The West is learning about Collective Responsibility

Mon, 2016-04-25 07:50 by Matthew Mitchell

We are starting to realise that all the little decisions we make about what to do, or what not to do really matter. We are learning that throwing our plastic bag (or our used coffee cups, or our cigarette buts) into the street, does matter - because collectively all this rubbish is having an impact on our environment and especially our wildlife. We are learning that things we once thought of as insignificant are in fact significant and often have far reaching effects. In Australia we have learned that longer showers affect our water supplies, that our small individual actions are impacting our water storages as well as the flow down our rivers, and consequently the water available for farming and other purposes. What an awakening! Who would he guessed that city dwellers, so removed from nature and so supplied with apparent excesses of everything from water to electricity to coffee (and a wide variety of palm oil products) would start to become aware of the plight of coffee growers (and of deforestation) in distant lands, and to change their habits based on this knowledge! We are coming to realise that there is such a thing as collective responsibility - that we cannot disassociate ourselves from the society we live in and its impacts locally and globally. It is becoming increasingly difficult for Westerners to say about foreign wars that they personally have nothing to with them. All a protaganist must do is ask, well do you drive a car? Then you use oil and in one way or another are contributing to problems in the middle east. Do you use a computer, mobile phone or iPad - then how can you say that you and your actions play no part in the conflicts in Africa over the scarce resources used to make these devices? Do you buy manufactured goods from China? Does your country sell them the coal used to power those factories? Then how can you say that Chinese pollution not - even if in only some tiny way - your fault? One challenged by such a statement may retort: "I have no choice but to drive a car, that is how most westerners live" or "I have no choice but to buy Chinese goods, as these goods are not produced here". But they used to be - why are they not made here now?

This raises the second thing we are learning - consequences accumulate not only over space but over time. The purchasing choices of recent decades, and the constant search to save a little here and there has had far-reaching effects. Our choices have supported companies that seek to produce things as cheaply as possible, and punished those that payed good wages and provided good conditions, Thus we as a nation have shed industries, and jobs, that it seems will never be regained. And now many of us really have no choice but to buy the cheapest, as our job market shrinks and the pressures we bought to bear on overseas countries are now brought to bear on us? And it is mostly the younger generation who struggle to find work and who are paying exorbitant prices for things that were - until fairly recently - relatively affordable eg: housing and basic utilities.

So - slightly older Australians might say - this is not my doing, others allowed this offshoring of our industry, others allowed the highly profitable (for packaging companies) disposable plastic bottle industry to supplant the previous, much more sustainable, refundable bottle system (remember the glass bottles, which you would get 20c for if you returned - back when 20c was the cost of playing an arcade video game?) But it was our doing - collectively. Who else can be held responsible for the paths our society has taken? Who? People in other countries? Which such people had such control over us? Our tiny elite - our 1%? Do 1% of people really have so much sway over the other 99%? Are we really that powerless? Or is the truth that the 99% - or least a large proportion of them - were in some way complicit? Is it true that evil men only succeed where good men stay silent? So where were the good men? Where were the 99% of good men, and women, who could have stood up and stopped any of these things - if they really wanted to? Or were the 99% happy to go along and allow, for example, the introduction of negative gearing? To not stand up against something so obviously unjust and unfair? Perhaps it didn't seem important, just like many of these things; the growing use of plastics, the growing dependence on cars, and the subsequent relative degradation of public transport infrastructure. So what we are now learning is that these small things do matter - and in the long run they matter a lot! So what is to be done now? It is clear that now we must change our old indolent ways - we must start to stand-up for what is right, big things of course, but also we must take responsibility for our small decisions too. Why buy a disposable coffee-cup (another piece of land-fill, if it doesn't end up in the bay)? Why buy $1 milk when you know farmers are struggling, for goodness sake we can nearly all afford to pay a fair price for milk!

So I suggest we all do take personal responsibility for the collective actions of our society - we are part of it, and we cannot disassociate ourselves from it or its effects. We cannot say that homelessness, unemployment, unprofitable farming etc, are not our fault - because in some way these things are only the way they are because we allow them to be. Deep down we know this - the next step is to honestly acknowledge it. White Australians know that collectively they carry the responsibility to amend past mis-deeds. We know it matters for a white Australian Prime-Minister to apologise to the Indigenous people of this land. It is effectively a collective apology. Some may deny they have any responsibility for the past and for the on-going situation of Aborigines in this country - but they do. As long as we do not have a treaty with the Aborigines we are letting them down. Who else's responsibility is it to fix past wrongs? Is it just the job of a few politicians? Or some social welfare workers? Or is the responsibility of everyone of us to ensure that everyone else in our country is treated justly; treated fairly; treated humanely? Again the question arises - if it is not up to you - then who is it up to? The person next to you? Why them and not you? Thus we must start to take responsibility for our actions - including our past mistakes. We must have sufficient humility to do this, and also sufficient selflessness to not worry about how our own personal situation may be detrimentally effected by doing the right thing - that is if we want to live in the country where the right thing is done. Because if we do not, then we keep going right on ignoring all problems we are collectively creating by putting our heads in the sand, seeking the cheapest bargains where-ever we can, and allowing ourselves to be more and more driven to the level of animals by the selfish, individualistic, competitive nightmare we are currently experiencing.

So let all Australians - new to the country or old - take responsibility for the lack of a treaty with the decendants of the original inhabitants of this land. And let the older Australians apologise to the younger generations for the mess they have left them to deal with. Then let us hope that the Indigenous and the young can forgive and then we can all get on with fixing this mess, recreating a truly human, civilised, society in which both people and planet are cared for. The alternative is now obvious - it leads to oblivion of all that is good, leaving a bunch of increasingly selfish people fighting over the decaying scraps of a dying planet.

Comments

Sheila Newman

Mon, 2016-05-09 16:56

Hi Matthew,
I know you worked hard on this piece but it runs so counter to much of what we support on candobetter.net that I feel constrained to make these comments.

MATTHEW wrote: The West is learning about Collective Responsibility: We are starting to realise that all the little decisions we make about what to do, or what not to do really matter. We are learning that throwing our plastic bag (or our used coffee cups, or our cigarette buts) into the street, does matter - because collectively all this rubbish is having an impact on our environment and especially our wildlife.

SHEILA: Who is this 'we'? The situation seems to be becoming worse, not better. We are losing environmental protection laws; consumption continually rises. New generations grow up with very little understanding or interest in wildlife or habitat loss. In the 1970s people were more aware and had more traction. Then NGOs were seduced into cooperating with corporations and receiving government grants. They were easily infiltrated and gutted.

MATTHEW wrote: We are learning that things we once thought of as insignificant are in fact significant and often have far reaching effects. In Australia we have learned that longer showers affect our water supplies, that our small individual actions are impacting our water storages as well as the flow down our rivers, and consequently the water available for farming and other purposes.

SHEILA: Water has been commodified to take advantage of forced population growth. Farmers have been ruined by having their water diverted to intensive irrigators and pig farmers. Steve Bracks was a major propagandist for mass immigration and 'saving our water for future generations' and he was behind the water grab in the Mallee Wimmera that Pipe Right Inc tried to fight and lost. see Consider the $3b at stake in the Wonthaggi Desalinisation Plant and consider how strong a protest this drew and how the judiciary silenced this protest by bankrupting the NGO. Water is a focus of massive corruption in this country and globally. The outsourcing of its management has brought billions to the 1% and has taken our power to control its use away. Furthermore the business model is totally unsustainable, See,

MATTHEW wrote: What an awakening! Who would he guessed that city dwellers, so removed from nature and so supplied with apparent excesses of everything from water to electricity to coffee (and a wide variety of palm oil products) would start to become aware of the plight of coffee growers (and of deforestation) in distant lands, and to change their habits based on this knowledge!

SHEILA: They only change their habits based on growthist propaganda, which subsumes all independent voices, fooling the uncritical. And it works on guilt (which seems to be the message you are faithfully relaying here, although probably without any focused benefit). I haven't noticed the growthists pushing against palm oil. It is everywhere. In soap, in washing powder, in shampoo...

MATTHEW wrote: We are coming to realise that there is such a thing as collective responsibility - that we cannot disassociate ourselves from the society we live in and its impacts locally and globally. It is becoming increasingly difficult for Westerners to say about foreign wars that they personally have nothing to with them. All a protaganist must do is ask, well do you drive a car? Then you use oil and in one way or another are contributing to problems in the middle east. Do you use a computer, mobile phone or iPad - then how can you say that you and your actions play no part in the conflicts in Africa over the scarce resources used to make these devices? Do you buy manufactured goods from China? Does your country sell them the coal used to power those factories? Then how can you say that Chinese pollution not - even if in only some tiny way - your fault? One challenged by such a statement may retort: "I have no choice but to drive a car, that is how most westerners live" or "I have no choice but to buy Chinese goods, as these goods are not produced here". But they used to be - why are they not made here now?

SHEILA: Because, against the wishes of the population, globalism broke down trade protection (A terrible policy amongst many better of Whitlam's) and put an end to a swathe of small businesses. Those that survived have since been decimated by the cost of land, rent, power, water which makes production costs too expensive, reduced profit margin and makes Australia uncompetitive with most other countries which have much lower land-costs. See

MATTHEW wrote: This raises the second thing we are learning - consequences accumulate not only over space but over time. The purchasing choices of recent decades, and the constant search to save a little here and there has had far-reaching effects. Our choices have supported companies that seek to produce things as cheaply as possible, and punished those that payed good wages and provided good conditions, Thus we as a nation have shed industries, and jobs, that it seems will never be regained. And now many of us really have no choice but to buy the cheapest, as our job market shrinks and the pressures we bought to bear on overseas countries are now brought to bear on us? And it is mostly the younger generation who struggle to find work and who are paying exorbitant prices for things that were - until fairly recently - relatively affordable eg: housing and basic utilities.

SHEILA: Once again a consequence of destroying local production and encouraging massive imports from poorer countries, paid for by credit cards marketed by the 1% who profit from all this.

MATTHEW wrote: So - slightly older Australians might say - this is not my doing, others allowed this offshoring of our industry, others allowed the highly profitable (for packaging companies) disposable plastic bottle industry to supplant the previous, much more sustainable, refundable bottle system (remember the glass bottles, which you would get 20c for if you returned - back when 20c was the cost of playing an arcade video game?) But it was our doing - collectively. Who else can be held responsible for the paths our society has taken?

SHEILA: The power elite who have allowed the public messaging stick to be captured in the form of the duopoly press who also control the political elite here. Australians have been disorganised in a big way and have been led to believe that what the mass media and the ABC pretend is public opinion really is, so they feel alone and invalidated. See (Which is why the alternative media like candobetter.net should validate them, not just repeat the brainwashing of the mass media and government which blames us all or says we wanted this. People fought all of this as much as they could. They lost to traitors like Keating and Hawke profiting from Reagan Thatcher economics post oil shock - but there was a completely different way of behaving, which was the tack taken by Europe.)

MATTHEW wrote: Who? People in other countries? Which such people had such control over us? Our tiny elite - our 1%? Do 1% of people really have so much sway over the other 99%?

SHEILA: Absolutely! Haven't you read anything about the Property Council of Australia or the Multicultural Foundation of Australia? (see Look at the political theory of focused benefits and diffuse costs in a democracy.
Haven't you noticed how mass media and government continually make up stories about why we are at war, which they market repetitively to less and less well-educated generations? Generations who have not even learned clear thinking, let alone history or geography. The anti-war movement has been completely subsumed to the pro-refugee movement, which is carried by the mainstream media because it benefits their war industries by drowning out the fact that refugees are created by wars.

MATTHEW wrote: Are we really that powerless? Or is the truth that the 99% - or least a large proportion of them - were in some way complicit? Is it true that evil men only succeed where good men stay silent? So where were the good men? Where were the 99% of good men, and women, who could have stood up and stopped any of these things - if they really wanted to? Or were the 99% happy to go along and allow, for example, the introduction of negative gearing?

SHEILA: Negative gearing as the major cause of housing unaffordability is another furphy. It's just a form of investment with logical tax deductibility. (See It is part of the fuel of massive over-reliance on property development in our economy, fueled by mass immigration and constant population movement in search of jobs, divorce, etc. There are many ways to counter the overimportance of the real-estate sector of the economy, but manipulating negative gearing so that it only applies to new constructions accelerates the property development juggernaut and habitat destruction. As well, it pits home owners against non-home owners when the two should be in solidarity about the right to shelter. There is never any real focus on the property industry that benefits disproportionately from negative gearing - it is instead held up as a growth industry that gives people 'jobs' [which they would not be so reliant on if they were not all in debt].

MATTHEW wrote: To not stand up against something so obviously unjust and unfair? Perhaps it didn't seem important, just like many of these things; the growing use of plastics, the growing dependence on cars, and the subsequent relative degradation of public transport infrastructure. So what we are now learning is that these small things do matter - and in the long run they matter a lot! So what is to be done now? It is clear that now we must change our old indolent ways - we must start to stand-up for what is right, big things of course, but also we must take responsibility for our small decisions too. Why buy a disposable coffee-cup (another piece of land-fill, if it doesn't end up in the bay)? Why buy $1 milk when you know farmers are struggling, for goodness sake we can nearly all afford to pay a fair price for milk!

SHEILA: People might start out by trying not to use throw away cups and by trying to buy less-exploitative milk, but given the increasing rates of debt and precarity, many people make cuts even to the smallest expenses. Most people do not use throwaway cups in their homes, but hospitals and corporate cafeterias and many cafes now do. Why? I would like to know. They seem to prefer it to investing in dishwashing machinery.

MATTHEW wrote: So I suggest we all do take personal responsibility for the collective actions of our society - we are part of it, and we cannot disassociate ourselves from it or its effects. We cannot say that homelessness, unemployment, unprofitable farming etc, are not our fault - because in some way these things are only the way they are because we allow them to be. Deep down we know this - the next step is to honestly acknowledge it. White Australians know that collectively they carry the responsibility to amend past mis-deeds. We know it matters for a white Australian Prime-Minister to apologise to the Indigenous people of this land. It is effectively a collective apology.

SHEILA: Apologies are cheaper than land-tenure. Australia didn't give back their land and successive PM's are trying to free-title indigenous land - to make it another brick in the yellow brick road of the 1% who benefit from real-estate speculation in a growing population. No treaty has been negotiated. Cheap, these apologies. I find them shamefully superficial.

MATTHEW wrote: Some may deny they have any responsibility for the past and for the on-going situation of Aborigines in this country - but they do. As long as we do not have a treaty with the Aborigines we are letting them down.

SHEILA: That's right, but do you think the governments and press intend to allow the idea of a treaty to reach serious debate? Of course not.

MATTHEW wrote: Who else's responsibility is it to fix past wrongs? Is it just the job of a few politicians?

SHEILA: A 'few' politicians? A mass of overpaid, commercially well-connected stooges in internationally affiliated parties with globalist agendas. They should represent us on this, but they represent the banks, the land-bankers and the press moguls. That is why there are such attempts to get new political parties going, but since they are rarely covered in the mainstream media, it is difficult to get them known - because we do not have any other state or national media besides the ABC and Murdoch/Fairfax. Furthermore it is clear that the vast bulk of our politicians do not respect or fear the public - and why should they? The state pays and controls the police, the army, and the law-makers.

MATTHEW wrote: Or some social welfare workers? Or is the responsibility of everyone of us to ensure that everyone else in our country is treated justly; treated fairly; treated humanely?

SHEILA: Bureaucracy has that effect. Once you might have gone next door and taken a child out of a dangerous situation, but these days you fear prosecution because it is 'not your job'. So you ring the police or child welfare. Our societies are segmented into roles that divide us and disempower us which are regulated from top down and people don't know each other due to population movement (moving house, migration, commuting) and we have little presence or power at local and neighborhood level.

MATTHEW wrote: Again the question arises - if it is not up to you - then who is it up to? The person next to you? Why them and not you? Thus we must start to take responsibility for our actions - including our past mistakes. We must have sufficient humility to do this, and also sufficient selflessness to not worry about how our own personal situation may be detrimentally effected by doing the right thing - that is if we want to live in the country where the right thing is done. Because if we do not, then we keep going right on ignoring all problems we are collectively creating by putting our heads in the sand, seeking the cheapest bargains where-ever we can, and allowing ourselves to be more and more driven to the level of animals by the selfish, individualistic, competitive nightmare we are currently experiencing.

SHEILA: This message is what we hear all the time from the mass media and the churches. The meek shall inherit the earth, but in the mean-time, shut up and look to your own sins. It is all 'our fault', but we have so little power and talk so little with each other. We have been diversified, not just by mass immigration, but by our jobs, our new classes, our educations, debt and overwork, that it is very hard for us to find common values. Candobetter.net tries to bring these matters to the foreground and create awareness and promote organisation to take back the talking stick; we are not into telling the masses that they are guilty of creating the problems from which the one per cent all benefit. with the mass media there is a resemblance to the organised church, which conveyed from the pulpit what it deemed the public needed to know, and urged them to consult it about any problems instead of their taking power for themselves.

MATTHEW wrote: So let all Australians - new to the country or old - take responsibility for the lack of a treaty with the decendants of the original inhabitants of this land. And let the older Australians apologise to the younger generations for the mess they have left them to deal with. Then let us hope that the Indigenous and the young can forgive and then we can all get on with fixing this mess, recreating a truly human, civilised, society in which both people and planet are cared for. The alternative is now obvious - it leads to oblivion of all that is good, leaving a bunch of increasingly selfish people fighting over the decaying scraps of a dying planet.

SHEILA: An indigenous treaty without an end to mass immigration would be laughable. So let's make that part of the treaty. That would also benefit everyone else born or resident in this country - except the 1%.

Matthew Mitchell

Mon, 2016-05-09 18:13

I accept the legitimacy of all these comments - there is no doubt - for example, that the 1% do have power, they have and do manipulate us - and all these problems you mention do exist, and I am not saying that we have the collective consciousness yet to address all these problems. But I believe we can. Can the 1% really hold on their power against the wishes of the 99%? - all it takes is for the everyday people in the police forces, in the armed forces, those who deliver their groceries, those who sell them milk and coffee etc to say - no, we are not going to serve you anymore. That is it for them. End of their story. The trouble has always been that when people do remove the power from their elites (perhaps like the French revolution) a new bunch of sociopaths/psychopaths take over. That is perhaps the real challenge we face - not ending the old system - but creating the new.

Sheila Newman

Mon, 2016-05-09 18:29

Thanks Matthew, for the feedback. (Sorry, I called you Michael by accident; just edited it out.) I feel that the french revolution was an exception to the rule of the bastards taking over being exactly the same, but it took Napoleon to seal its effects and several generations to complete the revolution. In disorganised countries like Australia you do not have the capacity for intergenerational organisation and history keeping that they had in France. However, we have to do something, as you say, and we do try to help take back the talking stick on candobetter.net. So it is not entirely hopeless until the country is entirely wrecked, which is well on the way.

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