A shame I can't record more about hidden people, especially children who need so much for others to know about them. A quarter of our population's poor. The United States grows more children in poverty than any other industrial nation. Our government bombs for humanitarian reasons, starves children to drive their parents into submission, drives families into shelters or out of their own country with violence and threats of violence unless they kneel on the alter of our democracy. Yet we have jailed nearly two million of our own citizens, far more than any other democracy. And tens of millions among us plead for enough to eat. Are these conditions the fruits of our military victories?
What blessings belong to the brutal champions of our warring practices? Perhaps they have to constantly calculate who will strike back next. They might enjoy smug confidence thinking they are envied for possessing the most powerful economic engine in the world. They certainly know the thrill of savagery, the exhilaration earned by the untouchable terrorist. Commanding power and retaining power are their only occupations. Nothing else matters to them. Every other human value or emotion is either unknown or inconsequential. What satisfaction or investment in any purpose that might reward the living can compare with their interference in human evolution? They know they are important whether their actions are right or wrong. They are either a conduit for the stream of history or a boulder obstructing the flow. The commanders will be noted and remembered for their exercise of force, whether they kill or construct. The masters of such a concentration of power, the largest, best organized, and most energetic economy supplying the largest, most destructive and mobile military force ever assembled, know they are immortal if they act, whatever they do. The consequences of their adventures permanently alter the course of human events. Their instruments are irresistible to them. Absolute power corrupts absolutely.
We must never again construct a system that allows anyone to act on our behalf. We must all carry out our mutual decisions. Impossible as this sounds, the alternative, a monopoly on power, leads to destruction.
Will Miller, Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the University of Vermont contributed an essay entitled "Social Change & Human Nature" to the February 1999 issue of Monthly Review. He wrote:
"But human nature is not the problem. Given social opportunities and the institutional structures to meet their needs by means that hurt no one else, historically, most people have chosen non-selfish alternatives. We are a social species, and social species survive by cooperation -- evolutionary 'mutual aid' in Peter Kropotkin's sense. Our current problems are rooted in the forced competition required by the structure of market society, with its carefully crafted artificial scarcities of opportunity for cooperative and mutually satisfying activity. This forced competition for scarce educational, work, housing an opportunities is the basis for dividing the majority of people against one another by sex, race, age and ability. A ruling minority depends on a divided majority for its security and continued privilege."
"At the same time, [capitalism] is a system that both produces and selects the most socially stunted among us -- least able to trust and cooperate with others -- and places them in positions of power and privilege. In an Adlerian sense the desire for coercive power over others is often a part of a desperate strategy for enhancing one's self-esteem. Acts of domination over others require numbing oneself to the needs of others and the repercussions of one's own acts on others. People become mere objects, in a field of objects, to be manipulated for private advantage. For those whose self-esteem is low enough, having coercive power over others is compensatory -- even exhilarating. In Henry Kissinger's own words, 'power is the ultimate aphrodisiac.'"
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