Public policy planners, national security officials and think tankers have curiously special definitions for these words that set up a clear battle line in an Us vs. Them mentality. There has always been a war between those who own the world and those who rent themselves out for wages. The war continued in this country with the writing of the Constitution. Our founding fathers understood well this age old-struggle and designed a system that has kept power in the hands of the Oligarchy. From the perspective of the people who own the country and their well paid functionaries, Instability is a situation where the public actually begins to influence government, to have a voice in shaping major decisions that affect their lives (what we would call Democracy). Containment is a reaction to this threat from the bewildered herd whose stampeding would surely crush the privileged elite and force them to give up some of their already huge piece of the pie. The idea is to put down any progressive movement toward a more equal distribution of wealth. Rollback is the final tightening of the screws in order to return things to their proper balance where the rich rule and the powerful prevail.

A laboratory experiment illustrating these terms occurred in the last 40 years in America. Instability began to appear in the late 50's with the emergence of the Civil Rights Movement, the Beat Movement and the Peace Movement (Ban the Bomb). When later in the 60's the anti-war movement, feminism, and environmentalism emerged, not to mention the sexual revolution, a very dangerous situation took hold. It was called a 'crisis of democracy' by the newly formed Council on Foreign Relations. The dramatic climax of this horrifying turn of events was the riot at the 1968 Democratic Convention, followed by the trial of the Chicago 7. Add to this mess people like Timothy Leary and John Lennon advocating a kind of philosophical anarchy, and the ordered ontology of the 50's was gone forever. This was an exciting time for idealists and believers in peace, justice and equality, but for the 'Establishment' it was a situation that called for swift reactions. Look what happened to Martin Luther King, Bobby Kennedy and Malcolm X.

Containment started with Nixon and with the FBI's COINTELPRO. This was the war against the Black Panthers and the Yippies. The war on drugs was born which Nixon admitted was a tool for containing 'the Blacks'. They had their work cut out for them because the minds of the people had to be changed back - put back in the box. So as women, environmentalists and civic activists were gaining ground, a parallel force was taking shape in Government and corporations to take back control. By the time Carter was President this was already changing in that Carter was perceived as a Liberal. He and his whole administration were centrists hand picked from the Council on Foreign Relations. (I'm not saying as some do that the CFR is the evil mastermind of the 'New World Order' or that everything is carefully plotted by the Illuminati, only that institutions of concentrated power and privilege will on their own naturally produce these distorted effects.) This set the stage for Reagan and his deregulation of business combined with massive give-aways to the military and a major shift in the distribution of wealth to the upper classes. With more money in their hands, more effective control of popular opinion was possible and gullible people were brainwashed by Rush Limbaugh, G.Gordon Liddy and others. Add to this the 'more for me' mentality drilled into us, and you've successfully driven out the demons of a leveling spirit and concern for the poor.

With the fall of the Soviet Union came the time to begin Rollback. With no more shadow of a doubt that unregulated Capitalism and free markets was God's plan, and Globalization firmly set in motion, the people could finally be driven back into their holes. As Michael Parenti states, it was time to 'keep them down and hungry with their noses to the grindstone...to return to 19th century standards, the kind that prevail throughout the third world'. The corporatization of America led by Clinton firmly in support of NAFTA, GATT, and later the WTO shifted the political spectrum several notches to the right to where policies that in the 60's would have been considered far right were now 'New Democrat'. Look at the Prison Industry closely and you'll see hundreds of thousands of nonviolent drug users and a profitable warehousing of potential dissidents. The threat of down-sizing loomed heavily over working peoples' heads as their jobs moved to Mexico and Indonesia, robbing them of any remaining uppity notions about job security or benefits. Also rolled back was the social compact. The safety nets established by Kennedy and Johnson were weakened and all but destroyed. And still the drum beat of individualism and the ridicule of socialist values remains strong as the stock market and corporate media gain more and more momentum.

This process is cyclical. As I write this in July, 2000, I see Instability fast approaching. The first signs were Seattle 1999, then the Ralph Nader candidacy. There is a new atmosphere and a new communication tool that can take any message and make it instantly global. Even if most people don't know specifically what, they do know that something is terribly wrong. This is the most important task: to articulate these issues that are so obscured and marginalized by a delirious fevered culture disfunctionally unaware of the global destruction left in its wake. It won't take long before a new vocabulary arises like it did in the 60's, for as Terrence McKenna believed, reality is language, and not until new concepts evolve that can redefine human culture in this new hypercharged century can we hope to destabilize again the Plutocratic order.

Jim Matus Ancient Ecstatic Brotherhood of Paranoise