Creature From Jekyll Island by G. Edward

In practice the needs of the population are always underestimated, with the result that there is a chronic shortage of half the necessities of life; but this is looked on as an advantage. It is deliberate policy to keep even the favored groups somewhere near the brink of hardship, because a general state of scarcity increases the importance of small privileges and thus magnifies the distinction between one group and another.... The social atmosphere is that of a besieged city, where the possession of a lump of horseflesh makes the difference between wealth and poverty. And at the same time the consequences of being at war, and therefore in danger, makes the handing over of all power to a small caste seem the natural, unavoidable condition of survival....

War, it will be seen, not only accomplishes the necessary destruction, but accomplishes it in a psychologically acceptable way.

In principle it would be quite simple to waste the surplus labor of the world by building temples and pyramids, by digging holes and filling them up again, or even by producing vast quantities of goods and then setting fire to them. But this would provide only the economic and not the emotional basis for a hierarchical society....

War, it will be seen, is now a purely internal affair.... waged by each ruling group against its own subjects, and the object of the war is not to make or prevent conquests of territory, but to keep the structure of society intact.1

THE FUNCTION OF WASTE IN MODERN

TOTALITARIANISM

Once again, it is clear that Orwell's grim narrative was a primary model for The Report from Iron Mountain. The authors of that blueprint for our future spoke at length about the value of planned waste as a means of preventing the masses from improving their standard of living. They wrote:

The production of weapons of mass destruction has always been associated with economic "waste." The term is pejorative, since it 1. G e o r g e O r w e l l , 1984 ( N e w Y o r k : N e w A m e r i c a n L i b r a r y / S i g n e t , 1949), pp-153-164.

A PESSIMISTIC SCENARIO

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implies a failure of function. But no human activity can properly be considered wasteful if it achieves its contextual objective....

In the case of military "waste," there is indeed a larger social utility.... In advanced modern democratic societies, the war system ...

has served as the last great safeguard against the elimination of necessary social classes. As economic productivity increases to a level further and further above that of minimum subsistence, it becomes more and more difficult for a society to maintain distribution patterns insuring the existence of "hewers of wood and drawers of water."...

The arbitrary nature of war expenditures and of other military activities make them ideally suited to control these essential class relationships.... The continuance of the war system must be assured, if for no other reason, among others, than to preserve whatever quality and degree of poverty a society requires as an incentive, as well as to maintain the stability of its internal organization of power.1

These documents from the real past and the imagined future can help us to better understand our present. The spectacle of wasteful government spending suddenly becomes logical. It is not stupidity that pays farmers to destroy their crops, or that purchases trillion-dollar weapons systems that are never deployed or in some cases not even completed, or that provides funding for studies of the sex life of the tse-tse fly, or that gives grants to pornographers posing as artists. The overriding object behind most of these boondoggles is to waste the resources of the nation. It is obvious by now that the decline in living standards in the Western world is associated with a widening gap between the haves and the

have-nots. What is not so obvious, however, is that this is according to plan. To that end, massive waste in government spending is not an unfortunate by-product, it is the goal.

That brings us back to the question of finding an acceptable substitute for war. War is not only the ultimate waste, it is also the ultimate motivation for human action. As Orwell said, waste in the absence of war "would provide only the economic and not the emotional basis for a hierarchical society." Will the environmental-pollution model be able to sufficiently motivate human action to be a substitute for war?

That is not a safe assumption. The possibility of war in our future cannot be ruled out. The environmental-pollution model is not yet thoroughly proven. It is working well for limited purposes 1. L e w i n , Report, pp. 34-35,40-41.

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THE CREATURE FROM JEKYLL ISLAND