LIBERATING THE SOCIAL IMAGINARY TO LIBERATE OUR VILLAGES
Miguel Valencia's speech for the degrowth international seminar in Klimaforum09, Copenhagen 2009, parallel to the climate summit COP15:
Spanish: https://teoremaambiental.com/tag/ecomunidades-red-ecologista-autonoma-de-la-cuenca-de-mexico/
Let me apologize for possible mistaken words in this text. English is
not my native language and I’m not used to write in this language.
Our villages and cities are
dying because of intense development
Everywhere in Mexico, the same force is at work. It weakens our
villages, sickens and kills their inhabitants. It destroys our communities and
makes a mockery of our traditional commons. Year after year, it causes the loss
of support capacities: water tables, streams and lakes, groves, rainforests,
seas. It constantly impoverishes our country's fauna and flora. This force is
modernization. It is an undeclared war waged against nature and people's
commons. In its name, the landscape is tainted with single crops such as: corn,
barley, palms and also with urban sprawl, channels, pylons. All towns are more
and more invaded by pavement, pipes, autos, noises, advertisements, commercial
franchises, Wal Mart stores. The peasants and town residents observe
helplessly how in few months there are built under passes, freeways, big
parking lots, huge malls, industrialized housing. In few hours, they
see how their public parks and gardens, sidewalks, squares, are filled with
used plastic bottles or bags, aluminium cans, printings, metal and plastic
carcases.
Mexican towns and cities are rapidly losing their peasants, artisans and
wise men, but, at the same time they are resenting a fast increase in their
levels of violence, poverty and unemployment, because of the soaring growth of
the huge land monocultures, migration, drug harvest and traffic, sweat shops
and new life styles. Our towns are powerless territories subject to powers
without territory. World economy now dominates our village’s life and
economics. Towns and cities have lost the means to stand on their
own.
Confrontation and dissent
with globalization in México: A chronicle of a bloody warfare
Dissent rises in the early 90 but, since the beginning of this
century, at least 1,500 local movements have been initiated; campesinos,
indigenous people, women, workers, neighbours, citizens of all social strata
have rejected the construction of airports, large dams, turnpikes, oil
facilities, toxic waste confinement, mining operations, water extraction,
elevated freeways, Metro lines. The most relevant dissent in México: the Atenco
town stopped the construction of the Mexico Cy new international
airport; Ignacio del Valle, the campesino leader of this movement, is now in
top security seclusion, convicted for 120 years; Zimapan town halted a toxic
confinement; people of San Luis Potosí City succeeded to stop operations
of San Xavier, Canadian mining company; ; campesinos of La Parota
stopped a large dam project in Acapulco; people of Cuatro Cienegas continuously
oppose to water extraction in the desert ecological reserve; 13 towns movement;
campesinos against the urbanization of Morelos rice fields; campesinos and
people of Tlahuac against the 12th Metro line project on their
wetlands in Mexico Cy. In recent years, most local resistance leaders in Mexico
have warrants. At least every fortnight a local leader mysteriously disappears
or is found tortured and killed by unknown people.
The social imaginary
manipulated by development programs and globalization has been a tragedy.
For decades, the images of new cars, high speed roads, big dams,
bridges, towers, underpasses, houses in suburbia, have devastated the mind of
the majority of Mexican people; but globalization introduced again new images
of world class weapons, cruiser sea travel, contemporary houses, and many
others that colonized the mind of part of the low income, middle and well- to-
do Mexican classes. The American Dream or the European life style has become
now a part of the social imaginary of most Mexicans. But these images drive now
the transformations that ravage Mexican towns, villages, and nature’s
treasures. Derived from the spectacle of wealth, several new creeds or faiths
invade not only a great part Mexican people, but I think, of most people in
most countries. These new creeds could be summarized in the following ones:
faith in progress, development and modernization; faith in science and
technology; faith in economic growth; faith in the modern State and democratic
institutions. As a result of the emergence of these basic creeds, most people
believe that there is no dignified human life on earth without mobile phones,
lap tops, bottled water, cars, fast trains, planes... And that world class
newspapers, big radio networks and national TV broadcast are essential for a
good living. And that society cannot achieve prosperity without abundant school
certificates, university degrees and doctoral studies.
With the rise of economic
classical thinking, in the 18th century epistemic revolution,
these contemporary faiths emerged.
Economic ideas introduced the idea of a world without boundaries and
limits, unbridled exploitation of nature and the legitimization of big risk
activities; in those days, modern states lost the notions of scale, size,
proportion and limit and began to nurture industrial activities, international
trade; in that century, the fundamentals of our legal system were
created in order to protect pirates, bankers, corporations; and then, science
and technology became the most important partners of economy. From this
epistemic revolution evolved these creeds and our modern thinking; in our days
everybody is now deeply involved in only one dimension of life: the economic
dimension. The One-Dimensional Man, denounced by Herbert Marcuse in the 60s, is
now present everywhere in the world. Techno-scientists presently conduct high
risk experiments using nuclear energy, genetic engineering, nanotechnology,
robotics, in such a manner “to make humans an endangered species”, according to
Bill Joy, the great American computer scientist. Economy has conquered the mind
of modern man and commands his life, needs, desires, beliefs; the idea of
scarcity, essential to economic thinking, saturates the contemporary thinking.
In our days, because economic ideas, multinationals and states face a
Shakespearian dilemma “to grow or not to be”. As economy
implements the ugliness, gigantism, accelerated change, that now subdue modern
world.
Economy operates by means
of different systems and instruments designed
by techno scientists.
Systems like: states, world organizations, central banks, financial
operations, employments, schools, universities, hospitals, media, agribusiness,
tourism, transportation. Instruments like autos, planes, internet, mobile
phones disturb human behaviour and produce profound changes in values, beliefs,
desires, needs: in the process, certain new values emerge deep in human mind
that changes social perception of the reality: a estrangement of the individual
from its community, society, or world. Alienated individuals desire to
have more, bigger and faster and they are the most
influentials. Systems facilitate, of course, “free choice” but, in a world
without people; inculcate love for competition, profitability, technicalities;
they stimulate anonymity, conformism, addictions, consumerism, servitude;
subordination, up rootedness, disenchantment. Induce parting from nature;
squandering life; stingy interchanges between people; scorn for manual work;
love for hierarchies; disdain for spontaneity. They turn work as an addiction,
consumption as the basis of life. Techno systems empower the dominant system
and degrade people’s minds. The colonization of the modern social
imaginary is systemic. Evidently, these economic systems are
against the natural order and human conviviality; they turn poverty into misery
and bring about the awful violence that pervades the world; they drive the
destruction of nature.
Schools teach the great advantages of productivity and how to
become a disciplined consumer; teach how to live in permanent servitude and
dissatisfaction. Not only Coca Cola or the automobile are addictive, also
schools or clinics become a drug. As Ivan Illich said “School opium is more
powerful than old time churches”. Mass media systematically misinform
people thru excessive information; the combination of misinformation with
commercial and political advertising produces deformation, propaganda and
manipulation. Like VIH virus, schools destroy immunity defences; just as the
drug dealers do, advertising creates the new necessities. Daily work
is every day more abstract and takes more hours: it strongly colonizes the
imaginary. Unemployment is resented by people as a personal blame, not as a
systemic failure, which leads to paralyzed, destroyed persons. In the new
consumer society, as Zygmut Bauman says, individuals simultaneously promote a
product while they are themselves the product they promote; they are the
consumer, the marketing manager, the salesperson and the article for
sale. The exams a person should pass to have access to the most
important social recognitions, requires the individual to recycle himself as a
precious object or property, as a product capable of catching attention,
attract clients, and generate demand.
Modern systems produce uniformity all over the world; differences are
disappearing among cities, suburbia, towns, dwellings, landscapes,
generations, gender; in this uniform environment the human personality loses
identity and cultural references to guide his life; individual high risk
behaviour proliferate in the world: drugs consumption, crime, extreme sports,
certain forms of sexuality, tend to increase; panic, emptiness haunts all human
activities; as society malfunctions increase, politicians and capitalists feel
more powerful than ever. The tragedy lies today in that too many people in the
world want even more jobs created; want ever more investments in
infrastructure, housing, hospitals, scientific experiments and technological
advances. People trust in the modern systems and in the growing economies;
people rely on the very pervasive instruments and institutions that are
destroying their life and their
future.
Liberating the social
imaginary is essential to relocate life and economy
It is impossible to liberate the social imaginary without a severe
critique of the dominant system. This liberation implies studying,
investigating, reflecting, working on oneself; implies philosophy endeavours;
it entails a desire to be free, a will to change our own life style and the
construction of a pertinent personal praxis; it requires detoxification,
education in the ways of degrowth. “Without the abandonment of the
drug of growth, says Serge Latouche, we cannot change our own imaginary; least
we will be able to change others’ imaginary. It is not possible to change the
world with laws and decrees...The key is self-transformation.... As our
imaginary has been colonized, the enemy hides deep in our minds...
nevertheless, because of the systemic character of the dominant values...
nobody is responsible; the process is anonymous… Thus, the adversary is other people, and we
feel impotent of transforming ourselves” ... He quotes Zygmut Bauman “there is
a common world in the globalized society and this is the
unique thought” ... Latouche says “beyond the elite, the ensemble of values and
beliefs shared by people is considerable”. To liberate our villages,
many people should abandon many ideas, like: having a car, a house in suburbia
or a university degree; they must abandon the idea that having an employment is
good for his health and his future. We degrowth activists have to demonstrate
that we can live much better with much fewer infrastructures, equipment and
things, and with minimal dependence from governments, parties and big
enterprises.
But the liberation of the social imaginary also implies the voluntary
defence of territories, animals, forests, rivers, seas, peasant cultures,
people’s commons, traditional knowledge, endangered species, clean air, public
space, human rights. It also implies rejection of GMOs harvests, nuclear power
development, agribusiness, mining and petroleum operations, toxic waste
confinements, dam construction, big farms and stables operations, serial
housing, automobile use, “local development”. It implies also denouncing
the misleading notion of sustainable development; revitalizing the village by
producing for local needs and consuming local produce; organizing micro-
cooperatives and micro-syndicates; reducing voluntary working time and
consumption; constructing new ecological communities with rigorous rules. It
also means to grow vegetables in our own dwellings or nearby in the eco-region;
to walk and cycle for everyday mobility; to modify toilets and water
facilities; to separate residues; to support local money, savings and loans; to
use or produce hand made products. To abandon the use of automobile, bottled
water and red meat consumption. On the other hand, liberating the social
imaginary means also to enhance political and
social involvement within our village environment; to collaborate
with citizen initiatives; to voluntary work on
environmental and social issues without the support of the
governments, foundations or national or multinational companies; to
experiment on ways how to survive the economic crisis, the peak oil and the
climate change; to refuse to empower the State and free trade ; to break with
the symbolic system of globalization. Last but not least, to turn
art an integral part of our lives.
A cultural revolution emerges when men and women work together for the
rebirth of his village, town or community, when they expand the realm of
gratuity and solidarity, when they are blessed by the love for nature,
altruism, cooperation, ludism, autonomy and beauty.
This cultural revolution begins in our minds, the moment when we become
aware, as Baruch Spinoza did, that simple poor life constitutes in
itself a source of light to inspire us the understanding of the
different dimensions of poverty and our own potency; that the joys
of frugal or poor life permits us to liberate a strong desire to live free up
to our natural limits and avoid external affections or imaginations that
diminish or inhibit this desire and our capacities. An he says let the reality
teach us his truth in order to comprehend the world as it is here
and now; in that way we can liberate ourselves form all forms of
servitude and acquire a freedom rooted in Need; thus, we can find good
responses to very difficult questions. We have to discover and respect
essential the link between Desire and Reason, for the good deployment of our
own potential, to facilitate the creation of societies based in freedom and
respect for everybody’s singularity. Spinoza said that
“weakness solely consists in letting external things conduct our lives and
decline what demands our nature in itself. Centuries later,
Gandhi said: “Freedom can be achieved through inner sovereignty”
Climate change, peak oil, high risk technologies can easily bring harsh
painful corrective changes in our villages in the coming years, but
joyful, pleasant transformations will come only from the discovery of
our inner power or potency while we voluntarily adopt a frugal, poor, simple,
slow life.
--
Miguel Valencia
ECOMUNIDADES
Red Ecologista Autónoma de la Cuenca de México
¡DESCRECIMIENTO O BARBARIE!
Acción inmediata frente al Pico del Petróleo y al Cambio Climático
Textos recientes en http://red-ecomunidades.blogspot.com/
https://descrecimientomexico.blogspot.com/
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