Freedom and the Decline of Western Civilization

Is Maslow’s hierarchy even achievable in this world of fear

“From the first day to this, sheer greed was the driving spirit of civilization.” -Friedrich Engels

Going through life only getting what you need can dull the shine pretty quickly.

Sometimes you need what you want.

As far as Mazlow’s hierarchy is concerned, most folks around me have at least the first couple of levels. Maslow used the terms “physiological”, “safety”, “belonging and love”, “social needs” or “esteem”, and “self-actualization”.

Factories, in my experience, absolutely have satisfied the first two. Perhaps even a little of the third.

At what cost?

Most of the people I worked with at the factory had very little life beyond work and bars. Some had interesting lives, and families, even though they seemed to float on autopilot a lot of the time. I have looked in on a couple of the lads I worked in the factory with all those years ago.

After thirty-plus years they are still working the five days, then sitting around a fire drinking for two days. Same old, same old.

It is our ability to achieve a cohesive grasp of the first three that allows us access to the next levels.

Happy, joyous and free.

The mantra of the alcoholic in recovery. Show of hands, how many of you non-alcoholics are happy, joyous and free?

Are any of you deluding yourself?

Always, we look elsewhere for happiness, once I get to this place, once I have this job. I have met few, happy, joyous, and free people. I know many that appear to have two out of three, ain’t bad.

They all pretend to have freedom, it is however a construct. Where I live you can’t even have the simple freedom of owning your land.

Naysayers?

Just stop paying your property tax for a year then come back to me. Greed and taxation. Here’s a little story.

We all know income tax was created to help fund a war. It was kept after for whatever reasons. Property taxes on the other hand are supposed to be for the maintenance of the municipalities infrastructure and its people's needs.

In Alberta, there is a large county administered by the provincial government. How it got that way defies common sense. The ground in this county is sand or clay, harsh winters or harsh summers, nothing in between. To have homesteaded in such an inhospitable region could only have resulted from desperation or madness. Both of which are rampant in the area to this day.

The great depression,

which one you say?

Oh sorry, the dirty thirties.

Water went elsewhere, crops dried up, and rural people went broke. The villages and towns dotting the prairie landscape found their coffers dwindling. Services were cut, and people were cut. What were they thinking when they foreclosed on the farmer?

Who had money to buy a farm from the village? Who would dare profit from their neighbours’ misery?

Of course, corporations do it all the time now.

Then and there it was different. Pioneers share a bond. Without taxes, and buyers for the foreclosures, the villages and towns soon followed into bankruptcy. Thus the province took control.

The family farm as depicted by Rockwell is mostly erased from the prairie landscape today. Certainly, there are agribusiness and corporations run by families. The small freeholds of self-sufficiency which supported a population of roughly twenty-four thousand are gone now, the vast land is inhabited by less than five thousand people today.

Yes I do like to generalize, Toynbee was specific and it took ten volumes to understand his ideas of Western civilization.

Somewhere, along with learning who Arnold Toynbee was, I came to learn Western Civilization is declining two hundred times faster than any other civilization in recorded history. I wonder if it has anything to do with people talking about people and things, instead of ideas.

Ideas can be fun! A mate and I once found ourselves in the path of an election campaign. Do you follow campaigns? How many have you lived through? I tell you now, dear reader, Canada used to have the most laid-back elections in the world.

Jean Chretien was on the trail this particular election, perhaps his first election campaign for Prime Minister, more likely his second. Either way, we stood in the path of the machine. The security was polite as most Canadians are, and asked us to make a path and stand back, as mister Chretien and his team would be disembarking the bus and walking into the building.

We looked at each other with a mischievous twinkle in our eyes. We had an idea. Our overnight kit was in small duffle bags, backpacks were for camping in those days. Before we moved back three or four paces to make room we dropped our bags. Mr Chretien would walk within two feet of our unmarked duffle bags.

We waited for the security team to descend on our suspect bags, blatantly left within the blast radius of the path….

the bus arrived….

Mr. Chretien walked past.

Huh?

Vancouver was a different time and place back then. A couple of years before this anticlimactic tale, I had been in Toronto. At the time, Toronto was the great melting pot for Canada’s immigrant population. It was also a very large city, relative to the rest of Canada, with large city issues, including poverty, drugs and violence. It was safe enough, like most places, if you avoid known crime areas.

To comprehend how safe it was overall took a total blackout. No rioting, nor looting, raping or pillaging. Except for the usual of course.

It was mind-blowing to read the news the next day and the only mention of a business window getting broken was from a common bar fight. What a country!

Perhaps the decline involves the division of Western civilization into two main groups of workers. Those that work to live, and those that live to work. Factory and boardroom. What happened to the middle class in North America?

Give up?

Greed.

The corporation’s bottom line does not involve the welfare of its people. People have been reduced to assets. Wait you say, doesn’t this sound like people are chattel, barely paid slaves?

Someone once told me “job” stands for “just over broke.”

Good ole Ben couldn’t align the idea of being government property when we joined the Navy. He quit as soon as he could. I was a little slower in my understanding.

Being property on paper was too much for Ben, are any of us truly free of bondage as wage earners?

I suppose being able to quit on a whim and go home without fear of going to the brig does lend a different perspective to life.