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.
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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
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