Jim Brumm: Long-Term Thinking for a Short-Sighted World

Philip Morris is the number one corporate criminal in the world. Adbusters Adbusters 89 The Ecopsychology Issue 90_morris_teaser.jpg Splash Image: 

We’ve all seen the movies, the blood-soaked tales of monsters that simply will not die. Immortal and indestructible, they rise up to torture the embattled heroes again and again and again. Philip Morris has been that monster for over a century, peddling its poison on the open markets and sending hundreds of thousands to early graves. Like any good monster, it mutates – changing its product, packaging and message to attract a new generation of young smokers as the old ones die off. And just when you think you have it trapped – cornered by damning science and angry legislation – you open the door to find the monster has escaped. By lobbying the state of New York to revoke Philip Morris’s corporate charter, we can finally end the carnage. As any harrowed horror protagonist can tell you, the only way to be sure you’re rid of the monster is to cut off its head and watch it die.

Which corporate crooks do you think should be next on the chopping block?

  

Download this PDF poster for print or GIF for the web and let’s spread this around until those responsible are brought to justice.

Help open the Israeli mindscape. Adbusters Adbusters 90 Whole Brain Catalog 90_truthbombs_teaser.jpg Splash Image: 

Photo by Mohammed Salem - Reuters

Adbusters’ bold new project aims to air citizen-produced advocacy spots on Israeli television.

-->

The continued Israeli occupation of the Palestinian territories is one of the key Arab and Muslim grievances with the West and the root of conflict in the Middle East.

Despite Palestinian resistance and international pressure, it will be the citizens of Israel who will ultimately decide: Either the settlements are evacuated and a Palestinian state is born, or the apartheid system continues and more blood is shed.

This is your chance to speak to the people of Israel directly. Adbusters is launching a public awareness campaign on Israel’s major television networks and we need your help developing 15, 30 and 60-second advocacy commercials. An inexpensive endeavor with great potential: The spots can be aired for as little as a few hundred dollars and reach many of Israel’s 7.2 million citizens.

Militarized, isolated and afraid, Israelis feel demonized and normally see only condemnation in international opinion. This fresh, new project is a rare opportunity to engage the deciders in a fruitful dialogue and help salvage their future and ours.

Please send your ideas, storyboards, concepts with pictures and complete 15, 30 and 60-second spots to: truthbombs@adbusters.org

Help open the Israeli mindscape. Adbusters Adbusters 90 Whole Brain Catalog 90_truthbombs_teaser.jpg Splash Image: 

Photo by Mohammed Salem - Reuters

Adbusters’ bold new project aims to air citizen-produced advocacy spots on Israeli television.

-->

The continued Israeli occupation of the Palestinian territories is one of the key Arab and Muslim grievances with the West and the root of conflict in the Middle East.

Despite Palestinian resistance and international pressure, it will be the citizens of Israel who will ultimately decide: Either the settlements are evacuated and a Palestinian state is born, or the apartheid system continues and more blood is shed.

This is your chance to speak to the people of Israel directly. Adbusters is launching a public awareness campaign on Israel’s major television networks and we need your help developing 15, 30 and 60-second advocacy commercials. An inexpensive endeavor with great potential: The spots can be aired for as little as a few hundred dollars and reach many of Israel’s 7.2 million citizens.

Militarized, isolated and afraid, Israelis feel demonized and normally see only condemnation in international opinion. This fresh, new project is a rare opportunity to engage the deciders in a fruitful dialogue and help salvage their future and ours.

Please send your ideas, storyboards, concepts with pictures and complete 15, 30 and 60-second spots to: truthbombs@adbusters.org

Help open the Israeli mindscape. Adbusters Adbusters 90 Whole Brain Catalog 90_truthbombs_teaser.jpg Splash Image: 

Photo by Mohammed Salem - Reuters

Adbusters’ bold new project aims to air citizen-produced advocacy spots on Israeli television.

-->

The continued Israeli occupation of the Palestinian territories is one of the key Arab and Muslim grievances with the West and the root of conflict in the Middle East.

Despite Palestinian resistance and international pressure, it will be the citizens of Israel who will ultimately decide: Either the settlements are evacuated and a Palestinian state is born, or the apartheid system continues and more blood is shed.

This is your chance to speak to the people of Israel directly. Adbusters is launching a public awareness campaign on Israel’s major television networks and we need your help developing 15, 30 and 60-second advocacy commercials. An inexpensive endeavor with great potential: The spots can be aired for as little as a few hundred dollars and reach many of Israel’s 7.2 million citizens.

Militarized, isolated and afraid, Israelis feel demonized and normally see only condemnation in international opinion. This fresh, new project is a rare opportunity to engage the deciders in a fruitful dialogue and help salvage their future and ours.

Please send your ideas, storyboards, concepts with pictures and complete 15, 30 and 60-second spots to: truthbombs@adbusters.org

Engulfed by consumer culture. Malcolm Klimowicz Malcolm Klimowicz 90 Whole Brain Catalog 90_klimowicz2_teaser.jpg Splash Image:  Photo by Roderik Henderson, Transvoid: The Mental Desert

I arrive home from work, drained and empty. Too tired for human interaction, I press the buttons on the remote and stare blankly into the big TV box. It’s not long before the commercials and endless parade of product placements overwhelm my defenses and penetrate my mind. Every detail of every message is meticulously calculated, designed to be repetitive and hypnotic, played over and over until the mindfuck finally kicks. In. My head is now filled with fatuous desire. Fast forward. Like a junkie on a comedown, I stumble into the sterile mall corridors as if in some kind of trance. The motley group of shoppers surrounding me, all the same – glazed eyes, blank stares, faces twisted into ugly masks of want. We are an army of zombies. Instead of brains and human flesh, we devour strategically placed merchandise and affordably priced products manufactured in China. I quickly drain my plastic cards and my soul, returning home with my bounty of shopping bags. All filled with mass produced garbage, quickly tossed onto a pile of all the other trash I’ve accumulated. Tomorrow I will wake up, have my coffee and leave the comfort and security of my home for work. I will spend another long and tedious day in the indentured monotony that masquerades as a job. When it’s over, I will again return home and rest in front of the big TV box and wait for the radiating commercials, like little particles penetrating what is left of my mind. And every night I tell myself, “maybe one of these days, I’ll pull the plug.”

–Malcolm Klimowicz

Engulfed by consumer culture. Malcolm Klimowicz Malcolm Klimowicz 90 Whole Brain Catalog 90_klimowicz2_teaser.jpg Splash Image:  Photo by Roderik Henderson, Transvoid: The Mental Desert

I arrive home from work, drained and empty. Too tired for human interaction, I press the buttons on the remote and stare blankly into the big TV box. It’s not long before the commercials and endless parade of product placements overwhelm my defenses and penetrate my mind. Every detail of every message is meticulously calculated, designed to be repetitive and hypnotic, played over and over until the mindfuck finally kicks. In. My head is now filled with fatuous desire. Fast forward. Like a junkie on a comedown, I stumble into the sterile mall corridors as if in some kind of trance. The motley group of shoppers surrounding me, all the same – glazed eyes, blank stares, faces twisted into ugly masks of want. We are an army of zombies. Instead of brains and human flesh, we devour strategically placed merchandise and affordably priced products manufactured in China. I quickly drain my plastic cards and my soul, returning home with my bounty of shopping bags. All filled with mass produced garbage, quickly tossed onto a pile of all the other trash I’ve accumulated. Tomorrow I will wake up, have my coffee and leave the comfort and security of my home for work. I will spend another long and tedious day in the indentured monotony that masquerades as a job. When it’s over, I will again return home and rest in front of the big TV box and wait for the radiating commercials, like little particles penetrating what is left of my mind. And every night I tell myself, “maybe one of these days, I’ll pull the plug.”

–Malcolm Klimowicz

Engulfed by consumer culture. Malcolm Klimowicz Malcolm Klimowicz 90 Whole Brain Catalog 90_klimowicz2_teaser.jpg Splash Image:  Photo by Roderik Henderson, Transvoid: The Mental Desert

I arrive home from work, drained and empty. Too tired for human interaction, I press the buttons on the remote and stare blankly into the big TV box. It’s not long before the commercials and endless parade of product placements overwhelm my defenses and penetrate my mind. Every detail of every message is meticulously calculated, designed to be repetitive and hypnotic, played over and over until the mindfuck finally kicks. In. My head is now filled with fatuous desire. Fast forward. Like a junkie on a comedown, I stumble into the sterile mall corridors as if in some kind of trance. The motley group of shoppers surrounding me, all the same – glazed eyes, blank stares, faces twisted into ugly masks of want. We are an army of zombies. Instead of brains and human flesh, we devour strategically placed merchandise and affordably priced products manufactured in China. I quickly drain my plastic cards and my soul, returning home with my bounty of shopping bags. All filled with mass produced garbage, quickly tossed onto a pile of all the other trash I’ve accumulated. Tomorrow I will wake up, have my coffee and leave the comfort and security of my home for work. I will spend another long and tedious day in the indentured monotony that masquerades as a job. When it’s over, I will again return home and rest in front of the big TV box and wait for the radiating commercials, like little particles penetrating what is left of my mind. And every night I tell myself, “maybe one of these days, I’ll pull the plug.”

–Malcolm Klimowicz

The birth of a movement. Kalle Lasn and Micah White Kalle Lasn and Micah White 90 Whole Brain Catalog 90_ecomind_teaser.jpg Splash Image: 

Photo by Jörg Klaus - bransch.net

For thousands of generations we humans grew up in nature. Our teachers were flora and fauna and our textbooks thunderstorms and stars in the night sky. Our minds were like the forests, oases and deltas around which our cultures germinated: chaotic, wild, fecund.

But in the last couple generations, we have largely abandoned the natural world, immersing ourselves in virtual realms. Today the synthetic environment rivals nature as a driving force in our lives, and the mental environment has become the terrain where our fate as humans will be decided. By emigrating from nature we’ve done something more than just move domiciles – we have fundamentally altered the context in which we live our lives.

Along with this transition to a new psychic realm, we have also seen the exponential rise of mental illnesses. Globally, humanity is now suffering from an epidemic of uncontrollable anxieties, mood disorders and depression. The United Nations predicts that mental disease will be bigger than heart disease by 2020.

Why is this happening? Why are we breaking down mentally?

If you ask psychologists what increases the general loading of psychopathology on the human animal, they will list a lot of things: the breakdown of community, the insecurity of social roles, the stresses of modernity and globalization and maybe even the chemicals in the air, water and food that may be affecting our brains in unknown ways. Others blame the thousands of aggressive, erotically charged marketing messages our brains absorb every day as the culprit. And still others say that heavy internet use leads to addictions and depression and that the digital revolution may be rewiring our brains in unhealthy ways. Nobody knows for sure.

But it’s tantalizing to guess.

What follows is just a beginning, an introduction to some of the mental pollutants, information viruses and psychic shocks we have to deal with daily – a survey of the threats to our “ecology of mind.”

For countless generations the ambient noise was rain and wind and people talking. Now the soundtrack is full-spectrum, undecodable. From the dull roar of rush-hour traffic to the drone of your fridge and the buzz of your monitor, various kinds of noise (blue, white, pink, black) are continuously seeping into our brains. And the volume is constantly being cranked up. Two, perhaps three generations have already become stimulation-addicted. Can’t work without background music. Can’t jog without earphones. Can’t sleep without an iPhone tucked under the pillow. The essence of our postmodern age may be found in this kind of incessant brain buzz. Trying to make sense of the world above the din is like living next to a freeway – you get used to it, but at a severely diminished level of mindfulness and well-being.

Quiet feels foreign now, but quiet could be just what we need. Silence may be to a healthy mind what clean air and water are to a healthy body. In a cleaner, quieter mental environment, we may find our mood calming and depression lifting.

From the moment your radio alarm sounds in the morning to the wee hours of late-night TV, micro-jolts of commercial pollution flow into your brain at the rate of about 3,000 marketing messages per day. Every day, an estimated 12 billion display ads, three million radio commercials, more than 200,000 TV commercials and an unknown number of online ads and spam emails are dumped into our collective unconscious. Corporate advertising is the single largest psychological experiment ever carried out on the human race. Yet, its impact on us remains unstudied and largely unknown.

The first time we saw a starving child on a late-night TV ad, we were appalled. Maybe we sent money. But as these images became more familiar, our capacity for compassion waned. Eventually these ads started to annoy us, even repulse us. And now we feel nothing when we see another starving kid.

The average North American witnesses half a dozen acts of violence (killings, gunshots, assaults, car chases, rapes) per hour of prime-time TV watched. As for sex in the media and porn on the internet, we all know what catches our attention and stops us from zapping the channels: pouting lips, pert breasts, buns of steel, buoyant superyouth. Growing up in a violent, erotically charged media environment alters our psyches at a bedrock level. It distorts our sexuality – the way you feel when someone suddenly puts a hand on your shoulder or hugs you or flirts with you – how we think about ourselves as sexual beings. And the constant flow of commercially scripted, violence-laced, pseudo-sex makes us more voyeuristic, insatiable and aggressive. Then, somewhere along the line, nothing – not even rape, torture, genocide, or war porn – shocks us anymore.

The commercial media are to the mental environment what factories are to the physical environment. A factory dumps pollution into the water or air because that’s the most efficient way to produce plastic or wood pulp or steel. A TV station or website pollutes the cultural environment because that’s the most efficient way to produce audiences. It pays to pollute. The psychic fallout is just the cost of putting on the show.

The information we consume is increasingly flat and homogenized. Designed to reach millions, it often lacks nuance, complexity and context. Reading the same factoids on Wikipedia and watching the same viral video on YouTube, we experience a flattening of culture.

Cultural homogenization has graver consequences than the same hairstyles, catchphrases, action-hero antics and video clips propagated ad nauseam around the world. In all systems, homogenization is poison. Lack of diversity leads to inefficiency and failure. Infodiversity is as critical to our long-term survival as biodiversity. Both are bedrocks of human existence.

At first all that information was pleasurable. It felt as if the sum of all knowledge was only a hyperlink away and we skipped joyously down the infotrail, sending emails to our friends, adding bookmarks and hopping from site to site late into the night. But as the initial glow wore off, we were left in a state of digital daze: unable to concentrate, feeling foggy, anxious and fatigued.

For many of us, what began as an exhilarating romp has become a daily compulsion. Our smart phones, netbooks and computers now keep us constantly online. While waiting in line at the supermarket or enjoying an evening walk or reading a book or even sitting at a concert, we keep texting our friends and receiving quick Twitter updates. We are drowning in an endless stream of connectivity. And future generations may be even more wired. A Pew Research Center study found that American teenagers send 50 or more text messages a day and one-third send more than 100 a day. Another study by the Kaiser Family Foundation reported that American children between the ages of 8 and 18 spend an average of 7 ½ hours a day using some sort of electronic device.

Our online lives may now be impairing our ability to follow a sustained line of thought, to think deeply about something and maybe even to reach “the heights of ecstasy and the depths of tragedy” in our creative lives. We may be suffering from the infodisease that Nicholas Carr first diagnosed in himself. “Over the past few years,” he writes, “I’ve had an uncomfortable sense that someone, or something, has been tinkering with my brain, remapping the neural circuitry, reprogramming the memory… what the Net seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation. My mind now expects to take in information the way the Net distributes it: in a swiftly moving stream of particles. Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski.”

In the race for economic expansion we depleted oil reserves, pulped ancient forests and pumped water until the wells ran dry. Now we’re depleting the “old growth culture” – sucking dry the history, mythology, music, art and ideas that previous generations have bequeathed to us. All of our past is being picked over, recycled, remixed, regurgitated and repurposed.

Jaron Lanier, the father of “virtual reality,” is perhaps the most respected and outspoken technologist to identify a troubling deficiency in our cultural health. In You Are Not a Gadget: A Manifesto, Lanier writes that our culture has become one of nostalgic remixing where authentic “first-order expression” is chopped up and mashed into a derivative piece of “second-order expression.” And although Lanier shies away from proposing an infallible metric for distinguishing between the two, he does suggest that what distinguishes first-order expression is that it contributes something “genuinely new [to] the world” whereas derivative works recycle, repeat and fail to innovate.

The result is a society that treats our cultural heritage as a resource for exploitation. Instead of producing new works of genuine art that replenish our mental environment, we celebrate the amateur whose mash-ups may be hilarious but contribute nothing of value to the cultural conversation. This situation becomes especially distressing when we consider that just as there is a finite amount of nutrients in our soil, there is a finite amount of creativity that the past can yield. Great art is rare, and only so many mash-ups can be released before the original power of a truly artistic creation is lost. And without the production of an authentic culture, our mental environment is in danger of becoming a clear-cut wasteland, overfarmed and depleted.

In Lanier’s words, “we face a situation in which culture is effectively eating its own seed stock.”

We are on the brink of a synergistic catastrophe. Financial, ecological and ethical collapse loom on the horizon even as the rate of mental illness continues to climb. The world has literally gone mad.

But as more people trace their anxieties, mood disorders and depressions back to the toxins in our mental world, the first murmurs of insurrection can be faintly heard. From blackspotted billboards to breakaway attempts-at-downshifting, to revolutionary provocations in failing states, we are witnessing the birth pangs of the quintessential uprising of the 21st century. What will come is a rewilding of our souls, a riot against the production of fake corporate and commercial meaning. What begins here today will be known as the environmental movement of the mind.

Kalle Lasn is cofounder and editor in chief of Adbusters. Micah White is a contributing editor at Adbusters and is writing a book about the future of activism.

The birth of a movement. Kalle Lasn and Micah White Kalle Lasn and Micah White 90 Whole Brain Catalog 90_ecomind_teaser.jpg Splash Image: 

Photo by Jörg Klaus - bransch.net

For thousands of generations we humans grew up in nature. Our teachers were flora and fauna and our textbooks thunderstorms and stars in the night sky. Our minds were like the forests, oases and deltas around which our cultures germinated: chaotic, wild, fecund.

But in the last couple generations, we have largely abandoned the natural world, immersing ourselves in virtual realms. Today the synthetic environment rivals nature as a driving force in our lives, and the mental environment has become the terrain where our fate as humans will be decided. By emigrating from nature we’ve done something more than just move domiciles – we have fundamentally altered the context in which we live our lives.

Along with this transition to a new psychic realm, we have also seen the exponential rise of mental illnesses. Globally, humanity is now suffering from an epidemic of uncontrollable anxieties, mood disorders and depression. The United Nations predicts that mental disease will be bigger than heart disease by 2020.

Why is this happening? Why are we breaking down mentally?

If you ask psychologists what increases the general loading of psychopathology on the human animal, they will list a lot of things: the breakdown of community, the insecurity of social roles, the stresses of modernity and globalization and maybe even the chemicals in the air, water and food that may be affecting our brains in unknown ways. Others blame the thousands of aggressive, erotically charged marketing messages our brains absorb every day as the culprit. And still others say that heavy internet use leads to addictions and depression and that the digital revolution may be rewiring our brains in unhealthy ways. Nobody knows for sure.

But it’s tantalizing to guess.

What follows is just a beginning, an introduction to some of the mental pollutants, information viruses and psychic shocks we have to deal with daily – a survey of the threats to our “ecology of mind.”

For countless generations the ambient noise was rain and wind and people talking. Now the soundtrack is full-spectrum, undecodable. From the dull roar of rush-hour traffic to the drone of your fridge and the buzz of your monitor, various kinds of noise (blue, white, pink, black) are continuously seeping into our brains. And the volume is constantly being cranked up. Two, perhaps three generations have already become stimulation-addicted. Can’t work without background music. Can’t jog without earphones. Can’t sleep without an iPhone tucked under the pillow. The essence of our postmodern age may be found in this kind of incessant brain buzz. Trying to make sense of the world above the din is like living next to a freeway – you get used to it, but at a severely diminished level of mindfulness and well-being.

Quiet feels foreign now, but quiet could be just what we need. Silence may be to a healthy mind what clean air and water are to a healthy body. In a cleaner, quieter mental environment, we may find our mood calming and depression lifting.

From the moment your radio alarm sounds in the morning to the wee hours of late-night TV, micro-jolts of commercial pollution flow into your brain at the rate of about 3,000 marketing messages per day. Every day, an estimated 12 billion display ads, three million radio commercials, more than 200,000 TV commercials and an unknown number of online ads and spam emails are dumped into our collective unconscious. Corporate advertising is the single largest psychological experiment ever carried out on the human race. Yet, its impact on us remains unstudied and largely unknown.

The first time we saw a starving child on a late-night TV ad, we were appalled. Maybe we sent money. But as these images became more familiar, our capacity for compassion waned. Eventually these ads started to annoy us, even repulse us. And now we feel nothing when we see another starving kid.

The average North American witnesses half a dozen acts of violence (killings, gunshots, assaults, car chases, rapes) per hour of prime-time TV watched. As for sex in the media and porn on the internet, we all know what catches our attention and stops us from zapping the channels: pouting lips, pert breasts, buns of steel, buoyant superyouth. Growing up in a violent, erotically charged media environment alters our psyches at a bedrock level. It distorts our sexuality – the way you feel when someone suddenly puts a hand on your shoulder or hugs you or flirts with you – how we think about ourselves as sexual beings. And the constant flow of commercially scripted, violence-laced, pseudo-sex makes us more voyeuristic, insatiable and aggressive. Then, somewhere along the line, nothing – not even rape, torture, genocide, or war porn – shocks us anymore.

The commercial media are to the mental environment what factories are to the physical environment. A factory dumps pollution into the water or air because that’s the most efficient way to produce plastic or wood pulp or steel. A TV station or website pollutes the cultural environment because that’s the most efficient way to produce audiences. It pays to pollute. The psychic fallout is just the cost of putting on the show.

The information we consume is increasingly flat and homogenized. Designed to reach millions, it often lacks nuance, complexity and context. Reading the same factoids on Wikipedia and watching the same viral video on YouTube, we experience a flattening of culture.

Cultural homogenization has graver consequences than the same hairstyles, catchphrases, action-hero antics and video clips propagated ad nauseam around the world. In all systems, homogenization is poison. Lack of diversity leads to inefficiency and failure. Infodiversity is as critical to our long-term survival as biodiversity. Both are bedrocks of human existence.

At first all that information was pleasurable. It felt as if the sum of all knowledge was only a hyperlink away and we skipped joyously down the infotrail, sending emails to our friends, adding bookmarks and hopping from site to site late into the night. But as the initial glow wore off, we were left in a state of digital daze: unable to concentrate, feeling foggy, anxious and fatigued.

For many of us, what began as an exhilarating romp has become a daily compulsion. Our smart phones, netbooks and computers now keep us constantly online. While waiting in line at the supermarket or enjoying an evening walk or reading a book or even sitting at a concert, we keep texting our friends and receiving quick Twitter updates. We are drowning in an endless stream of connectivity. And future generations may be even more wired. A Pew Research Center study found that American teenagers send 50 or more text messages a day and one-third send more than 100 a day. Another study by the Kaiser Family Foundation reported that American children between the ages of 8 and 18 spend an average of 7 ½ hours a day using some sort of electronic device.

Our online lives may now be impairing our ability to follow a sustained line of thought, to think deeply about something and maybe even to reach “the heights of ecstasy and the depths of tragedy” in our creative lives. We may be suffering from the infodisease that Nicholas Carr first diagnosed in himself. “Over the past few years,” he writes, “I’ve had an uncomfortable sense that someone, or something, has been tinkering with my brain, remapping the neural circuitry, reprogramming the memory… what the Net seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation. My mind now expects to take in information the way the Net distributes it: in a swiftly moving stream of particles. Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski.”

In the race for economic expansion we depleted oil reserves, pulped ancient forests and pumped water until the wells ran dry. Now we’re depleting the “old growth culture” – sucking dry the history, mythology, music, art and ideas that previous generations have bequeathed to us. All of our past is being picked over, recycled, remixed, regurgitated and repurposed.

Jaron Lanier, the father of “virtual reality,” is perhaps the most respected and outspoken technologist to identify a troubling deficiency in our cultural health. In You Are Not a Gadget: A Manifesto, Lanier writes that our culture has become one of nostalgic remixing where authentic “first-order expression” is chopped up and mashed into a derivative piece of “second-order expression.” And although Lanier shies away from proposing an infallible metric for distinguishing between the two, he does suggest that what distinguishes first-order expression is that it contributes something “genuinely new [to] the world” whereas derivative works recycle, repeat and fail to innovate.

The result is a society that treats our cultural heritage as a resource for exploitation. Instead of producing new works of genuine art that replenish our mental environment, we celebrate the amateur whose mash-ups may be hilarious but contribute nothing of value to the cultural conversation. This situation becomes especially distressing when we consider that just as there is a finite amount of nutrients in our soil, there is a finite amount of creativity that the past can yield. Great art is rare, and only so many mash-ups can be released before the original power of a truly artistic creation is lost. And without the production of an authentic culture, our mental environment is in danger of becoming a clear-cut wasteland, overfarmed and depleted.

In Lanier’s words, “we face a situation in which culture is effectively eating its own seed stock.”

We are on the brink of a synergistic catastrophe. Financial, ecological and ethical collapse loom on the horizon even as the rate of mental illness continues to climb. The world has literally gone mad.

But as more people trace their anxieties, mood disorders and depressions back to the toxins in our mental world, the first murmurs of insurrection can be faintly heard. From blackspotted billboards to breakaway attempts-at-downshifting, to revolutionary provocations in failing states, we are witnessing the birth pangs of the quintessential uprising of the 21st century. What will come is a rewilding of our souls, a riot against the production of fake corporate and commercial meaning. What begins here today will be known as the environmental movement of the mind.

Kalle Lasn is cofounder and editor in chief of Adbusters. Micah White is a contributing editor at Adbusters and is writing a book about the future of activism.

The birth of a movement. Kalle Lasn and Micah White Kalle Lasn and Micah White 90 Whole Brain Catalog 90_ecomind_teaser.jpg Splash Image: 

Photo by Jörg Klaus - bransch.net

For thousands of generations we humans grew up in nature. Our teachers were flora and fauna and our textbooks thunderstorms and stars in the night sky. Our minds were like the forests, oases and deltas around which our cultures germinated: chaotic, wild, fecund.

But in the last couple generations, we have largely abandoned the natural world, immersing ourselves in virtual realms. Today the synthetic environment rivals nature as a driving force in our lives, and the mental environment has become the terrain where our fate as humans will be decided. By emigrating from nature we’ve done something more than just move domiciles – we have fundamentally altered the context in which we live our lives.

Along with this transition to a new psychic realm, we have also seen the exponential rise of mental illnesses. Globally, humanity is now suffering from an epidemic of uncontrollable anxieties, mood disorders and depression. The United Nations predicts that mental disease will be bigger than heart disease by 2020.

Why is this happening? Why are we breaking down mentally?

If you ask psychologists what increases the general loading of psychopathology on the human animal, they will list a lot of things: the breakdown of community, the insecurity of social roles, the stresses of modernity and globalization and maybe even the chemicals in the air, water and food that may be affecting our brains in unknown ways. Others blame the thousands of aggressive, erotically charged marketing messages our brains absorb every day as the culprit. And still others say that heavy internet use leads to addictions and depression and that the digital revolution may be rewiring our brains in unhealthy ways. Nobody knows for sure.

But it’s tantalizing to guess.

What follows is just a beginning, an introduction to some of the mental pollutants, information viruses and psychic shocks we have to deal with daily – a survey of the threats to our “ecology of mind.”

For countless generations the ambient noise was rain and wind and people talking. Now the soundtrack is full-spectrum, undecodable. From the dull roar of rush-hour traffic to the drone of your fridge and the buzz of your monitor, various kinds of noise (blue, white, pink, black) are continuously seeping into our brains. And the volume is constantly being cranked up. Two, perhaps three generations have already become stimulation-addicted. Can’t work without background music. Can’t jog without earphones. Can’t sleep without an iPhone tucked under the pillow. The essence of our postmodern age may be found in this kind of incessant brain buzz. Trying to make sense of the world above the din is like living next to a freeway – you get used to it, but at a severely diminished level of mindfulness and well-being.

Quiet feels foreign now, but quiet could be just what we need. Silence may be to a healthy mind what clean air and water are to a healthy body. In a cleaner, quieter mental environment, we may find our mood calming and depression lifting.

From the moment your radio alarm sounds in the morning to the wee hours of late-night TV, micro-jolts of commercial pollution flow into your brain at the rate of about 3,000 marketing messages per day. Every day, an estimated 12 billion display ads, three million radio commercials, more than 200,000 TV commercials and an unknown number of online ads and spam emails are dumped into our collective unconscious. Corporate advertising is the single largest psychological experiment ever carried out on the human race. Yet, its impact on us remains unstudied and largely unknown.

The first time we saw a starving child on a late-night TV ad, we were appalled. Maybe we sent money. But as these images became more familiar, our capacity for compassion waned. Eventually these ads started to annoy us, even repulse us. And now we feel nothing when we see another starving kid.

The average North American witnesses half a dozen acts of violence (killings, gunshots, assaults, car chases, rapes) per hour of prime-time TV watched. As for sex in the media and porn on the internet, we all know what catches our attention and stops us from zapping the channels: pouting lips, pert breasts, buns of steel, buoyant superyouth. Growing up in a violent, erotically charged media environment alters our psyches at a bedrock level. It distorts our sexuality – the way you feel when someone suddenly puts a hand on your shoulder or hugs you or flirts with you – how we think about ourselves as sexual beings. And the constant flow of commercially scripted, violence-laced, pseudo-sex makes us more voyeuristic, insatiable and aggressive. Then, somewhere along the line, nothing – not even rape, torture, genocide, or war porn – shocks us anymore.

The commercial media are to the mental environment what factories are to the physical environment. A factory dumps pollution into the water or air because that’s the most efficient way to produce plastic or wood pulp or steel. A TV station or website pollutes the cultural environment because that’s the most efficient way to produce audiences. It pays to pollute. The psychic fallout is just the cost of putting on the show.

The information we consume is increasingly flat and homogenized. Designed to reach millions, it often lacks nuance, complexity and context. Reading the same factoids on Wikipedia and watching the same viral video on YouTube, we experience a flattening of culture.

Cultural homogenization has graver consequences than the same hairstyles, catchphrases, action-hero antics and video clips propagated ad nauseam around the world. In all systems, homogenization is poison. Lack of diversity leads to inefficiency and failure. Infodiversity is as critical to our long-term survival as biodiversity. Both are bedrocks of human existence.

At first all that information was pleasurable. It felt as if the sum of all knowledge was only a hyperlink away and we skipped joyously down the infotrail, sending emails to our friends, adding bookmarks and hopping from site to site late into the night. But as the initial glow wore off, we were left in a state of digital daze: unable to concentrate, feeling foggy, anxious and fatigued.

For many of us, what began as an exhilarating romp has become a daily compulsion. Our smart phones, netbooks and computers now keep us constantly online. While waiting in line at the supermarket or enjoying an evening walk or reading a book or even sitting at a concert, we keep texting our friends and receiving quick Twitter updates. We are drowning in an endless stream of connectivity. And future generations may be even more wired. A Pew Research Center study found that American teenagers send 50 or more text messages a day and one-third send more than 100 a day. Another study by the Kaiser Family Foundation reported that American children between the ages of 8 and 18 spend an average of 7 ½ hours a day using some sort of electronic device.

Our online lives may now be impairing our ability to follow a sustained line of thought, to think deeply about something and maybe even to reach “the heights of ecstasy and the depths of tragedy” in our creative lives. We may be suffering from the infodisease that Nicholas Carr first diagnosed in himself. “Over the past few years,” he writes, “I’ve had an uncomfortable sense that someone, or something, has been tinkering with my brain, remapping the neural circuitry, reprogramming the memory… what the Net seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation. My mind now expects to take in information the way the Net distributes it: in a swiftly moving stream of particles. Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski.”

In the race for economic expansion we depleted oil reserves, pulped ancient forests and pumped water until the wells ran dry. Now we’re depleting the “old growth culture” – sucking dry the history, mythology, music, art and ideas that previous generations have bequeathed to us. All of our past is being picked over, recycled, remixed, regurgitated and repurposed.

Jaron Lanier, the father of “virtual reality,” is perhaps the most respected and outspoken technologist to identify a troubling deficiency in our cultural health. In You Are Not a Gadget: A Manifesto, Lanier writes that our culture has become one of nostalgic remixing where authentic “first-order expression” is chopped up and mashed into a derivative piece of “second-order expression.” And although Lanier shies away from proposing an infallible metric for distinguishing between the two, he does suggest that what distinguishes first-order expression is that it contributes something “genuinely new [to] the world” whereas derivative works recycle, repeat and fail to innovate.

The result is a society that treats our cultural heritage as a resource for exploitation. Instead of producing new works of genuine art that replenish our mental environment, we celebrate the amateur whose mash-ups may be hilarious but contribute nothing of value to the cultural conversation. This situation becomes especially distressing when we consider that just as there is a finite amount of nutrients in our soil, there is a finite amount of creativity that the past can yield. Great art is rare, and only so many mash-ups can be released before the original power of a truly artistic creation is lost. And without the production of an authentic culture, our mental environment is in danger of becoming a clear-cut wasteland, overfarmed and depleted.

In Lanier’s words, “we face a situation in which culture is effectively eating its own seed stock.”

We are on the brink of a synergistic catastrophe. Financial, ecological and ethical collapse loom on the horizon even as the rate of mental illness continues to climb. The world has literally gone mad.

But as more people trace their anxieties, mood disorders and depressions back to the toxins in our mental world, the first murmurs of insurrection can be faintly heard. From blackspotted billboards to breakaway attempts-at-downshifting, to revolutionary provocations in failing states, we are witnessing the birth pangs of the quintessential uprising of the 21st century. What will come is a rewilding of our souls, a riot against the production of fake corporate and commercial meaning. What begins here today will be known as the environmental movement of the mind.

Kalle Lasn is cofounder and editor in chief of Adbusters. Micah White is a contributing editor at Adbusters and is writing a book about the future of activism.

A message to economics students all over the world. Kalle Lasn Kalle Lasn 90 Whole Brain Catalog 90_g20special_teaser.jpg Splash Image: 

Photo by Joe Sheffer via Flickr

We are a colony of maggots, feeding on nature’s bloated corpse while economic policy makers soothe our troubled minds with lies. Not to worry, they tell us, we’re pulling out of this recession, we’re making progress – the key is more liquidity, more stimulus, more credit, more consumption, more growth.

The time has come to call their bluff.

We need to band together and challenge this powerful intellectual army, whose generals include Greenspan, Summers, Bernanke, Geithner, who have boots on the ground in Blankfein, Buffett, Bloomberg, Straus-Kahn, whose propaganda ministers include Wolf, Friedman, Krugman and textbook authors Samuelson, Nordhaus, Mankiw, and whose foot soldiers are the business and economics professors in universities around the world. Their combined efforts perpetuate the great economic myth of our time: the necessity of ever-increasing growth and consumption, a myth that keeps the ghost ship of consumer capitalism sailing perilously toward certain destruction.

There has never been a better time to wage this meme war. In the aftermath of the meltdown of 2008 (which not even one in a hundred economists saw coming), the profession is demoralized and ripe for a monumental mindshift … the very kind that transformed the science of astronomy 400 years ago, when we suddenly woke up to the fact that the Earth revolves around the Sun and not the other way around. Today, as climate catastrophe looms, threatening the greatest market failure the world has ever seen, we are experiencing another mass awakening. We are beginning to realize that our human money economy is not the center of the world, but rather just a subset of the planetary bioeconomy.

You are feeling restless, the public has grown uneasy, and the internet is buzzing with dissent. The movement to overhaul curricula, pioneer new measures of progress and usher in a true-cost global market regime suddenly feels unstoppable.

Have some fun, whip up debate, slap up posters, invite dissenting guest speakers to address your class and relish the thrill of playing cat and mouse with your professors. We are standing at the beginning of a new era in which a new kind of economy, a sustainable economy, is struggling to be born.

Go to kickitover.org, read some articles, share them with a friend, print some posters and be a part of it.

A message to economics students all over the world. Kalle Lasn Kalle Lasn 90 Whole Brain Catalog 90_g20special_teaser.jpg Splash Image: 

Photo by Joe Sheffer via Flickr

We are a colony of maggots, feeding on nature’s bloated corpse while economic policy makers soothe our troubled minds with lies. Not to worry, they tell us, we’re pulling out of this recession, we’re making progress – the key is more liquidity, more stimulus, more credit, more consumption, more growth.

The time has come to call their bluff.

We need to band together and challenge this powerful intellectual army, whose generals include Greenspan, Summers, Bernanke, Geithner, who have boots on the ground in Blankfein, Buffett, Bloomberg, Straus-Kahn, whose propaganda ministers include Wolf, Friedman, Krugman and textbook authors Samuelson, Nordhaus, Mankiw, and whose foot soldiers are the business and economics professors in universities around the world. Their combined efforts perpetuate the great economic myth of our time: the necessity of ever-increasing growth and consumption, a myth that keeps the ghost ship of consumer capitalism sailing perilously toward certain destruction.

There has never been a better time to wage this meme war. In the aftermath of the meltdown of 2008 (which not even one in a hundred economists saw coming), the profession is demoralized and ripe for a monumental mindshift … the very kind that transformed the science of astronomy 400 years ago, when we suddenly woke up to the fact that the Earth revolves around the Sun and not the other way around. Today, as climate catastrophe looms, threatening the greatest market failure the world has ever seen, we are experiencing another mass awakening. We are beginning to realize that our human money economy is not the center of the world, but rather just a subset of the planetary bioeconomy.

You are feeling restless, the public has grown uneasy, and the internet is buzzing with dissent. The movement to overhaul curricula, pioneer new measures of progress and usher in a true-cost global market regime suddenly feels unstoppable.

Have some fun, whip up debate, slap up posters, invite dissenting guest speakers to address your class and relish the thrill of playing cat and mouse with your professors. We are standing at the beginning of a new era in which a new kind of economy, a sustainable economy, is struggling to be born.

Go to kickitover.org, read some articles, share them with a friend, print some posters and be a part of it.

A message to economics students all over the world. Kalle Lasn Kalle Lasn 90 Whole Brain Catalog 90_g20special_teaser.jpg Splash Image: 

Photo by Joe Sheffer via Flickr

We are a colony of maggots, feeding on nature’s bloated corpse while economic policy makers soothe our troubled minds with lies. Not to worry, they tell us, we’re pulling out of this recession, we’re making progress – the key is more liquidity, more stimulus, more credit, more consumption, more growth.

The time has come to call their bluff.

We need to band together and challenge this powerful intellectual army, whose generals include Greenspan, Summers, Bernanke, Geithner, who have boots on the ground in Blankfein, Buffett, Bloomberg, Straus-Kahn, whose propaganda ministers include Wolf, Friedman, Krugman and textbook authors Samuelson, Nordhaus, Mankiw, and whose foot soldiers are the business and economics professors in universities around the world. Their combined efforts perpetuate the great economic myth of our time: the necessity of ever-increasing growth and consumption, a myth that keeps the ghost ship of consumer capitalism sailing perilously toward certain destruction.

There has never been a better time to wage this meme war. In the aftermath of the meltdown of 2008 (which not even one in a hundred economists saw coming), the profession is demoralized and ripe for a monumental mindshift … the very kind that transformed the science of astronomy 400 years ago, when we suddenly woke up to the fact that the Earth revolves around the Sun and not the other way around. Today, as climate catastrophe looms, threatening the greatest market failure the world has ever seen, we are experiencing another mass awakening. We are beginning to realize that our human money economy is not the center of the world, but rather just a subset of the planetary bioeconomy.

You are feeling restless, the public has grown uneasy, and the internet is buzzing with dissent. The movement to overhaul curricula, pioneer new measures of progress and usher in a true-cost global market regime suddenly feels unstoppable.

Have some fun, whip up debate, slap up posters, invite dissenting guest speakers to address your class and relish the thrill of playing cat and mouse with your professors. We are standing at the beginning of a new era in which a new kind of economy, a sustainable economy, is struggling to be born.

Go to kickitover.org, read some articles, share them with a friend, print some posters and be a part of it.

A psychological test of temptation. Andrew Tuplin Andrew Tuplin 90 Whole Brain Catalog 90_eatthis_teaser.jpg Splash Image: 

In 1968 Stanford psychology professor Walter Mischel tempted hungry four-year-olds with a delicious deal. His researchers placed children, one at a time, in a room where they sat alone with a puffy white marshmallow. The children were told that they could either eat the marshmallow right away or they could wait for fifteen minutes – at which point they would be rewarded with a second marshmallow. Then the researcher left the room.

One third of the children gobbled up the marshmallow right away.

One third controlled their appetites for a little while but eventually caved.

One third resisted temptation for the full fifteen minutes and received their reward.

Thirteen years later Mischel did follow-up research that found dramatic differences between the two groups (the gobblers and the resisters). The gobblers, now high school students, were more likely to have behavioral problems and low attention spans, and they found it difficult to maintain friendships. Meanwhile the resisters were thriving. They averaged 210 points higher on their SAT scores than the gobblers. Mischel continued tracking these groups into their late thirties and found that, as adults, the gobblers had more weight problems and were more likely to have had drug problems too.

Mischel’s study points to the need to teach our children self-control, to give them the tools to resist the temptations of consumer culture and the notion that all wants must be immediately satiated. According to Mischel, the daily rituals and activities that go on in the home can be a training ground where we teach our children how to think so they can outsmart desire. Simple things – not snacking before dinner, saving up allowance, not opening gifts until Christmas morning – are actually important exercises in cognitive training that equip children to resist.

When one in two adults are overweight, when obesity has become the number one health risk and when financial meltdowns are caused by the lure of easy credit and the desire for luxurious marshmallowy castles, it is past time to act. We must learn to resist. The marshmallow has been winning for too long.

—Andrew Tuplin

A psychological test of temptation. Andrew Tuplin Andrew Tuplin 90 Whole Brain Catalog 90_eatthis_teaser.jpg Splash Image: 

In 1968 Stanford psychology professor Walter Mischel tempted hungry four-year-olds with a delicious deal. His researchers placed children, one at a time, in a room where they sat alone with a puffy white marshmallow. The children were told that they could either eat the marshmallow right away or they could wait for fifteen minutes – at which point they would be rewarded with a second marshmallow. Then the researcher left the room.

One third of the children gobbled up the marshmallow right away.

One third controlled their appetites for a little while but eventually caved.

One third resisted temptation for the full fifteen minutes and received their reward.

Thirteen years later Mischel did follow-up research that found dramatic differences between the two groups (the gobblers and the resisters). The gobblers, now high school students, were more likely to have behavioral problems and low attention spans, and they found it difficult to maintain friendships. Meanwhile the resisters were thriving. They averaged 210 points higher on their SAT scores than the gobblers. Mischel continued tracking these groups into their late thirties and found that, as adults, the gobblers had more weight problems and were more likely to have had drug problems too.

Mischel’s study points to the need to teach our children self-control, to give them the tools to resist the temptations of consumer culture and the notion that all wants must be immediately satiated. According to Mischel, the daily rituals and activities that go on in the home can be a training ground where we teach our children how to think so they can outsmart desire. Simple things – not snacking before dinner, saving up allowance, not opening gifts until Christmas morning – are actually important exercises in cognitive training that equip children to resist.

When one in two adults are overweight, when obesity has become the number one health risk and when financial meltdowns are caused by the lure of easy credit and the desire for luxurious marshmallowy castles, it is past time to act. We must learn to resist. The marshmallow has been winning for too long.

—Andrew Tuplin

A psychological test of temptation. Andrew Tuplin Andrew Tuplin 90 Whole Brain Catalog 90_eatthis_teaser.jpg Splash Image: 

In 1968 Stanford psychology professor Walter Mischel tempted hungry four-year-olds with a delicious deal. His researchers placed children, one at a time, in a room where they sat alone with a puffy white marshmallow. The children were told that they could either eat the marshmallow right away or they could wait for fifteen minutes – at which point they would be rewarded with a second marshmallow. Then the researcher left the room.

One third of the children gobbled up the marshmallow right away.

One third controlled their appetites for a little while but eventually caved.

One third resisted temptation for the full fifteen minutes and received their reward.

Thirteen years later Mischel did follow-up research that found dramatic differences between the two groups (the gobblers and the resisters). The gobblers, now high school students, were more likely to have behavioral problems and low attention spans, and they found it difficult to maintain friendships. Meanwhile the resisters were thriving. They averaged 210 points higher on their SAT scores than the gobblers. Mischel continued tracking these groups into their late thirties and found that, as adults, the gobblers had more weight problems and were more likely to have had drug problems too.

Mischel’s study points to the need to teach our children self-control, to give them the tools to resist the temptations of consumer culture and the notion that all wants must be immediately satiated. According to Mischel, the daily rituals and activities that go on in the home can be a training ground where we teach our children how to think so they can outsmart desire. Simple things – not snacking before dinner, saving up allowance, not opening gifts until Christmas morning – are actually important exercises in cognitive training that equip children to resist.

When one in two adults are overweight, when obesity has become the number one health risk and when financial meltdowns are caused by the lure of easy credit and the desire for luxurious marshmallowy castles, it is past time to act. We must learn to resist. The marshmallow has been winning for too long.

—Andrew Tuplin

Professional ethics in the War on Terror. Blake Sifton Blake Sifton 90 Whole Brain Catalog 90_totalcontrol_teaser.jpg Splash Image:  Image by Troy Page / truthout via Flickr

Though their actions invoke less dramatic imagery than the interrogators and prison guards who tortured and humiliated Muslim detainees at Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib, equally guilty are the legions of professionals who facilitated the abuse.

Although the principal maxim of medical ethics is “First do no harm,” psychologists and doctors working for the military and CIA actively assisted in the torture of human beings. Psychologists helped fine-tune techniques such as sleep deprivation, stress positions and waterboarding, and doctors often monitored harsh interrogations, intervening when necessary to keep struggling prisoners alive and alert so the questioning could continue.

How could medical professionals demonstrate such little empathy in the presence of human suffering?

“People are capable of incredible cruelty. It’s increased in circumstances where there aren’t clear rules and boundaries,” says psychoanalyst Dr. Stephen Soldz. “We dehumanized the enemy after 9/11. We did it as a culture and the military did it spectacularly well. Like many others, military doctors felt a duty to serve their country.”

In 2007 Dr. Soldz urged the American Psychological Association to ban psychologists from participating in the interrogation of terror suspects.

“Professional ethics are always weak,” he says. “We have wonderful statements by professional associations about what the ethics are, but many people don’t internalize them.”

Justice Department memos revealed that doctors with the CIA’s Office of Medical Services declared that depriving prisoners of sleep for upwards of 180 hours was not classified as torture, nor was hosing down detainees with freezing cold water for up to two-thirds of the time it takes hypothermia to set in.

“They signed up to be part of the CIA’s covert operations, so presumably their commitment to medical ethics was long gone,” Dr. Soldz explains.

Another group whose human empathy lost out to zealous patriotism and cold, hard professionalism were the lawyers who crafted the framework for the authorization of torture. It was their technical expertise in legal jargon that allowed the United States to follow the path of every oppressive state before it and justify its disregard for human rights through a mantra of security.

“A few bad apples” did not cause the degradation and anguish of thousands of Muslims in Iraq, Afghanistan, Guantanamo Bay and an untold number of secret prisons around the world. Their pain was the product of system-wide moral failures by individuals whose conduct is supposed to be held to the highest professional standards.

The Justice Department recently determined that the lawyers who devised the technical justification for torture “exercised poor judgment” but were not guilty of professional misconduct. To this day there has been no investigation into the behavior of the medical personnel involved.

Kishore Mahbubani wrote, “In 1989, if anyone had dared to predict that within 15 years the foremost ‘beacon’ of human rights would become the first Western developed state to reintroduce torture, everyone would have shouted ‘impossible.’ Yet the impossible has happened!”

The speed with which the United States abandoned its principles and resorted to torture was startling. Centuries of progress were essentially abandoned overnight in a fit of fear and blind rage as the darkest potential of human nature was allowed to infect even the most venerable professions.

For there to be any chance of America reclaiming its moral legitimacy, President Obama’s government of hope and change must prosecute those responsible and refuse to allow the crimes of the recent past to be ignored, forgiven and forgotten.

–Blake Sifton

Professional ethics in the War on Terror. Blake Sifton Blake Sifton 90 Whole Brain Catalog 90_totalcontrol_teaser.jpg Splash Image:  Image by Troy Page / truthout via Flickr

Though their actions invoke less dramatic imagery than the interrogators and prison guards who tortured and humiliated Muslim detainees at Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib, equally guilty are the legions of professionals who facilitated the abuse.

Although the principal maxim of medical ethics is “First do no harm,” psychologists and doctors working for the military and CIA actively assisted in the torture of human beings. Psychologists helped fine-tune techniques such as sleep deprivation, stress positions and waterboarding, and doctors often monitored harsh interrogations, intervening when necessary to keep struggling prisoners alive and alert so the questioning could continue.

How could medical professionals demonstrate such little empathy in the presence of human suffering?

“People are capable of incredible cruelty. It’s increased in circumstances where there aren’t clear rules and boundaries,” says psychoanalyst Dr. Stephen Soldz. “We dehumanized the enemy after 9/11. We did it as a culture and the military did it spectacularly well. Like many others, military doctors felt a duty to serve their country.”

In 2007 Dr. Soldz urged the American Psychological Association to ban psychologists from participating in the interrogation of terror suspects.

“Professional ethics are always weak,” he says. “We have wonderful statements by professional associations about what the ethics are, but many people don’t internalize them.”

Justice Department memos revealed that doctors with the CIA’s Office of Medical Services declared that depriving prisoners of sleep for upwards of 180 hours was not classified as torture, nor was hosing down detainees with freezing cold water for up to two-thirds of the time it takes hypothermia to set in.

“They signed up to be part of the CIA’s covert operations, so presumably their commitment to medical ethics was long gone,” Dr. Soldz explains.

Another group whose human empathy lost out to zealous patriotism and cold, hard professionalism were the lawyers who crafted the framework for the authorization of torture. It was their technical expertise in legal jargon that allowed the United States to follow the path of every oppressive state before it and justify its disregard for human rights through a mantra of security.

“A few bad apples” did not cause the degradation and anguish of thousands of Muslims in Iraq, Afghanistan, Guantanamo Bay and an untold number of secret prisons around the world. Their pain was the product of system-wide moral failures by individuals whose conduct is supposed to be held to the highest professional standards.

The Justice Department recently determined that the lawyers who devised the technical justification for torture “exercised poor judgment” but were not guilty of professional misconduct. To this day there has been no investigation into the behavior of the medical personnel involved.

Kishore Mahbubani wrote, “In 1989, if anyone had dared to predict that within 15 years the foremost ‘beacon’ of human rights would become the first Western developed state to reintroduce torture, everyone would have shouted ‘impossible.’ Yet the impossible has happened!”

The speed with which the United States abandoned its principles and resorted to torture was startling. Centuries of progress were essentially abandoned overnight in a fit of fear and blind rage as the darkest potential of human nature was allowed to infect even the most venerable professions.

For there to be any chance of America reclaiming its moral legitimacy, President Obama’s government of hope and change must prosecute those responsible and refuse to allow the crimes of the recent past to be ignored, forgiven and forgotten.

–Blake Sifton

Professional ethics in the War on Terror. Blake Sifton Blake Sifton 90 Whole Brain Catalog 90_totalcontrol_teaser.jpg Splash Image:  Image by Troy Page / truthout via Flickr

Though their actions invoke less dramatic imagery than the interrogators and prison guards who tortured and humiliated Muslim detainees at Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib, equally guilty are the legions of professionals who facilitated the abuse.

Although the principal maxim of medical ethics is “First do no harm,” psychologists and doctors working for the military and CIA actively assisted in the torture of human beings. Psychologists helped fine-tune techniques such as sleep deprivation, stress positions and waterboarding, and doctors often monitored harsh interrogations, intervening when necessary to keep struggling prisoners alive and alert so the questioning could continue.

How could medical professionals demonstrate such little empathy in the presence of human suffering?

“People are capable of incredible cruelty. It’s increased in circumstances where there aren’t clear rules and boundaries,” says psychoanalyst Dr. Stephen Soldz. “We dehumanized the enemy after 9/11. We did it as a culture and the military did it spectacularly well. Like many others, military doctors felt a duty to serve their country.”

In 2007 Dr. Soldz urged the American Psychological Association to ban psychologists from participating in the interrogation of terror suspects.

“Professional ethics are always weak,” he says. “We have wonderful statements by professional associations about what the ethics are, but many people don’t internalize them.”

Justice Department memos revealed that doctors with the CIA’s Office of Medical Services declared that depriving prisoners of sleep for upwards of 180 hours was not classified as torture, nor was hosing down detainees with freezing cold water for up to two-thirds of the time it takes hypothermia to set in.

“They signed up to be part of the CIA’s covert operations, so presumably their commitment to medical ethics was long gone,” Dr. Soldz explains.

Another group whose human empathy lost out to zealous patriotism and cold, hard professionalism were the lawyers who crafted the framework for the authorization of torture. It was their technical expertise in legal jargon that allowed the United States to follow the path of every oppressive state before it and justify its disregard for human rights through a mantra of security.

“A few bad apples” did not cause the degradation and anguish of thousands of Muslims in Iraq, Afghanistan, Guantanamo Bay and an untold number of secret prisons around the world. Their pain was the product of system-wide moral failures by individuals whose conduct is supposed to be held to the highest professional standards.

The Justice Department recently determined that the lawyers who devised the technical justification for torture “exercised poor judgment” but were not guilty of professional misconduct. To this day there has been no investigation into the behavior of the medical personnel involved.

Kishore Mahbubani wrote, “In 1989, if anyone had dared to predict that within 15 years the foremost ‘beacon’ of human rights would become the first Western developed state to reintroduce torture, everyone would have shouted ‘impossible.’ Yet the impossible has happened!”

The speed with which the United States abandoned its principles and resorted to torture was startling. Centuries of progress were essentially abandoned overnight in a fit of fear and blind rage as the darkest potential of human nature was allowed to infect even the most venerable professions.

For there to be any chance of America reclaiming its moral legitimacy, President Obama’s government of hope and change must prosecute those responsible and refuse to allow the crimes of the recent past to be ignored, forgiven and forgotten.

–Blake Sifton

What happens to a society that cannot distinguish between reality and illusion? Chris Hedges Chris Hedges 90 Whole Brain Catalog 90_americanpsychosis_teaser.jpg Splash Image: 

Image on left by TOM MIHALEK/AFP, on right by LOE RUSSELL

The United States, locked in the kind of twilight disconnect that grips dying empires, is a country entranced by illusions. It spends its emotional and intellectual energy on the trivial and the absurd. It is captivated by the hollow stagecraft of celebrity culture as the walls crumble. This celebrity culture giddily licenses a dark voyeurism into other people’s humiliation, pain, weakness and betrayal. Day after day, one lurid saga after another, whether it is Michael Jackson, Britney Spears or John Edwards, enthralls the country … despite bank collapses, wars, mounting poverty or the criminality of its financial class.

The virtues that sustain a nation-state and build community, from honesty to self-sacrifice to transparency to sharing, are ridiculed each night on television as rubes stupid enough to cling to this antiquated behavior are voted off reality shows. Fellow competitors for prize money and a chance for fleeting fame, cheered on by millions of viewers, elect to “disappear” the unwanted. In the final credits of the reality show America’s Next Top Model, a picture of the woman expelled during the episode vanishes from the group portrait on the screen. Those cast aside become, at least to the television audience, nonpersons. Celebrities that can no longer generate publicity, good or bad, vanish. Life, these shows persistently teach, is a brutal world of unadulterated competition and a constant quest for notoriety and attention.

Our culture of flagrant self-exaltation, hardwired in the American character, permits the humiliation of all those who oppose us. We believe, after all, that because we have the capacity to wage war we have a right to wage war. Those who lose deserve to be erased. Those who fail, those who are deemed ugly, ignorant or poor, should be belittled and mocked. Human beings are used and discarded like Styrofoam boxes that held junk food. And the numbers of superfluous human beings are swelling the unemployment offices, the prisons and the soup kitchens.

It is the cult of self that is killing the United States. This cult has within it the classic traits of psychopaths: superficial charm, grandiosity and self-importance; a need for constant stimulation; a penchant for lying, deception and manipulation; and the incapacity for remorse or guilt. Michael Jackson, from his phony marriages to the portraits of himself dressed as royalty to his insatiable hunger for new toys to his questionable relationships with young boys, had all these qualities. And this is also the ethic promoted by corporations. It is the ethic of unfettered capitalism. It is the misguided belief that personal style and personal advancement, mistaken for individualism, are the same as democratic equality. It is the nationwide celebration of image over substance, of illusion over truth. And it is why investment bankers blink in confusion when questioned about the morality of the billions in profits they made by selling worthless toxic assets to investors.

We have a right, in the cult of the self, to get whatever we desire. We can do anything, even belittle and destroy those around us, including our friends, to make money, to be happy and to become famous. Once fame and wealth are achieved, they become their own justification, their own morality. How one gets there is irrelevant. It is this perverted ethic that gave us investment houses like Goldman Sachs … that willfully trashed the global economy and stole money from tens of millions of small shareholders who had bought stock in these corporations for retirement or college. The heads of these corporations, like the winners on a reality television program who lied and manipulated others to succeed, walked away with hundreds of millions of dollars in bonuses and compensation. The ethic of Wall Street is the ethic of celebrity. It is fused into one bizarre, perverted belief system and it has banished the possibility of the country returning to a reality-based world or avoiding internal collapse. A society that cannot distinguish reality from illusion dies.

The tantalizing illusions offered by our consumer culture, however, are vanishing for most citizens as we head toward collapse. The ability of the corporate state to pacify the country by extending credit and providing cheap manufactured goods to the masses is gone. The jobs we are shedding are not coming back, as the White House economist Lawrence Summers tacitly acknowledges when he talks of a “jobless recovery.” The belief that democracy lies in the choice between competing brands and the accumulation of vast sums of personal wealth at the expense of others is exposed as a fraud. Freedom can no longer be conflated with the free market. The travails of the poor are rapidly becoming the travails of the middle class, especially as unemployment insurance runs out. And class warfare, once buried under the happy illusion that we were all going to enter an age of prosperity with unfettered capitalism, is returning with a vengeance.

America is sinking under trillions in debt it can never repay and stays afloat by frantically selling about $2 billion in Treasury bonds a day to the Chinese. It saw 2.8 million people lose their homes in 2009 to foreclosure or bank repossessions – nearly 8,000 people a day – and stands idle as they are joined by another 2.4 million people this year. It refuses to prosecute the Bush administration for obvious war crimes, including the use of torture, and sees no reason to dismantle Bush’s secrecy laws or restore habeas corpus. Its infrastructure is crumbling. Deficits are pushing individual states to bankruptcy and forcing the closure of everything from schools to parks. The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, which have squandered trillions of dollars, appear endless. There are 50 million Americans in real poverty and tens of millions of Americans in a category called “near poverty.” One in eight Americans – and one in four children – depend on food stamps to eat. And yet, in the midst of it all, we continue to be a country consumed by happy talk and happy thoughts. We continue to embrace the illusion of inevitable progress, personal success and rising prosperity. Reality is not considered an impediment to desire.

When a culture lives within an illusion it perpetuates a state of permanent infantilism or childishness. As the gap widens between the illusion and reality, as we suddenly grasp that it is our home being foreclosed or our job that is not coming back, we react like children. We scream and yell for a savior, someone who promises us revenge, moral renewal and new glory. It is not a new story. A furious and sustained backlash by a betrayed and angry populace, one unprepared intellectually, emotionally and psychologically for collapse, will sweep aside the Democrats and most of the Republicans and will usher America into a new dark age. It was the economic collapse in Yugoslavia that gave us Slobodan Milosevic. It was the Weimar Republic that vomited up Adolf Hitler. And it was the breakdown in Tsarist Russia that opened the door for Lenin and the Bolsheviks. A cabal of proto-fascist misfits, from Christian demagogues to loudmouth talk show hosts, whom we naïvely dismiss as buffoons, will find a following with promises of revenge and moral renewal. And as in all totalitarian societies, those who do not pay fealty to the illusions imposed by the state become the outcasts, the persecuted.

The decline of American empire began long before the current economic meltdown or the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. It began before the first Gulf War or Ronald Reagan. It began when we shifted, in the words of Harvard historian Charles Maier, from an “empire of production” to an “empire of consumption.” By the end of the Vietnam War, when the costs of the war ate away at Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society and domestic oil production began its steady, inexorable decline, we saw our country transformed from one that primarily produced to one that primarily consumed. We started borrowing to maintain a level of consumption as well as an empire we could no longer afford. We began to use force, especially in the Middle East, to feed our insatiable thirst for cheap oil. We substituted the illusion of growth and prosperity for real growth and prosperity. The bill is now due. America’s most dangerous enemies are not Islamic radicals but those who sold us the perverted ideology of free-market capitalism and globalization. They have dynamited the very foundations of our society. In the 17th century these speculators would have been hung. Today they run the government and consume billions in taxpayer subsidies.

As the pressure mounts, as the despair and desperation reach into larger and larger segments of the populace, the mechanisms of corporate and government control are being bolstered to prevent civil unrest and instability. The emergence of the corporate state always means the emergence of the security state. This is why the Bush White House pushed through the Patriot Act (and its renewal), the suspension of habeas corpus, the practice of “extraordinary rendition,” warrantless wiretapping on American citizens and the refusal to ensure free and fair elections with verifiable ballot-counting. The motive behind these measures is not to fight terrorism or to bolster national security. It is to seize and maintain internal control. It is about controlling us.

And yet, even in the face of catastrophe, mass culture continues to assure us that if we close our eyes, if we visualize what we want, if we have faith in ourselves, if we tell God that we believe in miracles, if we tap into our inner strength, if we grasp that we are truly exceptional, if we focus on happiness, our lives will be harmonious and complete. This cultural retreat into illusion, whether peddled by positive psychologists, by Hollywood or by Christian preachers, is magical thinking. It turns worthless mortgages and debt into wealth. It turns the destruction of our manufacturing base into an opportunity for growth. It turns alienation and anxiety into a cheerful conformity. It turns a nation that wages illegal wars and administers offshore penal colonies where it openly practices torture into the greatest democracy on earth. And it keeps us from fighting back.

Resistance movements will have to look now at the long night of slavery, the decades of oppression in the Soviet Union and the curse of fascism for models. The goal will no longer be the possibility of reforming the system but of protecting truth, civility and culture from mass contamination. It will require the kind of schizophrenic lifestyle that characterizes all totalitarian societies. Our private and public demeanors will often have to stand in stark contrast. Acts of defiance will often be subtle and nuanced. They will be carried out not for short term gain but the assertion of our integrity. Rebellion will have an ultimate if not easily definable purpose. The more we retreat from the culture at large the more room we will have to carve out lives of meaning, the more we will be able to wall off the flood of illusions disseminated by mass culture and the more we will retain sanity in an insane world. The goal will become the ability to endure.

Chris Hedges, a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter for the New York Times, is the author of several books including the best sellers War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning and Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle.