Marcus Anthony speaks in a recent video blog (http://22cplus.blogspot.com/2010/05/other-side-of-hong-kong.html) about the beauty and tranquility of Hong Kong’s outlying islands, and how few citizens are willing to unplug themselves long enough to explore them: Shopping for clothes or the latest electronic gadgets is a much more popular Sunday pastime than hiking in those lush and soul-healing green hills. But then, in order to acknowledge their need for th
at healing, people would first have to acknowledge that they have souls – that they’re not just biological gadgets, wired up and ready to serve the global corporations that constitute a kind of nightmare distortion of the benign world government that futurist thinkers dreamt of 100 or so years ago. And there’s an exact parallel between those soul-extinguished Hong Kongers and the tepid, slow-motion response of Americans to the Louisiana oil spill catastrophe – as if that black, sticky, toxic ooze had somehow got into people’s minds and hearts as well as destroying some of the country’s finest landscapes and killing millions of innocent fellow-creatures. (It will probably start to affect Florida – America’s no. 1 holiday playground – soon.)
It’s true that President Obama has reacted with characteristic restraint and caution to a situation which probably didn’t call for either of these qualities, but we can’t expect our leaders to feel the passion and reverence for life on our behalf that we’re not willing or able to manifest for ourselves. The problem is, as I mentioned in a previous blog, we’ve sold our souls for oil, and we can’t claim them back at a moment’s notice just because we’re feeling a bit queasy about the bargain – all those hocked souls are in safe deposit, well locked away.
The two most valuable corporations in America are, appropriately enough, Exxon and Apple: oil and gadgets, at over $225 bn. each of market capitalization – if the combined value of those corporations was shared equally among all Americans, every man, woman and child would have $1500 worth. But of course the value isn’t shared equally, or anything remotely like equally: a tiny number of people derive stupendous wealth from them, and the rest of us little or nothing. Only the negative effects are shared out equally: the oil when it’s spilled spills on everyone and everything, while the negative social effects of IT addiction are down to “society” as a whole to deal with.
It doesn’t look like a great bargain for what we’ve given away, does it? Maybe it’s time we started to reclaim our souls, even if we have to make do with fewer gadgets and less oil. We can only become wholer, saner and happier in the process.
Yes, but waking up a planet may take some shaking. Maybe that's what the earthquakes, tsunamis, fires, oil gushing into the Gulf, mass breakdown of our economic systems, etc., is trying to do. I have to wonder just what it will take.
ReplyDeletePerhaps these are wakeup calls from "a higher part of the system". I have no evidence for it, but perhaps we just have to really fuck things up before we "get it".
ReplyDeleteInteresting about Foxconn, too, in China, Simon. The comment in today's South China Morning Post - workers feel like robots! A money and machines society ain't no fun when you have to make the machines, but don't have enough money to buy them. Like a donkey being tortured by having multiple carrots strapped about its head, but too far away to actually "consume".
I'm not sure we need any more wake-up calls; we just need to wake the f*** up. The oil spill at least is a very clear and dramatic consequence of greed, negligence and connivance - rather like the credit and banking crisis.
ReplyDeleteIt would be nice if some higher level of consciousness was trying to get through to us, but I wouldn't blame it for giving up the attempt and trying again in a hundred years or so.