I keep seeing statistics and voices calling out that the economic disparities between rich and poor in this country continue to widen. It makes me wonder… in a democratic society where (at least politically) “majority rules”, how come the most wealthy among us, “the one percenters” as they have recently been coined, seem to continue to call the shots on a government financial policy? Why doesn’t at least a majority of the “ninety-nine percenters” come to an agreement and vote for a more equitable path forward?

There are a number of explanations out there for this, which in my opinion have at least some merit.

1. Many of us still believe in the “American Dream” of becoming “one percenters” ourselves so we don’t want to diminish that hallowed group we aspire to.

2. In our society, “money is power”, and with the expense of running political or legislative campaigns, the wealthy in this country can exercise tremendous political power relative to their numbers.

3. There is a persistent Calvinist ideological thread in the U.S. that accepts that there will always be “winners” and “losers”, and that the presence of so many “losers” is the greatest inspiration encouraging all of us to try harder, to excel and join the ranks of the “winners”.

Along with the above, I would put forward at least a fourth reason why the vision of the majority is not asserting itself in our political process and legislative action. Most of us have been “schooled” in a public education system to be passive recipients of approved knowledge, accepting external authority from our superiors telling us what to do and when to do it, while we are told to sit quietly and attentively in our seats. Thirteen years of such “training” in preparation for the adult world, and no wonder we generally fail to assert our political will!

This while most of us who are part of the “one percenters”, have been raised in an environment away from these public schools, an environment where we are trained instead with an expectation that we will be in the seat of power and wield it. We have an expectation that we must actively leverage our power to maintain and even enhance it. Here is radical educator John Taylor Gatto calling out the components of an elite education that are not found in conventional public schools.

And in a more recent book, The Education of Millionaires, author and Forbes blogger Michael Ellsberg, he calls out his seven “core success skills” gleaned from his study of the most economically successful among us…

* Learn How to Sell
* Learn Marketing
* The “Right” Way to Network with Big Wigs
* Define Your Vision
* Invest in Yourself
* Build the Brand of “You”
* Take an Entrepreneurial Mindset

Look at the stories of the most successful of the entrepreneurs among us who by leveraging their energy and innovative ideas, rise into that top economic percentile of Americans. Those stories, including those of Bill Gates, Steve Jobs and others, usually involve avoiding, rather than staying in, conventional public education.

Our public school system seems to excel instead at creating academic winners and losers, and among the winners, train up the “apparatchiks” (or a “mass of clerks” as Gatto has said) that will pull down an upper-middle class income doing the high-powered grunt work for “The Man”. That actually is not surprising to me given that one of the key visionaries of the U.S. public education system was Horace Mann, whose vision was significantly influenced by his study of the Prussian education system in the early 19th century. The Prussians developed perhaps the first mandatory universal education system in the world, with a three-tiered system of schools as follows…

Tier 1 – For the children of the Prussian aristocratic elite (their “one percenters”) to train them to be entrepreneurial, strategic and visionary leaders of society

Tier 2 – For the top ten percent of the rest of the country’s youth (the “winners” of the non-elite) to be the “knowledge workers” as professionals, industrial managers and the middle-level military officers

Tier 3 – The rest of the rest (the “losers”) to be the worker-bees of the economy and rank and file foot soldiers of the army

Having the social privilege of being white, combined with the economic privilege of solid middle-class “knowledge worker” jobs, my partner Sally and I were able to let our kids follow their instincts and leave school in their early adolescence before they were completely transformed into either academic “winners” or “losers”. Directing their own development after that point, in the enriched environment that we had the privilege to provide them, they are both now launched into adulthood with living-wage jobs, aspirations based on who they are as unique human beings, and the tested agency to set goals and effectively move towards manifesting those goals.

I hope they both can live up to their professed beliefs in equity and the democratic process and leverage their agency to join with other like-minded people to challenge the logic of “The Man” that keeps the “one percenters” on top of still formidable pyramid of undemocratic power and privilege.

1. A body of authoritative officials organized in nested ranks.

2. Any group of objects ranked so that every one but the topmost is subordinate to a specified one above it.

In the simplest terms, we exist within a “hierarchy” when other people have control over us and tell us what to do based on their higher position in the explicit or implied “org chart”. The most obvious example is the military, where you take orders from and are responsible to a person of a higher “rank”. The captain gives orders to their lieutenants, who then give orders to their sergeants, who then give orders to their corporals and privates. You are not supposed to question orders, you are supposed to obey them. And “outranking” someone does not just mean you tell them what to do, you are also responsible for how well they do what they do, and are responsible for all the people “under your command”.

Even if you are not in the military you may still exist within a number of other hierarchies. At work you may take orders from and answer to a manager, supervisor, or some other sort of “boss”. Your “boss” has a “boss” above them and on up the org chart to the owner, director, CEO or whoever else is “on top” of the company or organization you work for.

In your religious congregation you may take ethical or spiritual direction from (and feel you are answerable to) a minister, priest, imam, rabbi, or other clerical official, who may themselves take direction from a higher ranked clerical official, with some god or other deified entity at the top of that pyramid of authority. (I always think hierarchy when I hear a fundamentalist Christian talk about being “god-fearing”.)

We live in a democratic country where we no longer have emperors, monarchs or other nobility. And though we elect our President, governors, mayors and legislators, we still tend to think of them as authority figures above us who pass and implement laws, set up agencies, and otherwise control and direct our behavior and are responsible for our safety and at least elements of our wellbeing. Again, the levels of control are for the most part clearly defined, local officials taking direction from state officials, and state officials taking direction from federal.

If you are a kid and you go to school you probably take instruction from, and are answerable to, one or more adult teachers who are in turn responsible for all or part of your formal education in school. The teachers are generally answerable to a principal who in turn is answerable to levels of the school bureaucracy above them and on up to a state board and/or superintendent of education.

And as a kid, when you get home from school, you may take direction from and be answerable to your parents or other guardians who are in turn generally considered responsible for your care as well as your behavior. Depending on the family and religious structures within your culture, your parents may feel they must answer to their parents, some other patriarch or matriarch in your family, or to some sort of deity.

All of these examples meet one or both of the Wiktionary definitions of hierarchy…

1. A body of authoritative officials organized in nested ranks.

2. Any group of objects ranked so that every one but the topmost is subordinate to a specified one above it.

In general, in a hierarchy, we think of people higher up in the structure having authority or even control over the people below them, with coercive power as necessary to enforce that authority. Though in general we hope that these authority figures exercise their authority responsibly, considering our needs and even our feedback; that is often not the case.

The Other Paradigm… a Circle of Equals

“Circle of Equals” is the term I like to use to define the opposite of hierarchy, where people interact with comparable rather than ranked status. Members of such circles we often describe as “peers”, “partners”, “colleagues”, “members”, or “citizens”, and we use adjectives like “egalitarian” or “democratic” to describe their relationship with each other. Borrowing from the business world we talk about “flattening the org chart” (think Tom Friedman’s book The World is Flat).

In Wikipedia, egalitarianism is defined as…

A trend of thought that favors equality of some sort among moral agents… Emphasis is placed upon the fact that equality contains the idea of equity of quality. Moral agents should get the same, or be treated the same, or be regarded as possessing the same quality in some respect despite race, religion, ethnicity, sex, sexual preference, gender expression, species, political affiliation, economic status, social status, and/or cultural heritage. Egalitarian doctrines tend to maintain that all humans are equal in fundamental worth or social status.

In a circle of equals there can still be leaders or managers, but they generally serve in that capacity at the behest of the group, or at least answer to some degree to the group. If the group leaders still direct the group, they do so based on the will of the group and are generally answerable to the group (instead of the other way around). That said, leadership within a circle of equals is more often about facilitating the effective action of group members toward the group’s goals.

In the real world of course a particular institution or more informal grouping of people can fall anywhere on a spectrum between absolute hierarchy and complete egalitarianism with elements of both. Going back to my earlier examples of hierarchy, most of them (except perhaps the military) can be reworked more as circles of equals.

For example, in a “matrixed” work environment “teams” may be defined that agree amongst the team members who their team “lead” should be. More realistically perhaps, a manager or supervisor is focused on providing the appropriate resources, support, and otherwise facilitating the activities of the team of people that they manage. Though directives still may come from the “top” leadership, the team decides more collaboratively how they will carry out their part of the organization’s objectives. Decisions generally are made more collaboratively, including input from all involved. This could include managers being reviewed by the people they manage.

In terms of a religious congregation, the clerical person facilitates the worship services, which may be led by that person or other congregation members. In the Quaker religion, some worship services are not led at all. Congregation members gather, are initially silent, then rise and speak (or not) as they are so moved.

In political institutions this can be seen with citizens being politically active as community organizers and lobbying their elected representatives, rather than just being passive voters and spectators of the political and legislative process. Government as a circle of equals was the vision of at least some of our founding fathers, particularly people like Thomas Jefferson.

Finally, when it comes to adults, youth and children, it’s adults playing more of a facilitative and mentoring role rather than mostly directing what youth and children are doing. In schools and other venues focused on learning, this it’s kids directing their own education, seeking adults (when needed) for advice, instruction, and access to learning resources.

In families it’s kids speaking their minds, being listened to by parents and guardians who try to facilitate their kids developing and blossoming as unique, autonomous human beings with their own agency and self-direction. It’s parenting that is neither authoritarian, permissive, “helicopter” or neglectful, but instead provides an enriched environment for development.

My Life’s Work

So at age 56, I now see clearly that my life’s work is witnessing, facilitating and advocating for this transition from hierarchical to more egalitarian circles of equals within our society, and particularly in the area of kids and adults, which in many ways seems like the last vestige of the hierarchical “us and them” thinking that I am trying to move us away from.

So as a parent, I have tried to engage my kids as fellow human beings who are not quite as far on their personal development as I am, thus my stewardship and mentoring, but in every other way my equal.

In my paid work now at Kaiser, I try to approach it not as a worker-bee waiting for marching orders, but as a free agent bringing my skills and experience to bear to do what I can to help my colleagues be successful. At every opportunity I try to “speak truth to power” and candidly and visibly offer my thoughts to management to model how others can do so as well. When I am called upon to lead a meeting or other work group, I try to address everyone, whatever their place in the “food chain”, as equals and make sure their contribution is requested and heard.

As a blogger for close to three years now I continue to write pieces about my own experiences, about our history, and looking at our contemporary society, championing this great transition from one paradigm to another.

It is clear to me that “what it’s all about”, is the evolution of human consciousness, and that that evolution will be best facilitated by moving away from hierarchy and the wisdom of the few, towards a circle of equals, with no “us and them”, unlocking, sharing and leveraging the wisdom of us all.

That transition is what I often describe as from “patriarchy to partnership”, or alternatively from “hierarchy to a circle of equals”. If those terms don’t resonate with much meaning for you, maybe our human societal evolution could be described at its most basic as moving from “us and them” thinking towards thinking instead that there is no “them” and there is only “us”.

Though I don’t think I know anyone that was killed or injured on that day, watching and pondering that day’s events brought great sadness to me. I had such hopes for the symbolic power of a new century, a new millennium even (arbitrary markers, I know) to inspire us to look and move forward from the massive wars (hot and cold) and genocides of the 20th century. It had felt to me that with the fall of the Berlin Wall, perhaps the last remnant of the negative trajectory of nationalism, colonialism and calculated violence as a tool of power – that culminated with World War I, leading to World War II, the Cold War, and so many systematic exterminations of people – was finally over. There was no longer “us and them” and now only “us”.

But the events of 9/11 and the subsequent events they catalyzed seemed to dash those hopes and create a new “Axis” of evil, and a new 21st century over-arching violent conflict between world-views. Lives would be lost, others ravaged by severe injuries, and so much of our resources and psychic energy would be focused on the conflict and its collateral damages rather than continuing to build the human infrastructure and understanding to move forward. It was depressing for me to contemplate that perhaps we humans were not as far along on our evolutionary path as I thought we were.

From my reading of history, just as World War I had demoralized the world to the extent of bringing on the Great Depression, 9/11 and the subsequent wars on “terror”, Afghanistan and Iraq again crashed our human civilization’s “immune system” and brought on the Great Recession.

The “Great War” was a conflict that had no compelling justification behind it (as far as I can see) and was instead a calculated exercise of organized technologically-enhanced violent statecraft leading to the senseless slaughter, particularly of an entire generation of our young men who were bravely “serving their countries” as soldiers. There were no winners of that war, only guilty or naïve losers left alive in the wreak of human civilization as we had known it. It is no wonder in my thinking that the self-perceived disability of human civilization would lead to economic collapse, genocide, “round two” of total war and a new ideological divide of the world into hostile camps. (I am at least grateful that we did not have “round three” with all our nuclear weapons!)

With the fall of the Iron Curtain and renewed hopes of a new era beyond all that, the events of 9/11/2001 and the subsequent invasions and occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq in response again took their psychic toll on all of us. The perpetrators of the carnage of 9/11 and subsequent attacks against civilian populations, were in my opinion engaged in their own cruel and calculated “statecraft” of sorts.

For years now we have lived with every new day bringing more of our courageous young people dead or maimed, and our government encouraging us to “keep shopping” despite the carnage. Perhaps many of us medicated ourselves by turning our homes into ATMs and allowing unscrupulous practitioners in the finance industry to exploit that fact until it became psychically unsustainable. Finally it all crashed with the “Great Recession”, nearly a century after the “Great War”, but not an unrelated legacy of that earlier conflict. 1914 to perhaps 2014 (hopefully), a hundred year story arc and a lesson hopefully learned.

Again from my earlier piece…

Looking at “us and them” thinking in our human history, it was all about how we divided people up by age oar gender, clan or tribe, and later by more abstract concepts such as race or nation. However the dividing was done, there was an in-group within which there was at least a degree of mutual respect and care surrounded by outsiders that generally engendered fear. To mitigate that fear, often the in-group would define itself as somehow privileged or otherwise superior to the outsiders and justified in exercising a degree of separation from and control over (including violence against) those outsiders.

I am hoping that we can at least begin to be done with this! I for one am ready to accept that there are no “them”. The religious extremists, the jihadists, and the tyrannical regimes are all “us”… and we have to come to grips with that!

Easy for me to say… since I have not been personally and deeply wounded by loss of family, others close to me, or the entire ancestry that I am born from, in these cataclysms, and really don’t have the proper “standing” to speak. There is still so much justice and restoration that still needs to take place, the continuing legacy of violence and particularly calculated and organized violence.

Though I only came close to meeting him once, I learned about McLuhan’s ideas through a dear family friend and one-time McLuhan collaborator, Mary Jane Shoultz, who I willingly let regale me with the synthesis of their radical thinking during my teen years in the 1970s. Mary Jane meshed McLuhan’s ideas on how we are profoundly impacted by our communication technology with her own radical feminist thought to come up with such provocative concepts as “spliteracy” and “patriarchal pimperialism”. She was my favorite “Feminist Aunt”, and beyond my own mom (Jane Roberts) probably had more influence on my own developing world view than anyone else in my youth.

What recently rekindled my intimate tangle with McLuhan’s ideas was a link shared with me to his extensive 1969 interview in Playboy Magazine, which I had never seen before. (As you know, we male types counted on Playboy back in the 60′s and 70′s for such good articles as this one!) Per the article’s author…

McLuhan contends that all media — in and of themselves and regardless of the messages they communicate — exert a compelling influence on man and society. Prehistoric, or tribal, man existed in a harmonious balance of the senses, perceiving the world equally through hearing, smell, touch, sight and taste. But technological innovations are extensions of human abilities and senses that alter this sensory balance — an alteration that, in turn, inexorably reshapes the society that created the technology.

Despite the conventional (patriarchal) pronoun usage, here is an approach to understanding human culture and why all of us do what we do, which some McLuhan critics have called “technological determinism” (as opposed to say the “economic determinism” of Karl Marx). But it makes sense to me that since we perceive the world through our five (or even six) senses, any technology that expands or morphs that sensory input is going to have a profound impact on what we judge to be important and how we interact with and view our place in the world.

So for example, hearing FDR’s “fireside chats” on the radio delivered to our ears with all the intimacy and reassuring acoustic nuances of a well-modulated human voice was a very different experience from reading say the transcript of those same words in the newspaper the next day. In fact all the key leaders during World War II used their spoken words (heard by most listeners through their radios) to enflame a collective spirit (“retribalization” as McLuhan would call it) within their nations (for better or worse) that led to launching and finally ending this holocaust.

McLuhan would argue that without the radio this “retribalization” could not have happened, and the events of the period may have played out quite differently. The new technology of radio did not cause the war, but it did amplify and focus the societal (patriarchal) pathology that drove events. According to McLuhan, even without Hitler…

Some other demagogue would have used the radio to retribalize the Germans and rekindle the dark atavistic side of the tribal nature that created European fascism in the Twenties and Thirties.

McLuhan’s point is that our communication technology is a sort of powerful magic that, like Willow in “Buffy the Vampire Slayer”, we need to appreciate and use thoughtfully lest it warps our ethical compass while it reshapes our capabilities. One way or the other, Willow would never be the same once she was fully engaged in the powers of her witchcraft. The question was could she maintain her equilibrium, her “Willow-ness” in the course of that transformation.

So as Marx called out the major historical changes in human economic activity around the means of production, McLuhan calls out three major advances in our communication technology that inspired complete transformations of human society. Again, from the author’s set-up to the interview…

According to McLuhan, there have been three basic technological innovations: the invention of the phonetic alphabet, which jolted tribal man out of his sensory balance and gave dominance to the eye; the introduction of movable type in the 16th Century, which accelerated this process; and the invention of the telegraph in 1844, which heralded an electronics revolution that will ultimately retribalize man by restoring his sensory balance.

McLuhan’s take was that the invention of a phonetic alphabet – a mechanism to represent the basic sounds of human speech as a small set of symbols that could be recorded on smooth portable surfaces (the pages of a book), allowing the capture, transport and decoding/reading of that human voice – was a sort of powerful magic that profoundly changed the capabilities of an individual human being to communicate with others. In the process it gave a prominence to our visual sense that diminished the other four (or five) senses and threw humans unknowingly out of their previous sensory equilibrium. As McLuhan says in the interview…

It divorced the visual function from the interplay with the other senses and thus led to the rejection from consciousness of vital areas of our sensory experience and to the resultant atrophy of the unconscious. The balance of the sensorium — or Gestalt interplay of all the senses — and the psychic and social harmony it engendered was disrupted, and the visual function was overdeveloped.

Phonetic literacy made it possible for the spoken wisdom of one person to be recorded, saved and reinvoked over and over again, facilitating the Axial Age (roughly 800 to 200 BCE) and the rise of religions like Judaism and later Christianity that are built around various versions of a book (the Bible) and other written liturgy. The wise words of some of the best thinkers of the age could be captured and read by or to others to spread that wisdom and exponentially magnify its impact on human culture.

It also suggested that other aspects of human existence, endeavor and experience might be disassembled down to a small set of basic building blocks to be better studied, understood and eventually manipulated. The precursor to the scientific method of Aristotle and others, disassembling holistic natural processes down to their component parts.

McLuhan argues that our visual sense is the most detached of all our senses, and its rise to preeminence in the new era of phonetic literacy, made the collective consciousness of tribal society increasingly difficult to maintain. The other senses of “literate” people diminished in usage and importance. The collective power of human voices singing together, the tastes of shared food, the smell of human pheromones and perhaps the psychic abilities that were once a natural part of human perception, atrophied in comparison to this compelling new visual technique.

This all makes sense to me from my reading of history (which for me has been mostly Western history). Over the past 3000 years the use of literacy was limited to a few in positions of clerical or political authority or otherwise elite status. My understanding was that in 15th Century Europe it was illegal in many places for regular folk to even read the bible (protecting the franchise of the Roman Christian church hierarchy of priests, bishops, etc to “lead the flock”).

With the 16th Century and the invention of movable type and the advent of printing (in Europe, while it had been done previously in Asia), the spread of literacy was exponential, and as McLuhan would argue, all the re-balancing of the hierarchy of our senses and the change to how humans viewed the world that went with it.

For example, McLuhan links the whole concept of nationalism to a change in perspective brought by the communication revolution of printing, making possible pamphlets, newspapers and books…

Nationalism didn’t exist in Europe until the Renaissance, when typography enabled every literate man to see his mother tongue analytically as a uniform entity. The printing press, by spreading mass-produced books and printed matter across Europe, turned the vernacular regional languages of the day into uniform closed systems of national languages — just another variant of what we call mass media — and gave birth to the entire concept of nationalism.

Likewise, McLuhan saw other key developments of the Modern Era (from the 16th to the 20th Century) being facilitated by this new orientation that more universal literacy and the technique of easily constructed and reproduced printed pages gave to people…

The individual newly homogenized by print saw the nation concept as an intense and beguiling image of group destiny and status. With print, the homogeneity of money, markets and transport also became possible for the first time, thus creating economic as well as political unity and triggering all the dynamic centralizing energies of contemporary nationalism. By creating a speed of information movement unthinkable before printing, the Gutenberg revolution thus produced a new type of visual centralized national entity that was gradually merged with commercial expansion until Europe was a network of states.

This makes sense to me as well, since much of what inspired or enraged the people of the West over the past five centuries was what people read – Luther’s Ninety-five Theses catalyzing the Protestant Reformation, the Communist Manifesto catalyzing revolution, or the blaring headline’s of the daily newspapers. Many historians credit Joseph Pulitzer and William Randolph Hearst and their daily newspapers for pushing the US into war with Spain in 1898.

And then wrestling with McLuhan’s contention that literacy has given primacy to the human visual sense, which he sees as promoting more detachment at the expense of the other senses, I can see that too. Just think about the values implied in our conventional language usage. Its all about some form of “seeing”, whether you “saw the light”, will “see you later” or have a “point of view”. And my own continuing experience is that it is music heard with my ears that feels so connecting to memories in my own life and inspiring a sense of connection between me and the larger community (see my piece “The Soundtrack of My Life”).

And finally, to finish this first foray into McLuhan’s ideas as expressed in the 1969 interview, he speaks of the most recent fundamental change in our communication technology which he sees as inspiring a new profound transformation in how we “view” the world. Beginning with the invention of the telegraph in the mid 19th Century and intensifying with all the other forms of electronic media that followed – telephone, radio, cinema, television and computers. McLuhan says the impact of these new media includes bringing the senses (at least seeing and hearing) back into more of a balance, and provocatively called out that the rise of electronic communication is “retribalizing” people and culture…

The electronically induced technological extensions of our central nervous systems, which I spoke of earlier, are immersing us in a world-pool of information movement and are thus enabling man to incorporate within himself the whole of mankind. The aloof and dissociated role of the literate man of the Western world is succumbing to the new, intense depth participation engendered by the electronic media and bringing us back in touch with ourselves as well as with one another.

When McLuhan was interviewed in 1969, it was the age of television, and McLuhan spoke to its transformative power in the political arena…

TV is revolutionizing every political system in the Western world. For one thing, it’s creating a totally new type of national leader, a man who is much more of a tribal chieftain than a politician. Castro is a good example of the new tribal chieftain who rules his country by a mass-participational TV dialog and feedback; he governs his country on camera, by giving the Cuban people the experience of being directly and intimately involved in the process of collective decision making. Castro’s adroit blend of political education, propaganda and avuncular guidance is the pattern for tribal chieftains in other countries. The new political showman has to literally as well as figuratively put on his audience as he would a suit of clothes and become a corporate tribal image — like Mussolini, Hitler and F.D.R. in the days of radio, and Jack Kennedy in the television era. All these men were tribal emperors on a scale theretofore unknown in the world, because they all mastered their media.

McLuhan died in 1980 before the Internet came on the scene as the preeminent electronic media, more prodigious in its reach than television and adding the interactive two-way communication. And where radio and television had a limited set of “broadcasters”, the Internet gave individuals and a much wider array of groups the capability to put their ideas out their in the information marketplace. I bet if McLuhan were alive today he would have a field day de-constructing the aspects and metaphors of the “World Wide Web”, moving us toward the “Global Village”, a term that he coined for the world.

See part two of my pieces on McLuhan.

Food-chugging show host Guy Fieri

But none of the shows on the network that I have seen seem to throw in this caveat and caution about eating these “feast foods” sparingly. Instead, their ubiquitous presentation on the array of cooking and eating shows makes the case that food in the United States is all about joyful overconsumption, rather than sustenance. This while many people in the world do not have enough to eat. Though I have not seen any exposes, I would suspect that the Food Network has a lot of connections and support from the meat, dairy and restaurant industries, whose products they generally feature in their programming, rather than the healthier beans, grains and vegetables.

Now confessing my biases here, I am a vegan, who started this diet twenty years ago because I realized that my body had a genetic predisposition to high cholesterol and high blood pressure. I realized that if I continued to eat meat, dairy and eggs it was going to send me over the edge into those “lifestyle diseases” of diabetes and heart disease. Even as a vegan I still struggle with that cholesterol and blood pressure and take medicine every day to control it. So maybe that makes me doubly sensitive to a network that appears to be devoted to encouraging people toward a lifestyle that would send me to an early grave. So maybe take my rant with a grain of salt (or salt substitute).

So why are we over-consuming all these tasty treats to the detriment of our health? I got to figure that we are medicating ourselves somehow. Is it that we have created a culture that is in some ways sustaining and invigorating, at least in principle (or as it appears to many others around the world), but peel back a layer or two and see the heavy price being paid in fear and stress.

Is that Philly cheese steak with all its warm juicy tastiness a substitute for a more wholesome physical and emotional intimacy with someone we love​? Are we living in a society that is devaluing the good things in life that are free and accessible (like love and sex and work for a good cause) because there is no profit in it? Are we somehow substituting consumption for empowerment?

My partner Sally and I went to a party last night to celebrate a friend’s 60th birthday. There was an open bar, tasty hors d’oeuvres, a DJ and dancing. The food and drink were a treat and helped loosen up the crowd, many of whom had known each other in the past but not seen each other for years. But the dancing was awesome and the highlight of the evening. Sally and I rarely have (or make) the opportunity to dance, but every time we do it’s always “This is fun and good exercise and why don’t we do this more often?” We heard others say to each other, “Nobody dances any more!”

While our DJ cost money (though certainly nothing like the food and drink) our son Eric and his circle have discovered dancing and are having regular dance parties with perhaps just an iPod and speakers and BYOB. He tells us he finds dancing exhilarating and transformative.

But in a culture built around capitalism, a market economy, and the ongoing relentless promotion of consumption, who is promoting those elements of human culture, like dancing in ones apartment with friends, that have no business model (once at least the iPods and speakers have been purchased)? To watch all the advertisements, you could become convinced that to have fun, to have intimacy, or some other life-enhancing experience costs money. The corollary to that is once you run out of money you run out of life-enhancing experience.

Could this be a factor in driving many of us to suffer long hours and bad working conditions because we have become convinced that everything compelling, invigorating and just plain fun in life is going to cost us?

I for one am seriously contemplating this, and starting to imagine a life for myself and my partner Sally that is a lot simpler, in smaller cheaper living quarters, with less expenditures and less “stuff”, which will require less paid work “for the man” to support. And maybe even with more dancing.

In a broader sense, “privilege” can refer to special powers or de facto immunities held as a consequence of political power or wealth. Privilege of this sort may be transmitted by birth into a privileged class or achieved through individual actions. One of the objectives of the French Revolution was the abolition of privilege. This meant the removal of separate laws for different social classes (nobility, clergy and ordinary people), instead subjecting everyone to the same common law.

As the conventional wisdom goes, “rank has its privileges”, and the granting of ever increasing perks as one moves up the pecking-order has proven to be an effective tool to maintain that hierarchical order. Particularly so when that moving up can require great investment of ones “blood and treasure” and other costs to the human psyche, a person can feel that they have earned and therefor are entitled to that privilege.

Then there are the many forms of privilege based on an “accident of birth” and generally requiring a certain devotion to playing some conventional role to somehow feel that one has earned that accidental status. A father earns his privilege as male head of household by working and worrying himself to death, since privilege is not necessarily the same thing necessarily as liberty and being able to do whatever you want. Thus that other now rarely heard phrase, “noblesse oblige” (the privilege of aristocracy has its responsibilities). If you’ve got the pedigree and are willing to play the part and saddle the responsibilities, why not reap the perks and have your little world that narcissistically revolves around you?

Just look at much of our advertising in the media and see how much of it leverages the lure of privilege, to drive in a luxury car, live in stately “McMansion”, or have a vacation with all the trimmings in a gorgeous tropical resort with a gorgeous bikini-clad trophy spouse.

Certainly in the contemporary drama playing out in Egypt, strongman President Mubarak has exhibited the patronizing hubris of privilege in his recent speeches. He has heard his flock speak, can take care of their problems, now he urges them to go back to their jobs and let him continue to run the country as he is most qualified to do.

Allan Johnson talks a lot about the concept of privilege and its historical political context in his written works, including The Gender Knot…

As societies have developed new forms of control and domination, systems of privilege have changed in order to make use of them. Under European feudalism, for example, class privilege depended on military force, control over land, and traditional obligations between nobles and peasants. With industrial capitalism, however, class is based primarily on control cover complex organizations such as corporations, government, universities and the mass media.

Mubarak’s privilege is probably closer to the feudal variety, or its modern corollary based on controlling a network of overt and covert police and at least the tacit consent of the army. But like all forms of privilege, it generally leads to corruption of the privileged minority and the resulting dis-empowerment of the non-privileged majority.

In fact, as long as much of the world is still caught up in systems of economic and political privilege, those societies are particularly vulnerable to the challenge of religious extremist groups like Al-Qaeda, which leverage the illegitimacy of the privileged to justify their own violent extremism as somehow the most effective antidote.

But in my opinion the most compelling reason for the historical trend away from privilege is that it is standing in the way of human development. We humans are a species with an insatiable developmental imperative.

There are times in our history that a privileged minority among us has convinced the rest of us (or at least themselves) that it is in the interest of human development that the privileged and powerful control everyone else. But it can only go so far before enough people decide they can run their own live better with the liberty of their own initiative and a societal consensus to facilitate that liberty.

So in my framing of human history, its all about that developmental imperative, and particularly in the last three-thousand years that development has been facilitated by the transition from authoritarian to egalitarian, strongman to citizen, “us and them” to “all of us”, all of which revolve around moving beyond privilege to a circle of equals. Egypt circa 2011 CE is one more chapter in that compelling story.

Bowen felt that severe problems within the family unit stem from a multigenerational transmission process whereby levels of differentiation among family members can become progressively lower from one generation to the next…

Those with “low differentiation” depend on others’ approval and acceptance. They either conform themselves to others in order to please them, or they attempt to force others to conform to themselves.

This generational transmission and lack of differentiation seems to be applicable as well to the larger society beyond the family. The system that I am trying to call out and somehow exorcise seems to perpetuate itself by people within that system who conform or try and force others to do so. That perpetuation is supported by adults who are perhaps not sufficiently differentiated themselves, plus conventions that are applied to child-raising and education that do not sufficiently encourage young people to develop that differentiation.

So given all that… I believe our society is moving (at times three steps forward and two back) toward what I see as a more evolved “circle of equals”. A society full of what Bowen described as more “differentiated” people. Again from Wikipedia…

To have a well-differentiated “self” is an ideal that no one realizes perfectly. They recognize that they need others, but they depend less on other’s acceptance and approval. They do not merely adopt the attitude of those around them but acquire their principles thoughtfully… Thus, despite conflict, criticism, and rejection they can stay calm and clear headed enough to distinguish thinking rooted in a careful assessment of the facts from thinking clouded by emotion. What they decide and say matches what they do. When they act in the best interests of the group, they choose thoughtfully, not because they are caving in to relationship pressures. Confident in their own thinking, they can either support another’s view without becoming wishy-washy or reject another’s view without becoming hostile.

Bowen’s “differentiation” seems to be a useful goal to be achieved by all people, whether adult or youth, and an evolutionary state that I believe we are moving towards. People with such differentiation can examine the system they are living within in, its unconscious assumptions and conventions, and consciously choose to do and be something different. That is the revolution that begins within, being the change we seek.

The apocalyptic strain in modern politics means, as Wilentz notes, “you no longer disagree with the person; the person is a threat to the very existence of the country and its values.” In modern American politics, it’s always apocalypse now. During George W. Bush’s presidency, opponents said that his national-security agenda amounted to “war crimes.” The liberal group MoveOn.org (in)famously labeled Gen. David Petraeus as “General Betray Us.”… All of this was merely the overture for a more raw and relentless conservative attack on President Obama and the Democratic Congress. Glenn Beck has said that Obama “has a deep-seated hatred for white people.” Republican Rep. Paul Broun of Georgia described former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi as one of the “domestic enemies of the Constitution.” Newt Gingrich declared: “The secular socialist machine represents as great a threat to America as Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union once did.”

Brownstein goes on to give a brief history of civil political discourse (or lack there of) in the United States relative to today, concluding that…

The apocalyptic strain in modern politics means, as Wilentz notes, “you no longer disagree with the person; the person is a threat to the very existence of the country and its values.”

So essentially arguments are being presented on controversial issues in the political debate and the legislative process not in the sense that my position is better than my opponents, but that my opponent’s position is a disaster waiting to happen, and that my opponent’s motivations are at best naïve, but more likely disingenuous, self-serving or outright evil.

I frame what Brownstein, Obama and Wasserman-Schultz are addressing in terms of human society’s transition over the past three millennia. That’s a pretty grand scope, I know, but it really gives me such a strong historical context or flow to understand the dynamics of why we are the way we are. That transition is what I often describe as from “patriarchy to partnership”, or alternatively from “hierarchy to a circle of equals”. If those terms don’t resonate with much meaning for you, maybe our human societal evolution could be described at its most basic as moving from “us and them” thinking towards thinking instead that there is no “them” and there is only “us”.

Looking at “us and them” thinking in our human history, it was all about how we divided people up by age or gender, clan or tribe, and later by more abstract concepts such as race or nation. However the dividing was done, there was an in-group within which there was at least a degree of mutual respect and care surrounded by outsiders that generally engendered fear. To mitigate that fear, often the in-group would define itself as somehow privileged or otherwise superior to the outsiders and justified in exercising a degree of separation from and control over (including violence against) those outsiders. I’m talking here about the classic conquest and subjugation that we read about in ancient history or the more modern versions of colonialism and imperialism. Sometimes even framing the subjugation paternalistically as being for the subjugated group’s own good.

This “us and them” thinking would even permeate and stratify the in-group. A subset of people would be defined (or define themselves) in positions of authority as rulers, lords, or priests, and later as aristocrats or bosses, responsible for and exercising control over their fellow in-group members. This subset exercised a degree of privilege among their own maintained (again as with outsiders) by separation, control and even violence; and justified paternalistically.

We have remnants of this “us and them” thinking even today in various aspects of our everyday lives, between managers and the people they manage, between adult school staff (teachers and principals) and the students they manage, and generationally between parents and the children that they “manage”. The same dynamics of privilege, separation, control and paternalism apply, including a degree of violence where necessary justified as “discipline” or “consequences”.

As these areas of our lives are affected by “us and them” thinking, so is our political and legislative process. As Brownstein calls out in his piece…

Throughout American history there has always been a portion of the opposition that views the president and the governing party as not only misguided or ineffective but also fundamentally un-American… The mid-19th-century Whigs considered Andrew Jackson an executive tyrant who would shred the Constitution; many white Southerners viewed John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson as tyrannical for dismantling segregation.

These are arguments tied up with the maintenance of privilege based on fear of out-groups (white men of the unpropertied class in the case of the Whigs and black people for the segregationists), a fear which was often framed paternalistically in terms of “managing” people who could not properly manage themselves. This fear and resulting paternalism was often “spun” into (and perhaps obscured within) a larger ideological context to gain support based on idealistic constructs beyond mere fear and maintenance of privilege.

In this way, the challenge to white privilege embodied by the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was reframed by defenders of that privilege in terms of states rights and religious values in order to gain allies. These allies included conservative Christians, who based on their Christian principles of “love thy fellow man”, etc. would not necessarily be supporters of white privilege. Supporters of Civil Rights were painted as part of a larger movement dedicated to undermining Christianity and promoting in its place a godless secularism, socialism or worse. To this end, a profound ideological divide between the political parties was framed and repeatedly reinforced. Even progressive at times used this hyperbolic construct to their political advantage, including portraying Barry Goldwater as a danger to world peace rather than just a danger to Democratic control of the White House.

The reality of that artificially widened ideological divide is something quite different according to Brownstein…

In fact, the stakes in our political debates, though substantial, are rarely so large. The parties’ visions are distinct but not so disparate that they risk a rupture with American tradition. Each side operates along the continuum of debate over the proper balance between government and the private sector that has shaped American politics since Alexander Hamilton and Thomas Jefferson. This isn’t arm-wrestling between Karl Marx and Friedrich Hayek.

Given all the above, people in the United States and throughout the world still strive for a more egalitarian society based on friendship and cooperation and moving beyond “us and them” thinking. This effort is supported by the best of our ethical and faith traditions, based as they are on the Golden Rule and the inherent worth and dignity of every human being. It is to the detriment of the effective governance of our country that we fail to practice it in our political and legislative debates.

But like any ceasefire between combatants, it generally has to be mutual to be effective. Given my bias as a progressive myself, it looks to me like the occasional cease fires in the last forty years have more often been violated by those of “us” who are conservatives.

And given that conservatism in principle involves conserving the best of the past, I acknowledge more of an inclination towards a traditional hierarchical view of the world. But in the experiment in egalitarianism that the United States represents, I challenge my fellow citizens on both the left and right of our political spectrum to surrender the idolatrous allure of “us and them” thinking in favor of only “us”, and the best of human-kind.