Americans live in a gilded cage of debt and consumption. When others in the progressive movement rail against how difficult it is to motivate Americans versus times past, I have to remind them of the differences. No wealthy person in 1925 could fly across the country almost at whim, no wealthy person had access to the kind of mass media we do - there are more people now, who know Duke Ellington's music than when he had just started up with the "Washingtonians".

In his challenge growing out of John Kenneth Galbraith's death, Richard Parker throws down the gauntlet to the future:

Galbraith is gone now -- but the principles and values he stood for, oftentimes by standing apart from liberals and conservatives alike, seem in this new century more relevant than ever before. Who will take his place is a question I've been asked repeatedly over these past few days.

My answer is, Who first is ready to listen?

The reality of post-modernity is that power, mass production and consumption grow inexorably intertwined. Whether liberal or conservative, a post-modern thinker deals with the root of that nexus. Parker rightfully points out one of the keys to Galbraith's insight - consumers are no longer competitors with producers, but part of the chain of production. The absorbtion of the individual in fact, is a theme that shows up in many places in Galbraith's work, for good and for ill. He writes about the overwhelming reality of the organization man - that is to say, his organization. He writes about the need for a macro economy, and the notion of planning.

The discipline of economics is only slowly catching up with Galbraith. The hottest new field is "behavioral economics" - which studies how human beings behave. It is something that Galbraith argued for decades ago. In 1992 I wrote "Every theory of economics is a theory of psychology scaled up." And argued that the basis for our mathematics of economics had to be rooted in a better theory of the individual. Galbraith was right to argue against over mathematicization of economics, because all mathematics will be provisional depending on the base of our understanding of the human animal.

In recent years we have come to understand more and more that human beings are, to use the same phrase that Parker uses - political animals. What Aristotle was arguing was more startling than those oft repeated and punned on words are understood to know. Aristotle was arguing that the ability to live in a polity - the polis - a blending of many interests into one unit, was the distinguishing feature of human beings from all the other animals, the catagorical difference. Not intellect, nor emotion, nor soul - but the polis is what sets man apart from all the other animals.

We have come to understand that there is a physical reality to the organization man, because human beings are wired to come to incorporate an understanding of the nomos of behavior around them.

The reality of power is the great discovery in the social world of the late 20th century. Whether it is the post-structuralists - Foucault was to assert that we are bound up in a web of power, since even language is enforced by the reality of power relationships. It is also the reality of the libertarian right - even as they struggle against it, it is presumed in their formulations.

We are all Galbraithians now, merely that it has taken this long for the world to catch up with what he saw. The mathematics and the insights need not be at war - as the recently departed Oldman knew.

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There, I've scared off the Mike McCurries of this world with enough Greek and history - let us get back to the reality of Galbraith's work that Richard Parker so eloquently asserts. Power is the reality of human social behavior. Indeed, power is its own policy - those with power must act within that cone of possibilities that allow them to keep, transmit and multiply power. The essence of power is how to bend the human individual around the organizational self, to have them suspend or alter their judgment to the force of humanity they feel swirling around them.

Who will accept that it is mediating between this force, the force of the social self which is as real as the parts of our brains that enforce it and recognize it - and the dignity of the individual. The same social force that shames the wealthy into giving, pushes the young man to enlist in a useless war, and both will call it an honour. The same force that allows the Democratic country to hire fewer policemen, confident that the public will comply with regulations seen to be good, allows the autocratic country to recruit more irregulars to spy on their own publc, and the totalitarian state to have people scurry by glaring cult of personality posters without a peep.

If there is a home of this self-consciousness of post-modernity, it is the world of blogging, a world that relentlessly analyzes every utterance for its narrative and memetic content, and thus is about how the media transmits power - particularly the power of, as Chris Bowers of mydd notes those who do not really have it. Blogging is the place where those who were once relegated to being merely end stage consumers, have grown conscious of the need to have a core of their own, separate from the identities that they are presented with to consume. It is appropriate that on the same day that Parker reminds of Galbraith's insight that consumers are the end stage of production, that salon.com also runs an article on how individuality is a commodity, like any other.

If there has been a single guiding point to my writing on the internet, it has been this: that the world has not been divided into "producers" and "consumers" any longer, and that the moralities that developed to mediate that world, the politics, the economic structures, the ideas and memes - are all obsolete. The world of ordinary people is filled with "don't tread on the grass" signs that tell them not to take up too much space, not to be too too, not to stand up to tall, lest their own ordinary breathern cut them down "to be more like stalks" - to quote another late 20th century thinker whose work has gotten more attention of late. The fundamentals of political space have changed, and with it the kinds of organizations which work. The vast pyramids of production that Galbraith observed and chronicled in, for example, The Affluent Society have become heavy weights on our backs. And the means by which we enforce them have become more and more expensive.

Thus, if there is any space devoted to the realities of what Galbraith wrote, it is the internet discourse, which currently has a home most in blogging - though of course it will move on at some point to other fields and other innovations. And if there is a response, it is found in the work of Ralph Waldo Emerson - to be a human being is to combine the poles of liberal and conservative, of protection and innovation. To live in a new age, is to be a new kind of person.

For a brief time Cambridge was home to both Amartya Sen and John Kenneth Galbraith, one having set down his pen, the other having used it to write a book on violence and identity, and give a lecture that amounted to a talk. Sen's work centers around how rational choice is the foundation of public participation. He warns of the surrender of the individual to the irrational, not in the sense of warning individuals to surrender identity - but instead to have many identites, but not to surrender to any of them.

The response to Parker's challenge is not merely to leaders, who must accept that in the end economics is what people will live with, and not balance sheets and equations. But also to every individual, who must realize that we cannot escape power, but that, instead, power ebbs and flows within us, causing us to join with others at some moments and to break with others at different moments. The question is when, and for what?

The urge of our times is mobocracy - to allow our unthinking spleen decide for us when to join the herd, and when to reduce to rubble that which was, before the mob got its hands on his throat, a human being. The elites of this country became a mob and stampeded into Iraq. Every day on the internet, miniature mobs cast out the individual with too many ideas, to forcefully expressed. The internet allows these mini-mobs to form faster, and to strike with less remorse than the physical world does, it places in the hands of those with money the ability to manufacture consent in ways that the mass broadcast world finds mysterious, or to expose the ugly fault lines of our own social failings. If the worst of the last era was government by the mass, the worst of this is government by the manufactured mob.

"The god of canibals will be a canibal. Of crusaders a crusader Of merchants, a merchant" - so noted Ralph Waldo Emerson in the 19th century's middle years. The god of mobs will be a mob, of consumers a consumer. This is why George Bush's god is a coward and bully, for that is what he and his circle are.

And the same thing that can be said for god, can be said for government. Having reduced our selves to a mob of consumers, and having proclaimed that it is right that we should be so - our government is powerless to act on the great everyday evils, but can drop everything to shove a feeding tube down someone's throat. It is powerless to raise people's standards of living, but can afford to build a wall longer than the Great Wall in China between the US and Mexico. It is powerless to pressure our economic enemies, but can spread vicious jokes about our friends.

And it is here that Parker' challenge finds its first, and most important, test. We cannot demand leaders who resist and are conscious of the calculus of power, unless we do so ourselves. Our disciplines of economics, our laws which give rise to government, our politics which gives rise to policy, our discourse which gives rise to consensus, our philosophy which gives rise to principle - are only reflections of this first test. The most fundamental choice of the individual in the public sphere is to decide when to sacrifice individuality to participate in power. If we surrender the ability to make this choice rationally, if we turn it into some mystical experience of identity beyond our control, then we are truly lost.