The Third World is the same wherever we
go. It is us First Worlders who have created the Third World, thanks
to our evil plan of World Globalisation. Without rich consuming
countries wanting more more more and therefore wanting to trade with
every part of the world, much of what is now the Third World would
simply have remained the world, or Planet Earth. To convince these
Earthlings that they want our abstract little notes and coins, that
they want to trade all of their precious resources for it, I guess
first we have to teach them to envy us and our superior lifestyle and
culture. Being “Christians” we sent Missionaries ahead to
“convert” the Earthlings to our peculiar religion, appropriately
worshipping a genocidal god, and had a lot of success. Being
Consumers now we send Hollywood to convert the Earthlings to our
modern, updated, secular religion, worshipping our new god, Economy.
Unlike Jahweh, the Christian god, who is clearly genocidal in his
official literature, Economy wants to wipe out all species on this
planet, not just specific races of humans. Hollywood, it seems, has
been far more successful than the Missionaries. As a result more
people than ever, living as heathens, close to the land, are now
living in poverty, perhaps because they suddenly have to pay for
food, perhaps because their environment is becoming increasingly
polluted as a result of industrialisation. Either way, they want
cellphones, they want Coca-Cola and they want action movies. As I
sign of their independence, they may even form their own centralised
government, therefore becoming, like us, a country, and even making
their own action movies with local actors and locations. As a
continuation of their independence from the imperialism of global
advertising corporations like Coca-Cola and McDonalds the may even
develop their own soft drinks and takeaway chains, so the profits
from diabetes, obesity and heart disease can stay in the local
economy.
Having established a centralised
authoritarian government that worships the Economy, they can now
embrace their position in the world as Third and Poverty. Some
heretics, living in small tribal groups in unity with nature, remain
outside of the classifications of Third World and Poverty, but they
are being worked on. A growing proportion of this exciting new
country are now futilely striving to become First World, and
therefore lose the final link they have with the environment they
live in, the humans they share their environment with and even a full
experience of their own bodies. Hollywood has been the great teacher
for a century now, sending movies, television and pop music from Los
Angeles to (almost) every corner of the world. The American Dream,
now officially dead in all remotely intelligent discussions in
America, is now the dream of all who worship Economy, who see it not
as a dream but as a literal truth. Stable governments worshipping
Economy and welcoming Globalisation are being deliberately spread,
not for the sake of some ancient Greek philosophy, Demokratia, but
for the sake of Trade in praise of Economy. We will never extract
and consume all of the planet's resources if we focus only on First
World Christian Capitalist countries.
It is noble, even necessary, to spread
our way of life, with alienation and airports, bureaucracy and border
patrols, concrete and carbon monoxide to the entire planet. By some
anomalous miracle of green politics most world governments have
agreed that Antarctica will not be exploited and is not even a
country, though it has been tentatively drawn on to define which rich
countries look after which pieces of mouth-wateringly immaculate
virgin-white continent. The most empathetic and least money-obsessed
among us even volunteer in poor poverty-stricken Third World
“countries”, helping them “develop” their lives,
environments, communities and bodies into something that can serve
the Economy and so bring them a paper-thin slice of the money-pie.
Meanwhile they are very quickly losing connection with thousands of
years of cultural tradition, the way-of-life and unity with the
environment that have successfully brought them here (when it is
widely agreed that the Industrial Consumer way of life will
definitely not last 1000 years or bring the human species into any
recognisable future). While 100,000 years of folk medicinal
knowledge is being lost forever in our lifetime, modern psychiatric
drugs are spreading like a plague from the eastern United States of
Amnesia.
Outside of the executive boardrooms of
major corporations and the debate chambers of “secular”
Capitalist Governments, we know that this progress may not be “good”,
but we recognise that is it “inevitable”. That's how things are
now. We can't go back to being Cave Men. We must all step into and
live entirely within the Real World, and forget that anything else
ever existed, because it didn't. It has always been like this and if
it hasn't it was always leading up to this. It will always be like
this and if it is unsustainable we will have to be unsustainable
“Sustainably”.
My friends and I compare our Third
World experiences in countries in Central America and South-East
Asia, finding similarities in tropical fruits and tourist economies.
“Everything is so cheap!” we exclaim with delight. Many of us
travellers are peripheral beings in the West, but in the Third World
we become white Messengers carrying wads of divinely-ordained money.
We are seen as “rich” by the locals and are treated as such.
They want what we have, though we have travelled halfway across the
world to get away from it. All we have is this
universally-recognised abstraction, currency, which is terrifyingly
finite. We battle with the locals for possession of this abstraction
and they blackmail and threaten us by withholding the resources they
possess, food and shelter, exchanging them for our notes of
abstraction, just as we taught them.
I am told that Guatemala is a very poor
country. I found, upon flying into the United States of Anorexia, a
profound paranoia and distrust. They suspected me of wanting to
overstay in their free country and so questioned me and checked my
documents for hours before allowing me to pass the border. Upon
flying into Guatemala, with a long line of locals wanting to cross
the border, they saw me, the tallest, richest, whitest person in the
line, and waved me through. Come, stay, spend your money, enjoy our
food and our women, they seemed to be saying. They tried to sell me
bus tours and any number of contrived travel options inside the
airport and, upon seeing me proudly stepping out into the hot air
unencumbered by their expensive controlled holidays, gave me pitying
looks. As soon as I stepped outside the doors of the airport I was
leaped upon by thirty taxi drivers willing to take me anywhere. I
did not choose one, somehow one of them chose me and led me away to
his car, naming a price that sounded cheap until I realised it was in
US dollars.
This was Guatemala City, the central
temple of Economy in this “developing” country, and so I took the
bus straight out of the city, to Cobán, less developed, more poor,
more welcoming, more comprehensible, more “authentic”, cheaper,
the great dream of the rich foreigner, able to buy anything in the
poor naïve Third World town. In Cobán, my local town for six
weeks, the streets are dirt and lined with women selling fruit and
tortillas, men selling energy boosters and cigarettes. I would walk
through the streets a perfect Gringo, with more money than Spanish.
They would try to talk their prices up to much more than they usually
charge, but, I slowly learned, could be talked back down to the
normal price. I learned with my Canadian friend, who has good
Spanish and is a social genius, that to break through the image of
Rich Gringo is very easy. To make a joke, to give a compliment or to
simply humble ourselves, we suddenly transmute in their eyes into a
real person and they laugh with us and empathise with us as the
strange foreigner in a difficult situation, and we are friends,
sometimes family, and they don't even want to charge us. We found
that if we ask for food, say we have no money, it will be given to us
without second-thought. Money is secondary to everyone eating. I
was surprised and confused by how much the large gathering of
Westerners I met in Guatemala became obsessed with living as cheaply
as possible and talking the price of everything down as low as
possible. While it made me feel more confident to learn enough
Spanish to facilitate commerce, it made me feel satisfied and
comfortable to later learn enough Spanish to laugh and joke with bus
drivers.
Outside Cobán many people don't even
speak Spanish, the language of four-hundred years of Colonisation,
Christianity and Capitalism. They live in small villages in a
variety of relationships to their Mayan traditions. It amazed me the
extent to which they have survived these centuries of Colonisation,
while México is progressively polluted by America like a leaking
landfill above them. We received visits from Mayan shaman women, who
blessed our gathering with ceremonies around the fire. We brought
our multi-cultural performance into their village and they all
gathered around us in fascination of our strangeness. We received a
lot of sun and a lot of rain and we discovered, upon digging toilets,
that there is about two metres of topsoil. Consequently, there was
plenty of food, not only tropical fruits but maize, their staple food
and the central god of the Mayan cosmology. Everyone had bananas and
wanted to give them to us in appreciation of meeting us. We weary
travellers always appreciated a bunch of bananas to nourish and
delight us. There was plenty of food, but every village had a
tienda, a little shop selling candy, chips and softdrinks, and every
tienda was painted with either a Coca-Cola or Pepsi logo. It seems,
unless they take the collectivo into town, the tienda is the only
place to spend money, and only on junk food. In the poor Mexican
villages, the Mexican Mayans all seemed desperate to sell us anything
to make a tiny amount of money. The Guatemalan Mayans, less
advanced, were less interested in our money. But every day, as Cobán
sucked us towards it, bus after bus was filled with perfumed young
men and round old women also sucked into town for their chance of
making money.
Despite what is often referred to as
“Poverty”, there were cellphones everywhere, and the cellphones
that we Westerners left lying in our tents tended to disappear.
There were satellite dishes in the most obscurely-placed houses, all
with the mark of the beast, the “Claro” logo, the huge central
American cellphone corporation. Why would everybody in Guatemala
want a cellphone? The advertising in Cobán was very aggressive.
“Claro” logos were everywhere and constantly there were vans
driving slowly through the narrow streets shouting through
loudspeakers on their roofs advertising for everyone needing a
cellphone. Desensitised and over-exposed to advertising, it just
aggravated me. New to its power to manipulate and the novelty of
advertising not being completely insidious in their environment, the
locals surely responded conscientiously to the advertising.
It is such a relief for me, Western
Consumer of New Zealand, distant outpost of the British Commonwealth,
to not have a cellphone for a while, to not use it for a while. We
rich Capitalists, dissatisfied with what our culture offers us,
consumption, accumulation and entertainment as the meaning of life,
travel all the way to Guatemala to gather together in the remote
river valley of Rio Sachicha, to live together on the earth without
commerce. Yet we are pulled over and over again to the urban centres
to satiate our craving and buy something, anything, to have it and
take it with us, not even caring if it is later stolen by some poor
local. We exhaust ourselves in the exuberance and chaos of the Third
World, we obtain their intestinal parasites, and we retreat home to
our sterility and stupormarkets to recover from our loss of
illusion-of-control.
We educated post-consumer hippies are
confused and conflicted by the development of the Third World, by
Guatemala, surviving 400 years of Colonisation, only to embrace
Capitalism now. We want to support their development, we want to
exploit their resources, their naïvety, their pure land and
way-of-life and we want to leave them untouched, to maintain a life
not defined by our failed institutions.
I guess we learn and we return to New
Zealand and Canada and Finland with an experience that reverberates
through our bodies, rather than media-produced images in our heads.
We may not understand, but at least we don't pretend to understand.
We may not reject Imperialistic Corporate Industrial Consumerism, but
at least we worship the Economy with a disrespectful irony and
sarcasm.
