We’ve gone from living in a natural world to living in a manufactured one.
Most of us spend the majority of our time in some ethereal place created from fantasy and want. We embrace the value of more to compensate for lives that seem, somehow, less. We are the first two or three generations in history to grow up in a predominately electronic environment. TV programming is inundated by sex and violence because the networks have determined they are an efficient way to produce audiences. The commercial media are to the mental environment what factories are to the physical environment. A factory dumps pollutants into the water or air because that’s the most efficient way to produce plastic or wood pulp or steel. A TV or radio station “pollutes” the cultural environment because that’s the most efficient way to produce audiences. It pays to pollute. The psychic fallout is just the cost of putting on the show. Every day an estimated 12 billion display ads, 3 million radio commercials, and more than 200,000 TV commercials are dumped into North America’s collective unconscious, flooding our brains with thousands of repetitive “driving” messages. This blunting of our emotions is a self perpetuating process. The more indifferent we become, the more voltage it takes to shock us. Information has become a form of garbage. It comes indiscriminately – directed at no one in particular, disconnected from usefulness. We are swamped with information. We are constantly being hyped, suckered and lied to. Information diversity is as critical to our long term survival as biodiversity. When one man gains control of more than half a country’s daily newspapers (Black-Canada), or amasses a global media empire the size of Rupert Murdoch’s, it’s a serious problem; as the scope of public disclosure shrinks. Cultural homogenization has graver consequences than the same hairstyles, catchphrases, music and action hero antics perpetrated ad nauseam around the world. Are the myriad daily choices we make, apparently freely, truly the product of our own will? Dreams by definition, are supposed to be unique and imaginative. Yet the bulk of the population is dreaming the same dream. It’s a dream of wealth, power, fame, plenty of sex and exciting recreational opportunities. What does it mean when a whole culture dreams the same dream? Feeling empty? Don’t worry. Consumption will fill the void.

A recantation of a great urban legend: It was about a grand country wedding on the Sunshine Coast of British Columbia. It had been an affair to remember, the union of two well-off and respected families. The reception was held in one of the locals’ big, grassy backyards. There was a band, and one by one everyone got up to dance. It turned out that the septic pipes ran under the lawn. The weight of dozens of guests bearing down was too much for the system, and the pipes burst. Raw sewage rose up through the grass. It began to cover everyone’s shoes. If anybody noticed, they didn’t say anything. The champagne flowed, the music continued. Until finally a little boy said, It smells like shit!” And suddenly everyone realized they were ankle-deep in it. This is analogous to the creeping dysfunction of North American life. It has happened so gradually that hardly anyone has noticed. Those who have clued in apparently figure it’s best to ignore the shit and just keep dancing.

Over a twenty-year period, Elvis Presley evolved from an avatar of American cool to the embodiment of American excess. Almost entirely confined to bed in his last months, Elvis devoured pills and fried-banana-and-peanut-butter sandwiches, suppressing the pain of being Elvis and seemingly losing himself inside his own expanding girth. He was found, appropriately, dead on the throne, head down, like an offensive lineman waiting for the snap. His points of contact; fat hands on the tile and ass on the porcelain. There is no better metaphor for the old American dream. With a few exceptions, we are all Elvis now. We have learned what it means to live full-on, to fly and fornicate like an American, and now we refuse to let that lifestyle go. So we keep consuming. Our bodies, minds, families, communities, the environment – all are consumed.

The Declaration of Independence, in 1776, freed Americans not only from Britain but also from the tyranny of British corporations, and for a hundred years after the document’s signing, Americans remained deeply suspicious of corporate power. They were careful about the way they granted corporate charters, and about the powers granted therein. Abraham Lincoln, shortly before his death warned “Corporations have been enthroned….An era of corruption in high places will follow and the money power will endeavor to prolong its reign by working on the prejudices of the people…until wealth is aggregated in a few hands…and the republic is destroyed”. The event that changed the course of American history was Santa Clara County –vs- Southern Pacific Railroad, a dispute over a railroad route, the US Supreme Court deemed that a private corporation was a “natural person” under the US Constitution and therefore entitled to protection under the Bill of Rights. Suddenly, corporations enjoyed all the rights and sovereignty previously enjoyed only by the people, including the right to free speech. This 1886 decision ostensibly gave corporations the same power as private citizens. But considering their vast financial resources, corporations thereafter actually had far more power than any private citizen. They could defend and exploit their rights and freedoms more vigorously than any individual and therefore were more free. In one stroke the premise that all citizens have one equal vote and exercise an equal voice in public debates had been undermined. Post Santa Clara America became a very different place. By 1919 corporations employed more than 80 percent of the workforce and produced most of America’s wealth and the country was increasingly being ruled by a coalition of government and business interests. The US has since been ruled as a corporate state. In 1997, 51 of the world’s hundred largest economies were corporations, not countries. The top 500 corporations controlled 42 percent of the world’s wealth. Corporations lobby legislatures, bankroll elections, manage our broadcast airwaves, set our industrial/economic and cultural agendas. They grow as big and powerful as they please. These legal fictions that we created two centuries ago, now have more rights, freedoms and power than we do.

Biting into a hash brown patty at McDonalds; the grease shines on the chin like baby oil! Gone is the connection between the actual growing of food and its consumption. Our relationship with the industrial food industry resembles the one that industry has with its chickens, pigs and cows. In exchange for zero responsibility, we get zero control. Every person should have a personal farmer in the same way we have a personal physician, lawyer or dentist.

Everything human beings once experienced directly has been turned into a show put on by someone else. Real living has been replaced by prepackaged experiences and media created events. Our media saturated world, where all communication flows in one direction, from the powerful to the powerless, produces a population of lumpen spectators “modern men and women, the citizens of the most advanced societies on earth, thrilled to watch whatever they are given to watch”. The spectacle is an instrument of social control, offering the illusion of unlimited choice, but in fact reducing the field of play to a choice of preselected experiences: adventure movies, nature shows, celebrity romances, political scandals, ball games, net surfing…. In the real world we live off the planet’s natural resource and the backs of future generations.

We lie in front of our TV’s like beaten dogs. We toady to corporations and wear their branded logos like serfs. We breath bad air, drink foul water, lick corporate lollipops and never let out a peep. We can’t stop watching as the bombs land on Baghdad, tears flow freely for Princess Di and we can’t get enough news about President Clinton’s escapades. We press the remote and the show goes on. We can roll over and squel like a pig, as the corporations want us to act.

How much harm does a company have to do before we question it’s right to exist. We think it’s normal for corporations to have more rights than we do; legitimate for them to clear-cut ancient forests, influence elections, run our airwaves, take politicians on jaunts to the Bahamas and draft the world trade rules.

A corporation has no heart, no soul, no morals. It cannot feel pain. You cannot argue with it. That’s because a corporation is not a living thing, but a process, an efficient way of generating revenue. When a corporation hurts people or damages the environment, it will feel no sorrow or remorse because it is intrinsically unable to do so. It may sometimes apologize, but that’s not remorse - that’s public relations. Trying to rehabilitate a corporation, urging it to behave responsibly, is a fool’s game. The only way to change a corporation is to rewrite its charter. -or- what if each shareholder was deemed personally responsible and liable for collateral damage to bystanders or harms to the environment? Why shouldn’t it be so? If you’re a shareholder, a part owner of the corporation, and you reap the rewards when the going is good, why shouldn’t you be held responsible for that company when it becomes criminally liable? If we rewrote the rules of incorporation so that every shareholder assumed partial liability, financial markets would immediately undergo dramatic change. Instead of choosing the biggest cash cows, potential shareholders would carefully investigate the companies they were about to sink their money into. They would chose companies with good environmental records and avoid multinationals that use child labor or break labor laws overseas.

The ideas, expressions and concerns of individual citizens no longer matter very much. Culture isn’t created from the bottom up by the people anymore – it’s fed to us top-down by corporations. Under current conditions, real debate is impossible. Real democracy is impossible. Real change is impossible.

Fifteen hundred eminent scientists, including the majority of all living Nobel Prizewinners, signed a Warning to Humanity in 1992, and 58 world academies of science released a similar document in 1994, warning that the human experiment on planet Earth is veering out of control. Population growth, over consumption, inappropriate technological applications and relentless economic expansion are destroying the life-support systems on which our future depends.

Never ending material growth is the cornerstone of our current economic system. There is no such thing as a zero-growth model within it’s framework. In fact, nothing much but material growth really matters, economists have decreed. And yet, constant growth within finite terrain is the ideology of a cancer cell. It’s madness. It’s madness propagated twenty-four hours a day by the corporate controlled mass media, which are structurally incapable of offering us the root-cause analyses of our current predicament. We just keep pushing buttons and hot dinners keep popping out. Deep down we all know the planet is dying, but nobody wants to talk about it.