Our Fate is not in our hands

Why do I keep banging on about Strathclyde Region’s social strategy? Basically because I got a decade to ensure that it was firmly embedded – which is 5 times longer than any other strategy I handled. To be fair, I’ve been responsible for only 4 strategies in my time – in Scotland, Azerbaijan, Krgyzystan and Bulgaria

I did start what was to be a 4 year project in 2010 in China but resigned after only a few weeks because I couldn’t cope with life in Beijing – expressed in this (short) paper Lost in Beijing – the loneliness of a long-distance consultant which, in offering the various reasons for my departure, also argued the importance of fitting people properly to context.

Most of us like to think that we are, at least, partially responsible for our “lucky breaks” although I have increasing respect for the view of my fellow-blogger, Dave Pollard who has, in recent years, taken to the argument that denies there is any such thing as Free Will. In a recent post he explained

Caitlin Johnstone got to the heart of why we continue to tolerate the massive dysfunction, corruption and inequality of wealth and power that characterizes our political, economic and social systems. She wrote:

People say “I’m free because where I live I can say, do and experience anything I want!” But that’s not true; you can’t. You can only say, do and experience what you’ve been conditioned to want to say, do and experience by the mass-scale psychological manipulation you’ve been marinating in since birth. You can do what you want, but they control what it is that you want.

It appears that we can, on the one hand, appreciate that we have no free will — that everything we believe and do is strictly the result of our biological and cultural conditioning, given the circumstances of the moment — and, on the other hand, rail against stupidity, greed, incompetence and the thousand other sins that, somehow, ‘shouldn’t’ be allowed, or ‘shouldn’t’ be. As if we had some choice in the matter. So the questions that Caitlin’s remarkable paragraph raises for me are:

1. She says we are conditioned by “psychological manipulation”. By whom? Just the rich and powerful control freaks? Or everyone we meet, read, and otherwise interact with?

2. She says they control what we want. I might agree, but that depends on who they are. Again, just the rich and powerful they? Or everyone?

3. Presumably they control what we want through persuasion, manipulation, propaganda, censorship, advertising, PR, misinformation, and otherwise feeding into our conditioned beliefs and desires. Don’t family, friends, co-workers, writers, artists, scientists, philosophers, neighbours, acquaintances, community-members and just about everyone else we interact with basically do the same things? And don’t they often have more influence than the miscreants Caitlin principally seems to want to blame?

4. Where exactly do the miscreants and other influencers who condition us get the ideas, beliefs etc that they try to push on us? Aren’t they just conditioned the same as we are?

A few years ago, another writer made the same point - Raoul Martinez’s Creating Freedom – the lottery of birth, the illusion of consent and the fight for our future (2016)

British artist and documentarian Martinez makes his literary debut writing on a theme taken up recently by writers such as economists Thomas Piketty and Joseph Stiglitz, journalist Bob Herbert, and activist Ralph Nader: inequality, injustice, greed, and entrenched power have undermined democracy and threaten the common good and the future of our planet. Because the forces that shape identity act so insidiously, individuals may feel they have freedom of choice; however, as the author insists, freedom is a delusion. 

In reality, we are manipulated by capitalism, which indoctrinates us to be consumers; the media, controlled by wealthy owners who make sure their own self-serving views are promoted; an electoral system hijacked by big donors and lobbyists; and an economy that benefits the wealthy with access to better education and resources. Our idea of freedom, Martinez argues, has been “expertly moulded to suit the interests of those with the power to shape it.” He devotes a third of the book to examining limits on “innate freedom,” which include the economic and social conditions into which a child is born, early nurturing and education, and “variations in genes and experience.” 

In Part 2, “The Illusion of Consent,” Martinez examines limits on political freedom from government institutions and policies, economic theories that endorse capitalism, and media that have spun “webs of deceit and secrecy” throughout society. To the author, “free market” is an oxymoron. His final section proposes ways “to change the game.” The arts, he says, can help us imagine a better future; equally important are individual “acts of courage, generosity and compassion.” Drawing on a wide range of sources, including political theory, philosophy, and the social sciences, Martinez argues earnestly and densely for an alternative to our “impoverished vision of humanity.” The choir to which he preaches, though, is likely to want more than a well-intentioned manifesto of familiar ideas; it will also want concrete suggestions for change.