There are various
ways to view behaviours, values, attitudes, and even what
we think we know, in order to explain why we people do what we
do. For example,
criminal behaviour has in the past been viewed from a genetic viewpoint, which implies that criminals are
born criminals, and this viewpoint has been used to justify the
total domination and control of the criminal classes (i.e.
treating the children of criminals as criminals). Currently, and particularly so
within democratic-capitalist
societies, criminal behaviour and most other behaviour is
largely
viewed from a psychological perspective, which sees that
individuals make choices about which motivations to follow, and
therefore the individual is to blame for their own criminal behaviour. And this justifies our punishment of those
individuals who have performed that crime. This psychological perspective is also favoured by most
formal religions, where individuals are ultimately rewarded or
punished in their afterlife for the way they lived their lives. In cultures
that have less formal religions, the individual's criminal behaviour is
often linked to the family and is said to cause the sickness,
death, bad luck, etc. of other family members. In this scenario,
crime is viewed from the perspective of the extended family, and the
family's identity often becomes more important than the
individual's identity, and this belief motivates the family to
keep the behaviour of other individuals within the family, responsible and honest.
In these viewpoints, the society
(including the conditions in which people live) is never regarded as the
underlying cause of criminal behaviour, and therefore there is no reason
to change the society, its laws, or the way in which things are done.
But if the laws and policies within the society are really to blame, and
we fail or refuse to accept these social problems as social problems, we
can expect to see these social problems remaining within our society. The AEM views many
continually reoccurring social problems, such
as property crimes, addiction, (long-term) unemployment, poverty,
aboriginal poverty, confidence scams, corruption, organised crime, black-markets,
and even bad leadership as social problems that stem from the
socially dysfunctional constitutions of capitalism and elitism in
general. That is, if, as the AEM claims, all forms of elitism are
invalid (and also extremely anti-social), social problems are bound to
be created by it. The AEM agrees with Emile Durkheim
(1858-1917), known as the father or sociology, who sees social
problems, such as crime and suicide as indicators of a society
that suffers from a lack of cohesion (i.e. a society in which
individuals feel alienated from or by their society). The AEM
claims that this
lack of social cohesion will always exist while their is poverty
and economic stratification in general. We also believe that the amount of social
problems within a society is directly proportion to how
socially dysfunctional a culture is.
And because our capitalist society is riddled with these
continual social problems, stress,
and insecurity, we have to conclude that our contemporary
democratic-capitalist society is extremely dysfunctional (as are
all elitist societies).
By viewing social problems
from a sociological perspective, we concern ourselves with changing our society
and laws,
and the way in which we handle social problems, so that we don't keep reproducing them. To do this is
to be taking responsibility for what problems we, as a society,
have created. And when we do truly take responsibility for our own
social problems, we know that is inappropriate and abusive to be blaming or punishing those individuals
who have become a part of these social problems.
It would be more appropriate to blame and punish ourselves for
doing this to these people. And
when we do acknowledge our social problems as social problems, and
therefore change what we do as a society, the reproduction of these
social problems stops almost immediately.
However, stopping the reproduction of
social problems does not always mean stopping social problems in there
tracks. For example, in the AEM's Egalitarian society, we claim that we
will stop the reproduction of unemployment (because the society's
Egalitarian government is responsible for employing everyone), but that
does not necessarily mean that there will be no unemployed people. It
means that nobody who is already working and nobody entering the
workforce will ever become unemployed. However, there are many wives for
example who have never worked, and who had no intention of working, and
we are not about to make them work as it is not their fault that they
have become full-time housewives and have developed their existence and
ambitions around this lifestyle (we also don't take money away from the
rich, even though the rich are much greater economic burden upon the
society than are the unemployed, but nobody talks much about that). So,
the moral of the story is that while sociological solutions to social
problems will serve to prevent many social problems from being
reproduced,
and while we try our best to make it as painless as possible for those
people involved in these social problems, the process may take up to
fifty years and more to completely rid our society of these social
problems, but we do eventually rid ourselves of these problems (unlike
our capitalist society). This is what taking
responsibility, as a society, entails: putting up with the problem we
have already created (and we have no right not to), knowing that it is
diminishing each year. We have to be satisfied that we are not redeveloping
them in each new generation.
Sociologists
often conclude that our values and beliefs, and our attitudes
towards many things are also the product of our social
environment, and they have mountains of evidence to support this
claim. Feminists and Marxists are in this category of
sociologists, and so is the AEM. When you read our 'How the Existing Culture Shapes the
Values, Beliefs, Desires, Fears, Fantasies, and Ambitions of the People,
and How this Serves to Reproduce the Culture and Its Social
Problems' web page, you
will see that the AEM agrees
with Marx in concluding that the ruling values and
beliefs of a society are deliberately shaped and nurtured by the ruling
class. The AEM goes a bit further
in also declaring that most of our fears, desires, fantasies, and
ambitions are also created within, and by the context of our
society/constitution. That this does occur creates a serious problem
because whether or not we realise it, it is our own values and
beliefs (which are the values and beliefs of the elite),
and the ambitions and fantasies that we develop by living
within a particular society (and which are also those of the
elite), serve to support the existence of our own social problems
(and poverty). In short, the AEM regards the hell that is one's culture as the
product of the society's values and beliefs, ambitions, etc. (i.e.
our social problem are our own fault), but this is something that
is denied by peasants all over the world. We tend to blame bad
men in power or greedy, ruthless people, and fail to realise that
our own values and beliefs, which are propagated and institutionalised
by most ruling classes, serve to reproduce the
problem of bad, ruthless, or greedy men in power, even after a
revolution (and even after the change to democratic-capitalism). Therefore, if we
want our world to improve, we have to start questioning what we
think we know, and our values and beliefs about our economically
stratified societies. Unfortunately, we all tend to resist giving
up our associated elitist desires and ambitions, even when we know they
are socially detrimental and invalid. But through educating the
public, values and beliefs do change through time. This is how slavery
became outlawed in many parts of the world, how women got the vote, and how child labour was
abolished. And this is how the AEM intends to defeat invalid and
unnecessary forms of institutionalised domination (i.e. the social
problem of elitism), as well as the social problems that stem from
it.
It should be mentioned however, that even though many social problems
do require changing our constitution in order to rid our society of them, many social problems don't (See the example about heroin
addiction, later).
Of course, there are obvious reasons why
our political and capitalist leaders are in denial about why such social
problems exist, and why they continue to
insist upon blaming the victims of their self-serving mismanagement of
the society (i.e. they don't want
to give up their wealth and power). And because theirs is the only
viewpoint that is continually relayed to the public (no matter which
capitalist party is in government), we the public have also come to
believe that those people involved in social problems are the ones who
we should direct our anger towards. In fact, capitalist governments have
become extremely practiced at getting the public to look that way, so that we
don't look their way, when looking for someone to blame for any social
problem. We are encouraged to think of
these people, not as victims or beneficiaries (of social mismanagement), but as individuals who made
their own poor or wrong choices in life, and who therefore have no one else to
blame but themselves, and as such it is not the responsibility of
the society to pick up the tab when solving their problems. And
convincing the public to accept this viewpoint is very easy to achieve
within a society where most of us (who have never perceived ourselves to
be a part of a particular social problem) are easily convinced that we
are not to blame for that social problem even through we supported or
accepted our constitution and the government's rulings and policies associated with that
social problem. It is also easy to stir self-righteousness,
self-interest, and vindictiveness within an economically insecure public
that abhors governments wasting taxes on those people who are part of a
social problem. And in being the self-righteous and vindictive citizens
that we were culturally conditioned by the psychological perspective to be, we seem to prefer, and even
cheer when governments instead pledge to waste vast amounts of money
(which is required forever more), in an effort to catch people and/or
deter people from becoming involved in these social problems. But the
fact of the matter is, that we as a society, who chose to support or do
nothing about our constitution and our governments' policies associated with any social
problem, must bare responsibility for making the poor choices we made in
managing our society, and which served to allow the repetition of more
of our own people making the same poor choices.
Take tobacco for
example. Currently, we have not heard a word from the government about
how successive governments (and therefore the society) have allowed the
sale of cigarettes (and continue to allow) to anybody who wants them,
for generations.
And we allowed this even though we have known for hundreds of years that
smoking is not good for your health and extremely addictive. And then,
with the government's encouragement, we turn around and blame the
existing smokers for becoming addicts because studies have shown that
their smoke is affecting our health too. And as such, we feel justified
in economically and
socially disadvantage smokers to encourage them to stop. This is not taking responsibility. It is
blaming the victims of our own social mismanagement, and even though
this strategy has proven to be a resounding failure with another 20% of
young people becoming hooked (when we could have easily and cheaply
prevented non-smokers from taking up smoking), the federal and state
governments have no intention of changing their laws and policies,
especially when they are reaping their share of the $6B+ paid by
nicotine addicts in tax each year. If the AEM was managing this
social problem over the past fifteen years, we would now have virtually
no smokers under the age of 30 years of age by now, and in another fifteen
year, no smokers under 45 years of age, and so on. And it would not
have required any increase in the price of cigarettes our ousting
smokers from various social environments. To oust smokers from anywhere
is to not be accepting what you have created, and if you have been
supporting the federal and state governments' policies over the past
fifteen years, you certainly cannot claim to be innocent in relation to
the continuing social problem of nicotine addiction and passive smoking,
when these policies have served to create yet another generation of
smokers. And this will continue as long as we as a society continue to
deny responsibility for our own poor decisions, which allow cigarettes
to be sold to anyone, and which served to reproduce this social problem.
Heroin addiction is a similar story that
clearly displays the contrast between how our democratic-capitalist
governments and the AEM Egalitarian society deals with this social
problem. So far, all of Australia's democratically elected
governments have focused their efforts on deterring smuggling,
dealing, and using heroin, thereby saying that these people
are the problem, and that there is nothing wrong with our society,
or the way in which we deal with the heroin problem. As such,
-
new heroin addicts continue
to be created each day by existing addicts trying to pay for
their habit,
-
black-markets and organised crime associated with heroin continue,
-
drug-money continues to be used
by terrorists and dictators to buy weapons,
-
property crimes that are required to support heroin addicts'
$2000 per week habits continue,
-
deaths by overdosing
continue,
-
families of heroin addicts
continue to be devastated and stressed,
- heroin addicts are not supported by
the society and are often regarded as criminals,
-
heroin addicts continue
to become prostitutes to fund their habit,
-
the transmission of
disease, such as AIDS continue to spread via dirty needles,
and these disease are then further transmitted through sexual
intercourse,
- our country
looses billions of dollars to the heroin market each year, and
then we waste another fortune on the law enforcement of heroin
crimes,
- heroin continues to remain freely available
on the streets.
In this strategy,
our children and grandchildren still hold a good chance of
becoming heroin addicts. In fact, we can say that this policy
is definitely, and very suspiciously, keeping heroin addiction
alive and well. And after years of failure to beat heroin
addiction by this method (in fact, heroin addiction is
increasing), governments, in their determination to not be
beaten by the criminal element (or so they say), only strengthen
their resolve and keep going in the same direction, only harder
(e.g. zero tolerance).
Now consider how
the AEM will handle heroin addiction by viewing it as both the
medical problem and the social problem that it is. First, the
AEM recognises that substance addiction is a sickness, and that
trying to deter people from being an addict is to display one's
ignorance or denial about what an addiction is (This is
particularly evident when we are discussing nicotine addiction.
The majority of people [i.e. non-smokers], with
the encouragement of the government, insist on treating the
smoker as being defiant, bad mannered, ignorant, in denial,
irresponsible to other people, weak-willed, or anything other than an
addict). An addiction means that people know that the substance
is costing them a fortune, killing them, costing them friendships and
relationships, etc. and yet they still cannot stop consuming the
substance. This is what an addiction means, and every addict
is a product of what our society allows people to become
addicted to (even though we wrongly declare we are helpless in being
able to prevent it). As such, the AEM treats heroin addiction
(and any addiction) as a
sickness (i.e. a medical condition), which entails providing heroin
addicts with a prescription for heroin or heroin substitutes.
The heroin addict still pays for their heroin, but it will be
easily affordable because it is
not going through a black-market. As you can
see, the heroin addict is not being punished for being an
addict, other than by having to pay a greatly reduced cost for
the substance. Nor are we attempting to catch and
punish the people who are in the heroin trade. By handling
heroin addiction in this appropriate way,
-
we immediately and effortlessly
stop the existence of black-markets associated with heroin
because all heroin addicts can buy heroin much cheaper from
the state,
-
their is no incentive to sell heroin in order to finance one's
own habit.
-
we stop the need
for
heroin addicts to commit property crimes to pay for their
habits, thus property crime and the costs associated with
law enforcement decrease considerably.
- we stop the need for addicts to become
prostitutes,
-
we prevent those who
have managed to give up heroin from restarting their addiction,
- we save the country billions of
dollars that are gobbled up by the drug trade annually,
- the medical bill associated with heroin
addiction shrinks each year until it's gone completely.
- anybody who is
not a heroin addict when the AEM takes government, including
our children and grandchildren, will never become heroin
addicts.
- the state has
access to all existing addicts, and it is therefore well
placed to provide counseling and advice on new treatments and
heroin substitutes, safety procedures, and clean needles.
- the stress experienced by addicts and
their families is immediately removed,
- the stress on the society is also
immediately removed,
- our existing heroin addicts
become productive members of the society again (rather than
spending all their spare time partaking in the property crime
that is necessary to fund their habit).
As mentioned, the
way in which the AEM handles heroin addiction doesn't require
changing to a new constitution (although in the AEM's Egalitarian
society, because everybody can only buy and sell through the
state, and because there are consumer cards instead of cash,
nobody is able to sell heroin even if they wanted to. See our 'Our
Three Strategies' web page for a discussion about
this).
However, within the
democratic-capitalist society, the laws and policies relating to
heroin addiction that are in place now are unlikely to change much for a
number of reasons. First, to start managing heroin addiction properly,
governments would first have to admit that they weren't handling it
properly in the first place. As you know, admitting that one (or one's
political party) was wrong, mistaken, abusive, ignorant, negligent,
incompetent, or self-interested is not what politicians do if
they hope to be re-elected. As far as democratically elected governments
and politicians are concerned, it is much safer to be a ruthless coward
and to shamelessly blame the victims of one's own mismanagement of the
society with as much gusto as possible, rather than to admit anything
and
risk baring the costs associated compensating our victimized victims.
Further, because the opposition party enforced similar laws and policies
when it was in government, it's members are now unable to object to the
current government's laws and policies, lest they be declared
hypocrites, and you know how politically damaging it is to be seen as a
hypocrite. So, like always, the message to the public message is to 'keep looking that way', and then you
won't look this way (at the government or ourselves) when looking for
someone to blame, and sadly, most of us do. And this is even easier to
achieve within a democratic society because heroin addicts represent a
small minority group within the greater society. As such, most of us
don't really care about heroin addicts, one way or another. It's not a
part of our lives. And because democratic-capitalist governments don't
usually do anything unless there is strong public support for change,
heroin addicts are a politically powerless social group, who have no choice but to
bare whatever hardships the government (and therefore the society) decides to dish out.
Second, the social problem of elitism, which is
supported by the capitalist aspect of our constitution, is based
upon a psychological perspective (as opposed to the AEM's
sociological perspective), which serves to rationalise or
justify why certain people deserve to be more or less
economically
rewarded than others. As such, the psychological perspective in
general, is defended wherever it is threatened, including in the way
social problems are perceived and dealt with. Likewise, those who have succeeded
in installing and maintaining the democratic-capitalist constitution
perceive the need to publicly denounce the sociological viewpoint in
general because it negates their elite status, and so they do, and
have done so for thousands of years. And as you know, repeated
advertising (and denouncing) works even when no facts are
proffered (e.g. coke is the real thing), and through this
process most
of us have been conditioned to believe in our dysfunctional
constitution and to accept the completely unacceptable, and many
of us actually become motivated to verbally abuse our addicts, our
homeless, our unemployed, etc.
Let us know if you have any questions relating to how
the AEM intends to deal with any other social problems.
