Mushrooms

When I was in the infantry in 1957, I once asked my sergeant to explain a confusing order from headquarters. "What's going on?" I asked. He turned to me with a tired, resigned expression and said, "Infantry men are like mushrooms, son. You know how they grow mushrooms, don't you?" "No," I said. "You keep 'em in the dark and feed 'em shit," was his answer.

That is what has been done to America. We have been kept in the dark, and fed the "shit" of false patriotism. It is a rich brew, and as long as we are ignorant of its real purpose, we cannot be blamed too harshly for our addiction to it.

Our form of government, democracy, is not at fault. Democracy is, rather, the hope of civilized humans. It is capitalism that lies at the root of the problem. I know, we have been told that democracy and capitalism are inseparable; one cannot exist without the other. That is not true. If we think about the difference between them – and we are carefully taught not to do so – we think of capitalism as our economic system, and democracy as our political system. But, they are actually two separate systems of government operating simultaneously.

For this reason, I should lead off with a thumbnail sketch of the history of these two systems. I have relied heavily on the relevant volumes of The Story of Civilization by Will and Ariel Durant. There are many sources of this information, but the Durants have provided such a wealth of factual detail in their books that the reader is able to filter fact from commentary more readily than in the others.

The methods of modern capitalism were developed in seventeenth, and eighteenth, century France and England. The merchant class which developed these methods, described loosely as colonialism, was at first financed by feudal monarchies which hoped to benefit from the enterprises. But the merchants themselves were the beneficiaries and it wasn't long before they possessed more money as a group than did the Monarchs, who depended upon the less lucrative ownership of land and slaves. Soon, these rich merchants were able to buy the lands and titles of the established nobility, and to challenge the authority of the King himself. In the long run, they have largely succeeded in displacing monarchy as a form of government.

On the surface, that success looked like a long-delayed return of wealth from the feudal lords to the people, because the wealth of European kings had been extorted from the people at sword point over the previous thousand years. In fact it was simply a change of actors in the same play; the merchants became the new ruling elite. But, they lacked the justification for their new power that the established monarchies had spent thousands of years creating for themselves: That their right to rule came not just from brute strength, but rather, from God and the traditions of a mystical past. The merchants had to devise a new "justification" that would not only explain their own right to rule, but would at the same time strip monarchy of its pretended legitimacy.

How the merchants went about creating this "new Order" is an interesting story because the conflict goes on to this day. Monarchies had traditionally used a populace conditioned to defend royal power when threatened. During times of peace, monarchs claimed their power to rule came directly from God. But, during times of war or other threat, being unable to draw from this fiction, they claimed that God was using the populace as His tool to protect the monarch and therefore the country. All monarchs relied intimately on organized religion to accomplish this conditioning of the populace and rewarded it grandly for its service.

The new merchant class, knowing where the monarch's power really came from, chided the populace for their blind faith. Organized religion – represented most powerfully by the Catholic Church – knowing where its butter came from, weighed in heavily on the side of monarchy as the legitimate form of government. The merchants were on their own.

However, the merchants had recently learned that long before the Christian and Muslim age, the Greeks had developed for a short time what they had called democracy; rule by the people. This example was used to show that divine right to rule was unnecessary to good government; that, since the real power of the King came from the people, not God, the people – represented, of course, by the merchant class – ought to be able to decide who would rule them.

There were many factions in this struggle. Organized religion got left on the sidelines and now insists that, although they may have been wrong about the power of the monarch, they had been right about the power of the populace coming from God. Some of the merchants could see the wisdom of using the Church as monarchs had, resulting in so-called Christian democracies. But, most of the powerful merchants decided to base their power to rule on the "law of the jungle," or what we now call" social Darwinism," and as such a return to the first step of monarchy: "Might makes right." Philosophers and scientists were engaged to falsify and manufacture "evidence" for both sides of the debate.

And so, our modern ideas of democracy began simply as a way to justify the rule of the many by a different few.

In the meantime, the general public heard the debates between these powerful factions. They began to understand that finally their power was being recognized. Most took sides as to which elite would win, not realizing that any other choice existed. But, some began to insist that, since it was now acknowledged by all that power to rule came from the "people," it should never again be taken out of their hands by an elite group or individual among them. They saw these elitist groups as a parasite on the body public.

We all know that capitalism in the hands of the merchant class defeated monarchy in the Western world. Out of this conflict of interest has come the struggle between the "royalty" of capitalism and the "egalitarianism" of democracy. The French revolution was the first great victory of that "new royalty" over democracy; our own revolution is only now resulting in the second.

MUSHROOMS