The Perils of Censorship

There is little in this life that I would find as reprehensible as censorship. Though the malicious or malignant idea may engender offense and though the words or sentiments of the agent provocateur may even incite others to despicable or deplorable acts, the intentional effort to silence another entirely and forbid them from expression is perhaps itself the height of truly atrocious acts one may engage in, in respect to engagement and communication. Beyond the simple matter of its gross and repressive nature, the act or effort to censor or silence another, either before or in the course of their expression is equally a wholly disingenuous act of a supposedly strident thinker or speaker, while also being emblematic of their own inherent insecurity in the notions and ideas they may seek to posit.

Thought often the province of the single minded totalitarian, such is and can be observed to be present throughout any variety of political or social ideological alignment one may think of, as it supercedes the very notions of inclusivity which is more and more frequently, being enacted by those who would claim to be the champions of such. For to those who seek “safe spaces,” the proverbial slippery slope into abject orthodoxy and the adherence to an insistence that such be the only true or acceptable notions espoused in the open market of ideas, the very act of seeking to silence opposition as opposed to offering retorts, in effect closes the very market in which they would peddle their intellectual or sociological wares and in doing so, exposes the very sort of fear, hatred and intolerance that they would otherwise seek to condemn.

Should one truly be secure in their convictions, then the fear of opposition or questioning should be non existent. Should one truly believe that which they say is to be true, right and just, then surely they should, in the course of offering such to the world, not only be unafraid of opposition, but welcoming of it, as it is only through such conflict and argument that the true validity of such may be shown and the real and proper strength of said convictions be truly fleshed out. Absent this, argument itself is nothing but empty propagandist rhetoric, meant to fall on the ears of those already in agreement and those who in the absence of a contrary position offered, have no choice but to accept such as fact.

In this, should a speaker, thinker, writer or advocate of any idea or of any stripe wish to be taken as respected intellectual, and their ideas themselves taken as worthy of consideration, their openness to opposition and contradiction by opposing parties is not only a right and good thing to court, but an essential one. For it is within the realm of argument that the notions and positions offered may truly win the hearts and minds of others, as without such, the singular narratives presented and accepted, absent alternative offerings becomes themselves the province of orthodoxy. This orthodoxy being itself is in turn, built shaky grounds as when detraction is finally and inevitably found, heard or thought of privately, the original orthodoxy will become the focus of abject scorn and ridicule, even if such is only rooted in the enthusiasm with which many may take to that which may appear rebellious or revolutionary.

It is for these reasons, among the plethora of more basic and obvious intellectual and moral or ethical causes, that the actors participating in censorship, be it by way of the blocking of speech entirely or merely the demeaning of detractors by way of spurious slanderous claims relating to their person, should be themselves viewed with nothing short of scorn and contempt by any who may think or may seek to think with open minds and rational processes of thought. For as has been demonstrated time and time again, the enthusiasm with which one or the groups to which they belong may take to totalitarian senses of narrative and debate, defy all social, political or ideological paradigms, short of those which hold true and objective reason as the higher virtues, as it is only through this cold objective rationality that real and valid truth may ever, in any sense, be realized.

We must not run or hide from criticism of dissent, as argument is itself, the very whetstone upon which our ideas may be sharpened or dulled. And should one wish to maintain the lopsided bluntness of an unrefined point or notion in such a fashion, they should be regarded as nothing less than cowardly and as nothing more than a strident and obnoxious fool.

Perpetual Forgetting: The Depth and Cost of Political Amnesia

Perpetual Forgetting

The Depth and Cost of Political Amnesia

By Nicholas Goroff

“Didn’t they learn anything from the last eight years?”

A common refrain heard from those who follow politics, is that voters suffer from a form of political amnesia when it comes to voting. Every few years, when a general or midterm election crops up, voters head to the polls to choose between a handful of influence laden candidates who take office and quite often wind up doing very much the same thing as their predecessors, typically with only newly refined rhetoric and campaign marketing accompanying it for the purposes of presentation. And as this ‘out with the old, in with the new old’ cycle repeats itself every two to four years, the sparing and superficial changes of office and official, yielding little in the way of genuine reform, predictably renews outcry that voters simply never learn.

Now while these repeat performances from war hawks, corporate puppets, religious dominionists and neoliberal economics enthusiasts seem to dominate our elections and government, a longer and more sustained form of political amnesia seems just as present, albeit somewhat overshadowed by way of revisionist history.

Presently, the fight(s) over economic inequality exist largely as the beating heart of most true populist political movements. Short of the corporate owned “Tea Party,” which relies on establishment money so as to preserve the status quo by means of distracting attention onto more rhetorical issues like gun rights and bombastic nonsense, the economic oligarchy and gross inequality derived from its ceaseless crusade for industrial “growth” and “progress,” has served to galvanize the will of revolutionaries and radicals throughout the globe. While to many this may seem like a new development in terms of popular politics, it takes only a quick glance at human history to see that inequality and the fight for power and economic security between the masses and wealthy elites, has been at the very center of human politics since mankind first abandoned it’s hunter-gatherer roots in favor of an agrarian and ownership society.

That day long ago, when a fool drew a line in the dirt, proclaiming everything behind it to be his and all the other fools, more foolish than he believed him, marked the dawn of the fight over inequality. From that day sprung a long history of peasant revolts against  feudal nobility, the advent new systems of government designed to better cater to popular needs while preserving private power and eventually numerous socialistic revolutions rooted still in that old conflict between rich and poor. Yet despite the age old battles by the masses to rid themselves of subjugation at the hands of the elite, the struggle continues on, again and as always, painted as one that is still in it’s infancy.

But why then when we can measure the struggle for equality and shared benefit which ranges from refutation of claims of rule by divine right to the more modern battle cries of the ninety-nine-percent, is the matter still so regularly painted as one that is new to society?

The answer lies, as it so frequently does, within the tactical playbook of those who seek to preserve their rule. Division and distraction are commonly regarded as the two primary tools of political manipulation. If one of power wishes to avoid answering questions on a given issue, they need only to make enough noise about a different one to rally their loyalists against their detractors to distract from the conversation entirely. And yet beyond this common and deceptive tactic, the ability to count on general forgetfulness and the invocation of revisionist history plays a crucial role in maintaining the status quo.

Consider socialism in America. To most, the idea of Marxist or Engelian principles such as redistribution of wealth, robust state controlled public services and the general principle of collective good are believed to be modern ideas, all disproven and beaten down during the twentieth century and cold war. Yet it is by the cherry picking of historical writings and the selective exaltation of historical figures and ideas that this notion of newness to socialistic or populist thinking is perpetuated.

While legend and mythology permeates popular American history, such as Samuel Adams leading the Boston Tea Party, or George Washington and his cherry tree, countless numbers of revolutionary patriots and popular ideas have been lost to an intentional rewriting of our nation’s founding. At a cursory glance from the average text book, one might easily be led to believe that the “founding fathers” were all of a singular, capitalist mindset and supportive of ideas commonly regarded as conservative or libertarian. Yet upon a closer and more rigorous inspection, it does not take long at all to find calls for worker ownership of farms and businesses, state orchestrated redistributions of wealth, the establishment of public health care and legal-political systems have all been carried in the hearts and minds of leaders, radicals and revolutionaries since before we had even split from great Britain.

Doctor Thomas Young of Boston played a rather pivotal role in the nation’s founding and yet outside of local history, popular history has largely forgotten him. Could this be due to his radical notions about social equilibrium not fitting the desired mold the early American elites sought to preserve, or merely convenient oversight by post-revolution historians?

While the latter may seem convenient, the former seems far more likely. Doctor Young, a man who was run out of New York for being too secular in his politics, not only introduced the concept of open forum government meetings in America, but also called on a constitutional provision requiring wealth redistribution. And though it was Doctor Young himself who helped orchestrate the now well known Boston tea party, while being the only man participating who did not disguise himself as a Mohawk in the process, his contributions to our founding, his ideas, convictions and contributions to the cause of American independence, have all been lost to revisionist mythology.

In a more modern example, the promotion of the Democratic and Republican parties as the sole legitimate political institutions in our nation, is itself a thoroughly perpetuated lie, rooted largely in the twentieth century advent of commercialized political propaganda. In the era of Woordrow Wilson and the drum beat for military involvement in World War One, our modern divide and distract political circus was born. Through manipulation of media and public opinion, as well as what were in essence political purges of non-conforming political movements and parties throughout the country, the bipolar narrowing of afforded political thought took from the public the options for alternative policies and robbed them of historical remembrance of gains made by socialist workers parties throughout the nation.

As one gilded age gave way to the next, with only the rationalizations and public presentations of their systems being subject to change, the fight for equality between the masses and their ruling elites was routinely repainted by those in power as a new debate. Remanded to perpetual infancy, populist movements that were not hijacked or co-opted by oligarchic and plutocratic institutions were constantly being forced to start over, never reaching the critical mass needed to see real reform or revolution take place.

Much like repeating of history as seen through a retrospective analysis of election results and the policies which followed, this cultivated and well maintained amnesia which seeks to keep the age old questions of equality and egalitarianism at bay have taken such deep root in our current partisan paradigm, that such becomes cause for many Americans to stop and scratch their heads at the sight of massive rallies in places like Europe and South America. So well controlled is the true and long vested populist angst against the perpetuators of the status-quo, that whenever the struggle is spoken of, regardless of the age or era, it is regarded as a new and curious phenomenon.

In this, the advancement of what is arguably the central underlying social struggle that has waged since first the concepts of wealth and property were devised, is kept relegated to the twin statuses of underdeveloped social theory and utopian dreams of an ungrateful underclass. And though the masters of coin and influence no longer seek to justify their power by way of claiming divine right, the rationalizations offered in the forms of economic paternalism and neoliberal theories are but a half step away from the erroneous notions of being ordained by God.

Should this cyclical social and political amnesia persist, the struggles of the many to free themselves from the obligations set upon them by the few, will see little in the way of tangible and measurable change. Yet there is reason to be optimistic, in that by way of our advancements in information technology and communication, we have in effect recreated the type of communicative threats to power that were first afforded by the advent of the printed text. No longer able to firmly control the narratives in play, the modern strategy of burying truth beneath mountains of distracting hyperbole has become the latest play by the elite to keep the masses disorganized.

Yet even in this, the aggressive and consistent revolutionaries, no longer content to be marginalized, shouted down or have their voices buried beneath heaps of manufactured distraction, take greater steps than ever before in holding fast and true to their causes of class based equilibrium and an end to things such as plutocracy and economic imperialism. Stopping short of saying the brighter future lies just over the horizon, the very acknowledgement of the history to the struggle is grounds for cautious optimism. And as this, the cause of the “99%” continues to make gains in terms of public discussion, it remains imperative that understanding  in regards to the history of the cause be delivered hand in hand with the arguments themselves, lest we collectively find ourselves forced to yet again, start from zero as suffering amnesiacs who’ve forgotten all they’ve learned.

Is it time for a change yet?

Is it time for a change yet? Plenty of people would say so. Plenty seem to think so.

After decades of deregulation of the banking and finance sectors, all carried out with the specific aim of allowing the rich to get richer, the economy of the masses has suffered severely, while those at the top are enjoying a type of wealth, status and privilege never seen by this planet before. From shelter to sustenance and everything in between, the most basic needs of people have become so commercialized, commoditized, controlled and corrupted, that even little Oliver would need a credit check before humbly asking for “more.”

Is it time yet?

With tent cities and homeless camps cropping up across the nation, houses and whole neighborhoods sit idle, awaiting a speculators figures to give the green light to part them off like a used car that goes to rot in a patch of tall weeds. As major American cities find themselves going up for private auctions to pay debts to nebulous conglomerates of wealthy financiers, with the working people who stand to suffer the greatest, erroneously being saddled with the blame, social strife and crimes born of generations of desperation and need are met with brutality and obstinate loathsome judgement, the systems in play taking great lengths to ignore the true sources of such problems.

Is it time yet?

A multi-tiered political system of separate but equal, offering tip-top influence and power to the highest bidder while striving to convince the people below that their votes count, while taking every available step to prevent them from casting one, sets out false paradigms of left and right to distract the masses from the cancer of corporate oligarchy, while throughout the whispers and cries for revolution, doubt as to the prospective virtue of public and collective good are sewed throughout so as to ensure no consensus is reached between the options of responsive state and anarchistic social Darwinism. The glossy fliers, hi-definition commercial promises and cults of personality which are force fed each election cycle, seek only to harness the nebulous rage of the people for their own quick victories, before all is turned back to serve the moneyed influence peddlers and corporate masters of this, our industrial power complex and still, we’re told that our voice matters.

Is it time yet?

Non-violent nobodies finding their lives taken away as they’re penned up in steel and concrete boxes, with murderers, rapists and thieves of the higher orders of our society given little more than stern warnings as “affluenza” shifts from being a made-up term used to defend the privileged in court, to a common concept more descriptive of the broken class based in-justice system and it’s contrived measure of human value. The best government money can buy, the finest justice that status can claim.

Is it time yet?

Body counts in foreign attacks quantified by nationality. “Five Americans and fifty others, dead.” A subtle attempt to further dehumanize those who are not of our tribe, for the purpose of making their casual murders in the name of freedom and commerce acceptable to the masses. Generations raised on war, with concepts of virtue, honor and duty being co-opted for the purposes of nationalist combat. The endless hours of Halo and director’s cut blu-rays of countless romanticized war movies, indoctrinating the underclasses into the notions that killing and dying for your country is more noble than living to better your world.
The concept of empire, now repackaged as a quest to “defend freedom,” so as to distract from resource grabs and subjugation that has come to define American multinational business. An “us-versus-them” narrative, so well crafted, that the minute and relative differences between cultures are sold as reason enough for “us” to kill “them” and take what they have.

Is it time yet?

The classic slave pens of old have now been replaced with wooden stools for the elderly to sit  upon as they greet Walmart shoppers on their way to purchase sneaker and t-shirts made by children, labeled as “workers,” for whom the net cost of a single shoe is often greater than the daily wage paid to make a hundred of them. The notion of slavery, while simply abhorrent to the people, now written off as costly for companies who’ve realized that to enslave a person in the land they live and pay them fractions of pennies so as to say they’re getting a “fair deal,” is now joined with the word “wage” at home and “outsourcing” abroad. The cost of wealth, again proving to be dignity of millions.

Is it time yet?

Courts which now serve the purposes of rationalizing the inhuman evils of greed, corruption, subjugation, erosion of civic virtue and the domination of the many at the hands of the few, rule from polished benches set high above the heads of those below. Ruling on matters of popular consequence with only exclusive benefit in mind, these men and women, many of whom call themselves ‘Christian,’ slam gavels to call for order before casting judgment upon matters which so often break the very commandments of compassion espoused by their enlightened profits, while turning to some selective interpretation of the law, further rationalizing the evils they do in the name of supposed order. A system corrupted by ideology and self-righteous condemnations, which at the same time while consistently serving wealth and entitlement to power, makes the concept of justice so murky, that even those who suffer are led to question if they did something wrong.

Is it time yet?

Whereas police were once called “civil servants,” the term is now lost beneath armor plating and hidden behind assault masks and soldier’s rifles. So militarized are those who are supposed to be our protectors, that by both equipment and action, one is hard pressed to find the difference between detectives in small town America and commandos in Afghanistan. Flashbangs in toddlers cribs and “justified homicides” occurring in every other raid at a wrong address, discretion as the better part of valor has now been replaced by might making right, with the shield now protecting our oppressors from the rage and will of those oppressed, signifying little more than their place as modern city guards, sent out to protect the new nobility, in this new feudal era.

Is it time yet?

Our politics, our police, our courts and our corrections. Our industries and energy, economy and medicine. Our candidates and managers, our labor and our sweat. With revolution brewing is it time for action yet?

The Never-Wheres and Coulda’-Beens: Greed And A Generation Lost

It might not be too over the top to say we’re looking at a potentially lost generation. Despite technological advancements, evolving arts and culture and hopeful, bold, new ideas about how we can collectively realize that “another world is possible,” there are forces at work that sadly, are greater than the sum strength or resilience the youth of today are capable of withstanding. Bombarded from all sides by not only messages about the world and ways to live, but demands, obligations and responsibilities unlike any natural creature has or ever will experience on this planet.

Chained to economic models of the future which all too often fail to account for a whole host of variables regarding supply, demand, labor, capital, production and materials sourcing and most of all changes in environment, social or political climates and of course, people. Under the crushing demands to make as much as you can, those of means now operating on a greed instinct to horde what they can to ensure their survival has now subjugated masses beneath the weights of cost, debt and the demand for more.

The world expects to see its first trillionaire soon. The word, as I type it, is unrecognized by spellcheck as it has yet to exist. Yet despite this quantum leap in regards to individual human wealth, starvation, social strife and genuine struggle still plague millions.

Tucked now, into what they’re told is a comfortable middle ground between abject poverty and unfathomable wealth, are generations of Americans whose potential will never be realized. Doctors, scientists, scholars and artists, all drowning in oceans of could’a-been’s and never-wheres. Revolutionary thoughts never developed, new ideas never cultured.

This is not an aberration. Nor is it a side effect of a condition, but rather it is a symptom of one. A disease. A social parasite living in the grander psychic zeitgeist that is the modern world.

Greed. The instinctual compulsive desire to accumulate more, to ensure one’s survival, hence bolstering one’s chances to pass their genes along to young who can survive and breed themselves, has in the light of modern society, run amok to the detriment of numbers not seen since feudal eras. To call it a sin would be subjective, as moral or ethical judgment on a matter often only serves to cloud the bigger picture. And besides, taking it as a biological function is just more fun. But be it a sin, instinct or something else entirely, the primitive need to have, keep and gain more for one’s self is now finding itself front and center in a way that nature likely never intended it to be.

Why then, have the needs of the many taken such a backseat to the desires of the few?

A large contributing factor comes from ideology. Whereas typically one thinks of ideology as political or social stances that are relatively right or wrong in varying degrees, the reality is simply that ideology is a nonsense, one-size-fits-all philosophy from which all other thoughts regarding politics or public life are sprouted.

A backwards reasoning. While logic and science insist on conclusions to come as a result of evidence, data analysis and tested, proven theory, ideology works somewhat in reverse. Desired conclusions are established ahead of time, with all research or thought on the matter coming after the fact, all molded and perceived with the central goal of supporting the core idea. An ideology is formed when enough of these positions and ideas, again, all rooted with the central aim of promoting the core thesis or philosophy, are assembled to form a web of self-supporting notions which are in turn taken on by the “thinker” as indisputable truth.

Are there issues with violence, poverty, social unrest? Well, before thinking about the matters themselves and their various parts (which can be a real bore,) establish a side to take. Liberal? Well, just get rid of the guns, increase the social assistance programs and draft whatever laws or policies are required to make the upset parties feel better. Or are you conservative? Well clearly more guns, more business freedom and tougher law enforcement are the only things that will work. Oh, or maybe you’re a libertarian, in which case just eliminating government and letting people be “freer” will universally address all the problems at hand.

And so on…

The logical disconnect between ideology and reality is, for the purposes of this piece, most easily recognized through observation of the greed-is-good, Gordon Gecko mentality that would seem to have taken over the nation at some point. Now according to some ideologies, self interest, rugged individualism and competitive greed based social structures are not only natural, but were part of our founding philosophy.

This of course is at best, marginally true and at worst, utter nonsense. However taking a long view, it can be easy to see how we got here.

A Brief History Of The Zeitgeist Of Greed

Greed, as we know it, has always been around. This is true. From the first time one fool drew a line in the dirt and proclaimed everything behind it his, and other fools where foolish enough to agree with him, the desires to not only have, but have more than others, have been at work in our species. It’s only natural. Survival mechanism, etc…

Now, in regards to modern greed, a relatively safe place to start on the topic could be roughly a hundred years ago. Though games of greed and empire have been around forever, it is within the last century that such has truly been institutionalized and inflated to the levels we see now. As business interests lined up to support American involvement in World War 1, the advent of modern marketing and public relations (as per Creel and Bernays) under Woodrow Wilson set the stage for the modern competition or conflict models which have defined our global relations.

Political parties and organizations which opposed the mainstream partisan ideologies of neoliberal economics, foreign intervention and a military state were marginalized through means of media manipulation, frivolous legal action and an orchestrated drum beat of nationalism and pride. Commercial society began to grow with advertisements now being tailored, both commercially and politically, with the specific aims of manipulating mass psychology. And soon, a new day had dawned in the realms of power and manipulation.

Following this, the attempts to temper this rampant lust for power and wealth were tepid, with market bubbles and fluctuations, rooted largely in the win-at-all-costs mentalities of traders and bankers, who saw no problems with risking the economic vitality of the nation in order to secure their own short term, high yield gains, ultimately leading to the Great Depression. Though following this, new attempts to apply modern sociological thinking to the matters by way of public programs and safety nets were put into play with substantial results, the prosperity enjoyed after both such programs had taken affect to raise the base standard of living coupled with the industrial growth that came out of war time production and spending, ultimately led to a backslide in thinking once again, ultimately resulting in modern day pro-market loyalists to decry the public programs born of necessity as plights which prolonged the suffering.

This post-WWII shift in thinking was also largely, if not primarily attributable to another facet of orthodox imperial thinking, which came about as a result of the Cold War.

Though American history generally paints the time when east and west faced off with nukes as one of Soviet aggression being confronted by a noble American, freedom-loving boldness, a more nuanced and objective review paints a much different picture.

Though the post-war dreams of FDR and the-man-who-should-have-been-President, Henry Wallace, were those of competing systems (progressive capitalism and soviet communism) each vying in their own rights to prove in peaceful, non-militaristic means, which system worked the best, such dreams were ultimately dashed by hardliners both within DC and Moscow. With Truman’s forced ascent to power at the behest of party bosses and Stalin’s own growing tyrannical paranoia regarding western intentions both seeing their true hay-days as the remaining world powers looked to carve up the fractured and war-torn world, the competition between ideas quickly became an arms race, complimented by countless intelligence based political annexations of various nations, in what was the dawn of the new imperialism.

Through Europe, Asia, Africa and South America, the US and USSR played their high stakes games of Risk, installing puppet governments in various nations to hedge the client states of their adversaries, all the while allowing the industrial war machines to grow exponentially in size and scale. To the Soviets, such global imperial strength was rationalized as a defense of the people against a corporate empire, with Americans and westerners seeing their own efforts as those in support of freedom and democracy.

Neither side was being honest with themselves, as American backed coups in nations which dissented from American policy wracked up massive body counts in their installation of friendly dictators. To the Soviets, the resources and populations of the areas their union won, went almost immediately to bolstering their own publicly financed war machines, turning what was supposed to be a populist workers state into a industrial military empire of its own.

On the philosophical or ideological fronts, the rhetoric between Soviet state domination of wealth and resources and American private sector greed, led to a gaping divide between concepts of public and private ownership and benefit, causing capitalism and socialism both to be seen as absolutely exclusive and polarized schools of thought. Following the US effectively spending the Soviet’s to death, the perceived victory in the west only served to bolster the notions of western capitalist orthodoxy being the ‘one true way’ for societies to exist.

In the pride of a presumed victory, the notions that greed, self interest and market style competition were taken on by many as the definitive and absolutely just  social theories, leading to a general public merging of the concepts of freedom and democracy and those of financial gain and unfettered capitalism. Soon, greed was not only good, but virtuous and a new version of some very old world thinking resurfaced with a glossy new veneer.

Whereas poverty had once, for a brief period of time, been recognized as a social condition stemming from societal and economic conditions, a renewed individualist mindset was fostered declaring that under all circumstances, individuals alone were responsible for their fates. If one was born rich or poor didn’t matter as the dream of social mobility was rolled into the concept of individualist sinking or swimming, declaring that any who were poor were poor because they were lazy and all who were rich, were so do to hard work and virtuous, intelligent effort.

Akin to the classic feudal senses of divine entitlement in its declaration of earned versus unearned wealth and status, the new, secular Calvinism found a ready home in a nation sitting atop a sudden and tentative economic bubble, which was happy to believe that such would last forever and that all who enjoyed it, deserved it by way of labor and effort.

It would seem then, that as such a self satisfying idea took deeper and deeper root, the ideology of greed under the auspices of capitalism, became something more akin to a religious conviction than any sound sociological thought. Wealth accumulated in methods that benefited those atop the economic food chain was celebrated, regardless of the affects that said accumulation had on the larger population. The poisoning of the ecology, the marginalization and subjugation of entire work forces and even the lawful corruption of public institutions by way of campaign financing, lobbying and the appointment of industrial insiders to positions of regulatory authority over the very industries they served, were all viewed as right and appropriate steps towards bolstering the top-down economic model.

Meanwhile, efforts by the underclasses to advance their own standing in society were opposed in various means, depending on the nature of their ventures. Was a member of the underclass able to innovate in some grand industrial sense, such innovation became almost immediately coveted, with efforts to buy out, take over or coopt the innovation with the specific aims of employing such to serve the established corporate oligarchy, being taken almost immediately. For industries outside of private sector control, or those which threatened such, laws were passed in the interest of marginalizing the threat or industry that the captains of the corporate elite could not control.

From questions as to ‘who killed the electric car,’ to those of a perpetual and obviously failed war on drugs, all aspects of modern life were turned to serve the corporate elite, all in the name of western capitalism, which at this point was almost universally conflated with freedom, liberty and democracy.

Though these events transpired as matters of our recent past, their affects today are becoming more apparent than ever, with the gradual slide into a corporate oligarchy (or outright plutocracy, depending on one’s definitions,) speeding up as it has been, the old marketing ploys of equating big business with political freedom have now begun to find less fertile grounds in terms of efforts to sew the messages effectively. Struggling underclasses rally together to decry what they often only understand as a broken system in loose and general terms. From the Tea Party to Occupy, the specifics in rhetoric and stated cause all exist upon an underlying and perhaps subconscious recognition that all is not right and that the direction we’ve been hurtling in, has proven to be a wrong or harmful one.

Is it too late though?

Perhaps. Whereas the Teaparty’s initially misguided anti-authoritarian, anti-government sentiments have now been fully co-opted by the corporate establishment to further their aims of total domination of the social, political and economic narratives, all under the continued guises of “freedom” and “liberty,” the diffused an often chaotic aims of what remains of the Occupy movement continue to make establishing a central narrative of socio-economic and political imbalances of power difficult to deliver to the broader population. The left-right paradigm, in all its reductionism and logical dishonesty, has created an environment where the rage of one side may be harnessed by the source of the corruption being raged at, while that of the other can be counted on as dispersed throughout a range of often topical political issues.

All the while, the debt and credit based popular economies of monetary obligations between parties using money that doesn’t even really exist in a tangible sense outside of tallied spreadsheets and ledgers, continues to keep the masses under the boot of those of means and power, with their demands and desires for more being seen not only as lawful, but socially beneficial. The churning machinery of modern market economics, which states that the broader market concerns take precedence over all other matters, has made ours a system in which masters must be satisfied before the commoners may be fed. From matters of government (which itself is wholly tainted by the excessive influence of moneyed powers,) to those of labor and capital (the latter of which has come to be held in higher esteem than the former,) the needs and vitality of the masses, society as a whole, are cast not as capstones for the larger structure, but as building blocks used in the foundations of social pyramids.

And thus do we return to a lost generation. Overtaken by debt, bills, costs of living and endless and increasing lists of obligations, the masses have been left too busy to effectively organize. Too scattered throughout social, ethnic, racial, religious, political and ideological divides, all nurtured by elite powers for the purposes of warding off the potential for a united front in the face of obvious corruption of social structures, the people as a social body, have been turned into the worst kind of slaves.

Meant to struggle just to make ends meet, with their labors and wages being leveraged as line items in the bottom lines of their masters profit quotas, they are fooled in greater and greater numbers into blaming one another, blaming other groups, blaming foreigners or any other party that can be sold to them as their enemy, all for the sake of maintaining the illusion of benevolent elites who sat waiting for the hardest of workers to join them in their worlds of luxury.

It was Steinbeck who famously said;

Socialism never took root in America because the poor see themselves not as an oppressed proletariat, but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires…”

And herein lies the crux of the game. The true mastery in this new era of human subjugation. In this nation’s rush to defeat the perceived evil of common, collective society as was embodied in their minds by socialism, it has thrust itself head first into a renewed and modernized version of the same old rationalizations for greed and corruption that plagued pre-enlightenment societies for centuries. Now, in place of divine right, wealth is seen as evidence of worthiness on its own, with the assumption of hard work and diligence being its source, while spreading lines that the absence of such was suggestive of a weak and lazy character.

So effective has this ruse been, that even those who themselves are at or near the bottom of the socio-economic ladders, more often turn a scornful eye to those just beneath them. Both for the purposes of a quick and easy scapegoat for larger, more complex issues that they may not fully understand, while at the same time offering those with meager means the ability to look snidely down their noses at another, rationalizing that whatever little wealth or personal security they may enjoy was wholly deserved as a result of their own labor and diligence, unlike those other folks, who are clearly just lazier than they.

And so, throughout all of this, the marketing ploys, the mass manipulation, the bombarding and overwhelming of the population with contrived obligation to faceless corporate masters and even the political games which keep the underclasses fighting amongst each other, there remains but one hopeful saving grace.

When taken in the broader, objective context of long-view sociology, the patterns of social systems leading to social unrest, leading then in turn to overhauls of the systems that be, until the preexisting or newly created flaws in such make themselves apparent, it could, theoretically, be presumed that this present onset of strife and stratification is a sign that yet another paradigm shift is on the way.

From feudal times where divine right to wealth and power was used to justify both riches and poverty, up through the popular revolutions of the old world, leading then up through the development of collective, Marxist theory and its clashes against more vested and traditional conflict models, the total growth of social and civilized theories can be taken to suggest that even now in this present and dramatic time, humanity itself is simply undergoing further growing pains as it evolves towards the near utopian fantasy of a fair, just and egalitarian world. Human potential, though revered for what it has and can accomplish, continues to strive for greater freedom on its own, coming into conflict over and over again with larger societal constraints that often only exist to serve selective beneficiaries.

A growing understanding of the incomplete and imperfect nature to orthodox thinking, be it conservative, liberal, libertarian, anarchist, socialist or other, continues to refine the gross and total perceptions of the world in the minds of more rational and objective thinkers. And while the daily constraints of obligation and care continue to challenge broader and more widespread recognition of these failings in absolute thinking and the ready ways in such lends itself to corruption of final goals, the unrest created and the dialogues and debates such leads to has lead to cracks emerging in the old walls of big tent orthodoxies.

Whether these cracks will deepen, leading to a collapse of these faulty traditional models of social and political thought is less a question of ‘if,’ but rather ‘when,’ leading back again to the possibility for a lost generation.

Evolution is slow. Biological or social, changes to the fundamental structure and function of a thing takes time. A hopeful view could take up the line that the angst and unrest signifies a sea-change in the overall social and political paradigm. Yet a more realistic view is one which would suggest that such anger, rage and unrest will be passed generationally to culture and develop over time. Much like the notions of self interest being mutually exclusive to common interest, as evolved through generations during the cold war, this new paradigm, which according to raw logic and observation will (and must) draw causal lines between popular struggle and selective private insistence for gain, does in theory present the notion that a generation or two or three removed from now, the concepts of balance between private and public interests (presently regarded in an over-simplified manner as simple “hybrid” systems) may rise to take the place of these old orthodoxies.

However as society, the nation and the species wait for this next sociological evolution, this generation, with the artists, researchers, scholars and thinkers, whose works could advance our total culture and civilization forward at speeds unimaginable to common sense, will remain the province of speculative possibility. Their works, ideas, writings, talks and legacies never realized as they find themselves crushed beneath the weight of a society determined to cater to excess at the expense of all below. Raw human potential, never cultivated, with education being seen as little more than job training as desperation grows.

Perhaps future generations will look back onto these times of contrived and artificial want and worry with sad eyes, wondering to themselves just what could have been, had the possibilities for realization of self and ability not been ground down to serve the interests of those who’s lives remain focused only on securing their own short term and short sighted personal gains.

Perhaps. Only time will tell.

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