Local Futures

  • Home
  • Media Room
  • Blog
  • Store
  • Contact

The Economics of Happiness

Donate
Menu
  • About
    • About Local Futures
    • Who We Are
    • Founder, Helena Norberg-Hodge
    • Our History
    • Get Involved & Support Us
    • Close
  • Our Projects
    • Global to Local
      • International Alliance for Localization (IAL)
        • Join the IAL
        • IAL Members
          • IAL Member Organizations
          • IAL Listserv
        • Video Project: Voices from the IAL
      • Webinar Recordings
        • Sacred Activism in a Post-Trump World Webinar
        • Talking Climate Webinar
        • People Power: Democracy and the Economy Webinar
        • Beyond Trump: The Path to Real Change Webinar
        • Bringing the Food Economy Home Webinar
        • A World Without ‘Free’ Trade: What it would look like and how to get there
        • Beyond ‘Free Trade’ – Alternatives to Corporate Rule
        • Education: Promises, Myths & Realities Webinar
        • Debt and Speculation in the Global Economy Webinar
        • A New Activism Webinar
        • Climate Change or System Change Webinar
        • Going Local Webinar
      • Animation: Going Local: the solution-multiplier
      • Insane Trade Short Film and Factsheet
        • Insane Trade! & Factsheet Translated
      • Planet Local
        • Culture
        • Eco Communities
        • Ecology
        • Health
        • Local Business & Finance
        • Local Energy
        • Local Food, Farming & Fisheries
        • Local Policy & Community Rights
        • Place-based Education
        • Sharing & Repairing
        • Planet Local Short Film Series
          • 1 – Introduction: The New Local Food Movement
          • 2 – Diverse Farming Systems
          • 3 – Local Food Webs: Exploring Systems of Distribution
          • 4 – Local Food Processors: AKA Making Delicious Food
          • 5 – Challenges & Solutions
          • 6 – Ecovillages & Networks for New Farmers
          • 7 – And Finally… Here’s a Little More Inspiration
      • Local Bites Podcast
        • Unpacking Global Empire from an Indigenous Perspective with Tyson Yunkaporta & Helena Norberg-Hodge
        • More than Just the Vegetables
        • Food Sovereignty in the Global Economy
        • Transition, Tradition, and Trade
        • Not-for-Profit Businesses
        • Love, Values, and Wellbeing Economies
        • Growing a Farmers Market from the Ground Up
        • Beautiful Places: A Conversation with Wendell Berry
        • Creating the Framework for a New Economy
        • From GDP to GNH
        • Rebuilding Healthy Communities: The Growing Ecovillage Movement
        • Seeds of Resilience, Seeds of Sovereignty
        • Why Local Ownership Matters
        • Local Alternatives to Globalized Development: A View from India
        • How to Feed the World? A Political Agroecological Approach
        • Helena Norberg-Hodge on how corporate ‘free trade’ deals threaten local communities and economies worldwide
    • Our Work in Ladakh
      • Past Work in Ladakh
        • Experiences in Ladakh 2018
        • Experiences in Ladakh 2017
      • Ancient Futures (book & film)
      • Local Futures’ History in Ladakh
        • Women’s Alliance of Ladakh
    • The Economics of Happiness Film
      • Economics of Happiness Conferences
      • The Film
      • DIY Economics of Happiness Workshop
    • Close
  • Events
    • Upcoming Events
      • Full Events Calendar
    • Economics of Happiness Conferences
      • Past International Conferences
      • Other Past Events
    • Calendar
        • « February 2021 » loading...
          M T W T F S S
          1
          2
          3
          4
          5
          6
          7
          8
          9
          10
          11
          12
          13
          14
          15
          16
          17
          18
          19
          20
          21
          22
          23
          24
          25
          26
          27
          28
    • Close
  • Learn & Take Action
    • Learn About Our Work
      • Learn about Globalization
      • Learn about Localization
      • Learn about Big Picture Activism
    • Activist Tools
      • COVID-19 Response: Let’s Localize Like Never Before
      • What You Can Do To Localize Right Now
      • Films for Change
      • Recommended Readings
      • Organizations for Change
      • Independent Media Sources
      • Maps of Alternatives
    • Close
  • Publications
    • Local is Our Future (latest book)
      • Endorsements for Local is Our Future
      • Translations of Local is Our Future
    • Ancient Futures (book & film)
    • The Economics of Happiness (film)
    • Translated Resources
    • Free Reading Materials
    • Films
    • Books & Other Publications
    • Newsletters & Annual Reports
    • Close
You are here: Home / Resistance and Renewal / A Tribute to Eduardo Galeano

A Tribute to Eduardo Galeano

May 8, 2015 by Alex Jensen 1 Comment

“Plastic delights, plastic dreams. In the paradise promised to all and reserved for a few, things are more and more important and people less and less so. The ends have been kidnapped by the means: things buy you, cars drive you, computers program you, television watches you.”
— Eduardo Galeano, from Upside Down: A Primer for the Looking-Glass World

Local Futures wishes to pay tribute to the Uruguayan writer, Eduardo Galeano, who passed away on April 13th. In a style that was at the same time polemical irascible and accessible, Galeano exposed the hidden brutalities of colonialism and corporate globalization – as well as the unsung beauties of the humble, the vernacular, the quotidian across Latin America.

“No computer could count the crimes that the pop culture business commits each day against the human rainbow and the human right to identity. But its devastating progress is mind-boggling. Time is emptied of history, and space no longer acknowledges the astonishing diversity of its parts. Through the mass media the owners of the world inform us all of our obligation to look at ourselves in a single mirror.

“Whoever doesn’t have, isn’t. He who has no car or doesn’t wear designer shoes or imported perfume is only pretending to exist. Importer economy, impostor culture: we are all obliged to take the consumer’s cruise across the swirling waters of the market. Most of the passengers are swept overboard, but thanks to foreign debt the fares of those who make it are billed to us all. Loans allow the consuming minority to load themselves up with useless new things, and before everyone’s eyes the media transform into genuine needs the artificial demands the North of the world ceaselessly invents and successfully projects onto the South.”

Galeano was one of earliest writers to popularize an understanding of the structural relation between great affluence and accumulation in some parts of the globe and amongst a small stratum of society within every country, and the suffering and deprivation suffered in the vast “backyard” of this narrow but tremendous privilege:

“To turn infamies into feats, the memory of the North is divorced from the memory of the South, accumulation is detached from despoliation, opulence has nothing to do with plunder. Broken memory leads us to believe that wealth is innocent of poverty.”

It is not a pleasant relationship to acknowledge, since doing so politicizes poverty, shows it to be caused rather than an unfortunate but nevertheless timeless or genetic condition. Galeano constantly reminded his readers that affluence and opulence are incompatible with fulfillment of ethical duties. His book, Upside Down: A Primer for the Looking-Glass World, is a marvelous, kaleidoscopic historical survey of the absurdities and vapidity of consumer culture, and fulmination against the needless exploitation and incalculable neo-imperialist violence undergirding that culture. He saw the globalization of this absurdity and recoiled in horror: the flattening of the richness and diversity of the Earth itself and its tapestry of cultures is lamentable enough, but by a commercial system that rewards venality and produces misery even in the hearts of its putative beneficiaries, is appalling.

“The invisible violence of the market: diversity is the enemy of profitability, and uniformity rules. Mass production on a gigantic scale imposes its obligatory patterns of consumption everywhere. More devastating than any single-party dictatorship is the tyranny of forced uniformity. It imposes on the entire world a way of life that reproduces human beings as if they were photocopies of the consummate consumer.”

He was one of the few writers, from either the global North or South, to understand that “development” as emulation-of-the-rich was not just objectionable because of environmental limits and constraints, but also because even if the project were physically possible, to succeed at it would be a Pyrrhic victory of the worst sort. Global industrial-consumerist growth and development aren’t just physically impossible, they are undesirable, even deadly. He wrote:

“The leaders who promise to take the countries of the South into the First World by an act of magic that will turn us all into prosperous subjects of the kingdom of waste ought to be tried for fraud and as accessories to a crime. For fraud because they promise the impossible; if we all consumed like those who are squeezing the earth dry, we’d have no world left. And as accessories to a crime because the lifestyle they promote – the huge orgasm of delirious consumption they call happiness – sickens our bodies, poisons our souls, and leaves us without the home the world wished to become long before it existed.”

But Galeano didn’t just pillory this dismal system. His was also, at core, a liberatory project, toppling the narrative of the inevitability of the status quo, the limpid notion that however bad things may be, it’s the best of all possible worlds, so get used to it. Even to read his Upside Down is to be inoculated against officially approved resignation to consumerist dystopia. He only had to train his historian’s and journalist’s eye on actual people, in actual communities, in the actual world, to breathe life into this project of alternative possibilities:

“Official history, mutilated memory, is a long, self-serving ceremony for those who give the orders in this world. Their spotlights illuminate the heights and leave the grass roots in darkness. The always invisible are at best props on the stage of history, like Hollywood extras. But they are the ones – the actors of real history, the denied, lied about, hidden protagonists of past and present – who incarnate the splendid spectrum of another possible reality.”

Through story, experience, people’s history, poetry, and a trenchant, sarcastic sense of humor, Galeano bequeathed us an indispensable critique that grows in relevance with every passing day.

Share this:

  • Email
  • Facebook
  • Twitter
  • LinkedIn

Related

Big Picture Activism
Small Loans, Big Problems: The False Promise of Microfinance

Filed Under: Resistance and Renewal Tagged With: class, consumerism, culture, democracy, globalization, happiness, inequality, mental health, poverty

Author: Alex Jensen

Alex Jensen is a Researcher and Project Coordinator at Local Futures. He has worked in the US and India, where he co-ordinates Local Futures' Ladakh Project. He represents Local Futures on the core group of the Vikalp Sangam/Alternatives India initiative. He has worked with cultural affirmation and agro-biodiversity projects in campesino communities in a number of countries, and is active in environmental health/anti-toxics work.

Comments

  1. prabodh parikh says

    May 12, 2015 at 7:22 pm

    thank you for your tributr to galeano. outstanding mind, so contemporary and sharply insightful.

    Reply

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Subscribe to the Economics of Happiness Blog

Sign up for our email updates

Latest Blogs

  • What did we lose when we lost the stars?

    February 22, 20211 Comment
  • Trade treaties and the climate emergency

    February 15, 2021No Comments
  • Birdsong as a Compass

    February 7, 20212 Comments
  • Cities and Green Orthodoxy

    January 28, 20211 Comment
  • How to fix a food system that’s not designed to feed people

    January 19, 20211 Comment
  • Progress and the modernization of Ladakh

    December 18, 20203 Comments

Blog posts by Category

  • Capitalism (3)
  • Climate Change (41)
  • Community (26)
  • Consumerism (3)
  • Coronavirus (16)
  • Democracy (3)
  • Development (20)
  • Economic Growth and Degrowth (31)
  • Economics of Happiness Conferences (4)
  • Education (7)
  • Environment (31)
  • Food and Farming (54)
  • Free Trade and Globalization (39)
  • Happiness (2)
  • Health (22)
  • Indigenous worldview (13)
  • Inequality (5)
  • Inner transformation (13)
  • Livelihoods and jobs (33)
  • Local energy (7)
  • Local finance (4)
  • Localization (44)
  • Nature (1)
  • New economy (17)
  • Resistance and Renewal (15)
  • Technology (27)
  • The Economics of Happiness (15)
  • Uncategorized (3)
  • About
  • Contact
  • The Economics of Happiness
  • Learn & Take Action

Sign up for our email updates

Donate Now

International Society for Ecology and Culture © Copyright 2021 | site by digiflip
loading Cancel
Post was not sent - check your email addresses!
Email check failed, please try again
Sorry, your blog cannot share posts by email.