Hi, I'm mejeffdorchen and welcome to the moment of truth -- the one place in the electromagnetic spectrum where the truth can drop its character armor, kick back with a pina colada, take a break from the broadcast rat race, and be itself.You know, every once in a while I'll say to myself, well, you've done all you can. You've said what you have to say, and now it's time to just live your life as decently as possible and let things take their course. And what I'm really saying to myself is that this therapeutic thing I've been doing -- writing the moment of truth -- has done its job. It's given me the opportunity to talk back to myself about things in the world, generally beyond my influence, that bug me. I know that reading the moment of truth on the radio implies that I think I have some kind of important message to spread. But let's face it, not many more people pay attention to this segment of the program than the amount of people who actually pay attention to Bob Greene's columns in the Tribune.
We all know that when Bob Greene was going off about the baby Richard thing and when he goes off about child neglect and injustice in general, he's really wrestling with, trying to repair, deep-rooted psychological wounds from his own childhood. And I'm no different from Bob Greene in that respect. In fact I consider myself to be a kind of Bob Greene with a human face, so to speak.
However, unlike Bob Greene, I sometimes experience periods during which I feel healed, whole. I'm at peace. Perhaps complacent. I don't know. Whatever it is, I just can't get a big head of steam up during these periods of wholeness and contentment. I can't get mad at extreme capitalism because I know it to be doomed. I know, and it's a quite peaceful knowledge, that the present trend of concentration of wealth upwards into the hands of totalitarian organizations whose sole motivation is greed -- I know that this trend, this fad, if you will, contains the seeds of its own demise in its anti-life and anti-human fundamental essence.
Suppose a kind of ultimate conflict comes to pass, pitting the corporate soul-prison against the democratic impulse. I don't see how the corporation could win. Without popular influence the corporation will allow itself any excess in the name of profit. Without popular influence the corporation will shed any mask of humanity or even friendliness and simply become its truest self: a totalitarian destroyer of the imagination, the environment, free speech, free thought, free association, free movement, independent collective action, and the dignity of life.
This form of government has already been tried, and has failed time and time again. Always the resistance of all things in the universe to totalitarian control rears its head. Resistance, even the miniscule resistance represented by the niggling anti-authoritarian notion in the mind of an otherwise willing subject, is eventual death to totalitarianism. Totalitarianism is a purist utopian project that cannot tolerate the slightest imperfection. Thus, in this universe at least, it can never truly exist as it desires. So its ultimate natural state is defeat. The corporation is a totalitarian organism. Capitalism is a totalitarian superorganism. As such they cannot exist in their ideal states, which are utopian. If they exist at all they exist as diseased perversions of themselves.
How can a diseased perversion -- striving for perfection, totality, control, ownership, obedience -- how can such a miscreation triumph in the face of nature, which is content to be flawed and perverse, forever incomplete, effortlessly imperfect, unstrivingly inadequate? Democracy is nature's answer to the fundamental fact that any system will encounter opposition. People will gripe, just as fan belts will break. Democracy is government's wise acknowledgment of its own inability to coerce total loyalty. The fact is, people will participate in affairs that they believe affect them, regardless of whether they're given permission. A system can either accomodate this dynamic by at least making a show of giving people a say, or it can declare war against the dynamic and either lose the war or be the victor in a universe without human beings in it.
The flaws in participatory social organization in this age of advanced technology can be traced to the grossly unequal power that refuses to acknowledge its social obsolescence. What I mean is, it's not that the US brand of democracy is a worthless joke. It's simply that most of what is worthwhile about it is frustrated by the antihuman force of totalitarian corporationism.
But I'm at peace. Because I know that totalitarian corporationism is doomed. All it can do to survive in the long run is adapt -- that is, it can become participatory corporationism. And that's the slippery slope, my friends, to popular control of wealth and resources. So, ta da! This week, with my stomach full of crawfish and ice cream, with spring in the air, with a decent job providing me a roof over my head, food on the table, and clothes to wear -- not to mention enough free time to write essays like this one -- hey, with all this going on, for me, history is over. I just happen to be the only one that knows right now. And I'm giving the rest of you as long as you need to catch up.
Until then, I'm mejeffdorchen and this has been the Moment of Truth.
Notice: The copyright on these essays will only be invoked if someone besides Jeff Dorchen tries to make a profit with them or uses them without giving Jeff credit.
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