against the insanity that constantly >stalks us?
Some did some did not. In the 80's there was more equal distribution of wealth but on the flip side there was those who were denied it,there was alot of issues in the 80's like, religious right's satanism scare,the fact was for the poor and those in hospitals,they were turned out on the street,there was alot of disdain for the poor in America yet in the popular media there was a hullabaloo for feed the world and hands across America . It was alot of show but where the rubber meets the road it was close to the same old thing, very little to help the most desperate and suffering.
>I mean, just before Reagan got in, before they starting gutting the >middle class completely, before they starting throwing half the ghetto >in jail, wasn't there some safety in America?
Yes up to a point. Depends on where you were located at back than. When the hippie movement got infiltrated and shut down by the government,it was a tragedy,for it was the government and the authoritarian personalities within it who saw the freedom of the 60's as a threat. The neo cons still harp about those dirty hippies on the right. On the right they saw hippies as a counter-culture that threatened their cultural hegemony/empire at it's roots, it's social domination of culture. Empires cannot tolerate an alternative cultures to empire existing near the empire.Because the rulers know most people do not like living under someones boot, they'd rather be respected, free and loved as a worthy human part of a whole..
So there was government/corporate psyops,cointelpro, etc.There was trauma to remind people behind this shell of a democracy are guns(kent state)and we are not free. So all that hope turned inward with the eeexxxpand your mind bullshit, new age tripe,and drugs like LSD .The notion of a viable counter community to escape the sick stifling authoritarian culture of normal-land was abandoned and what survived afterward became the "Me Generation" that voted in reagan..and they turned away from the dream, and so did the culture at large,turning away from freedom for maybe they thought the price for it was too steep..
In the 70's things were not so stable ,there was the gas shortages,I remember people fighting at the pumps for gas,with their kids in the car.In the 70's there were food shortages too.riots etc.
It has NEVER really been all that stable or free here in America,depending on how you look at it,that is a nostalgia trap.
Freedom died when America was colonized.
>Things were still relatively cheap. The environment was cleaner than it >had been.
Silent Spring was written in the late sixties and pollutants like DDT were used all the time in the 70's,and there were other toxic wastes,I think the difference was it had not reached the saturation point on this earth yet,like it is doing now.
>The power of segregation had been broken.
>The anti-abortion crowd was still disorganized, and the E.R.A. was still >a possibility.
Yes and it took tremendous organizing on many levels to create these things, and time too. There are some simple things that have altered culturally the way real life changes in a society occur forever.
I suggest one of the insignificant monkey wrenches was the availability of home air conditioning to the middle and lower classes.Before air conditioning neighbors would on hot summer days go outside and socialize with each other after work.Kids played outside and the suburbs were not the little manicured islands with no signs of life except for the flicker of tv screens they are nowadays.
Another change was the corporate push to longer work hours appealing.The 24 hour open store. The need for traveling from place to place after work,and latchkey kids.
Longer work hours meant people came home too tired to cook a family dinner,people were too tired to go out and socialize with neighbors after work,longer work hours and cuts in pay and benefits damaged the grass roots connections between neighbors,As did families moving from town to town as the parents pursued jobs,they never had a chance to bond to the places and people where they lived.
Latchkey kids were admonished to not trust strangers and to stay inside the house where it is safe.
All this"prosperity" over time caused some social/ emotional damage,as Tv got more violent and the news turned into 24 hours people began to isolate and get turned on inside their own heads and homes and real life connections between people faded and the art of socialization was lost.I guess it was hard for humanity to face up to the fact that freedom from authoritarians and elitist fucks is won often by your blood being shed,and blood of your fellows , literally.Pacifism did not work. Ghandi was murdered,so much for that. I guess the reality of what kind of monsters we are up against and have been up against for so long,was overwhelming to contemplate even with all the material things that made the 70's look so stable compared to now.
>I grant you that the rest of the world was the worse for our >anti-Communist slaughter (e.g., The Shock Doctrine victims). I grant you that there was already stagflation. But, it sure didn't feel as insane
>and desperate in America then as it does today.
I know, I feel that way too I think it is an illusion tho. I think partly for me since there was no internet, I got my news from the same sources everyone else did.And so I never saw how bad it really was.So maybe ignorance was bliss.Also my body was younger,and I wasn't in pain and the medical issues were not making my life harder,I was going through psych shit,but that's a whole other ball of wax.
>Also, today, isn't there some safety in Europe, which seems to have >learned something from the two World Wars?
The generations closer to the war learned it. But every generation that grows up not experiencing how bad it was,or who are not able to empathize with those times and thus can forget, there is danger there. Today jokes are made about the holocaust, those jokes said in say 1959 would have pissed off alot of people.We have become so desensitized .Also Margret Thatcher did alot of damage to the equality that threatened European elitists.Thatcher and her supporters wanted to return the balance of power between the rich and the poor to that which existed before the post WWII reforms, the rich the authoritarian,the corporate.
>It has always seemed to me that material well-being is at least a >palliative, if not a cure, for the disease that you describe. We had the >opportunity to make a sustainable society, using population planning and >lower consumption. But, I agree with you that that opportunity was >trampled by the right as soon as Reagan got in.
A palliative is not a cure, it's a band aid on a sucking chest wound. Sadly for some a little bit of palliative creates an addiction,a greed to acquire more and more that cannot ever be satiated.Even if Reagan never got in,there will always be the manipulating selfish psychopathic assholes that want more than everyone else has and will take it from others and scheme and ruin the peace of others just because they can.
These personality types " parasitic alpha pigs" are the problem.
>I don't want to argue about how hopeless it is or isn't. I just want to >get a baseline on what you think is possible. My guess is that you >haven't totally given up or you wouldn't take the trouble to post here.
True.But my solution might not be easy, tidy,pleasant,or surgical, it might be very messy and take alot of guts and intelligence and a few bad mistakes ,it will take alot of education, to teach people how to not tolerate abuse and to recognize it.To admit certain toxic personalities do not change,nor do they want to.. they are what they are and we cannot live around them or tolerate them if we want freedom,sharing, peace and equality to be our future.
First we must STOP child abuse,that includes spanking and parents dominating kids and talking to them like dogs. Parents that teach through domination and fear are teaching kids to dominate so others will do what they say out of fear or guilt.Training their kids to be hypocrite bullies
We have to create havens,out of our homes, make them be asshole free zones where sensitive and wounded souls can go to learn to trust again,and fight the very types of people that broke them.We need to become self sufficient as possible, that is, learn everything we can learn that can sustain us, from how to build a solar panel,to home medical care to sewing our own clothes and canning.. and share our skills with others for FREE.
We have to learn to share what we have and let it go with no strings.We need to create a gift economy.One that does not need money or banks to get things people need to them.
t-economy.com/
We need to become smaller, big huge impersonal empires do not serve the needs of people at all. Breaking up into smaller groupings would be better because power would be close to each member,reachable and accountable..We need to be tribal again.(not necessarily primitive)
http://www.newtribalventures.com/NTV/We have to accept to protect a viable cooperative community that can get along we have to also accept we must not tolerate authoritarians, psychopaths and toxic personalities and we must reject the philosophies they espouse as self serving socially destructive bullshit.We cannot by-stand when others are hurt or deprived or bullied anymore.We need to be there for each other,even if it risks our own self. We need to care to speak to each other with respect,listen empathize with others..And do it up to a point..and that point is reached when one deals with a toxic personality,a person with NO consience..These cold blooded charmers are not capable or willing to live and let live any where they are and these toxic persons will not do their part and share in a community ,so we have to learn how to detect them, reject them limit their freedom ,restrain them from gaining any social clout,wealth,power position or too much privacy while in the community and if necessary destroy them and move on...
http://www.ponerology.com/This is how some tribes maintained such peaceful egalitarian ethics.
They kill the "alpha urges and if failing to curb that they kill the alphas " people who abuse people and power, and take too much from others.
an egalitarian band of hunter-gatherers that deliberately excludes any alpha role and makes its decisions by consensus. Along with tribes, which are larger and more recent but politically similar, these bands are so deeply committed to egalitarianism that their leadership is never very strong, let alone coercive. Yet they govern themselves rather well in the absence of formal institutions.
Yet sadly they have no defense against 'alphas',and so the 'alphas' destroy them.
We as people need to learn how to BE the alphas for ourselves,and not bow down or react in ways of obedience or by-standing when encountering a toxic personality in our midst. After dispatching the toxic asshole we must than go back to being EQUALS with everyone else in the community who isn't a toxic personality. Each member of said culture has to SHIFT between these two 'roles' of equal among equals and alpha among alphas That ability to detect discern who is a toxic danger socially,and as individuals each must be able and willing to take control of the threat,and let go of that control once the threat has been nullified,go back to egalitarian and consensus .Each person living in an asshole free zone must learn to shift between these two poles. That kind of flexibility can create the kind of culture we long for, yet still defend it from those capricious greedy bullies who would destroy it,exploit it, and dominate it..
Because if an abuser comes into our community or wheedles in,a thug, a salesman of bad ideas,a so called 'leader".Repeatedly there are certain signs a person is not a community oriented kind of person.
To have a safe and egalitarian community it requires each person in the community to trust themselves to act and do without a leader on the outside taking away the responsibility from them.They must not by-stand and on top of that each must be able to be an alpha and say to this thug, Enough,is enough and be strong enough in trusting themselves to destroy the threat by whatever means stops the threat to the community's well being.People need to understand what abuse is and what it is not.And once they understand what abuse is to NOT tolerate it.
We are all kings, each of us unique yet we are all equal too.For this good kind of society to survive each person in it must have an inner locus of control of their own, not an outside one. An outside locus of control is the thing in people that impulses them, to not trust their own senses, it relies on leaders, experts and other symbolic authorities to tell them right from wrong , to give permission,and to suspend responsibility,when in reality any so called authority or chain of command cannot suspend an individuals responsibility for what they do,yet people suspend responsibility for authority way too much,we have been conditioned by trauma and by this top down hierarchical culture to behave that way...and it is killing us all.
http://www.noogenesis.com/malama/nvc/domination.html
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