Nils Gilman, “Deviant Globalization”

“Deviant Globalism” is almost redundant. Despite what delusional folks like Thomas Friedman would have you believe, the vision of human beings operating as a politically and economically integrated global species is perhaps the most deviant and destructive idea ever proposed. We are hard-coded to care about maybe 150 people maximum, the approximate size of our ancestral tribal units. This means that people outside our tribe on the other size of the planet will never be anything but an abstraction to be exploited, feared or ignored.

The future, such as it is, will likely be more like the distant past, in that it will feature resilient communities producing what is needed to support them locally, as humans have for the vast majority of our time on this planet. Isn’t it becoming obvious that the unintended consequences of our hyper-complex, unsustainable global society are worse than the benefits? The “deviant globalism” this article is referring to is just a logical consequence of globalism’s mass destruction of local cultures and its reduction of humanity to alienated consumers. This is ultimately the source of the violence in places like Afghanistan, Pakistan and Yemen — ancient tribal cultures that protect communities against deviance are under relentless assault by the predator-armed forces of global capitalism. Fortunately, this is one bubble that may not last much longer in the face of the ongoing global systems collapse.

It was with great interest that I first read the title and then heard the podcast of “Deviant Globalization”. I’m working on my PhD in Language and Literacy Education, starting on my dissertation, and deeply interested in such matters. I’m looking at minority language policy in south Georgia (the state, not the country). And as any proponent of postmodernism will tell you, policy cannot be analyzed without looking at the surrounding culture.
There is a poultry processing plant in the community that I’m looking at that was left empty by recent ICE raids. In the scramble for cheap labor, a deal was made where South Koreans can come work in the plants and receive a green card for their troubles. Why Hispanics are not offered the same deal is an issue in and of itself, but what is interesting is the middle man in this deal who charges people in Seoul for access to the positions. Their “deposit” is held until one year of work is completed and then they are “free” to go. Ahhh…capitalism at its finest in the deviant globalization mix.