THE GREENING OF AMERICA by CHARLES A. REICH

[islandboy]

For both the professional and the non-professional, regulation does not stop with the job itself. Job requirements merge into requirements of the society as a whole. These broader and vaguer restraints are difficult to perceive, we are so accustomed to them. We are often aware of some of the particulars of this direct supervision, such as laws against the use of drugs, but as in most matters where the Corporate State is concerned we do not see the whole design. We think that the state has intervened to prevent certain excesses: murder, theft, drug addiction. But the pattern is not a series of negatives or prohibitions imposed on otherwise unregulated private lives for the good of the community. Instead, the state has undertaken to define, within rather strict limits, the life-style of its citizens with respect to (individual life choices), culture and consciousness, and political thought and activity.
Political life shall be limited to loyalty to the Corporate State, enforced by loyalty oaths (to whims of others), internal security laws, and restrictions on speech and expression; for example, life is made distinctly unpleasant for the man who wishes to contend publicly that "our form of government" is wrong. All of this repression is upheld under the legal doctrine, mentioned earlier, that "the national interest" prevails over any "individual interest." And it is all enforced by an elaborate system of official surveillance, including wiretapping, eavesdropping, invasions of privacy by police searches, police photography of demonstrators, congressional investigations, and all of the other methods with which we have become familiar. The full force of these restrictions can only be appreciated when they are seen not merely as a pattern, but as a web in which each restraint augments all of the others. The individual feels pressure from the meritocracy, from the rules concerning him, from the organization he works for, from the draft and public welfare, from regulatory laws. Anything he does is likely to be the subject of notice by some official agency. Significantly, the law makes little distinction between the criminal and non-criminal areas.

[islandboy]

In other words, the law is not particularly concerned with distinguishing between whether an individual has breached some rule or whether he is in need of affirmative correction; criminal and civil laws are simply different means to produce the desired result. And there is cooperation among the different agencies of pressure; thus, from time to time one notes in the newspaper that some political dissenter, not easily reached by any specific law, has been attacked by permitting some portion of the character information on file concerning him to be "leaked" to his enemies.  One of the ways we can perceive this surveillance most clearly is in the use of the criterion of "character" when individuals are selected for collage, graduate school, employment, and promotion. "Character" means the individual's personality, habits, friends, activities, politics, opinions, associations, and disciplinary and police record. All of these are thought by an increasing number of organizations to be an appropriate subject for investigation in order to reach a decision on an individual's "merit." In many cases these matters are thought to have an importance equal to the individual's "ability" and "achievement." Surveillance of character has become pervasive in our society. Most colleges and graduate schools and large private employers investigate applicant's character, and the federal government has elaborate procedures and many thousands of people occupied full time with character investigations. Where the government is concerned, the chief emphasis is upon making sure of political loyalty. Most agencies that determine qualifications for the various professions and occupations, such as the committees governing admission to the bar, licensing authorities for physicians, taxi drivers, boxers, and wilderness guides consider character an important element in determining their actions.

[islandboy]

What does "good" character mean to all of these official investigators? First, that the individual has never violated, or been accused of violating, any laws, regulations, or rules of any private organization. Second, that the individual is not rebellious against the Corporate State, or against the specific objectives of organizations or against duly constituted authority, public or private, or against the conventions of life. Third, that he is a "team" man who goes along with the group, does not think or act with undue independence, and acts in ways that are approved by others. fourth, that he is not emotionally unreliable or undesirable. Fifth, that he has commended himself to his superiors at various stages in his life and in the various institutions through which he has passed. To ascertain "character," organizations make use of police and other official records, questioning of the applicant himself, and statements by school authorities, former employers, friends, and enemies. These sources of information are carefully and permanently kept secret from the applicant, who has no opportunity to refute anything reported concerning him. No adequate effort is made to ascertain the truth or reliability of statements made about an individual. A collage teacher, for example, may fill out dozens of forms each year without having anyone check the basis for his opinions. Persons asked to supply information are not limited to reasonably objective facts, but invited to answer such questions as "cooperation with others," "ethical standards," "appropriateness of dress," "language and conduct," "ability to react constructively to criticisms, suggestions, advice," "emotional stability."  Although few teachers, school authorities, or former employers know individuals in their school or organizations very well, they are told to answer the questions on the basis of whatever opinions or information they have.

[islandboy]

The information and opinions concerning an individual's character are filed away and continue to be available down through the years. Nothing in the file is ever changed or disclosed to the individual, so that his character-on-file takes on an independent existence that may have an ever more remote relationship to the real individual, assuming that it ever did resemble him. The rule of most organizations is, when in doubt, don't take a chance. Thus, a file suggests an individual may be a "risk" constitutes a permanent disability to him. The consequences to the individual of this stress upon character are profound. Beginning with childhood, he learns that he must trim his sails, be prudent, please those in authority, avoid experimentation and trouble, and try to force his individuality into the rigid mold of "good character" prescribed by the State. The State, not content with dictating his working life, has thus intruded deeply into his private life and private personality.  The personality that emerges from all of this processing is, in the language of the new generation, "uptight." Uptight means rigid, tense, afraid, narrowly limited. But the concept of up-tightness, as developed by the new generation, carries a far deeper critique of the American personality. In part, up-tightness might be defined as how much of society a person carries around within himself. The uptight person is concerned with goals, with competence, with coping, with managing the past and the future. He is a person with a coating or crust over him, so that he can tolerate impersonal relations, inauthenticity, loneliness, hassling, bad vibrations. He is preoccupied with the nonsensual aspects of existence, so that he has little capacity to receive or give out sensual vibrations. He is a person who can successfully handle the frustrations, difficulties, trauma's, and demands of the Corporate State, and by that very fact is diminished in his humanity, tense, angry, and tight as he confronts the world.

[islandboy]

The individual was placed in the position of seeing much that was wrong in his society but remaining personally aloof. He could not be passionate; he could not be moral. He might have private feelings but publicly, and especially in his work, he went along with the system. Sadly, many of those who took no public stand undoubtedly felt deeply concerned, but there was no communication between likeminded people, no solidarity which would have made effective action possible. To take a public stand meant being picked off, one by one, without even the satisfaction of having done any good. To perceive evil was to feel utterly alone.   For the individual of the Fifties and Sixties, deprived of his political and public manhood, denied work of which he could be proud, the Corporate State provided substitute images of the heroic life: the cowboy, the gangster, the detective, the virile romantic hero. Rare indeed was the popular entertainment which attempted to show that an individual could be proud of his job or, except in war, proud of his contribution to society. He must watch the deterioration of his community as a spectator in the bleachers, a nonparticipant in the great events of his times.  The product of the system we have described is the "new man" of the technological age, a man suitable for operating machines and working within organizations. He is a man who permits himself to be dominated by technique, by propaganda, by training, by advertising, by the state, all to the end that he shall be as perfectly suited as possible for playing his part. He is an artificially streamlined man, from whom irrationality, unpredictability, and complexity have been removed as far as possible. He is oversimplified in the service of reason; he tries to control himself by reason, and the result is not man but a smoothed-down man.

[islandboy]

But the real tragedy of the lost self in America is not that of the professional middle class, who have had all the advantages, but the tragedy of the white-collar and blue-collar worker, who never had a chance. The meritocracy has placed them low on the scale, convincing them that they have little value as people. The productive state has demanded output from them all their lives, draining them of life, creativity, vitality, and never giving them a chance to be renewed. Competition has made them fearful and suspicious of their fellow men, believing that every other man is not a brother but a threatening rival with a knife at the throat of his adversaries. Imprisoned in masks, they endure an unutterable loneliness. Their lives are stories of disappointed hopes, hopes disintegrating into the bitterness and envy that is ever present in even the most casual conversation of the worker.  Caring nothing about their work, nothing about what happens to them, they face a prospect stretching all the way to retirement, another form of death. But death is with them already, in their sullen boredom, their unchanging routines, their minds closed to new ideas and new feelings, their bodies slumped in front of television to watch the ball game on Sunday.  If anyone doubts these words, let him look at the faces of America. Stand at a commuter train station and see the blank, hollow, bitter faces. Sit in a government cafeteria and see the faces set in rigidity, in unawareness, in timid compliance, or bureaucratic obstinacy; the career women with all their beauty fled, the men with all their manhood drained. We do not look at faces very often in America, even less than we look at ruined rivers and devastated hills.

[islandboy]

What have we all lost? What aspects of the human experience are either missing altogether from our lives or present only in feeble imitation of their real quality?  Let us take our list off the yellow pad where it was jotted down one fine morning in early summer.
Adventure, Travel: The Yukon, the Hebrides, a blizzard, fog on the Grand Banks, the lost cities of Crete, climbing a mountain on rock and ice in elemental cold and wind.
Sex Experiences: In different times, circumstances, and localities, in moments of happiness, sorrow, need, and comfortable familiarity.
Nature: The experience of living in harmony with nature, on a farm, or by the sea, or near a lake or meadow, knowing, using, and returning the elements; Thoreau at Walden.
Physical Activity: Chopping wood, carrying a boat, running, walking, climbing, experiencing heat and cold, swimming, building a house, paddling a canoe.
Clothes: Clothes to express various moods, and to express the body, its strength, its shape, its sensuality, its harmony with the rest of nature. Clothes for fun, for work, for dignity.
Morality: Having a moral stand with respect to something happening to oneself, to others, or to society; maintaining that stand, and giving it expression.

[islandboy]

Bravery, Worship, Magic and Mystery, Awe, Wonder, Reverence, Fear, Dread, Awareness of Death, Spontaneity, Romance, Dance, Play, Ceremony and Ritual, Performing for others.
Creativity: In more primitive cultures, creativity and art are part of everyday life, and each person has an opportunity to exercise his creative side.
Imagination and Music as a part of daily life.
Multimedia experiences: Music, light, smell, dance, all together.
Alterations of Time: Staying up all night, getting up before dawn, sleeping all day, working three days straight, or being wholly oblivious to measured time.
Seasons:  Observing the four changes of season by stopping other activities for a while and going to some place where the change is fully visible.
Growth, Learning, Change: Constantly learning new things, experiencing changes of feelings and personality, continually growing in experiences and consciousness.
Harmony: Enough time and reflection to assemble various experiences and changes into a harmony within the individual, relating them to each other and to earlier experiences.

[islandboy]

Inner Life: Introspection, reflection.
Responding to Own Needs: Staying in bed when the need is felt, drinking a milk shake on a hot afternoon, or stopping everything to watch a rainstorm.
Own Special Excellence: Having enough independence to disregard other people's standards of excellence, and then pursue it.
Wholeness: Being completely present with another person, or completely given to some experience, rather than being partially withheld as most roles demand.
Sensuality: Being sensually aware of all the stimuli at a given moment; smell, temperature, breeze, noises, the tempo of one's own body.
New Feelings: Experiencing feelings or emotions qualitatively different from those previously known.
Expanded Consciousness: Experiencing previously unknown kinds of awareness, new values, new understanding.
New Environments: Experiencing a total new environment long enough to make adjustments to it and understand its terms (such as six months in the tropics).
Creating an Environment: Taking whatever elements are given, natural, human, and social, and making a unique pattern out of them as one's own creation.
Conflict, Disorder, Suffering, Pain, Challenge, Transcendence, Myth Making and Telling, Literature, Art, Theatre, Films, Bare Feet, Aesthetic Enjoyment of Food, New Ways of Thinking, Nonrational thoughts, New Ideas, ability to Listen to Others.

[islandboy]

People: Perceiving Them Non-verbally.
People: Seeing the Uniqueness of Each One.
People: Creativity in Relationships.
People: Exchanging Experiences.
People: Exchanging Feelings.
People: Being Vulnerable with Them.
People: Friendship.
Affection, Community, Solidarity, Brotherhood, Liberation.

Indeed, the saddest thing of all in America is probably the fate of most of its teen-agers. For at sixteen or seventeen, no matter how oppressive the Corporate State, there is still a moment when life is within their grasp. There are a few years when they pulse to music, know beaches and the sea, value what is raunchy, wear clothes that express their bodies, flare against authority, seek new experience, know how to play, laugh, and feel, and cherish one another. But it is a short, short road from Teensville to Squarestown; soon their senses have been dulled, their strength put under restraint, their minds lobotomized; bodies still young, cut off from selves, walk the windowless, endless corridors of the Corporate State.

[islandboy]

When man allows machines and the machine-state to master his consciousness, he imperils not only his inner being but also the world he inhabits and upon which he depends. He permits himself to be forced to exist in a universe that is, in the most profound sense, at war with human life.  More and more individuals and groups speak out against the destruction of the natural world.
The Corporate State draws its vitality by a procedure that impoverishes the natural world. It grows by a process that we call "impoverishment by substitution." It is not a question of mistaken priorities or lack of awareness or even of greed. The "progress" of the State is rooted in destruction of existing values.  Most discussion concerning our environmental crisis assumes that it is just a case of neglect or of excess. The first view is war and inertia permitting of problems to grow out of hand. The second view is that we are guilty of a moral failure, that in our rush to acquire and grow, we have not paused to tend to deeper qualitative values; we have simply not assumed moral responsibility for how things are used--the ends to which new technology and systems are put. The third view is our problem is permitting the introduction of any and all technology without controls, priorities, or values. The fourth view emphasizes a more general failure to plan--a failure to agree in advance on goals and then provide for them. A fifth view, perhaps the most pessimistic, suggests that our success itself leads to loss of meaning, that affluence and progress bring on the trouble with our children that they just have too much. All of these views "blame" man but they do not take account of the uncontrolled forces that dominate the Corporate State.

[islandboy]

What is the logic of these forces? What do they, if left to themselves, tend to do with man's natural world? Up to now we have stressed their indifference to man's values. But this indifference does not mean that the forces lack a pattern of their own. They want to exploit, for their own purposes, the natural and human resources that are available. They want to substitute for whatever exists something of their own manufacture. And they want to prevent man from becoming aware of what is happening to him.

(My note: Like making climate change profitable to Al Gore, and universities and experts to get large grant money to hide the truth of what was really happening. I believe pollution could be the main causes, and that is man-made waste, but everyone has his hand in this, and rich should not be made richer by promoting their own agenda).

[islandboy]

Suppose a man is employed to work in a coal mine, and after twenty years he develops an occupational illness of the lungs. The costs of his illness, to himself and his family, in terms of direct expenses, losses of opportunity for his children, and more general deprivation and suffering, are part of the "hidden" costs of coal mining. if they are not included in the man's salary, or otherwise paid for by the producer, they fall upon the individuals concerned and upon society, and the social gain represented by production of coal is actually offset by the uncompensated loss of health, education, happiness, and psychological stability. For example, we may have more coal but also more juvenile delinquency if the miner's children are uncared for at home; the real costs of coal include crime, more policemen, courts, community insecurity. Perhaps, by some measurement, the production of coal still represents a net gain, but it will be far less of a gain than is usually assumed, and may actually, by other standards, be a net loss.  Just as the mining of coal has its unexamined human costs, so it has "hidden" environmental costs. To call them "hidden" is simply to show how our awareness has been dulled, for they assault one's senses and one's feelings. And to call them "Environmental" is also an inadequate description, for environmental costs are really indirect human costs. What we are referring to is the destruction of landscape by mining, the denudation of hills and valleys, the pollution of streams and of air, the degradation of cultural life by long hours, physical exhaustion, lack of education, and making the world a more depressing place to live in, and this should be measured against the energy coal gives off.

[islandboy]

Today a man gets poorer simply by standing still. There is a general rise in prices, a gradual inflation each year. One of the important costs of a rapidly growing and changing economy is the risk that each individual bears--that he and his training or job will become obsolete. Such an economy has many victims, but it does not pretend to pay more than a tiny fraction of the costs, although they are just as much costs of production as the physical industrial accidents which once wee treated the same way. An example of another type of cost for the individual is the growth of large cities. Living in an urban environment is far more expensive than in a small town. And at the same time so many country pleasures are lost that the urban worker needs expensive substitutes---television, for example, instead of a Sunday afternoon ball game with local friends. Since one of the consequences of "growth" is to make the simple product complicated, individuals are constantly having to pay more for a "better" product---color instead of black-and-white TV, homogenized instead of regular peanut butter. There is no logical place to end this catalogue, but there is a moral place---with the human costs of the draft and war. A man drafted into the army lost some of his most productive years. Some of his best opportunities for education are passed by, his family loses his support, and if he is injured or killed, the loss is incalculable and irreparable. Yet individuals--poor ones especially--are required to pay these costs of the defense and war policies that are one consequence of uncontrolled power. In short, we can say that the same power that turns out America's affluence also creates our social problems of poverty and wealth. Poverty and inequality are part of the cost of the well-being we enjoy. they are not an accidental consequence or some unfinished business, but a built-in part of the structure itself.

[islandboy]

Today,  continued  growth depends upon creating new wants, developing new goods and services. In large measure, this is done by a process of "substitution." One cannot sell anything to a satisfied man. Ergo, make him want something new, or take away something he has and then sell him something to take its place. Take away man's appreciation of natural body odors and then sell him deodorants and perfumes. Remove adventure from daily life and substitute manufactured adventure on television. Make it hard for an adult man to enjoy physical sport and give him a seat in a stadium to watch professionals play. Give him less time to cook and sell him instant dinners. It has always been contended that the logic of commerce is improvement: make a better mousetrap and everyone will profit. But that is only what some optimists hope will be the result of commerce. The logic of commerce is simply to sell, whether the product is better or worse. Pollution of a beach is of course an accident; only a paranoid would see it as a plot to sell swimming pools. But failure to safeguard footpaths does sell cars.   The substitution phenomenon can be seen at work in the case of our neglected public services. We have "no money" for urban public schools, although they have obsolete plant and equipment, lack adequate teaching staffs, and suffer from broken windows, unheated rooms, hopelessness, and despair. We have "no money" for improving the urban environment, "no money" for public libraries and museums, "no money" for the Job Corps or other youth programs. We have "no money" for all the tasks which we know are necessary if the society is to be kept from tearing itself apart.  Where is the money, then?