The Dustbin of Fallen Civilizations and Empires

The more we exist outside the system, the more creative we are.

– Beatrice Wood

News that the Ecuadorian embassy in London cut off Wikileaks’ access to the Internet is troubling, principally because of the question marks left as to Julian Assange’s safety in England. Fears that Wikileaks might have been put out of business – particularly at a time when it was making public the dark email secrets the Clinton mob was desirous of keeping hidden – were eased by a later report that Wikileaks is now operating under contingency plans. Knowing that his organization was a threat to the ambitions of those who want violent power over the rest of mankind, Assange provided for alternative means of communicating to the general public should its initial system be compromised.

That the institutional order fears having the public know what it knows should disturb all decent, intelligent minds. The political establishment is so terrified of the liberty of men and women to express ideas and information contrary to its interests that it must lock away the speakers of truth (e.g., Chelsea Manning, Assange, Ed Snowden). It also works to destroy  the system that facilitates such communications (e.g. the Internet). Ever since Gutenberg’s invention, the ruling classes have labored to keep minds in lockstep formation. Dissenters, free-thinkers, and those who pursued truth unimpeded by coercively-enforced doctrines and dogmas, have faced censorship, heresy trials, imprisonment, being burned at the stake or hanged as witches, having their brains forcibly lobotomized or chemically stupefied, prosecution for treason or for revealing guarded state secrets, or other coercive means designed to isolate the virus of free, energized minds.

During the many years in which our ancestors experimented ways of thinking and creating that produced such advances in human well-being as the Renaissance, the Scientific Age, the Reformation, the Enlightenment, the Industrial Revolution, and Western Civilization itself, our precursors gave expression to the underlying premise of pluralism: we could learn from one another’s experiences with how to live. Even the idea of societies grounded in collectivism were experimented with in the 19^th-century American “communes,” undertakings whose failures helped to confirm the social importance of privately-owned property.

Creating alternative methods of producing goods was just one of the many ways in which we humans have managed to satisfy our material needs. After the factory system replaced the guilds, modifications within the factory model brought about such changes as the assembly line, open-hearth steel mills, and other forms which, seen as improvements, soon led many to view such methods as part of the status quo to be defended. There seemed to be no need to incorporate resiliency into the factory model: the assembly line was just “the” most efficient way of producing goods. Reinforced by the tenets of institutionalism, it became preferable to change the people who worked in industries, than to have the organizations change to better satisfy the oft-ignored inner needs of employees. Thus was born the profession of the “industrial psychologist,” whose function was to “manage” people by conditioning them into believing that company purposes were the same as their purposes, a practice picked up from the political arena. That these managers worked in departments known as “human resources” – human beings as “resources”? – did little to quiet the inner emptiness so many people feel for their work.

But Henry Ford’s factory model and Andrew Carnegie’s steel mills have long since been challenged by alternative thinking that has produced alternative methods of production. Perhaps sinning against the tenets of institutionalism – by accepting that a given form or practice had to be maintained – was a point of departure. Perhaps building adaptability, and flexibility into the design and thinking of every organization is the best way to resist the institutional infection; to provide it with the resiliency living bodies require in order to survive in an ever-changing world.

When I was in law practice, I had a client who owned a number of private schools for young children. When the school sought to expand by adding two more schools, the building designs were as follows: [1] for a school to be built in a residential neighborhood, the architect designed it as a home; [2] for a school to be built in a more commercial area, the building was designed so that, should that school ever close, the facility could easily be converted to a drive-in bank or other commercial enterprises. Such examples illustrate how incorporating resiliency into our thinking has practical consequences.

As I was writing this article, I read a news report of the discovery of another fairly complete fossilized dinosaur. Its mockingbird descendant that now sings to me as I finish this has an ancestry that runs many millions of years longer than does the route back to my Spanish ancestors. Those who came before us include the small mammals that managed to survive whatever it was that brought the age of the dinosaurs to an end. To them, we owe our special existence. But our ancestral trail also includes the men and women whose thinking and social practices continue to influence us. Has the institutionalized violence of political systems become so integrated into our DNA that we are doomed to a self-inflicted extinction, or can we energize a sufficient resiliency to create the options that sustain life?

Should we fail in our efforts, will evolutionary forces be inclined to continue the experiment to determine whether any species can be entrusted with conscious intelligence? (Should a new candidate be sought, I herewith nominate the dolphins!) When that day comes, will intelligent minds – be they human or otherwise – have occasion to see a connection between the fossil remains of extinct species, and the petrified systems whose lifeless remains are to be found in the industrialized “Rust Belt,” or in the dustbin of fallen civilizations and empires?

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