Some folks here at caucus99percent have asked those of us who reject mainstream political assumptions to start explaining more clearly what we DO believe. This thread is my response to that. I'm going to use this thread to uncover and piece together my own political philosophy. I also would like this thread to provide a place for everybody's questioning of assumptions, the more fundamental the better--and not just assumptions I want to question! I hope that everybody feels free to bring their own questioning and imaginings to the table.

Come outside.

WHAT HOLDS US BACK?

Welcome to the essay I've been putting off writing, because this one goes down to what I think of as bedrock reality: who I am, what my life is, why I act, why I don't act. In the course of this essay, I may also imagine what other people's lives might be, why they act, why they don't act. Those guesses about other people could be wrong, but I'm going to include them, mainly because I'm not average. Most people are worse off than me, and everybody, including me, should remember that.

Since this is going to be a hard essay to write, let's start on a positive note. I'll share one of my dreams with you.

I'd like to found a press.

I have a lot more to say about that, but because I think it's just possible that someday my dream might come true, I'm not going to share too many details online where megalomaniac assholes deploy software to monitor every little person who disagrees with them. The days when I could say "Oh, I'm too small; they wouldn't bother with little ol' me" are over, if even little Wordpress sites are getting taken down. Thinking "Oh, I'm not radical enough for them to bother" also likely does not apply any more either; their standards for what is too radical appear to be quite fluid.

So there, before I got to the third paragraph, is the first obstacle.

Meet Obstacle One: Everything Wired Is Monitored

You want to talk about self-censorship? Here it is. I've got a bunch of ideas for things to do, all of them currently daydreams. It would be incredibly helpful to talk them over with you, but I'm strongly disinclined to put them where you can see them, because everything I say here is collected. Given the nutcase way the security state is behaving, it's no longer crazy to say that some security state goon might decide someday to look at the data being collected on me. If that ever happens, said goon will probably wreck whatever plans I revealed, either because I am a dissident, or just because he can.

Of course, I don't need to use the internet. We could get a bunch of us together, and brainstorm in person. I think it would be a blast. And we wouldn't have to only brainstorm about my ideas, of course; we each could bring something to the table, and only time and the need for sleep would set the limits.

Meet the next obstacle. All of you will be familiar with this one:

Obstacle Two Needs No Introduction: Money

Ever wonder why attendance at festivals and conventions is going down? Fewer people have the time and money to travel. (I bet this affects the numbers at big, centralized rallies as well, but that's just a guess.)This is something that spooks me more than a little; freedom of movement is a big deal to me, and I always understood why the English were so emphatic about their footpaths remaining open to anybody, whether they went through a big estate or not. Americans' freedom of movement--and probably the movements of people elsewhere--are hampered by not being able to take time off, either because they can't afford to, or because they would lose their jobs if they did. Even those who can take time off don't always have the money to travel. When I was a kid, travel and lodging were relatively cheap. Those days are gone.

There are probably people here who could afford to travel. But there are also people who couldn't. Are we to leave them out simply because they are further down the economic scale?

This is the point where I start to envision a C99 travel fund, with people like me donating to it so that people with less money could still travel.

Meet Money The Obstacle II: Electric Boogaloo.

Why don't I start a travel fund, or, failing that, at least visit some of you? (I'm assuming that I would be welcome; if I wouldn't that would definitely present another obstacle!) It's been obvious to me for a while that it would be a good idea; unlike most people, my time is relatively free (more on that later). So why don't I?

Because two years ago I bought a house.

I felt somewhat ambivalent about that decision. I have a family, though no children, and, like everyone who has a family they actually like, I wanted that family to be secure. Security is essentially an illusion these days, but I wanted the closest thing to security we could get. There were clearly two paths to that security: one, go light, and two, buy and own land outright.

Seeing the crazy prices on real estate, I seriously considered dumping most of our worldly goods and radically changing our lives. I did research on living in RVs; I even bought and read a book on the subject. At the end of the day, there were too many strikes against the idea: there are three rather than two of us (and two cats), which would be pretty cramped in an RV; one of us has a chronic disease, which could present some problems for a nomadic existence later on; and the killing blow: only one of us realistically could drive something that big. I tried to imagine myself overcoming my driving anxiety. I pictured myself driving the RV. Fine. I pictured myself backing it up.

So, if we didn't get security by becoming as light, moveable, and flexible as possible, we had to get it by owning land. It was absolutely clear to me that renting was the least powerful and least secure option out there, and that it should never be done by anybody who has a reasonable chance of doing something else. Most people don't have a chance of doing something else. (Like I said, I'm privileged).

I bought a house. Because there was no mortgage, it may seem that there would be no debt, but there actually were far more costs associated with getting into a house than I had foreseen. There ended up being what is, for me, substantial credit card debt. I'm told that what I think is substantial is actually really light debt by American standards. Doesn't matter; it looks substantial to me. Additionally, I now have responsibility for a house, which means that when the 30-year-old HVAC goes out, I have to do something about it. Until I do actually replace that HVAC, which is teetering on its last legs, and furnish the two unfurnished rooms in my house (my bedroom and the living room), and pay off my debts, I don't feel free to rent a room at the beach two hours away, much less travel the country.

Now maybe that obstacle isn't a material one. If I were a different person, I'd spend money if I had it in my account and not worry about the HVAC or my bedroom, and you all would have probably met me by now. So maybe the obstacle is in my mind.

But I bought the house to get the closest thing to security for my family I could, so it seems like half-assed pretzel logic to seek security and then act with reckless abandon. Particularly when I'm in debt. Have I mentioned that I hate debt, especially considering who's often on the other end of those debts?

Now, you might ask why I need to see any of you at all in order to found a press. The reason is that there's a serious limit to what I can do alone. Besides, I don't really want to do it alone.

Meet obstacle three.

Obstacle Three: Cultural Blitzkrieg

I've written elsewhere about the 40-year assault on American culture and the people who live here. The barrage has been psychological, cultural, economic, moral, legal; everything has been the subject of sustained and unrelenting attack. Somebody once told me that a Nixon staffer, on his way to jail, told the press: We will take America so far to the right that it will be unrecognizable. The most important word in that sentence is not "right," but "unrecognizable." That word, in that context, seethes with malice. The metaphor is of battering a face.

It seems likely that the subsequent forty years of cultural blitzkrieg were what he was talking about.

The damage wreaked by that carpet-bombing has become so terrible that even right-wing people have finally noticed something is amiss, though as usual, they mostly misdirect the blame. In fact, we are living in a strange politics now where more people on the right are horrified by the social wreckage than those on the left (even though many of those right-wingers were cheering on the wrecking ball as recently as ten years ago.) I am not talking about Democrats here (you will never find me confusing the words "Democrat" and "left" in my essays.) Many independent left-wing dissidents look at the wreckage and say, "Who cares, American culture was horrible anyway."

The culture was not a very good one. Grievous sins created fault lines right through its heart. However, preferring the rubble left by forty years of right-wing carpet-bombing to the culture that preceded it is remarkably wrongheaded. After all, it's not like the Black Panthers were wrecking the culture for its racist crimes. It wasn't Emma Goldman smashing the power structure to bits for its injustice. It matters who wrecks something, and why. (Iraq is an excellent example of this truism). Usually, the agenda of the wrecking crew affects what kind of social arrangement you end up with and, in particular, who benefits from the ruin thus created. Even a thirst for vengeance on America at any cost could hardly be satisfied with the current arrangement, which leaves the exact same people in charge who were in charge in the year of my birth: mostly white, mostly men, entirely rich.

Well. Unless the people wanting vengeance were the people who were in charge in the year of my birth--mostly white, mostly men, entirely rich--and they wanted vengeance for being told off, temporarily, by a large section of the American people. Apparently, some of the political and legal results of the years 1954-1980 still rankle nearly forty years later. Narcissists don't like being told there are limitations to what they can do. But that is no reason for the independent left, or any dissident, to agree with them.

Their relentless barrage has reorganized the cultural and political landscape the way a volcano reorganizes an island. It also seems to have reconstructed people's brains, changing the way they think and process information. One of the ways this has occurred is through the deployment of handheld continuous digital devices, which interrupt human attention on the local at repeated intervals, or, at worst, eradicate it altogether. In recent years, people have noticed that conversation itself is a dying art, and that face-to-face interaction is becoming difficult. (Recently, I was in a Thai restaurant. I glanced over at a table nearby, and three men were all staring down at their cell phones in their laps. It was as if they were a million miles from each other. I had to wonder why they bothered to have a meal together at all.) People now talk about "getting together" as an outmoded cultural artifact, the way I would talk about going to see Buffalo Bill Cody's Wild West Show: Remember when people used to do that?

Disrupting attention from the local and the material has a host of potential reactionary results, especially when the disruption becomes continuous, which it has since cell phones became ubiquitous. I could write a book on the effects of the digitization of human interaction, and people have: https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2015/10/reclaiming-conver... For now, suffice to say that it's obviously harder to find friends in meatspace when people have relocated their social lives online, and if you can't find friends, how are you going to find allies? (For those who think that finding friends online is a fine replacement to finding them in the material world, I refer you to the beginning of this essay.)

It's also hard to find friends when the pool of potential friends has been shrunk by the cultural barrage I described. Let me explain what I mean by that. A great many people now parrot one or another set of prefabricated talking points. The repetition of these talking points replaces thinking, and governs how the adherent understands the world. The only independent choice involved in this mental operation appears to be the choice of which fixed set of talking points one repeats, which is largely determined by party affiliation or one's placement on an arbitrary political scale.

Although I might like or even love those people, they won't be able to provide the kind of friendship I'm looking for, which is a meeting of minds, without which my kind of political action is impossible. You have to at least see the same reality I do, even if we don't agree on what to do about it or whether it's good or bad. If not, how can we form the kind of friendship that makes activism possible?

Obstacle 4: Exhaustion

Right now, I'm feeling, "I just don't have the energy to do this. I can't finish this essay."

That feeling, more than anything, stops me from acting. It is another result of the cultural blitzkrieg, but it deserves its own category. There are two different elements to this exhaustion: moral and material.

Weaponized material exhaustion works in a fairly simple way. Once you find potential friends, it's hard to actually make friends. Once made, it's difficult to maintain friendship, much less take on a substantial undertaking with those friends, like, for instance, pushing back against the status quo. Why? People's time and energy have been stolen and they haven't any to spare.

I have written before about the theft of time. It works simply: you drive down wages and salaries without driving down prices. People then work more and more to try and maintain their standard of living. They mostly fail, and work more and more to slow their descent. Eventually, they are lucky if they have time and energy to do their jobs, look after their children and any elderly people or invalids in their families, and get an hour or two on the sofa in front of the television once a day. Anything other than family or work falls into rapid disrepair. Indeed, the family itself falls into disrepair, since raising children takes considerable time. Organizations which arise from communities of blood, culture, or propinquity wither, and forms of quick portable interaction prosper.

Moral exhaustion is perhaps the most important obstacle to action around. History tells us that occasionally, even starving people rebel. But demoralized people rarely do. Sometimes the demoralized lash out in a kind of convulsion, attacking one or many scapegoats. Sometimes the demoralized remember who is really to blame, and do what a veteran did while I lived in Washington DC. He came to the National Mall in his dress uniform with a sign that said "Tax the rich." He propped that sign against his leg, saluted the Capitol Building, and blew his brains out.

What demoralized people rarely do is mount successful resistance.

Again, I could write an entire book about the psychological games the powerful have been playing with the people of the United States. Right now, it's enough to say that they have been destroying human beings' capacity for hope by activating it, presenting the simulation of success, and then revealing that success to be even more failure. It's a spin on learned helplessness: animals and humans cease to take action when they experience repeated adverse effects with no possibility of escape. In this case, supposed avenues of escape are repeatedly opened up, only to have each one provide the same adverse stimulus, the same pain, in increasing dosage each time. This is, by the way, why I call Obama a hope vampire.

It's fairly obvious that the powerful are using the psychological tactics of a military operation on the populace. In my research for this essay, I looked up "shock and awe," expecting to find some information on the Nazis. Imagine my surprise when I found this Wikipedia entry:

Shock and awe (technically known as rapid dominance) is a tactic based on the use of overwhelming power and spectacular displays of force to paralyze the enemy's perception of the battlefield and destroy its will to fight. Though the concept has a variety of historical precedent, the doctrine was explained by Harlan K. Ullman and James P. Wade in 1996 and was developed specifically for application by the US military by the National Defense University of the United States.

Rapid dominance is defined by its authors, Harlan K. Ullman and James P. Wade, as attempting

to affect the will, perception, and understanding of the adversary to fight or respond to our strategic policy ends through imposing a regime of Shock and Awe.[3]

Further, rapid dominance will, according to Ullman and Wade,

impose this overwhelming level of Shock and Awe against an adversary on an immediate or sufficiently timely basis to paralyze its will to carry on ... [to] seize control of the environment and paralyze or so overload an adversary's perceptions and understanding of events that the enemy would be incapable of resistance at the tactical and strategic levels.[4]

Each of these obstacles deserves its own essay, and eventually will get one, but for now, I thought it would be useful to catalog all the obstacles I could see and put them in one place.

The next essay will be on the major responses I see to these obstacles: how we understand them, and how we react.

What prevents you from acting?