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The Paradise Perspective: Commentary from a Free and Compassionate Alternate Reality Volume 1, Number 7 How the Baby Boomers Almost Saved the World ...and why they failed by Glen Allport Exclusive to STR February 12, 2007 Say
the word and you'll be free Say
the word and be like me Say
the word I'm thinking of Have
you heard the word is love? It's
so fine, It's sunshine It's
the word, love --
John Lennon & Paul McCartney,
The Word In
the 1960s, the first half of the Baby
Boom generation began to emerge from childhood into – well, teenhood.
Already liberated (or corrupted, depending on who you asked) by Elvis and
Little Richard, this tsunami of youthful rebellion continued on the road
to heaven (or hell), which was apparently paved with massage oil, bricks
of hashish, and 45-rpm records: the fabled “sex, drugs, and rock ‘n
roll.” Long
hair, peace, and love were
in; racism, being uptight, and
waging war were out. Naturally, our parents were horrified. Not
everyone fit these stereotypes, but enough did that one might speak of the
tenor of the times. Some of what follows is how that tenor sounded, at
least to me, as it was happening. ———— Yeah,
come on all of you, big strong men, Uncle
Sam needs your help again. He's
got himself in a terrible jam Way
down yonder in So
put down your books and pick up a gun, We're
gonna have a whole lotta fun. And
it's one, two, three, What
are we fighting for? Don't
ask me, I don't give a damn, Next
stop is And
it's five, six, seven, Open
up the pearly gates, Well
there ain't no time to wonder why, Whoopee!
we're all gonna die. --
Country Joe and the Fish, I
Feel-Like-I’m-Fixin’-to-Die Rag In
the beginning I misunderstood But
now I've got it, the word is good --
John Lennon & Paul McCartney, The Word
(again) Instead
of Burning Man,
Boomers had Woodstock
and the Summer of Love.
Instead of rap and video games, Boomers grooved to Stevie
Wonder (and a thousand other artists who were focused, as much as
anything, on love and peace) and staged massive anti-war protests. “Do
your own thing” was the generation’s affirmation of personal freedom
and rejection of all forms of repression. “Do whatever you want as long
as you aren’t hurting anyone else” was another oft-heard sentiment. Boomers
took the “not hurting others” part seriously and rejected the racist
and sexist attitudes of their elders, supporting integration, civil
rights, and gender equality – despite sometimes violent opposition. As
the Vietnam War raged, Boomers not only embraced peace and compassion;
they put real energy into anti-war demonstrations and marches, and in
political opposition to President Johnson and other war-mongering
Democrats. Boomers supported Eugene McCarthy and even Richard Nixon, who
wasn’t much in harmony with Boomer ideals but said he had a “plan”
to end the war, although he, uh, couldn’t tell us what it was. Best of
all, many Boomers supported Nobody.
The Nobody for President
movement, begun in 1975, brought the voting choice “none of the above”
into the limelight, along with the subversive idea that we might actually
be better off without anyone
ruling us. It
was easy to see a more free, peaceful, and compassionate world emerging as
this Baby Boom generation moved into the future. The Boomers’ personal
respect for the choices of others seemed to ensure that freedom would
blossom as the younger generation gradually became the adult majority.
Boomers’ willingness to visibly and energetically oppose war and other
evil made a warmer, more humane future believable. The sense of connection
with others shown by many Boomers (volunteering for the Peace Corps,
joining communes, supporting the rights of minorities and the downtrodden)
reinforced that sense of being on the verge of a better, healthier world.
Surely, the repression, conformity, racism, and war-mongering of previous
generations were about to give way to a more open, free, compassionate,
and peaceful world. ———— So
what happened? I believe the answer is surprisingly simple. With tragic
consequences, Boomers failed to embrace non-coercion, at least where
government was concerned – and that
one mistake sabotaged everything positive the Boomers stood for, including
peace, love, and freedom. Failing
to reject coercion eventually even corrupted the Boomer’s positive
stance on sexuality; consider, for example the bizarre, zero-tolerance
laws that have recently been used to imprison
people for consensual sex between what would have been considered
adults in most times and places throughout history. When a 17-year-old can
be sentenced to ten years in prison because his 15-year-old girlfriend
initiated oral sex, you know that the use of government coercion to
“protect” us has gotten so far out of hand as to almost defy
description. And this is only one example of how “compassion” becomes
“tyranny” when enforced by government power. Compassion
is not something you “enforce.” Compassion does not long survive
coercion, and attempts to provide compassion via coerced taxation reminds
of the ‘60s anti-war saying that “killing for peace is like f*cking
for virginity.” One does not make progress towards a goal by using
methods that undermine or destroy the goal. Compassion
is a natural and voluntary emotion that, in a healthy person, leads to
appropriate action within the context of his or her own life. Compassion
and coercion are diametrically opposed; whenever coercive government
begins doing something for alleged reasons of compassion, you know
a disaster is in the making. For example: Prohibition
of Alcohol, 1920 – 1933 Alleged reason: Compassion,
expressed by protecting us from ourselves at gunpoint, because alcohol is
dangerous. Americans were told Prohibition would reduce spousal and child
abuse, employee absenteeism, and other symptoms linked to heavy drinking. Actual results included forcible ending of consumer protection with
subsequent blinding and death of numerous Americans from bad booze;
creation of vast, wealthy, and violent criminal empires; corruption of
legislators, police and judiciary; ruining of many thousands of lives due
to arrest and imprisonment; none of the promised improvement in
productivity or worker absenteeism or in reducing family violence; an
actual increase in drinking
(after initial drop), according to many authorities. Alleged reason:
Compassion, expressed by
protecting us from ourselves at gunpoint, because pot and other drugs are
dangerous. Well, we were TOLD
that marijuana is dangerous; in fact, its
safety record is exceptional; far better than that of prescription
drugs. Actual results include forcible ending of consumer protection
resulting in very high prices and occasional deaths;
500,000
Americans currently in prison because they prefer pot (or some other
illegal drug) to, say, vodka; creation of vast, wealthy, and violent
criminal empires; corruption
of legislators, police
and judiciary; creation of vast and expensive bureaucratic and
law-enforcement empires; destruction
of the freedom that Americans have fought for since colonial times;
similar harm
to other nations caused by the US drug war; extreme
racial bias in practice; failure
at elimination or reduction of drug usage; an increase in the potency
of illegal drugs (e.g., from coca to cocaine to crack) because more potent
forms take less space, are easier to smuggle, and bring more cash per
pound. War
(in Alleged
reason: Compassion,
expressed by liberating foreigners from tyrants, protecting Americans from
supposed danger, and spreading American-style democracy. Actual
results include death
for millions, including over 655,000
Iraqi civilians since the 2003 invasion; the moral
and financial
bankrupting of America; over
700 US military bases on foreign soil (imagine the annual expense for
a single such base); a military
budget larger
than the next 20 biggest military spenders combined; extremely
widespread emotional
damage among the civilian and military survivors of war and their
children; increasing disrespect
and outright hatred for America by people around the globe. Alleged
reason: Compassion,
expressed by ensuring a good education for even the poorest American
children. Actual
results include traumatic levels of boredom, violence,
coercive and otherwise disrespectful
treatment of children throughout their childhoods; increasing
replacement of actual education with pro-government propaganda, and
notoriously bad results in core academic subjects. As John Taylor Gatto, a
three-time former NYC Teacher of the
Year puts it, “Mandatory education serves children only
incidentally; its real purpose is to turn them into servants.” (Against
School, Harper’s Magazine,
September 2003). Gatto’s books and website document that “The real
makers of modern schooling were leaders
of the new American industrialist class, men like: Andrew Carnegie,
the steel baron, John D. Rockefeller, the duke of oil, Henry Ford . . .,
and J.P. Morgan, the king of capitalist finance.” These men wanted
easily manipulated consumers and a large pool of docile corporate workers;
governments saw massive new bureaucratic empires and a chance to reduce
parental influence while increasing government control over future voters
and potential cannon fodder. Mandatory education was (and is) a win-win
for corporations and government, the conjoined-twin pillars of Power.
Furthermore, experience with public education taught power-seekers a
valuable lesson: that anything
can be sold to American voters if it is only presented as being “for the
children.” This is true even if the program is demonstrably harmful
to children. ———— One
would think that a community such as the one described in this article
would be a powerful ally in the fight against an ever expanding and
oppressive government. Unfortunately, the hippy community does not
understand fully the free market forces that it embraces. – David Barnes, The Hippy Market Nobody
is starving
in China, man. Mao is doin’
his sh*t. –
Twenty-ish propaganda victim, By
supporting government power (“But only good
government power, man!”) the Boomers of all stripes – not just the
Hippies who David Barnes describes in the quote above – played into the
hands of Power itself. The power elite adapted instinctively, dancing
around the issues like Cassius
Clay danced around opponents in the ring, shifting from the Red Menace
to the War on Drugs to the War on Terror; moving from the Great Society to
Compassionate Conservatism. “You want GOOD power? You want a warm,
cuddly, mommy-daddy government that will make everything OK? You GOT it,
boys and girls! We feel your pain! Heck: we
even smoked pot! We promise to solve every problem, to leave
no child behind, and to make all the bad people be nice. So on
election day, be sure to vote!” The
To
say it plainly: Boomers, as a group, failed to understand that love and
freedom require each other. Like
millions before and since, Boomers were seduced by the idea that
compassion can be imposed at gunpoint by the State – not that this scam
is ever described so directly by proponents. ———— Emphasizing
love at the expense of freedom leads to horrors, because freedom is a necessary part of love. Even seemingly minor reductions
in freedom begin the process of corrupting love, because love and coercion
are polar opposites. More of one always means less of the other. For
that reason, it is equally true that freedom
without love also
leads to horrors. A free society absolutely requires a sense of connection
with others (love) to function. A million people who don’t give a bleep
about each other will never create a healthy, functional free society, no
matter how many of them have read Ayn
Rand. ———— I
have no doubt that if the Boomers had developed a wide and profound
understanding of the love
and freedom duality, the world would be very different today. Imagine
the anti-war passion of the 1960s and early 1970s being channeled by a
group which truly understood that giving coercive power of
any type to the power-hungry never
leads to anything good. Imagine if the Boomers had insisted on
dramatically reducing the initiated coercion of government and putting the
energy and finances thus saved into real works of compassion. John Lennon
expressed something close to this: Imagine there's no countries It isn't hard to do Nothing to kill or die for And no religion too Imagine all the people Living life in peace... --
John Lennon, Imagine
I
have come to believe that it isn’t countries or religions we need to
end; it is systematic
initiated coercion and widespread
emotional damage. A country is just a very large group of people
(the land is secondary, as shown by changing borders, among other things).
Whether or not the people of a country condone the use of initiated
coercion (the State as we have known it) is the real issue. Lennon’s
idea of “no countries” may actually have been surprisingly close to
that; for example, in 1973 he and Yoko Ono ran an advertisement for the country
of Nutopia: “Citizenship of
the country can be obtained by declaration of your awareness of NUTOPIA.
NUTOPIA has no land, no boundaries, no passports, only people. NUTOPIA has
no laws other than cosmic. All people of NUTOPIA are ambassadors of the
country.” As
with countries, religions can be positive or negative; their actions may
be compassionate or cruel. The issue is mostly emotional damage, not
whether someone carries Jesus in her heart – or the Buddha, or whomever.
People practice their religion and behave generally in accord with their
level of emotional health; healthy
people think and behave in healthy ways. On the other hand, people who
must be told to “love one
another” probably can’t, and religious teaching will not likely fix
the problem. The capacity for love grows naturally in childhood
(and in infancy and even in the womb) when we are treated with
affection, compassion, and respect. No amount of later teaching can
replace the love we needed in childhood. Imagine
no possessions I
wonder if you can No
need for greed or hunger A
brotherhood of man Imagine
all the people Sharing
all the world... --
John Lennon, Imagine
(again) Here
also, I would argue that Lennon did not get things entirely right (but
then, he was still young). The hypocrisy of an extremely wealthy person
promoting the idea of “no possessions” seems obvious, but the truth of
Lennon’s position shines through despite the corrupting influence of
Marxism (if indeed that’s what it was). It is not possessions per
se – not property itself and the ownership of property – that
causes so much harm, but rather the combination of emotional
damage and coercive
State power. Emotional damage dims the sense of connection with
others, which in turn leads to greedy, insensitive, and otherwise
unhealthy behavior. For example, people who did not get what they needed
in childhood often feel that no amount of money (or sex, clothing, power,
or whatnot) is ever enough, and in a sense they are right – because no
amount of anything received as an adult can make up for the love one needed
but didn’t get as a child. It
is important to understand that private property itself
is actually a critical element in creating and maintaining prosperity,
in providing a mechanism for the poor to improve their lot, in preventing
the concentration of wealth in the hands of those who seek power (and thus
in protecting human rights – if that seems counterintuitive, consider
reading The Black
Book of Communism), and in creating the levels of wealth that allow
for and encourage charity and philanthropy. Non-coercive socialism makes
sense and often works well in a small setting (families, churches,
communes, etc.) but in larger groups and especially when imposed and
funded coercively, it leads to the erosion of wealth, to the concentration
of power, and eventually to much worse. I
like to think that what Lennon was really imagining (or would have
eventually imagined) was a world without severe and widespread emotional
damage, and without the systematic use of initiated coercion to run
societies. What I personally imagine, in other words, is a world of love
and freedom, and I believe that Lennon – like many others of his
generation – was very close to imagining such a world as well. Would
John have gotten there, at some point? We’ll never know. For now, all we
can do is take up where he left off. ———— Love
and freedom are a connected duality, and each
half only works with help from the other.
Our job is to move that thought, and eventually that understanding,
into people’s minds as widely and quickly as possible. The free and
compassionate world – the secret world of our hearts – depends on it.
Life itself on this Earth may depend on it. The
Boomers stumbled and failed here; their children and grandchildren must
not. Glen Allport is the author of The Paradise Paradigm: On Creating A World of Compassion, Freedom, and Prosperity and maintains paradise-paradigm.net. This is one in a series of columns on the human condition.
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