The Untied State of America
I hate politics.
My friends are incredulous about this — they remind me that I’m outspoken, unapologetically liberal, that I studied political theory and later national security, and before that I was a model United Nations nerd. They tag me on facebook to debate their acquaintances, knowing I’ll dependably deploy words and facts in the right measure of condescension and incredulity to shut down bigotry and social conservatism.
Yes, we need policy change. But this isn’t about politics. Political theory never captured my interest — I gravitated instead toward the study of early human culture. I considered the dawn of agricultural society, big game hunting as human domination, the roots of inequality among men. I devoured Bruno Latour and conceptualized politics for the first time as the flip-side of a false and fundamental dichotomy, a sort of tool or process designed (or evolved) to lead us away from the “state of nature.” Technology not as a means to ‘progress’ but of continual divorce and denial. Nature and culture as separate and distinct pillars, only to be united if and when we get our shit together and stop holding humans as exceptional. And so when I studied national security under the U.S. Military, it was from the standpoint of not politics but strategy.
This isn’t about politics. This is about culture. This is about directionality. This is about the story we tell ourselves, about ourselves.
The story we have been telling for a long time — too long — is about growth. This is true in most of the developed world, where the understanding that we are pillaging and making uninhabitable this planet and its resources has not been enough to slow capitalism or its technological machinations. The social construction of science, ever-leveraged in a project to differentiate (elevate?) man from nature — from the universe of “what is possible” — has often encouraged both culture and politics in its strategy of growth. More food > more women > more babies > more land > more money > more productivity > more. Any “fundamental limits to growth” became a challenge to innovate our way out of, breached again and again. In the imaginations of artists and politicians alike, the planet itself could not contain this directive: the exploration and domination of the stars came to be an eventuality, inevitable.
“Love” sang the counter-culture, again and again. “Better” sang the technologists, optimizing where there was no ‘more’ to be had. “There is still so much to understand,” faded the voices of the scientists, careful warnings lost on the culture of more: They aren’t sure. They can’t prove it’s our fault. Just keep swimming/producing/earning/exploiting. Grow. Win. More.
And so we are untied.
Politics is a distraction. Neither candidate is telling a new story. A forced choice: senseless hatred vs. greed and corruption. Even policy change — so needed — is only part of the solution. We need to be able to imagine a better future. We need a story that, while acknowledging we have never been great, we have only been more, sets us on a sustainable path. We need a story that says loudly: we do not hate, we do not kill, we do not build walls, we do not continue a path of growth that engenders destruction in the long term. We need to teach our children this story, so that they do not grow up in a country that breeds and then exports hatred, violence, and domination.
Rather than talk about politics, let’s talk about narrative.
Our strategy can no longer be growth. We are too big. Our strategy cannot be exclusion. Diversity is strength. Our strategy now should be optimization: it can and it must get better than this. “Are you ready, and at the price of what sacrifice, to live the good life together?” Tell me a story about that.
