WESTERN SOCIETY AS ADDICTIVE ENABLER

A recent article in Common Dreams allows me to reflect further upon a common malaise in Western society: alcoholism. One can see, from reading this article, that the agenda of the right wing (as described by Miller) is similar to an alcoholic bout. The elites have grown so great in their needs for profit and power that only the continued acquisition of assets and the disposal of liabilities will stave off that feeling that the whole house of cards will begin to collapse. So taxes must be shifted to the middle classes, the world must be conquered so that it can be written off once its profit-potential has been extracted, and the government must be made into a pure servant of capital.

Actually, what the government is, is an enabler. The whole drama is the drama of the perils faced by a family of an alcoholic father. George W. Bush is our alcoholic father-figure. And we are his enablers. The two permitted political parties are enabling parties, as Miller points out, the Republicans as part of the machine, the Democrats as "both complicit and fratricidal," and the people as secondary enablers.

As Miller points out, the new right-wing fundamentalist agenda builds upon prior US government agendas. So the violence that we see emanating from the corporate and government elites, poisoning the world, ruining its peopel, bribing the rich with everyone else's money and calling it "prosperity," that's all old news. Nothing new from a society founded upon the white conquest of brown-skinned native people and the enslavement of Africans brought over in genocidal death-ships. Derrick Jensen's "The Culture of Make-Believe" tells the story of how our culture got to be so sick in this way. Our institutions are mere vehicles for the grasping domination epitomized in the right-wing agenda, our principles function mainly to preserve the direction of violent attack (indicating who will be allowed to destroy whom with impunity), and what it all boils down to is property. Jensen quotes Locke (83), "Government has no end but the preservation of property," thus government exists to enable property rights.

So we enable through our respect for property, and our legitimation of government as a civil society seals the deal. Maybe it would be effective to use Jensen's catalog of violence in "The Culture of Make-Believe" to propel ourselves upon a "twelve-step" program, to learn how to be anti-propertarians, so that a revolution in civil society and in government can be made possible. At any rate, it appears that the new right-wing agenda knows no limits to its reactionary urge to propertize everything, and to turn property rights into an absolute power over things and people that will free the owning class from all responsibility or obligation to nature or to society. Property is to be upheld in the New World Order against all aspects of our humanity, and we will eventually have to recognize its seed within us if we want to do something about it.