Who is We?

Images of identical strangers curated by François Brunelle in a collection called I am not a Look-Alike.

Language currency dictates that the shorthand for Americans to refer to the ownership of the geopolitical and military activities of the United States government is "We."  As alienated as Americans are from the activities of the government in general, and this administration in particular, it's a reflex to complain about "we", "us', "our president", "our war", "our hegemony".  I don't know about you but I had nothing to do with it and if I felt any true responsibility for it, I would disown it.  But in spite of the benefit to the warring classes of the reflexive use of "we" by Americans who are excluded from any say in the way the US government and its military conduct themselves in this world,   regardless of whom their votes elect-- the benefit is a built in unmerited self-implication in the guilt-- we were never consulted and our opinions would never be heeded.  This is the nature of the government we find ourselves subject to.  According to polls, we do not approve of it, and yet that fact and, thanks to Trump's inflation, an arm-and-a-leg will get you a cup of coffee.

What kind of world do we want to build?  

More to the point: Who is 'We'?

This is a question that anyone who is interested in the future of the planet must take seriously.  For many, we is of course the community, the nation, the hemisphere, the species, the planet.  American society indulges the worst predilections—the predilections that privilege the worst most diseased people.  When there is blame to go around, "We" is to blame.  We allow the greedy to get rich.  We allow the rich to lie to us and have their way with the only planet we've ever known. We allow the powerful to police us (and even worse to police themselves).  We allow police to deprive us of our freedom.  These are indulgences that we give without thought.

We sound culpable, and yet any less than superficial analysis will reveal that the "We" who passively let the worst have their way with the world are absent from the pronoun.  There is no us there doing the letting.  The worst do not ask our permission.   They do not burden us with a choice of how we are to survive.  They simply employ us as they wish in return for the meager means to prolong our survival.  

There was once a prevailing sense of community that mitigated the order we found ourselves in on gaining consciousness of the world.  Community educated us and involved us.  It got many of us organized in the workplace, and to some extent at the polls.  That decayed particularly rapidly in the 1980's with the rise of Reaganism and Thatcherism, the twin brands of Neoliberalism.  It was Margaret Thatcher who tolled the death knell by declaring, "There is no such thing as society."  Her words marked the open race to enclose every last commons for corporate profit.  There was no turning back.  Government was rapidly re-oriented from community and commonality to the principle that individuals were responsible for their own predicaments.  Billionaires were simply individuals who wanted the success available to all badly enough to work for it.  The poor by behaving imprudently were choosing poverty for themselves.  Employers were not obligated to care for their workers-- they were paying their workers to be ambitious enough to care for them.  Employment was not for life, but "at will".  Your co-workers were not comrades but competition.  You were expendable.  Contrary to the fiction that each individual was responsible for the circumstances we all found ourselves in, the hard reality for those beholden to employers for their sustenance was that every individual was an island in a hostile sea, an atom cast adrift in a void.  No such thing as society meant no such thing as "We".

It took a financial disaster caused by the reckless abandon of the elite to cause stirrings of consciousness of how far we had fallen from our ability to come together to reclaim our shared destiny.  "Change we can believe in." turned out to be a lie, but "We are the 99%" became a rallying cry that woke some of us from our slumber.  It inspired the Presidential campaigns of Bernie Sanders who re-introduced us to the concept of "Not me. Us."   The stifling of the pandemic of Social Democracy in 2020 was throat clearing for the elite handling of the COVID pandemic.  When Social Democracy threatened to bring us together in solidarity, COVID atomized us again.  We have not recovered.  Social media consolidates the commons-suffocating impulses of the right and it fragments the many warring strands of the left.  The right gains ground in spite of its inherent unpopularity. Meanwhile, the left can only bicker over the tattering of what's left of the planet and of Us.

What is to become of us?  May we relearn how to find out together.

~~~~~

An antidote to the dissolution is Naomi Klein's Doppelganger and pariticularly its ultimate chapter: Unselfing.