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Poor
man wanna be rich, rich man wanna be king, and a king ain’t satisfied
till he rules everything. ~
Bruce Springsteen, “ Certainly
you and I have much to worry and complain and gripe about concerning
government, and in particular the one we call the United States: it
lies, it cheats, it steals. It
kills both at home and, increasingly, abroad.
But after we realize the problems, we have to look for answers.
And my thinking keeps returning again and again to the question
of Power – perhaps the American government continues to seek more and
more Power in the world because the American people continue to do the
very same thing. As
21st Century Americans, we can in mere hours travel distances
that, for thousands of years or more, would have taken men days, weeks,
or even months. We can speak
instantaneously to people all over the planet, no matter where they are,
or see and hear people and events as they happen.
We can, with the simple flip of a switch or push of a button,
increase or decrease the amount of heat and light in a room.
We even have machines that wash our clothes and our dishes.
In short, each of us commands – and takes almost totally for
granted – Power that even a hundred years ago was unattained by kings
and unimagined by wise men. Because
we can do all these things alone, by ourselves, we think that it’s our
Power, that we each individually possess it.
But that’s a misconception.
It’s a self-deception. We
have that Power only because we’re all connected to the Grid, and
it’s the Grid that infuses us with this Power. And
a great deal of Power it is, too. According
to Consuming
Power: A Social History of American Energies by David Nye, the Interestingly,
Ivan Illich, author of Deschooling
Society, used the same “slave” imagery in his book Energy
and Equity, published in 1974 during the energy crisis of the
Seventies. The very term
“energy crisis,” he wrote (and I quote here at length): “safeguards
the illusion that that machine power can indefinitely take the place of
manpower. To resolve this
contradiction and dispel this illusion, it is urgent to clarify the
reality that the language of crisis obscures: high quanta of energy
degrade social relations just as inevitably as they destroy the physical
milieu. “The
advocates of an energy crisis believe in and continue to propagate a
peculiar vision of man. According
to this notion, man is born into perpetual dependence on slaves which he
must painfully learn to master. If
he does not employ prisoners, then he needs machines to do most of his
work. According to this
doctrine, the well-being of a society can be measured by the number of
years its members have gone to school and by the number of energy slaves
they have thereby learned to command.
This belief is common to the conflicting economic ideologies now
in vogue. It is threatened
by the obvious inequity, harriedness, and impotence that appear
everywhere once the voracious hordes of energy slaves outnumber people
by a certain proportion. The
energy crisis focuses concern on the scarcity of fodder for these
slaves. I prefer to ask
whether free men need them. “The
energy policies adopted during the current decade will determine the
range and character of social relationships a society will be able to
enjoy by the year 2000. A
low-energy policy allows for a wide choice of life-styles and cultures.
If, on the other hand, a society opts for high energy
consumption, its social relations must be dictated by technocracy and
will be equally degrading whether labeled capitalist or socialist” (p.
3-4). Most
Greens, many Democrats, and even some Republicans would argue that to
solve any potential energy problems, to make sure that the Power stays
on and the Grid stays functional and intact – to ensure the
availability and viability of our energy slaves – the government must
manage the situation, must write, pass, and strictly enforce laws and
rules and guidelines concerning fuel and technology and its uses.
Illich says that this “necessarily impli(es) huge public
expenditures and increased social control” and that it
“rationalize(s) the emergence of a computerized Leviathan.”
But there is another option that, he said, “is barely
noticed.” People, he
wrote, “do not yet think about the use of minimum feasible power”
(p. 5) We’ve
all heard the famous statement of Lord Acton’s that “power tends to
corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.”
Illich added that “beyond a certain threshold, mechanical power
corrupts.” The massive use
of energy, he said, “acts on society like a drug that is physically
harmless but psychically enslaving.
A community can choose between Methadone and ‘cold turkey’
— between maintaining its addiction to alien energy and kicking it in
painful cramps — but no society can have a population that is at once
autonomously active and hooked on progressively larger numbers of energy
slaves” (p. 6). These
“energy slaves” – what I have called Power – come to us through
the Grid: that network of pipes and wire and cables and pavement that
binds us one to another and literally empowers us.
Without that Grid, however, the slaves disappear.
The Power vanishes, and with it modern civilization: Witness New
York City in the summer of 1977, when the Grid failed, the Power went
out, and the energy slaves disappeared.
What the Grid needs, what it craves, to stay functional – what
it needs to distribute all this Power, all these slaves, to so many
people – is efficiency. And
what gives the Grid the efficiency it needs is the Power and the
authority of the State. Take
just one example: when I was a boy, it took us 3 ½-4 hours to drive the
120 miles to my grandparents’ cabin on Lake Ontario.
We took NYS Route 11 north through Marathon and Cortland.
It became Salina Street as it took us slowly through downtown
Syracuse. Eventually we
reached Pulaski and I knew we’d be there soon.
Now, I could cover the same trip in a little over two hours
because the State has made the Grid – in this case, the automotive
part of the Grid that we call highways – more efficient.
In the mid- and late Sixties the State built Interstate 81,
partly by using its power to tax and partly by using its power of
eminent domain to seize land it could not simply buy.
Without eminent domain, for example, just one landowner could
have thwarted the entire system, either by preventing it completely or
by causing a variation, a curve, that could make the road less
efficient. Just compare the
fast, straight, efficient Interstates of upstate New York with the slow,
meandering, inefficient roads of Lancaster County, Pennsylvania. Could
a free marketplace have built such fast and efficient roads?
Perhaps. But I think
they’d be more like those in Lancaster County.
I doubt that I’d be able to reach Lake Ontario in about two
hours. I think about the
little walk I took today during our class break (summer classes run 2 ½
hours, so a break is pretty necessary!).
The State is altering the main entrance to campus and moving its
traffic light so that it aligns with the entrance to the credit union
across the street and creates a better, more efficient traffic flow.
If all these interests – the college, the credit union, the
road construction crew, the owners of the road, the electric company,
the company that times and maintains the street lights to maintain
maximum efficiency on the streets – if these were all private, what
are the chances that they would agree?
If they could, how long would it take them to come to this
agreement? We
like to think – we want to think – that under private management, in
a free market, everything would work just as if not more smoothly, more
efficiently, as under State control, but as far as I can see that’s
purely theoretical. Perhaps
under a truly free market the automobile industry would never have taken
off the way it did because without roads, without a network of highways
– without the Grid – what good are cars?
Agreement often comes more quickly through coercion than through
persuasion. Freedom is
messy. Freedom is quirky,
eccentric, idiosyncratic. Freedom
is in many ways the antithesis of efficient.
The Grid has no room for idiosyncrasies.
It needs the State. Mussolini,
as we know, made the trains run on time. It’s
this Grid that enables us to have the Power we crave – the Power we
think we must have. We want
it to be efficient. We need
it to be efficient. It
provides us those energy slaves that do so much work for us – work we
refuse to do for ourselves. And
we want more all the time: bigger, faster cars; bigger TV screens; more
entertainment; more food; more money; more excitement.
More electricity. More
money. More Power.
And it’s become unchecked.
At one time, people had an internal self-governor.
They had a conscience. They
had a concept of God. They
had character, morals, a sense of honor and of right and wrong.
But all that’s gone now. Character,
honor, and morality are outmoded ideas, mere relics of another time.
And we’re left with an aching emptiness in our souls that we
desperately fill with speed, with sex, with food, with thrills, with
noise – with Power. It
only stands to reason, then, that if we are such people – and we are
– then the government we create, the government which stems from our
wants and our desires, would reflect those qualities.
We are a greedy, desperate, soul-less people who seek Power over
everything. Why then do we
wonder that the government seeks the same thing? Complaining
about the State certainly has its place.
We must continue to point out its lies, its hypocrisy, its
iniquity. But that isn’t
enough; it can’t be. We
also have to do something about it.
In Energy
and Equity, Illich wrote that we “must reject the fatal image of
man the slaveholder currently promoted by an ideologically stimulated
hunger for more energy” (p. 9). To
reduce the State’s hunger for Power, each of us must reduce our own.
We must lessen our dependence on the Grid.
We must, as Gandhi said, “be the change that you want to see in
the world.” We must free our slaves. |
