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Date: Wed, 25 Jan 1995 18:23:27 -0800
From: Jay Hanson 
To: ab3f+@andrew.cmu.edu
Subject: The Industrial Religion
 
The Industrial Religion
By Jay Hanson - November 4, 1993
 
This document is herby placed in the public domain.
Interested parties may use this material in any way they wish.
Hopefully it will help save us all -- we haven't got much time.
 
Jay Hanson
78-6622 Alii Drive
Kailua-Kona, HI 96740
Phone/FAX 808-322-7268
 
==================
== Propositions ==
==================

On November 18, 1992, the Union of Concerned Scientists,
representing over 1,500 of the world's leading scientists
(including 99 Nobel laureates), issued an Urgent Warning to
Humanity that implored all peoples of the world to halt the
accelerating damage to Mother Earth's life support systems.  The
scientists warned us that we may have as little as ten years to
avert the environmental disasters that now confront us.*1
 
"The human world is beyond its limits.  The present way of doing
things is unsustainable.  The future, to be viable at all, must
be one drawing back, easing down, healing."  If correction is not
made, a collapse is certain "within the lifetimes of many who are
alive today."*2
 
"If scientific projections are correct, the human species will
experience the unfolding of an entire geological epoch in less
than one lifetime. . . .  The potential damage to life and
property along coastal areas is likely to be unprecedented in
human history. . . .  If we continue to ignore the Entropy Law
and its role in defining the broad context in which our physical
world unfolds, then we shall do so at the risk of our own
extinction." 
--  Jeremy Rifkin,  ENTROPY:  Into the Greenhouse World
 
"On nearly every issue we have failed to apply the precautionary
principle when it was appropriate -- indeed prudent -- to do so.
We have had more than enough talk about environmental problems. .
. .  Despite the very real achievements and advances of recent
years, the state of the world environment and the living
conditions of many of its people have continued to get worse. . .
.  we no longer have the luxury of picking and choosing what to
do next:  the state of the world environment demands that we take
action simultaneously on a broad front, with no further delay. .
.  It is no exaggeration to say that the ability of the biosphere
to continue to support human life is now in question."*3
 
"Before enlightened self-interest takes hold, we must radically
reevaluate what our self-interest really is.  Trite or foolish as
it may sound, the world requires a spiritual revolution -- a
revolution on the outlook on life, a change of heart, a metanoia.
Almost everyone throughout the civilized world pays lip service
to the environment today, but not all are realizing the extent of
the change in attitudes and behavior necessary to save the
planet."*4
 
"The only processes that we can rely on indefinitely are
cyclical; all linear processes must eventually come to an end."*5
 
"Economics plays a central role in shaping the activities of the
modern world, inasmuch as it supplies the criteria of what is
economic' and what is uneconomic,' and there is no other set of
criteria that exercises a greater influence over the actions of
individuals and groups as well as over those of governments."*6
--  economist E.F. Shumacher
 
"Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from
any intellectual influences, are usually the slaves of some
defunct economist. . . .  It is ideas, not vested interests,
which are dangerous for good or evil."*7
-- economist John Maynard Keynes
 
"Can capitalism survive?  No.  I do not think it can. . . . there
is inherent in the capitalist system a tendency toward
self-destruction."*8
--  economist Joseph Alois Schumpeter
 
"America is becoming a land of private greed and public
squalor."*9
--  Labor Secretary Robert B. Reich
 
"If the truth be known, we are on the verge of losing an entire
generation of our young people, killing and dying in the streets
of America."
--  U.S. Representative Ron Dellums
 
"Form determines content.  Corporations are machines."*10
--  economist and advertising executive Jerry Mander
 
==================
== Introduction ==
==================
As we race towards the 21st century, we find ourselves in the
midst of rapid and profound change.  We see our workers'
paychecks able to buy fewer and fewer necessities each year.  We
see our financial institutions looted by professional crooks,
prison populations soaring, teenage gang violence exploding and
our public schools rotting away.  We see our once-beautiful
Hawaii covered with concrete.  We see un-happiness everywhere!
 
What went wrong?  Instead of richer and happier, we see that
traditional economic development has actually made us poorer and
un-happier.  Indeed, history has shown us (very forcefully) that
the pursuit of traditional economic development is actually the
pursuit of un-happiness.
 
Who (or what) has benefited from traditional economic
development?  Have we considered that widespread un-happiness
might be due to faulty economic theory?  Could the problem be
that happiness is un-economical?  Or worse, is it possible that
un-happiness is good for corporate profits?
 
What's wrong with our government?  If America is really a
democracy, why can't we solve our social problems?  If America is
not a democracy, what kind of government is it -- and who (or
what) is in control?
 
The answers revolve around three central ideas:  human "needs"
are different from human "wants," "human needs" are different
from "corporate needs," and corporations are different entities
from those humans who own or operate them.
 
We will begin with a glance at the man who planted the amoral
seeds for modern-day political and economic theory: Niccolo
Machiavelli.
 
==================================================
== Niccolo Machiavelli planted the amoral seeds ==
==================================================
Machiavelli was born in 1469 and is considered by many to be the
founder of modern political science.  His chief contribution to
political thought lies in his freeing political action from moral
considerations.  Machiavelli insisted that morals have no place
in politics, people are fundamentally bad, and the end justifies
the means.  In other words, he "abolished the moral problem" for
politics.  For example, consider Machiavelli's practical advice
on how to gain power:
 
"You must recognize that there are two ways of fighting:  by
means of law, and by means of force.  The first belongs properly
to man, the second to animals;  but since the first is often
insufficient, it is necessary to resort to the second. . . .  Nor
did a prince ever lack legitimate reasons by which to color his
bad faith.  One could cite a host of modern examples and list the
many peace treaties, the many promises that were made null and
void by princes who broke faith, with the advantage going to the
one who best knew how to play the fox.  But one must know how to
mask this nature skillfully and be a great dissembler.  Men are
so simple and so much inclined to obey immediate needs that a
deceiver will never lack victims for his deceptions."*11
 
Machiavelli's political ideas combined with Adam Smith's economic
theories to found "Industrial Religion."*12  Today, apostles of
Industrial Religion are destroying our communities and sentencing
our children to living (and dying) a horrible nightmare.
America: what went wrong?
 
=================================
== America's moral foundations ==
=================================
Thomas Jefferson laid the sacred*13 moral foundations of America
in 1776.  TRUTH, EQUALITY, LIBERTY, JUSTICE, and HAPPINESS are
pivotal ideas in our Declaration of Independence:  "We hold these
truths";  "all men are created equal";  "among which are life,
liberty";  "deriving their just powers";  "the pursuit of
happiness."  Today, we seldom concern ourselves with the first
four ideas, instead, we focus on the pursuit of happiness.
 
It is true that happiness is a worthy goal we all ought to
pursue, but we need to understand what true happiness is in order
to find it.  Mortimer J. Adler says that happiness is not a means
to an end;  it is an end in itself.  Happiness is living the
human life fulfilled by the things that we all naturally need.*14
 
But confusion over the words "need" and "want" has frustrated our
pursuit of happiness.  The words are commonly used as if their
meanings were equivalent.  They're not.
 
"Needs" are natural desires, the same in all human beings, for
they are inherent in human nature.  Moreover, there are a finite
number of human needs.  Material needs include such basics as
air, food, water, shelter, sleep and physical security.  Our
social needs include things like true economic security (not just
jobs), love, affection, acceptance, esteem by others and
self-esteem.  Moral needs include such things as service,
meaningfulness, aesthetics, perfection, truth and justice.  For
example, a good education, a sense of community and a dependable
job are needs.
 
"Wants" are acquired desires and differ among individuals.*15
Unlike needs, there are an infinite number of human wants.  For
example, drinking beer, buying jewelry, buying milk bottle caps
and watching professional sports on television are wants.
 
We are easily diverted from our needs when we encounter
un-happiness such as disappointment with our jobs, disgust with
government corruption, worry about our children or the continual
stress of trying to make ends meet.  Instead of confronting the
source of un-happiness, most people respond by recoiling from it,
looking immediately for ways to escape or ignore it.  Hedonistic
pursuits (such as alcohol, smoking, candy and watching
mind-killing television) bring us temporary happiness by
diverting our attention away from our underlying needs.  Faulty
logic leads us to conclude that we can be permanently happy if we
can enjoy permanent hedonism (i.e., stay drunk).  Indeed, it can
be argued that every addiction is caused by an intense and
continuing need for distraction from un-happiness -- addiction is
distraction.  Thus, we can see how our pursuit of happiness has
been transformed into our addiction to hedonism.
 
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
"The Lottery, with its weekly pay-out of enormous prizes, was the
one public event to which the proles [proletarians or working
class] paid serious attention.  It was probable that there were
some millions of proles for whom the Lottery was the principal if
not the only reason for remaining alive.  It was their delight,
their folly, their anodyne, their intellectual stimulant.  Where
the Lottery was concerned, even people who could barely read and
write seemed capable of intricate calculations and staggering
feats of memory."
--  George Orwell, 1984
 
==============
== Hedonism ==
==============
The ancient founders of hedonism, Epicurus and his disciples,
thought that pleasure and happiness were identical -- at first.
But as they began to identify other features of a good life, it
soon became apparent to them that some things are even more
desirable than pleasure.  Plato opposed hedonism by arguing that
if a life which includes both pleasure and wisdom is more
desirable than one which includes pleasure alone, then pleasure
can't be the only good.  In a similar manner, Aristotle argued
that the pleasure accompanying a worthy activity is good, but the
pleasure accompanying an unworthy activity is bad.
 
In the modern world, the leading self-avowed hedonist was John
Stuart Mill, who acknowledged Epicurus as his teacher.  Like
Epicurus, Mill could not long maintain the simple-minded view
that pleasure is the only good.  "There is no known Epicurean
theory of life," Mill writes, "which does not assign to the
pleasures of the intellect, of the feelings and the imagination
and of moral sentiments, a much higher value as pleasures than
those of mere sensation."*16  But Mill's powerful appeal to our
higher sentiments could not withstand the seductive ideas of Adam
Smith.
 
======================================
== Adam Smith's "Wealth of Nations" ==
======================================
In the Middle Ages, the naked pursuit of wealth was named
"avarice" and considered a sin.  But avarice was re-labeled
self-interest and became a virtue when Adam Smith  published The
Wealth of Nations in 1776 -- the same year that Thomas Jefferson
wrote our Declaration of Independence.  Whereas Jefferson failed
to mention selfishness as one of America's founding ideas, Smith
argued that selfishness was fundamental for prosperity and must
not be constrained by explicit moral considerations (Smith had
read his Machiavelli).
 
For Smith to be right, Jefferson must have completely forgotten a
very important idea.  But Jefferson didn't omit selfishness from
our founding ideas by accident;  in fact, he was strongly opposed
to selfishness:
 
"Self-love, therefore, is no part of morality.  Indeed it is
exactly its counterpart.  It is the sole antagonist of virtue,
leading us constantly by our propensities to self-gratification
in violation of our moral duties to others.  Accordingly, it is
against this enemy that are erected the batteries of moralists
and religionists, as the only obstacle to the practice of
morality.  Take from man his selfish propensities, and he can
have nothing to seduce him from the practice of virtue."*17
 
Unfortunately, Thomas Jefferson's passionate appeal for moral
restraint fell on selfish ears.
 
The celebrated economist Joan Robinson sarcastically describes
Smith's remarkable ideology:  "This is an ideology to end all
ideologies, for it has abolished the moral problem.  It is only
necessary for each individual to act egotistically for the good
of all to be attained."*18  Abolished the moral problem, indeed!
The moral problem of selfishness continues -- but morality is no
longer a problem for economics.
 
=========================================
== Economics denied the higher virtues ==
=========================================
Smith said that "laissez-faire" (let alone) economics would allow
selfish individuals to raise the wealth of the working class
automatically, as if by an "Invisible Hand."  The idea of
laissez-faire economics is described in a short passage from his
Wealth of Nations:
 
"It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or
the baker, that we expect our dinner, but from their regard for
their own self-interest.  We address ourselves not to their
humanity but to their self-love, and never talk to them of our
own necessities, but of their advantages.  Nobody but a beggar
chooses to depend chiefly upon the benevolence of his fellow
citizens."
 
Smith hoped that if we concentrated on self-interest, certain
innate human attributes would regulate economic activity:  "How
selfish soever man may be supposed, there are evidently some
principles in his nature which interest him in the fortune of
others, and render their happiness necessary to him, though he
derives nothing from it except the pleasure of seeing it."  Smith
added:  "Every man, as long as he does not violate the laws of
justice, is left perfectly free to pursue his own interests in
his own way, and to bring both his industry and capital into
competition with those of any other man, or order of men."
 
In other words, Adam Smith assumed that the innate empathy,
morality and ethics of individuals would somehow regulate
laissez-faire economic activity.  Unfortunately, Jefferson was a
better judge of human nature than Smith.
 
In the 1870s, the new celebration of selfishness was named
"economics" by William Stanley Jevons who defined it as:
 
". . . the mechanics of utility and self-interest . . . to
satisfy our wants to the utmost with the least effort -- to
procure the greatest amount of what is desirable at the expense
of the least desirable -- in other words, to maximize pleasure,
is the problem of economics."*19
 
Jevons should have added that economics has a few other
itsy-bitsy problems.  For example, in The Economic Way of
Thinking, economist Paul Heyne tells us that we really don't
"need" such a thing as clean water, because there are no "needs."
There are only "wants," and these are backed up by purchasing
power, or "demand."  Demand can always find substitutes, says
Heyne, for there are "substitutes everywhere."*20  Heyne's wild
assertions point out a basic doctrine of economics:  enough money
will enable one to find a substitute for anything.  How is it
possible that otherwise rational men believe this?  Is economics
some sort of magic act?
 
Alchemy was an ancient art practiced in the Middle Ages devoted
chiefly to discovering a substance that would transmute the more
common metals into gold or silver and to finding a means of
indefinitely prolonging human life.  Alchemy was dubious and
often illusory -- alchemy was in many ways the predecessor of
modern economics.
 
For example, in his 1974 lecture to the American Economic
Association, Robert Solow defended his illusion of unlimited
economic growth:  "the world can, in effect, get along without
natural resources."  Like an alchemist who claims that he can
change lead into gold, Solow is claiming that he can change money
into any exhaustible resource:  "at some finite cost, production
can be freed of dependence on exhaustible resources
altogether."*21  Leapin Lizards!  (In 1987, Solow won the Nobel
prize for economics.)
 
Economists have even gone so far as to assert that selfishness is
the will of God!  Economist Hermann Gossen tells us that not only
is the maximization of individual pleasure God's will, it is
"life's ultimate purpose."  Gossen maintains that any moral
restraint would inhibit God's master plan.  As Gossen puts it,
"It would only frustrate totally or in part the purpose of the
Creator were we to attempt to neutralize this force in total or
in part, as is the intention of some moral codes promulgated by
men."  And he asks with moral indignation:  "How can a creature
be so arrogant as to frustrate totally or partly the purpose of
his creator?"*22  (Was Gossen thinking of a new type of God -- an
industrial God?)
 
The good news is that economics is catching-up with the rest of
the world.  In 1992, Gary Becker won the Nobel prize for "having
extended the domain of economic theory to aspects of human
behavior which had previously been dealt with -- if at all -- by
other social science disciplines such as sociology, demography,
and criminology."*23  In 1993, Robert Fogel shared the prize for
discovering that "There is such as thing as morality and morality
is higher than economics."*24  (My God!)
 
Thus, this economic way of thinking, which unfortunately corrupts
all modern thought, has "abolished the moral problem," has denied
that needs are any different from wants, has re-labeled the
medieval sin of avarice the virtue of self-interest;  and has
sanctified America's "Industrial Religion."
 
=================================
== In God we trust! Which God? ==
=================================
The distinguished psychoanalyst Erich Fromm is best known for his
application of psychoanalytic theory to social and cultural
problems.  Fromm's approach to personality is wide ranging in its
perspectives and propositions.  He is not exclusively a
psychoanalyst but draws on information from other disciplines --
notably, history, sociology, and anthropology.  Fromm's books
have been tremendously popular, reaching audiences all over the
world.  Perhaps more than any other theorist, he has made us
aware of the continuing and interrelated impact of social,
economic, and psychological factors on human nature.*25
 
In To Have or To Be, Fromm shows that while our official religion
is Christian, we secretly worship power, money and success:
 
"[The social character of society] must fulfill any human being's
inherent religious needs.  To clarify, 'religion' as I use it
here does not refer to a system that has necessarily to do with a
concept of God or with idols or even to a system perceived as
religion, but to any group-shared system of thought and action
that offers the individual a frame of orientation and an object
of devotion.  Indeed, in this broad sense of the word no culture
of the past or present, and it seems no culture in the future,
can be considered as not having religion.
 
"This definition of 'religion' does not tell us anything about
its specific content.  People may worship animals, trees, idols
of gold or stone, an invisible god, a saintly person, or a
diabolic leader;  they may worship their ancestors, their nation,
their class or party, money or success.  Their religion may be
conducive to the development of destructiveness or of love, of
domination or of solidarity;  it may further their power of
reason or paralyze it.  They may be aware of their system as
being a religious one, different from those of the secular realm,
or they may think that they have no religion, and interpret their
devotion to certain allegedly secular aims, such as power, money,
or success, as nothing but their concern for the practical and
the expedient.  The question is not one of religion or not? but
of which kind of religion? -- whether it is one that furthers
human development, the unfolding of specifically human powers, or
one that paralyzes human growth.
 
". . . for we are what we are devoted to, and what we are devoted
to is what motivates our conduct.  Often, however, individuals
are not even aware of the real objects of their personal devotion
and mistake their 'official' beliefs for their real, though
secret religion.  If, for instance, a man worships power while
professing a religion of love, the religion of power is his
secret religion, while his so-called official religion, for
example Christianity, is only an ideology.
 
"Luther established a purely patriarchal form of Christianity in
Northern Europe that was based on the urban middle class and the
secular princes.  The essence of this new social character is
submission under patriarchal authority, with work as the only way
to obtain love and approval.
 
"Behind the Christian facade arose a new secret religion,
'industrial religion,' that is rooted in the character structure
of modern society, but is not recognized as 'religion.'  The
industrial religion is incompatible with genuine Christianity.
It reduces people to servants of the economy and of the machinery
that their own hands build.
 
"The industrial religion had its basis in a new social character.
Its center was fear of and submission to powerful male
authorities, cultivation of the sense of guilt for disobedience,
dissolution of the bonds of human solidarity by the supremacy of
self-interest and mutual antagonism.  The 'sacred' in industrial
religion was work, property, profit, power, even though it
furthered individualism and freedom within the limits of its
general principles.  By transforming Christianity into a strictly
patriarchal religion it was still possible to express the
industrial religion in Christian terminology."*26
 
The creed of Industrial Religion is such that it destroys its own
context -- both physical and moral.  It does this by encouraging
its members to dominate and exploit other members of society
(both present and future).  The most aggressive and ruthless
members are rewarded with even more power and riches.  Thus, the
creed of Industrial Religion has made America's "rich people
problem"*27 inevitable.
 
=====================================
== America's "rich people problem" ==
=====================================
Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Paine, James Madison and Abraham
Lincoln all warned against the excessive accumulation of capital.
Franklin declared that "no man ought to own more property than
needed for his livelihood,"*28 while Madison decried "the unequal
and various distribution of property"*29 as the major cause of
social unrest.
 
Lincoln said that too much money in too few hands would destroy
America:
 
"The money power preys upon the nation in times of peace and
conspires against it in times of adversity.  I see in the near
future a crisis approaching that . . . causes me to tremble for
the safety of my country.  The money power of the country will
endeavor to . . . work . . . upon the people, until the wealth is
aggregated in a few hands, and the republic destroyed."*30
 
More recently, the outcry against greed was taken up by Louis
Brandeis, who, before he ascended to the U. S. Supreme Court,
declared forcefully that:  "We can either have democracy in this
country or we can have great wealth concentrated in the hands of
a few, but we can't have both."*31
 
Justice Brandeis -- one of the most famous justices of all time
-- clearly foresaw that too many rich people would change America
from a democracy (one-citizen-one-vote), into a plutocracy
(one-dollar-one-vote).
 
Today, America's "rich people problem" has reached epidemic
proportions, and while the growing numbers of homeless citizens
are painfully apparent, the growing number of rich people has
been less visible.  In 1975, there were 4,585 millionaires in
America; by 1986, the number had grown to 31,859.  New York Times
columnist Anthony Lewis has noted, "The gap between rich and poor
in America is far and away the widest in the developed world." We
see the homeless every day, but we seldom see the rich because
they leave their dirty work to their surrogates:  the big
corporations!
 
Richard Grossman and Frank T. Adams, in Taking Care of Business:
Citizenship and the Charter of Incorporation, describe how
citizens controlled corporations before the Civil War of 1861.
Up to that time, corporations were chartered for a specific
limited purpose (for example, building a toll road or canal) and
for a specific, limited period of time (usually 20 or 30 years).
Each corporation was chartered to achieve a specific social goal
that a legislature decided was in the public interest.  At the end
of the corporation's life time, its assets were distributed among
the shareholders and the corporation ceased to exist.  The number
of owners was limited by the charter; the amount of capital they
could aggregate was also limited.  The owners were personally
responsible for any liabilities or debts the company incurred,
including wages owed to workers.  Often profits were specifically
limited in the charter.  Corporations were not established merely
to "make a profit."
 
Early Americans feared corporations as a threat to democracy and
freedom.  They feared that the owners (shareholders) would amass
great wealth, control jobs and production, buy the newspapers,
dominate the courts and control elections. (one-dollar-one-vote)
 
Back in 1814, Thomas Jefferson clearly foresaw the danger of the
big corporations when he said:
 
"I hope we shall crush in its birth the aristocracy of our
moneyed corporation, which dare already to challenge our
government to a trial of strength and bid defiance to the laws of
our country."*32
 
After the Civil War, during the 1870s and 1880s, owners and
managers of corporations pressed relentlessly to expand their
powers, and the courts gave them what they wanted.  Perhaps the
most important change occurred when the U.S. Supreme Court
granted corporations the full constitutional protections of
individual citizens.  Congress had written the 14th Amendment to
the constitution to protect the rights of freed slaves, but the
court in 1886 declared that no state shall deprive a corporation
". . . of life, liberty or property without due process of law."
 
"There was no history, logic or reason given to support that
view,"  U. S. Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas was to
write 60 years later.  But it was done anyway.  By applying the
14th Amendment to corporations, the court struck down hundreds of
local, state and federal laws that were enacted to protect people
from corporate harm.
 
By the early 20th century, courts had limited the liability of
shareholders;  corporations had been given perpetual life times;
the number of owners was no longer restricted;  the capital they
could control was infinite.  Some corporations were given the
power of eminent domain (the right to take another's private
property with minimal compensation to be determined by the
courts).  Of course, a corporation cannot be jailed.  It cannot
even be fined in any real sense;  when a fine is imposed, it is
the shareholders who must pay it.
 
In effect, the U. S. Supreme Court bestowed natural rights on
un-natural creatures, amoral beasts that were created to serve
selfish men.  Now corporations had life and liberty (but no
morals), and the fears of the early Americans were soon realized.
 
===========================================================
==="Form determines content. Corporations are machines." ==
===========================================================
In The Absence of the Sacred, advertising executive and economist
Jerry Mander uncovers the true nature of corporations:
 
"The corporation is not as subject to human control as most
people believe it is;  rather, it is an autonomous technical
structure that behaves by a system of logic uniquely well suited
to its primary function:  to give birth and impetus to profitable
new technological forms, and to spread techno-logic around the
globe.
 
"We usually become aware of corporate behavior only when a
flagrant transgression is reported in the news:  the dumping of
toxic wastes, the releasing of pollutants, the suppression of
research regarding health effects of various products, the tragic
mechanical breakdowns such as at Three Mile Island, in Bhopal, or
in Prince William Sound, Alaska.  Sometimes we become concerned
about a large corporation closing a factory, putting 5,000 people
out of work, and moving to another country.
 
"Even when we hear such news, our tendency is to respond as if
the behaviors described stem from the people within the corporate
structure -- people who are irresponsible, dishonest, greedy, or
overly ambitious.  Or else we attribute the problem to the moral
decline of the times we live in, or to the failure of the
regulatory process.
 
"Seeing corporate behavior as rooted in the people who work
within them is like believing that the problems of television are
attributable solely to its program content.  With corporations, as
with television, the basic problems are actually structural.  They
are problems inherent in the forms and rules by which these
entities are compelled to operate.  If the problems could be
traced to the personnel involved, they could be solved by
changing the personnel.  Unfortunately, however, all employees are
obligated to act in concert, to behave in accordance with
corporate form and corporate law.  If someone attempted to revolt
against these tenets, it would only result in the corporation
throwing the person out, and replacing that person with another
who would act according to the rules.  Form determines content.
Corporations are machines."*33
 
Corporations -- by their very structure -- are forced to exhibit
Mander's eleven inherent rules of behavior:  The Profit
Imperative, The Growth Imperative, Competition and Aggression,
Amorality, Hierarchy, Quantification, Linearity and Segmentation,
Dehumanization, Exploitation, Ephemerality, Opposition to Nature,
and Homogenization. "Form determines content.  Corporations are
machines."*34
 
Corporations do not "need" such things as clean air, justice,
truth, beauty or love to survive.  The only thing that large
for-profit corporations "need" to survive is PROFIT.  It is
impossible for these corporations to forego significant monetary
profits for moral reasons.  If managers sacrifice significant
profits to save important natural ecosystems or a community's
quality of life, they may be fired and/or subject to stockholder
litigation.  Management must bend itself to the corporate will
and that will is to enrich the rich.  Today, the richest 1
percent of America's families controls 28 percent of the nation's
wealth and 60 percent of the nation's corporate stock.*35
(one-dollar-one-vote)
 
Thus, a large corporation may be seen as a man-made life form, a
beast with a will of its own:  an "economic cyborg."  Visualize a
powerful creature that has humans for talons, a bank vault for a
heart, computers for eyes and an insatiable need for PROFIT.  The
economic cyborg -- a "terminator" -- a machine in human disguise!
 
Economic cyborgs ingest natural materials (including people) in
one end, and excrete un-natural products and waste (including
worn-out people) out the other.  Cyborgs have no innate morals to
keep them from seducing our politicians, subverting our
democratic processes or lying in order to achieve their own
selfish objectives.  Moreover, cyborgs are only nominally
controlled by laws, because the people who make our laws are in
turn controlled by these same cyborgs.*36  Today in America, we
live under the de facto plutocracy of the economic cyborgs.
(one-dollar-one-vote)
 
=======================
== To have or to be? ==
=======================
In To Have or To Be, Erich Fromm explains two fundamentally
different modes of existence: the Having mode, dedicated to
material possession and property, aggressiveness and personal
gain;  and the Being mode, suffused with love, the spirit of
caring for ourselves and nature, and cooperation.
 
"Because the society we live in is devoted to acquiring property
and making a profit, we rarely see any evidence of the being mode
of existence and most people see the having mode as the most
natural mode of existence, even the only acceptable way of life.
All of which makes it especially difficult for people to
comprehend the nature of the being mode, and even to understand
that having is only one possible orientation.  Nevertheless,
these two concepts are rooted in human experience.
 
"The alternative of having versus being does not appeal to common
sense.  To have, so it would seem, is a normal function of our
life:  in order to live we must have things.  Moreover, we must
have things in order to enjoy them.  In a culture in which the
supreme goal is to have -- and to have more and more -- and which
one can speak of someone as 'being worth a million dollars,' how
can there be an alternative between having and being?  On the
contrary, it would seem that the very essence of being is having;
that if one has nothing, one is nothing.
 
"Yet the great Masters of Living have made the alternative
between having and being a central issue of their respective
systems.  The Buddha teaches that in order to arrive at the
highest stage of human development, we must not crave
possessions.  Jesus teaches: 'For whosoever will save his life
shall lose it; but whosoever will lose his life for my sake, the
same shall save it.  For what is a man advantaged, if he gain the
whole world, and lose himself, or be cast away?'  (Luke 9:24-25).
Master Eckhart taught that to have nothing and make oneself open
and 'empty,' not to let one's ego stand in one's way, is the
condition for achieving spiritual wealth and strength."*37
 
Religious historian Robert Bellah agrees with Fromm, "That
happiness is to be attained through limitless material
acquisition is denied by every religion and philosophy known to
humankind, but it is preached incessantly by every American
television set."*38  We can see how Industrial Religion demands
that we reject of all other religions and philosophies.
 
============================================================
== Consumed, burned up, worn out, replaced, and discarded ==
============================================================
At the dawn of the age of American affluence that began after
World War II, retailing analyst Victor Lebow proclaimed:
 
"Our enormously productive economy . . . demands that we make
consumption our way of life, that we convert the buying and use
of goods into rituals, that we seek our spiritual satisfaction,
our ego satisfaction, in consumption. . . .  We need things
consumed, burned up, worn out, replaced, and discarded at an ever
increasing rate."*39
 
Thus we were made to understand that the way to spiritual
happiness was through consumption -- and consume we did! The
American economy of the 1950s was the engine of mass production.
America's large corporations flooded the country with products.
In fact, consumerism was even seen as a patriotic duty.*40
 
"Economic salvation, both national and personal, has nothing to
do with pinching pennies," declared a 1953 advertisement for
Gimbles' New York department store.  "If you want to have more
cake tomorrow, you have to eat more cake today.  The more you
consume, the more you'll have, quicker."*41
 
"If you switch on your radio or television, or open your paper,
corporations speak to you.  They do it through public relations
and through advertising.  American corporations spend more than
$100 billion yearly on advertising, which is far more than is
spent on all secondary education in this country.  In some ways
corporate advertising is the dominant educational institution in
our country, surely in the realm of lifestyle."*42
 
In The Overworked American, Harvard Professor of Economics Juliet
B. Schor says:
 
"Four billion square feet of our total land area has been
converted into shopping centers, or about 16 square feet for
every American man, woman, and child. . . .  Most homes are
virtual retail outlets, with cable shopping channels, mail-order
catalogues, toll-free numbers and computer hookups.  We can shop
during lunch hour, from the office.  We can shop while traveling,
from the car.  We can even shop in the airport, where video
monitors have been installed for immediate on-screen
purchasing."*43
 
Like an alcoholic sobering-up after a 40 year drinking binge, we
sober-up to find that our consumption binge has not made us
happier!
 
Why are we surprised?  Almost 40 years ago, the distinguished
psychoanalyst Erich Fromm pointed out that our economic system
had alienated us from ourselves, from our fellow humans, and from
nature:
 
"Modern capitalism needs men who co-operate smoothly and in large
numbers;  who want to consume more and more;  and whose tastes
are standardized and can be easily influenced and anticipated.  It
needs men who feel free and independent -- yet willing to be
commanded, to do what is expected of them, to fit into the social
machine without friction;  who can be guided without force, led
without leaders, prompted without aim -- except the one to make
good, to be on the move, to function, to go ahead.
 
"What is the outcome?  Modern man is alienated from himself, from
his fellow men, and from nature.  He has been transformed into a
commodity, experiences his life forces as an investment which
must bring him the maximum profit obtainable under existing
market conditions.  Human relations are essentially those of
alienated automatons, each basing his security on staying close
to the herd, and not being different in thought, feeling or
action.  While everybody tries to be as close as possible to the
rest, everybody remains utterly alone, pervaded by the deep sense
of insecurity, anxiety and guilt which always results when human
separateness cannot be overcome.  Our civilization offers many
palliatives which help people to be consciously unaware of this
aloneness: first of all the strict routine of bureaucratized,
mechanical work, which helps people to remain unaware of their
most fundamental human desires, of the longing for transcendence
and unity.  Inasmuch as the routine alone does not succeed in
this, man overcomes his unconscious despair by the routine of
amusement, the passive consumption of sounds and sights offered
by the amusement industry;  furthermore by the satisfactions of
buying ever new things, and soon exchanging them for others.
Modern man is actually close to the picture Huxley describes in
his Brave New World:  well fed, well clad, satisfied sexually,
yet without self, without any except the most superficial contact
with his fellow men . . . .  Man's happiness today consists in
'having fun.'  Having fun lies in the satisfaction of consuming
and 'taking in' commodities, sights, food, drinks, cigarettes,
people, lectures, books, movies -- all are consumed, swallowed.
The world is one great object for our appetite, a big apple, a
big bottle, a big breast;  we are the sucklers, the eternally
expectant ones, the hopeful ones -- and the eternally
disappointed ones.  Our character is geared to exchange and to
receive, to barter and to consume;  everything, spiritual as well
as material objects, becomes an object of exchange and
consumption."*44
 
In fact, regular surveys by the National Opinion Research Center
of the University of Chicago reveal that the number of Americans
who report they are "very happy" is no more than in 1957.
Despite near-doublings in both gross national product and
personal consumption expenditures per capita, the "very happy"
share of the population has stayed around one-third since the
mid-50s.*45
 
Studies indicate that the main determinants of happiness in life
are not related to consumption at all.  These determinants are
satisfaction with family life (especially marriage), followed by
satisfaction with work, and leisure to develop talents and
friendships.  Oxford University psychologist Michael Argyles's
comprehensive work The Psychology of Happiness concludes:
 
"The conditions of life which really make a difference to
happiness are those covered by three sources -- social relations,
work and leisure.  And the establishment of a satisfying state of
affairs in these spheres does not depend much on wealth, either
absolute or relative."*46
 
In The Poverty of Affluence, clinical psychologist Paul Wachtel
argues that economic growth does not work for us the way we think
it does.  Having more and more does not really leave us feeling
more and more fulfilled.  Wachtel says that we are a society of
un-happy neurotics.  In fact, our frantic pursuit of growth ends
up working against the attainment of secure and lasting
satisfaction.
 
"It is ironic that the very kind of thinking which produces all
our riches also renders them unable to satisfy us.  Our restless
desire for more and more has been a major dynamic for economic
growth, but it has made the achievement of that growth largely a
hollow victory.  Our sense of contentment and satisfaction is not
a simple result of any absolute level of what we acquire or
achieve.  It depends upon our frame of reference, on how what we
attain compares to what we expected.  If we get farther than we
expected we tend to feel good.  If we expected to go farther than
we have then even a rather high level of success can be
experienced as disappointing.  In America, we keep upping the
ante.  Our expectations keep accommodating to what we have
attained. 'Enough' is always just over the horizon, and like the
horizon it recedes as we approach it.
 
"It is not the achievement of lives of pleasure and security I
oppose;  it is the illusion that the path to such a life must be
lined with factories spewing smoke and billboards stirring envy
and insatiable desire.  A rich material life is in our grasp, and
I hold no brief for poverty.  But riches that do not yield
satisfaction are worthless.  By failing to understand our
experience we make ourselves poorer than we need to be."*47
 
Pulitzer Prize-winner Jonathan Freedman says that "once some
minimal income is attained, the amount of money you have matters
little in terms of bringing happiness.  Above the poverty level,
the relationship between income and happiness is remarkably
small."*48
 
The celebrated anthropologist Gregory Bateson tells us that "In
biology there are no values which have the characteristic that if
something is good, then more of that something will be better.
Economists seem to think that this is true of money but, if they
are right, money is shown to be certainly unbiological and
perhaps antibiological.  For the rest, good things come in optima,
not maxima."*49
 
In Mind and Nature, Bateson goes even further:  "It is even
possible that when we consider money, not by itself, but acting
on human beings who own it, we may find that money, too, becomes
toxic beyond a certain point.  In any case, the philosophy of
money, the set of presuppositions by which money is supposedly
better and better the more you have of it, is totally
antibiological.  It seems, nevertheless, that this philosophy can
be taught to living things."*50
 
The noted historian Lewis Mumford believed that society is
dehumanized by technological culture and that it must return to a
perspective placing emotions, sensitivity, and ethics at the
heart of civilization.  Here's his opinion on money fetishism:
 
"The desire for limitless quantities of money has as little
relevance to the welfare of the human organism as the stimulation
of the 'pleasure center' that scientific experimenters have
recently found in the brain.  The stimulus is subjectively so
rewarding, apparently, that animals under observation willingly
forgo every other need or activity, to the point of starvation,
in order to enjoy it."*51
 
The British economist, John Maynard Keynes, has profoundly
influenced the economic policies of many governments since World
War II, and many consider his General Theory of Employment,
Interest, and Money one of the most significant theoretical works
of the 20th century.  Here he calls "love of money" a "disgusting
morbidity":
 
"The love of money as a possession -- as distinguished from the
love of money as a means to the enjoyments and realities of life
-- will be recognized for what it is, a somewhat disgusting
morbidity, one of those semi-criminal, semi-pathological
propensities which one hands over with a shudder to the
specialists in mental disease."*52
 
In fact, most Americans agree that money is not the only measure
of happiness.  A 1990 Fortune magazine poll found that few
Americans consider money the best yardstick for evaluating what
their lives are truly worth.  Only 20 percent of Americans say
money adequately measures happiness in their lives.  Many more
Americans consider enjoyable work (86 percent), happy children
(84 percent), or a good marriage (69 percent) to be more
important than money.*53
 
================================
== The spiral of un-happiness ==
================================
It's not as though happiness were a big mystery.  It's not as
though we don't know what people "need" to make them happy.
Psychologist Abraham Maslow devised a six-level hierarchy of
motives that, according to his theory, determine human behavior.
Maslow ranks human needs as follows:  (1) physiological;  (2)
security and safety;  (3) love and feelings of belonging; (4)
competence, prestige, and esteem;  (5) self-fulfillment; and (6)
curiosity and the need to understand.  Maslow's election to the
presidency of the American Psychological Association in 1967,
suggests that his work is of great interest to psychologists.
Perhaps in part because of the optimism and compassion Maslow
expresses, his theory has become immensely popular and has a
large following.*54
 
Maslow says that humans will instinctively pursue what they need
to be happy.  The essential problem is that our instinct is
easily overwhelmed by habit and societal forces.*55  For example,
clever diversions (such as advertising) by the economic cyborgs
easily divert our pursuit of happiness away from basic needs and
focus our attention on more new wants.
 
Maslow says that Freud's greatest discovery is that the cause of
so much psychological illness and un-happiness is the fear of
knowledge of ourselves -- of our emotions, impulses, memories,
capacities and destiny (death).  This kind of fear is defensive;
it is protection of our self-esteem, of our love and respect for
ourselves.
 
But this fear of knowledge of ourselves also keeps us from
discriminating between our wants and needs.  This in turn has led
the rich and powerful to develop an aggressive, hedonistic
society focused upon wants.  Like the Sorcerer's Apprentice, they
have called forth demonic economic cyborgs from the nether world
that have trapped us in a downward spiral of un-happiness.
 
How have the cyborgs trapped us?  We are driven by basic human
needs, yet our fear-of-knowing makes it difficult to distinguish
exactly what it is that we do need;  clever mind-domination
(advertising) by the cyborgs diverts our attention to new wants;
television creates hostility in us by causing us to feel inferior
and also by showing violent programs.  This in turn motivates us
to satisfy our new wants;*56, *57  satisfying our new wants does
nothing to satisfy our original basic needs (in fact, we divert
limited resources that might address our basic needs).  Economic
competition to earn more money generates more fear;*58 collapsing
social and physical environments frighten us even more;  and
these in turn add more spin to our spiral of un-happiness. . . .
 
We are beginning to see how making people un-happy is good for
cyborg PROFIT.  The more un-happy and hostile people become, the
more likely they are to be motivated by advertising to purchase
things they don't need.  This ability of advertising to separate
people from their needs (and their money), is what gives
advertising its value.
 
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
"In a way, the world-view of the party imposed itself most
successfully on the people incapable of understanding it.  They
could be made to accept the most flagrant violations of reality,
because they never fully grasped the enormity of what was
demanded of them, and were not sufficiently interested in public
events to notice what was happening.  By lack of understanding,
they remained sane.  They simply swallowed everything, and what
they swallowed did them no harm, because it left no residue
behind, just like a grain of corn will pass undigested through
the body of a bird."
--  George Orwell, 1984
 
========================================
== A nation of mentally ill consumers ==
========================================
Widespread symptoms of mental illness in America were documented
in 1937 by psychologist Karen Horney.  She was dean of the
American Institute for Psychoanalysis, which she helped to found
in 1941, and a professor at New York Medical College in 1942.
That her work is considered viable is evidenced by the
establishment (in 1955) of the Karen Horney Clinic in New York
City.  In more recent years, the Clinic has expanded to become a
training center for analysts.*59
 
In The Neurotic Personality of Our Time, she described neurotic
personalities produced by the social difficulties existing in
that time and culture.  She found that our aggressiveness, desire
for material goods and expectations for unlimited freedom had
turned us into a society of antisocial and frustrated neurotics.
 
"If, however, power, prestige and possession have to be acquired
by the individual's own efforts he is compelled to enter into
competitive struggle with others.  From its economic center
competition radiates into all other activities and permeates
love, social relations and play.  Therefore competition is a
problem for everyone in our culture, and it is not at all
surprising to find it an unfailing center of neurotic
conflicts."*60
 
Our mental illness became more apparent during World War II when
one out of every five young men (nearly five million) was
rejected for military service because of mental illness. (Of the
one million additional men accepted for service that were later
discharged with a disability, 43 percent had neuropsychiatric
problems.)
 
The frequency of emotional disturbance in our culture was even
more dramatically demonstrated in the Midtown Manhattan Study
conducted by Srole in 1962.  In this research, residents in a
section of New York were randomly sampled.  Over 1,600 persons
filled out a detailed questionnaire concerning the severity of
their past and present symptoms.  The researchers found that fewer
than one in four persons was "well" and nearly one in five was
"incapacitated" by emotional disorder.*61
 
A National Institute of Mental Health survey, conducted between
1980 and 1985, estimated approximately 28 percent of American
adults (45 million) suffer from mental disorders or drug abuse,
or a combination of both.
 
"Phobias affected 10.9 percent of the participants . . .  Another
7.4 percent reported alcohol abuse or dependence, 5.4 percent
reported dysthymia (mild depression), 5 percent cited severe
depression, 3.1 percent suffered nonalcohol drug disorders, and
2.1 percent reported obsessive-compulsive disorder.  Other
disorders occurred in 8 percent of the population."*62
 
What do we do when we are un-happy?  Horney reminds us that by
buying things, we temporarily mitigate our feelings of
helplessness, insignificance, humiliation and dependence on
others.63  In other words, we mitigate the symptoms of our
un-happiness with material consumption while we remain blind to
the underlying causes of our un-happiness.
 
In fact, discontent is required.  "An economy primarily driven by
growth must generate discontent.  We cannot be content or the
entire economic machine would grind to a halt."*64
 
In Brave New World Revisited, Aldous Huxley describes how
motivation analysts use our subconscious fears to trap us:
 
"In every case the motivation analyst has found some deep-seated
wish or fear, whose energy can be used to move the consumer to
part with cash and so, indirectly, to turn the wheels of
industry.  Stored in the minds and bodies of countless
individuals, this potential energy is released by, and
transmitted along, a line of symbols carefully laid out so as to
bypass rationality and obscure the real issue."
 
In Media Sexploitation, Professor of Journalism Wilson Key
explains how women's sexual fears are exploited for PROFIT:
 
"Women are carefully trained by media to view themselves as
inadequate.  They are taught that other women -- through the
purchases of clothes, cosmetics, food, vocations, avocations,
education, etc. -- are more desirable and feminine than
themselves.  Her need to constantly reverify her sexual adequacy
though the purchase of merchandise becomes an overwhelming
preoccupation, profitable for the merchandisers, but potentially
disastrous for the individual.
 
"North American society has a vested interest in reinforcing an
individual's failure to achieve sexual maturity.  By exploiting
unconscious fears, forcing them to repress sexual taboos, the
media guarantees blind repressed seeking for value substitutes
through commercial products and consumption.  Sexual repression,
as reinforced by the media, is a most viable marketing
technology.
 
"Repressed sexual fear, much like all types of repression, makes
humans highly vulnerable to subliminal management and control
technology.  Through subliminal appeals and reinforcements of
these fears, some consumers can be induced into buying almost
anything."*65
 
Now we can see that a life of hostility, violence, anxiety and
fear is required for the economic cyborgs;  the un-happiness in
our society is no accident -- making people un-happy is necessary
for PROFITS.  Un-happiness is required!
 
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
"How could you have a slogan like 'freedom is slavery' when the
concept of freedom has been abolished?  The whole climate of
thought will be different.  In fact there will be no thought, as
we understand it now.  Orthodoxy means not thinking -- not
needing to think.  Orthodoxy is unconsciousness."
--  George Orwell, 1984
 
=======================
== Electronic heroin ==
=======================
Broadcasting evolved from electronic communication through wires
(hence the term wireless, frequently used in the early years of
radio).  The roots of broadcasting technology lie in the
development of the telegraph (1844) by the American inventor
Samuel Morse and of the telephone (1876) by the Scottish-American
inventor Alexander Graham Bell.  Although the telephone evolved
into a means of private two-way communication, some early critics
feared it would be used primarily in conjunction with a central
station that could transmit propaganda into private houses and
disrupt the sanctity of the home.  If those early critics could
only see us now!
 
Mass propaganda has become the stock and trade of modern
totalitarian governments.  At his trial after World War II,
Hitler's Minister for Armaments, Albert Speer, delivered a long
speech in which he described Hitler's methods:
 
"Hitler's dictatorship differed in one fundamental point from all
its predecessors in history.  It was the first dictatorship in
the present period of modern technical development, a
dictatorship which made complete use of all technical means for
the domination of its own country.  Through technical devices like
the radio and the loud-speaker, eighty million people were
deprived of independent thought.  It was thereby possible to
subject them to the will of one man. . . .  Earlier dictators
needed highly qualified assistants who could think and act
independently.  The totalitarian system in the period of modern
technical development can dispense with such men; thanks to
modern methods of communication, it is possible to mechanize the
lower leadership.  As a result of this there has arisen the new
type of the uncritical receipt of orders."*66
 
In the Plug-In Drug, Marie Winn says that television is a type of
addictive drug:
 
"When we think about addiction to drugs or alcohol we frequently
focus on negative aspects, ignoring the pleasures that accompany
drinking or drug-taking.  And yet the essence of any serious
addiction is a pursuit of pleasure, a search for a 'high' that
normal life does not supply.  It is only the inability to
function without the addictive substance that is dismaying, the
dependence of the organism upon a certain experience and an
increasing inability to function normally without it.  Thus
people will take two or three drinks at the end of the day not
merely for the pleasure drinking provides, but also because they
'don't feel normal' without them.
 
"Real addicts do not merely pursue a pleasurable experience one
time in order to function normally.  They need to repeat it again
and again.  Something about that particular experience makes life
without it less than complete.  Other potentially pleasurable
experiences are no longer possible, for under the spell of the
addictive experience, their lives are peculiarly distorted.  The
addict craves an experience and yet is never really satisfied.
The organism may be temporarily sated, but soon it begins to
crave again.
 
"Finally, a serious addiction is distinguished from a harmless
pursuit of pleasure by its distinctly destructive elements.
Heroin addicts, for instance, lead a damaged life:  their
increasing need for heroin in increasing doses prevents them from
working, from maintaining relationships, from developing in human
ways.  Similarly alcoholics' lives are narrowed and dehumanized
by their dependence on alcohol.
 
"Let us consider television viewing in the light of the
conditions that define serious addictions.
 
"Not unlike drugs or alcohol, the television experience allows
the participant to blot out the real world and enter into a
pleasurable and passive mental state.  The worries and anxieties
of reality are as effectively deferred by becoming absorbed in a
television program as by going on a 'trip' induced by drugs or
alcohol.  And just as alcoholics are only vaguely aware of their
addiction, feeling that they control their drinking more than
they really do ('I can cut it out any time I want -- I just like
to have three of four drinks before dinner'), people similarly
overestimate their control over television watching.  Even as
they put off other activities to spend hour after hour watching
television, they feel they could easily resume living in a
different, less passive style.  But somehow or other, while the
television set is present in their homes, the click doesn't
sound.  With television pleasures available, those other
experiences seem less attractive, more difficult somehow.
 
"Finally it is the adverse effect of television viewing on the
lives of so many people that defines it as a serious addiction.
The television habit distorts the sense of time.  It renders other
experiences vague and curiously unreal while taking on a greater
reality for itself.  It weakens relationships by reducing and
sometimes eliminating normal opportunities for talking, for
communicating."*67
 
According to the Washington Post, Terence McKenna's Food of the
Gods "Deserves to be the modern classic on mind-altering drugs
and hallucinogens."  In this modern classic, McKenna convinces us
that television is emotionally equivalent to heroin:
 
"The nearest analogy to the addictive power of television and the
transformation of values that is wrought in the life of the heavy
user is probably heroin.  Heroin flattens the image;  with
heroin, things are neither hot nor cold;  the junkie looks out at
the world certain that what ever it is, it does not matter.  The
illusion of knowing and of control that heroin engenders is
analogous to the unconscious assumption of the television
consumer that what is seen is 'real' somewhere in the world.  In
fact, what is seen are the cosmetically enhanced surfaces of
products.  Television, while chemically non-invasive, nevertheless
is every bit as addicting and physiologically damaging as any
other drug.
 
"Most unsettling of all is this:  the content of television is
not a vision but a manufactured data stream that can be sanitized
to 'protect' or impose cultural values.  Thus we are confronted
with an addictive and all-pervasive drug that delivers an
experience whose message is whatever those who deal the drug wish
it to be.  Could anything provide a more fertile ground for
fostering fascism and totalitarianism than this?  In the United
States, there are many more televisions than households, the
average television set is on six hours a day, and the average
person watches more than five hours a day -- nearly one-third of
their waking time.  Aware as we all are of these simple facts, we
seem unable to react to their implications.  Serious study of the
effects of television on health and culture has only begun
recently.  Yet no drug in history has so quickly or completely
isolated the entire culture of its users from contact with
reality.  And no drug in history has so completely succeeded in
remaking in its own image the values of the culture that it has
infected.
 
"Television is by nature the dominator drug par excellence.
Control of content, uniformity of content, repeatability of
content make it inevitably a tool of coercion, brainwashing, and
manipulation.  Television induces a trance state in the viewer
that is the necessary precondition for brainwashing.  As with all
other drugs and technologies, television's basic character cannot
be changed;  television is no more reformable than is the
technology that produces automatic assault rifles."*68
 
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
"All that was required of them was a primitive patriotism which
could be appealed to whenever it was necessary to make them
accept longer working hours or shorter rations.  And even when
they became discontented, as they sometimes did, their discontent
led nowhere, because, being without general ideas, they could
only focus it on petty specific grievances.  The larger evils
invariably escaped their notice."
--  George Orwell, 1984
 
=================================
== Our "dysfunctional" society ==
=================================
Vice President Gore has described our society as
"dysfunctional."*69  Like the unwritten rules of a dysfunctional
family, the unwritten rules that govern our relationship to our
society have been passed down from generation to generation.
And, as in a dysfunctional family, the first rule in a
dysfunctional society is that no one questions the rules.
 
In fact, there is a powerful psychological reason not to question
the rules.  Children are so completely dependent that they cannot
afford even to think there is something wrong with the parent,
even if the rules do not feel right or make sense.  Since
children cannot bear to suspect that the all-powerful parent is
the source of their dysfunctionality, they assume the problem is
within themselves.  This is the crucial moment when the
psychological wound is inflicted, when children suffer a
fundamental loss of faith in themselves.
 
Just as children blame themselves for their family's
dysfunctionality, we passively blame ourselves for the failure of
our society to provide a feeling of community and a shared sense
of purpose in life.  And just as children cannot reject their
parents, we are too frightened to reject our society by
questioning the rules.  Instead, we choose to pass our lives
plugged into our electronic heroin and quietly spiral downward
into oblivion. . . .
 
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
"Until they become conscious they will never rebel, and until
after they have rebelled they cannot become conscious."
--  George Orwell, 1984
 
=========================
== Profitable violence ==
=========================
All over the world, physiologists, critics of the arts,
government leaders, and people in the industry itself have become
concerned about the high percentage of violence shown on
television.  Studies show that television violence tends to make
watchers more aggressive and violent.
 
On June 25, 1993, cable network magnate Ted Turner testified
before the House Energy and Commerce Telecommunications
Subcommittee  "As a parent with five children, I don't need
experts to tell me that the amount of violence on television
today and its increasingly graphic portrayal can be harmful to
children."  He went on to say that  "Television violence is the
single most significant factor contributing to violence in
America."*70
 
"More than 3,000 studies have been conducted in the past four
decades showing a consistent correlation between 'viewing
violence and aggressive behavior,'  according to a recent
American Psychological Association (APA) report.  By the time a
child has finished elementary school, he will have seen 8,000
murders and 100,000 acts of violence, the APA estimated.  In
addition to aggressive behavior, children also develop increased
fearfulness of becoming a victim, and become more callous about
violence directed at others, said a recent report by CQ
Researcher.  For years the entertainment industry maintained that
the content of movies and television reflects society more than
it influences it.  Sen. Paul Simon (D-Ill.) has worked for eight
years to get the networks to acknowledge that 'inappropriate'
violence is bad."*71
 
Brandon Centerwall, professor of epidemiology at the University
of Washington, has linked the doubling of murder rates among
white populations in three countries to television viewing.
 
"In later life, serious violence is most likely to erupt at
moments of severe stress -- and it is precisely at such moments
that adolescents and adults are most likely to revert to their
earliest, most visceral sense of the role of violence in society
and in personal behavior.  Much of this sense will have come from
television."*72
 
Beyond the overwhelming evidence that watching television incites
violence, there seem to be other effects that are just as
alarming.  People who watch a large amount of violence on
television tend to become emotionally passive to real acts of
violence inflicted on others.*73
 
Economist and advertising executive Jerry Mander says that
television advertising is "designed to persuade and to dominate
minds by interfering with thinking patterns."  It is used by
people who enjoy dominating others and are good at it.  Thus, the
basic nature of advertising and all technologies created to serve
it will tend to transform natural thinking patterns into social
mutations.
 
"If we take the word 'need' to mean something basic to human
survival -- food, shelter, clothing -- or basic to human
contentment -- peace, love, safety, companionship, intimacy, a
sense of fulfillment -- these will be sought and found by people
whether or not there is advertising.  In fact, advertising
intervenes between people and their needs, separates them from
direct fulfillment and urges them to believe that satisfaction
can be obtained only though commodities.  It is through this
intervention and separation that advertising can create value,
thereby justifying its existence."*74
 
Mander makes a convincing argument that television deadens our
intellect, alienates us from other human beings, dominates us
with Orwellian mind control techniques and has made us unable to
understand the difference between real experience and the
flickering images on a TV screen:
 
"If people were believing that an image of nature was equal to or
even similar to the experience of nature, and were therefore
satisfied enough with the image that they did not seek out the
real experience, then nature was in a lot bigger trouble than
anyone realized."*75
 
The authors of The Great Reckoning argue that the most insidious
effect of television may be the fact that it "drowns out
abstraction" for the uneducated.  By asserting the primacy of the
visual over the abstract in the mass culture, television is
actually remaking the modern mind.  Television is a medium of
images;  it enables people to see, but discourages them from
taking an interest in what cannot be seen.  In effect, people
lose the ability to understand complex ideas.*76
 
Orwell saw it coming 50 years ago!  Every night, there are
hundreds of millions of alienated, isolated humans sitting in the
dark, becoming more violent and losing the ability to understand
that which cannot be seen -- all for PROFIT! Mander is right,
nature is in a lot more trouble than we realize!
 
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
"There was a vast amount of criminality in London, a
whole-world-within-a-world of thieves, bandits, prostitutes, drug
peddlers, and racketeers of every description;  but since it all
happened among the proles themselves, it was of no importance."
--  George Orwell, 1984
 
===========================
== Justifiable homicide? ==
===========================
It has been said that more people have been killed because of
religion than any other cause.  This is certainly true when one
considers Industrial Religion.  For example, cigarette smoking
causes about 435,000 American deaths each year.  During the last
40 years, roughly 17 million Americans have been killed by
tobacco smoke while tobacco companies have pocketed something
like a thousand billion dollars.*77  Tobacco company apologists
will argue that the victims willingly lined up for the slaughter.
However, if advertising alters one's judgment and interferes with
free will, weren't the tobacco companies the proximate cause of
most of those deaths?  If there were no cigarette advertising or
manufacturing, how many victims would have died?
 
There are many other deadly economic interests besides tobacco:
 
"We are a culture that assumes the benefits of progress.  We
still look to new machines, new chemicals, and new techniques as
the primary means to improve our condition -- despite the fact
that they are harming us in increasing numbers:  In 1900, cancer
accounted for only three percent of the total deaths in the
United States.  Since the introduction of thousands of new
chemicals beginning in the 1940s -- pesticides, herbicides,
radiation, artificial hormones, food additives, toxic wastes,
industrial chemicals, and toxic building materials -- one in
three Americans contracts the disease."*78
 
The petrochemical industry discharges roughly 200 million tons of
hazardous wastes into our environment each year.  Since about
1988, publications of the scientific mainstream have emphasized
that chemicals are causing reproductive and immune system damage
in wildlife, laboratory animals and humans.  Recently, it has
been learned that many common industrial chemicals mimic hormones
and thus interfere with the fundamental cell chemistry of birds,
fish and mammals (remember that we humans are mammals).*79
 
A report published by the National Research Council titled,
Environmental Neurotoxicity, said "There is convincing evidence
that chemicals in the environment can alter the function of the
nervous system."  The report suggested that chemical exposures
may be responsible for some degenerative brain disorders such as
Parkinson's disease, Alzheimer's disease, and Lou Gehrig's
disease.*80  We have no way of calculating the millions of
cancers, birth defects, and other crippling conditions that have
been caused by the 70,000 different chemicals now in commercial
use.
 
In Making Peace with the Planet, Barry Commoner argues that our
current practice of environmental protection is a return to the
medieval approach to disease, when illness and death were
regarded as a debt that must be paid for original sin.  Today,
this medieval philosophy is recast in a modern form: some level
of pollution and some risk to health are the unavoidable prices
that must be paid for the material benefits of modern technology.
For example, here is Time magazine's response to the appalling
deaths in the chemical accident in Bhopal India:
 
"The citizens of Bhopal lived near the Union Carbide plant
because they sought to live there.  The plant provided jobs, and
pesticide [provided] more food.  Bhopal was a modern parable of
the risks and rewards originally engendered by the industrial
Revolution . . . .  There is no avoiding that hazard, and no
point in trying; one only trusts that the gods of the machines
will give a good deal more than they take away. . . ."*81
 
Like the medieval priests who accepted the Black Death as the
"will of God," Time says that the reason more than five thousand
people were killed, and thousands more were blinded and maimed
was because the victims owed it to the gods of the machines!  How
touching!  Time ends with a prayer to the gods of the machines
that the economic good will somehow outweigh the human tragedy!
 
Did Time consider the possibility that the economic good accrued
to different individuals than those who had been forced to pay
the debt?  Does it make any difference if 99% of the people pay
the costs while only 1% of the people get the benefits?  When
economists calculate cost/benefit ratios, do they just throw all
the poor people into one big pot -- like so many pounds of meat?
Were those people who were killed, blinded and maimed asked if
the economic benefits outweighed the costs?  Will the deformed
babies born to Bhopal mothers be considered an economic benefit
because of the staggering medical costs?
 
At an October 1992 news conference, Vladimir Pokrovsky, head of
the Russian Academy of Medical Sciences, shocked the world:  "We
have doomed ourselves for the next 25 years." He added:  "The new
generation is entering adult life unhealthy.  The Soviet economy
was developed at the expense of the population's health."  Data
released by the Academy show that 11 percent of Russian infants
are suffering from birth defects and 55 percent of the school-age
children suffer heath problems.  The Academy also reported that
the increase in illness and early death among those aged 25-40
was particularly distressing.*82
 
Economists have developed several ingenious ways of solving
financial dilemmas that involve killing people (remember that
economists "abolished the moral problem").  Placing a dollar
value on human life means that untimely death is rational and
quantified.  Thus, the economic cyborgs can kill legally (a new
meaning to justifiable homicide).  This raises many fascinating
questions:  are rich people worth more than poor,  are whites
worth more than blacks,  are young worth more than old,  men
worth more than women,  is there a discount for cripples,  are
economists worth more than housewives?  It is clear that there
are enough calculations here to generate a lot more economic
benefits by employing a whole army of economists for quite some
time.  Can we use these additional economic benefits to kill a few
more people?  Wait a minute -- doesn't that presuppose that
people are the property of the state -- isn't that fascism?
 
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
To the Party, "power is not a means to an end;  it is the end in
itself.  To the Party, power means the capacity to inflict
unlimited pain and suffering on another human being."  For the
Party, power creates reality, it creates truth.
--  George Orwell, 1984
 
===================================
== We do not belong to the state ==
===================================
In America, the people do not belong to the state.  America was
not founded upon collective rights, it was founded upon
God-given, individual human rights -- but many people have either
forgotten or never knew.
 
For example, Honolulu Mayor Frank Fasi recently told Kona Rotary
Club members:  "I don't believe 125,000 people on this island
should make the decision of what is best for this state.  The
spaceport is necessary and has to be done." In other words, Fasi
says that the rights of the entire population of Hawaii county
should be sacrificed to the state.
 
The sentiment expressed by Fasi is not one that we often hear in
America -- it sounds strange.  What kind of philosophy is this?
Is it Republican, Democrat, Libertarian, Marxist or what?
 
The idea that the people belong to the state is called fascism.
When Fasi makes that kind of statement, he is preaching the
doctrine of Benito Mussolini and Adolph Hitler.
 
Here is Fasi's philosophy as articulated by Benito Mussolini in
The Doctrine of Fascism:
 
"Liberalism denied the State in the name of the individual;
fascism reasserts the rights of the State as expressing the real
essence of the individual.  And if liberty is to be the attribute
of living men and not of abstract dummies invented by
individualistic liberalism, then fascism stands for liberty, and
for the only liberty worth having, the liberty of the State and
the individual within the State.  The fascist conception of the
State is all-embracing;  outside of it no human or spiritual
values can exist, much less have value.  Thus understood, fascism
is totalitarian, and the fascist State -- a synthesis and a unit
inclusive of all values -- interprets, develops, and potentiates
the whole life of a people."
 
Frank Fascist?  Frankito Fasolini?  Voter beware!
 
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
"The essence of oligarchical rule is not father-to-son
inheritance, but the persistence of a certain world-view and a
certain way of life, imposed by the dead upon the living.  A
ruling group is a ruling group so long as it can nominate its
successors.  The party is not concerned with perpetuating its
blood but with perpetuating itself."
--  George Orwell, 1984
 
=======================================
== Divide and conquer for "progress" ==
=======================================
Divide and conquer is a tactic used by economic cyborgs to
further their own selfish economic interests.  Since the cyborgs
destroy natural ecosystems for profit, they are able to exploit a
natural division in our community:  the division between the
labor and environmental movements.  These tactics can be quite
successful with labor being portrayed as being "for progress"
while environmentalists are portrayed as being "against
progress."
 
One never asks:  progress towards what?  Despite the intense
economic development of the last 20 years, what exactly has
progressed?  Who claims that our schools, infrastructure,
economic security or taxes are any better?  Why would any
rational individual want any more of this progress?
 
For example, common sense tells us that those who are developing
our county for profit should pay the public infrastructure costs
(roads, water, schools, etc.) that are associated with their
profit-making projects.  It is clearly unfair to force the
tax-paying residents to subsidize private developers (it's
welfare for the rich).  But in the past, passing infrastructure
costs along to the public has been a favorite way for politicians
to help their rich developer pals maximize their profits.
 
A 1990 report, issued by the Hawaii County Public Works
Department, lists a total of $558 million worth of planned
projects.  Yet the county's budget for this infrastructure is
only about $4 million per year.  In other words, we are over 100
years behind in our county infrastructure and county tax-payers
of this county owe an infrastructure debt of $558 million!  How
far behind are we in state projects? Is this stupidity or
corruption?
 
Furthermore, have these past 20 years of economic development
improved the economic condition of the working class?  Hardly!
Despite this intense development, real income has declined
precipitously.  Isn't this un-economic development?  Do we really
want more of the same?
 
If you don't believe that our government has sold out the working
class people, consider these long-term economic trends as
articulated by Hawaii's Special Assistant to the Governor for
Economic Affairs, Gregory G. Y. Pai, Ph.D.:
 
"To begin with, we are all aware of the transformation of Hawaii
from an agrarian plantation society into a tourist-oriented
service economy during the roughly three decades since Hawaii
became a state.  In spite of the unprecedented economic growth
and prosperity that resulted, an important consequence was that
the labor force was transformed from one primarily craft and
skill oriented to one predominantly sales and service oriented.
Because of the historically lower wages paid to trade and service
jobs, the result was a long-term decline in wage and income
growth in the state.  By 1982, Hawaii's rank in terms in annual
wages paid per employee had dropped to 42nd in the nation.  Given
Hawaii's traditionally high cost of living, the result was
greater pressures on families in the struggle for economic
survival.  In the two decades between 1969 and 1989, the median
income of households in Hawaii, adjusted for inflation, increased
by 43 percent from $27,094 to $38,829.  However, the consumer
price index for Honolulu, which measures price increases for
household expenditures such as food, clothing, shelter, energy,
transportation, and medical care grew by 227 percent during the
same period.  Thus, the costs of living in Hawaii, in the last two
decades, grew at a rate five times faster than the growth in
income for Hawaii households.  Analysis of 1990 Census data also
reveal a trend toward an increased bi-modal distribution of
household income.  In short, the rich have continued to get
richer while the poor have gotten poorer.
 
"This deterioration in economic welfare for Hawaii's families is
graphically reflected in long-term statistics on social welfare
expenditures.  Despite the impressive growth in Hawaii's overall
economy, total state government social welfare spending increased
dramatically from $24 million in 1967 to $434 million in 1990.
Individuals receiving social welfare payments doubled from 22,400
to 52,000 persons.  Between 1969 and 1990, recipients of aid to
families with dependent children, child-welfare foster care, and
general welfare assistance grew from 7,073 to 33,652 cases, while
the level of monthly payments increased from $14 million to $176
million.  In the meantime, households receiving food increased
from 1,500 to 32,000, while the annual value of food stamps
distributed rose from one million dollars to $79 million."*83
 
Contrary to popular belief, environmentalist goals are not
intrinsically incompatible with labor.  "We want safe jobs and a
clean environment,"  states Edwin Ruff of the New York State
AFL-CIO and a member of the New York State Labor & Environment
Network,  "We can do that together."
 
"Ultimately, if we destroy the environment, we destroy everyone's
jobs," said Lynn Williams, International President of the United
Steelworkers of America, and the keynote speaker at New York's
Annual Labor & Environment Conference.  "Toxic chemicals that
disturb the community outside the plant come from inside the
workplace, where workers are under a much greater threat.  People
don't have to die for their jobs."*84
 
The following is part of an article published by the United Auto
Workers on Nov. 1991:
 
"Taking on corporate America and our Republican-led federal
government to improve the environment while we improve the
economy is an uphill battle.  The tasks are vast, the problems
difficult, and the challenges unparalleled.  But I am confident
that with labor and environmentalists forging alliances, we will
solve our environmental crisis in a way that's good for jobs and
the economy."
 
The environmentalists and organized labor in every community must
join hands to fight the cyborgs.  Bill Towne, of the Amalgamated
Clothing & Textile Workers Union, says,  "It's always been, is
it jobs or the environment first?' and now we've matured enough
to where we recognize that it's both."
 
Remember, the only thing that economic cyborgs "need" to survive
is PROFIT.  For profit, cyborgs will destroy natural ecosystems.
For profit, cyborgs will exploit desperate workers.  Thus, the
goal of economic cyborgs is intrinsically incompatible with both
labor and the environmentalists (indeed, all of nature).
 
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
"The Party claimed, of course, to have liberated the proles from
bondage. . . .  In reality very little was known about the
proles.  It was not necessary to know much.  So long as they
continued to work and breed, their other activities were without
importance.  Left to themselves, like cattle turned loose upon the
plains of Argentina, they had reverted to a style of life that
appeared to be natural to them, a sort of ancestral pattern.  They
were born, they grew up in the gutters, they went to work at
twelve, they passed through a brief blossoming period of beauty
and sexual desire, they married at twenty, they were middle-aged
at thirty, they died, for the most part, at sixty.  Heavy
physical work, the care of home and children, petty quarrels with
neighbors, films, football, beer, and, above all, gambling filled
up the horizon of their minds.  To keep them in control was not
difficult."
--  George Orwell, 1984
 
========================
== Workers are losing ==
========================
History has shown us that the cyborgs' behavior can only be made
socially responsible by coercion such that as used by the early
labor movement.  Having no political power and struggling to feed
their families, desperate workers had no recourse but to take
matters into their own hands.  Organize.  Strike!  Settle.  Once
labor was able to organize and gain political power, its
hard-fought gains (that were bought and paid for with blood) were
finally enacted into law.
 
For example, Industrial Workers of the World was a union that had
a dramatic impact on the early labor movement.  "We are going
down in the gutter," I.W.W. leader William "Big Bill" Haywood
announced, "to get at the mass of workers and bring them up to a
decent plane of living."  During its relatively short heyday, the
I.W.W. conducted numerous strikes, including a dramatic and
successful textile strike at Lawrence, Massachusetts.  The I.W.W.
introduced new strike tactics, such as the sit-downs and mass
picketing, and it packed some California jails by deliberately
violating city ordinances.*85
 
Today, labor's hard-won accomplishments are being unraveled.
Barlett and Steele clearly show how the cyborgs have "gone to
bed" with their political cronies in order to weaken the laws
that had once kept the cyborgs in check.  As a result, millions
of American workers have been forced to move from jobs that paid
$15 an hour, into jobs that pay $7;  millions are victims of mass
layoffs, production halts, shuttered factories and owners who
enrich themselves by doing damage and then walking away.*86
 
In the last twenty years, American workers' leisure time has
declined steadily.  Full-time workers report they have only
sixteen and a half hours of leisure a week.  In fact, working
hours are already longer than they were forty years ago.
 
Full-time American manufacturing employees currently work 320
more hours per year than their counterparts in West Germany or
France (the equivalent of over two months).  Moreover, if present
trends continue, by the end of the century, Americans will be
spending as much time at their jobs as they did back in the
nineteen twenties.*87
 
But while most Americans must work longer hours in order to make
ends meet, many others no longer have the chance to work those
longer hours.  Instead, millions of average working Americans are
forced to slash their pay checks so that the rich folks can get
even richer.  Here's an example:
 
"The Bank of America, which reported $1.5 billion in profits last
year, is planning to turn all but a handful of its 18,500
employees into part-timers.  The bank plans to force tellers and
other workers into working weeks shorter than 20 hours,
disqualifying them for health insurance and other benefits.  Pay
and benefits will be slashed an average of $17,200 per year for
each worker."*88
 
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
"But it was also clear that an all-round increase in wealth
threatened the destruction -- indeed, in some sense was the
destruction -- of a hierarchical society. . . .  For if leisure
and security were enjoyed by all alike, the great mass of human
beings who are normally stupefied by poverty would become
literate and would learn to think for themselves;  and when the
had done this, they would sooner or later realize that the
privileged minority had no function, and they would sweep it
away.  In the long run, a hierarchical society was only possible
on a basis of poverty and ignorance."
--  George Orwell, 1984
 
===========================================================
== Ecological harmony changed into exploitive domination ==
===========================================================
Our secret religion -- Industrial Religion -- was born in the
seventeenth century.
 
Before the seventeenth century, the goals of science were wisdom,
understanding the natural order, and living in harmony with
nature.  In the seventeenth century, ecological harmony changed
into exploitive domination.
 
The English philosopher Francis Bacon (1561-1626) advocated a new
empirical method of science in passionate and vicious terms.
Nature has to be "hounded in her wanderings," wrote Bacon, "bound
into service" and made a "slave."  She is to be "put in
constraint," and the aim of the scientist is to "torture nature's
secrets from her."  These violent images of torture with
mechanical devices paralleled the torture of women during the
seventeenth century witch trials.  This is not surprising since
Bacon was attorney general for King James and torturing women was
his business.  Thus, we have a crucial and frightening connection
between mechanistic science and patriarchal values, which had a
tremendous impact on the further development of science and
technology.*89
 
At about the same time Bacon was busy torturing women, the French
mathematician and philosopher Rene Descartes was attempting to
account for observed phenomena on the basis of what he called
clear and distinct ideas.  Ultimately he developed a radical
philosophy predicated on the fundamental division of reality into
two separate and independent realms:  that of mind and that of
matter.
 
The Cartesian division allowed scientists to treat matter as
material substance completely separate from themselves, and to
see the material world as a multitude of different objects
assembled into a huge machine.  Such a mechanistic worldview was
held by Isaac Newton, who constructed his mechanics on its basis
and made it the foundation of classical physics.  And Newton's
physics became the dogma of Industrial Religion.
 
The consequence of our devotion to Industrial Religion has been
that our natural environment is treated as if it consists of
separate parts to be exploited by different interest groups.  This
fragmented view is imposed upon a society that is split into
different nations, races, religious and political groups.  The
belief that all these fragments are really separate can be seen
as the essential reason for the present series of social,
ecological and economic crises.  It has alienated us from nature
and from other human beings.  It has brought a grossly unjust
distribution of natural resources that is creating economic and
political disorder.  It has brought an ever rising wave of
violence, both spontaneous and institutionalized.  It has brought
an ugly, polluted environment in which life has become physically
and mentally unhealthy.
 
=============================================
== Science knows nothing of "deep reality" ==
=============================================
"Deep reality" describes the ultimate physical laws and
substances that constitute our world.  The Scottish philosopher
David Hume (1711-76) argued that our knowledge concerning deep
reality can only be subjective (biased by the observer) because
it comes to us via our senses.  This subjective knowledge can
only describe how reality appears to us -- a superficial sort of
"apparent reality."  We can know nothing of an objective deep
reality via our senses.
 
Hume's outrageous skepticism attacked the very foundations of
science.  Scientists knew that Hume's argument had to be refuted
before they could claim to know anything at all about deep
reality.  The great German philosopher, Immanuel Kant
(1724-1804), rose to the challenge.
 
Many consider Kant to be the greatest thinker since Plato and
Aristotle.  He was also a scientist and an enthusiastic supporter
of Isaac Newton.  Kant was "awakened from his dogmatic slumbers"
by Hume's unacceptable argument and struggled to refute it.  He
failed.
 
Bertrand Russell (1872-1970) was a British philosopher,
mathematician, and Nobel laureate whose emphasis on logical
analysis influenced the course of 20th-century philosophy.  He was
also a realist who believed that objects perceived by the senses
have an objective reality.
 
Russell was appalled by Hume's skepticism:  "To refute him has
been, ever since he wrote, a favorite pastime among
metaphysicians.  For my part, I find none of their refutations
convincing;  nevertheless, I cannot but hope that something less
skeptical that Hume's system may be discoverable."  Yet Hume's
argument still stands after two hundred and fifty years of
challenge:  we can know nothing of deep reality via our senses.
 
Modern physics (the basis of all science) has probed the depths
of our physical world with mathematics, linear accelerators,
bubble chambers and billions of dollars.  What have modern
physicists found?
 
The giants of twentieth century physics, Albert Einstein, Niels
Bohr and Werner Heisenberg have shown us astounding new concepts
of matter, space and time that are totally different from
Newton's.  High-energy particle scattering experiments have
demonstrated that subatomic particles are not made of any
physical substance.  At the subatomic level, matter does not
exist with certainty at definite places, but rather shows
"tendencies to exist," and atomic events do not occur with
certainty at definite times and in definite ways, but rather show
"tendencies to occur." In the subatomic world, classical concepts
like "elementary particle," "material substance" or "isolated
object" have lost their meaning;  the whole universe appears as a
dynamic web of inseparable energy patterns.  Bohr:  "Isolated
material particles are abstractions, their properties being
definable and observable only through their interaction with
other systems."  Heisenberg: "The world thus appears as a
complicated tissue of events, in which connections of different
kinds alternate or overlap or combine and thereby determine the
texture of the whole."
 
These changes in science show surprising parallels to a
fundamental idea expressed in many religious philosophies -- the
unity of all things.  All things perceived by the senses are
interrelated, connected and are different aspects of the same
deep reality.  Yet this deep reality cannot be directly
experienced, understood or even described!  Einstein on
understanding:  "As far as the laws of mathematics refer to
reality, they are not certain; and as far as they are certain,
they do not refer to reality."  Heisenberg on description: "Every
word or concept, clear as it may seem to be, has only a limited
range of applicability."*90  Hume was right:  we can know nothing
of deep reality via our senses.  (There are probably other ways
of knowing -- i.e. mysticism and intuition.)
 
While science knows nothing of deep reality, a revolutionary new
theory is showing scientists how apparent reality is
inter-connected:  Chaos Theory.
 
============================================
== The Science of Wholeness: Chaos Theory ==
============================================
Chaos is the condition of being without order (confusion or
noise).  As Briggs and Peat show in Turbulent Mirror (1989), "The
world defined by science has been a world of almost Platonic
purity.  The equations and theories describing the rotation of
the planets, the rise of water in a tube, the trajectory of a
baseball, or the structure of the genetic code contain a
regularity and order, a clockwork certainty, that we have come to
associate with nature's laws. . . .  Turbulence, irregularity,
and unpredictability are everywhere, but it has always seemed
fair to assume that this was noise,' a messiness that resulted
from the way things in reality crowd into each other."  In other
words, the chaos that scientists had observed in nature was
thought to be due to poor experimental conditions.  They were
wrong.
 
The source of the chaos that scientists have observed in nature
is the sensitivity of all things to all other things.  In one
scientific article, four pioneers of chaos theory explain that
the sensitivity of dynamical physical systems is so great that
the perfect prediction of the effect of a cue ball striking a
rack of billiard balls is impossible.  "For how long could a
player with perfect control over his or her stroke predict the
cue ball's trajectory?  If the player ignored an effect as
minuscule as the gravitational attraction of an electron at the
edge of the galaxy, the prediction would become wrong after one
minute!"
 
The smallest particle determines the whole.  In such a world,
there are no separate and distinct parts.  In fact, cosmologists
(those who study the origin of the universe) speculate that if
the initial conditions at the big bang had varied by as much as a
single quantum of energy (the smallest known thing we can
measure), the universe would be a vastly different place.
 
Modern science has clearly shown that Newton's physics is limited
and defective.  Yet its bastard -- Industrial Religion --
continues to lead us to violent death.
 
Our survival demands that we discard Industrial Religion and
adopt a new religion that is consistent with modern science --
one that admits uncertainty and respects the unity of all things.
 
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
"In the end the Party would announce that two and two made five,
and you would have to believe it.  It was inevitable that they
should make that claim sooner or later:  the logic of their
position demanded it."
--  George Orwell, 1984
 
=========================================
== The brink of environmental disaster ==
=========================================
Last year, the Union of Concerned Scientists, representing over
1,500 of the world's leading scientists (including 99 Nobel
laureates), issued an Urgent Warning to Humanity:
 
"The earth is finite.  Its ability to absorb wastes and
destructive effluent is finite.  Its ability to provide food and
energy is finite.  Its ability to provide for growing numbers of
people is finite.  And we are fast approaching many of the
earth's limits.  Current economic practices which damage the
environment, in both developed and undeveloped nations, cannot be
continued without the risk that vital global systems will be
damaged beyond repair.
 
"A new ethic is required -- a new attitude towards discharging
our responsibility for caring for ourselves and for the earth.
We must recognize the earth's limited capacity to provide for us.
We must recognize its fragility.  We must no longer allow it to
be ravaged.  This ethic must motivate a great movement,
convincing reluctant leaders and reluctant governments and
reluctant peoples themselves to effect the needed changes."*91
 
Pope John Paul II criticized our consumer lifestyle:
 
"Modern society will find no solution to the ecological problem
unless it takes a serious look at its lifestyle.  In many parts
of the world, society is given to instant gratification and
consumerism while remaining indifferent to the damage which these
cause.  As I have already stated, the seriousness of the
ecological issue lays bare the depth of man's moral crisis."*92
 
Until now, the economic cyborgs had us convinced that no matter
how badly we treat ourselves or our Mother Earth, the scientific
community can save us.  But last year, the U.S. National Academy
of Sciences and the Royal Society of London admitted in a joint
statement that science and technology may NOT be able to save us:
 
"If current predictions of population growth prove accurate and
patterns of human activity on the planet remain unchanged,
science and technology may not be able to prevent either
irreversible degradation of the environment or continued poverty
for much of the world."*93
 
Never before in history have these two prestigious groups of
scientists issued a joint statement.  Concerning this
unprecedented event, the president of Worldwatch Institute,
Lester R. Brown, noted:
 
"It was a remarkable statement, an admission that science and
technology can no longer ensure a better future unless population
growth slows quickly and the economy is restructured. . . .  That
they chose to issue a joint statement, their first ever, reflects
a deepening concern about the future among scientists."*94
 
On March 18, 1993, both Germany and Holland issued urgent
warnings:  "All efforts now to prevent the ozone hole are too
late," said the head of Germany's environmental protection
office, Heinrich von Lersner.  He went on to explain that German
scientists are measuring a steadily decreasing layer of ozone in
the sky over Europe.*95
 
Dutch scientists say that greenhouse effect is really here! The
Royal Dutch Meteorological Institute said that the Netherlands'
four warmest years of the century all fell in the last five
years.  This obvious climate change "fits the image of a
temperature rise due to the greenhouse effect."  It is no longer
probable that the natural variability of a stable climate could
cause so many warm years so close together, the institute added.
 
It is the first time official Dutch meteorologists have been so
clear.  Until now, the run of warm weather was considered by the
Dutch scientists to be statistically insignificant.*96
 
Botanists are saying that plants may not be able to save us from
global warming:
 
"Plants may not be able to save the world from 'global warming'
as they can consume only so much carbon dioxide, scientists said
in a report published on Thursday.
 
"Argentine and British botanists found in joint experiments that
too much of a good thing for plants acted just like an overdose
of food in an animal -- it made them sick.
 
"Some scientists had reported that plants exposed to extra carbon
dioxide grew bigger than normal plants.  This led to theories
that plants could absorb the carbon dioxide, caused by burning
fossil fuels, that could be behind the gradual warming of the
earth's atmosphere.
 
"But the botanists said in the science journal Nature that
different plants reacted differently to overdoses of carbon
dioxide.  They said many of the species they tested simply dumped
the excess carbon into the soil through their roots.
 
"This, in turn, allowed micro-organisms to grow and eat up other
nutrients, causing the plants to wither.
 
"The botanists, working at Sheffield University in northern
England and Cordoba National University in Argentina, said
doubling carbon dioxide concentrations in the air did not cause
any of their plants to grow more than usual."*97
 
Indonesia is beginning to panic:
 
"Global warming will cause rising sea levels that will submerge
large chunks of Indonesia in the next two decades, displacing
millions of people, experts said on Thursday.
 
"Speaking at a seminar on climatic changes, officials and
environmental groups said about 3.4 million hectares (8.4 million
acres) of arable land as well as ports, railways and homes would
be under water by 2010.
 
"Up to three million people would have to be resettled, they
said, presenting a study undertaken by local environmental groups
and officials with the help of the Asian Development Bank.
 
"The report called for prompt action.
 
"'The government alone cannot prevent or prepare for climatic
change.  This massive effort will require the input, energy and
dedication of the Indonesian, and indeed international, society
as a whole,' it concluded.
 
"Indonesia, an archipelago that is home to about 183 million
people, is one of the countries most at risk from rising sea
levels.
 
"Scientists expect global warming, caused by emissions of
'greenhouse gases' such as carbon dioxide, to raise temperatures
by up to 5 Celsius (9 Fahrenheit) in the next 100 years.
 
"Thermal expansion of the oceans and the melting of mountain
glaciers and polar ice will have raised sea levels by as much as
29 cm (11 inches) by 2030 and 71 cm (28 inches) by 2070, eroding
and flooding coastlines.
 
"Indonesia's report, concluding a year-long study, said that
apart from submerged land, damage to other soil would reduce
yields on upland crops by as much as 40 percent, costing about $6
billion annually.
 
"The team called for immediate action, suggesting that the
government build dams, canals and ponds to protect against
increasing floods as well as constructing homes for those forced
to leave inundated areas.
 
"The islands most affected would be densely populated Java, Irian
Jaya, Sumatra, the Indonesian half of Borneo and Sulawesi.
 
"Officials at the one-day seminar acknowledged the problem of
rising water levels and called for concerted global action.
 
"In a speech to the seminar, the minister of the environment,
Sarwono Kusumaatmadja, said even a slight rise in sea levels
would cause chaos in the form of worsening health, declining
agricultural production and widespread starvation.
 
"World experts will discuss the problem of rising sea levels at a
November meeting in the Netherlands, which rebuilt its seawater
defenses after nearly 2,000 people drowned four decades ago."*98
 
====================================
== The brink of economic disaster ==
====================================
The cyborgs keep the profits generated from their destructive
money-making activities, while all of society is forced to pay
the costs.  It's as though only the richest one percent of the
people have credit cards but the bill must be divided and paid by
everyone.
 
In State of the World 1993, Brown points out that our economic
way of thinking is killing us:
 
"Industrial firms are allowed to internalize profits while
externalizing costs, passing on to society such expenses as those
for health care associated with polluted air or those from global
warming.
 
"An expanding economy based on such an incomplete accounting
system would be expected to slowly undermine itself, eventually
collapsing as support systems are destroyed.  And that is just
what is happening.  The environmentally destructive activities of
recent decades are now showing in reduced productivity of
croplands, forests, grasslands, and fisheries;  in the mounting
cleanup costs of toxic waste sites;  in rising health care costs
for cancer, birth defects, allergies, emphysema, asthma, and
other respiratory diseases;  and the spread of hunger.
 
"The bottom line is that the world is entering a new era, one in
which future economic progress depends on reversing environmental
degradation.  This in turn is contingent on new economic and
population policies."*99
 
World Bank economist Herman Daly and theologian John Cobb warn
us:
 
"We human beings are being led into a dead end -- all too
literally.  We are living by an ideology of death and accordingly
we are destroying our own humanity and killing the planet.  Even
the one great success of the program that has governed us, the
attainment of material affluence, is now giving way to poverty.
The United States is just now gaining a foretaste of the
suffering that global economic policies, so enthusiastically
embraced, have inflicted on hundreds of millions of others.  If
we continue on our present paths, future generations, if there
are to be any, are condemned to misery."*100
 
Victor Furkiss, a prominent futurist and Professor of Government
at Georgetown University, describes our appalling situation:
 
"Present-day society is locked into four positive feedback loops
which need to be broken:  economic growth which feeds on itself,
population growth which feeds on itself, technological change
which feeds on itself, and a pattern of income inequality which
seems to be self sustaining and which tends to spur growth in the
other three areas.  Ecological humanism must create an economy in
which economic and population growth is halted, technology is
controlled, and gross inequalities of income are done away
with."*101
 
Our colossal stupidity is condemning our children to living a
horrible nightmare -- one that they will not awaken from.  Our
current lifestyle cannot be sustained.  Thus, we can see that
today's big question is not whether children will achieve a higher
standard of living than their parents (they won't).*102  Today's
big question is whether or not they will live long enough to
retire.
 
=====================================
== The brink of political disaster ==
=====================================
In An Inquiry into the Human Prospect, Economics Professor Robert
Heilbroner projects continuing (but gradually slowing) economic
growth until approximately the year 2005.  At that time, the world
will need highly authoritarian governments to control the
transition to economic decline.  In other words, a dictatorship
will be necessary to insure that we all receive a proper burial.
 
Indeed, we are probably seeing the beginning of Heilbroner's
inevitable worldwide economic decline.  According to the Rocky
Mountain Institute:
 
"For roughly two-thirds of all workers, real wages dropped 12% in
the last decade and a half.  Over that period, only the upper
class experienced significant real income growth, with the
richest one percent of Americans enjoying a 75% rise."*103
 
The damage suffered by Hawaii's working class is far worse than
the national average.  U.S. Census Bureau statistics show that
Hawaii's consumer prices increased 73 percent during the 80's
while wages only increased 13 percent.  In other words, real
wages dropped 32 percent and prices are increasing 600 percent
faster than wages.  And as we now know, this dismal trend is
expected to accelerate in the future.
 
In 1840, Alexis de Tocqueville, a French politician and writer,
published his famous book, Democracy in America, still considered
by many to be the greatest interpretive work ever written on the
United States.
 
De Tocqueville said that America's greatness was due to her
passion for righteousness,  "America is great because America is
good.  When America ceases to be good, America will cease to be
great."
 
De Tocqueville foresaw the dangerous trend of our present
government, but was unable to name it:
 
"I think, then, that the species of oppression by which
democratic nations are menaced is unlike anything which ever
before existed in the world;  our contemporaries will find no
prototype of it in their memories.  I seek in vain for an
expression which will accurately convey the whole of the idea I
have formed of it;  the old words despotism' and tyranny' are
inappropriate.  The thing itself is new, and, since I cannot
name, I must attempt to define it."*104
 
The word that de Tocqueville was looking for hadn't yet been
invented:  "totalitarianism."  Totalitarianism comes into being
when all the governing and managing power of a society, both its
political and its economic power, is concentrated in the
centralized bureaucracy of the state.  This is the case when our
government combines with the cyborgs -- when both economic and
political power sleep in the same bed:  "As steel goes, so goes
the nation."*105  ". . .what was good for our country was good
for General Motors, and vice versa."*106  (one-dollar-one-vote)
 
So perhaps there is a method to today's madness.  Daly tells us
that the "Lack of control by the individual over institutions and
technologies that not only affect his life but determine his
livelihood is hardly democratic and is, in fact, an excellent
training in the acceptance of totalitarianism."*107
 
In Hawaii, we see the tilt towards totalitarianism when our
government becomes a business agent for the economic cyborgs.  The
most flagrant example of this is with geothermal development in
Puna.*108  Other examples include military-based economic
development, the Ka'u Spaceport, sea bed mining and government's
perpetual attempts to "streamline the permitting process."  Any
attempt by government to remove barriers to economic development,
without first establishing objective criteria to determine which
economic developments are actually in the public's best interest,
carries with it the stench of totalitarianism.
 
In his new book, Preparing for the Twenty-First Century, Yale
historian Paul Kennedy argues that the political system of
America is so corrupt that we will not be able to save ourselves.
Perhaps some great mishap (next time a nuke parked under the
World Trade Center) or a worldwide financial crash might shock us
out of complacency, but Kennedy is definitely not optimistic.  He
argues that in order to save ourselves, we must become a
different kind of country:
 
"While an impressive array of American individuals, companies,
banks, investors, and think tanks are scrambling to prepare for
the twenty-first century, the United States as a whole is not and
indeed cannot, without becoming a different kind of country.
Perhaps a serious program of reforms might be undertaken
following a sufficient shock to complacency, like a financial
crash or a broadly perceived external threat;  but just how
likely that is to happen is impossible to say.  Even if there
should be such a catalyst, there surely could be no coherent
response by the United States unless political leadership --
especially the president -- recognized the larger challenges
facing the country and had the courage and the ability to
mobilize opinion to accept changes which many would find
uncomfortable.  That in turn, would require leadership very
different from the sort demonstrated by recent incumbents of the
White House, whether it concerned domestic deficits or global
population and environmental issues.  It remains to be seen,
therefore, whether traditional approaches will carry the American
people successfully into the twenty-first century -- or whether
they will pay a high price in assuming that things can stay the
same at home while the world outside changes more swiftly than
ever before."*109
 
The blunt message of Who Will Tell the People, by William
Greider, is that American democracy is in much deeper trouble
than most people will acknowledge.  The glaring contradictions
between faith and fact are so frightening that most of us can't
help but turn away from the implications.  The rotted condition
of American democracy is difficult to comprehend, not because the
symptoms are hidden, but because the symptoms are visible
everywhere.  Greider's work is among the most frightening I have
read.
 
What are some of the obvious symptoms of our rotted democracy?
For example, reducing the National Debt is a high priority
national goal, yet our debt continues to skyrocket out of
control.*110, *111  We say that we need more economic growth for
the well-being of our people, yet by all measures, the public's
well-being has been plummeting -- even during periods of high
economic growth.*112, *113, *114, *115, *116, *117, *118, *119 We
claim to be a democracy where all are created equal, yet greedy
men scramble for personal power, and our corrupt political system
has become a national disgrace.*120  We announce that we want
world peace, yet we continue to be the world's largest weapons
dealer to third-world nations.*121  In 1990, 2,162 young
Americans were killed in school by firearms and 5.3 percent of
our students carried a gun!*122  We profess to be a Christian
nation, yet every day we allow 30 million Americans to go hungry.
(Third World famine-relief organizations, such as London-based
Oxfam, are now focusing their efforts on Boston, Hollywood,
Minneapolis-St. Paul, New York, San Francisco, Seattle and
Washington, DC.*123)
 
Will we be able to salvage our political system without violence?
Here is one candid opinion from an executive with the influential
public-relations firm of Hill & Knowlton:
 
"The big corporations, our clients, are scared shitless of the
environmental movement," Mankiewicz confided.  "They sense that
there's a majority out there and that the emotions are all on the
other side -- if they can be heard.  I think the corporations are
wrong about that.  I think the companies will have to give in
only at insignificant levels.  Because the companies are too
strong, they're the establishment.  The environmentalists are
going to have to be like the mob in the square in Romania before
they prevail."*124
 
I'm afraid, Mankiewicz will be right:  "The environmentalists are
going to have to be like the mob in the square in Romania before
they prevail."
 
====================================================
== "Flat-Earth" economics is politics in disguise ==
====================================================
By now we have seen how Adam Smith and his disciples founded
Industrial Religion which has brought so much un-happiness to
America.  What's worse, our present -- incredibly stupid --
economic theory is rapidly closing out the options of future
generations.
 
One of the many critics of present economic theory, James
Robertson, says in Future Wealth:
 
"Conventional economics is based on primitive conceptual
assumptions.  It embodies questionable value judgments and
incorrect understandings of facts, for example about human nature
and the natural world.  It reflects what economic life and the
state of human development were like two hundred years ago.  In
short, it suffers from factual error, philosophical
misconception, and historical obsolescence.  The 21st-century
needs a stronger conceptual basis than this."*125
 
No doubt concerned individuals, those that are still able to
think in abstractions, are now wondering how such colossal
stupidity has prevailed for so long.  I think the answer lies in
the complementary nature of economics and politics -- their
principles are essentially the same.
 
Niccolo Machiavelli did for political thought what Smith did for
economic thought 250 years later -- he "abolished the moral
problem."  Both Smith and Machiavelli felt that the values in
their theories were to be measured only by practical successes.
 
Like Smith's, Machiavelli's message is that one must not allow
moral considerations to deter the pursuit of self-interest.
Machiavelli's "political views are more acceptable in our era
than in any since his own;  nowadays anyone who disagrees with
him is assumed to be naive."*126
 
Thus, the most important principle in economics and politics is
the same -- self-interest.  "Flat-Earth"*127 economics readily
serves modern-day Machiavellians and justifies their immoral
activities -- economics is actually politics in disguise -- and
vice versa.
 
There are dozens of recent books, written by authors from many
different disciplines, that challenge the incredible
presuppositions which underlie standard "Flat-Earth" economic
theory.  Moreover, many authors are pointing the way towards
achieving sanity in economic thought.
 
The reason that we are unable to adopt a sane economic theory is
because of the symbiotic relationship between today's Smithian
economic system and today's Machiavellian political system;  they
continually reinforce each other.  The reason that we are unable
to adopt a sane economic theory is because of the "mother of all
flaws" in our political system.
 
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
"His mind slid away into the labyrinthine world of doublethink.
To know and not to know, to be conscious of complete truthfulness
while telling carefully constructed lies, to hold simultaneously
two opinions which canceled out, knowing them to be contradictory
and believing in both of them, to use logic against logic, to
repudiate morality while laying claim to it, to believe that
democracy was impossible and that the Party was the guardian of
democracy, to forget, whatever it was necessary to forget, then
to draw it back into memory again at the moment when it was
needed, and then promptly to forget it again, and above all, to
apply the same process to the process itself -- that was the
ultimate subtlety:  consciously to induce unconsciousness, and
then, once again, to become unconscious of the act of hypnosis
you had just performed.  Even to understand the word
'doublethink' involved the use of doublethink."
--  George Orwell, 1984
 
===============================
== The "mother of all flaws" ==
===============================
Edmund Burke once said:  "The only thing necessary for the
triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing."  Burke is right,
we good women and men can't treat life as a spectator sport -- we
must do something.
 
But in order to know what to do, we must first identify the
specific fundamental fatal flaw in the American political system
from which all other flaws spring -- the "mother of all flaws."
What exactly is the flaw in our political system which allows
evil to prevail and has deprived the American citizens of their
natural God-given rights?  Simply stated, it is this:  The ease
with which economic power may be exchanged for political power
and vice versa. (one-dollar-one-vote)
 
That's it!  It's that simple!  But now that we have identified
the mother of all flaws in the American political system from
which all other flaws spring, we good men and women must act.
Since the problem may be so simply stated, it follows that the
solution may also be simply stated: Stop the quick and easy
exchange between economic power and political power
-- bring back one-citizen-one-vote.
 
Take the profit out of politics and we can take our country back
from the economic cyborgs!  But it's going to take more than just
talk, more than just education.  We are not going to be able to
talk the economic cyborgs out of a profit.  The cyborgs will not
give up without a fight!
 
====================
== Natural rights ==
====================
If any single document can be considered the source of the
political beliefs of our founding fathers, it is the Second
Treatise of Civil Government, published in 1689, by the English
philosopher John Locke.  Locke argued that there is a natural law
governing humans.  According to Locke, all of us are equal;  all
possess the same natural rights of life, liberty and property;
all possess the same obligations not to infringe upon the rights
of others: "And reason . . . teaches all mankind who will but
consult it, that being all equal and independent, no one ought to
harm another in his life, health, liberty or possessions."*128
 
According to Locke, if government ceases to protect the rights of
individuals, then it is time for the people to rise up and take
the power of government back into their own hands.  Reading
Locke, one is reminded of Thomas Jefferson's remarkable statement
that society would benefit from a revolution every twenty
years!*129
 
In fact, Locke's revolutionary ideas led directly Thomas
Jefferson's words in our Declaration of Independence:
 
"When in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one
people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them
with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the
separate and equal station to which the laws of nature and of
nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of
mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel
them to the separation.
 
"We hold these truths to be self-evident;  that all men are
created equal;  that they are endowed by their creator with
certain unalienable rights;  that among these are life, liberty,
and the pursuit of happiness;  that to secure these rights,
governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers
from the consent of the governed;  that whenever any form of
government becomes destructive to these ends, it is the right of
the people to alter or to abolish it, and to institute a new
government, laying its foundation on such principles, and
organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most
likely to effect their safety and happiness."
 
The Anglo-American revolutionary writer Thomas Paine called for
American independence in his 1776 pamphlet Common Sense, which
was widely distributed and had a profound influence on public
opinion in America.  He later published the Rights of Man, in
which he defended the French Revolution, and proclaimed our
God-given, individual human rights:
 
"The illuminating and divine principle of the equal rights of man,
(for it has its origin from the Maker of man) relates, not only
to living individuals, but to generations of men succeeding each
other.  Every generation is equal in rights to the generations
which preceded it, by the same rule that every individual is born
equal in rights with his contemporary.
 
"Every history of the creation, and every tradionary account,
whether from the lettered or unlettered world, however they may
vary in their opinion or belief of certain particulars, all agree
in establishing one point, the unity of man;  by which I mean,
that men are all of one degree, and consequently that all men are
born equal, and with equal natural right, in the same manner as
if posterity had been continued by creation instead of
generation, the latter being only the mode by which the former is
carried forward; and consequently, every child born into the
world must be considered as deriving its existence from God.  The
world is as new to him as it was to the first man that existed,
and his natural right in it is of the same kind.
 
"The Mosaic account of the creation, whether taken as divine
authority, or merely historical, is full to this point, the unity
or equality of man.  The expressions admit of no controversy.
'And God said, Let us make man in our own image.  In the image of
God created he him;  male and female created he them.'  The
distinction of sexes is pointed out, but no other distinction is
even implied.  If this be not divine authority, it is at least
historical authority, and shows that the equality of man, so far
from being a modern doctrine, is the oldest upon record.
 
"Man did not enter into society to become worse than he was
before, not to have fewer rights than he had before, but to have
those rights better secured.  His natural rights are the
foundation of all his civil rights."*130
 
But it remained for John Stuart Mill to convert the idea of
liberty into a philosophically respectable doctrine, to put it in
its most comprehensive, extensive, and systematic form -- the
form in which it is generally known today:
 
"The object of this Essay is to assert one very simple principle,
as entitled to govern absolutely the dealings of society with the
individual in the way of compulsion and control, whether the
means used be physical force in the form of legal penalties, or
the moral coercion of public opinion.  That principle is, that
the sole end for which mankind are warranted, individually or
collectively, in interfering with the liberty of action of any of
their number, is self-protection.  That the only purpose for
which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a
civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm to
others.  His own good, either physical or moral, is not a
sufficient warrant.  He cannot rightfully be compelled to do or
forbear because it will be better for him to do so, because it
will make him happier, because, in the opinions of others, to do
so would be wise, or even right.  These are good reasons for
remonstrating with him, or reasoning with him, or persuading him,
or entreating him, nut not for compelling him, or visiting him
with any evil in case he do otherwise.  To justify that, the
conduct from which it is desired to deter him must be calculated
to produce evil to someone else.  The only part of the conduct of
anyone, for which he is amenable to society, is that which
concerns others.  In the part which merely concerns himself, his
independence is, of right, absolute.  Over himself, over his own
body and mind, the individual is sovereign."*131
 
Beginning in 1776, the revolutionary assemblies in most states
adopted constitutions.  All of them declared the people to be the
source of governmental authority.  In the words of the Georgia
constitution of 1777:  "We, therefore, the representatives of the
people, from whom all power originates and for whose benefit all
government is intended, . . ."  The Massachusetts constitution of
1780 expressed the same idea in the form of an original social
contract:  "The whole people covenants with each citizen, and
each citizen with the whole people, that all shall be governed by
certain laws for the common good."
 
The most remarkable state document of this period was the bill of
rights prefixed to the Virginia constitution of 1776.  The
Virginia Bill of Rights states the principles on which branches
of government should operate and guarantee individual liberties:
 
"That all men are by nature equally free and independent, and
have certain inherent rights, of which, when they enter into a
state of society, they cannot, by any compact, deprive or divest
their posterity;  namely, the enjoyment of life and liberty, with
the means of acquiring and possessing property, and pursuing and
obtaining happiness and safety."
 
James Madison was the fourth president of the United States and
known as the father of the Constitution because of his central
role in the Constitutional Convention.  Madison agreed with Locke
and Jefferson when it came to revolution:
 
"If there be a principle that ought not to be questioned within
the United States, it is that every nation has a right to abolish
an old government and establish a new one.  This principle is not
only recorded in every public archive, written in every American
heart, and sealed with the blood of a host of American martyrs,
but is the only lawful tenure by which the United States hold
their existence as a nation."*132
 
U. S. Chief Justice John Marshall was principally responsible for
developing the power of the U.S. Supreme Court and formulating
constitutional law in the nation.  In 1803, Marshall said:
 
"That the people have an original right to establish for their
future government such principles as, in their opinion, shall
most conduce to their own happiness is the basis on which the
whole American fabric has been erected."
 
Abraham Lincoln agreed with the rest:
 
"Any people anywhere, being inclined and having the power, have
the right to rise up, and shake off the existing government, and
form a new one that suits them better.  This is the most
valuable, -- a most sacred right --- a right, which we hope and
believe, is to liberate the world.  Nor is this right confined to
cases in which the whole people of an existing government may
chose to exercise it.  Any portion of such people that can, may
revolutionize, and make their own, of so much of the territory as
they inhabit.  More than this, a majority of any portion of such
people may revolutionize, putting down a minority, intermingled
with, or near about them, who may oppose their movement.  Such
minority, was precisely the case, of the tories of our own
revolution.  It is a quality of revolutions not to go by old
lines, or old laws;  but to break up both, and make new
ones."*133
 
Thus, we possess natural, individual human rights, we are born
with them:  they come from God, not from government.  Indeed,
government has a moral obligation to protect our God-given,
individual human rights.
 
Philosopher Mortimer J. Adler maintains that natural human rights
derive from natural human needs.  Thus, "the right to a decent
living" is also included among natural human rights because all
humans need to make a decent living.  This is not an argument for
indiscriminate welfare payments, however, because individual
natural rights are balanced by each individual's obligation to
make the effort to live well.
 
According to Adler, we have a natural right only to those things
that all human beings naturally "need" in order to lead a decent
human life.  Conversely, the rich do not have any sort of natural
right to buy or exploit whatever they happen to "want," even if
our government allows them to. (one-dollar-one-vote)
 
In today's society, natural human rights constantly conflict with
what could be called "unlimited property rights" (the right of
individuals and economic cyborgs to accumulate unlimited amounts
of property).  In his great New Nationalism address in Kansas in
1910, Theodore Roosevelt proclaimed that "the object of
government is the welfare of the people."  To achieve this goal,
Roosevelt insisted that human rights must take precedence over
property rights:
 
"We are face to face with new conceptions of the relations of
property to human welfare, chiefly because certain advocates of
the rights of property as against the rights of men have been
pushing their claims too far.  The man who wrongly holds that
every human right is secondary to his profit must now give way to
the advocate of human welfare, who rightly maintains that every
man holds his property subject to the general right of the
community to regulate its use to whatever degree the public
welfare may require it.
 
"No man can be a good citizen unless he has a wage more than
sufficient to cover the bare cost of living and hours of labor
short enough so that after his day's work is done he will have
time and energy to bear his share in the management of the
community, to help in carrying the general load.  We keep
countless men from being good citizens by the conditions of life
with which we surround them.
 
Adler takes these arguments ever further when he says that
because all human beings have a moral obligation to try to live
decent lives, it is their obligation, their "duty," to overthrow
any government that frustrates or prevents them from doing
so.*134
 
Therefore, I argue that the people have God-given, human rights,
but economic cyborgs do not!  The cyborgs were not created by
God, but are the creations of greedy men, and men have no
authority to bestow God-given rights upon their creations.  If
our corrupt government violates our God-given rights for the
benefit of these tyrannical man-made creatures, we have the moral
duty to overthrow our corrupt government and form a new one:  a
government that shall be most likely to serve our safety and
happiness.
 
============================
== First Amendment rights ==
============================
"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of
religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof, abridging the
freedom of speech, or of the press;  or the right of the people
peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for redress
of grievances."
--  Amendment 1, Constitution of the United States (1791)
 
Of the ten amendments that comprise our Bill of Rights, the
principal guarantee of our common freedoms is contained in the
First Amendment:  freedom of religion, speech, assembly, petition
and press.  The Founding Fathers -- Jefferson, Madison, Monroe,
Franklin, and the rest -- recognized that freedoms of belief and
expression would be vital for our new system of government to
survive and flourish.
 
The First Amendment protects our right of unpopular expression
from repression by those in power.  In 1927, U. S. Supreme Court
Justice Brandeis said:
 
"Those who won our independence believed that the final end of
the state was to make men free to develop their faculties. . . .
They valued liberty both as an end and as a means.  They believed
liberty to be the secret of happiness and courage to be the
secret of liberty; . . . that public discussion is a political
duty;  and that this should be the fundamental principle of
American government
 
"Fear of serious injury cannot alone justify suppression of free
speech and assembly. . . .  It is the function of speech to free
men from the bondage of irrational fears.
 
"Those who won our independence by revolution were not cowards.
They did not fear political change.  They did not exalt order at
the cost of liberty.  To courageous, self-reliant men, with
confidence in the power of free and fearless reasoning applied
through the process of popular government, no danger flowing from
speech may be termed clear and present. . . .  Such, in my
opinion, is the command of the Constitution."*135
 
In 1963, U. S. Supreme Court Justice Stewart noted:
 
"Speech is often provocative and challenging.  It may strike at
prejudices and preconceptions and have profound unsettling
effects, as it presses for acceptance of an idea.  That is why
freedom of speech . . . is . . . protected against censorship
unless shown likely to produce a clear and present danger of a
serious substantive evil that rises far above public
inconvenience, annoyance or unrest. . . .  There is no room under
our constitution for a more restrictive view."*136
 
As Chief Justice Earl Warren was ending his tenure on the U. S.
Supreme Court in the spring of 1969, the Court was presented with
two cases concerning the "criminal syndication"*137 laws that
were still on the books.  In the first case, a young black man at
a civil rights rally had been heard to say that he had just
gotten his 1-A draft status for Vietnam, and if he were sent, the
first person he would kill would be President Johnson.  He was
arrested and convicted of violating the 1917 Espionage Act.
 
The U. S. Supreme Court reversed his conviction.  It ruled that
the young man did not pose a "real threat" to the President.
Instead he just used "a rude offensive method of stating
political opposition to the President."
 
Then the Court struck down all criminal syndication laws with a
landmark ruling in a case that grew out of a Ku Klux Klan rally
near Cincinnati, Ohio.  Clarence Brandenburg, an Ohio Klan
leader, gave a rabble-rousing speech in which he said that while
the Ohio Klan was not "revengent," if changes were not made in
society, violence might happen.  He was arrested and convicted of
violating an old Ohio criminal syndication law.
 
The U. S. Supreme Court reversed his conviction and found the
Ohio law unconstitutional.  The Court ruled that a speech not
only must be directed at inciting imminent unlawful action but
also must be likely to produce such immediate action.  The Court
noted that "freedoms of speech and press do not permit a state to
forbid advocacy of the use of force or of law violation except
where such advocacy is directed to inciting or producing such
action."*138
 
Henry Steele Commager is a brilliant writer as well as an
impeccable historian.  Commager has often collaborated with other
notable historians and is regarded as one of the foremost
authorities on American history.  Here is his opinion on
criticism and dissent:
 
"If our democracy is to flourish it must have criticism, if our
government is to function it must have dissent.  Only
totalitarian governments insist upon conformity and they -- as we
know -- do so at their peril. . . .  Americans have a stake in
nonconformity, for they know that the American genius is
nonconformist.
 
"It is easier to say what loyalty is not than to say what it is.
It is not conformity.  It is not passive acquiescence in the
status quo. . . .  It is tradition, an ideal, and a principle. .
. .  It is a realization that America was born of revolt,
flourished on dissent, became great through experimentation. . .
 
"From the beginning Americans have known that there were new
worlds to conquer, new truths to be discovered.  Every effort to
confine Americanism to a single pattern, to constrain it to a
single formula, is disloyalty to everything that is valid in
Americanism."*139
 
=====================================
== Rights require responsibilities ==
=====================================
"We, the people of the United States, in order to form a more
perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquillity,
provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and
secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity,
do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States
of America."  --  The Preamble to the Constitution (1787)
 
Of the five phrases in the Preamble that state the objectives of
government, the one that calls for promotion of the general
welfare is the only one whose meaning has been hotly debated.  In
We Hold These Truths, Adler explains the meaning of the "promote
the general welfare" clause:
 
"In the first place, like justice, domestic tranquillity, common
defense, and liberty, what the general welfare stood for had to
be conceived as an element in the common or public good that the
government was being created to serve directly, and the common
good in turn conceived as a means to the pursuit of happiness --
the ultimate end to be achieved by a just and benevolent
government."*140
 
The movement toward promoting the general welfare reached its
climax when Franklin Roosevelt, in his 1944 message to Congress,
said that:
 
". . . true individual freedom cannot exist without economic
security and independence. . . .  People who are hungry and out
of a job are the stuff of which dictatorships are made. . . .  In
our day, these economic truths have become accepted as
self-evident.  We have accepted, so to speak, the second Bill of
Rights, under which a new basis of security and prosperity can be
established for all."
 
Roosevelt then went on to enumerate the economic rights that he
asked Congress to find ways of implementing.  They include:
 
"The right to a useful and remunerative job in the industries or
shops or mines of the nation;
 
"The right to earn enough to provide adequate food and clothing
and recreation;
 
"The right of every farmer to raise and sell his products at a
return which will give him and his family a decent living;
 
"The right of every businessman, large and small, to trade in an
atmosphere of freedom from unfair competition and domination by
monopolies at home and abroad;
 
"The right of every family to a decent home;
 
"The right to adequate medical care and the opportunity to
achieve and enjoy good health;
 
"The right to adequate protection from economic fears of old age,
sickness, accident, and unemployment;
 
"The right to a good education."*141
 
But Roosevelt only told us half of the story!  He didn't mention
that along with each right went a corresponding duty.  Thus,
Roosevelt set America on a course of personal irresponsibility
that has reached epidemic proportions.
 
A 1989 study by People for the American Way found that:
 
"Young people have learned only half of America's story.
Consistent with the priority they place on personal happiness,
young people reveal notions of America's unique character that
emphasize freedom and license almost to the complete exclusion of
service or participation.  Although they clearly appreciate the
democratic freedoms that, in their view, make theirs the 'best
country in the world to live in,' they fail to perceive a need to
reciprocate by exercising the duties and responsibilities of good
citizenship."*142
 
Only 12 percent of those participating in the study felt that
voting was part of what makes a good citizen.  When asked what
was special about the United States, they responded:
"Individualism and the fact that it is a democracy and you can do
whatever you want. . . .  We really don't have any limits."
 
But they're wrong -- we do have limits.  Moreover, we have gone
way beyond our limits.  By stressing personal rights without
responsibility, we are actually surrendering our personal rights
and freedoms.
 
President Kennedy made it clear when he said:  "Our privileges
can be no greater than our obligations.  The protection of our
rights can endure no longer than the performance of our
responsibilities."*143
 
It's time to take personal responsibility for our government.
It's time to take control of our futures.  It's time to take
America back from the rich.
 
========================
== Where do we start? ==
========================
Common sense tells us that the easiest way out of our spiral of
un-happiness and social collapse is for the rich and powerful to
see that their own self-interest consists of something more than
just personal wealth and power.  They need to see that the coming
world of slums and pollution and ugliness and riots will not be
pleasant.  Their walled communities and private armies cannot
save them from our common fate.  Like us, they will be unable to
escape the brutal consequences of their choices.
 
According to Reinhold Niebuhr, the "man of power" may display
compassionate impulses from time to time, but he always remains
something of a beast of prey.  He may be generous within his
family and within the group that shares his power and privilege.
Yet any generosity towards the working class is merely a cynical
display of both power and pity.  Moreover, even this generosity
freezes within him if his power is challenged or his generosities
are accepted without grateful humility.  On the other hand, most
average individuals lack the intellectual ability to form
independent judgments.  And, even when they form their own
judgments, they are unlikely to overcome the fear of social
disapproval and assert themselves.*144  But Saul Alinsky argues
that we average individuals can force social changes.
 
In Rules for Radicals, Alinsky persuades us to transform
ourselves from "rhetorical radicals" into "realistic radicals."
 
"You don't communicate with anyone purely on the rational facts
or ethics of an issue. . . .  It is only when the other party is
concerned or feels threatened that he will listen -- in the arena
of action, a threat or a crisis becomes almost a precondition to
communication."*145
 
Alinsky says that the community organizer must build a power
structure:  "No one can negotiate without the power to compel
negotiation."  Alinsky makes it clear that power is the
prerequisite:  "To attempt to operate on a good-will basis rather
than on a power basis would be to attempt something that the
world has not yet experienced."
 
In fact, we have a recent example where Alinsky's radical ideas
worked.  Remember Rosa Parks?  Ms. Parks was thrown in jail for
refusing to give her seat on a bus to a white man.  A friend of
hers, E. D. Nixon, bailed her out of jail, then called upon his
friends to boycott the buses.  "It's the only way to make the
white folks see that we will not take this sort of thing any
longer,"*146 he said.  At that point, Mr. Nixon made a call to
Dr. Martin Luther King . . . and the rest is history.
 
By now, we ought to see why our pursuit of happiness has made us
no happier than we were in 1957.  We are pursuing the things that
cannot bring happiness, while we are destroying the things that
can.  The economic cyborgs have trapped us in a spiral of
un-happiness and social collapse.  Moreover, we now are being
condemned to lives that are devoid of natural beauty, to lives
crowded with social convulsion and violent death.
 
We must organize!  Our only hope is to break the quick and easy
exchange between political and economic power.  Once we are free
to determine our own destiny, we, the people will build a new
society based upon Thomas Jefferson's love for TRUTH, EQUALITY,
LIBERTY, JUSTICE, HAPPINESS (as we now understand it) -- and upon
sane economic theory.
 
President Kennedy stated the problem quite simply:  "If a free
society cannot help the many who are poor, it cannot save the few
who are rich."*147
 
================
== Postscript ==
================
AND it came to pass on the third day, when it was morning, that
there were thunders and lightnings, and a thick cloud upon the
mount, and the voice of a trumpet exceeding loud ; and all the
people that were in the camp trembled. . . . 
 
And the Lord said unto Moses, Go down, charge the people, lest
they break through unto the Lord to gaze, and many of them will
perish. . . . 
 
And God spake all these words, saying, I am the Lord thy God,
which brought thee out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of
bondage, Thou shalt have no other gods before me.  Thou shalt not
make unto thee a graven image, nor the likeness of any form that
is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is
in the water under the earth :  thou shalt not bow down thyself
unto them, nor  serve them : for I the Lord thy God am a jealous
God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children, upon
the third and upon the fourth generation of them that hate me ;
and shewing mercy unto thousands, of them that love me and keep
my commandments. -- Exodus xix-xx, Revised Version
 
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
 
To those who followed Columbus and Cortez, the New World truly
seemed incredible because of the natural endowments.  The land
often announced itself with a heavy scent miles out into the
ocean.  Giovanni da Verrazano in 1524 smelled the cedars of the
East Coast a hundred leagues out.  The men of Henry Hudson's Half
Moon were temporarily disarmed by the fragrance of the New Jersey
shore, while ships running farther up the coast occasionally swam
through large beds of floating flowers.  Wherever they came
inland they found a rich riot of color and sound, of game and
luxuriant vegetation.  Had they been other than they were, they
might have written a new mythology here.
As it was, they took inventory.
-- Frederick Turner
 
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
 
"Now I a fourfold vision see,
And a fourfold vision is given to me;
'Tis fourfold in my supreme delight
And threefold in soft Beulah's night
And twofold Always.  May God us keep
From Single vision & Newton's sleep!"
-- William Blake,Letter to Thomas Butts
 
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
 
"These are the times that try men's souls:  The summer soldier
and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the
service of his country;  but he that stands it now, deserves the
love and thanks of man and woman.  Tyranny, like hell, is not
easily conquered;  yet we have this consolation with us, that the
harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph.  What we
obtain too cheap, we esteem too lightly."
-- Thomas Paine,  The American Crisis, no. I
 
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
 
FOOTNOTES:
 
1   "World's Scientists Issue Urgent Warning to Humanity" --
Union of Concerned Scientists (11/18/92)
 
2   "Beyond the Limits:  Confronting Global Collapse, Envisioning
a Sustainable Future" -- Meadows & Meadows (1992)
 
3   "The World Environment 1979-1992:  Two Decades of Challenge"
-- Tolba and El-Kholy (1992)
 
4   "Nature, Technology and Society:  Cultural Roots of the
Current Environment Crisis" -- Ferkiss (1993)
 
5   "Educating a Nation:  A Natural Step" -- In Context (Spring
1991)
 
6   "Small is Beautiful:  Economics as if People Mattered" --
Schumacher (1973)
 
7   "The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money" --
Keynes(1936)
 
8   "Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy" -- Schumpeter(1942) 
(Schumpeter is typically rated as the century's second most
important economist, behind Keynes)
 
9   "We're Number One:  Where America Stands -- and Falls -- in
the New World Order" -- Shapiro (1992)
 
10  "In the Absence of the Sacred" -- Mander (1991)
 
11  "The Prince" -- Machiavelli (1513)
 
12  "To Have or to Be" -- Fromm (1977)
 
13   Indeed, Thomas Jefferson's original draft of the Declaration
of Independence began with  "We hold these truths to be sacred
and undeniable."  The substitution of the word "self-evident,"
with its scientific overtones, is thought to have been made by
Benjamin Franklin.
 
14  "Six Great Ideas" -- Adler (1981)
 
15  "Haves Without Have-Nots" -- Adler (1991)
 
16  "Utilitarianism" -- Mill (1861)
 
17  "The Basis of Rules of Morality" -- Jefferson (letter to
Thomas Law 1814)
 
18  "Economic Philosophy" -- Robinson (1964) -- quoted in "Adam
Smith's Mistake:  How a Moral Philosopher Invented Economics and
Ended Morality" -- Lux (1990)
 
19  "The Theory of Political Economy" -- Jevons (1965 reprint) --
quoted in "Adam Smith's Mistake: How a Moral Philosopher Invented
Economics and Ended Morality" -- Lux (1990)
 
20  "Adam Smith's Mistake:  How a Moral Philosopher Invented
Economics and Ended Morality" -- Lux (1990)
 
21  "The Economics of resources or the resources of economics" --
American Economic Review (May 1974) - quoted in "Steady-State
Economics" -- Daly (1991)
 
22  "The Laws of Human Relations" -- Gossen (1854) -- quoted in
"Humanistic Economics" -- Lutz and Lux (1988)
 
23  "The World Almanac and Book of Facts" -- Microsoft Bookshelf
(1993)
 
24  "Two American economists share Nobel Prize" -- West Hawaii
Today (Oct 13,1993)
 
25  "Theories of Personality" -- Schultz (1976)
 
26  "To Have or To Be" -- Fromm (1977)
 
27  "The Maximum Wage:  A Common-Sense Prescription for
Revitalizing America -- by Taxing the Very Rich" -- Pizzigati
(1992)
 
28   "The Myth of the Middle Class:  Notes on Affluence and
Equality" -- Parker (1972) -- quoted in "The Maximum Wage:  A
Common-Sense Prescription for Revitalizing America -- by Taxing
the Very Rich -- Pizzigati (1992)
 
29  "The Pursuit of Equality in American History" -- Pole (1978)
-- quoted in Pizzigati
 
30   "The Federal Reserve Bank" -- Kennan (1966) -- quoted in
"The Unseen Hand" -- Epperson (1985)
 
31   "Wealth Triumphs, We Lose" -- In These Times (August 6-19,
1986) -- quoted in Pizzigati
 
32  "Voices of the American Revolution" -- Peoples Bicentennial
Commission (1975) -- quoted in "Corporations and the Environment"
(1981)
 
33  "In the Absence of the Sacred" -- Mander (1991)
 
34   Ibid.
 
35  "The Maximum Wage:  A Common-Sense Prescription for
Revitalizing America -- by Taxing the Very Rich" -- Pizzigati
(1992)
 
36  "Land and Power in Hawaii" -- Cooper and Daws (1985)
 
37  "To Have or to Be" -- Fromm (1977)
 
38  "The Broken Covenant" -- Bellah (1975)
 
39  "Journal of Retailing" -- quoted in "How Much is Enough" --
Durning (1992)
 
40  "The Work of Nations" -- Reich (1991)
 
41  "Fortune" -- (December 1953) -- quoted in Reich
 
42  "In the Absence of the Sacred" -- Mander (1991)
 
43  "The Overworked American:  The Unexpected Decline of Leisure"
-- Schor (1992)
 
44  "The Art of Loving" -- Fromm (1956) (See also "To Have or to
Be" -- 1977)
 
45  "Are We Happy Yet?" -- Durning (The Futurist Jan-Feb 1993)
 
46   "The Psychology of Happiness" -- Argyle -- quoted in "How
Much is Enough?" -- Durning (1992)
 
47  "The Poverty of Affluence" -- Wachtel (1989)
 
48  "Happy People" -- Freedman (1978) -- quoted in Wachtel
 
49  "Symptoms, Syndromes, and Systems" -- Bateson (1978)
 
50  "Mind and Nature:  A Necessary Unity" -- Bateson (1979)
 
51  "The Myth of the Machine" -- Mumford (1966)
 
52  "Essay in Persuasion" -- Keynes (1931)
 
53  "A Brewing Revolt Against the Rich" -- Fortune (December
1990) -- quoted in Pizzigati
 
54  "Theories of Personality" -- Schultz (1976)
 
55  "Toward a Psychology of Being" -- Maslow (1968)
 
56  "The Psychology of Being Human" -- McNeil (1974)
 
57  "The Neurotic Personality of Our Time" -- Horney (1937)
 
58   Ibid.
 
59  "Theories of Personality" -- Schultz (1976)
 
60   Ibid.
 
61  "The Psychology of Being Human" -- McNeil (1974)
 
62  "Mental Disorder Numbers Outpace Treatment" -- Science News
(February, 27, 1993)
 
63  "The Neurotic Personality of Our Time" -- Horney (1937)
 
64  "The Poverty of Affluence" -- Wachtel (1989)
 
65  "Media Sexploitation" -- Key (1976)
 
66  "Brave New World Revisited" -- Huxley (1965)
 
67   "The Plug-In Drug" -- Winn (1977).
 
68   "Food of the Gods:  The Search for the Origional Tree of
Knowledge" -- McKenna (1992).
 
69   "Earth in the Balance:  Ecology and the Human Spirit" --
Gore (1992).
 
70  "TV Violence" -- Associated Press (March 18, 1993)
 
71  "Warning: TV Violence Is Harmful, Networks Acknowledge" --
Washington Post (July 1, 1993)
 
72  "Expect TV not to curb violence" -- George Will (June 25,
1993)
 
73  "Violence and Aggression" -- Bailey and Time-Life Books
(1976)
 
74  "Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television" -- Mander
(1978)
 
75   Ibid.
 
76  "The Great Reckoning:  Protect Yourself in the Coming
Depression" -- Davidson and Rees-Mogg (1993)
 
77  "Rachel's Hazardous Waste News" -- (January 20, 1993)
 
78  "When Technology Wounds:  The Human Consequences of Progress"
-- Glendinning (1990)
 
79  "Rachel's Hazardous Waste News" -- (December 30, 1992)
 
80  "Rachel's Hazardous Waste News" -- (June 17, 1993)
 
81  "Making Peace with the Planet" -- Commoner (1990)
 
82  "Russians Doomed for Next 25 Years" -- Financial Times
(October 8, 1992) -- quoted in Brown
 
83  "The Long-Term Outlook for Hawai's Population and Economy" --
Pai address at the 1993 United Way Symposium (March 12, 1993)
 
84  "Toxics in Your Community Newsletter" -- Citizen's
Environmental Coalition (Winter, 1993)
 
85  "The American Labor Movement" -- Litwack (1962)
 
86  "America:  What Went Wrong?" -- Barlett and Steele (1992)
 
87  "The Overworked American:  The Unexpected Decline of Leisure"
-- Schor (1992)
 
88  "Solidarity" -- UAW (May-June 1993)
 
89  "The Tao of Physics (Third Edition)" -- Capra (1991)
 
90   Ibid.
 
91  "World's Scientists Issue Urgent Warning to Humanity" --
Union of Concerned Scientists (11/18/92)
 
92  "Earth in the Balance:  Ecology and the Human Spirit" -- Gore
(1992)
 
93  "Population Growth, Resource Consumption, and a Sustainable
World" -- Royal Society of London and the U.S. Academy of
Sciences (1992) -- quoted in Brown
 
94  "State of the World 1993" -- Brown et al.
 
95  "Environment Office Warns of Ozone Hole Over Germany" --
Reuter's News Service (March 18, 1993)
 
96  "Dutch Scientists Say Greenhouse Effect a Reality" --
Reuter's News Service (March 18, 1993)
 
97  "Plants May Not Be Able To Stop Global Warming" -- Reuter's
News Service (August 11,, 1993)
 
98  "Indonesia Faces Chaos From Rising Seas" -- Reuter's News
Service (August 12,, 1993)
 
99  "State of the World 1993" -- Brown et al.
 
100 "For the Common Good" -- Daly and Cobb (1989)
 
101 "The Future of Technological Civilization" -- Furkiss (1974)
-- quoted in Daly and Cobb
 
102 "Declining Fortunes:  The Withering of the American Dream" --
Newman (1993)
 
103 "Beyond Weapons:  A New Vision of Security" -- Rocky Mountain
Institute (Fall/Winter 1991)
 
104 "Democracy in America" -- de Tocqueville (1840)
 
105  U.S. Steel company motto -- (quoted in Reich)
 
106  Statement by president of General Motors -- (quoted in
Reich)
 
107 "Steady-State Economics" -- Daly (1991)
 
108 "Geothermal Development in Hawaii:  The limits of State
Autonomy and Legitimacy" -- Rodriguez and Juvik (Dec. 1992)
 
109 "Preparing for the Twenty-First Century" -- Kennedy (1993)
 
110 "Bankruptcy 1995" -- Figgie (1992)
 
111 "The Great Reckoning:  Protect Yourself in the Coming
Depression" -- Davidson and Rees-Mogg (1993)
 
112 "America:  What Went Wrong?" -- Barlett and Steele (1992)
 
113 "The Politics of Rich and Poor:  Wealth and the American
Electorate in the Reagan Aftermath" -- Phillips (1990)
 
114 "Boiling Point" -- Phillips (1993)
 
115 "The Overworked American:  The Unexpected Decline of Leisure"
-- Schor (1992)
 
116 "We're Number One:  Where America Stands -- and Falls -- in
the New World Order" -- Shapiro (1992)
 
117 "Where We Stand:  Can America Make It in the Global Race for
Wealth, Health, and Happiness?" -- Wolff (1992)
 
118 "A Green Hawaii -- Sourcebook for Development Alternatives"
-- Rohter (1992)
 
119 "The Price of Paradise:  Lucky We Live Hawaii?" -- Roth
(1992)
 
120 "Who Will Tell the People:  The Betrayal of American
Democracy" -- Greider (1992)
 
121  The Center for Defense Information -- 202-862-0700 (1993)
 
122 "It's Not Just New York . . ." -- Newsweek  (March 9, 1992)
-- quoted in "The Spirit of Community:  Rights, Responsibilities,
and the Communitarian Agenda" -- Etzioni (1993)
 
123 "Third World America" -- The Maui News -- (Nov. 19, 1992)
 
124 "Who Will Tell the People:  The Betrayal of American
Democracy" -- Greider (1992)
 
125 "Future Wealth:  A New Economics for the 21st Century" --
Robertson (1990)
 
126 "An Incomplete Education" -- Jones and Wilson (1987)
 
127 "The Politics of the Solar Age:  Alternatives to Economics"
-- Henderson (1988)
 
128 "Of Civil Government:  Second Treatise" -- Locke (1689)
 
129 "Philosophy -- A Modern Encounter" -- Wolff (1971)
 
130 "The Rights of Man" -- Paine (1791)
 
131 "On Liberty" -- Mill (1859)
 
132 "Passport to Liberty:  The People and Ideas That Make America
Great" -- Sammer (1992)
 
133 "Lincoln on Democracy" -- Cuomo and Holzer (1990)
 
134 "Haves Without Have-Nots" -- Adler (1991)
 
135 "Passport to Liberty:  The People and Ideas That Make America
Great" -- Sammer (1992)
 
136 "The First Amendment Book" -- Wagman (1991)
 
137  Criminal syndication is defined as any doctrine or teaching
of unlawful acts of force as a means of effecting political
change.
 
138 "The First Amendment Book" -- Wagman (1991)
 
139 "Passport to Liberty:  The People and Ideas That Make America
Great" -- Sammer (1992)
 
140 "We Hold These Truths" -- Adler (1987)
 
141  Ibid.
 
142 "The Spirit of Community:  Rights, Responsibilities, and the
Communitarian Agenda" -- Etzioni (1993)
 
143  Address at Vanderbilt University -- John Fitzgerald Kennedy
(May 18, 1963)
 
144 "Moral Man and Immoral Society" -- Niebuhr (1932)
 
145 "Rules for Radicals:  A Pragmatic Primer for Realistic
Radicals" -- Alinsky (1971)
 
146 "The Words of Martin Luther King, Jr." -- Coretta King (1958)
 
147 "Inaugural Address" -- John Fitzgerald Kennedy (1961)