Industry government
In the social sciences, the term government refers to the particular group of people which is the administrative bureaucracy of a society at a given time. States are served by a continuous succession of different governments. Each successive government is composed of a specialized and privileged body of individuals, who monopolize political decision-making, and are separated by status and organization from the population as a whole. Their function is to enforce existing laws, legislate new ones, and arbitrate conflicts via their monopoly on violence. In some societies, this group is often a self-perpetuating or hereditary class. In other societies, such as democracies, the political roles remain, but there is frequent turnover of the people actually filling the positions.
In most Western societies, there is a clear distinction between a government and the state. Public disapproval of a particular government (expressed, for example, by not re-electing an incumbent) does not necessarily represent disapproval of the state itself (i.e. of the particular framework of government). However, in some totalitarian regimes, there is not a clear distinction between the regime and the state. In fact, leaders in such regimes often attempt to deliberately blur the lines between the two, in order to conflate their own selfish interests with those of the polity.
The 14th century Arab scholar Ibn Khaldun defined the government as "an institution which prevents injustice other than such as it commits itself". The British philosopher-anthropologist Ernest Gellner considered Ibn Khaldun's definition to be the best in the history of political theory. For Ibn Khaldun, government should be restrained to a minimum for as a necessary evil, it is the constraint of men by other men.
Industry refers to the production of an economic good ,either material or a service, within an economy. There are four key industrial economic sectors: the primary sector, largely raw material extraction industries such as mining and farming; the secondary sector, involving refining, construction, and manufacturing; the tertiary sector, which deals with services (such as law and medicine) and distribution of manufactured goods; and the quaternary sector, a relatively new type of knowledge industry focusing on technological research, design and development such as computer programming, and biochemistry. A fifth, quinary, sector has been proposed encompassing nonprofit activities. The economy is also broadly separated into public sector and private sector, with industry generally categorized as private. Industries are also any business or manufacturing. Industries can be classified on the basis of raw materials,size and ownership.
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GEORGE ORWELL, ME AND GOVERNMENT
The famous writer George Orwell had "a horror of politics…. I am definitely “left,” but I believe that a writer can only remain honest if he keeps free of party labels. During the Depression in the 1930s he developed a broad nonpartisan commitment to “socialism." My politics is also non-partisan. From the very start, literature was always Orwell’s first concern. This was not true of me. The social sciences were my first concern but not until I got to university in 1963 at the age of 20. Orwell wrote that "since early childhood I always knew I wanted to write.” This statement is repeated in various forms, all through the years, till the end. My desire to write was a slowly evolving process from the 1960s through the 1990s. It took both Orwell and I a long time and incredibly hard work to discover what to write and how to write it. His first literary attempt was a long poem, eventually discarded. My first literary efforts were essays in high school and university and they were virtually all discarded. According to Irving Howe(1920-1993, American literary and social critic, Orwell was "the best English essayist since Willaim Hazlitt, and perhaps since Dr Johnson.
Writing novels became Orwell's dominant passion--and an accursed ordeal--"writing a novel is agony.” He finally concluded, some would say accurately, “I am not a real novelist.” And yet shortly before he died he was still excitedly announcing to his friend and publisher Fredric Warburg, “I have a stunning idea for a very short novel." My dominant literary passion did not really crystallize until I did not have to attend to jobs and endless meetings, to socializing and community responsibilities, in other words until I retired and took a sea-change. From 1999 onwards I wrote essays and poetry, letters and journals, an immense variety of internet posts.
MASS MEDIA
Mass media refers collectively to all media technologies, including the internet, television, newspapers, and radio, which are used for mass communications, and to the organizations which control these technologies. Since the 1950s, in the countries that have reached a high level of industrialization, the mass media of cinema, radio and TV have a key role in political power, in both government and industry. Mass media play a significant role in shaping public perceptions on a variety of important issues, both through the information that is dispensed through them, and through the interpretations they place upon this information. They also play a large role in shaping modern culture, by selecting and portraying a particular set of beliefs, values, and traditions, an entire way of life, as reality. That is, by portraying a certain interpretation of reality, they shape reality to be more in line with that interpretation. Contemporary research demonstrates an increasing level of concentration of media ownership, with many media industries are already highly concentrated and dominated by a very small number of firms.
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I found the following quotation in Victor J. Vitanza's article: “Abandoned to Writing: Notes Toward Several Provocations,” Enculturation, Vol.5, No.1, 2003. It was of special interest to me as a writer who attempts to write about the media, industry and government among many other subjects.
"Maurice Blanchot(1907-2003), French writer, philosopher, and literary theorist, wrote that 'to have a system, this is what is fatal for the mind; not to have one, this too is fatal. Whence the necessity to observe, while abandoning, the two requirements at once'......What Karl Schlegel (1772-1834), German poet, critic and scholar, said of philosophy is true for writing: you can only become a writer, you can never be one; no sooner are you a writer than you are no longer a writer."
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SLOUGH OF DESPOND
As I was retiring from full-time teaching and settling into George Town Tasmania in 1999, Boris Yeltsin(1931-2007) sent Russian troops into Kosovo and the then breakaway region of Chechnya in Russia. Yeltsin had been instrumental in engineering the final collapse of the Soviet Union and state communism in the late 1980s and early 1990s. The story of government and industry in these years is complex, too complex to deal with here. In August 1991 Yeltsin rallied his country against an attempt at a coup. This coup had been aimed at reestablishing state communism. His was one of the key political pushes in Russia to establish democracy in that country. He had made what some called "a stunning debut" as the Russian President. He possessed a confessional edge no previous President had possessed. This was reflected in his memoir which appeared in 1994 and it was entitled The Struggle For Russia. I had just begun to work on the second edition of my own memoir in 1994 which was becoming increasingly confessional as the editions appeared in my computer. Perhaps this was one reason I took an interest in his memoir.
In my last years as a teacher, 1991 to 1999, and in Yelstin’s years as President in those same years of 1991 to 1999, he presided over a chaotic Russia, over his own chaotic behaviour, his own depressions, his alcohol problem and the 75th anniversary of Lenin’s death(1924-1999). In 1991 Yeltsin declared the Soviet Union extinct; in 1993 he banned the Russian parliament and the Communist Party. During all of this time the Arc Project of the Baha’i community proceeded apace in Haifa Israel on Mt. Carmel. -Ron Price with thanks to “FoxNews.Com Home>World and Associated Press,” 23 April 2007.
That 4 year plan(1) was ending when
you resigned back in ’99, Boris, and
we were developing our resources
during a new paradigm and culture
80 years after the writing of those
Tablets during the Great War.(2)
The unfolding magnificence of the
Terraces was capturing attention as
a galvanic coherence was beginning
at last in expansion, consolidation,
in vision and activity, unbeknownst
in previous years & little understood.
It was a festive moment in those years
with their chronology of expectations
ending with the completion of that Arc.
I’m sorry you missed it all, dear Boris,
as tangled fears seized helpless millions
and your time was ending in that slough
of despond, phantoms of those wrongly
informed imaginations & those troubled
forecasts of doom which seem to have
been around all my life and yours, Boris.
(1) 1996-2000. A new Baha'i paradigm began in 1996, 80 years after the first words in the Tablets of the Divine Plan were written.
(2) Tablets of the Divine Plan unveiled in New York in 1919.
Ron Price 28 April 2007
.....in celebration of the 9th Day of Ridván BE 164.
The following two prose-poems deal with conflict in various ways. When governments can not sort out the problems in their countries by means of politics, violence and war often follow.
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A Prose-Poem in Memory of Jameson Bond
WAR
On 5 June 1967 Israel attacked Egypt in what was later dubbed “The Six-Day War.” When a country can not resolve conflict through politics and government war is often the result. The industry that is brought into play is the military-industrial complex. For an excellent overview of this aspect of government and industry go to: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military-industrial_complex At the time, I was 22 and had just graduated from Windsor Teachers’ College with a qualification to teach in primary schools; I had also just started working at a summer job with the Motor Vehicle License Branch of the Department of Transport of Ontario in Brantford Canada. The other major event of my life in May 1967, in the month leading up to that “Six-Day War,” was my taking a train from Brantford to Toronto on Friday evenings after work and spending the weekends with the woman who had agreed, three months before, to be my wife, Judy Gower of Scarborough where Judy lived with her parents.
Six weeks after that “Six-Day War” I would be twenty-three; in ten weeks I would be married to Judy Gower; in eleven I would be living in Iqaluit on Baffin Island in Canada’s Northwest Territory as a homefront pioneer for the Canadian Baha’i community and in twenty weeks the “long-to-be-sustained campaign” of worldwide proclamation by the international Baha’i community on the world-wide stage “of the healing message that the Promised One has come” was launched.(1)
On 5 June 1968, exactly one year after that “Six-Day War” and after teaching grade three for nine months(9/67-5/68) among the Inuit in Iqaluit NWT, I had just begun my own undubbed “Six-Month War.” On 1 June 1968 I entered the first of a series of four psychiatric units and large psychiatric hospitals. This prose-poem explores the notion of the war-metaphor applied to my own life in these early years of my pioneering experience in that first Plan of the Universal House of Justice, 1964-1973. (2) --Ron Price with appreciation to (1)The Universal House of Justice, Wellspring of Guidance, Wilmette, 1969, p.109 and (2) Ron Price, Pioneering Over Four Epochs: Unpublished Memoirs, 5 June 2007.
Mine was no decisive, quick and elegant victory,1
chewed up by nine months of a teaching novitiate
and by a body chemistry that had been chewing me
up for years. No armoured infantry, no brigades, tanks,
artillery, no operational changes in plans---just a stay at
your post until you drop, mate........Well....... I dropped.
I got myself into a hospital and, after six months,
was redeployed in another region for a counter-attack
against other forces mobilized in the south of the country
near my home where, with some reservists we flushed-out
a dozen or so new believers when the defensive infrastructure
was extremely poor against the effectiveness of that Eastern
Proc Team as it was called, at the time, and the two highly
specialized, local and experienced regiments.2
I had been trained extensively by one, Jameson Bond,
for rapid refitting of my spirit so that I could return from
sorties three or four times a day. But after many months
of attack-waves my body cracked and I went beyond my
use-by-date in that frozen Arctic littoral, a place to which
I did not return in the last forty years nor will I ever again.
Our forces in that Eastern District, largely in the persons
of Jameson and Gale Bond, had advanced slowly for years,
long before I arrived in ’67 with the call of the Kingdom,
part of a quite precise, coordinated plan of combined forces
over the entire Canadian Arctic. Breakthroughs had begun
to occur3 just as I had to leave that combat zone but, after six
months, engaged as I was in a war of recuperative-healing,
I entered another two zones for shock troops, zones which
kept me busy for the next three years in Prince Edward County,
Ontario and in Whyalla, South Australia and---little did I know
then what I know now that the battle for heavenly treasures4 at
what He called the threshold of oneness would require many
degrees of engagement and disengagement that always seemed
quite beyond my capacity to achieve---such was and is my battle
and, yes, it was and is our only real battle or war everyday.5
1 General Haim Bar Lev’s view when the 1967 crisis that precipitated the Six-Day War broke out. General Lev pressed the Israeli government to start the war as soon as possible.(Wikipedia, “Six-Day War,” p.11)
2 A teaching team in Ontario known as ‘The Eastern Proclamation Team,’ part of a national program organized and implemented by the then Eastern/Ontario Branch of the National Teaching Committee of the National Spiritual Assembly of the Baha’is of Canada, posters in shop-windows, the two local Bahá’ís, a rented room on the main street of Picton Ontario and-Bob’s Your Uncle....a dozen youth joined the Cause.
3 The first Inuit in the District of Franklin to become a Bahá’í was Josephee Teemotee on 29 May 1968.
4 ‘Abdu’l-Baha, Tablets of the Divine Plan, Wilmette, 1977(1928), p.87.
5 J. Cowper Powys, writes that “we need to approach each day as if going to war, as if giving ourselves up to intense engagement” in his book In Spite Of: A Philosophy for Everyman, Village Press, 1974(1953). ‘Abdu’l-Baha writes of “armies, conquerors, forces, fortifications, castles, right and left wings, inter alia in His Tablets of the Divine Plan(Wilmette, 1977. I have come to see these terms in The Tablets of the Divine Plan as an illustration of His ‘war metaphor,’ a concept introduced to me by Jameson Bond over the 16 months of association with him and his wife Gale in 1966 and 1967 in Windsor Ontario. This concept has added a tremendous dynamic to my life and I write this prose-poem in memory of Jameson Bond whose funeral was today. As Shoghi Effendi writes: “Ultimately all the battle of life is within the individual,” Living the Life: A Compilation, London, 1974, p.20.
Ron Price
5 June 2007
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BLOODY SUNDAY
Bloody Sunday was an incident on 30 January 1972 in Derry Northern Ireland in which twenty-six unarmed civil rights protesters or bystanders were shot. They were shot by soldiers of the 1st Battalion of the Parachute Regiment of the British Army during a march by the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association. Thirteen men, seven of whom were teenagers, died immediately or soon after. The report of the Saville Inquiry accepted by the British government and made public this week, found that all of those shot were unarmed, and that the killings were unjustified and unjustifiable. Five of those wounded were shot in the back.
The Saville Inquiry was established in January 1998 to look at the events of Bloody Sunday. This was one year before I retired from full-time work as a lecturer in Australia. In March 2000 when the Inquiry’s oral hearings commencd, I had taken a sea-change near the Bass Strait in northern Tasmania and had become a full-time writer and poet. The Inquiry’s findings made public just three days ago, a decade into my retirement. The British Prime Minister, David Cameron, outlined the findings of the Saville inquiry. It was not his responsibility, he emphasized, to defend the indefensible. It was, he said, the fault of the "poor bloody infantry,” not the officers, not the politicians, not the government. These findings could re-open the controversy, and potentially lead to criminal investigations for some soldiers involved in the killings. The IRA, the Provisional Irish Republican Army, had initiated a campaign against the partition of Ireland. This campaign had begun in the two years prior to Bloody Sunday, but public perceptions of the day boosted the status of, and recruitment into, the IRA enormously. Bloody Sunday remains among the most significant events in the troubles of Northern Ireland chiefly because the killings were carried out by the army and not paramilitaries in full view of the public and the press.
I was just about to begin my first year teaching secondary school in Whyalla South Australia. Within two weeks of Bloody Sunday I had over 100 students in classes in my first year as a teacher in the dry-dog-biscuit of a land in northern South Australia. I was 28, the secretary of the Baha’i community of Whyalla, a community which formed its first local spiritual assembly less than a dozen weeks later.-Ron Price with thanks to Wikipedia, 18 June 2010.
Ireland is haunted by its history:
by seven centuries of conflict with
its neighbour across the sea; with
the trauma of a 19th century famine.
This difficult and tangled history
is part of an extrordinary cultural
flowering beginning in that same 19th
century when two god-men walked on Earth:
a silent revolution began which affected
the very stones which began to speak!!!
Ron Price
18 June 2010
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CRITIQUE OF MASS CULTURE
Nathaniel West's critique of mass culture in his novel The Day of the Locust(1939) and a recent popular movie The Truman Show(1998) both exaggerate the problems of mass culture, and they both implicitly assume that some viable, utopian alternative exists. Sadly, the only alternative to consumerism that most critics envisage is an oppressive government that drastically limits personal freedom, telling people what they should desire. While it should be obvious that desire can be and is partly regulated, the impossibility of regulating all of human desire should be accepted as such. The claim of The Truman Show that a free market enables a repressive regime of corporate media power to accomplish such regulation is based on an assumption about and an unjustified distortion of media power. The products of consumer society are not always beautiful and elegant, but they help in the process of differentiating individuals and enabling the human community to continue.
SYSTEMS OF GOVERNMENT AND INDUSTRY
Any political/economic system one could argue can be justified only as the lesser of two evils. Giving up utopian dreams is not so much a sign of maturity but, rather, a settling for some degree of chaos and contradiction in a pluralistic, a secular and scientific age. The anthropological problem posed by consumer society is, how can a society exist without an absolute sacred, an authority rooted in the sacred? In historical terms, modern society is an anomaly. But the sacred has not disappeared; it has rather been integrated into the fabric of our culture, integrated so profoundly that we hardly recognize it as such. We don't have any overarching, generally accepted, public sacred, but we do have a whole host of private sacreds. Each individual creates his or her own sense of the sacred, in part through consumer products. The great advantage of this system is that it differentiates people without the need for rigid hierarchies, thus maximizing personal freedom. But the definition of limits is a problem and existential questions confront all men in all societies. All societies have been groping for a new vocabulary, for some sense of the totality of life uniting: the ethical, metaphysical, the meditative and the mystical. Of course, from my perspective, the Baha’i Faith provides such a noetic, integrating mechanism. Time will tell whose mechanism is the most fertile for this emerging global society.
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YET AGAIN
Political stability and the survival of civilization depended on an effective autocracy. This truth was not accepted by the senatorial class until the reign of Trajan in the late first century AD. -Ronald Martin, Tacitus, Bristol Classical Press, 1994, London, p.242.
And as we head through the centre of
this great maelstrom of history
a Voice speaks to help us survive
by the skin of our teeth1.
It spoke, then, at the beginning of Empire2 ,
as It speaks now at the start of global Order,
in the midst of tempest,
in our darkest incoherence this ocean speaks,
winning its way into the hearts of people
who go about, quietly and obscurely,
to bring about a new Kingdom everywhere
as governments collapse, anarchy increases,
complexity bites into the acid tendrils
of the mind and individuals are easily overwhelmed
by incomprehensible mysteries and boredom.
Our days have long been troublesome,
as they were then in those early days of Empire
when He spoke; our great body has been invaded
by open violence and slow decay while a pure and
humble religion, yet again, insinuates itself into the
minds of men, lowly erects a place of honour on a
mountain square, its handiwork and wisdom to adore.
Ron Price
17 November 1996
1 Kenneth Clark, Civilization, Penguin, 1969, p.28.
2 The Roman Empire began in 31 BC with the emperor Octavian.
