Must a Sense of Impotence Keep Our Masses Silenced?

In the center of China’s ancient capital, more than a million people assembled to demand increased--what? Freedom? Democracy? Liberation from the grip of an unjust and stifling bureaucracy?

In Moscow, a puzzled and overworked group of leaders strives to keep faith with the liberating command of the current sovereign that has unleashed protests and occasional violence in the Baltic states and even in Georgia, homeland of the terrifying Stalin.

Yet in America, there is only silence.

Of course, we have no heritage of ancient despotism to overthrow. The democracy we established 200 years ago still survives. Yet the foundations of American freedom are being slowly eroded and the voices of protest and resistance are quiet, not out of acquiescence but because they are stilled by a sense of impotence--the self-defeating belief that little or nothing can be done to change the downward course of events.

I find it astonishing that one can scarcely gather a group of people without finding virtually unanimous agreement that the United States is on the verge of a national deterioration.

The problems of the country are not spiritual, although they have a spiritual dimension. They consist in the decay of those material and ideological elements on which the country was founded and on which it has prospered: growing abundance, the absence of class divisions and the natural resources of a once-virgin continent.

Over the past two decades, we have presided over the relative decline of the American economy, using terms such as “deficit” and “trade imbalance” to conceal the fact that we are plucking the goose that lays the golden egg. The frequent and demagogic tirades against the prosperity of other nations in a global economy is only a mask for our own failure to modernize and restructure our own industrial capacities. The fault is not to be found in Tokyo or in Bonn but in the absence of America’s managerial efficiency, the prevalence of short-term planning, the relative and inexcusable decline in the educational skills of our workforce, the detachment of the worker from the product of his labor and the enterprise for which he toils.

Second, as the Kerner Commission predicted in the 1960s, we have moved toward two societies--one rich and one poor, one black and one white, separate and unequal. It is, of course, this presence of a society within a society that is at the root of our current distress over crime and drugs. Somehow it has been made to seem softheaded to blame poverty and hopelessness for the current epidemic of lawlessness and random violence. Nevertheless, the connection is a reality, just as the urban ghetto is the direct consequence of an erosion of that sentiment--best known as empathy--that links our feelings to the distress of our fellow human beings. But empathy is in short supply these days.

Moreover, the exclusion of many millions of Americans from the working society diminishes the productivity of the nation, eliminating large numbers from the ranks of producers and consumers, leading along the irresistible force field of economic power to the concentration of wealth in fewer and fewer hands.

Third, and inescapably hazardous to those of every group, is the destruction of the planet and its resources, the poisoning of the air and water on which we must all subsist. We unleash this poison into the fragile envelope of nature that sustains us in order to make money--or, at least, so that some can make money. The trade-off here is a simple one. We can reduce present profits in return for life, probably for many of us, and certainly for the next generation.

It has become clear that we cannot attack difficulties such as these through the present political system. The hierarchy of both parties has been thoroughly corrupted not only by the private economic bureaucracies that rule social life, but also by those who comprise them. The “political leaders” (with some honorable exceptions) have been absorbed--psychically, spiritually and in action--into the controlling centers of wealth to the point where they identify the desires of large enterprise with their own function as public servants and, of course, with the fulfillment of their personal ambitions.

If there is to be a change, a reversal of the disastrous course on which we are now set, it must come from beneath, from a public movement strong enough to move the still-malleable process of organized popular leadership. This is not a novel concept. Important social changes in America--from the anti-slavery movement of the 1850s to the forces for civil rights, women’s liberation and peace in the 1960s--have always come from beneath.

Once we understand that our sense of impotence is not a reality, but imposed upon us by those structures that benefit from the fragmentation of the one force--an aroused people--that threatens their present domination, then we can regain the confidence necessary to take us into the polling places and, if necessary (and it will be necessary) into the streets. If Mikhail S. Gorbachev and Deng Xiaoping find they cannot ignore the voices of popular discontent, surely our own, more tenuously ensconced leaders will listen and act. In fact, they will probably scurry frantically to get to the head of the parade.