Give A Damn

Individualism, capitalism and representative liberal democracy are the concepts giving people the opportunity to simply not give a damn about anything that matters. Why? Well, read on to find out.

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Our societies, and I'm talking about the societies I know something about, the western capitalist or neoliberal democracies in Australia, New Zealand, Europe, Canada and America, aren't just flawed; they're toxic. They're ruled by a set of ideologies that give all individuals who make up those societies multiple excuses to not give a damn about anything that truly matters. What are those things? Well, your fellow men and women for starters, or what about the environment we leave behind for our children, or justice? We, as collectives and as individuals don't give a damn about any of it. We've been taught not to. Of course I don't believe this applies to me, as I'm sure you think this doesn't apply to you; we've been taught manners, to care about our neighbors and to plan ahead for our futures, haven't we? But that's just the point: we don't even realize that we don't give a damn. Not really.

We're all products of our environments. The "nurture versus nature" debate has long been decided; there's a little bit of nature and a whole lot of nurture. Identical twins develop into completely different persons and personalities. There's a Gandhi and a Hitler in all of us. We are Schrodinger's Cat, and society is the observer deciding which cat materializes. We from The Netherlands like to praise Max Verstappen for his abundant "natural talent" as a race car driver; he's the first Dutch Formula One world champion and this coming weekend there's a good chance he'll secure his second world championship with four races still to go.

We also like to stress, as does the international sports press, that the racing is "in his genes", as his father was also a Formula One driver (albeit a lot less successful) and his mother was a good kart racing pilot of her own right. This is dumb, of course; there's no "racing-gene" that we know of, and Max's talent isn't natural, it's nurtured (some might say it's otherworldly). He's been sat in a go-kart at four years old by his father who gave him a rather strict upbringing as a racer, giving him very specific assignments, telling him to overtake whenever there's an opening, making him race on slick tires in the rain to get a "feel" for the vehicle under all circumstances and so on.

Max, like all of us, is the product of his upbringing and his immediate and wider environment; he had a father with the will and means to sculpt his son into the world champion he is now, and his father lived in a country that gave him the opportunity to become a racer himself, and they both had and have relatives, friends and associates who support them in their efforts. Society is a giant filtering system that produces the individuals who make up that society. And society spawns the belief systems that inform our actions. So, what does our society teach us? Karl Marx once said: "the leading ideas of any age, are the ideas in the leaders of that age." The king and the clergy were our leaders when the Bible gave us the ideas and beliefs that informed our actions. The people in ages long gone believed that leadership was god-given, that the right to rule was handed down, starting in heaven. God and the king were their excuses to not give a damn. Personal responsibility was constrained to praying, visit the church on Sunday, confessing sins (or buying them off), and work hard. What do we believe now? What's our excuse to not give a hoot?

First and foremost there's capitalism. It's the stupid idea that if we just care about ourselves, and nothing else, everything will be fine. It's the story about the baker who, making bread to make a living for himself, provides a valuable service for society. Other bakers do the same and they compete for the customers' patronage, and through this competition only the best bakers will remain and the optimal price for bread will be achieved. But in their selfish quest for more profits those "best bakers" will compete among themselves as well, so ultimately elimination through competition will leave just a few bakers who, adamant to retain their relative monopoly and power, will agree among themselves to not compete anymore; they'll form a cartel. Capitalism, as an ideology, bets on the belief that you too can become part of that cartel, if only you work hard enough, if you are smart enough, if you are ruthless enough while fighting giants. It's a cut-throat game in which you either eat or are eaten. And it only works for the few left standing.

The other stupid idea behind capitalism is that the means of production are privately owned. Decisions are made by a single person or a few board-members, hired by the owners whose only objective is to grow profits, for that's the sole metric deciding who survives the game of global competition. We, the workers, the 99 percent, don't have to bother with those decisions. So if the company has to decide whether to dump its waste cheaply in the river or expensively process it in a responsible manner, a few people who don't work there, whose children don't play near and swim in that river, decide to go for profits, and profits alone. The river becomes a toxic waste dump. And the tragedy is that we tacitly accept this state of affairs. Sure, we'll protest here and there, even though we know we'll lose eventually; if the protest is successful and government makes rules forcing the company to take the responsible and expensive route, the company will move to another place that doesn't have those rules, and where labor is a lot cheaper as well.

The solution is obvious: let the company be owned by all who work there. Let everyone who actually works there make the decisions in a democratic way. If the workers decide, you can be damn sure they'll protect their children and not dump the waste in the river. And they'll damn well protect their own jobs and not move the company abroad. They'll weigh profits, their income, against the effects on the wider society of which they themselves are an integral part. They'll give a damn. And herein lies another solution for people to truly care about what happens to themselves, their fellow citizens and the environment: direct democracy. Representative democracy as we know now is just another excuse to not give a damn. We delegate all decisions to a government that doesn't give a damn about us, for capitalism is not just an economical system, it's a political ideology as well. Anarcho-capitalists and capitalist libertarians do not understand that capitalism can not function without government because the private ownership of capital has to be protected by an institution with the monopoly on force. All their fancy ideas only amount to another equally forceful institution with another name.

This direct democracy, starting in small circles like the family, a single company, then spreading out into a city, a province, a nation, with concentric and layered circles of decision-making, is anarchism. This can never exist when what we need to survive and thrive is privately owned and managed, only when it's collectively owned and managed. Concentration of wealth amounts to concentration of power, which is the exact opposite of democracy and responsibility. Society is a complex system which can not be successfully managed from the top down; press a button here, and there's no way of knowing for sure what will happen over there. It can only successfully be managed organically and from the bottom up. And when I say successfully, I mean in a just way that harvests our ability to give a damn. In our current world there's no way to be a responsible consumer; everything we buy is sure to have been produced in an exploitative and polluting way. Responsible entrepreneurship is impossible under capitalism. But we don't give a damn, because it's so much easier to delegate responsibility higher up.

It's so easy to just have to go to the voting booth once every four years. It's comfortable to just wake up and go to work and not have to bother yourself with the consequences of your company's actions and decisions. It's so much easier to be ruled by the ideas of leaders, instead of our own ideas. Isn't it funny, and tragic at the same time, how the ideologies that purport to promote individualism, individual freedom and individual responsibility have turned out to be the least individualist, the least responsible and the least free? Freedom in this system means the freedom to exploit, the freedom to pollute, the freedom to be completely self-centered, the freedom, in short, to not give a damn. I know this is a harsh mirror-image I'm presenting to you now, but it's one we've looked away from for far too long. And maybe I'm not convincing any of you. So maybe look at the below linked video that was the direct inspiration for this rant; this short and sweet account from an "accidental anarchist" comes from someone who has worked close to the levers of power of government and may be more convincing than someone like me, an anonymous person writing stuff on the internet...

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