Gap Protestors: 1000 Line Sidewalks

We live entangled in webs of endless deceit, often self-deceit, but with a little honest effort, it is possible to extricate ourselves from them. If we do, we will see a world that is rather different from the one presented to us by a remarkably effective ideological system, a world that is much uglier, often horrifying. We will also learn that our own actions, or passive acquiescence, contribute quite substantially to misery and oppression, and perhaps eventual global destruction.

As long as some specialized class is in a position of authority, it is going to set policy for the special interests that it serves.  But the conditions of survival, let alone justice, require rational social planning in the interests of the community as a whole – and by now that means the global community.  The question is whether privileged elites should dominate mass communication and should use this power as they tell us they must – namely, to impose necessary illusions, to manipulate and deceive the stupid majority and remove them from the public arena.  The question, in brief, is whether democracy and freedom are values to be preserved or threats to be avoided. In this possibly terminal phase of human existence, democracy and freedom are more than values to be treasured; they may well be essential to survival.

Modern industrial civilization has developed within a certain system of convenient myths.  The driving force of modern industrial civilization has been individual material gain, which is accepted as legitimate, even praiseworthy, on the grounds that private license yields public benefits in the classic formulation.  Now it has long been understood very well that a society that is based on this principle will destroy itself in time. It can only persist with whatever suffering and injustice that it entails as long as it is possible to pretend that the destructive forces that humans create are limited, that the world is an infinite resource and that the world is an infinite garbage can. 

At this stage of history either one of two things is possible:

Either the general population will take control of its own destiny

and will concern itself with community interests

guided by values of solidarity, sympathy and concern for others

or alternatively there will be no destiny for anyone to control. 

…it seems perhaps not unrealistic to look forward to a mass political movement that will be devoted to badly needed reforms, anti-imperialist and antimilitarist, concerned with guaranteeing minimal standards of health, income, education, industrial safety and conditions of work, and overcoming urban decay and rural misery. Within it, or related to it, there might develop a variety of more radical movements that explore the possibility of dismantling the system of private and state power and democratizing basic social and economic institutions through cooperatives and community and workers' control, and that organize and experiment to these ends. I would hate to see the Left too well organized at this stage (not much fear of this in any event), though one would hope that destructive factional squabbling could be overcome in favor of sympathetic and fraternal disagreement and, where possible, cooperation among those who have rather different ideas about what are, after all, rather obscure and poorly understood matters.

There are no magic answers, no miraculous methods to overcome the problems we face, just the familiar ones: honest search for understanding, education, organization, action that raises the cost of state violence for its perpetrators or that lays the basis for institutional change—and the kind of commitment that will persist despite the temptations of disillusionment, despite many failures and only limited successes, inspired by the hope of a brighter future.