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Date: Thu, 8 Feb 2007 23:27:43 -0500 (EST)
From: •••@••.•••
To: Richard Moore <•••@••.•••>, •••@••.•••
Subject: Re: Rachel's News #893: Escaping the Matrix
Wow, richard, this is a truly remarkable boost for your book! Editor
Montague's review of your work is the lead story in the current
issue. Congratulations. Rachel's News is very highly regarded in my
circles.
Nick.
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Hi Nick,
Yes indeed! I was very pleased to see this. :-)
I'll be featuring it in the review section of the book's website,
along with a plug for Rachel's Weekly, which I've subscribed to since
1997.
cheers,
richard
---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Thu, 8 Feb 2007 18:36:37 -0500
From: •••@••.•••
Reply-To: Rachel News <•••@••.•••>
To: Rachel News <•••@••.•••>
Subject: Rachel's News #893: Escaping the Matrix
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RACHEL'S DEMOCRACY & HEALTH NEWS #893
Thursday, February 8, 2007
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<snip>
ESCAPING THE MATRIX
By Tim Montague
In the movie, The Matrix, a computer hacker named Neo (played by
Keanu Reeves) is living an ordinary life in what he thinks is 1999.
However, when he is contacted by the enigmatic character, Morpheus,
Neo learns that he is actually living in the year 2199 where some
malevolent computers have created a realistic but totally false
version of 20th-century life ("the matrix") to keep Neo and the rest
of the population happily enslaved. It turns out the computers are
"farming" the population to fuel a campaign of total domination being
carried out in the real world of 2199. To gain freedom and justice,
Neo must first make a decision to confront the awful truth, then join
forces with Morpheus and others to figure out how to escape from the
matrix.
Like Neo, we have a choice -- to go on pretending that everything is
as it appears, or to search for a deeper truth about the nature of
our reality. In our matrix, we live in a democracy where everyone is
created equal, with liberty and justice for all. Our school books,
television shows and politicians assure us that if we work hard and
play by the rules we can all get ahead and have "the good life." In
reality we live in an economy that is wrecking the planet and
destroying the future for our children, increasingly benefiting only
a handfull of elites.
Richard Moore's slim new book Escaping the Matrix: how we the people
can change the world (ISBN 0977098303) is an intriguing indictment of
our 'dominator' society, how it's killing the planet and what we
might do about it.
Moore's analysis of the situation -- a world on the verge of a
nervous breakdown -- is that corruption by corporate and political
elites is an inevitable aspect of societies like ours, based on
domination and exploitation by a warrior class -- the
"military-industrial complex that President Eisenhower warned us
about in 1961.
Moore begins by framing events and organizations as diverse as World
War I, the World Trade Organization, and the United Nations as guided
by capitalism. "Capitalism is basically the belief that those who
have the most spare money -- the most capital -- should decide how
our societies develop. This is a political belief, a belief about who
should make the important societal decisions. It is an entirely
undemocratic belief; in fact it is a belief in the virtue of
plutocracy -- rule by the wealthy."(p. 54)
This has created a modern crisis. "...[C]ivilization is suffering
from both a chronic disease and an acute, life-threatening infection.
The acute infection is the unsustainability of our modern societies;
the chronic disease is rule by elites -- a disease we've been
suffering from ever since the first Mesopotamian kings, some 6,000
years ago."(p. 58)
This pretty much sums up the first third of the book -- which
includes a compelling recap of world events from this point of view.
Recent events, like the decline of the American manufacturing economy
and the war on terror, suddenly make very good sense. Capital is
finding its way out of slow-growth markets into faster growth
markets. Government's role is to protect those corporate interests at
any cost, including manufacturing excuses to start a nasty oil war.
In the middle third of the book, Moore serves up a brief history of
humanity and what led to our violent and oppressive ways. He asks,
How did hierarchical society come to be in the first place? Were
human cultures always so competitive and war-like? Citing the work of
Riane Eisler, author of The Chalice and the Blade, Moore says that
there is good evidence that prehistoric European humans lived in
'partnership societies' that were egalitarian and based on
cooperation not domination.
While the first agrarian societies were evolving in what is today the
Middle-East (the fertile crescent), nomadic herding culture emerged
on the Russian steppes. The herding cultures were inherently more
aggressive than their agrarian counterparts by virtue of their
nomadic lifestyle and relative scarcity of resources. "These were
male- dominated warrior societies, with strong chiefs. Archeological
evidence reveals that human sacrifice was practiced, warrior deities
were worshipped, and that chiefs were buried with impressive caches
of weapons. Eisler places these societies in the category of
dominator societies."(p. 75)
When dominator (nomadic herder) society mixes with partnership
(agrarian) you get a volatile mix: "Thus hierarchical civilization
seems to have arisen as a hybrid between these two cultural strains:
the partnership strain contributed the civilizing technologies and
the slave to till the soil; the dominator strain contributed the
ruling hierarchy and the dominator culture."(p. 77)
"With the production afforded by slave-based agriculture, rulers
could afford to pursue conquest and expansion."(p. 79) Bringing us to
where we stand today -- the product of 6,000 years of dominator
expansion. And as we see, when dominator culture runs into more
cooperatively based cultures like indigenous hunter-gatherers,
dominator culture tends to absorb or exterminate the others.
"Over the centuries we've seen warrior chiefs replaced by kings, and
kings replaced by corporate elites, but always there have been a few
who made the rules and the many who obeyed them, a few who reaped the
rewards and the many who paid the taxes and fought in the wars. We've
seen slavery replaced by serfdom replaced by employment, but always
it has been a few at the top who have owned the product of our
labors."(p. 83)
Moore then explains, "The source of our crisis is the dominator
culture itself. Environmental collapse and capitalism are merely the
terminal symptoms of a chronic cancer, a cancer that has plagued us
for six thousand years. No matter what dominator hierarchy might be
established, or which group of leaders might be in charge, things
would always evolve toward something similar to what we have now.
Such is the path of domination, hierarchy, and rule by elites."(p. 84)
Then Moore lays out a path back to "...a culture based on mutual
understanding and cooperation rather than on war and conquest, a
culture based on common sense rather than dysfunctional doctrine, on
respect for life rather than the pursuit of profit, and on democracy
in place of elite rule."(p. 85)
This clearly will require nothing short of a radical awakening and
transformation of our culture. Moore then reviews two social
movements from which we can draw important lessons.
The first is the anti-globalization movement embodied in the World
Social Forum gatherings. But Moore is uncertain of this movement
saying, "It is a very large choir, but it's not a quorum of the
congregation. In its current form it is unlikely to have even a
restraining effect on our descent into oblivion."(p. 87) However, he
acknowledges that the anti-globalization movement will likely be
embodied in whatever larger transformative movement does eventually
shift us to a partnership society.
Moore believes that the populist movement (which began as the
Farmer's Alliance) -- is another example we should study. "The
Farmers' Alliance began in 1877 as a self-help movement in Texas,
organizing cooperatives for buying supplies and selling crops. The
cooperatives improved the farmers' economic situation, and the
movement began to spread throughout the Midwest and the South. By
1889, there were 400,000 members."
But the movement was hobbled by two things. First, it failed to build
a broad and diverse base; it did not expand beyond rural farming
culture. "Although movement activists sympathized with urban
industrial workers, and expressed support for their strikes and
boycotts, the culture of the Populist leadership did not lead them to
bring urban workers into their constituency, to make them part of the
Populist family. From an objective strategic perspective, it is clear
that this was a fatal error of omission." (p. 93)
Second, it dove headlong into partisan politics -- a logical
progression for this kind of social movement but one that created a
no-win situation. "In order to promote their economic reform agenda,
and encouraged by their electoral successes, they decided to commit
their movement wholeheartedly to the political process. They joined
forces with the Democratic Party and backed William Jennings Bryan in
the election of 1896." Then the backlash: "Corporations and the
elite- owned media threw their support to the Republican candidate,
William McKinley, in what [Howard] Zinn calls "the first massive use
of money in an election campaign." Bryan was defeated, and the
Populist movement fell apart."(p. 90)
Harmonization -- group dialog
Moore believes that to avoid the fatal flaws of partisan politics we
should build consensus through a process he calls 'harmonization.'
Harmonization is a form of group communication where participants
work together, usually with a trained facilitator, to solve common
questions or problems.
You can learn much more about harmonization at Moore's website.
Harmonization is about coming up with creative solutions to common
problems -- solutions that take into account everyone's concerns.
There are a variety of techniques for achieving harmonization. One is
the Wisdom Council, a technique developed by Jim Rough that brings
people from diverse points of view together for an extended
conversation. Through dynamic facilitation the group members achieve
mutual understanding, respect, solidarity and community.
Another leader in this movement for creative dialog is Joseph
McCormick, founder of Reuniting America which aims "To convene
Americans from across the political spectrum in dialogue around areas
of mutual concern to build trust and identify opportunities for
collaborative action." As Moore point out, this kind of dialog can be
readily facilitated in any group of people, and it is an ancient
human tradition, capable of transforming conflict into creative
synergy.
Moore goes on to describe how we could scale harmonization up from
the community level to the regional or national level. Moore believes
that harmonization has the potential to become the basis of a
'community empowerment movement' that would transform our current
adversarial culture into a cooperative partnership culture.
The core principles of this movement are local sovereignty and
harmonization. The local community level is where everyone involved
finds a shared common interest and motivation to strengthen and
protect the community. Regional or national issues can be taken on by
creating delegations from local constituencies. Local wisdom councils
would delegate individuals to represent their community's interests
at larger regional gatherings, and so on, up the geographic scale.
Moore argues that centralized governments, corporations and
institutions that currently make most of the decisions will be
unnecessary and counterproductive in this new partnership society.
Making the transition to a culture based on sovereignty and
harmonization will require 'repossessing the commons' -- all the
things we share together but none of us owns individually including
air, water, wildlife, the human genome, and human knowledge. Moore
also includes the financial and monetary systems in the commons.
"Each community doesn't necessarily need to maintain its own
currency, but it must have the right to do so at any time it
chooses."(p. 174)
Moore argues that only locally owned and independently operated
businesses are good for the community. And that non-local ownership
is a pitfall to be avoided entirely. And though it's a radical
departure from our current system, this form of sovereignty would be
a huge step in the right direction. In the meantime we can get on
with exploring harmonization techniques.
"Any movement, which aims to create a transformed and democratic
society, needs to keep this in mind: when the new world is created,
everyone will be in it -- not just the people we agree with or the
people we normally associate with. A movement must aim to be all-
inclusive if it seeks to create a democratic society that is all-
inclusive. Is there anyone you would leave behind, or relegate to
second-class citizenship? If not, then you should be willing to
welcome to the movement anyone who shares the goal of creating that
new world," Moore concludes.(p. 93)
<snip>
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Editors:
Peter Montague - •••@••.•••
Tim Montague - •••@••.•••
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