The Secular Fundamentalist

Restructure: Shifting the Parameters of Social Control

Chapter 11: Restructuring - shifting the parameters of social control

If the ransacked and battered natural environment is finding it difficult to differentiate between ‘military’ damage and ‘civilian’ productivity, the human community isn’t faring much better.

Permanent revolution and production war mobilization has already uprooted and transformed our lives to a degree that in less sophisticated times would have been accompanied by military/security force intervention and extremist political pressure.

Despite its violence and psychological intrusiveness, the Chinese Cultural Revolution was amateurishly primitive by comparison and nowhere near as far reaching.  The reconstruction of human society that is now being attempted is the most totalitarian ever, just out from a century heavily scarred by its stamp.

Totalitarianism doesn’t have to be predicated by violence and repression, or even primarily mediated by the state.  That is just old fashioned totalitarianism.  The New fashioned privatized variety still has the penchant for the strongest possible control of civil populations, the culture of enthusiasm, the quasi religious veneration of its objectives and symbols, the intensive propaganda and the mass mobilization, especially of the young etc. etc. At least in developed and mature economies it no longer needs to use intimidation and force to marginalize and depower its enemies; intimidation and force that always used to give away its more sinister face.

Medievally garbed mullahs, Red Guards and Black Shirts who want or wanted a return to older and/or authoritarian styled religious and political disciplines and observances, are and were the old fashioned fundamentalists.  New fashioned fundamentalists in suits push the much more powerful disciplines and observances of the goods and services economy.
 
A sales conference, rock concert, media award ceremony, quiz show, political rally and religious revival meeting are all run by ‘priests’ who carry on the veneration/worship of their respective icons in exactly the same way.  The New Fashioned fanatics are just as iconoclastic, aggressive and blinded by the overwhelming ideological claims for their own beliefs as the old ones.

Just because our Mullahs don’t wear ‘funny’ costumes and beards, and shout tough slogans at meetings and on the media, does not mean that they are not into power dressing in a corporate version of body armor.  It doesn’t mean that they don’t talk tough and don’t speak with very loud and incessant voices throughout the entire architecture of discourse and imagination; especially in our dreams and fantasies, our internal motivation structures and our unguarded moments.  Our mullahs are incredibly good at penetrating them, which makes them far more menacing than any of their predecessors or competitors.

Our mullahs have used the technological, information and knowledge revolutions to develop very high density management systems that keep penetrating ever deeper into the macro and micro variables that govern behavior.  They have learnt how to depoliticize this control and bury its imperatives in the structure of the choices and institutional patterns of the products and services they offer.  They are very skilled in closing out alternatives that do not suit them by structuring matters so that the unwanted option seems unimaginable to the bulk of the population.

Hence many of the choices made by individuals which seem to be theirs alone, in reality, are elaborately constructed for them by anonymously invisible powers that be. Thus only cranks and town planning undergraduates would seriously suggest that public transport should replace the car in modern cities.  The choices on offer are not really between public transport and car, but which brand of car to buy, resources permitting.

These ‘choices’ are so omnipresent it hardly ever surfaces that auto based cities are obscenely wasteful, grossly inefficient, damaging to the human and natural environment and ought to be public transport modified and/or closed down as soon as decently possible.

Cars only give an impression of speed.  The ads always portray them on deserted and picturesque country roads full of limitless kinetic pleasures for the driver who wants it all.  Inevitably, peak time, stop start, long bumper-to-bumper queues in and out of cities at overall bicycle speed is their fate for the bulk of their journeys.  But that is not what really kills the average speed of vehicles.  It is the time it takes to earn the after tax money or do the work to capitalize, depreciate, service, parts replace and repair, insure, fuel, wash and garage it (or the extra depreciation if it is left in the weather).  Add that to the actual travelling time and divide into the kilometres travelled and you get roughly a walking pace.

Travel time has much more to it than just its journeying component.  However, Real Travel Time gets buried into the modern lifestyle infrastructure, well away from critical auditing pressures. These might reveal that modern industrial workers travel at hundreds of times greater cost, but no faster than their medieval peasant counterparts.  Of course, if the unaccounted for environmental ‘expenses’ were included in our calculations, these costs would be thousands of times greater and the car would be going backwards.

Through their strategically central position in the economy as suppliers of capital and jobs, the hydrocarbon industrial lobbies have such a stranglehold on transport policy and the character of transport dialogue, rational public debate has become almost impossible.  Their agenda is not only ‘softwared’ into the culture, but over time, the domination of their products have ‘hard wired’ modern cities to depend on them.  The progressive marginalization of public transport has not just been in the denial of resources, but in the very design of urban concentrations.

Very sensibly, politicians anywhere near the prospect of power go ideologically limp whenever someone suggests public transport should be the central rather than a marginal player in the transport mix.  They simply cannot resist the temptation to grab a cliché wipe, dab it at the subject and then throw it into the too hard basket.  Even if they remembered, let alone agreed with their Town Planning Principles 1 lecturer, the fact is that change is out of the question and getting involved in the debate can only have omni-directional downsides.


Bicycle Victoria is one of Australia’s most successful public interest groups.  Its membership, resources and influence are constantly growing.  Their slogan is, ‘More People Riding More Often’.  Under this banner, they have repositioned themselves to intensively tap into the tourist and lifestyle markets.  Under its aegis, the bicycle infrastructure within the whole state is being gradually upgraded and expanded, bicycle and ancillary equipment sales are burgeoning and special events multiplying.

This happy state of affairs has been made possible by marginalizing anti-car killjoys and concentrating on the marketable fun to be had out of healthy exercise and mutual interest togetherness.

Bicycle Victoria doesn’t threaten the hydrocarbon lobby because it is playing the game.  BV is expanding the niche potential for more intensive and safer use of the road system and creating additional manufacture and marketing opportunities.  They all add to the overall consumption of goods and services.  Car use isn’t being slowed down and in fact one can see lots of cars going off on weekend with full bicycle racks, to places of scenic interest that are too far away to easily bicycle to.

If a group were now able to take over BV who argued for replacing cars in the transport mix, at least in part with bicycles, it would be institutional suicide.  It would lose its market focus, its sponsors, government sympathy and its following faster than you could say Public Relations Disaster.  It would have become ‘too political’ for anybody’s comfort.  It would become identified with humorlessly earnest left-of-centre-do-gooding intellectual meddling.  Worse, it would be seen as creating a negative win/lose, them/us conflict model of public lobbying.

Would the intellectual basis for their position ever be canvassed in the public media sufficiently to capture attention and hold it long enough so that it might alter public consciousness and behavior even in the smallest degree?  One would have to be the most doggedly determined optimist to believe that.

Not even I would vote for such a change when the existing BV platform has delivered such significant benefits for bicyclist, albeit crumbs from the table of the transport giants.  I know its and my place in the available marketing mix.  In the end we all have to be realists, for who in their right mind would want to be seen as anti-fun and togetherness?


The democratic and Christian traditions remain, but their functions have been eaten away or co-opted from behind, leaving only a ritualistic facade to front the giant corporate tower that steadily rises above them.  Now that it is no longer necessary to unduly maintain a civil society, or a sense of the transcendent self, they are being allowed to gradually rot and peel off, like old paint. In the meantime, what remains of the liberal humanist tradition has been used to take over the role of religion as a sociological smoother and masker of the totalitarian character of markets.  It acts as a leverage point for disabling and removing traditional inhibitors to cultural marketization.  It is the creator of Trojan horses that gift progressive reforms which then colonize and swallow their beneficiaries.

Liberalism is more properly to be described as Libertarchy, whereby ‘freedom’ is used as an arm of the increasingly absolutist market system of control.  ‘Doublethink’ may have been the invention and plaything of the traditional totalitarians, but the imagineers and their Industrial Driver masters are the ones who have perfected this control mechanism from an inspired art form into a relentlessly methodical science.  That libertarian market absolutism is considered synonymous with ‘freedom’ is testament to the devastating effectiveness of modern thought control and its colonization of libertarian social ideas.

We still go through the motions of having elections.  Political enthusiasts and concerned citizens still have reasonable avenues for making themselves heard and having input into decision making processes. However, they do not have, even remotely, the intellectual, informational, managerial and resource firepower of the industrial drivers and this imbalance keeps growing. The capacity to generate information and agenda setting independently of the Idearchy, whether at the grand or domestic level, just keeps getting smaller.  Public information is steadily being remolded and depoliticised into entertainment and spectacle.  Each step in vacuuming out dissonances is always constructed as a necessary efficiency for better or more secure management and rational use of resources.

Each small step in limiting the power or effectuality of the citizenry compounds the rationale for making further and larger steps later seem less significant and threatening.  All totalitarians have had this strategy of maneuvering populations into situations they would not easily have initially countenanced, if they had had the prescience to see where they were being led.  The Nazis didn’t win power at the 1933 election by openly espousing an electoral platform for the mass murder of all the Jews in Europe.  Nobody has ever voted for a government that promised to facilitate accelerated asset stripping of the planet until nothing worth saving was left.

The quiet re-engineering of the citizen into customer is more far reaching in the long run than the mass murder and state sponsored terrorism of the past, just as ecocide is more far reaching than genocide.  The extent of totalitarian capacity to interfere with and subvert independent consciousness and the scale of the destruction of life now in train, trivializes anything that has ever preceded it.


Once upon a time, when demon socialism still roamed the land, there were political parties, like the Australian Labor Party, that actually took their orders and got their agenda from their own ideological traditions and the institutionalized face of their rank and file.  For this the ALP was accused of being ‘undemocratic’ (a beautiful piece of double-speak) because the party parliamentarians were directly responsible to their own party executive of ‘thirty-six faceless men’, rather than the electorate at large.  It was a good line and it helped to keep them out of office.

However the New Men of the ALP, once they had overthrown the power of the party machinery, very rapidly learnt who the masters really were (and it was not the electorate) when as the Federal Government, they rocked the boat too much for their comfort.  Fortunately for Australia’s constitutional arrangements, its electorates are very conservative and easily frightened, so engineering the removal of the ALP government was not difficult.  Having thus been disciplined, all future ALP governments have been very careful to stay within the Responsible-Guidelines-For-Government, as laid out by the opinion leaders who matter.

Democracy has always been about domesticating dissonances, to the extent that oppositionist forces would eventually come to feel constrained by the institutional processes that enveloped them.  Their participation in democratic rituals and decision-making processes soaked up their available energy and focus at the expense of their critical intent and dynamism.  All democratic constituencies would similarly be drawn into a broader consensus that would tend to marginalize the more radical voices on all sides. 

Thus it did not produce what the old aristocratic/gentry Tories had feared; rule by the rabble.  Nor did it produce what socialists had hoped for; rule by the proletariat.  What it did do, was to entrench the power of capital as the constellation of interests representing the ‘reasonable’ and ‘moderate’ middle ground.

The transformation of this power of the centre into an overwhelming gravitational field from which almost nothing can escape is a trajectory that exactly follows the explosive growth and diversity of capital itself.  As has already been noted, its density, energy, control of information and propaganda increasingly subsumes the state and the citizen into industry and its customers. In this environment, the democratic state can be relied on to come up with the ‘right’ answers demanded by the industrial oligarchy and their lobby organization, research institutions, academic and media mouthpieces.

Because the vast bulk of democratic agenda is now mostly peddled through these institutions and individuals, all political parties anywhere near the levers of power reflect overwhelmingly industry views and its ongoing internal debates and struggles.

Thus popular democratic process is increasingly about style, market ‘differentiation’, rhetoric, personality and leadership, and less about policy and substance, which ‘appears’ as a given, almost a fait accompli, only to be fiddled with at the margins.


More profoundly, as B.L. Zeebub pointed out in chapter 1, the totalitarian system has cleaned out the existential heartland, its social commons and systems of governance and regulation, and transferred all that capitalization effort into the marketing software hub, leaving large tracts of our reproductive software ‘wealth portfolio’ in tatters and the mystified victims wondering why, when surrounded by a cornucopia of consumer goodies , they feel so poor.  They no longer have the tools to even recognize what has gone.

An enormous transfer of energy and resources into the commercial industrial sector parallels the destruction of the non-commercial and non-commodifiable in human affairs.  This in turn reconstructs the culture and character of personality development, as the older influences are dissolved in favor of consumption goals.  The New People are designed to operate at a high level of industrial/technological skill functioning.  However, broader character development has been arrested at around adolescent level to fit the propaganda susceptibility requirements for the consumer acolyte. 

Traditional family networks that would have previously ensured proper adult development have had so many of their functions transferred to the industrial sector, they have been left almost helpless to be anything but consumer distribution depots.

The increased pressure of revolutionary industrial/technological change, the cultural resource transfers to the commercial sector and the degradation of the uncommercializable ones are causing high levels of stress and distress, displacement and alienation, underemployment and unemployment, over-exploitation and exhaustion, major transfers of wealth and power to those with a competitive edge and a reduction of the human being to its most basic production/consumption behavioral settings.

The sum of this is that in the human landscape, just as with land degradation, the industrial monoculture has cannibalized large parts of the traditional cultural ‘forests’ and the diversity of what is left.  It has exhausted what were once robust social ‘soils’ by reckless over consumption. As a result of very narrow personal development goals and inadequate community and relationship maintenance, the weakened human ‘plant’ has been made susceptible to infestation by growth distorting pathogens, behavioral ‘weeds’ and ‘fast growth’ substance abuse.

Illicit drug use and promiscuous sexuality trace this process exactly.  It is irresistibly bubbling into the mainstream society as a consequence of weakened or broken family, community and civil structures, worn out and incoherent adult values frameworks and the taking to extremes of the impulsive consuming passion; i.e. the quick, easy convenient and pleasurable problem solving fix.

He was a stud.
She was a porn star.
It was sex at first sight
’cross a crowded bar,
One stoned and drunken evening.

They couldn’t wait
And hit the road without much rubber.
‘Twas too wet.
They skidded,
Slid down the slippery embankments
Of desire
And rolled voluptuously,
Wrapping themselves
Around the tree of life.

They exploded onto the screen like stars
Contracted to perform
As a nightly inferno.
But sadly they cooled,
Dribbled down the drain
And drifted.

During a dark and tempestuous journey,
They were washed down the rapids
Of disappointment
Onto the rocks
Of despair,
And on into the river
Of indifference.

He dried out
Into a bed of stones.
She filled out
Into a clump of spikes*.
He could not quench their thirst
And she could only struggle
Vainly
Flailing,
In hot winds that blew
Her discontented restless brood
Out of her in gale force bursts,
Wailing, Wailing, Wailing.

The rains never came.
Death came instead;
A gusty sigh,
A puff of dust,
A fluttering twig.

* spinifex- a prickly species of hummock grass found in the deserts of Australia.


MacDonalds understands children and the child inside every adult.  They organize children’s birthday parties at well below cost to ensure their parents cannot resist an inexpensive soft serve option.  Virtually everyone in the early childhood cohort goes to several of these parties, as their friends methodically invite each other to ‘Mackas’.  Parental hold outs are put under increasing pressure to follow suit as their child understandably comes to think that having a ‘Mackas’ party is not only de rigueur, but an appropriate return for hospitality received.

The children don’t necessarily ‘like’ Mackas’ food particularly, so much as the little games, the gee gaw toys, the colorful packaging, the fast service, the Ronald McDonald and friends corporate characters, the playpen, the well lit ‘cheerful’ atmosphere, the crowds of other children and even the small kids’ counter step up that ‘empowers’ them to order for themselves.  It isn’t enough for the recalcitrant parent to produce homemade junk food that is ten times tastier.  The children want the authentic MacDonalds ‘experience’ and they will apply remorseless pressure every time the family car passes the golden arches, which seems to become more frequent by the month.

MacDonalds understand the old Jesuit adage, “Give me a child before the age of seven and I will give you the man or woman”.

The parent who hates the MacDonalds fast food culture is in no position to uncompromisingly oppose their children’s participation in it.  If they try, they become the problem, not MacDonalds and MacDonalds will discipline them accordingly, with constant reminders of their obstinacy at every turn, as well as the ongoing resentment and plaintiveness of those who have been forced to ‘miss out’.

You can’t say no to McDonalds, because it is such a treat. 
You can’t say no to McDonalds because it is the place to meet. 
You can’t say no to McDonalds, ‘cos not going’s such a loss. 
You have to go to McDonalds because McDonalds is the boss!

Even as they indulge their greedy and insatiable customers, the industrial drivers have quietly asset and power stripped them to facilitate the move into glitzy cages and the life of plump battery hens.