Wages of Rebellion Read Free Page B

produce nothing. They make nothing. They only manipulate money. They are no different from the detested speculators who were hanged in the seventeenth century, when speculation was a capital offense.
    The obscenity of their wealth is matched by their utter lack of concern for the growing numbers of the destitute. In early 2014, the world’s 200 richest people made $13.9 billion, in one day, according to Bloomberg’s billionaires index. 22 This hoarding of money by the elites, according to the ruling economic model, is supposed to make us all better off, but infact the opposite happens when wealth is concentrated in the hands of a few individuals and corporations, as economist Thomas Piketty documents in his book
Capital in the Twenty-First Century. 23
The rest of us have little or no influence over how we are governed, and our wages stagnate or decline. Underemployment and unemployment become chronic. Social services, from welfare to Social Security, are slashed in the name of austerity. Government, in the hands of speculators, is a protection racket for corporations and a small group of oligarchs. And the longer we play by their rules the more impoverished and oppressed we become.
    Yet, like Ahab and his crew, we rationalize our collective madness. All calls for revolt, for halting the march toward economic, political, and environmental catastrophe, are ignored or ridiculed. Even with the flashing red lights before us, even with huge swaths of the country living in Depression-like conditions, we bow slavishly before the enticing illusion provided to us by our masters of limitless power, wealth, and technological prowess. The system, although it is killing us, is our religion.
    Clive Hamilton, in his
Requiem for a Species: Why We Resist the Truth About Climate Change
, describes the dark relief that comes from accepting that “catastrophic climate change is now virtually certain.” 24 This obliteration of our “false hopes” requires not only intellectual knowledge but emotional knowledge. Intellectual knowledge is more easily attained. Emotional knowledge, which requires us to accept that those we love, including our children, are almost certainly doomed to insecurity, misery, and suffering within a few decades, if not a few years, is much harder to acquire. To emotionally accept the impending disaster, to attain the visceral understanding that the power elite will not respond rationally to the devastation of the ecosystem, is as difficult to accept as our own mortality.
    The crisis before us is the culmination of a 500-year global rampage of conquering, plundering, exploiting, and polluting the earth—as well as killing by Europeans and Euro-Americans of the indigenous communities that stood in their way. The technical and scientific forces that created unparalleled luxury and unrivaled military and economic power for a small, global elite are the forces that now doom us. Ceaseless economicexpansion and exploitation has become a death sentence. But even as our economic and environmental systems unravel—thirteen of the fourteen warmest years since weather record-keeping began over a century ago have occurred in the opening years of the twenty-first century—we lack the emotional and intellectual creativity to shut down the engine of global capitalism. 25
    Anthropologists, including Joseph Tainter in
The Collapse of Complex Societies
, Charles Redman in
Human Impact on Ancient Environments
, and Ronald Wright in
A Short History of Progress
, have laid out the familiar patterns that lead to the breakdown of complex societies, which usually collapse not long after they reach their period of greatest magnificence and prosperity. 26 “One of the most pathetic aspects of human history is that every civilization expresses itself most pretentiously, compounds its partial and universal values most convincingly, and claims immortality for its finite existence at the very moment when the decay which leads to death has already