A Complaint Free World or How I Learned to Stop Complaining and Love Fascism

Nobody wants to be a complainer.

It’s not cool. It’s not empowered. It’s not enlightened. It’s not positive or proactive. It’s certainly not attractive or sexy. Complaining is almost as unattractive as whining, but not quite.

Lucky for us, someone has started a movement to stop all this unattractive and negative complaining. It’s called The Complaint Free World movement. The man who started it is Will Bowden. He is the pastor of a Unity Church in Kansas. And he’s been on Oprah.

From Oprah’s website: “It’s like if you’re not articulating the complaint, if your complaint has no where to go, your mind stops creating the complaint.” And what’s the difference between a comment and a complaint? “If you’re putting a lot of energy into it, if you want it changed, you’re complaining.”

By that definition, our documentary What A Way To Go is soundly guilty of the label “complaint” and Tim and I are master complainers. Going on four years now, we’ve put huge amounts of energy into research, writing, production and now promotion of what Marc Maximov called “a bleak, relentless, ecological horror film.”

And we aren’t apologizing or protesting such a description. In fact, when I read the review to Tim we donned big smiles. We will use Maximov’s words in our promotional literature.

Now I learn that despite our best efforts to incite and support complainers, The Complaint Free World movement is growing. 4,062,000 little purple plastic bracelets have been distributed to 78 countries. Sixty six newspapers have run articles about it. And if you want to join the movement, you too can obtain a free purple plastic bracelet of your very own, embossed with the words “A Complaint Free World.”

This is a dangerous movement.

This movement aids and abets the Culture of Denial, the real religion of the well-fed and well-entertained masses of Americans. The Culture of Denial poses a greater threat to life on the planet than terrorism. After all, terrorism threatens only rich, First World human beings. The Culture of Denial, of which the Complaint Free World movement is a branch congregation, threatens to eradicate most life on the planet as we mindlessly continue to spew carbon atoms into the atmosphere at ever increasing rates as if there were no tomorrow.

Do you know that carbon emissions climbed again in this last year, despite the fact that An Inconvenient Truth won the Academy Award for Best Documentary?

The inconvenient truth is, at some point there will be no tomorrow if we keep this up.

The Complaint Free World movement is dangerous in the same way that many pseudo-spiritual systems are dangerous. These thought systems suggest that there is nothing wrong outside of the individual. They proffer the idea that we are each individually and solely responsible for our suffering. They suggest that the world out there is fine, that it is our own limited thoughts and beliefs that create our reality.

Thus, we are advised to change our thoughts and everything will be fine. Bring God into your heart, cheer up, be good, be nice, stop complaining and step outside the bounds of time and space and everything will turn out okay after all. You were just dreaming the 90% reduction (otherwise called “population collapse”) of large fish in the ocean. You just had it conjured up in your little mind that the glaciers that used to provide fresh water and reflect sunlight have all but melted. Clean up your thinking folks. It’s all you complainers’ fault that we are losing more than 200 species a day. So stop your damn complaining!

Let’s think about this.

A complaint, as defined by the dictionary I recently discovered on my iMac is “a statement that a situation is unsatisfactory or unacceptable.”

What happens then if we eliminate complaints from the world?

It’s pretty simple and pretty sad. We stop speaking up about situations that are unsatisfactory or unacceptable. Like global warming, like top soil loss and degredation, like toxic waste in our air, water and furniture. Like epidemic cancer rates.

We stop examining and talking about what is oppressive, destructive and life threatening. We effectively repress whatever is unsatisfactory or unacceptable. In the words of the good pastor we stop “articulating the complaint,” and “if your complaint has no where to go, your mind stops creating the complaint.”

What happens when we do that?

In psychological terms we would call that repression or denial. In political terms, that would be called fascism. My trusty dictionary confirms this. Fascism is “any movement, tendency, or ideology that favors dictatorial government, centralized control of private enterprise, repression of all opposition…”

Do I think the pastor of that Unity church is a fascist?

Of course not. I’d probably even like him. If I asked him to sit with me and talk and grieve about the loss of the life-support systems on the planet, he’d probably say something like “Yeah, it’s really sad.”

My guess is that the good pastor believes that if he can get people to stop complaining about the little stuff that they will feel better about themselves and so be in a better position to do something about the big issues.

There may be some truth in that. But I wonder. I wonder if people just end up repressing how they really feel and retreat into a kind of spiritual la-la land, out of touch with the realities of their bodies and the world, out of touch with their need for a real voice in the world, lost in passive hoping for a better tomorrow.

I often say to Tim, “Let’s not throw the baby out with the bathwater.” No matter how stinking and polluted the bathwater is, I like to make sure there isn’t a brilliant baby in there struggling for breath. I look for the baby before we sling the bathwater into the hazardous waste lagoon. But it is equally important to take note of the very real and toxic pollution in the bathwater. The quantities of denial and fuzzy thinking that permeate the bathwater of The Complaint Free World movement, look pretty toxic. The baby may already have suffocated.

I’ve thought about issuing a general disclaimer to my blog posts. This is what it would be:

“No matter what I write here, and no matter how emphatically I write it, be advised that I am always open to examine and suspend my assumptions. I’m always open to listen to other’s points of view, if those people with different points of view will likewise agree to examine and suspend their assumptions. This is the crux of true dialogue.”

That being said, I will state:

“It is unacceptable for one species to destroy the world. It is not satisfactory. I don’t approve. It does not please me. “

If that makes me a complainer, so be it. I’ll pass on the purple bracelet.