Bilen som maktmiddel

“The car, of course, is the other connection to the outside world, but to be precise it connects the inhabitants to the inside of their car, not to the outside world per se. The outside world is only an element for moving through, as submarines move through water.” – James Howard Kunstler, “The Geography of Nowhere: The Rise and Decline of America’s Man-Made Landscape”, page 167

Det er altså ikke forbrenningsmotoren som er problemet, men bilen! Vi må begynne å gå igjen. Hvorfor har vi fått et så kaldt samfunn? I stor grad fordi vi ikke går, og slik ikke treffer på hverandre.

Elitene ønsker ikke at vi skal gå, da dette kan føre til opprør, ved at forbindelser knyttes og tanker utveksles. Nei, de vil at vi skal passere hverandre bak tykke stålpansere, i hver våre automotive bobler, som en forlengelse av den suburbane drømmen. Som ble skapt av elitene for å forhindre opprør!

“DR: From the 1920s to the 1970s an iconography was developed that turned corporations into our heroes. Instead of me buying stuff from people I know, I actually trust the Quaker Oat Man more than you. This is the result of public relations campaigns, and the development of public relations as a profession.

PN: Did the rise of PR just happen, or did they have to do that in order to prevent things from getting out of control?

DR: They had to do that in order to prevent things from getting out of control. The significant points in the development of public relations were all at crisis moments. For example, labor movements; it’s not just that labor was revolting but that people were seeing that labor was revolting. There was a need to re-fashion the stories so that people would think that labor activists were bad scary people, so that people would think they should move to the suburbs and insulate themselves from these throngs of laborers, from “the masses.” Or to return to the Quaker Oats example, people used to look at long-distance-shipped factory products with distrust. Here’s a plain brown box, it’s being shipped from far away, why am I supposed to buy this instead of something from a person I’ve known all my life? A mass media is necessary to make you distrust your neighbor and transfer your trust to an abstract entity, the corporation, and believe it will usher in a better tomorrow and all that.

It got the most crafty after WWII when all the soldiers were coming home. FDR was in cahoots with the PR people. Traumatized vets were coming back from WWII, and everyone knew these guys were freaked out and fucked up. We had enough psychology and psychiatry by then to know that these guys were badly off, they knew how to use weapons, and — this was bad! If the vets came back into the same labor movement that they left before WWII, it would have been all over. So the idea was that we should provide houses for these guys, make them feel good, and we get the creation of Levittown and other carefully planned developments designed with psychologists and social scientists. Let’s put these vets in a house, let’s celebrate the nuclear family.

PN: So home becomes a thing, rather than a series of relationships?

DR: The definition of home as people use the word now means “my house,” rather than what it had been previously, which was “where I’m from.’” My home’s New York, what’s your home?

PN: Right, my town.

DR: Where are you from? Not that “structure.” But they had to redefine home, and they used a lot of government money to do it. They created houses in neighborhoods specifically designed to isolate people from one another, and prevent men in particular from congregating and organizing — there are no social halls, no beer halls in these developments. They wanted men to be busy with their front lawns, with three fruit trees in every garden, with home fix-it-up projects; for the women, the kitchen will be in the back where they can see the kids playing in the back yard.

PN: So you don’t see the neighbors going by. No front porch.

DR: Everything’s got to be individual, this was all planned! Any man that has a mortgage to pay is not going to be a revolutionary. With that amount to pay back, he’s got a stake in the system. True, he’s on the short end of the stick of the interest economy, but in 30 years he could own his own home.” – Douglas Rushkoff, 2011

Derfor, er du en sann revolusjonær benytter du apostlenes hester!

Relatert

Ivan Illich on Cars – excerpts from Energy and Equity also collected in Toward a History of Needs (også her)

ER DET BRA Å GÅ PÅ STI?

Bilen er et undertrykkelsesmiddel av elitene for å forhindre borgerne fra å treffe på hverandre, da dette kan lede til at forbindelser knyttes og tanker utveksles, hvilket i ytterste konsekvens kan føre til revolusjon.

Enhver bilist er et underkuet menneske!