Conclusion

Trying to sum up my life so far is not an easy task. But a large part of the conclusion to my text has to do with the changes that have taken place in the world since my childhood. Because I spent most of my life being very involved in everything that was going on, or at least in everything that I thought was going on, my conclusion has a lot to do with recent history. As I indicated in my introduction, my childhood and the early part of my adult life took place during the thirty glorious years between 1945 and 1975, a period of unprecedented economic and social development. Back then, people like me really believed that things were moving in the right direction, that ordinary individuals like us were finally becoming more and more powerful, not to mention prosperous. We shared this weird idea that society was becoming more and more egalitarian, rather than more and more elitist like it had in days gone by.

Nowadays, however, all our illusions are shattered. Egalitarianism is out, middle class prosperity is a thing of the past, socialism is dead, feminism is dead, racism and religion are back with a vengeance. Speculators are much more numerous than entrepreneurs and most world governments are almost inert because of their enormous accumulated debt. Since the same vulture capitalists who brought us the 2007-2009 crisis are still doing the same things all over again, the next time everything falls apart at once governments all over the world will probably be too weak to do anything about it. As a result, the next great depression may make the last one look like a Sunday school picnic by comparison.

At the same time, millions of people did not stop getting killed by military forces when the Vietnam War ended, nor when the cold war was won by the USA. There was no winding down of major conflict when there was only one major superpower, nor when there was only one major political ideology. During the opening years of the twenty first century, millions of people were still dying in “Africa’s world war” (in and around the Democratic Republic of the Congo), not to mention millions more in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria and dozens of other places. The USA did not stop spending hundreds of billions of dollars on murderous, useless wars and military equipment because of its colossal debt, nor did military adventures and expenditures decline that much in most other countries.

To be sure, not everything in recent history is as negative as that; there are several ways in which today’s world has progressed, at least a little bit. For one thing, the revolution in electronics has made it a whole lot easier to communicate, at least in some countries. Making a text like this one available to millions of people (even if few of them actually read it) would simply not have been possible before the advent of the personal computer and increasingly available high speed internet. People doing documentary research and writing doctoral theses nowadays have a much easier time of it than we had even as recently as the 1980s. In many fields and at most levels of education, it is now entirely possible to write term papers and make public presentations without having to refer to any printed material whatsoever. The downside of that is obvious, as millions of people have become much too lazy to look into any of the billions of incredibly valuable sources that no one has ever bothered to transfer to the web. Billions of other documents have disappeared forever because they were written on outdated computers whose contents were never transferred to any of the newer technologies. Not to mention the fact that the net has always been extremely vulnerable to nihilistic sabotage.

The massive shift in manufacturing from the former industrialized countries to places like China, India and Brazil is another major change. On the positive side, millions of people in those countries are somewhat better off than they used to be, when they were mostly ultra poor peasant countries. On the negative side, half the population is still ultra poor, either continuing as peasants or joining the rapidly growing underclass in urban areas. At the same time, most of the industrial workers in those places have to put up with horrible working and living conditions, very similar to those described by Friedrich Engels and Charles Dickens back in nineteenth century Britain.

Another negative aspect of partial third world industrialization is the fact that most of it is based on shipping manufacturing jobs from high wage countries to low wage countries. Pro capitalist governments in the poorer countries deliberately discourage the growth of the middle class, in order to preserve their low wage “reserve army” for as long as possible. Free trade is an integral part of the neoliberal counter revolution and makes it that much easier to increase the steadily expanding gap between the social classes.

Countries that become almost totally dependent on free trade regularly put their populations in grave danger. In Canada, for example, one remaining multinational company given a monopoly on the production of injected medical drugs caused a major crisis when it was unable to maintain decent quality standards. Totally unprotected countries end up becoming completely reliant on importation for absolutely everything that their populations really need in order to survive in any kind of difficult period.

But surely the most important negative shift of the current period of history is the ecological crisis. People have been talking about the catastrophic increase in all the different kinds of pollution since the zero growth movement of the 1970s, but no one has really done anything major to try and stop it. For example, the poorly planned European attempt to control airline pollution ran into a massive refusal from most of the other countries in the world. Incidents like these make it seem highly unlikely that human beings are going to be able to mobilize themselves anywhere near sufficiently to make a significant difference to the beleaguered environment.

In any case, most people are far too brainwashed by the worship of Mammon, recently reinforced by the laissez faire counter revolution, to do anything at all about the ecology crisis, or to take any other kind of collective responsibility. In the much more popular consumer society, they spend trillions of dollars every year on games, pets, illegal drugs, organized crime, spectator sports and associated leisure activities, even as the world threatens to fall apart before their very eyes. As I mentioned earlier, the unfortunate revival of old time religion, belief in magic and libertarianism have rendered most human beings completely impotent so far as social efficiency is concerned.

Another good example of this kind of social impotence comes from the never ending health care debate in the USA. The libertarian, Tea-Party ultraconservatives despise Obama’s law because it requires everyone to have some kind of health insurance, which is completely opposed to their incredibly shortsighted definition of individual liberty as being freedom from any kind of social responsibility whatsoever. They have genuinely become a kind of ultra right wing version of the hippy movement from days gone by.

What they are proposing is in fact the kind of individual selfishness that Ayn Rand was preaching back in the 1950s. This implies total freedom for toxic personalities to do whatever they like, thereby denying freedom to every “inferior” being who does not possess an ego as colossal as their own. Ultra individualism is also obvious among all the egomaniacs campaigning against gun control in the USA. Their diseased minds refuse to acknowledge that individual freedom for everyone is unattainable unless it is accompanied by at least a minimal degree of social equality. As Lord Acton put it, “liberty is not the power of doing what we like, but the right of being able to do what we ought”.

In the meantime, I discovered that more than a few of my students considered some of my courses to be quite boring. The less nerdy ones among them, however, often used my shortcomings more as an excuse than as a reason. Over the years, under the impact of the ultra egotistical neoliberal movement and the leisure oriented electronic media that goes with it, many of our students have become more and more interested in being entertained all the time, and less and less interested in working hard. For many of them, the computer icons for browsing and chatting have long since replaced serious writing and research. I have always thought that our students do not need any more electronic entertainment at school than they already get at home, and that what they really need is a lot more exposure to often monotonous intellectual work, a lot more reading, a lot more writing, and a lot more construction of original answers to problems.

Instead of being consumers all the time, they need to be the kind of people who conceive new ideas and write the boring programs that are required for making the real world function properly. Students in the human sciences, in particular, desperately need basic information about the non virtual world, as well as critical thinking and a scientific attitude, consciously opposed to magic, religion and constraining ideologies. It is just too easy to use boredom as an excuse for laziness. Nevertheless, none of that leaves me off the hook. The fact that I find everything in my own courses interesting does not mean that I should count on everyone else having the same reaction. Complacency is no substitute for delinquency.

At the same time, the fake democracy that most of us are living in nowadays has been reduced to a contest between political parties who equally support worldwide austerity measures to help pay for the financial panics caused by monetarism and speculative investment. In the USA, for example, the 2012 presidential contest was reduced to a choice between one candidate who invited several investment bankers into his administration and another one who was an investment banker himself. So the only real choice that people have is either voting for one or another version of the same thing, or getting their skulls cracked wide open in demonstrations against the establishment.

Most political commentators and business journalists prostitute themselves constantly by pretending to prefer the democratic process to street protests, except whenever any part of the world population votes for anti establishment parties that do not want to uphold austerity. All of a sudden, investment realities become way more important than the will of the people. For business courtesans, big time investors are allowed to poison the world economy whenever they feel like it, so long as ordinary people realize that their role in life is to mop up afterwards and not to imitate the big shots by avoiding all their own responsibilities. The thing that those courtesans hate the most is whenever any country already in debt chooses to pay for some new social service for ordinary people rather than increase business subsidies instead. In their constricted brains, the word “irresponsible” always refers to people from the lower classes, without either power or money, and never to anyone who possesses either of those rarefied attributes.

Most of the world’s neoconservatives also support fundamentalist religion, whose peculiar interpretation of morality has led to their total rejection of women’s liberation, contraception, abortion, gay rights and freedom from religion. By talking out of both sides of their mouths, they are quite likely breaking the all time world record for hypocrisy, supporting individual freedom whenever they feel like it and simultaneously opposing freedom whenever they feel like that too. Tea-Party politicians in many American states typically oppose handouts to people on welfare while at the same time joyously granting handouts to multinational corporations that seek to increase their profits by moving their operations away from more stingy local governments to more generous ones. Those people have no intellectual pride whatsoever and therefore no capacity to move society in any kind of sustainable direction.

On the positive side again, another thing that a lot of people used to fear, the population bomb, fizzled out. Even in most of the poorer countries, against the precepts of fundamentalist theology, people are not making nearly as many babies nowadays as some foolish observers projected that they would back in the 1970s. Nevertheless, world population is still increasing, meaning that somehow we are supposed to provide 70 to 80 percent more food and more energy over the next 25 years just to keep up with current standards of living, without having a negative effect on the environment. This tremendous effort is also supposed to succeed while allowing the multinational food companies to jeopardize famine control by artificially inflating the prices of basic commodities over and over again.

Unfortunately, toxic personalities still control the world, even more than they did in the past, and they will most likely never permit anyone to push past them and succeed in controlling any of the world’s toxic substances, whether they be illegal drugs or tar sands. Kakistocracy is not going to go away anytime soon; instead, it seems to be more entrenched than ever before. If it were simply a question of overthrowing the capitalist ruling class, as the Marxist idealists used to fantasize, solving our problems might be more plausible. Egomania, however, though highly concentrated among both public and private money managers, is not at all confined to the big shots.

Bullies can be found everywhere, from the schoolyard to the boardroom. Aside from those who run most of the governments, private corporations and other official institutions, we also have to include increasingly numerous organized criminals and members of street gangs. Not to mention ordinary bullies who perform honor killings regularly, as well as wife beatings, second degree murder of innocent people through bogus traffic accidents, and the endless list of other such personal abominations. In all my chapters, I spotlighted dozens of examples of bullying that I personally witnessed, during demonstrations against the war in Vietnam, on the picket line, inside radical groups, in the universities and the junior colleges where I worked, just about everywhere I went. It would have been nice if I could have concluded this text by claiming that human beings prefer cooperation to aggression, but in fact it seems that sadomasochistic social relations are the real norm, not only in the examples I have enumerated here but in thousands of similar situations that I did not personally witness or have yet to write about.

Moreover, none of the methods that people like me used in the past to change things for the better ever worked properly. During several decades of my life, I was involved along with millions of other people trying to push for significant social change. Some of us advocated radical solutions, genuinely believing that good things had already been accomplished in several officially anti establishment countries, but what a foolish enterprise that turned out to be. Millions of us also tried reform, at least until we found out that the more successful reform leaders betray their movements as often as the so called revolutionary chieftains do. Trying to effect change from either a nationalist or an internationalist perspective were also equally ineffective.

Some of the people involved in those efforts genuinely believed in what they were doing, but most of their leaders only wanted to use those movements to put themselves on top of world society, rather than the previous gang of big shots. Even the recent revival of anarchist permanent revolution in several different countries is just a repeat of yet another failed strategy from the past. Unfortunately, if any of humanity’s current problems are going to be solved, someone is going to have to come up with a whole new set of ideas to bring about social change, because everything that has been tried up until now has fallen far short of the target.

A lot of other deranged minds argued several decades ago in favor of the status quo, just as millions more such sycophants are doing nowadays. But the status quo is even more disgusting and unacceptable than the betrayed reforms and revolutions of bygone days. Which brings to mind a Rumanian witticism that I read about a few years ago in one of the Montreal newspapers. When talking about their own country, some Rumanians had this to say: “Our past was horrible, our present situation is a disaster, thank God we don’t have any future.” The lack of a future may indeed apply to all of humanity, and not just to those Rumanians, sometime during the current century, especially if we are incapable of solving the ecology crisis.

This gives new urgency to Douglas Adams concept of the “total perspective vortex”. In today’s world, what is so frightening is not just the realization that humans are, after all, just a very small group of barely intelligent beings lost in an enormous universe within which we do not seem to have any significance whatsoever. Even more frightening is the very real possibility that we may not be realizing any of this for very much longer.

To be honest, the prospect for significant, positive, long lasting social change is not a good one. A series of major catastrophes, setting back human development for centuries, or even forever, seems to be a much more plausible future. There is still the possibility that human beings will somehow figure out how to move past the incredibly dangerous problems that threaten our immediate future, and muddle through the way that we always have done in the past. Avoiding Armageddon, however, would mean that billions more human beings in the future would have to put up with the same kind of immense suffering that billions of others have already been forced to endure ever since our species started out. Unfortunately, it is not at all obvious which of those two possibilities would turn out to be the worst case scenario.

So, for those of you who have read my text, or at least part of it, what do you think? Have I been too pessimistic about whatever was going on in all those different situations that I described? When I wrote about many of those same things in the books and articles that I published several years ago, I discovered afterwards that I was still being too idealistic about some of those situations. So what about this time? I would be more than willing to enter into a dialogue with anyone who has anything reasonable to say about any of this stuff. Something at least that does not come from the same kind of true believer that I used to be myself a long time ago.