Walter Mosley (6 page)

We have more in common than we are against each other. It is only the big dollars of big business that separate us. But the technology and potential technique of the Internet open a door for us to unite outside of the edicts and directions of the so-called political parties, the Joes, and the Great Shadow Joe.

The new technology can bring down the walls of the oligarchs; it can allow us to unite and change politics from an adversarial stance to one of unity.

This is my ardent desire—to allow the individuals of our virtual democracy to come together on their own terms, not on the made-up issues of the wealthy who only wish to divide the lower classes and therefore shore up their position while keeping us groveling for crumbs.

And so, even if my articulation here is not at the moment technically possible, there is at least a strategy
for an attempt at building an underground system of democracy against the surface lies of the special-interest parties.

 

And let me underscore the core belief of this Democracy Initiative:
Objectivity
. This is not a left or right question. Democracy is for all of us; for the voter, the child, the lonely prisoner, and those who live here without the benefit of citizenship; it is for black and white, young and old, educated and uneducated, lovers and haters. We must support a system based on our participation no matter where that participation leads.

T
he late nineteenth and the twentieth centuries could be looked at as the testing grounds for what I call the
School of Suspicion
. This approach to discipline is the study of a world, or a system of worlds, that cannot be seen by the naked eye, understood by the conscious mind, or brought into focus by the cause-and-effect lenses of animal awareness. The
School of Suspicion
comes out of Einstein's negation of Newton, Freud's articulation of a completely unconscious mind that guides conscious human actions,
Darwin's notion that life is never an endpoint but always in the midst of bubbling biological change, and, of course, Marx's position that human organization is based not upon gods or the rights of kings but upon the complex dialectics put into play by the economic infrastructure. Marx tells us that we are slaves to this system of economics—that our minds and social organizations are dictated by the means and the mode of production.

One does not have to agree completely with Karl to accept the fact that the way we do business affects the way we live life in forms that are incomprehensible to the logical and objective mind.

Women are being raped by the tens of thousands in the Congo, hundreds of thousands of times, at least in part because of the worldwide need for the chemical—Coltan—that is used to make cell phones. The coveting of oil under the ground causes devastation in the towns and villages above. The concentration of wealth creates poverty; charity then continues rather than alleviating the disparity. Crazily, race is created by racism, which itself was brought into being by imperialism, under the rules of colonization and now under the new guise of globalization. Criminals are created by the division of labor and the kinds of personalities
needed to satisfy production. Alcoholism, drug addiction, and neuroses to a great degree are reactions to this organization of labor and the products it creates. Entire groups of indigenous peoples live on land they do not control. The atmosphere itself is a casualty of unnecessary waste and meaningless production.

Everything happens for a reason (maybe) but these reasons are not immediately knowable. How can I and my ancestors have built this great wealthy nation but still be poor? Why are our most revered institutions seemingly blind to the blights of obesity, illiteracy, disease, gangs, bloated prisons rolls, and common feelings of hopelessness and impotence?

Does someone up there hate us?

No.

The economic infrastructure calls for these situations, afflictions, and cyclic pain. The way we are organized to live and work, eat, and resist the ravages of nature, makes us into economic mutants that have no notion of the origins of our self-mutilations.

 

This step begins with the word
understanding
. It goes without saying that we have to understand the nature of our oppression before we can counter it, but in this case I'm using the word in its most active form. I
believe that we need to understand the economic infrastructure in the same way a psychotherapist believes that we need to comprehend unconscious motivations in our psyches.

Don't get me wrong here: I am not a proponent of psychoanalysis-proper, nor amIaMarxist. But I do believe that the
School of Suspicion
has opened doors to motivation in our hearts, lives, and the physical world—doors that we cannot ignore. How people live their lives originates in places that they have never been taught to question.

What I am proposing is a kind of Marxian Psychoanalysis that has as its goal the understanding of how our organization of labor and wealth creates the situations of our everyday lives and the bugaboos in our minds.

 

Almost everybody works for a living. We work hard, most of us. From the CPA to the corner heroin dealer, we all work. And you can't work unless there's a job to do. That's why there are no blacksmiths today: No one needs a blacksmith and so no one will pay for that job. But people do need accountants and drugs and women raped to keep them from getting in the way of the system of profit; we need mercenaries to kill Iraqis
and a president to toe the line; we need scientists and street sweepers, prostitutes and priests. Our needs create our world and, in turn, the world we create re-forms our needs. This wobbly spiral of human life and economy, which has many elements in common with the theory of evolution, is what we have to question if we are to understand and take control of our (human) destiny.

Once we accept the fact that everything happens for a reason (and that that reason is often based on production, labor, and need) we can begin to decipher the problems we have. Once we have even the dimmest notion of the purpose of an action, no matter how heinous or self-destructive, we will find ourselves on the road to recovery.

Consider the blue-collar worker who has received inferior schooling that has prepared him for only lowlevel labor and income. It is easy to understand why this worker either sells or uses drugs in order to cope with the oppressive configuration of his life. With just this small bit of knowledge we understand that this worker's suffering must be alleviated if we wish to change the situation. Law, morality, feelings of intellectual superiority fly out the window when we look at social situations through the lens of labor, production, and survival.

Sometimes a woman just needs a drink: Either give her the drink (soma) or assuage the need.

We need to put our culture on the analyst's couch if we want to understand our minds in this world. Mother-love is potent but so are unemployment and prison. Unconscious drives motivate everyone but so do the thrumming needs of the economic infrastructure. Evolution makes and remakes us with every generation (indeed with every birth) but a revolution festers in the cracks of the
School of Suspicion
and we are on the verge of making the leap from blindness to blinding light.

 

I am progressive politically but this particular step is not necessarily progressive. Once you understand the underlying economic reasons for a social woe you might not take an action to relieve that problem. I can only hope that, once people see that the forces that drive our enemies also drive us, they will want to sit down and reorganize the systems that have so warped our world.

T
he older we get the more we live in the past. Memories and beliefs blend with contemporary images beheld by our old eyes and we begin to see things that aren't quite there. If you learned survival from the Depression or a war, if you came to understand others through an old manifestation of racism or sexism, if you came to know the world through paper and ink rather than screens and keyboards, you may have a vision of the world that has ever-lessening relevance. But regardless of the waning significance of
your knowledge and awareness you are regarded, and regard yourself, as well-educated, knowledgeable, and maybe even influential; maybe you are—influential—but that doesn't make you right; you might very well be making decisions based on experiences, and supposed truths, that no longer govern the world we live in.

The reason you seem so smart and current is not because you live in this world today but because you have agglomerated wealth and mastered a backwardlooking but dominant system of articulation and communication.

In truth, in many ways, the younger generations know this world better than their elders simply because the world as it is is
all
they know. From computer systems to the distribution of wealth, young people have important contributions to make to the general dialogue about the way things actually are and, therefore, how change might be effected.

We cannot blame the youth for the TV shows, movies, ads, and campaigns that rob them of their wealth and (seemingly) their sanity. The term
bling
was co-opted by Madison Avenue and made into a billion-dollar business that the youth feed into but do not, in any meaningful way, profit by. Our culture, economy, and any hope for a future lie heavily on the
backs of our youth—and they know it. They rhyme about it and live out the frustrations in the streets and in their veins. They know many things but we also robbed them, most importantly, of a proper education that might enable them to speak to us about their world in our nomenclature.

The innocent future of the world belongs to the young while the past is our crime. My generation—the generation that, for the most part, sat by witnessing the holocaust of Cambodia, Vietnam, Chile, and elsewhere—now has rising ire against inner-city gangbangers and drug dealers. Can't we see these actions as attempts for (a small portion of) our youth to bring organization and a conception of justice into their lives? Can't we see that we forced this world into existence even as we now abandon it for the sweet dreams of a past that may have never been?

 

From our strongholds, our belief in a world that has long-since passed its zenith, we control and then castigate the young as they suffer for our mistakes. Do we honestly believe that the young have refused to take up the reins, to obtain a useful education, to face adulthood while at the same time living within a worldwide system of consumerist infantilization? After all ...
who makes the video games and
bling
, the fancy shoes and TV
reality
shows? The young people don't own or control this world; they merely finance it with their sparse dollars, their blood and souls.

 

What am I trying to get at in this diatribe? It's simple: We (the supposed elders) have to begin to create a collaborative relationship between ourselves and the youth of America and the world. We have to realize that we can't just ask inner-city youth to give up their gangs and music while we go banging away at foreign nations with abandon and even celebratory élan. We can't complain about the untrustworthiness of our young when our own bankers, congressmen, insurance companies, and financial advisors rob us blind and then ask to be bailed out, forgiven, and reelected. We have to sit at the table with the youth of our nation and change and grow as much as we are asking them to change and grow. Through this dialogue we have to learn from them as we expect them to learn from us. We have to give up some control, some money, and most of our connection to a dissipating image of the past.

The young people are the only ones who can take care of this world.... We need to make an absolute commitment to them.

The process of this step is to begin questioning our beliefs. For instance:

Recently a conservative candidate for president sang a rousing chorus of
bomb, bomb, bomb . . . bomb, bomb Iran
, a takeoff on a pop song of the middle '60s. This bastardization of a forty-year-old song made clear my fear that so many people in power live, and thrive, in the past.

Maybe in the '50s and '60s brute force was a workable method of curtailing nuclear proliferation; maybe we could attain our ends by flexing our muscles in those long-ago days. Looking at this stance from today's standpoint we might have been wrong even then, but today there is no question that our hegemony over weapons of mass destruction is over. Within a decade countries like Togo and Luxembourg will have the wherewithal to produce and deliver these terrible products.

If we follow these archaic templates of balance, the world will suffer from it. We need diplomacy and communication to stem the potential for violence on a grand scale. Young people are at the forefront of communication if only because they constantly create one of the most universal languages—popular music. We need to bring them into our meetings and discuss with them, as equals, the problems we all face in this twenty-first-century village of ours.

The older generation's decisions, to a great degree, are based on misplaced certainty and fear whereas the youth have optimism and a much healthier learning curve than our aging brains can muster. We must cut away that which is no longer useful in our stores of memory and bring what's left, our valid experience, to our young people. Together we have a chance of creating international parity and a country where brothers and sisters come in all ages, sexes, races, and creeds.

C
ost. The Great Shadow Joe and his acolytes, the Joes, grasp this term with uncanny acuity. They know what everything costs down to the micromil: planks of wood, fish off the coast of Brazil still swimming and dreaming of the filtered sun, unending acres of fallow earth in southern Wyoming, the labor in your hands and in your aging brain. They know how much it costs to get a left-handed person to buy a product in a market versus the cost of snagging a righthander. They understand the way to bring you to life in steps from sexual arousal, to desire for comfort, to the cash register—all while you're talking to your mother on a cell phone about Christmas dinner.