Excerpt from The Culture of Make Believe

Production Cannot Survive Creativity (p. 518)

From chapter "The View From Inside"

Our current system of production cannot survive creativity. It cannot survive life being life. It cannot survive humans being humans. It cannot survive each of us simply being who we are. In order for civilization to continue, we must each be tweaked, torn, our psyches twisted to conform to a social reality based on exploitation, or, failing that, our bodies broken, burned, hanged from trees as warnings to others who may otherwise be tempted to refuse to become one of those living dead who value property and production over life. The system cannot survive without each of us sacrificing our humanity and our lives to the goal and the god of production, wasting our lives in quiet desperation, or for those beyond the frontier—the non-White, or even those like the Irish immigrants who wished to be White even to their premature dying gasp—slaving away lives to a grave that may sometimes be a welcome rest after a time of too much toil. The system of production cannot survive if we so much as perceive the diversity that surrounds us, much less experience it, and much less if we shake off our identification with our Whiteness and identify instead with living individuals. For our system of production is, despite its awful momentum, extraordinarily fragile. All it would take to bring it to a halt is creativity, persistent creativity.

By creativity I do not mean the sort of feeble and febrile cleverness rewarded by our culture, where people beat a path to the door of someone who builds a better mouse- or mantrap—A more efficient way to convert the living to the dead—although, within our mindset, that sort of cleverness is the kind of mock creativity most often rewarded. But, instead, by creativity, I mean a remembering and realizing—making real—the full range of human possibilities in the service of creation and life. What I’m suggesting is a refusal to have one’s own particularity dulled or denied, or, rather, a refusal to hand it over in exchange for mass-produced commodities—the so-called comforts and elegancies—for which we sell our birthrights as living, feeling, empathic human beings.

Forget the rulers. The system of production could not long survive if those of us who are White—light-skinned or no—renounced our Whiteness and reclaimed our ability to perceive ourselves and others as individuals worthy of respect and consideration.

Of course, it’s not so easy. If enough of us renounce our Whiteness so that the ability of the remaining Whites to exploit us is threatened, some of us—many of us—will be killed, often spectacularly, in an attempt to terrorize the rest of us back into docility.