Rescued books and disseminated ideas — a serendipitous illustration of the value of sorting real and metaphorical trash — Jose Alberto Guttierrez, Antonio Gramsci and Chris Hedges

05 June 2017

Theme — the merit of sorting trash

I cobble two unrelated essays to make a serendipitous point about freeing minds.

First story — rescuing books on behalf of the poor

Jose Alberto Gutierrez grabs books from Colombia's trash:

Generally, rich and prosperous northern Bogota is good for hardcovers and rare editions; the south is where he finds the paperbacks. No one ever seems to mix the books with organic waste; instead, they are left out in separate boxes or bags.

As Jose's collection has grown, so too has his fame. The other drivers at the municipality used to think that Jose was crazy, but now they help out, bringing him whatever books they discover in the rubbish.

Local newspaper headlines hailing him as "Colombia's Lord of the Books" have brought more donations pouring in.

Jose has become a conduit connecting book lovers - [his rescued books library] has donated reading materials to some 235 schools, institutions and community libraries across Colombia.

Jose believes getting an education can help break the cycle of poverty.

Second essay

Chris Hedges recently wrote about deceased anti-fascist Antonio Gramsci. What Hedges said illustrates the worth of what Jose Guttierrez has been doing.

Pretend you are a young person reading the following extract for the first time:

Mass culture is a potent and dangerous counterrevolutionary force.

It creates a herd mentality. It banishes independent and autonomous thought. It destroys our self-confidence. It marginalizes and discredits nonconformists. It depoliticizes the citizenry. It instills a sense of collective futility and impotence by presenting the ruling ideology as a revealed, unassailable truth, an inevitable and inexorable force that alone makes human progress possible.

Mass culture is an assault that, as Gramsci wrote, results in a “confused and fragmentary” consciousness . . . . [that[ is designed to impart the belief to the proletariat that its “true” interests are aligned with those of the ruling class, in our case global corporatism.

That might get you to thinking about (a) the mechanics of acculturation and (b) the wisdom of rejecting them.

And how about this provocative excerpt from the same writing?

Gramsci presciently saw that the capitalist manager was not only tasked with maximizing profit and reducing the cost of labor. The manager had to build mechanisms of indoctrination to ensure social integration and communal solidarity in service to capitalism, hence the constant evaluations, promotions and demotions along with the gathering of employees at meetings to instill groupthink.

Along with this indoctrination come mini security and surveillance states in our workplaces where every movement and every word spoken are taped or filmed in the name of customer service. Corporations function as tiny totalitarian states, models for the larger corporate state.

This demonstrates the power of succinctly stated sociological propositions.

Dealing with such baldly stated observations (in a rational way) requires that we come up with persuasive counter-models. Which is, of course, the point to intellectual and scientific inquiry.

The moral? — Freeing minds is a noble endeavor

Efforts to liberate thinking from the oppressed places that poverty, sexism, autocracy and corporatism have imprisoned them are support-worthy.

Pertinent to this, writing and recorded mathematics allow us to string complex propositions, derivations, deductions and insights together in ways that other mediums have difficulty making equally cogent and arguably testable.

Hence, my mention of Jose Guttierrez' book-saving mission and Chris Hedges' illustration of that quest's potential power.

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Rescued books and disseminated ideas — a serendipitous illustration of the value of sorting real and metaphorical trash — Jose Alberto Guttierrez, Antonio Gramsci and Chris Hedges