Fuck you!
That was the essence of punk in some circles, honestly. To be egregious, offensive, and downright startling. To defy anybody who would try to exert control over others. Be it the tats, the hair, the piercings, or the style, punk emerged in the 1970s in both North America and the UK as a resistance to the status quo at the time, the samey WASP bullshit of the 1950s in which the nuclear family and the normative was touted as the only way to live. Didn’t matter if you were a POC, queer, or an alternative lifestyle, you were usually ostracized and othered.
Myself?
I no longer have the close-cropped mohawk that I sported as a younger man in my late teens, but that doesn’t mean I don’t still hold the values of punk near and dear to my heart, especially when it comes to power.
See, growing up in a small town, you can see microcosms of power and control laid out all around you – both as reflections of the greater society we existed within, but also in smaller echoes of what life was dictated to be. All around me were the false narratives multiplying of an imaginary middle class, whittling away already even in my 1990s childhood, combined with ever greater corporate and oligarchical control of the state and peoples living within it.
Now? It’s twenty years later. Fifty years past the dawn of the punk age. (And as far as I know – Glen Danzig is still an asshole.)
We’re also as of my writing this coming hot off the tail end of the newly implemented Canadian federal holiday aimed at Truth and Reconciliation, one in which our Prime Minister Justin Trudeau decided to take a vacation to Tofino and ignore all the invitations from various first nations to attend their Truth and Reconciliation events.
There’s no greater anecdote for how power and control function within our colonial societies.
Rich and powerful white businessmen are still being jackoffs.
For me – even after I continue my career shift through my book-launch next summer, I’m still going to consider myself an educator, and that denotes a responsibility to bring these sorts of issues to light. To teach. That includes educating on power, privilege, and control.
See, with my various mentees of all ages, I usually start by standing at the front of the room and beginning the lesson by announcing with entirely false bravado that I am the most powerful person in the room, as usually I am.
Several years back, as part of my social justice prep for my various classes, I built a privilege checklist, a very simple form that can give you a score based on the power you hold in Eurocentric North American societies. Take a moment and fill it out yourself!
For the record, my score is somewhere around the mid-twenties.
In a classroom context, I often outscore the majority of the room, and provide a bit of a wakeup call for the majority of my mentees. They’re unused to having power waved in their face like a flag, as so often in our society, these sorts of powers and privileges are a hidden construct of our society, distorting and warping people’s lives and the societies we live in without the majority of people understanding how they might be more or less advantaged than those around them.
Of course, part of the problem is that our society is built upon these sorts of things.
In my experience, I often make the self-depreciating joke that I’m just some dumb disabled logger kid. It’s a joke I tell largely for my own amusement, as it throws people off to hear such labels being used so flagrantly.
Does it encapsulate the entirety of my extremely deep identity, with my plethora of lived experience in situations and environments most people can’t even dream of?
Hell no!
But as I often say – people are stupid. They usually need context, even if it’s a joke. Hannah Gadsby has a great bit about self-deprecating humor, so I won’t segway too hard here, but it’s interesting to know that even despite my tougher upbringing and mental disabilities, this framing makes sense for a lot of people. Even if they don’t have the context, they can still vaguely grasp my experience because they understand these power structures even if they don’t have the full picture or story.
A lot of my worldview is framed from this sort of thing – living in defiance of what is expected. That’s because it’s the only way to threaten these power structures.
Punk fights these structures, and revels in doing the unexpected, and I’d be lying if I didn’t admire the local first nations cultural tendency to use humor and “taking the piss” (as the British say) to educate and enlighten.
In my local context, we had what was called the “Old Boys Club.” It consisted of the wealthy white businessmen who largely stayed home from WW2 and profiteered off the war effort. And that wealth then stayed close to home and trickled down to their descendants. My family profited too from this baroning of stolen land, although it never quite reached the last two or three generations leading up to me.
Land and money is the biggest sort of power one can have in our modern oligarchical corporate-driven world. Ayn Rand types will wax on like idiots about how free markets are the only true freedom, and how anybody can achieve wealth and power from hard work and clever business decisions. They often do so completely ignoring the corruption of free markets and the classic Keynes vs Hayek debate.
Not only have they been proven wrong, as the hilariously shitty “trickle-Down” neo-liberal Reaganomics of the 1980s played out, but these same sorts of people are usually the first ones to dip their toes into the pool of what the rest of us know as corruption to ensure they stay at the top.
I’ll be the first to admit that while I would love a true meritocracy in the world, the petty tyrants of our era are incredibly quick to abuse power structures and fuck with free market capitalism to ensure they never get toppled, regardless of how nepotistic, plutocratic, or corrupt they become.
Meritocracy simply doesn’t exist. It’s a myth. And that fucking breaks my heart.
If it wasn’t, I would already be a billionaire, as I’m a savant, no?
In the local context, self-enrichment usually came at the cost of either the workers or the private subcontractors who would bleed money while the Old Boys Club made off with millions. They’ll leverage capital to make money while taking on very little to no risk. And they played dirty like this for the majority of my life. I can dig up dozens of similar stories about contractors and small businesses getting stiffed on invoices, cascading defaults of owed debts that fucked dozens of companies, and just general shittiness that ended up fucking somebody over at the profiteering gains of others.
Be it getting buddies into office to grease the wheels of their friends, straight up lying, or sleazy backroom deals, it perpetuated to the detriment of the community and greater society.
Nice guys finish last, remember? That’s how the old idiom goes for a reason. And the guys who played fair increasingly got fucked over, my own family included. Unfortunately that had ripple-effects, meaning other people got fucked over too when we couldn’t pay bills or had to downsize against one’s will.
In the greater north american society, we can see how this perpetuates itself into vast monopolies like those of Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos. These men are literal scum, using the talents, intelligence, and hard work of others to create vast monopolies over entire market sectors. All while pretending they pulled themselves up by their own bootstraps. (Elon Musk literally comes from pre-apartheid South African emerald-mines, look it up.)
If you don’t believe me, look at how many industries Amazon has tried to consume or monopolize in just the past fifteen years! They went from books, to online consumerism, to music, to entertainment, and now are dabbling in luxury space travel masqueraded as humanism.
It’s actually fucking insane. Both the anarchists of the 1890s and the punks of the 1970s would have a fit! Molotov cocktails would be flying in a handful of heartbeats at these injustices.
And meanwhile, society is groomed to accept it. If you look at the majority of media outlets in the present day – most have already been eaten up by bigger players. Everything from local radio, to TV, to main-stream media have been bought out by bigger players like Post Media or subsidiaries of these whale-corporations in the Fortune-500.
So obviously, the power and control centralizes even further, and it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. The masses then become more and more apathetic as things seem more and more inevitable.
So, it’s all gloom and doom, right?
Well, not if people like me have anything to say about it.
There are a couple of alternatives to the enormously corrupt capitalist system we find ourselves in. Some are simply too hard to realize – that concept of meritocracy I mentioned above for example. The system is great at hiding it’s flaws, and then paying the media to normalize things so that they don’t fit the criteria. That includes talent and proliferation of talent.
As a writer, I’m encountering it right now. If you have money, you can simply pay your way to the top, even if your work is mediocre or shit.
Does that mean that every famous celebrity is a hack?
No, but you can be damn sure that the system is weighted against talent in favor of profit-margin and what’ll sell the best, even if that media isn’t the top of the talent pool. My example is dealing with the publishing industry, in which no publisher will take risks anymore on work that won’t be guaranteed-sells.
It also serves to dilute actual narratives in individual fields – celebrities raise money for charity, often in concert with big business or corporate support. Feel-good stories often have sleazier ulterior motives that relate to a contract signed in the background. They’re not making money from the art, they’re making money from what they sell in tandem with the art, such as a platform, a product, or an idea.
In my local context, this usually manifests in ideas that are shitty that get touted as incredible. (See my very first Pickup truck Diaries articles on gentrification if you want to see how housing is abused this way – more housing is sold as “crucially necessary”, when in reality, developers are lining their pockets off this false goodwill of “providing homes that are crucially needed.”)
Oftentimes, it’s marketed as an issue of supply and demand. For example: “We need more housing to bring the cost of housing down!” In the case of housing. But the only people capable of affording these new builds are folks who already have the capital, and usually use the housing to speculate or profiteer via high rents because the owner is earning home equity, not the renters. You can look at all the research over the past 50 years proving this, but it’s a deep dive, as a fair warning!
So if meritocracy won’t work, what else is there?
Well, all the edgy teenagers will scream: “COMMUNISM!” at you at the top of their longs, not having studied Soviet history or having read books like “The Soviet Experiment.”
I’ve specialized in Russian history due to my own Ukrainian roots, and I can tell you that corruption and authoritarianism can breed in communist systems just as easily as capitalist ones. There’s a reason the USSR collapsed and fell into the oligarchical mess of the 1990s and the later thinly veiled authoritarianism of modern Putin.
Anarchists like the punks of the 1970s will tell you that smashing the system and allowing people to live freely would be the answer, but often you end up with the same sorts of “Old Boys Clubs” as my hometown that are mere microcosms of the bigger hierarchies.
Myself? I’m an ecosocialist. Which I say with an enormous grain of salt on my tongue. If we want to stop our ship sailing full steam ahead towards the extinction of humanity, we have to live as sustainably as possible, which capitalism despises, as exploiting market niches is entirely how capitalism works.
Capitalism works like this: Gain resources, (usually via theft of native peoples – see European imperialism), fill a market need a la supply and demand, and damn everything else in the process. Greenwashing has become incredibly popular for that exact reason, to mitigate the truths of capitalism and the market. If you use mainstream media to trick people into thinking that they’re responsible for it all as consumers rather than those supplying the consumers and doing the majority of the shitty actions being at fault, you can allow a garbage system to perpetuate itself.
See, the biggest issue regarding power and control is that those who remain in power refuse to acknowledge that giving up their power is part of the solution, and forcing people to play within the corrupt capitalist system is how they give themselves a handicap.
It’s that problem of meritocracy again – placing the blame on others for not working hard enough rather than giving them the means to actually affect change and uplifting them to have the power to fix shit themselves. You force them to eat from your hand.
How many fucking boomers have blamed Millennials and Generation Z for their own misfortune in this way?
“Oh, you can’t afford a home because you buy too much avocado toast and Starbucks!”
These same boomers barely understand, or purposely and willfully misunderstand how inflation works and how stagnant wages over the past 40 years have created a new sort of classism based on age. The same 70,000 dollar a year salary in the 1970s that could pay off a home in a year is worth mere pennies to the modern day worker. Even those making six figures a year are barely capable of the same buying power.
So, where do we go from here?
What system will get us out of this fucking mess, rampant as it is with racism, classism, sexism, and glass ceilings that artificially imprison the populace in the system itself?
Well, to be honest – Even my ideal of Ecosocialism is somewhat utopian, as it expects that people will play fair and in good faith in order to fix the problems prevalent in the system. But we know from psychology that not only are humans a tribalist mess of selfish loyalties, we also know that everybody will cheat just a little bit whenever they can.
Corruption and self-benefit is inherent to the human condition insofar as people don’t understand what they’re truly impacting when they move towards their own benefit.
So of course, my answer is the same one it always is:
Education.
The more people know, the more inclined they’ll be to actually act in a long-term interest rather than a short-term one. Because humans are as short-sighted as they are greedy. And we’re at a point in human history where you need to be able to see multiple lifetimes of all humanity like I can, not merely be stuck in thinking about what you’re leaving your own kids. (That tribalism again!)
But if people know exactly what their decisions and the effects/affects are, they’re more likely to act in good conscience if they can accurately weigh the benefits against the detriments.
Of course, we have less than a decade left on our climate deadline before the greenhouse effect is unstoppable, so my own personal plan is to play the game as hard and as fiercely as I can.
If you know your opponents are guys like Ken Griffin, Jeff Bezos, and Elon Musk – full on fucking sociopaths that care more about their own benefit and ego than the continuation of humanity, deluding themselves into thinking that private luxury space travel is the solution, well…
I have to channel my inner punk, and flip them the bird.
I also have to play within capitalism, and build an empire separate from the mainstream capitalist society, in which education and independence of the corporations or entities I build is a primary focus.
I like the idea of community corporations that follow mandates of giving back percentages of profits to the communities they participate in, and mitigate the effects of capitalism as much as possible.
Of course, that’s all also the root of my Supervillain bit – that I’m going to be so revolutionary as possible to shock the world. That I’m not going to act within the standard means and methods that capitalism has employed up to this point.
Because only a madman would try to build an empire in such a fashion, right?
But alas… I’m not going to reveal the entirety of my plans for when I do have world-changing capital. That’d be no fun, right? Gotta keep a surprise for those reading my work this early into my career change.
In the meantime, I’ll ask that you channel your inner punk in the meantime. Don’t be afraid to look at those in positions of power, preferably in person, in the eye, and then you tell them to go fuck themselves!
The more we feel cowed into the rudimentary rules of “politesse,” the more we will perpetuate toxic systems and lock ourselves into an inevitable demise. Not just as individuals, but as an entire species. And I’m not ready to go out without throwing some haymakers first.
We need to rethink power and control for the new millennium, and academics and researchers have known this for half a century now, to no avail.
As individuals, how can we share our power and control with everyone, and enable those who could help fix things?
Vacationing in Tofino instead of honouring dead children is definitely the opposite of what we should be doing.
But I’ll let you decide for your own lives how you can share your power and control, especially if you’re a big educated white guy like me.
To finish off, I have to ask myself… For every haymaker I could throw, or systemic benefit I could exploit for my own gain, how could I uplift others with my power, instead?
That’s the real question, here. One you should be asking yourself, too.
Now…
Let’s get the fuck out of here.
-McRae
