Hostile environments
A hostile environment in a sexual harassment case may include “anything that creates fear, intimidates, ostracizes, psychologically or physically threatens, embarrasses, ridicules..” etc.
A number of thinkers are saying that forces like corporatism and fundamentalism are exerting increasingly suppressive effects on creative people.
Davidson Loehr [Ph.D.s in philosophy and religion; senior minister of the First Unitarian Universalist Church of Austin] says in his book America, Fascism, and God: Sermons from a Heretical Preacher: “The America that most of us loved has been cleverly and systematically murdered to feed the monetary and imperialistic hunger of some of our greediest people. The results of this death are easy to measure. The United States is 49th in the world in literacy and 28th out of 40 countries in mathematical literacy. Europe surpassed the United States in the mid-1990s as the largest producer of scientific literature.”
Loehr quotes political scientist Dr. Lawrence Britt, who identifies a list of social and political agendas common to fascist regimes, including: “Religion and government are intertwined; Corporate power is protected; Disdain for intellectuals and the arts.”
Speaking of elite power - Jennifer Abbott, a director and editor of the outstanding documentary The Corporation [site] [dvd] [source of the photo above] noted in an indieWire interview: “The corporation itself does not have morals, per se.. It has a legal imperative to put profit above everything, including the public good. The people who operate within the corporation have to follow that legal mandate, and that’s a big problem, because it’s an absurd situation to have the dominant institution of our day have to prioritize profit above the public good.”
So what do we do?
Musician Ani DiFranco - in an interview [on her site Righteous Babe Records] about her album Evolve - says, “It seems obvious to me that the personal is political. Conversely, once you understand yourself to be connected to all other living things, and the earth beneath your feet, you respond to the oppression of people and the destruction of the environment by governments by taking it personally.”
That is a start: making it personal. And learning more about the often subtle forms of political, religious and ideological tyranny that can fuel the suppression of innovation and individuality.
Morpheus: “The Matrix is a system, Neo. That system is our enemy. Most people are not ready to be unplugged. And many of them are so inured, so hopelessly dependent on the system, that they will fight to protect it.” The Matrix (1999)
Taking action against a corrosive system doesn’t have to be the high drama of the Apple 1984 commercial, or Tiananmen Square.
If you’re a shareholder, maybe you could demand a corporation develop a more active program to support arts and artists, such as the Rolex Mentor and Protege Arts Initiative.
Maybe we could help fund arts programs in schools. And support more meaningful, spiritually-evolved films like those distributed by The Spiritual Cinema Circle.
Jean Houston [author of A Passion for the Possible] cautions that we need “to move from dominance by one economic culture or group to circular investedness, sharing and partnership. It will involve putting economics back as a satellite to the soul of culture rather than having the soul of culture as satellite to economics.”
> related pages: ecopsychology … social activism
