Pamela's Blog 3

Published on Tuesday, May 5, 2009 by Nas2EndWork.org

“How Do I Con Thee? Let Me Count the Ways...Or: What is 'Individual Freedom'?”

by Pamela Satterwhite

What is “individual freedom”?

I came across this quote in Daniel Brook’s The Trap: Selling Out to Stay Afloat in Winner-Take-All America:

“The tide has been running against freedom,” [Arizona senator Barry] Goldwater warned in his [1964] nomination acceptance speech. Goldwater and his intellectual offspring redefined individual freedom as the power to spend more of the money you earn free from government taxation and regulation. These policies, they insisted, would unleash the gifted and ambitious. “In our vision of a good and decent future, free and peaceful, there must be room for the liberation of the energy and talent of the individual,” Goldwater declared. To this end, the market should be trusted to provide not merely things some of us might want, like the latest kitchen appliances, but the things we all desperately need, like health care. Government programs to assure equal access to basic necessities would drain people of initiative and enforce a soul-crushing Soviet-style conformity, Goldwater argued, and progressive taxation to more equally distribute wealth penalized success. As Goldwater put it, “Equality, rightly understood, as our founding fathers understood it, leads to liberty and to the emancipation of creative differences. Wrongly understood, as it has been so tragically in our own time, it leads first to conformity and then to despotism.” For Goldwater, postwar America’s growing economic equality was a threat to freedom, not its guarantor.
While Goldwater lost the 1964 election, Ronald Reagan was able to implement his governing philosophy in the 1980s, slashing top tax rates, cutting student aid, and busting labor unions.
…[These] ideas had been popularized in America in University of Chicago economist Milton Friedman’s 1962 book, Capitalism and Freedom… “Governments can never duplicate the variety and diversity of individual action.” Governments require conformity; markets unleash diversity. Thus, for devotee Goldwater, American was haunted by the threat of conformity…
(Daniel Brook, The Trap: Selling Out to Stay Afloat in Winner-Take-All America, p. 13-14, 61)

Though Goldwater and Friedman expressed these thoughts over forty-five years ago, we’ve yet to plant mushrooms in them to disassemble their molecules and nullify their toxicity. They continue to hang onto life, as vampires are wont. Now is the time to mycoremediate this poison. *

I think of poisonous ideas as “cons.” I propose a game of “Count the Cons.” How many can you find in the above ideas of Goldwater and Friedman? For inspiration I offer a poetic interlude, with apologies and gratitude to Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806-1861) for the rough use of her poem "How do I love thee? Let me count the ways..."

How do I con thee? Let me count the ways.
I con thee to the depth and breadth and height
My soullessness can reach, when ranging out of sight
of the ends of Avarice and ideal Deceit.
I con thee to the level of my everyday’s
Most awful greed, by sun and candle-light.
I con thee faithlessly, as bankers strive for Gain;
I con thee callously, as they refuse Moral Reins.
I con thee with a cynicism put to use
In my old gaffs, and with a bully’s animus.
I con thee with a glee I seemed to lose
While my heart slept, – I con with no regret
For lost joy throughout my life – and, if I could but choose,
I’d con thee even better after death.

The vampire’s dearest wish has apparently been granted for this confusion lives on, the Big Con continues.

I like to call the vampires ‘podrunks’ – the pitiful-power-drunk-few – otherwise known as “the men who would be kings” – the men who dream unceasing dreams, and scheme unceasing schemes, only and all of dominating.

The Big Con is that “wealth” manifests from podrunk will, its provenance traced to a podrunk mill. Or perhaps it precipitates from their merest touch, from their magnanimous wish to provide us with stuff.

While in truth, in reality, it comes from us, we who do the work, “the wind from below” – and from grandmother, of course, from our earth, our one berth.

These cons will cling to life so long as the podrunks continue to dominate the polity and the economy, which is why we must stake the vampire and bury the corpse (corporations) for good. Listen to this strident contemporary voicing of the con:

By and large, the poor aren't poor because the rich are rich. They're usually poor for their own reasons: family breakdown, low skills, destructive personal habits and plain bad luck. The presumption implicit in the criticism of growing economic inequality is that society's income is a given and, if the rich have less, others will have more. Up to a point, that's true. The government already redistributes much income, often for the good… the redistributionist argument is at best a half-truth. The larger truth is that much of the income of the rich and well-to-do comes from what they do. If they stop doing it, then the income and wealth vanish. No one gets it. It can't be redistributed because it doesn't exist. Everyone's poorer… Americans legitimately resent Wall Street types who profited from dubious investment strategies that aggravated today's crisis. And government properly redistributes income to reduce hardship and poverty.
But that's different from attempting to deduce and engineer some optimal distribution of income. Government can't do that and shouldn't try.
Scapegoating and punishing all of the rich won't do us any good if the resulting taxes dull investment and risk-taking, discouraging economic growth that benefits everyone. (“Poor Aren't Poor Because Rich Are Rich” by Robert Samuelson, Washington Post Writers Group, November 3, 2008)

In addition to the Big Con, I’ve found in these bits of Friedman-esque logic six overt and one implied con.

Overt Cons:
The “individual-as-island” con, closely tied to…
The “innovation-from-the-individual” con, closely tied to…
The “caged-or-encased-intellect” con, closely tied to…
The “commons-as-a-conformity-cage” con, as well as…
The “stick-as-inspiration” con; all part of…
The “merit-rises” con.

Implied Con:
The “justice-leads-to-the-despotism-of-the-lumpen” con.

We can use the “Big Con” lens to help decode the true point and purpose of these cons: together they perpetuate the propaganda that “the truly special few are not you, so never cease your labor – that’s all the world needs from you.”

And they perpetuate the propaganda that “modernity,” “wealth,” “technology,” “civilization” itself – all that we’re told we should bow down to – are brought to us by those “truly special few” “well-to-do.”

And the statement that “wealth” comes from what “the rich” do, translated into ‘plain-speak,’ says: “only those who’ve “benefited materially” from a stacked deck can continue stacking the deck.”

And it’s saying that those who’ve paid the price of supporting this stacked deck – the Chinese people paid forty-seven cents an hour, the Congolese people slaughtered for their land rich with minerals, all of us who’ve suffered the poisoning of our earth so that the podrunk-bellow “More!” can be met with more stolen water, oil, trees, coal… – that all of us must continue to pay this price of a degraded life if we want “cheap” commodities, or “a job.”

But what if we don’t accept that cell phones paid for with the blood of our brothers and sisters in the Congo are “cheap?” What if we no longer want commodities paid for with the lives, happiness and health of our brothers and sisters, either of America or of other lands? What if we dispute that this “society” they’ve built in the image of their own barren souls is what we want?

What if we reject the terms of the Con itself?

What if we no longer want to be slaves?

What then?

If you remove a wolf’s teeth, then give him a harness and food – is he “free”?

But what if she liked growing her own fruits and vegetables, seeds and grain? What if she liked building her own earthship, in relations of communion and good fellowship with her fellow living things? What if she enjoyed the challenge of designing sustainable home energy systems, under pressure of nothing but her own inspiration, systems that allow her to live in a harmonious self-sustaining cycle of exchange with the earth, her grandmother?

What if she wants her teeth back?

What then?

* To find out more about mycoremediation, read Paul Stamets’ Mycelium Running: How Mushrooms Can Help Save the World.

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Pamela's Blog 3

Published on Tuesday, May 5, 2009 by Nas2EndWork.org

“How Do I Con Thee? Let Me Count the Ways...Or: What is 'Individual Freedom'?”