The Thom Hartmann Reader

by Thom Hartmann

  From The Prophet’s Way by Thom Hartmann,

  © 1997, published by Inner Traditions International.

  Younger-Culture Drugs of Control

  From The Last Hours of Ancient Sunlight:

  Waking Up to Personal and Global Transformation

  It is not heroin or cocaine that makes one an addict, it is the need to escape from a harsh reality. There are more television addicts, more baseball and football addicts, more movie addicts, and certainly more alcohol addicts in this country than there are narcotics addicts.

  —SHIRLEY CHISHOLM (B. 1924)

  POLITICIANS AND WRITERS OFTEN REFER TO OUR CURRENT ERA AS the Information Age. The average person alive today, they say, knows more than anybody at any time in the past. Through the Internet, encyclopedias on CDs and DVDs, and 700-channel television, the collective knowledge of the planet is available instantly to even the most ordinary of citizens, they say. It’s a wonderful thing, and we’re spectacularly well informed.

  But is this really so?

  If we are so well informed, why is it that when you ask most Americans simple questions about the history of the world, you get a blank look? How many of our children have read even one of Shakespeare’s plays all the way through? How many people know with any depth beyond the 15-second sound bites served up on the evening TV news the genesis and the significance of the wars in, for example, Afghanistan or the Congo? Or that the United States government is still stealing Indian lands in Alaska, Arizona, Minnesota, Nevada, New Mexico, Wyoming, and a dozen other states?

  Information Deficits

  We may be living in an “information age” with “information overload,” in some sense. But when it comes to what actually gets into people’s heads, we’re living in an age of “knowledge scarcity.” People no longer know information that’s vital to sustain life, such as how to grow their own food; how to find drinkable water; what’s in their food; how to build a fire and keep warm; how to survive in the natural environment; how to read the sky; when the growing seasons begin and end; what plants in the forest and the fields are edible; how to track, kill, dress, eat, and store game; how to farm without (or even with) chemicals and tractors; how to treat broken bones and other common medical emergencies; and how to deliver a baby.

  Because of this information deficit, we are out of touch with reality and are also standing on a dangerous shelf of oil-dependent, corporate-induced information starvation. In the 1930s during the Republican Great Depression, far more people lived in rural areas than in cities. The information about how to grow and preserve food, how to survive during difficult times, and how to make do with less was general knowledge. Today we know the names of the latest movie stars and how much their movies grossed, or what level the Dow Jones Industrial Average is at, but few of us could survive two months if the supermarkets suddenly closed. In addition, according to the Barbara Bush Foundation for Family Literacy, fully 27 percent of all American adults are “functionally illiterate” … although fewer than 1 percent of American homeowners lack a television set.

  This works to the tremendous advantage of anyone who’d benefit from our being dependent on their systems, information, fuel, and food. We’ve become easy to manage and easy to control. We’ll vote for whomever has the best 10-second sound bite on the evening news or the most powerful and expensive advertising.

  We’re Not Just Asleep; We’re Intoxicated

  As a teenager growing up in the sixties in college towns and San Francisco, I made the acquaintance of several heroin addicts. By and large they were nice people—not the stereotypes we see on TV and in literature but relatively normal middle-class kids who got in over their heads with a drug that was stronger than they’d ever expected or believed. Later, as I grew through my twenties and thirties, I met my share of alcohol addicts. Similarly, most were good people at heart but had found themselves in the grip of a drug that consumed their lives. And I’ve known many tobacco addicts over the years, most similarly well intentioned, who always thought they could one day just say no and then discovered it was unbelievably difficult.

  One thing that I noticed about these addicts was that keeping the supply of the drug flowing into them had become the most important thing in their lives. It was at the core of their existence. They’d wake up in the morning, and their first thought would be how to get that day’s supply of their particular drug. The day was drenched with the drug, and eventually they’d go to sleep with the drug.

  Another thing you notice about addicts is that they will sacrifice things for their drug that they might otherwise consider important. They may have great plans for career, education, or relationships, but somehow those things end up subordinated to the enjoyment of their drug. Long after the drug has stopped producing a “high” but is just keeping them from flipping over into painful withdrawal, they’re still spending hours every day immersed in it.

  From the point of view of those running our culture, this is considered a good thing: younger-culture governments have traditionally regarded getting people addicted as desirable.

  For instance, consider that the US government continues to give millions of dollars in subsidies (a nice euphemism for gifts or corporate welfare) to tobacco producers. In the more distant past, 30 years after losing the American Revolutionary War, the British fought a war with China to protect their “right” to sell opium to the more than 12 million addicts they’d created in China. They won the war, and took Hong Kong as part of their booty, and the British Empire made billions on opium trade and opium taxes. Many historians believe that the British were successful in winning the Opium Wars in large part because so many members of the Chinese royalty and bureaucracy were themselves addicted to opium. This reduced both their effectiveness as military opponents and their enthusiasm for making the British—and their opium—go away.

  In dominator younger cultures, the first goal of the culture itself, as acted out most often by the cultural institutions of government and religion, is to render the citizenry nonresistant. What typically happens to peoples who won’t “adjust” is that they’re exterminated. Many native peoples have shared this fate; the result is that the only conquered peoples who survive tend to be docile. (If it sounds like conquerors treat the conquered like animals to be domesticated, you’re getting my point precisely.) As every heroin dealer, tobacco salesman, and liquor store owner knows, if you have people who depend on a daily dose of your product for a sense of well-being, you have people who are not going to give you much trouble. (They may cause problems for others, but generally the dealers are left alone.)

  Similarly, our technological culture has found a technological drug to maintain docility.

  One measure of a drug’s addictive potential is what percentage of people can take it up or put it down at will and with ease. This behavior is called chipping a drug—occasionally using it but also walking away from it without pain or withdrawal for months or years at a time. Research reported in Science News found that while large percentages of people could chip marijuana—and medium percentages of people could chip alcohol, cocaine, and even heroin—very, very few people (less than 5 percent) could chip tobacco. But imagine a “drug” that fewer than even 5 percent of Americans could walk away from for a month at a time without discomfort. Such a drug, by the definitions of addiction, would be the most powerfully addictive drug ever developed.

  In addition to discouraging chipping behavior, this drug would also have to stabilize people’s moods. It would put them into such a mental state that they could leave behind the boredom or pain or ennui of daily life. It would alter their brainwaves, change their neuro-chemistry, and constantly reassure them that their addiction to it was not, in fact, an addiction but merely a preference. Like the alcoholic who claims to be only a social drinker, the user of this drug would publicly proclaim the ability to do without it—but in reality would not even consider having it be completely absent from his home or life for days, weeks, or years.

  S
uch a drug exists.

  Far more seductive than opium, infinitely more effective at shaping behavior and expectations than alcohol, and used for more minutes every day than tobacco, our culture’s most pervasive and most insidious drugging agent is television. Many drugs, after all, are essentially a distilled concentrate of a natural substance. Penicillin is extracted from mold; opium, from poppies. Similarly, television is a distilled extract—super-concentrated, like the most powerful drugs we have—of “real” life.

  People set aside large portions of their lives to watch a flickering box for hours every day. They rely on that box for the majority of their information about how the world is, how their politicians are behaving, and what reality is, even though the contents of the box are controlled by a handful of corporations, many of which are also in the weapons and tobacco and alcohol business. Our citizens wake up to this drug, consume it whenever possible during the day, and go to sleep with it. Many even take it with their meals.

  Most people’s major life regrets are not about the things they’ve done but about the things they’ve not done—the goals they never reached, the type of lover or friend or parent they wished they’d been but know they failed to be. Yet our culture encourages us to sit in front of a flickering box for dozens (at least) of hours a week, hundreds to thousands of hours a year, and thereby watch, as if from a distance, the time of our lives flow through our hands like dry sand.

  The Sickness of “Living in Boxes”

  Psychologists agree that being separate from others is generally harmful to our mental health and well-being. To be well, we must connect with others.

  Louise and I live with a cat named Flicker, a beautiful black female with a thick gray mane that makes her look like a miniature lion. Flicker is nuts. The person we got her from told us that Flicker is quite certain that every human in the world is out to kill her and, we found, that appears to be true. A “scaredy-cat,” she is paranoid, in the clinical sense.

  Yesterday, on my way to the living room via the kitchen, I came across Flicker in the hall. She looked at me in bug-eyed fright, spun around, and ran toward the kitchen. I was heading in the same direction, so I kept walking: now she was certain that I was coming to get her. In the kitchen she paused for a moment, but I kept coming, as the way to the living room is through the kitchen. She glanced around with a panicked look, then ran toward the living room. I was still behind her. I tried purring at her, making soft sounds, and calling her, but nothing works with this cat: she knew that I was coming to hurt her. In the living room, I encountered her again, which sent her flying up into the air and then out to the safety of another hall that leads to the front door. Flicker’s world is a hostile place filled with malevolent giants. In the few months we’ve had her, we’ve managed to get close to her from time to time, but there is always that wildness in her, that latent certainty that she can trust only herself for her own safety.

  I was a guest on a nationally syndicated radio show a few weeks ago, and a man called in from someplace in Kansas.

  “Do you mean to say,” he said, “that plants and animals have a right to life on this planet?”

  “Yes,” I said. “That’s exactly what I mean to say.”

  “You know that that’s the position of the ‘deep environmentalists,’ don’t you?” he said. “The radical tree-huggers?”

  “Yeah, I’ve heard that,” I said. “What’s your position?”

  “That we have to assign a value to things, using science and economics. Some forests are worth keeping and others are not. Some species can survive along with us, like cows and dogs and deer, and others can’t, and so we shouldn’t worry about them.”

  “So where do you draw the line?” I asked. “How do you know which species we should keep and which we should wipe out to make more room for the ones we like or to make more room for more people?”

  “Keep the ones that are useful!” he said, as if the answer were obvious. “Who needs a spotted owl or a snail darter, for God’s sake? We need jobs, economic security, clean streets, and safe cities. Those are the important things.”

  I pointed out to him that even if his assumption (that the world is only here for humans) were true, such massive tinkering as wiping out hundreds of thousands of species and altering the chemistry of the atmosphere might still create unintended results that would end up making the planet inhospitable to our “master species.” And, in fact, there’s plenty of evidence that that’s exactly what’s happening.

  If we were to set aside our assumption of supremacy and instead adopt the older-culture view of all things having value and a sacred right to live on this planet, the odds of our unwittingly taking planet-scorching actions plummet.

  Like Flicker, the caller to this radio show sees only one world. That world is populated by bright and colorful and “real” human beings, and every other living thing has a dimmer presence. Every “thing” is here to serve us, and we are given the knowledge and the power over what shall live and what shall die. If it is to our advantage to strip the world naked, down to a single species of tree and grain and vegetable and fish, so be it. We have decided that it is right because we see and understand the world as it really is. And for those who don’t believe it’s possible, we have the words of several of our gods, reported by humans who are incapable of error, to prove it.

  This is the logic of the mentally unhealthy or ill.

  Just as Flicker is certain she has the world figured out and that my walking from the bedroom to the living room—regardless of what I may think my motives are—is proof positive of the malevolent intent of all humans, the caller is certain that everything he sees in the world was put here for him; and if I assert it has its own right to existence, I am conspiring to take it away from him.

  Paranoids construct a detailed and well-organized world where everything makes sense and is self-reinforcing. That man on the corner who is looking at you is the CIA spy who put the transmitter in your brain. He looks away because he doesn’t want you to know that he is the spy. He glanced at you not because you were staring at him but because he is wondering if you have figured out that he is responsible for the transmitter. He gets on the bus not to go to work but to follow you. And on and on.

  Similarly, whatever our worldview, we collect evidence to support it. Flicker believes that people are chasing her, and she sees signs of it everywhere. So if you believe that everything is a resource that we can use to our advantage, you’ll see signs of that everywhere, too.

  Sigmund Freud, the father of psychoanalysis and the man to whom many today look for definitions of what is “sick” and what is “healthy” mentally, made some interesting observations along these same lines in the years before he died. He pointed to his belief that what our civilization refers to as a “healthy ego” is, in fact, “a shrunken residue” of what we had experienced early in life when the ego experienced a “much more inclusive” and “intimate bond” with the world around it.1 Many psychologists say that one result of this “shrinking process” is that the third most common cause of death for Americans between 15 and 27 years of age, according to the National Institutes of Mental Health, is suicide.

  This shrinking into separateness, this breaking of the intimate bond with the world around us, this separating ourselves into isolated boxes, was largely unknown for the first 100,000 years or more of human history. It is still largely unknown by tribal people around the world, who, among those who have little contact with younger-culture people, have a suicide rate so low as to be almost immeasurable.

  Historian Theodore Roszak uses the word ecopsychology to define the study of the relationship between humans and the natural environment. In his books The Voice of the Earth: An Exploration of Ecopsychology and Ecopsychology: Restoring the Earth, Healing the Mind, Roszak eloquently shows how the physical, mental, and spiritual disconnect of modern people may be responsible for entire realms of personal and cultural mental illnesses and how reconnecting with nature can be a powerfu
l therapeutic process for both the individual and society.2

  But this disconnect from nature has been at the core of “civilized” human experience since the formation of the first such “civilization” seven millennia ago. It was celebrated by Aristotle in his writings on how the universe and the natural world were merely collections of simple particles (atoms) that humans could manipulate once they understood them; and it was refined by Descartes, who argued that the entire universe was a giant machine, and this machinelike nature echoed all the way down to the smallest level. If we could just figure out where the levers and switches were, we could always figure out a way to control the machine. We withdrew from the natural world and created an artificial world around us, in our cities and towns, which is quite alien from that in which we first evolved. We even asserted that animals were just biological machines, incapable of feelings or emotions. As time went by, we decided for ourselves that various things were right and wrong with the rest of the planet, and we set about organizing things “out there” to comply with our needs “in here.”

  We placed our planet at the center of the universe and ourselves at the top of the hierarchy of our world. Our younger-culture religions and philosophers proclaimed, both explicitly and implicitly, that all of creation is made only for man. Galileo even went so far as to propose that if humans were not present to observe the world, it would cease to exist. When it was finally accepted that our planet wasn’t the pivot point of all creation, we simply shifted our language to accommodate a fundamentally unchanged worldview: it is now the assumption of almost every “religious” citizen of any “civilized society” that we are at the spiritual center of the universe.