The Great Turning

by David C Korten

  Then on December 2, 2001, the Enron Corporation declared bankruptcy in the first of a wave of disclosures of corporate accounting fraud of unprecedented magnitude, to which a number of top officials, including both Bush and Cheney, were closely linked. Investor confidence was shattered and share markets fell sharply.

  Public support for a thorough rethinking and transformation of badly broken economic institutions was building. The plutocracy was again on the defensive, and things looked bad for the Republican members of Congress who faced the voters in the 2002 midterm elections. An administration desperately in need of another diversion again began beating the drums of war.

  The message went out: Iraq possesses weapons of mass destruction, intends to use them against the United States, and was complicit in the September 11 terrorist attack. The pundits of corporate media and the New Right picked up the cry. Public attention again turned to preparations for war, and in the 2002 elections the Republicans further consolidated their control over Congress.

  Ever the master of the stealth campaign, Bush used his January 2003 State of the Union message to buttress his claim to being a compassionate conservative and build support for war against Iraq. He spoke of a job for every man and woman who wanted one; support for small business; tax relief for middle-income workers; affordable health care for all Americans; energy independence; a major investment in nonpolluting hydrogen energy; human services for the homeless, the fatherless, the addicted, battered women, and seniors; and a major AIDS initiative for Africa. Even as he spoke, he was working to cut funds for these and other popular programs.

  In this same speech, he charged Iraq with posing a threat to U.S. and global security and asserted that a U.S. invasion of Iraq would remove a ruthless dictator and his weapons of mass destruction while bringing food, medical supplies, and freedom to Iraq’s people. It was a masterful piece of theater amplified by the corporate media. Although it fooled no one abroad, it played well at home, and Bush’s approval ratings soared. Bin Laden had given Bush the greatest political gift of his career. Bush reciprocated by giving Bin Laden the greatest political gift of his. 233

  Bush’s Gift to Bin Laden

  In disregard of an unprecedented global expression of public opposition, Bush began the bombing of Baghdad on March 19, 2003. The PNAC plan for U.S. global military domination was now in play. On cue, the nation rallied behind the administration. On March 21, 2003, with public attention focused on the war, a Republican-controlled Congress began debating a new White House tax plan that would further cut taxes for the wealthiest Americans and reduce benefits for veterans.

  Far from being the major military threat the administration had claimed it to be, Iraq turned out to be nearly defenseless. Its weak and demoralized military promptly disintegrated in the face of the massive firepower of U.S. forces. On May 1, 2003, Bush landed in a jet fighter aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln against the backdrop of a huge banner declaring “Mission Accomplished,” to announce victory in a war that had scarcely begun.

  In carrying forward the long-planned Iraq invasion, the Bush II administration combined ruthless dishonesty with arrogant incompetence to squander U.S. power in what James Webb, former secretary of the navy under President Reagan, called “the greatest strategic blunder in modern memory”—a costly and bungled invasion of the wrong country for the wrong reasons. A ruthless dictator was removed, but there were no weapons of mass destruction. Iraq had taken no part in the terrorist attack against the United States.

  The invasion brought the Iraqi people mainly death, the devastation of their physical infrastructure, and political instability. The blunder fueled worldwide terrorist recruiting, turned world opinion against the United States, isolated it from its former allies, depleted its treasury, and squandered its military resources on a violent quagmire with no exit strategy.34

  Meanwhile, Al Qaeda’s ranks swelled with new recruits, and Bin Laden’s reputation soared. Al Qaeda, however, had no need to launch further terrorist attacks on the United States, because the U.S. administration continued flawlessly playing out Bin Laden’s script of weakening the United States militarily, economically, and morally.

  Delusion and Denial

  This brings us to the question of how Mr. Bush won the loyalty, even the love, of so many Americans. Political success with a democratic 234electorate depends on the ability of the politician to project an image people can connect to psychologically. With the help of Karl Rove, master of the Machiavellian arts, Bush crafted a public image of himself as a strong father protector who cares for those loyal to him, vanquishes those who oppose him, and keeps his children safe from harm.

  The September 11, 2001, terrorist attack sent shock waves of fear and insecurity through the nation. Fear is the demagogue’s best friend because it causes regression to more primitive levels of emotion and behavior that are more easily manipulated. The ability of nineteen men armed only with box cutters to so easily penetrate the defenses of a nation protected by the world’s most powerful military to such dramatic effect dealt a devastating blow to our self-identity and sense of security. Suddenly it was clear that we were hated by people who have the means to do us substantial harm and from whom our expensive military establishment offers no protection.

  It was a national moment of great need and opportunity. Americans were ready to unite behind a great cause to demonstrate our solidarity in the face of adversity. A global effort to eliminate the injustice and intolerance that are root causes of terrorism would have been a suitable cause—as would a national effort to dramatically reduce oil consumption in general and dependence on Middle East oil in particular.

  Playing the role of national father protector, George W. fulfilled both his own need for a sense of personal omnipotence and his constituency’s need for reassurance, promising to keep us safe in return for unquestioning loyalty and obedience. He drew on the self-righteous exceptionalism characteristic of an Imperial Consciousness to assure the nation that the attack was, pure and simple, the work of evildoers who hate America for its freedom and democracy. Rejecting the possibility that we might bear any guilt, he retaliated with the full force of U.S. military power against the closest thing he could find to a visible enemy, ignoring the reality that the use of military force against invisible terrorist networks is both futile and counterproductive.

  Most Americans went into denial and rallied around the office of the president. Others were intimidated by the threat of being branded America haters, terrorist lovers, or Bush bashers. It took five years for the majority to acknowledge that the Bush II administration was bankrupting the nation and sending its youth off to be killed and maimed in an unwinnable war based on lies. It took Hurricane Katrina, the near total destruction by flooding of New Orleans, one of the most fabled of 235U.S. cities, and the needless deaths of more than a thousand poor blacks to awaken the nation to the gross incompetence and corruption of an administration once embraced as national savior, and to the lingering realities of race and class in America.

  Confronting Our National Shadow

  In Jungian psychoanalysis, the term “shadow” refers to aspects of the self that have been denied and relegated to the unconscious mind as threats to the conscious mind’s preferred self-image. It includes not only negative qualities but also positive potentials the conscious mind finds too unnerving to accept. For example, a man may deny those aspects of himself associated with the feminine; a woman may deny those aspects of herself associated with the masculine.

  It is much the same for nations. This is a time of sorrow and denial for the United States. We suffer from the considerable gap between our idealized self-image as a democratic, peace-loving nation and the reality of our history of genocide, slavery, discrimination, exploitation of working people, and imperial expansion. The denial of our national shadow comes at a heavy price, for we cannot correct disabilities we deny. An essential mark of maturity in both individuals and nations is the capacity to acknowledge and address all the dimen
sions of one’s character, both positive and negative. To become the people and the nation of our ideals, we must find the wisdom and the courage to collectively acknowledge and learn from our past transgressions and to engage in a process of national and global healing and reconciliation.

  Those who dismiss such critical examination as an act of disloyalty, even treason, reveal that they have yet to develop the emotional maturity to acknowledge the shadow of our national experience and to assume the full responsibilities of democratic citizenship, which requires a capacity for critical self-examination, both individually and nationally.

  We the people of the United States have received a wake-up call to the reality, perils, and sorrows of Empire we cannot afford to ignore. The devastating policy failures visited on the United States in the opening years of the twenty-first century speak to more than the sins of a corrupt and incompetent administration intent on rolling back the 236post–World War II economic and political gains of the U.S. middle class and asserting global imperial rule by military force. They speak to a five-thousand-year imperial legacy, a plutocracy posing as a democracy, and a wounded national psyche in denial of the shadow side of our national story.

  The idea that our proud nation could fall under the spell of extremist political forces is itself so alien to our self-image as to be difficult to accept. We have had our wake-up call to the reality that we are far from immune to the susceptibilities of an immature consciousness that have held our species captive to the self-destructive social pathologies of Empire for five thousand years. It is also a wake-up call to the power of stories in shaping our self-image and the course of history.

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  CHAPTER 14

  Prisons of the Mind

  Perhaps the only limits to the human mind are those we believe in.1

  Willis W. Harman

  Those who control the stories that define the culture of a society control its politics and its economy. This truth is crucial to explaining how a small cabal of right-wing extremists was able to render the democratic safeguards of the U.S. political system ineffective and gain control of the governing institutions of the nation. It is also crucial to framing a strategy for advancing the Great Turning.

  The leaders of the New Right view the world from the perspective of an Imperial Consciousness that holds elite rule to be the only viable option for maintaining social order. To build their political base they set about to frame the larger stories that would legitimate this worldview in the public mind and bind the political debate to their interests.

  Thus, the true believers of the New Right gained power not by their numbers, which are relatively small, but by their ability to control the stories that answer three basic questions: How do we prosper? How do we maintain order and keep ourselves secure? How do we find a sense of meaning and purpose in life? We might call these our prosperity, security, and meaning stories. The New Right has carefully honed and incessantly retold imperial versions of these stories to legitimate, even celebrate, the ordering of society by hierarchies of domination.

  Given the long history of elite rule in the United States and other Western democracies, many elements of the stories they needed were already familiar within the culture, as they are but variations of the stories imperial rulers have relied upon for millennia to legitimate injustice. The leaders of the New Right only needed to organize them into simple messages and recruit sympathetic scholars, preachers, politicians, media personalities, and think tank pundits to repeat them constantly through the megaphone of the corporate media. Together they 238created an echo chamber that embedded their stories in the culture and limited the boundaries of public discourse to a choice among policies that favor elite interests.

  We hear these stories echoed so often in so many different contexts that we come simply to accept them as statements of reality. Their narratives become prisons of the mind that confine us to the lower orders of consciousness and possibility. To liberate ourselves we must first recognize these narratives for what they are.

  IMPERIAL PROSPERITY STORY

  By definition, imperial elites inhabit a world of power and privilege based largely on their ownership of the productive assets on which the lives of all depend. They understandably favor stories that affirm the importance and legitimate the privilege of the owning class.

  The Story

  These are the essential elements of the imperial prosperity story:

  Economic growth, which expands the pie of wealth to create prosperity for all, depends on investment and therefore a wealthy investor class. The greater the financial returns to members of the investor class, the greater their incentive to invest. The more they invest, the faster the economy grows and the faster the lives of all improve. Since the market rewards individual investors in proportion to their contribution, inequality is natural, healthy, and essential to prosperity. Only the simpleminded or mean-spirited would begrudge the rich their due reward, because as the rich get richer, so does everyone else.

  Through regulation, taxes, and trade barriers, government limits profits for investors and reduces their incentive to invest, raises prices for consumers, and destroys jobs — thus impoverishing the society. Through welfare programs, government eliminates the incentive for the poor to work — thus eroding the moral fabric.

  In a free market capitalist economy, anyone can make it if they really try; individual failure is the mark of a character defect. Eliminating welfare programs to force the poor to work builds their character and brings them into the mainstream of society. 239

  To achieve prosperity and end poverty, we must free the wealthy from taxes, regulations, and trade barriers; sell off public assets and services to private investors, who are by nature more efficient and responsive to consumer interests; and eliminate the disincentive of public welfare programs. The free market will put people to work, eliminate poverty, get money in people’s pockets so they can make their own choices, create the wealth necessary to protect the environment, and provide people with better services at a cheaper price.

  Global corporations are benevolent, efficient, public-spirited institutions with an unequaled capacity to find and exploit natural resources, drive technological innovation, open new markets, create employment, and maximize the efficient use of productive assets to meet human needs. The greater their freedom, the faster poverty is eliminated, the environment is restored, and the people of the world enjoy universal freedom, democracy, peace, and prosperity.

  Global integration, market deregulation, and privatization are inexorable and beneficial historical forces that advance the wealth-creation process. Economic globalization is inevitable, there is no alternative, and resistance is futile. The winners will be those who adapt to the reality and take advantage of its opportunities. It is the beneficent mission of the Bretton Woods institutions — the World Bank, International Monetary Fund, and World Trade Organization — to facilitate the orderly advancement of these processes. Only the misinformed or mean-spirited who would deny the poor their opportunity for a better life oppose these institutions and their sacred mission.

  This story is commonly referred to as the Washington consensus, because it is propagated by the U.S. Treasury Department, the World Bank, the IMF, and various related think tanks, lobbyists, and contractors based in Washington, D.C. It is also known as economic liberalism, neoliberalism, and corporate libertarianism. Because advocates of the Washington consensus cling to their story with the blind faith of true believers in denial of all contrary evidence, international financier George Soros calls them “market fundamentalists.”

  Of the contemporary stories of Empire, the New Right prosperity story is the most often repeated and celebrated in policy papers and scholarly publications, taught in universities, and recited by pundits of 240the corporate media. Corporate globalists subscribe to it as their catechism. They differ among themselves mainly on their views of the extent to which it is appropriate for government to subsidize private corporations or to provide s
afety nets to cushion the fall of the losers in the market’s relentless competition.

  Neoliberal Elitism

  Economist Milton Friedman, the leader of the Chicago school of monetary economics, and technological futurist George Gilder played leading roles in legitimating and popularizing the neoliberal story. They were favorites of President Ronald Reagan (1981–89), who presented both with presidential awards.

  Friedman’s most influential work, Capitalism and Freedom, first published in 1962, argues that individual freedom is the inviolate moral absolute of economic life and that it is best secured through markets that guarantee the freedom of persons of wealth to use their money and property in whatever way they consider most beneficial to their individual interest. He is famous for his extraordinary assertion that it is immoral for any individual to sacrifice personal gain for a public interest. “It is easy to argue that he [the monopolist] should discharge his power not solely to further his own interests but to further socially desirable ends. Yet the widespread application of such a doctrine would destroy a free society.”2 Friedman argues against any public intervention that would constrain the ability of private monopolies of capital to maximize private financial gain. There is only one form of private monopoly that in Friedman’s view constitutes a threat to freedom — a monopoly created by a labor union to raise the wages of working people.3