we the sheep
i came home from a family dinner at my parents house (after a long day of yet more classes) last night and wrote this, which is no where near a completed essay but may eventually become one. dunno yet. tell me what ya think.
——–
In our franctured society, there are (as I said in the essay i posted last week) 3 classes. There are the sheep – domesticated,
complacent, scared and begging the wolves for protection, there are the
shepherds / sheep-dogs (domesticated wolves) who manage the herds, and decide
on a day to day basis who will be sheered and who will be slaughtered, and
there are the owners of the fields – wolves in men’s clothing - who are
generally only peripherally involved in any of the day to day operations but
whose tables are daily stocked with fresh meat and whose bank accounts reap the
rewards of a well maintained system. I
don’t need to say which role each social class occupies, we all know in our
bone marrow which class we belong too.
Every day we stare it blank in the
face and try not to see because if we look at it too carefully it scares us
shitless. Every day we numb back the
pain with endless drugs, endless television, and a vast array of
corporate–approved lifestyle identity niches that give us some sense of
identity without requiring us to do the unthinkable and identify ourselves as
individuals. We don’t do it because we
want to or because we choose to, we do so because failing to do so would mean
rendering ourselves unable to function in the only world we have. Those
who fail to do so are shunned and reviled, and more often then we would care to
admit - end up removing themselves from the situation by the only readily
available means - suicide. 1997, suicide was the 8th leading cause of
death in the U.S and the 3rd leading cause of death in 15 to 24 year olds (who
are old enough to see the world as adults but young enough to have not yet gone
completely numb to the horror of it).[1] For these people, anything, even the
cold dark oblivion of the grave, is better then living like this. For the majority that isn’t willing to
consider such a drastic solution, our consumer society offers few good choices
and a lot of not so good ones. Television – america’s favorite drug – is chief
among these. It is not a means of
communication in any meaningful sense since by its very nature it’s broadcasts
are unidirectional. Rather, it is a
means of propaganda distribution for the ruling class and a way for people to
“unplug” – to stop living their life-defeating meaningless lives for a few
hours at a time and be caught up in someone else’s dramas, troubles, and
victories. The bargain is as simple as
it is diabolical - they allow us to forget we are slaves and in return we
forget that we are slaves - and thus become incapable of fighting for freedom.
Most working class Americans know more about the “lives” of the fictional
yuppies, cops, and other parasites that populate these programs then they do
about the day to day operations of the government that bellows its claim of
democracy so unconvincingly. This is
not an accident. One would be hard
pressed to think of a better way for the ruling class to make sure that the
herd stays complacent then to teach the sheep to identify with the wolves who
consume them, and believe that is good for carnivores is good for the
herd.
Interspersed in these infusions of
synthetic reality we are bombarded with ads reasserting what we already know
and secretly fear – that we are worthless, imperfect, un-loveable, ugly and
frankly disgusting; and that the only way we can hope to ever fix ourselves is
to consume more. Shopping is patriotic,
it is recreation, it is identity – but more then any of these things it is
ritual. More specifically, it is the
ritual by which we assume our identities and assert our place in the
world. Any high school freshman in the
country can walk onto the campus of a strange high school any where else in the
country and tell you within five minutes who are the athletes, who are the
artists, who skateboards, who is popular, and within a very narrow margin of
error tell you what type of music any and all of them are listening too on
their identical ipods. Identity is
designed, fabricated, marketed, bought and sold; and our only possible role in
the sequence is as consumers of a product. The same is just as true of Americans at any age of life, from the
cradle to the grave we spend our entire lives playing roles designed for us,
and that is every bit as true of the middle aged executive working 60 hours a
week whose marriage is slowly disintegrating and whose children not so secretly
loathe him (or her) as it is of the teenage stuck in a dead end job or the
elderly person watching the price of their prescription drugs skyrocket even as
their fixed income completely fails to keep pace.
All of us are gears in the machine,
and all of us know it at the cores of our beings. We are lower then wild animals; we have been broken,
domesticated, castrated, and set to graze until we are called in for the
slaughter. We beg the wolves for
protection and they obligingly promise to protect us from all the other wolf
packs, and even while we watch them consuming the live of our friends and
neighbors we huddle together and reassure ourselves that if only we’re very
good sheep and work very hard we’ll come out all right in the end. Worst of all, when the call to the slaughter
comes, we compete with each other over who gets to go first.
We hate ourselves. From before we could talk we have been told
that we are not good enough as we are and one of the interesting things about
humans is that they will believe anything if they hear it enough. The most powerful weapon of the slave master
is the mind of the slave, after all. We know we are stupid, weak, ineffectual, and need strong leaders to
keep us safe from each other and from Johnny foreigner because we have been
told so since we could remember. And if
we think so lowly of ourselves, you can be damn sure we don’t think so highly
of our neighbors either. There are few
things that are more useful to tyrants then subjects that hate and fear one
another; and one of those few is having subjects who believe that, while maybe
they and their friends are all right, the vast majority of the country is
stupid and couldn’t possibly be trusted with freedom since they’d only mess it
up anyway. So it is that rich (mostly
Anglo) whites despise poor (mostly non-Anglo) white people, who are taught to
fear and hate black people, and black people are forced to compete for scarce
jobs and economic resources with Chicano’s or Asians, and so on down the
line. We fear each other and we compete
with each other, cooperation against common enemies is simply not an
option.
Societies with internal cohesion
and structure – where things like Families (for instance) are not just empty clichés
but actually the basic functional social unit, capable of competing directly
with States for the loyalty of the people – are much harder to rule; and have
in fact been one of the basic structures of every revolutionary movement in
human history. One of the chief aims of
the American ruling class for over a century, therefore, has been their
destruction. With the exception of
unassimilated immigrant minority groups, “family” in america no longer refers
to the vast web of social relationships spanning generations and giving meaning
and cohesion to all actions, it refers to single generation unit incapable of
meeting even basic needs like childcare without the assistance of Capital and
the State. Likewise “Community” which
for thousands of years has been a more extended version of the extended family
– a network of life-long relationships, obligations, and support – has been
reduced to functional nonexistence. People use the word today to refer to things as ephemeral as a loose
group of people who share a common interest or identity characteristic and
forget that it once meant something incomparably larger and more powerful. By breaking down any and all social
infrastructure that could provide any meaning, strength, or identity outside of
the marketplace, America has created every capitalists wet dream – a nation
full of people who don’t know who they are, where they come from, or what they
believe; and whose self loathing is only exceeded by their hatred and fear of
each other. Not only is each of these
things an opportunity to sell a product, but together they virtually guarantee
that the sheep will remain sheep since it is impossible for them to see
themselves or each other as anything else. And – to add insult to injury – they tell us that the fact that we are
deprived of these basic necessary social relationships makes us “individuals”
and that the choice of prefabricated lifestyles makes us “free.” This last point is critical because it is
the final lock and chain that guarantees our submission - as Harriet Tubman
pointed out it is impossible to free someone who refuses to believe that they
are not already free. In reality, we
are just as free as a cow on a slaughterhouse ranch – we may not have shackles
on our feet but that’s only because the farmer knows just how strong the fence
is.
We the people – the vast majority
who work day to day and whose flesh and bone feeds the machines – have no say
in any of this. No one asks cows or
sheep what they think of their role in the economy and no one cares. We are resources to be exploited, expended,
and disposed of – nothing more or less. There is no social contract between rich and poor and there never has
been, and the moment we begin to believe that there is we become like the dog
that is beaten every day and still begs for scraps from its masters hand. Freedom would mean an end to crouching and
whining submissively – it would require bold action, remembering our instinct
to rebel and springing for the throat come hell or high water. That instinct, however, has been bred out of
us as thoroughly as it has been bred out of every domesticated animal, and
because we are intelligent we remember what happens to those foolish enough to
fight back. There are two ways to go,
one is the quiet life where you slowly but surely work yourself to death in
order to provide for your children who will in turn do the same for your
grandchildren and so on; and the other is perhaps more exciting but also much
shorter and more brutal. True to our
instincts as herd animals, most Americans don’t even have to stop and consider
which of these they prefer, and that choice is demonstrated every morning of
every day when millions of us wake up to alarm clocks and commute through
gridlock to jobs we hate for bosses we despise. Every day all of us – the collective herd of herds that is the
global working class – makes a choice, and that choice is to sell another
irreplaceable day from the finite collection of days we are all allotted in
exchange for the basic necessities we need to repeat that choice again
tomorrow. For over 200 years radicals
have looked at this daily ritual and screamed out with hearts full of love and
rage that it cannot continue, that someday we the people must say enough is
enough and put an end to it. And every
day they have woken up to see the same ritual repeated.
It is
entirely possible that that golden day may never come, that we will all remain
sheep until the ranch itself is finally obliterated by ecological, financial,
or other collapse - taking us all with it. It is also, theoretically at least,
possible that the system will collapse some how and that we may decide to run
things a bit differently without ever having had to actively overthrow the
current system (most likely though it would just mean a new pack of wolves
running things). In the mean time,
however, if we the sheep (err people) decide that we’d like to keep our wool (thank
you very much) and that we don’t particularly feel like becoming cold cuts, it
might be a good idea to at least consider laying aside our sheepishness and
reminding the wolves that – all metaphors aside – we the people really are the
most powerful force on the planet, and when we stand up together we can
accomplish anything. Even freedom. The question is, how the hell do we stand up
together when there is no coherent “we” to convince to stand? And the answer is… I have no fucking clue. But maybe it would be a good idea to start looking for a new definition
of “we.” Which is a lot easier said then done but really, what the hell we
might as well give it a shot, gods know we’ve tried everything else.
[1]
http://www.mental-health-matters.com/articles/article.php?artID=220
