Higher Consciousness Won't Save Us

[Hannah Bell]

Autumn 2010 is a time of disillusionment for many who deplore the USA’s current political trajectory. Some who’ve been active for progressive causes are now gravitating toward hope that individual actions -- in tandem with higher consciousness, more down-to-earth lifestyles and healthy cultural alternatives -- can succeed where social activism has failed. It’s an old story that is also new... Forty years ago, such an approach became all the rage -- boosted by a long essay that made a huge splash in The New Yorker magazine just before a longer version became a smash bestseller.

The book was “The Greening of America,” by a Yale University Law School teacher named Charles Reich...That autumn, I was upbeat about Reich’s new book -- including its great enthusiasm for “the revolution of the new generation.”

In 1995, the same Charles Reich was out with another book -- “Opposing the System” -- his first in two decades. Gone were the claims that meaningful structural change would come only as a final step after people got their heads and culture together. Instead, the book focused on the melded power of huge corporations and the U.S. government. Reich’s new book was as ignored as “The Greening of America” had been ballyhooed...

The author saw a much fuller social context for the yearning and euphoria that had animated “The Greening of America” and the era it celebrated to excess in 1970. Far wiser in 1995, he wrote: “Most of the important things in life, the things we truly desire, such as love, joy, and beauty, lie in a realm beyond the economic. What we do not recognize is how economics has become the destroyer of our hopes. It is economic tyranny that cuts off our view of a better future.”

http://www.counterpunch.org/solomon09242010.html

[blindpig]

1. Ya think?

Feel good bullshit and blather wouldn't be so bad if it wasn't a distraction from our addressing the real issue, the distribution of the fruits of labor. He coulda saved a bunch of time and not confused people with his dribble if he had read Marx.

It is not the consciousness of men that determines their being, but on the contrary, it is their social being that determines their consciousness.

[Nuclear Unicorn]

2. Pretty awesome article. Thank-you for sharing.

But it leaves me with the question, so now what?

My hubby, who is pretty darned conservative, is also pretty pissed off about the melding of government and corporate entities. Me, ever the progressive, see government-corporate melding as the ossification of the mechanisms that lead to income-disparity, social injustice, lack of government services to maximize profits over people etc.

Hubby sees it as a threat to personal liberty, i.e. government controlling the economy.

We agree on the premise, just not the causes or conclusions.

We also pretty much agreed we don't trust the bastards either way.

Although hubby would never admit it, we've pretty much agreed we want to live our lives in accordance with something akin to "The Greening of America". In other words, we want nothing to do with the bastards and we want the bastards to leave us alone. We just want to be the best people we can be, help whomever we can help, be kind, be polite. We even set up a plot of land at the house to begin growing our own veggies and stuff next spring. If we can we want to grow it into a hobby farm. Sort of a zombie-apocalypse survivalist compound meets hippy commune. We want animals we can love and nurture and we want to appreciate what they give us.

I've been pretty disaffected by politics lately. I feel like I need to just get my life straight.

So now what?

[damntexdem]

3. Well, there's always higher unconsciousness.

;-)

[elehhhhna]

4. NO WAY! OPAH SAID "The Secret" would make me rich, gorgeous, and thin!

shit. what a bummer.

[earth mom]

5. ...

:spray:

[TBF]

6. K&R nt