Merge Your Identities
Bring your younger and elder selves together
The diviner of Davos has famously said we’ll merge our physical, biological and digital identities. We can get a head start by ridding ourselves of manufactured generational divides and uniting our forces.
August 6, 2021
As the alt media becomes the mainstream, it attracts writers and commentators of all ages. Perhaps younger in the video format and older in the written. In this emerging news-scape there are many whose perspective measures half a century or more. That’s the long view but it's not always an advantage. Those with shorter timelines and perspectives are more hip to the chill on the street.
Sadly, it's a different kind of chill.
Not the "chill, mate!" when you ask someone to kindly remove their AirPods and hurry up repacking their bag in the security line because you've got to make a flight. No, this is a chilling chill that affects all generations equally.
One of the perspectives that is denied young people, for a while, is that life is short. Or, as I prefer to believe, our concept of time is messed up.
As you enter your fifties you turn to the mirror and ask: that was quick, wasn't it? Well, it wasn't really. It's the clock what done it.
I've written before about The Tyranny of The Clock, in George Woodcock's phrase. People who meditate and know Eastern philosophies are better placed to speak. I just know we're measuring it wrong and pay too much attention to the wrong things. And that they're not the same for everybody.
If what matters was the same for everyone, the state-corporatists wouldn't have to impose the nuclear lifestyle, aspiring to a house and tending a garden, and yielding two generations of children. They would not continue to push the nuclear model even when they have put it out of reach for many.
I think our misunderstanding of time is what lies behind the perceived generation gap, along with manufactured division.
It didn't happen by accident. The state-corporatists took over the public square. Traditional venues were closed, human activity was streamlined, opportunities for idling were eliminated.
Ah!, Those happy times idling when we discover the most important things in life: we go wandering and come across a part of town we didn't know existed, with new alleys and bridges, except they're 500 years old and there's networks and pathways built by people who long preceded us who help us meet people today. Through seemingly-random connections we discover we like the same things and that leads to discoveries and skills we never knew we had and we invent games and spark ideas and realize that schoolbooks aren't the only way to learn but the physics and chemistry classes were useful for blowing things up in the woods — someone built NASA that way — and I've still got time because no-one knows where I am or expects me because when they said, "be home for tea" I said I'm meeting friends tonight and that was the right call. Yesterday it poured but this afternoon is never ending: the sun blends seamlessly into the twilight and I remembered a photographer on the bridge that Eiffel built saying how refracted light gets warmer, and colder and then warmer again, displaying its greatest beauty just as the sun falls below the horizon and if I hadn't been standing there I'd never have thought of that.
Bureaucrats, corporations and the media don’t want you to have time to think. They bombard the populace to drown out the conversation between younger and elder, richer and poorer, time waster and commuter. It was planned and they did it like this:
The people's palaces were closed. The ice cream parlours and diners, the workers' cafés and the tea shops, social clubs and movie halls. Like the pubs, most survive as an expensive, sanitized replica. As with the pubs, the state and big investors worked hand-in-glove to shut them down, passing social-safety regulations that small shops couldn't meet. Can you believe they made them rip out wood countertops before discovering that even ancient wood has its own antimicrobial properties. Central bankers printed money, inflating asset prices and rents and today’s would-be café owners have been pushed into pop-ups and food trucks.
Governments hand out millions in funding to community organizers, faith leaders and new types of voluntary organization. Notice the lack of such initiatives to unite society across ages and classes, backgrounds and wealth. The government promotes no venues where the primary aim is to strengthen society across generations. Quite the reverse.
Grassroots is out. These community organizations and NGOs are closely tied to interior ministries or to the police and social services. Governments see opportunities to monitor mental health and wellbeing and also for the (de-) radicalized to be “known to the intelligence services” next time some happening happens.
Communitarianism is in: the doctrine behind the Big Society, as former UK prime minister David Cameron called it. Don’t be misled. This is no appeal to collective or communal effort. This is the subordination of the individual to the community by an ideology that perceives excessive individualism as the problem in society. “Positive rights” are granted by the state as a privilege. Behind, and above, stand the stakeholders — the only people with permanent rights.
Communitarian slogans are everywhere in the media today. It’s behind the calls for mandatory Covid vaccination: your duty to society outweighs any individual risk of adverse effects.
And if you don’t obey, kindly leave the public square. Social media censorship will make sure you do.
All of this throttles the organic flow of ideas within society. It certainly limits the younger and elder sharing their experience.
In his book Bowling Alone (2000) Robert Putnam observed the withering of social networks in the United States of the late 20th century. The lost value of these networks he called social capital. Communitarians call the institutions that bolster social capital, civil society.
When I was reporting from Moscow between the first and second decades of this century, I spoke to the architect of the new Dinamo Moskva football stadium. He told me his project aimed to bring back the heyday of Russian soccer, when workers who could not afford a ticket would crowd outside the stadium, straining to hear their portable radios.
It is quite easy to paint the appeal to communitarianism in such rozy terms of shared experience, of rolled-up sleeves on kibbutzim, all in this together. In the past year the 75th anniversary of VE Day was used in Britain to revive the spirit of the Blitz. “Clap for carers” was synthesized around the world.
Don’t be bamboozled. This is synthetic community because while governments say they want to encourage it, they are busy wiping it out.
Cultural programming is designed to undermine trust and blot out shared experience, replacing it with a uniformity imposed from above. The techniques include:
constantly changing the education curriculum, including analytical terms
novels and movies that stress the unbridgeable gap between young and old
the media's urgency to reach the under-24s — lest they listen to their own folk
pop —I hope I die before I get old
fashion — doesn't dad look... 'dad'
politicians who overpromise, luring the youth with 'change'
psychological manipulation — hailing youth as heroes; damning them as failures
Millennials were the most telling victims of this last technique. Before they had even entered adulthood the state, the media and politicians assured them they were uniquely perceptive — before damning them for failing to overcome the economic roadblocks thrown in their way.
The Guardian was in the vanguard of social engineering, with one article after another exalting the talents of "digital natives" and implying that this would somehow bring a new world. What The Guardian was doing was buying their compliance in the project that's since been unveiled: smart, resilient, interdependent cities in which “digital natives” will be the slaves.
Governments wasted billions on electronic whiteboards, free laptops, tablets and smartphones, while playing jiggery-pokery with the curriculum. This miseducated were being given just enough training to make them smart-phone fodder.
It is the cult of information, as Theodore Roszak termed it, which I wrote about in the post, Information Drives the Muscles not the Brain.
Spring Turning
In the panel painting, Spring Turning, 1936, Grant Wood recalled his childhood in Iowa. Fields billow into the distance with no evidence of the 20th century — no cars, machinery, overhead power cables or even roads. Yet the lone farmer seems to be in possession, in his element. I can’t show you the image but here’s a link. It is as modern as a Microsoft screensaver yet it has timeless power. There’s a great retrospective on Wood here and here.
The humans are making their world regardless of technology. To understand this we must re-unite our young and elder selves, to combine that early sense of mystery with the wisdom of age. We must heal ourselves before we can unite with others. Then we’ll be able to speak to people of all ages, because we shall be those ages.
We do not exist because of technology; we do not labour on the Earth because of technology; we come first. We precede and supersede technology.
It is to stop us that they poison our ears with Net Zero-Zero Covid to cast carbon as evil and people as diseased, to frame us in opposition to nature. The farmer in Grant Wood’s painting does not need government. He asks for no “positive rights” granted by the state or corporations. His only right he draws from his creator, who made it conditional upon living in peace. It is not the farmer and his horses who pump pollution on a scale that threatens life. He never invented Roundup or asked for the crowded cities of factory workers. Nor culled them from time to time in war. It was the people who owned the production lines who did that.
If a decade ago, we had turned on the bankers and said, stuff your credit and your production lines it would have scared the bankers witless. They would have used the government to force you to borrow — what do you think the student loans are, if not forced borrowing?
So don’t be a fool and ask for even more, in a Che Guevara T-shirt clutching your iPhone and shouting, “What do we want? Mortgages. When do we want them? Now.” Work on different ways to co-habit and share. Anything but give to the bankers. Why take their loan — they’ve already told you their plan: you’ll be happy with nothing.
Be contrary, Mary. If you take everything the governments and the bankers say, and you do the opposite, you’re taking a few steps in the right direction.
If you are young, imagine looking back at your life. If you are elder, look ahead. Shakespeare said we have seven ages. We’ll do just fine if we focus on two and bring our younger and our elder selves together.