Part 1 of Diminishing Entitlement at the End of Empire Essay
Empire Makes People Too Comfortable:
Deep change starts with honesty. Folks need to evaluate what exactly industrial civilization is, and how it affects our being and place in the world. I’m not going to spend a lot of time doing this because a lot of other smart people have already done a great job developing this analysis. If you don’t have an understanding of how structurally flawed, oppressive, and unsustainable this system is, there are plenty of places to look to gain that understanding, not least among them a truthful reflection upon your personal life and how it connects to the world’s problems.
Industrial civilization has been described as a linear progress trap, a pyramid scheme and a cancer—all fitting descriptions. It is a way of life that is based on unrestrained consumption and a total denial of any real world limitations. It is a way of organizing human communities so that they are based on extractive economies (taking from the land and not giving back) and class stratification (inequality as people compete over climbing up the ladder and rationalize taking advantage of each other). The simplest way to understand industrial civilization is that it epitomizes Empire—that really awful way of living that is dependent upon theft, violence, and environmental devastation. If you don’t understand how empire works, take a moment and try really hard to imagine yourself in the shoes of an Afghani villager whose town was just bombed by a US drone attack. Imagine the people you love raped and murdered. Image the places you love destroyed. That is how empires work.
The problem is that this horrible way of living has given the privileged minority an absurdly high sense of entitlement that makes people very comfortable and complacent. Once that entitlement has become normalized people generally behave like spoiled children—they have high expectations, are very demanding, and can’t rationalize the need to change what they have become accustomed to. Since the nature of an empire is to exploit other people’s homes the comfortable consumers don’t have to see the damage and destruction first hand. This makes it easy to ignore.
When in Rome…Sell Your Soul
In order to make an honest assessment of this form of human society, and how we fit in to it, I think it is important to not have a distorted or romanticized view of “the people.” Just like it would be unrealistic and inappropriate to glorify an indigenous person as the “noble savage” it would likewise be naïve to embrace some overly simplified populace idea of “the people.” Reality is much more complex than that and personal identity is much more integrated into society’s vast array of structures and institutions. A general rule about “the people” though: given the opportunity to do so, people in this culture sell out. The people in our culture are by and large not motivated by community-oriented concerns, serious convictions to justice and beliefs in creating a better future, Jesus’ golden rule, or any other value system that would create an alternative to ruthless, empire living. Sure, some people care, but their concern is second to paying their bills and maintaining their entitlement.
There are exceptions—and I can’t stress how important they are—but our cultural ethos is generally shallow, selfish, and indulgent. That’s just how an empire functions. It creates citizens who are shallow, selfish and indulgent, and pats itself on the back for doing so. It’s tragic and hard to process, but I think it would be dishonest to romanticize the character and motivations of people in this society, it being the largest and most powerful empire the world has ever known. It’s not that human nature is inherently flawed or that people in our society are particularly evil, it’s just that—and this is the key idea—civilized people’s entitlement will generally increase to the amount of wealth and resources they can gain access to—and whatever level that is, they will rationalize a good self-justification for why they deserve that amount of entitlement.
Case and point: Take the average working-class man, the type who works hard for his money, unlike those rich sons-of-bitches on Wall Street or those lazy hippies. Then, give him a winning lottery ticket for $50 million, and watch how fast he changes his tune about who deserves what in life. Rare exceptions aside, the money will be spent in ways just as superficial, greedy and unhealthy as the wealth blown by the ruling class. Empire: When in Rome, do as the Romans.
In summary: Industrial civilized people like to be spoiled by comfort and increasing resource consumption. It is normalized behavior and it is rare for them to voluntarily decrease their entitlement and not move up the consumption ladder. The entire premise of industrial civilization is to spoil the minority upper and middle classes, who with lots of help (generally access to wealth and power) spend their lives climbing the ladder. The ruthless and violent hyper-militarism and injustice that all empires rely on is inseparable from the comfortable lives of those people higher up the ladder who consume the greater share of the earth’s resources. The costs and consequences of industrial civilization are externalized upon those lower down the ladder, and upon future generations. This situation is impossible to change if the entitlement of the privileged is not decreased, one way or another.
Growing Entitlement = Freedom (& Slavery)
It is hard to convince the privileged citizen’s of empire that they need to decrease their sense of entitlement because increasing entitlement to resource consumption is really what this system means by freedom. Freedom equals slavery, for sure—but even more to the point, freedom equals economic growth. When people indoctrinated with our culture’s value system say “freedom,” they mean free-market expansion. This is the basis of the American Dream. The more the market grows the more options we get and the freer we are, right? Economic growth is the highest good because it means more and more people can climb the ladder.
What the citizens of empire forget, or ignore, is that the growth is dependent upon cheaper labor (slavery) and more resources (extraction), hence empire’s close and necessary companion colonialism. It is a myth that the entire world can be middle class if we all embrace capitalism. The only potential state of equality is one absent of the civilized economic scheme. Freedom = economic growth? It’s kind of like how we freed the Iraqi’s, and a lot of other “developing” nations over the years. We don’t have the largest military budget in the history of the world after all, because we love democratic decision-making processes; it’s because other people don’t voluntarily donate their resources and labor to the empire.
Since the beginning of the modern historical era democracy has been a pretentious joke, the charming tag-along to its bullying big brother who has really been in charge, free-market capitalism. “Democratic participation” has always been the bone that’s thrown to seduce people who are upset by the mafia-like essence of this system. If you don’t like the system, you can work to change it, right? But the change never happens—because, as long as enough table scraps and spoils of war are kicked down the ladder so enough people can sell out (the carrot), this system gets renewed generation after generation. And at times, particularly when the ever-expanding economy is in a downward swing, state violence in the name of security can be used to put down rebellion (the stick). The entire game has nothing to do with genuine political or social freedoms and it never has. The reproduction cycle of empire thrives on people consenting to this system because the “haves” confuse their entitlement with freedom, while the “have-nots” are left with the very un-free options of (a) play along and try to climb up the ladder, or (b) risk your life rebelling. And since risking one’s life isn’t a very favorable option, people usually submit and sell out if given the opportunity.
If you doubt that capitalism’s unrestrained entitlement and greed are the engine that haven driven this culture from the start—as opposed to political accountability and personal liberty—ask yourself the following: Was this nation founded by genocidal slaves-owners who wasted no time raping the continent of it’s abundance and established the most powerful empire the world’s ever known, or was it founded by innocent political refuges who just wanted to escape oppressive circumstances to live in peace and quiet?
How about this one—according to our culture’s value system, what is worth more: one billion dollars of resources, or a healthy, sustainable local community? What do you think most Americans would choose if given that choice? As long as the resources are from someone else’s land and destroy someone else’s home, I think the answer is obvious. Excessive entitlement and greed trump social integrity and democratic tendencies not just because of a few greedy corporations and corrupt politicians (although they certainly help), but because they are the soulless anti-values at the center of any system of civilized economics. They are the rotten essence of the American Dream, and the entire industrial civilization it is rooted in.
Always One Step Behind Our Appetites
Before moving on I want to make one last point about our modern sense of entitlement and what it means to become acclimatized to such a destructive way of life. Even if all the people in our culture somehow did muster up the willpower, thoughtfulness and integrity to not indulge in the excesses of empire, maintaining the necessities of life alone through industrial civilization means keeping this system in tack, and keeping people dependent upon it.
For starters, we need to question—with an extraordinary amount of self-criticism—what is covered by “the basics.” One of the funny things about having an ever-expanding sense of entitlement is that people get very confused about how they define wants and needs. So people need to put a roof over their family’s head and food on the table, right? Does “food on the table” mean bananas in temperate climates and non-preserved tomatoes in the middle of winter? Are any of the products of modern, industrial agriculture really necessities? Does “a roof over their family’s head” justify houses that average 2,349 square feet? Even though energy efficiency has made great gains in recent years, the average house in 1950 used less energy than the average house today, simply because homes have more than doubled in size and have more unnecessary electricity-consuming devices. That’s the problem with a culture hell bent on increasing entitlement—even if you become more efficient per unit of resource consumed, we are always one step behind our gluttonous appetite.
George Monbiot makes a worthwhile point in calling attention to what he has coined “love miles”—the miles we spend in fuel consumption visiting our friends and family who don’t live in our local communities. Most people would consider it essential, a form of emotional necessity (understandably so), to have access to industrial transportation in order to visit their loved ones. Yet, as Monbiot points out, the vast majority of the people in the world will never fly, and if only a small minority in the privileged world continue to do so in order to visit loved ones then one of the most environmentally devastating practices in the world will continue unabated.
With a civilized industrial system that is so inherently damaging and exploitive, even actions considered “necessity,” or behavior motivated “by love,” are doomed to partake in the destruction of our planet and the oppression of the vast majority of Earth’s inhabitants. This system is fucked; it cannot be reformed. It is based on violence, coercion, indulgence, greed, and brings out the worst in humanity, offering economic incentives to those who sell their souls. If we are unwilling to decrease our sense of entitlement and revolutionize how we sustain ourselves on this planet we don’t have the right to pretend we care about our children’s future—it’s about time we admit this to ourselves.
