Overcoming Apathy (& la Defense)

Anyone wishing to gain a perspective on the magnitude of modern state & corporate power need only visit the towering skyscrapers at the Parisian industrial complex of La Defense. For all who recognise the fundamental conflict between life and corporate capitalism, this is a daunting experience. How could it be possible that we, as individuals, might hope to resist power on this scale–power which appears to be rooted in the foundations of immovable solidity? It is important that we focus on the apparent impossibility of change because it is in this area of fundamental belief that thought control is at its most effective; it is in these moments–when we feel that we have understood that there is a problem–that we are most likely to fail. The truth is that very often our awareness of the existence of a problem does not at all indicate that we are on the way to solving that problem.

Consider, for example, how we may argue with someone that there is a deep, underlying, systemic problem with the way we are living. The other person may duck and dive, ridicule and mock until, eventually, perhaps persuaded by sheer weight of evidence, he or she concedes that there is indeed a problem. Very often we find that the discussion continues along the following lines:"I agree that there is a problem, but there's nothing you or I can do about it. We are just individuals. Even if what you say is true, people aren't going to listen, they aren't going to change. We might as well forget about it and get on with our own lives while we can. We can't change anything".

Here it may seem as though we have succeeded in breaking through the rationalisations of the status quo. In fact, we have simply advanced to the next line of defence against change–the apathetic attitude of "we can't change anything". This involves a complete dislocation of what might have been a rational argument to a new, much more fundamental argument–that nothing can be done about anything anyway. This is often a device for removing the pain of an idea by resorting to some spurious certainty. No evidence is provided for this certainty, on the unspoken, worldly-wise assumption that 'we can't change anything' is common sense. But in fact no evidence is presented because the idea that human beings are unable to shape there destiny is nonsense. History is the record of human beings doing precisely that, for better or worse.

It is impossible to overemphasize how much our desired social change must depend on psychological change. In the past we have been prisoners of tyrants and dictators and consequently have needed to win our freedom in very real concrete terms. Now we in the modern industrialized countries are more or less free from this type of coercion, but nonetheless we are not free. We remain in psychological chains. We now need to free ourselves not from a slave ship, a prison, or concentration camp, but from our own minds, from our brains that have been brainwashed by the adverts, by the TV programmes & by the newspapers. The revolution now is not simply a matter of taking to the streets - but must become a psychological one - a matter of freeing ourselves from our brainwashed minds.

Yet resistance is not hopeless, because the smallest truth is ultimately more powerful than the largest lie. We may have been slumbering whilst the lies have been trumpeted at us for decades, yet when we hear truth even faintly wispering to us, we may become immediately alert and alive. Today, that truth is growing to be more than just a whisper, and it is beginning to be heard.

Returning to the sky-scrapers of La Defence; each and every one of them is built not on a bedrock of foundations, as appears to be the case, but on nothing more concrete than a set of fallacious beliefs, a set of illusions and lies. In a very real way, you & I keep them standing by a sort of psychic magic–by believing the illusions on which they depend. These illusions include the idea that endless economic growth is possible or desirable, that conspicious consumption is the answer to human happiness & fulfillment, by the idea that passivity & conformity constitute a meaningful existence, that success is defined by the amount of material objects that you own, and so on. These illusions are also supported & maintained by the incessant shouting of the giant, global voice of state and propaganda, which shouts so loudly that many of us are unable to collect our thoughts or independence of mind sufficiently enough to question even what is being said.

However because the voice of corporate propaganda is based on a set of lies and distortions, it can only make us listen by sheer volume of noise, but it does not have the penetrating clarity and conviction of truth. In the same way that totalitarianism can chain our bodies but not our minds, so corporate propaganda can chain our superficial desires but not our need to live freely & find fullfilment. Ultimately both totalitarianism & corporate thought control must run into the same insurmountable problem–the demands and requirements of real life, of both human beings and the environment. Over the last 150 years or so, this voice of corporate propaganda has been rapidly increasing in pitch and volume.

Inevitably two contrary voices of infinitely greater power have begun to grow. The first is the desolated cry of wounded life inside our unconscious minds & bodies; the second is the devastation outside in the environment. For the wound inside us is the same wound that we behold before us in the world. Though the needs of life may be repressed in the individual, often as a result of the conflicting demands of society, they do not simply disappear and die; rather they go 'underground', fester and ferment and become psychologically explosive. In other words, any individual or social victory over life can only ever be pyrrhic and temporary in nature–for life must eventually reassert itself.

It seems that the task now–the only task that matters–is to attend to the two voices of resistance, to the wounds inside and out, to the voices inside our desolated hearts & outside in the desolated world, and to act on their message in the understanding that it is not that we already have so many personal problems that we cannot deal with the world 'out there', but that our personal problems are a reflection of the problems out there and that only by attending to the root causes of both–the necessary lies of state and corporate control–can we hope to resolve either.
pp150-154

The forbidden truth is that we are living by a set of lies which are necessary for short-term profit, at the expense of human physical and psychological life and global environment integrity. We are living in a system where power ensures that the requirements of profit take priority over the requirements of living things.
p163

This essential message concerns the possibilities of finding happiness and sanity through freedom, and freedom through doubt and questioning. It urges each and every one of us to devote ourselves to rejecting the lies & illusions of the socially sanctioned version of reality.

And when we reject these lies we will see that the once seemingly immovable foundations of state & corporate control - will simply dissolve.