21st Century Living
copyright Adbusters.
Goddamn.
Over the past two days I have been trying to write a beast of a paper for my World Politics class about globalization and its effects on the proliferation and counter-proliferation of weapons of mass destruction. It's got me thinking.
For those of you who don't know, "globalization" is the trendy buzzword being whored around these days to describe the ever-increasing interdependency between nations in today's world. It preeminently describes the emergance of a global economy, but can also be applied to an emerging global 'culture' or society.
Globalization is a positive process. Global integration and cross-cultural understanding is the key to a border-free world where political differences are abolished and a new universal mindset of a shared humanity will emerge.
Ideally.
Unfortunately, the globalization process has been hijacked by transnational mega corporations and is being used as a tool to expand their influence and capacity for exploitation in their relentless, pathological pursuit of profit and power ( which just so happens to be the tagline for Joel Bakan's magnificent book; The Corporation, which has recently been made into a major film ).
Their plan has already begun to manifest, as seen in the "McDonaldization" of the world. These corporations are hard at work; eliminating cultural diversity and paving the whole goddamn world with the principles of the American dream: rampant consumerism, ruthless dog-eat-dog capitalism, and insurmountable apathy.
Consume more, love less. Fear everything, love nothing. This is the battlecry of the new generation, a generation that fights wars for profit. Despite your best efforts to deny the fact, the human life does have an exact monetary value. Want to know just how much your existence is worth, in dollars and cents? Just ask Ford. Just ask Halliburton. Just ask Exxon Mobile.
Are you happy? You need pills.
Do you feel safe? You're fooling yourself.
Don't own an American car? You are unpatriotic.
Feeling good about yourself? Well, guess what, you're fat.
Is your neighbor black, Hispanic, Arab? He is a terrorist.
Stop listening.
Globalization is a positive process. The corporations that are currently controlling it turn a blind eye to human suffering. To them, the difference between life and death is one or two decimal points. To the people dying in Iraq to further the hidden American agenda, it is absolutely everything.
Get educated. I leave you with lyrics from the song after which this post was named...
Ambition. Ambition is a tricky thing. Ambition is like riding a unicycle over dental floss tightrope over a wilderness of razorblades. Ambition means more, ambition means faster, ambition means better. What if you could supersize ambition? Does that make you ambitious, if you supersize ambition?
Around here, our ambition hurts more than it helps. Around here, ambition throws a non-perishable food item in the donation bin at Christmas, then pats itself on the fucking back because it thinks its done something decent.
Ambition will televise the revolution, and it will sell more fucking commercial spots than the Superbowl, the Olympics, the World Series, and the tragedy de jour combined.
- Matthew Good
I hope I have given you something to think about. I'd like to see some comments on this one.
posted by Sylpheed @ 10:27 PM
3Comments:
What I'm about to say is almost painful to speak, but I think globalization is the new communism to a degree. Like you said, ideally it is one of the most profound, magnificant, and overall amazing things humanity could ever accomplish for itself. To read about some of the more positive strides that are now being taken towards globalization can really inspire a person; really make it seem like we're going to make it as a race.
From a technological, societal, and even cultural standpoint, humanity is nearing a dead end for further advances. With that said, many people, including myself believe that casting down the borders we keep fighting over and establishing one super power is the only feasible ticket out of that dead end.
Unfortunately as you state, the corporation, once again gets involved. The sad part in this isn't that because of them globalization is given a bad name, or that because of them the only things becoming multinational are the fast food and weapons industries. The sad part is that the fact that it's happening is living proof that something as theoretically flawless as globalization is beyond mankinds ability right now. Furthermore, the people in charge of this blatent raping of the planet under banners of freedom and globalization for the sole purpose of more digits are the embodiment of our inability to progress.
Like you say, right now not everyone is settling for this bullshit. There are those who are informed of it. There are those who are fighting back. The problem there, is that the very establishments who should be promoting this behavior, namely the media, are the ones living in the pockets of the money grubbing corporation. Those with the right idea; those with the urge to destroy this radical capitalist channel of belief are simply ignored or quieted for the most part.
For us to actually move forward, this mode of "progression" needs to be stamped out. And for that to happen there needs to be far too many people involved for the media to silence. There needs to be a world of people screaming for it to stop. Even then success isn't assured.
This is of course, an opinion, and there may be many of you out there who completely disagree with my view. For our sake, I hope you're right. I hope we do have what it takes and this is all just turbulence. It's just that throughout history there are two constants that seem to vault forth in my mind.
The first of which are the dreamers ... name who you want; Ghandi, Karl Marx, Martin Luther King. They all had ideas for society and our progression in it that made it seem like we were an intelligent race and that we were here to accomplish something.
The second, is that throughout that history, these ideas, though they survive on paper are never implemented. The reasons are as always, purely human.
You wanted comments, but I'm not sure where to begin.
When one considers all the problems in the world) wars, genocides, famines, inhumane working conditions, poverty, intolerance, female circumcision, nuclear weapons, pollution, deforestation, global warming, illiteracy, child abuse, over-population, over-fishing, I mean I could type pages and pages and still not be finsihed with this list), there are four common responses:
1) Anger
2) Frustration
3) Sadness
4) Existential agnst over the futility of it all.
Unfortunately, none of these emotional reactions get us any where. I also don't think that blaming the amorphus, ambigious, phenomena of "globalization" is useful. I'm not trying to be insulting here, I promise. I just think that the problems commonally associated with "globalization" needed to addressed as interconnected, but ultimately discret, sets of concerns.
Cin (see above comment) said that globalization is the new communism. He's right, but not for the reasons he gave. Globalization is the new communism because nobody knows what the word means, and yet everybody somehow knows that it's bad.
I'm not claiming that we shouldn't be concerned with the working conditions in china, or the deforestation in brazil, etc., etc. We should. But we shouldn't approach these issues with the amount anger and disgust for "multi-national corporations" or "American consumerism" or whatever the catchphrase-insult-of-the-day is.
Why not? Well, for starters, because no one will take you seriously, except other protestors. Second, these are extremely complex issues without simple, protest-solgan solutions. Third, no one's going to take you seriously.
Okay, I really hope that didn't sound offensive.
I'm off to go partake in some Easy-Cheese (TM) produced by a good-old multi-national corporation, Kraft, which owns another one of my favorite corporations, Philip Morris. And then maybe when I'm done I'll smoke a cigarrette and support an industry that is responsible for the death of hundreds of thousands of people each year. :)
I am not "blaming" globalization for anything.
I was simply stating that it is a potentially wonderful process, one that could solve a lot of problems for mankind, but is being ruined by corporate greed.
I don't think I said globalization in itself was bad at any one point in what I wrote. I think it's quite the opposite. It promotes cooperation and peace, boosts economies, and lessens the incentive to resort to violence, just to name a few things. Of course, there are hundreds of negative effects as well, but thats for the realists and the pessimists to worry about. They can worry about the increased ease of WMD proliferation all they want, I'm going to look at the increased ease of counter-proliferation. I'm going to continue looking at it from a very idealist point of view - I am fully aware that the chances of a borderless world without political conflict emerging are slim to none, but its a nice thought, isn't it?
I'm not exactly sure what you're trying to say, other than that no one is going to take me seriously.
I'm not expecting anyone to take me seriously. I'm not Noam Chomsky, I'm a random english/journalism student with a blog. Who's going to take me seriously?
I don't know all of the facts...I barely know any of the facts. I'm by no means an authority on this subject. But I know more than the thousands of blissfully ignorant, politically apathetic people out there, and if what I wrote causes even just one of them to give a moments thought to globalization or corporate greed, than I have accomplished what I set out to do.
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