Underminers

Getting Cross With An Author

There’s a section in this book when I am explaining how to spot someone is quite clearly not an Underminer. It’s all very well creating complex definitions and making up examples, but there is nothing like a real life version of the very essence of non-Underminedness (new word alert!) to be able to draw on. The example comes from a book that I thought was excellent until I reached the last two chapters – I don’t think that’s enough to give it away – at which point it collapses into a sort of prone submission to the system, not just acting symbolically but actively attacking the very people who are Underminers.

To say it made me cross when I first read it is an understatement. Near the end of the penultimate chapter I wrote, “No it doesn’t, fool!” in the margin, and on the next page scrawled, “Crap! No way can you get 100% reduction + a viable economy. Greenwash again.”

And so on.

It was shockingly easy to pick a three paragraph extract apart, and that’s the saddest part – the writer (actually there are two, but one of them only writes the slightly “tougher” bits) is so confident of his agenda that there is no attempt at subtlety. I wasn’t big, and I wasn’t clever: I didn’t have to be.

I don’t think the author will take to the analysis kindly, but as will become very clear when it becomes public, there’s no point being nice to people who are actively trying to keep things as bad as they are – it only encourages them.

A New Chapter

Finally, the monster chapter is finished! I’ve just done a quick tot-up and it’s 14,378 words, give or take none. This is a long chapter – far longer than I first thought it would turn out, but once I got stuck into the later Tools of Disconnection then I realised they had to be done properly or not at all.

But it’s not the number of words that matters; and for all that I think it’s ok as a piece of writing as well. The test was whether I wanted to keep writing once I had finished, and apart from a few hours drinking an extra coffee and cleaning around the house, it was onto the next chapter with a skip and a jump. It does help that for each chapter I’ve written a few notes in advance, and as the current chapter is in progress ideas start to get moved around, trasferred to different chapters and things grow organically across the scope of the book.

So, two chapters down; three more to go in the first half of the book, then the really fun stuff starts – the undermining itself :-)

Getting Into A Routine

The reason I have managed to make significant progress in the last couple of days is because of something that has sorely been lacking in my life recently: routine. With so many conflicting and time-consuming things pulling at my daily work window the one thing that has suffered most is the thing that actually takes the most time – writing this book. The typical book varies from 80,000 to 120,000 words, although an increasing number are hitting the 150,000 or even 200,000 word mark, for reasons it would be unfair for me to suggest.

But all these words take a long time to write, not in the sense of typing them into a document (I wrote up to here in about 90 seconds) but researching, composing and finally submitting to “paper”. This morning, for instance, I had to flick through 3 different books and an online PDF of another just to arrive at a quotation that provided a good summary of the point I was trying to get across. That took a good 40 minutes. That wouldn’t have been possible without a routine, which is why, as from yesterday, my new routine consisted of ignoring everything else around me from the moment the rest of my family left the house (including calls of nature!) and just getting down to the business of writing for about an hour and a half. However much I have written up to then will be how much I write on Underminers for the whole day. It’s not a huge amount of time, but it’s long enough to make significant progress over a longer period of time, and short enough to leave me wanting to write more, which is always the best state to be in the next time you start.

Of course I am still hauling my way through the Tools of Disconnection, but well into the last third. I might even finish Chapter Two by next week.

Back At Last

I said when I first started this blog that I would only post something when I had done something constructive, and so I have. Over the last month (has it really been that long?) there have been all sorts of other things I have been involved in – some on the community side, some on the activist side and some just being part of a lovely family. There hasn’t been a lot of writing, sadly.

But today I finally got back on the wagon and did a proper piece of writing. To be fair I have been pushing things around, much like a piece of fluff that refuses to be swept and gets stuck to the brush all the time, but it’s good to have a rethink, even if it does betray a little laziness. I’m still on the monumental second chapter, and have realised that one of the Tools of Disconnection that Dave Pollard thought of, sits neatly between two others; and this makes a neat (or, rather, very sinister) progression from the subtle and indirect to the obvious and direct. There are four Tools that sit outside this progression which – now I have written the new Tool (“Turn Us Against One Another”) – are the next things to address.

They are: School Us, Steal Our Time, Steal Our Language and Give Us Hope. They are all horribly difficult to compress into a few hundred words. I can but try.

Dave Pollard – A Man of Fine Words

Dave Pollard and I get on pretty well – we don’t agree on everything, for instance he is a big supporter of Transition, whereas I think the underlying concepts of Transition are sound but the execution is pants in most cases (actually, with Dave at the helm, his incarnation of Transition is highly unlikely to be pants). One of the many areas we do agree on, however, is the need for the destructive industrial system to be brought down, and having admired his work for some time – in particular his willingness to bare his soul in the most extraordinarily beautiful ways – it was a delight to receive the essay which I have included in Chapter 2 verbatim, and which he has published on his own blog.

Thank you, Dave.

Writing has been very slow in this side of the pond partly due to dealing with the weather, but also because I have been very much embroiled in a couple of projects, both of which are extremely pertinent to Underminers. The first is related to a high-profile NGO which thinks that its message is the only message; the other is akin to an organisation that has been very much in the news recently. I’m sort of making it a rule not to cross over between projects too much, so if you want to find the latter (the former is not ready yet) then you will need to go to another of my blogs. I have a feeling though, that I will have to find a few extra hours in the day to write if this takes off.

Tools Of Discombobulation

Progress is currently slow. There was a period of fairly quick writing, but being the kind of writer that I am, it is now a nit-picking process of making sure what has been written makes sense and actually gets the points across in the way I want them to. Normally a writer would hammer through the first draft and then go back to the beginning to review it: in Time’s Up! (still available from all good book stores and a few bad ones) I wrote chapter by chapter, sending each chapter to a few friends – all of whom were duly credited – for criticism. I will probably be doing to same this time, but have the extra issue of having to produce at least one more chapter for a prospective publisher before 9th December, which wouldn’t be a problem, except the chapter I’m writing is very similar to the horrific CHAPTER 13 (in caps because I remember writing it so vividly) from TI!

Actually it’s harder.

I’m having to make a convincing case for Undermining the Tools of Disconnection, and then listing each of the 15 Tools (up from 10) in such a way as to allow the reader to start formulating Undermining strategies, so by the time the Undermining chapters are underway the reader is already well placed to decide whether she is going to take part in this or that task. I have just finished the treatment for the first Tool, and as I’m always open to criticism, here it is:

Reward Us for Being Good Consumers

Description:

It is fairly easy to make civilized people happy, or at least give people the sense that they are happy; they just have to be primed in the right way. What is key to creating this malleable state of mind is making people believe from a very early age that “happiness” is something far more superficial than having a deep and genuine state of contentment and well-being. The marketing of consumer goods and services (“experiences”) tap into the desire for happiness through colourful and positive images reflecting enjoyment of whatever is being marketed; this is compounded by continual messaging through the mass media that consumption in general is a “good thing”, and the consumption of anything new and fashionable is likely to lead to improvement in our quality of life. This powerful message is easily transferred to the next generation via parents and peers who are already primed.

Identification:

At a personal level, this can be recognised through being aware of anything that makes you feel better, yet is clearly a product of the consumer culture: so, for instance, if you are watching or listening to an advertisement and begin to feel happy, regardless of the source of the advertisement then that Tool is in operation. The same can be observed on other people who are showing signs of happiness where no source beyond that which has been manufactured is evident. The popularity of shopping malls, cinemas, amusement parks and package holidays are further evidence that the genuine need for happiness has been subsumed into industrial-scale consumption: we go shopping to “feel good” now.

Consequences:

The two main consequences of “consumption happiness” are, first, that we become less inclined to seek deeper, more satisfying forms of happiness from the real world – such as the enjoyment of dipping our toes into cool water on a hot day – instead seeking out disconnected sources of “happiness” through material consumption. The second, less direct, consequence is that increased consumption through our desire to be happy, leads to environmental and social degradation, particularly where the things we consume are produced, powered from and disposed of.

Perpetrators (examples):

Consumer journalists; advertising executives; marketing professionals; salespeople; travel agents; product developers.

There’s another 14 of these to do, so any comments are most welcome before I do all of them wrong.

The Feedback Loop of Disconnection

One thing I adore about writing – maybe not so much as talking, but it’s close – is the way ideas come about simply through the creative process. Stop and think hard for a while and it’s unlikely you’ll come up with anything original; start writing about it, even something only tangentially related, and as if by magic new things seem to pop out of the ends of your fingers, or pen (actually, I reckon it would be even more apparent with a pen, pencil or brush due to its tactility).

Today was no exception: I was working on a particularly difficult concept, which is how to make the Tools of Disconnection absolutely at the centre of the book. This is difficult because the concept, rather than the Tools themselves, is so esoteric – so what if there are things that make people less inclined to connect with the real world, we all have to get on with our lives, don’t we? This afternoon I was reading a very readable paper by Raymond de Young, called “Restoring Mental Vitality in an Endangered World: Reflections on the Benefits of Walking”, and pulled out something utterly fascinating – the assertion that it is our natural connection to the real world that we need for survival that makes us vulnerable to external, and less useful influences. Because, he says, as humans we are able to focus ourselves away from the “fascination” of natural occurences, we are also vulnerable to being “hijacked” when that focus wanes. Because we live in civilized environments, for the most part, when we lose focus, unlike in survival situations when we would reconnect with – for instance – the movement of a river, or the sound of a predator, the industrial system grabs our “fascination” for its own ends.

This is perhaps an even more esoteric idea than the Tools of Disconnection, but then while trying to knit the two together I stumbled upon an idea that made perfect sense: it is not the system purposefully trying to disconnect us from the real world, but the application of a range of methods of control (i.e. the normal way that we are contained within a civilized mindset) that creates that disconnection. What then happens is that state of disconnection makes us even more vulnerable to being controlled – we become more dependent on the system, although that’s sneaking into psychoanalysis, so I thought I’d better leave that bit out. Anyway, by contrasting that with the feedbacks loops occuring in the climate system, I was able to make – I think – quite a powerful statement regarding Disconnection, and why it is so important to Undermine these Tools.

Next stop is relisting the Tools of Disconnection, now 15, including the Uber-Tool (more later) which I will get on to this week. Meanwhile I have just assembled a pile of packing boxes for a Freecycler, and really must go and have a wee…