Submitted by Warren Pollack,
Revolution In America: Speaking Truth To Power
A Quaker essay from 1955 entitled “Speaking Truth to Power,” has over time evolved into a single soundbite used by academicians and intellectuals alike to describe the bravery, and personal absorption of risk, required to be candid with people firmly in power.
When you speak to power in the United States you are most likely going to be ignored as opposed to being imprisoned, persecuted, divested, or killed. Were our government “either functional or operable” it would consider people speaking to power to be an advantage and then adjust.
The last time a “government” adjusted to speaking to power, however, was best illustrated by the brave but foolish man who stood up to a tank (tank-man) in Tiananmen Square China thereby providing the symbolism of personal sacrifice and thus the political insecurity needed to justify a massive change in public policy. In the United States today any person, or group of people, standing up to a tank(s) or a militarized police vehicle(s) will be run over and flattened, the photographic evidence of being squashed and splattered on the pavement would then provide endless entertainment for millions of temporarily outraged people either in minute long videos or even five second repeating “Vines” until something more entertaining came along.
Our “dumb government,” has been buying tanks, bullets, and airport security apparatus more as a profit center for looting as opposed as a counter to any threat to power existential or otherwise. The reality being that when you speak to power today nobody listens or cares beyond those that will immediately profit from the growing security, military-industrial, banking, education, “healthcare.. etc”, and corruption apparatus.
The calls for a needed revolution go unheeded both not only by the elite looters at the top of our society and but also from the very disenfranchised at the bottom of it. It does not matter if nuclear reactors explode, twin towers fall, flood waters engulf, oil spills slick, food becomes rancid, healthcare becomes inaccessible and unaffordable, regressive taxation absorbs all economic activity, the middle class evaporates, corporate and banking schemes steal, constitutional rights are voided, top-secret initiatives determine the winners and losers, laws are written to special interests or broken by elites without recourse, or even an occasional baker's dozen of black men get shot. The point being, that in the United States every disaster perpetrated on the citizenry can be used by the empowered to legally siphon money “from the people” to the looters.
Rhetoric spins around a hamster driven news cycle, but no event no matter how dramatic will result in any kind of change let alone a revolution. The propaganda engine, intent on generating profitable controversy in lieu of producing risky and costly news, generates waves of noise from talking heads framed both left and right; with the competing waves canceling themselves out as they collide. “We the people” are encouraged to give our opinions in neverending and fruitless discussions on the dead end of chat boards and social networking. United States citizens are dupes and participants in pre-engineered divide and conquer rhetoric of a marketing born propaganda engine employing more than sixty years of experience.
Each individual participates with their voice in a cacophony of polarized and framed issues thereby causing a mass cancellation effect. This noise in turn allows for the looting of life, liberty, and property to occur to such an extent that a few have become rich beyond the dream of avarice as the majority become harvested useless eaters.
In this scientific age, there are many ideas that could improve the situation almost immediately but no impetus, reasoning, or leadership exists to see it happen. So no, an army of American “tank-men” symbolically standing up to oppression at the street level will not cause a revolutionary moment to occur. Change away from consumerism towards communism or laissez-faire capitalism, no, we cannot have any of that we are certainly not going to use the scientific method as opposed to magic for problem-solving. Of course, the restoration of rule law does not require any ideological adherence, social science, or planification whatsoever.
Perhaps as the chemical side effect of our hormone altering plasticine world, we have become genetically unglued. Evidence to this possibility exists in the public's attention to emasculated male celebrities displaying their sexual cross-gender identity crisis. The media circus certainly revels in the sideshow of menopausal-apeish-beast-women-creatures, the only manly figures remaining in the kabuki theater of US finance and politics. Revolution cannot be born by the spectacle of entertainment or by those that have been neutered or genetically cowed.
There are many reasons why the US will not have a revolution. To this end, I have updated some the original quaker essay talking points with a set of newly minted points of observation applicable for late 2015 and our fate onward from that point;
--A wholly coercive system consisting of a police state
--Bureaucracy runs amok
--Dependency has replaced morality, personal responsibility, and civics
--Propaganda has replaced fact and truth finding
--Everyone has a voice, as long as those voices speak within the narrow context of divide and conquer issue framing
--Opinions echo and cancel each other out
--Speaking in a single reformative voice becomes an impossibility
--Correctness has replaced personality
--Specialization and complexity caused loss of overview
--”Carpetbagging,” for friends and family represent the greatest personal imperative achievable
--Stoicism and polarization have become substitutes questioning and reason
--A great narrowing of opportunity, options, and outlook due to corporatization
--A profits efficient and integrated system of unparalleled complexity with no redundancy resiliency or planning
--Depersonalization paradoxically coexists with a worship with a celebration of self
--Schooling and indoctrination stress conformity and compliance rather than thinking
--Perception trumps fact, history, map, or insight
--Labor value and the value of human life continues to diminish
--Authority and compliance, rather than individual conscience represents the dominant ethos
--Participation in illusory economic dreams and fantasy become aspirational points of lockdown
--The natural environment continues to become permanently degraded thus diminishing the world's carrying capacity
--Corruption has become legalized and institutionalized
--All individuals franchised individuals are participants and beneficiaries of corruption
--Consumerism has become one of two major operable ideologies, Islam being the second major ideology
--Totalitarianism has become inverted
Totalitarianism has become distributed across governments, groups, elites, bureaucracies from local to federal, from federal to international, and from international to a few corporations that exist everywhere. Everyone that earns a wage, buys a product, pays taxes, ponies up money for fines, votes, or conducts economic activity have been captured and are beneficiaries of systemic corruption. Unconstrained local tyranny has been making brutal contact with this nation's most vulnerable, this trend will graduate to the middle class and expand from local to national level next.
In other words, the year 2015 differs significantly from 1955, because today you cannot speak to power because there is nobody to speak to, not a single leader can be found and constructive ideas, although plentiful and obvious, will not be allowed take hold.
A leaderless, narrowing, putrefied, lying lawless system of festering corruption; how well do you think our society will be able to absorb our next crisis point or rise to meet humanity's greatest challenge, survival itself? Speaking to power within a power vacuum anyone?; a vacuum being a place where sound cannot travel.
Thus, my personal strategy for change has morphed from speaking to power in favor of becoming a monk rather than a martyr. If I could stand in front of a tank and have it force positive change I would do so but clearly that opportunity won’t happen or present itself. Beyond 2015, I fear it will continue to be everyman for himself and thus divided we'll fall having rejected the spirit of one nation, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.
