Sunday, October 16th, 2011 – the north side of the Vancouver Art Gallery is crowded with tents. The tents are the kind that well-heeled environmentalists buy from Mountain Equipment Coop – so it’s not quite a third world refugee camp. There are metal barriers to keep the protesters in – but no barbed wire. And the police are here, but they’re pretty relaxed and talking about how the Canucks are going to do this year.
There is a bigger barrier here. My own cynicism has taken more than half a century to build. I want to embrace the notion that citizens must assert themselves against the excesses of corporate greed. It’s just that I don’t have much confidence in self-appointed leaders who had an epiphany at the age of twenty-two.
Economic systems that are based upon continuing growth – and increasing consumption – can’t be sustained. There is an island of unimaginable size in the middle of the Pacific Ocean that is growing as I write this – comprised solely of floating garbage. Things like plastic caps, disposable razors and…
I find it hard to believe though, that embracing transcendental meditation or yoga – or a return to the dictatorship of the proletariat – will rescue us from the brink.
Communism failed because it tried to change human nature. Capitalism is simply much better at allowing citizens to consume. It taps into the greed which is hard-wired into our DNA. It is the genius behind the little voice that tells a young man in China to sell a kidney and buy an iPad. It is the voice that convinces us to dump last year’s electronics into shipping containers bound for southeast Asia or Africa – while we sing about being ‘green’.
While corporate greed is undeniably ugly and may ultimately lead to our downfall, I can’t imagine that we can simply re-engineer society to remove greed and replace it with some form of social existentialism.
Let’s hope that the OCCUPY WALL STREET movement has started a dialog. We need to to re-engineer society – perhaps even capitalism – to do a better job of meeting the needs of more people and to save us from ourselves….
