Once upon a time, “locker room talk” like Donald Trump’s lewd and degrading remarks leaked to the media would have stayed safely sequestered from public view. Misogynistic locker room banter existed, as it were, in an alternate universe. What was said on the golf course or the barroom didn’t register as part of a man’s public reputation; in those places, men were free to say things that would be unforgivable in public. The coexistence of these two realms was seldom questioned. As a high school and college athlete, I remember hearing the kinds of things Trump has said, and they were quite unremarkable in that context. A boy could say the most brutish, repellant things in the locker room without damage to his reputation outside it. Respectable society would never find out. Likewise, when reporters and politicians mingled outside the public performances of their roles, an unwritten understanding kept their conversations safely off the record. I imagine Donald Trump feeling a sense of betrayal at the revelation of his remarks, as if a boy reported to another boy’s girlfriend what he said about her in the locker room.

I think this division into two realms extended to internal, psychological divisions in the individuals making the degrading boasts and comments about women. In polite company, they became people who did not harbor such thoughts. The locker room alter-ego was safely contained in a different psychic compartment. I can imagine a Donald Trump being sincerely – sincerely! – scandalized to hear in polite company the very things he himself said in the safety of the mens’-only field of misogyny. I can imagine him condemning what was said in all earnestness, with zero awareness of hypocrisy.

So it is that rape culture is allowed to persist. It needs a shadow zone. The locker room conversations that objectify and degrade women and contribute to rape culture need a “locker room” in which to happen, a wall of separation between it and the larger realm of general social acceptability.

This wall of separation is breaking down, thanks in large part to the ubiquity of recording technology and the impossibility of stopping the distribution of the recordings on the Internet. Contradictions, whether personal or social, that could once remain hidden are coming unstoppably to light. It is getting harder to uphold a divided self.

As with sex, so with money. Hillary Clinton is having a hard time maintaining a wall of separation between her public posture of economic populism and her decades-long ministration to the needs of Wall Street. In former times a politician’s speeches to elite insiders would exist in an inviolably separate realm from his or her public image. In inside circles of power, the politician would be free to express himself directly. No concealment of his allegiances was necessary, because no one outside the political and corporate elite was listening. So of course, Hillary Clinton was loathe to release the transcripts of her speeches to Wall Street banks. Those speeches were the equivalent of locker room talk, which is supposed to stay in the locker room. Here, though, the context is financial domination rather than sexual domination.

Something similar applies to Clinton’s infamous deleted emails. There is nothing new about the contrast between the public presentation of governance and its ugly inner workings. The exercise of political power has never been pretty. The backroom deals, the threats and coercion, the buying of favors… all the nastiness that the email scandal hints at is characteristic of politics as we know it. The difference today is that it can no longer be confined to the back room. In other words, it is getting harder to maintain the appearance of democracy in a reality of oligopoly.

It is perhaps necessary that Clinton and Trump are both such extreme expressions of the suppressed shadow of our culture, presenting itself in unambiguous form for clearing. Liberal pundits have repeatedly observed that the bigoted sentiments Donald Trump expresses are merely the undisguised version of what Republicans have been saying in code for a long time. The hidden erupts into view. Clinton, meanwhile, is no ordinary establishment politician; she is the very epitome of the establishment, embodying its insincerity, lack of imagination, normalized corruption, and narrow technocratic commitment to preserving the status quo.

This is not meant as a personal criticism. My purpose here is not to condemn Hillary or the Donald; it is to illuminate the dissolving of the insulating compartments that allow contradictions and hypocrisy to exist. Probably in person, each of them is a complex individual like you and me, a mixture of beauty and pain, playing the roles laid out for them. I imagine that in their most private moments neither fully identifies with those roles nor believes in the game into which they have been thrust, any more than you or I believe in it. The elites usually precede the people into cynicism. In any event, our current moment of social evolution is calling each of them, in their public roles, to be an avatar of a cultural shadow archetype, presented to us in extreme form so that it cannot be ignored.

Clinton and Trump are a product of their conditions, playing the “game of thrones” according to the secret rules of the insiders, in a system that has long allowed, encouraged, and in some ways nearly required hypocrisy. That system is coming to an end. We are entering by fits and starts an era of transparency in which, we may someday hope, secret rules and hypocrisy will have no purchase.

Another arena with a longstanding division between sanitized public presentation and gritty reality is law enforcement. As with misogyny and political corruption, there is nothing new about police brutality and nothing new about its disproportionate application to brown-skinned people. For a long time though, it was sequestered in the realm of the unmentionable, relegated to the left-wing margins of political discourse or the statistics of academic papers. No longer. The advent of ubiquitous cell phone video cameras and other video surveillance has lifted the lid off the dark political unconscious and exposed its contents to light.

Here again, this exposure is making the two contradictory functions of the police – serving and protecting, and bullying and abusing – impossible to maintain simultaneously. It is only possible if the latter function is well hidden in the shadows.

I could go on to make similar points about drone strikes, refugee camps, clearcuts, and all the other injury and injustice that technology and social media are bringing into view. For a long time, propriety and ideology have buffered normalcy from the ugly inner workings of its maintenance. For example, the ideology of development has buffered us from the horrors of Third World sweatshops, strip mines, dispossession of land, and so forth. Lurid caricatures of violent criminals hides the grinding injustice of the legal system. The triumphal narrative of exploration and progress obscures the genocide of indigenous cultures. These various buffers, which allow contradictions to stand, have been necessary to operate a civilization built on exploitation and ecocide. Open up any social institution – politics, finance, business, education, medicine, academia, and even philanthropy – and you will find within it the same ugly machinations of power.

Today these buffers are disintegrating, despite the best efforts of established power to maintain secrecy, prosecute whistle-blowers, and control information. We might thank technology for bringing the dark underbelly of our system to light, but I think something larger is afoot. The trend toward transparency that is happening on the systems level is also happening in our personal relationships and within ourselves. Invisible inconsistencies, hiding, pretense, and self-deception show themselves as the light of attention turns inward. The tools of self-examination are proliferating on every level, from the personal to the collective. Herein is a link between the political developments I’ve described and the world of self-help, spirituality, or consciousness. At its best, these comprise ways of shedding light onto our internal contradictions and blockages in order to create a kind of inner transparency. On the interpersonal level too, a lot of work around partnership and community also aims for transparency, for example to expose hidden resentments, repressed desires, and unconscious conflicts. Illuminating the contradictions between the story and the actuality of a relationship brings the possibility of healing.

When previously hidden contradictions rise to consciousness and collide, the result is first denial and rage, followed by cognitive dissonance and the breakdown of normalcy. We see that happening today in the public sphere. That process can be disorienting, even paralyzing, as familiar orienting certitudes turn false. Who are we as a people? What is reliable? What is possible? What is real? We aren’t what we thought we were, and it isn’t what we thought it was. This confusion is a good thing. It is a sign of liberation from the old story that confined us. The exposure and clearing of hidden contradictions brings us to a higher degree of integrity, and frees up prodigious amounts of energy that had been consumed in the maintenance of illusions. What will our society be capable of, when we are no longer wallowing in pretense?

Cross-posted from CharlesEisenstein.net

The post The Lid is Off: Transparency in the age of transition appeared first on P2P Foundation.

In fact Michael Arnovitz (“Thinking About Hillary — A Plea for Reason,” The Policy, June 12) comes right out and says that, because the Right and Left criticize Clinton for opposite, mutually inconsistent reasons, her critics must be wrong — presumably meaning that splitting the difference between them puts her in the Baby Bear position at the exact center, which is “just right.”

The problem is that But in fact the positions taken by those two parties are neither mutually exhaustive nor mutually exclusive. And the great majority of issues they agree on — the fundamental structural assumptions of corporate capitalism and American global hegemony — never become visible as “issues” at all because they’re not in dispute.

The “two sides” reflect the range of acceptable disagreement within a ruling class that shares most of its interests and assumptions in common. In fact even bringing up the concept of a ruling class, or of the basic structure of our system as reflecting the interests of that ruling class, is enough to make Chris Matthews clutch his pearls over “tinfoil hats.”

So that means both “centrism” and “extremism” are defined entirely in terms of the status quo. A centrist is one who implicitly accepts the normality and legitimacy of the existing system and its power structures. Any radical structural critique that looks into the role of class interest, race or gender privilege or the exercise of unaccountable power in its creation, is “extremist.”

“Moderates” are defined entirely in terms of how closely they adhere to a system regarded as normal, natural and inevitable in its fundamental nature, and “extremists” by how far they deviate from it.

Any “reform” that involves tinkering around the edges of a power structure without fundamentally changing it, and can be implemented by the same classes of people who are running the present system, will be classified as “moderate.” Any proposal that involves changing the fundamental power-structure and disempowering the current ruling class is “radical.”

Radical structural analysis refuses to treat the existing state of things as something that’s “just that way,” or “what most people want.” It sees the exercise of power for what it is — being in the interest of some at the expense of others. And it is therefore labeled “extremist” by the “centrists” who hold power.

Some of the most ardent centrists — like the smarmy Chris Matthews — dismiss any such radical structural critiques as “conspiracy theories.” On a late 2010 episode of the Matthews show, a guest who opposed the new TSA scanners and associated peep-or-grope regime claimed that the scanners were actually ineffective and mentioned that a number of high-ranking Homeland Security officials had stock in the company that made them. Matthews was near-apoplectic in denouncing this “conspiracy theory” — despite his own 30-second spots on MSNBC quoting Eisenhower on the Military-Industrial Complex.

So we wind up with a policy-making elite who limit themselves to a set of alternatives ranging from M to N, governed by what C. Wright Mills called “Crackpot Realism.” As Buckminster Fuller put it: They’re trying to solve problems with the same level of thinking that created those problems. Ivan Illich described such people’s approach as “attempting to solve a crisis by escalation.”

A good example of the latter is urban planners, who attempt to solve the traffic congestion caused by car-centered monoculture development by building new freeways and bypasses — which simply generate more traffic to and from the new suburbs and strip malls that grow up at every cloverleaf along the new subsidized highways. Or the American national security state, which deals with terrorism (the product of blowback from previous imperial intervention) through new interventions which generate even more terrorism.

Although centrists see themselves as the “adults in the room,” who see what must be done and don’t draw back from doing it, they also pride themselves on being the “real” humanitarians and idealists. To quote Michael Lofgren:

The benefit of crackpot realism is that the ordinary prudence of advocating avoidance of war can be depicted either as sloppy and unrealistic sentimentalism or as the irresponsible avoidance of the burdens and duties of a superpower in a dangerous world. In its refined form, crackpot realism wears the camouflage of idealism: military invasions are really aimed at humanitarian rescue, spreading democracy, or peacekeeping. In those cases, the crackpot realist can even affect a morally censorious tone: How can any serious person be in favor of letting Saddam Hussein remain president of Iraq? Or Bashir al Assad in Syria? Or whoever the Hitler du jour might be.

Centrism is utterly unself-critical, insofar as it ignores its own status as a component in a legitimizing ideology. Any system of power includes a cultural reproduction apparatus that tends to create the kinds of “human resources” who accept as normal and given the structure of power under which they live.

As part of a legitimizing ideology, centrist Horseshoe Theory is guilty of — as @NerbieDansers, a friend on Twitter, pointed out — “constant erasure of violence for which the reasonable, moderate center is responsible”; instead it “turns violence into a function of mere distance from a mythic peaceful center.” The system represented by the center is not simply “responsible” for violence; massive levels of violence have been, and are, entailed in establishing and maintaining the system of power that centrists recognize as normal.

The present system is not some natural or inevitable fact of nature that “just happened,” because it makes the most sense to do things that way. It is a thing with a beginning, a history — and (with apologies to Marx) it’s a history written in letters of blood and fire. As I have written elsewhere:

Bear in mind that the corporate-state power structure didn’t come about naturally or spontaneously.  It came about through conscious, massive application of political power over the past 150 years.

From the Gilded Age on, the state intervened massively in the market to create a society dominated by giant, centralized organizations like government agencies and corporations, and later by centralized state education, large universities, and nonprofit foundations. When this state-created and state-subsidized centralized industrial economy became plagued with chronic excess capacity and underconsumption, the state turned toward policies to keep it going.  This included a domestic economy centered on federal spending to absorb surplus capital through such massive state spending projects as the Interstate Highway System, a military-industrial complex that ate up huge amounts of surplus industrial output, and a foreign policy aimed at forcibly incorporating the markets and resources of the entire planet as a sink for surplus capital and output.

At the time the system was being imposed by the state, there was large-scale resistance by a general population that didn’t accept it as normal.  From the 1870s through WWI, a major part of the population refused to accept as normal a situation in which they worked as wage labors for large authoritarian hierarchies.  Movements such as the farm populist movement and the Knights of Labor amounted to near-insurrections, and such measures as the post-Haymarket repression and Cleveland’s suppression of the Pullman Strike constituted counter-revolution.

After the insurrection was defeated, the white-collar bureaucrats controlling corporate and state hierarchies adopted an educational system aimed at processing people who accepted the structure of power as normal.  The official public education movement, advocates of “100% Americanism,” and the like, aimed at creating “human resources” who were “adjusted” to accept authoritarianism and hierarchy as normal, and to “comply” with any orders coming from an apparatchik behind a desk — whether in a classroom, factory, or government office.

But we don’t have to look at history to see how much violence is at the heart of the system that these “reasonable centrists” take for granted. The system requires massive ongoing violence for its preservation. Just pick up a copy of William Blum’s KILLING HOPE and look at the United States’ post-WWII record of invading countries, overthrowing governments, backing military coups and sponsoring death squads. And the bipartisan foreign policy consensus that has prevailed for the past few decades has been defined around the legitimacy of such intervention. Even so-called “liberals” share the consensus that, as Chomsky put it, “America owns the world.”

The “reasonable centrists,” for their part, are typically shameless apologists for this consensus and the bloody intervention it promotes. The current news is full of examples of what garbage human beings these “adults in the room” really are.

At Business Insider, Josh Barro (“Donald Trump  and the GOP’s crisis,” May 3) contrasts Trump to “adults in the room” like Jeb Bush. The first three of Trump’s deviations from the alleged moderate orthodoxies of the donor class that Barro mentions are “opposing free trade, promising to protect entitlements from cuts, [and] questioning the value of America’s commitment to military alliances.” The fourth, challenging the growing acceptance of transgender people, is common to most of the GOP. So in practice, the main differences the Republican “adults in the room” have with Trump are his rejection of neoliberal orthodoxy on the global political hegemony of the U.S. and the corporate order it enforces, not his godawful social views.

Neera Tanden — head of Center for American Progress, Hillary Clnton ally and Clinton appointee to the Democratic Party’s Platform Committee — in 2013 stated on Twitter in regard to Syria that “while I don’t want to be the world’s policeman, an unpoliced world is dangerous. The US may be the only adult in the room left.”

Clinton herself, most centrists’ beau ideal of an adult in the room, associates herself with figures like Rahm Emanuel, who as head of the Democratic National Campaign Committee denied national party campaign funds in 2006 to candidates who opposed the Iraq war, and as Chicago mayor has run political cover for a police illegal detention site and promoted school charterization on the largest scale seen outside New Orleans. She voted to authorize Bush’s war in Iraq and regurgitated his lies about “weapons of mass destruction,” in order to maintain her future viability as a politican. As Obama’s Secretary of State, she was consistently the strongest voice in favor of military intervention as a tool of policy; she was the most influential voice behind Obama’s reluctant intervention in Libya, and to this day regrets that she did not persuade him to intervene in Syria full-scale. More recently she has not only defended Netanyahu’s crimes against humanity in Gaza, but promised to take America’s relationship with Netanyahu — not just Israel, but Netanyahu — to “the next level.”

Clinton recently devoted an entire speech (after praising her hosts, the American Legion — which started out as a right-wing paramilitary fighting Wobblies in the street) to smarmy self-congratulations that “the United States stands up to dictators” and promises to continue to maintain the world’s largest military to meet all the “threats” out there. This despite the fact that she actively encouraged a right-wing military coup in Honduras, and wears with pride the endorsement of her vacation buddy, war criminal Henry Kissinger, who was instrumental in Pinochet’s overthrow of Allende and the sweep of the entire South American continent by military dictatorships, as well as the invasion and genocide in East Timor.

As for all those “threats,” Clinton and Tanden share the same operating assumptions as Henry Kissinger and the rest of the bipartisan National Security establishment — a set of assumptions summarized by Chomsky’s statement quoted above that “the United States owns the world.” It is for the United States to unilaterally define what size military is sufficient for a given country’s “legitimate defensive needs,” while it defines its own “defensive” needs in terms of the ability to project offensive force anywhere in the world and successfully invade and defeat any other country. It is for the United States to unilaterally define “aggression” anywhere in the world, to define as a “threat” the capability to successfully defend against an American attack, and to define as “defense” encircling any such country, on the other side of the world, with offensive military bases.

The United States is the hegemonic power which upholds a global political, economic and military order established at the end of WWII, which exists to integrate the markets and natural resources of the Global South into the needs of Western corporate capital; and in the parlance of the U.S. National Security elite, any country which attempts to challenge that order by seceding from it is a “threat.”

In the name of upholding this global order against “threats,” the United States since WWII has invaded and/or overthrown the governments of more countries than any other empire in history, backed military coups and death squads, with a death toll of multiple millions.

This is what your “adults in the room” have done. They have constructed a system of power, first domestically and then globally, the main purpose of which is to extract surplus labor from us to feed the rentiers they represent. In enforcing this system of power, they have inflected megadeaths on the world, and have no compunctions against inflicting more. The “adults in the room” are monsters. It’s time to take away their plaything — the American state — which they have used to wreak this destruction and mayhem on the world, and to make sure nobody else ever wields it again.

Citations to this article:

• Carson, Kevin, “Why Are the ‘Adults in the Room’ So Awful?”, Libertarian Alliance Blog, Sept. 15, 2016
• Carson, Kevin, “Why Are the ‘Adults in the Room’ So Awful?”, The Gilmer Mirror, Sept. 15, 2016
• Carson, Kevin, “Why Are the ‘Adults in the Room’ So Awful?”, Augusta Free Press, Sept. 15, 2016

The post On Centrism: Why Are the “Adults in the Room” So Awful? appeared first on P2P Foundation.