The language used, the implications implied, the sheer brass balls brazenness of how we’re being conned – once you see it, I hope you NEVER unsee it. Okay – it’s time, everyone. We need to have this conversation about waste, and what to do about it.

In TL;DR Format:

I’ve been positively enraged by the “conversation” being foisted on us with regard to waste. It’s the most propaganda-laden conversation (aside from the conversations about tobacco, fossil fuel, and food additives and processing, and that’s another whole slew of BS conversations that we’ve had forced on us) and if you apply some of the principles of de-bullshitting this conversation  to those others, you’ll be far more able to counter what’s happening in the world today. 

Here’s a bit of a list of –

– Talking Points

It’s important to understand how things can be reported, misreported, and inserted into the cultural canon.

Conversations

Conversations are the basis of everything we communicate, of how we communicate. There’s not an image drawn but that it generates a response in the person seeing it. No sentence that doesn’t evoke some kind of opinion in the reader. Millions of writers have written billions of words to convey something to another person. Cave paintings were meant to convey – something – to those who would see the painting in future. 

When there were plentiful food animals about and the cave painting showed plentiful food animals about, the painting was supposed to convey “hey – there are plentiful food animals about. About here, since this cave can’t move.”

Such conversations were helpful and helped to spread knowledge (in this case about prey in the vicinity) to others.

Propaganda

But even cave paintings could also be used to sway, influence, coerce. These types of conversations I call propaganda. If that cave painting had included, for example, a figure wearing a fearsome headdress to whom other smaller figures were bringing portions of their catch for the day, and the fearsome figure is shown spearing one of the others that had brought too small a tribute, the message changes considerably…

It now says “See that person with the headdress on? They OWN this place  if you hunt any of THEIR prey you have to give a portion to them or they’ll kill you.” This is no longer just an informational message, it’s a piece of coercive propaganda which claims that a person wearing that headdress must be appeased.

Gone is the carefree “Come on! Plenty here for all!” of the message in the previous section…

Advertising

I don’t actually know why I included a separate heading for this. No matter what the actual content of advertising is, it’s telling you that you need to pay the dude in the headdress. Advertising is meant to sway, coerce – it’s propaganda.

Education

A slightly less threatening version of propaganda, you’d think. But in fact it includes all the “cultural norms” of the local society, i.e. all the things that you’ll get speared for. Education can be a cave wall painting showing where exactly the heart is in the animal depicted and the correct angle to get the spear, and in another part of the image, directions to where those animals are plentiful. It can include 27 pages of calculations to show the reader how to create fusion energy powered generators. These are educational and positive.

The message can also be a video showing how to create a powerful toxin, the ways to weaponise it, and how to deploy that weapon. These educational posts are negative, but still educational. I mean, yeah – weapon – but also “this is a list of the shizzle to watch out for people wanting to buy in your vicinity and then maybe checking in on them, hey?”

Lastly, the weapons message above will probably also include what organisations, religions, races, or sexual orientations to deploy them against, and then it’s totally propaganda.

One thing conversations have that propaganda does not, is the presentation of information without coercive themes, and what propaganda has that conversation doesn’t, is the avoidance, supplantation, or falsification of some key information to convince and coerce.

The Things Being Avoided

The key thing as you read, hear, or view any conversation is to be able to see which things are falsified, which things have been misdirected about, and which things have been censored to further the agenda of the person or corporation providing the conversation.

My Conclusions

I’m not going to talk about the finer points of conversations. I don’t care if a person uses rhetoric, ridicule, or repetition. There is a way that a conversation can enrich you and educate you without any strings attached, and a way that a conversation can constitute an attack on you and an attempt to subvert and dominate you. One’s good and the other is bad. The conversation on waste is being manipulated and is therefore the other kind, i.e. propaganda.

The “War” On Waste

You may know that there’s a series on Australian ABV TV by the name “The War On Waste” and unfortunately it too just suggests that we’re “at war with waste,” rather than what should be, which is for us to be at war with the corporations that have made multi-trillions of dollars producing something that by design becomes waste so that they can sell us the updated version of the previous piece of waste for a few extra trillion dollars.

It’s a war they’re winning because they pay a sizeable chunk of that income to spin doctors and venal persons who will fabricate any kind of study at all for them to prove that their particular piece of future waste is actually valuable to you, and then they pay another chunk to advertising companies, and those ad companies in turn pay a part of that chunk to newspapers and magazines to place ads that tell you to pay the person in the headdress for the product…

They pay those people to obfuscate the fact that their piece of crap is recyclable but they themselves won’t recycle it because that eats into their precious (and outrageous) profits.

Where To Start?

These days, there’s a “conversation” that goes:

“We (actually meaning “you the customers” (i.e. us)) Produce xxxx Million Tonnes Of Waste Every Year”Â

and it’s the very first, the very biggest, and very most destructive piece of outright propaganda out there. Allow me to break it down for you:

• “We Produce”: No no no and no! 

“We” don’t produce any waste outside of our feces and the skin and hair we lose. We “produce” CO2 as well. None of those are “waste.” Bacteria need our cast-off material to live on and provide nutrients to plants and smaller animals such as earthworms  and insects. The CO2 is needed by plants to grow and photosynthesize. 

The Thing Being Avoided here is that it’s the corporations who make products that are not designed to be used more than once, or that are designed to wear out and fail rather than lasting, and that then create the waste they refer to when those same corporations refuse to take the derelict products back and recycle them at the place where it makes the most sense, being the factory that produced it.Â

• “xxxx Million Tonnes Of Waste”: Waaaaaitaminute…

It would NOT BE WASTE if those corporations hadn’t decided to make a quick buck at the expense of lumbering us with their future waste.Â

The Thing Being Avoided here is exactly the same as the TBA above… If I had the choice of a takeaway food dish that I could re-use or return to the manufacturer, and dish that would pile up in the local landfill and they both cost the same, you know which one I’d pick. To a corporation though, a re-usable container that cost the same and lasts ten times as long would be a potential loss of nine sales..

• The last thing – about “Every Year” doesn’t really need clarification, does it? Except for one thing:

Why are we being misled on the scale and origin of the thing? That waste has been piling up for decades in many cases, mentioning only the figures for a year is spin doctoring at its worst. Why are they not saying “We Produced 27bn tonnes of this crap since we started making it and now we want YOU to deal with it” and bring home what they’ve really done?

Then there’s the evergreen perennial piece of bullshi… Of conversation:

Take Responsibility

This is another egregious piece of bunkum. We’re only responsible because for several generations now we’ve been brainwashed and manipulated into a situation where most people no longer have any idea of what those corporations are actually doing.

All deliberately instilled by relentless corporate propaganda, starting in our first years at school. Oh yes – food corporations developed, published, and inserted into curriculums school textbooks for almost a hundred years now. Guess what those books taught us?

Who’s Responsible?

Let’s assume your familial line is laid out like a comic or a cartoon film. It starts with your extreme ancestor reading that rock painting. If you’re very lucky you’re related to the first person with that fearsome headdress.

Most genealogies probably proceeded along quite average lines but every so often a rare side branch or two might have lucked out and become a Landowner Farmer, or Baker, or Laird o’the land – another Headdress.

If you’re currently not running a corporation, or running for or filling a political office or other functionary position right now, that probably means that your ancestors’ branch wasn’t one of those extraordinary side branches.

But some people branch runs back to a headdress… As a result, now there are people who hold a wealth and power they didn’t directly earn, but they’re using the old propaganda to try and keep getting stuff tithed to them. And they still expect to be paid full tithe for it.

Oh The Convenience!

And Oh! The Bullshit!

We were sold the idea of “convenience” because corporations can make more if they stress how much more “convenient” something is. To the point where convenience has become indispensable to us in some things. But the time saved by that “convenience” is something that those same corporations want to take back from us – in longer work hours, or more difficult duties, or higher prices.

Here’s a thought: You work for corporation XYZZY making the latest “convenient widgets.” They pay their entire staff a minimum wage, and their profits are fifty times what you earn by selling the widgets you make in your time there. Then you go to the supermarket where the food you buy is priced at fifty times what they paid the workers involved in making that product.

(Actually, it’s likely to be a thousand times or more – think about tinned goods rolling out of a mostly automated factory…) If those corporations paid commensurate pay to everyone involved and kept to a smaller profit, none of us would need to work as many hours a week to be able to afford our lives.

In effect, these corporations are stealing your life an hour at a time. Ironically, one of the ways they do that is by offering you “convenience” so that you can do more with the hours you have…

The only thing that used to keep that profiteering in check was the competition from other “convenient widget” makers but these days we no longer have that particular safety valve – because the much-vaunted “free market” has figured out that with the Internet they can now see one another’s prices for stuff and so, instead of facing monopolies, we now face multi-member oligopolies that ensure between them that they all raise their profits in unison. At our expense of course.

That kind of collaboration is what’s behind the conversation on waste. Long ago, manufacturers realised the problem with a disposable convenient world and decided that they needed to wash their hands of the waste problem. And the other problem is that none of these oligopolistic tactics were ever formalised, it’s just that communication and globalism have improved to the point that the signals are just baked-in. You can check another Widget maker’s prices, their advertising propaganda, and slowly, greed wins out over any form of restraint and it becomes a race.

With the competitive pricing differences levelled out by the worldwide communications network, the only way XYZZY Widgets can increase their customer base and sales now is to buy out all the other Widget makers. So the corporation salts away more profits for their “war fund” and that’s why everyone works 30 – 50 hour poorly-paid weeks, to vote in the Widgetmaker ballot. Buy XYZZY’s Widgets and accept their lousy wages and every dollar they make from selling to you and screwing you is a vote cast by you for the XYZZY Widget Co.

We need to start casting more emphatic and deliberate votes…

Your Responsibility.

See how long that took to come back around to here? The earliest rock paintings date back to hundreds of millions of years ago. That system of either exploiting or killing our fellow hominids has quite literally had that long to become established and entrenched. Keeping things in check, Keeping TheBastards Honest – that’s up to us.

You Can Help By

…washing your plastics, separating your waste stream into soft plastics, hard plastics, aluminium, steel, food waste, paper, textile, etc. By getting behind positive recycling stories and organisations and start-ups. By having conversations about waste and how urgent it is to change the conversation and approach.

Which we wouldn’t have to do if the stuff was designed to either last, or be taken back and recycled at the point of origin. 

What’s happening is that you’re paying your wages back to the company, spending more of your time that “convenience” saved you and more money paying for water and electricity and time spent preparing the waste that you never wanted for a slight chance that some company will actually recycle it rather than shipping it off to some third world desert.

The corporations won’t do that because none of them are willing to put some of their profits into recycling when they can get a much better a return by paying all these advertising agencies to convince you that it’s your fault…

You Can Really Help By

Just don’t sit and do nothing – get out and engage in a bit of peaceful activism… I call that “getting activated” because it really is like that. Once you get going, it’ll become second nature to disseminate relevant information, to let your government know when they’ve earned your vote and when they are gonna get your veto if they don’t buck up, you’ll be able to direct people to see for themselves online, what’s going on.Â

We can change things – but we need a much more numerous, much more vocal, and much more activated populace.

And one thing you can do immediately is to Share and Like this post, and perhaps donate to keep the website going.