RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL – (Opinion) “There is no order which is complete and there is no conforming order worth mustering which does not invite, for its life, the constant and random supply of fresh disorder.”
Looking at the world in the 1950s, the eminent English critic R.P. Blackmur (whom I was lucky enough to have had as a mentor at university), proposed that the “random supply of fresh disorder” was inherent in the natural development and growth of our cultures.
Disorder was an ‘invitation’ for change and as we have seen in Silicon Valley’s ethos of disruption, the power elite has increasingly used this to its advantage.
The renowned social scientist C. Wright Mills, writing in 1956, coined the term ‘Power elite’, using it as the title of his landmark examination of the organization of power in the United States and the very real dangers inherent in concentration of power in the military, corporate and political elite. He might well have included the financial elite.
If you haven’t noticed the exponential rise of the power elite and the disruption it caused, you haven’t been paying attention.
Moreover, while they often prefer to operate in the shadows, it’s hard to keep a low profile when you are flexing your political or social muscles.
As we have seen recently, despite a backlash from liberal voices seeking greater economic equality, Koch, Bezos, Musk, and Zuckerberg, to name just the most obvious, all make their voices heard in a variety of ways available only to their clique.
Why, seven decades later, do the insights of Blackmur and Mills resonate as if we were hearing them for the first time on the evening’s breaking news? Perhaps it is their universality, best expressed by the Japanese precept of “wabi-sabi”, which teaches that the greatest beauty comes from organization with a dash of disorder.
It is no surprise that OECD statistics show that the top 1% in the United States holds 42.5% of national wealth. The 1% richest in Brazil (around 1.4 million adults) have 28.3% of the country’s total income and this is rising.
Among democratic countries, Brazil has the highest concentration of income in the top 1 percent of the rankings.
It is undeniable that money buys power and power begets money in a perfect loop. What politician has the fortitude to ignore the voices and priorities of big donors who can make or break their futures?
Like swarms of mosquitos, the elite’s well-paid lobbyists suck the blood out of the legislative initiatives their paymasters don’t favor, not only while they are still being drafted but, significantly, when they are being implemented.
The much-discussed malaise of the USA’s decline as a world power, its failure to provide credible moral or political leadership in a world of growing authoritarian regimes, and the squandered opportunities to protect the environment, all contribute to the present state of chaos.
Likewise, the regular mendacious pronouncements of the Brazilian government are hardly likely to promote a sense of order. In addition, the shifting and renewed worldwide disruptions including the recent plunge in the world’s stock markets driven by the news of a new coronavirus variant creates an even more scary disorder.
Surveying the ragged landscape in this polarized age, we are forced to ask the systemic question: Just what price is society willing to pay for ‘order’? Should we be ‘ordered’ to mask or be vaccinated? Should we be told what to read or believe? Would we be better off if dictatorial order replaced democratic disorder?
Autocrats have almost always argued (or dictated) that order will only come with their firm hands on the tiller of the ship of state: avoiding the chaos of disorder is paramount.
No matter how self-serving these dicta, they have strong appeal, especially to those segments of the population for whom independent thought does not come easily and whose opinions are increasingly molded by power elite-controlled mass media.
For a large portion of society, politics has morphed into high-stakes TV entertainment rather than the business of governing. That this disrupts the distribution of honest and impartial news coverage and vital public information, is just considered collateral damage.
We need only survey the dumbing down of all popular media, spaces which the public mistakenly tends to think are in their interest, but which exist solely to make the maximum profit for their owners. The number and ‘stickiness’ of viewers determine what advertisers will pay.
Pandering to the tastes of an increasingly common denominator has been found to increase audiences and translate to a better bottom line, the ultimate measure of success in our greed-driven world.
Perhaps we can have a level of confidence that the ‘disorder’ pendulum will swing back (but not too far) towards a more orderly center and the new order of things will be better than the old.
We had better hope so.