Building Counterculture

The Game | Directions | Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3

It's been another week, cousins. There have been some more Nazi salutes from Republican stages that have been greeted by more Republican cheers and more cowardly deliberate confusion about what it was. There have been more demolitions of more load-bearing apparatuses of functional society, and more grotesque corruption conducted right out in the open with even greater impunity. There have been more broad-based firings of federal workers that somehow manage to be both discriminatory and indiscriminate, simultaneously done specifically to promote white supremacist outcomes and make diversity not only punishable but impossible, yet operationalized haphazardly and generally to create the maximum damage to the maximum number of people. And the president called himself a king, repeatedly, oh boy.

Republicans seem fine with all this, or at least they keep voting to make it happen. These are our so-called leaders. "So-called" because they aren't leading, they're punishing and threatening and demolishing, deliberately sabotaging the country in hostile takeover, and their increasingly clear purpose is to control our bodies and our lives so they can steal even more of the natural value we all generate for ourselves than they've already managed to steal. This theft of everything we own, even ourselves, is a violence that reaches its apex in slavery, which I'd argue is what they're driving us toward, at least those of us that they don't just intend to murder for being unwanted sorts of humans, like queer people and immigrants and racial or ethnic or religious minorities, or intellectuals, or people with a moral core, who refuse to go along with fascist nonsense. They're moving to outlaw bodily autonomy, to strip the right of women to vote, to end marriage equality, to cancel out the legislature and judiciary, to destroy public education and the Constitution right along with it, and they're gearing up for a thousand other crimes against humanity. The world's richest man—who kicked off the most recent popularization of sieg heils and fired up a chainsaw on stage at CPAC to celebrate his wanton destruction of millions of lives—wants to put a microchip into everyone's head and make sure anyone who wants to be able to do business have to do business with him, which is exactly the sort of thing that the creepy white supremacist religious cult that calls itself "Christian" has spent a century warning us means the end is near, but now it's clear that the end is what these religious creeps wanted to bring near all along, so I imagine they're as happy and satisfied as people whose dogma is inherently genocidal can be.

Enough of that for now.

I could go on and on for ten times as long on just the outrages of the last week, but you probably already know. Last week we faced the worst, which I think is a necessary first step in playing the game we're being forced to play. It's all well and good to do this, but if that's all we do, we'll just fall into despair and cynicism. So today we're going to imagine the best, which I believe is the necessary second step in playing the game we're all being forced to play.

Let's imagine the best.

But first, perhaps, a reminder why its necessary to do so.

Hey, have you heard the old story about how when medieval cathedrals were built, the people who started building did so knowing they'd never see it completed? It's a story that many have found inspiring; to begin something larger than a lifetime, as an inheritance to others you will never meet. Perhaps that's not the image to use, though. Perhaps your experiences of institutionalized religion mean that cathedral imagery leaves you cold.

Imagine then a great cliff; the highest anyone has ever even imagined, so high that the top is lost to the clouds and its true heights are unknown, and even that point of demarcation will take generations to attain.

Hold that picture in your mind, if you would.

Please forgive this brief interruption.

Maybe you've noticed that it's getting harder to truly know what's going on these days. Legacy media—controlled by corrupt billionaires and addicted to the false equivalency of balance rather than dedicated to the principle of truth—has failed us. I am recommending that if you have money to do so, you donate and subscribe to independent sources of information instead. This week I'm suggesting you support your nearest alt weekly. As Radley Balko says, "alt weeklies have a storied history of breaking big stories long before daily newspapers catch on (and then report and take credit for them). They’ve also been proving grounds for excellent journalists who may have not had the connections to break into the profession."

We now return you to the essay in progress.

I mentioned that we imagine the best because it allows us to play the the game we're being forced to play. That game is something I have been calling "demolishing the billionaire scam." The billionaire scam is the cumulation of all the lies my country (which is the United States in case you didn't know) was founded upon. The lies are: (1) that human society doesn't exist, so we bear no responsibility to one another as a global human family; (2) that some people matter and all others do not matter, and that those who matter have a natural right to dominate and possess and use and kill those who do not matter according to their wants and whims; (3) that, for those who do not matter, life must be earned, and creating profit for those who do matter is how it is earned, so those who fail to earn life in this way and yet remain alive are enacting a theft deserving immediate harsh punishment; and (4) that violence is a redemptive act when enacted by those who matter against those who do not, while even the notion of the idea of the possibility of future violence by those who do not matter in response to all this violence represents an unacceptable violent threat against the people who matter, a threat that demands immediate vindictive retribution.

Let me put the lies on a notecard for you.

Lie 1: We owe each other nothing.
Lie 2: Some people matter, the rest do not.
Lie 3: Life must be earned through profit.
Lie 4: Violence redeems.

When put into practice, these lies run on a systemic spiritual frame known as supremacy. There's white supremacy, and male supremacy, and christian supremacy, and there's wealth supremacy (which we call capitalism), and many other supremacies as well. And supremacy as three main outputs, which are colony and slavery and genocide.

The thing I want you to understand about colony and slavery and genocide is that, within the context of the founding myths of my country (no doubt other countries, too, but it's my country I know best), they are entirely reasonable conclusions. This may sound shocking. Indeed, it should be shocking, even though it frequently fails to shock people. However, they are logical conclusions to the billionaire scam, so much so that they should be considered inevitable and desired outputs of it.

Let's name the outputs:

Colony: This is the idea that what already belongs to others is there for the taking by those with the power to take it, and that the act of taking it is the only proof the thieves need that they own it and deserve to own it. And so supremacists and capitalists and other billionairists inevitably take for themselves things that weren't theirs and put their names on them, and credit themselves as originators and discoverers and natural owners of all the stolen wealth, and treat any hint of a thought of possibility of reparation and redistribution as a violent offense deserving immediate harsh punishment.

Slavery: This is the conclusion that the purpose of human existence is not thriving for all but profit for a few, which leads to the great billionaireist realization that cost is a major obstacle to profit, and labor is the greatest cost, and so cheap labor is good, but free labor is the best. And so billionaireists use what they have stolen to colonize not just land and resources but even the cultures and bodies of others, and use the fact that they have done so as proof that they had the right to do it.

Genocide: This is the conclusion that any mass group of humans who are not providing adequate profit or whose profit is inadequate to countervail the crime of their inconvenient existence is not only an unnecessary expense but an unjust crime against people who matter, which means those guilty of the crime must be destroyed as a redeeming act.

If you believe the billionaire lies, then you believe they are correct and true and that their frameworks and outputs are the foundation of all that is good. If a whole culture believes these lies, then colony and slavery and genocide represent the destination at which that culture will always naturally arrive, and the people enacting colony and slavery and genocide will believe themselves uniquely good—in fact, the only good people—no matter how vile they become. We've been here before; for example we're still arguing whether or not to honor the murderous cowardly traitors of the Southern Confederacy. And here we are now, again.

These are the lies and the frames and the outputs of the billionaire scam, and my country was founded on them. They are traditional, these lies, so traditional that they often pass almost unnoticed in public discourse. They are, in large part, what makes up our culture, certainly insofar as culture is defined or constrained by the ways that power is organized and operationalized. You can hear these lies in almost everything that our leaders say; sometimes hidden beneath the surface, but more often these days said right out loud, and (with increasing frequency these days) followed by the speaker placing their hand on their heart before shooting their right arm extended fully, straight out, at 45 degrees, palm flat. The gesture is an appeal to an industrialized nation in the relatively recent past that also arrived on the dark shores of the final destinations of the billionaire scam. This new gang is eager to run the same playbook, so it should be little surprise that they use the same signals. Maybe they'll even bring back the little mustache and tell us they're Chaplin fans.

This is why, if we want to demolish the billionaire scam, we need move from facing the worst about what it is (necessary because it allows us to understand why we must oppose it) to imagining the best—because, to one degree or another, we are going need to become radically different people than our culture now, and if we don't discover the world we want to create, we won't know it exists, and if we don't know it exists, we'll never arrive because we'll never start the journey. You can't get to where you need to be if you don't know what that is.

If we accept the billionaire frame, we'll always be inside the billionaire picture, even if we set ourselves in opposition. Assumptions—that only some deserve life, that life must be earned, that eliminating cost and maximizing growth and efficiency are the main purpose of humanity, that violence is a redemptive necessity—will sneak into our words and deeds. Speaking of which: The Democratic Party. They can't stop appealing to the billionaire class, and then they wonder why people don't perceive their differences from their opponents. These differences are real, but, because Democrats haven't yet left the billionaire frame, those differences are frequently undetectable by those suffering under it. Far too many Democrats still talk about finding common ground with it, as if that could ever be a good thing. And it's not just the Democrats I'm speaking of. I'm also speaking of myself—to myself. Maybe I'm speaking of you.

The billionaire scam—its foundational lies, its disgusting frameworks, its unimaginably evil outputs—it goes deep within; we were raised within it, and many of us bring it out without even realizing it. It is our foundational culture, and as such we are founded in it, too.

If we want to counter the culture, we will need to be the counterculture.

We'll need to build it. This is why I think of a cathedral, rising frame by frame, stone by stone. If cathedral imagery leaves you cold, building counterculture is also going to be a long climb, so I invite you to think of that cliff reaching into the clouds.

Let's imagine what building counterculture looks like. I have a few founding principles to suggest.

Another quick interruption to scroll quickly past before you continue the essay.

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For these principles, I'm using an x before y formulation rather than an x not y formulation. The billionaire scam, like every other scam, hides its lies behind truths. Today's fascists, like yesterday's and tomorrow's, point toward some virtue for which they have nothing but contempt in order to justify their demolition of that virtue. So we see that the current ransacking of the federal government by the world's richest man and his (allegedly) Hitler-admiring pet president—perhaps the single greatest instance of open corruption in my nation's history—is being enacted in the name of efficiency and anti-corruption. And suppression of speech is being enacted in the name of free speech, and institutional racial police brutality is enacted in the name of peace and self-defense, and the eradication of diversity from public life is being enacted in the name of racial equality, and so on.

We in the emerging counterculture aren't opposed to these virtues. We simply recognize different priorities. We don't value positive outputs like civility and order ahead of the things that create civility and order, like justice. We don't value prosperity above that which creates all prosperity, which is the generative nature of global human society when applied to sustainable practices within our natural human ecosystem, which is our planet. And so on.

These are principles that point us to where we are going, which I think ought to be a utopian vision—not because we expect to live to see utopia, or because we imagine ourselves wise enough to actually create one, but because we set our goals to the highest point we can imagine in order to climb farther than we ever could if we set our goal at some lower point. And—most of all, perhaps—because our culture has taught us to fear utopias as dangerously unrealistic and imagine dystopias as the realistic option, and we are trying to build counterculture.

Maybe we can't even imagine utopia, but if we try to imagine one and then climb toward the clouds, perhaps someday our children will manage it.

Family before Boundary

We begin by countering the most foundational of lies, which is that we bear no relationship with one another. Instead we hold fast to the great truth that every human is our neighbor, is our family, and that what affects one affects all. You may have noticed I've recently taken to calling you all "cousin." Others in the past may have said "comrade" to express human solidarity, which I like, but I like "cousin" even better, because it expresses the truly countercultural idea of a universal human family.

Likely the greatest expression of "boundary before family" can be found in our discourse around the southern border of the U.S., which is being framed by fascists very effectively as an invasion and a horde of animals, and used as a pretext to enable a state apparatus designed to monitor and track and round up human beings, before sending them to places unknown to do secret and horrible things to them. This is framed by practitioners of the billionaire scam as safety, unbelievably enough, while open borders are framed as a great existential danger.

But we are building counterculture, and we know that a world without boundaries is a world in which we have so honored our universal human connection that none have been excluded, a world in which such harmony has been established within our human family that boundaries have become unnecessary.

This doesn't mean that we don't recognize the need for appropriate boundaries, by the way. We recognize today that some mean us harm, and that those who commit violence of aggression and violence of neglect against their fellow humans are the author of all violence that follows, and that consequences and boundaries must attend such infractions. We recognize the difference between the aggressor and the aggressed-upon, the difference between the abuser and the abused, and we refuse to permit narratives in which those roles are reversed, because we know the reversal only ever empowers greater violence and abuse. We understand that those who have insisted that we are their enemies are not our friends, and we understand that anti-violence does not always mean nonviolence no matter how much we might desire a world without violence. We never treat the struggle of oppressed people to survive their oppression as a justification to deny them the solidarity we owe. We recognize the differences between lies and truth, between powerful and powerless, between what is claimed and what is done. We recognize that redemption requires reparation, so we refuse to recognize as redemptive any reconciliation void of reparation that abusive power enforces upon the abused for the sake of the abuser. And we enforce these boundaries, where necessary, however necessary, to protect our human family from those who would destroy all humanity chasing a set of billionaire lies.

We acknowledge the present need for boundaries. But it is family before boundary. Any boundaries we set, we set in respect of the humanity of our human family, even the humanity of those who through inhuman practice have refused to honor that of any other, including their own.

Plenty before Scarcity

You may have noticed there is a great belief in this world that there isn't enough to go around. It's a handy thing to get people to believe if you are somebody who would like to steal hundreds of thousands of times more than you need at the expense of everyone else, which is what a billionaire is. And so, behind the great fear of scarcity, every other inhumanity is justified, and every other injustice is inherited as we stop thinking of life as being something that belongs to every member of our human family as a natural birthright, and start to think of it as something that must be first be mediated through questions of deserved and not deserved, and must be subject to increasingly strict definitions of whether or not it has been earned—because when there isn't enough to go around, then only those who deserve it should have any at all, and once a culture has believed that only those who deserve life should have it, then one human's possession of millions of times more than they will ever need and another's possession of nothing at all will both be taken as proof of each of them deserving that.

But we are building counterculture, and we know that the scarcity mindset is a lie. We have the ability to make sure everyone is fed, everyone is clothed and sheltered, everyone has access to clean drinking water and health care and education. We can do it, and we can do it for less than we spend managing all of the problems that attend not doing it. We understand that the reason we don't do it today is because doing so would mean that those who want it all—which is what billionaires are—would have to accept less than everything, and that is, to a believer in the billionaire scam, a violent theft, the hint of the threat of the possibility of which justifies as much violence as is deemed necessary to crush the hope of it.

This doesn't mean that we don't recognize scarcity when it does occur, by the way. We understand that some resources are finite, and others are limited, and we work to build sustainable methods of production and consumption that honor that scarcity.

But it is plenty before scarcity. We put the well-being of every member of our universal human family as a priority before any boundaries or challenges we face, and so we never forget to dream of a world where every member of our human family has what they need, and none would dream of taking so much that others do not have enough—not only because it is right and good, but because these are conditions that lead to generate even more value, more plenty, more prosperity ... and, by the way, less scarcity. Hey look at that!

Justice before Convenience

I should define what is meant by justice. It means different things to different people, I know.

The billionaire scam's framework is supremacy, which holds that some people matter and others do not, and by this framework, it holds that the convenience of those whose lives matter are infinitely more important than the lives of those whose lives do not. The more that a society has believed the billionaire lies, the more that society will view justice as a state wherein those few deemed supreme are permitted to kill others for their own convenience, and the more that the inconvenience of the supreme class will be taken as grave injustice, no matter what the cost of maintaining that convenience ultimately is. It is this ability to kill and harm—whoever, whenever, however, for whatever reason—that makes up the definition of justice for fascists and other supremacists.

Examples of this view of justice are thick on the ground. Think of our fascist administration's gleeful demolition of sustainable energy, in order to demonstrate the virtue of their right to continue burning fossil fuels at maximum capacity—not despite the fact that it dooms billions, but because they believe they have the justified right to doom billions if they find it convenient, or even if it simply amuses them to watch the dismay of billions. Think of the harassment and persecution of queer people by christian supremacists, not because queer people are harming christians, but because christian supremacists simply find it more convenient to not have to acknowledge the existence of queer people, and consider this a perfectly justified reason to expel queer people from society.

But we are building counterculture, and we have a different view of justice, one that acknowledges our shared humanity and enforces boundaries to protect it against all encroachments until such a state of harmony exists that boundaries are no longer needed; one that recognizes that we live in a world of plenty in which there is enough to sustain everyone's lives, and where any true scarcities can be managed sustainably and intelligently to maintain that plenty, until the concept of scarcity becomes so unusual and rare that it is barely understood.

This doesn't mean that we refuse convenience, by the way. Convenience is great! Who doesn't like convenient things? It's important to always understand that we also value the things that fascists and white supremacists and other practitioners of the billionaire scam pretend to value; we simply value the underlying things that produce those values even more, because we know that the underlying things are what generate all the value. So it is with convenience, which the billionaire scam can generate for some for a while, but which will always be consumed when the all-consuming engine of billionairism has nothing left to consume—which, I'd argue, is what we have all seen happening in recent weeks.

So it is justice before convenience—we imagine the best, so we know what it is and we know what we're fighting to create. We imagine the best so that we keep aware that the climb before us is a long and multigenerational journey, knowing we're building a cathedral whose foundations were poured by those who came before us, knowing we'll build but never see completed. We imagine the best so we understand the direction we're heading, which frees us to recognize positive progress when it comes even though it is not the completed structure, so that we can celebrate that progress as it comes, and refuse any convenient profit that doesn't match the design—not because we hate prosperity, but because we have been captured by a vision of justice that will create far more prosperity than profit—the billionaire scam's old three-card-monte game—every will.

Perhaps your experience of organized religion means that images of cathedrals leaves you cold. I hear you. I would invite you to imagine instead a journey to the top of the very tallest mountain we can see—so high, the peak is lost to the clouds.

Before we start, cousins, let's all imagine the view.

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A.R. Moxon is the author of The Revisionaries, which is available in most of the usual places, and some of the unusual places, and the essay collection Very Fine People. You can get his books right here for example. He is also co-writer of Sugar Maple, a musical fiction podcast from Osiris Media which goes in your ears. He feels like a stranger.