The difference in revenues is considerable: in 2003, the revenue of the 225 largest fortunes in the world was equal to the total revenue of the world’s poorest 47 percent, i.e., 3.4 billion people. What do these 225 persons do that is extraordinary and indispensable enough to justify such a difference?
Global culture maintains the illusion of wealth by promoting lifestyles that will never be attainable for most of the world, because there are simply not enough resources. In any case, the reality is that over 50 percent of the planet’s inhabitants live on less than five dollars a day, and all the advertising in the world will not give them a car, a big house, or meat at every meal—rather, it will frustrate them.
Consumer culture does not understand the meaning of “enough.” Millionaires want to be billionaires; billionaires still want more. Everywhere, the rich, able to travel like nomads and with lawyers specializing in finance, pay practically no taxes in comparison to their revenue and their fortunes. (This is becoming increasingly visible on television and the Web.) The hatred of the poor for the rich is already considerable, but has not yet taken concrete form.
This will not be long in coming.
Between the rich and the poor is the middle class, and they are having a rather bad time right now. On the one hand, they are under economic pressure from outsourcing and competition; on the other, they are beginning to feel the effects of inflation and have seen their savings pulverized by the ups and downs of the stock market. Finally, they have been in debt for quite a while in order to buy houses or apartments, or sometimes simply to maintain their social status. Having enriched themselves during the first 30 postwar years, for the last 30, they have been doing nothing but getting poorer and watching their purchasing power dwindle.
Above all, the middle class is suffering psychologically. Advertising sells the idea that qualitative needs can be satisfied quantitatively. It is obviously impossible to satisfy emotional and spiritual yearnings through consumption—at least, beyond the very short moment of satisfaction that a purchase procures, but which soon gives way to a feeling of boredom, dissatisfaction, and even depression. Consumption is a sort of addiction in which the victim requires his fix ever more frequently. This syndrome is maintained by shifting fashions, themselves reinforced by a sort of general feminization of society. Advertising sells both illusions and fear. Not only does it indicate that being happy requires being beautiful and rich, but that if you are not, you are a loser. From infancy we are bombarded by millions of advertising messages on television, in magazines, and in the street. These messages create a lot of pressure and command us to be like the rest. This is extremely difficult to resist. You only need to have children to observe how early this constant propaganda influences them—and how effectively! Cuban leader Fidel Castro understood this when he declared in one of his speeches: “Advertising constantly distills its poison, giving birth to dreams and illusions, desires impossible to satisfy.”
The infantilization of the population is advancing quickly, thanks especially to, quite literally, the promotion of ignorance and stupidity in popular culture—simply watch any music television channel or “reality” show for a while, and you can almost feel your brain cells scream in agony! Deprived of his sense of responsibility, a citizen can no longer be anything but a docile consumer, obedient and immature. Perversely, the educational system is helping move us in this direction, since it is getting ever less effective. Children’s food is too fatty and sugary; everybody watches too much television (28 hours per week in North America!); the urban and suburban environments are not favorable to sensory development and stimulation; distraction by advertisements, smart phones, instant messaging, online social networks, and video games is constant; overstimulating leisure activities are overabundant; children don’t learn to appreciate calm and silence; and finally, alas, teachers are failing to encourage and inspire the brightest students. The function of school is no longer to teach subjects or how to learn and think critically; it is to institutionalize children from their earliest years. The most gifted learn to obey and perform, while the rest are progressively prepared for a life of unemployment or precarious, underpaid dull trades. A genuinely educated person, by contrast, is someone with a free mind who is eager to explore the world on his own. If his choice is to obtain well-paid work, why not! But the current educational system only succeeds in producing graduates with no other choice than to join the labor market on the terms decided upon by their future masters. They teach us that financial success is more important than personal fulfillment, that having a career is more important than family life, and that failure is not an option. No one wants to be a loser. The crux of the problem is that, since the aim is to prepare a person for being an immediately productive link in a great economic machine, instead of acquiring universal knowledge and developing a large horizon of thought, the student receives knowledge which rapidly becomes obsolete due to technological change.
Another effect of modern education is that the last generations of the West—Generation X, the children of the Baby Boomers, and, even more so, Generation Y, their children’s children—have been deprived of stories, myths, and well-defined traditions, which humans have cherished for hundreds of thousands of years. These children are badly prepared for living outside the artificial system constructed by the petroleum civilization: they have themselves become industrial products, placed since birth in a social context where they are evaluated, classed, and enclosed in a series of institutions that prepare them for a life of work, production, and consumption. Even if the wisdom of the ages were set before them, one is doubtful of their ability even to understand it.
As for science, what is it good for any longer? The most brilliant minds are increasingly mobilized to create consumer products, very profitable temporary treatments for chronic and recurring illnesses, or to manufacture products with planned obsolescence, in order to assure their replacement every few years. From shoes to washing machines: quantity and change rather than solid durability! Where did the sturdy, high-quality, good old “made in the USA” products of my youth go?
All this for the incomparable blessing of being offered 87,000 drink combinations by a coffee chain, or being able to click on 800 television channels. If you can choose between 50 different breakfast cereals—but only between two or three political parties, all with similar economic programs—then you have no real freedom. The illusion of “consumer choice” masks the tyranny of a tiny caste with similar and converging interests. Our leaders do not need to cook up plots in dark caves in order to know what is good for them. What is the difference between parties said to be “Right” and “Left” when all their cadres come from the same social class, have studied the same things together, and vote the same way on all economic subjects? Politicians, when they are not bogged down in sordid sex or money scandals, hardly make sense any more in this consumerist world. They are all subject to the market and only get ruffled over social and hygienic subjects of secondary importance: gay marriage, treatment of illegal aliens, anti-tobacco campaigns, etc. If there is a significant division, it is between globalists and anti-globalists, but the latter remain, for the time being, of marginal following.
And it is amusing to observe a society consisting essentially of docile office employees that adopts the fashions of “primitive” cultures: tribal tattoos are intended to make men seem tough; little hearts, dolphins, flowers, Chinese characters are for women—if not arrows on their lower backs or above their buttocks pointing to their butt (presumably meaning enter here?). Piercings, strange clothing, unusual holidays, tribal membership. . . One must be different, just like everyone else.
Everything is designed for immediate entertainment: constant amusement, pornography, drugs. Consumer culture makes us focus on having instead of being, possessions instead of relationships, appearances instead of well-being. This pushes us toward egoism, egocentrism, constant competition. In all areas, you compare yourself with the highest, idealized levels that you can
never attain, engendering considerable confusion and frustration. The result: problems like mental illness, divorce rates, addiction to drugs and other substances, and, increasingly, crime and despondency.
In 1970, 79 percent of American college students said their goal was a more meaningful life. In 2005, the same poll showed that the aim of 75 percent of students was to earn a living, but 81 percent of these admitted to feeling an existential void. Thirty percent of workers report being workaholics, accustomed to their emails, Blackberries, iPhones, and other electronic gadgets supposed to make them more productive. Fifty percent of workers report not spending enough time with their children and their families, while 40 percent say they do not have enough time for themselves and their own leisure activities.
So it is not surprising that our society suffers from a very high level of psychological illnesses such as anxiety, insomnia, and depression. A doctor friend of mine summarized the problem well:
We are prisoners of a vicious circle: we do alienating and meaningless work that creates a depressive state in the worker; a medication allows him to go on working; the work affords the worker the means to buy the medication; the doctor who prescribes the medication is required to do so and remain in the system because he has to pay back the loan he took out to finance his studies, not to mention his annual golf club fees.
The media jump from one sensational story to another without stopping, never making a fundamental analysis or allowing time for reflection. For the greater part of viewers, their brains long dulled if not lobotomized, this entertainment is enough. But acute minds easily perceive the influence of the media in question. In our consumerist world, where money is venerated, the least criticism of the commercial system and the excessive accumulation of wealth and stuff is a sort of heresy. Every politician, professor, or citizen who speaks against consumerist society endangers his career and can expect to be heckled, accused of extremism, ridiculed and ignored. The few dissidents work outside the media system, like Beppe Grillo in Italy.
The life of Westerners is getting further and further away from nature. Less home cooking, more processed foods, more fast food, less physical exercise. While a minority swears by organics and fitness, the majority buys pre-prepared, preheated food—an industrial, nutritionally unbalanced excrescence that requires enormous amounts of energy to produce and whose ingredients have traveled thousands of miles. Between such “frankenfood” and pollution, is it any surprise that cancer, diabetes, and heart disease are increasing? Obesity is growing, and life expectancy is declining. Add to this that fear and violence are ever-present in our whole culture: they permit you to sell films and win votes. Extremely violent acts are represented everywhere: on television, on the news, at the movies, in video games. . . Sixty percent of U.S. television programs contain violence, in spite of psychologists’ repeated warnings of the harmful effects this can have on behavior.
The reduction of the West to a “digestive tract with a sexual organ” is well advanced! You only have to look at a bit of television—filled with profligacy, frivolous game shows, “reality.” Should anyone be surprised that higher-minded immigrants from traditional societies do not want their children to assimilate: they simply don’t want them to become as degenerate as us! But they don’t succeed. Like The Borg from Star Trek, global culture assimilates everything in its path—“resistance is futile.” “Tittytainment” is propaganda designed to protect the neoliberal capitalist principles that direct globalization (as defined in 1995 by one of its theoreticians, the neoliberal ideologue Zbignew Brzezinski). To resist it, you have to know how to be an ascetic, how to cut yourself off from the world—or you take up arms against it like the Taliban. It’s impossible! Faced with this onslaught, the anti-globalists look paltry, indeed. As for leftists, wealthy pensioners, petty bourgeois fashion victims, and youth cultists, they are incapable of imagining anything but their idées reçues, their pre-programed thoughts. They preach the soft fascism of political correctness (which is getting less soft all the time). They are asleep, cradled in sweet dreams of social equality, human rights, universal solidarity, and other such illusions.
The most frightening effect of global culture is the loss of the social bond. This bond can only survive urban anonymity with great effort. Before, it was best to maintain good relations with your family and neighbors in case you got into trouble, financial or otherwise. But now, the welfare state frees us of interdependence and responsibility. The rites of passage, which gave structure and meaning to life and social positions, are being replaced by fashion. Even the system of social protection has become so bureaucratic and incomprehensible that it favors the lazy and the dishonest, to the detriment of those who actually need a safety net. Finally, the lack of moral sense and responsibility of political leaders and captains of industry is so flagrant that no one can any longer be seriously expected to obey laws and authorities, or to show the least civic feeling.
Globalization also changes people’s sense of identity. In a nomadic society based on clans, a person’s identity is bound with that of his family, clan, or tribe. In agrarian societies, identities and loyalties are defined in relation to the authority of the monarch and religion. Finally, in industrial societies, identity is constructed upon a real or mythical national culture and a generally homogenous ethnic composition. But since a great change has taken place in these last few years because of mass immigration, which has brought us, for better and for worse, a mixture of cultures living side by side, getting more or less along (depending on the countries and immigrant groups involved). In fact, in the past, migrations took place either toward relatively empty countries (Australia, America) or by invasion; since the 1970s, however, we have passed to immigration on a massive scale for labor, economic, demographic, or (post-)colonial reasons. Immigration has stopped being a matter of “minorities,” as it was in the 1960s; it has become a matter of new majorities in neighborhoods, cities, and eventually countries. It’s a phenomenon on the rise all over the world, and particularly in Europe and the United States.
The working classes of local extraction in the affected countries, which move out of certain areas, do not do so because of “racism,” but in order to regain security, not merely physical but also relational; they seek the feeling of being “among one’s own.” Those who aren’t able to leave the neighborhood often sink into despair, as they do not feel “at home in their home.” At any given moment in any given territory, some cultural model must predominate. And if immigration and the birthrates of immigrant populations cause the natives to become the minority, they feel socially and culturally insecure. The immigrants’ territories are not “ghettos” in the strict sense of places assigned to people. They are unstable zones where the law of the state is replaced by new local customs or organized crime.
In 2000, a UN report proposed various immigration scenarios in order to anticipate the aging of Western populations. The report suggested that a country like France accept 89.5 million additional immigrants between 2000 and 2050, i.e., 1.8 million per year. A real plan of colonization, assuming this is not a bureaucratic hoax! And then the same blackmail: the authors of the report threaten that if this level of immigration cannot be counted on, it will be necessary to raise the retirement age to 75.
In reality, the working classes do not try to separate themselves from foreigners as long as these are in the minority in their neighborhoods, if they come to work in a time when there is no unemployment, or if they accept a certain degree of integration, considering the native customs as the standard. When this is not the case, the immigrant must often accept work that is close to slavery and terrible living conditions. This immigration, often illegal, is encouraged and manipulated by industries that want to drag wages down and bust unions that are not yet under their control. They are helped by useful idiots: immigrant aid societies and bien pensant movie and television stars. The wealthy classes do not see the problem in the same way, not being confronted with it and having a tendency to ide
alize the foreign culture according to its festive and culinary aspect. The wealthy, themselves buffered from the negative consequences of mass immigration, often encourage racial and cultural mixture—not simply as a matter of a friendship or marriage between individuals but as an ideological good in itself. Didn’t Rousseau already discuss this in the 18th century? “Distrust those cosmopolitans who seek far from their own country duties that they scorn to fulfill at home; a philosopher loves the Tartars in order to be dispensed from having to love his own neighbors.”
No population wishes to become a minority in a territory where it was once the majority: not a White American, not a Frenchman, not a Belgian, not an Algerian, and not a Tibetan. As the anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss wrote, “It is the differences between cultures that make their encounter fruitful.” Demographic displacement is something altogether different.
Sociologist Alain Soral explains the genesis of this system in his book Comprendre l’Empire (“Understanding the Empire”). He describes the growing power of the West and, in the course of the last two centuries, the rise of networks of domination incarnated by an international finance cartel; the instrumentalization of Helleno-Christian humanism, the infiltration of states by these networks, the exacerbation of antagonisms. . . Soral describes an attempt to impose a supranational power by stealth. He also raises the question of popular revolts against this elite, which, from crisis to crisis, is both more powerful and more fragile, since it is increasingly arrogant and visible.
Survive- The Economic Collapse Page 11
