WORK IN PROGRESS
The Culture of Power in America
See this two slide PowerPoint Presentation portraying the 'Systems' part of the "Natural Systems" 'structure and systems' approach to solving the problems of our disturbed culture: Power and Culture - Analysis of Interaction of Systems.pptx . This model serves as a guide for the analysis and solution of our cultures problems.
The life orientation of the people is to gain power. Power is achieved by using two strategies. One strategy is offensive, to gain dominance, to win, to achieve, to acquire, and to be better, higher, or more than others are. The other strategy is complementary and consists of being defensive. One must vigilantly be on the defensive to guard against rivals who are on the offensive. The people establish rules that must apply to all participants as a part of the defensive strategy. Rules multiply and the solution to having too great a multiplicity of rules is to condense them into principles. Culturally knowledgeable people master the art of applying principles and communicating principles to prevent barbaric offensive strategies. Values are another, simpler, way of expressing principles in interpersonal interaction and imposing order on the people’s offensive strategies by promulgating values. Religion also imposes order and does so through communicating principles, values, and rules. Groups typically form as a strategy for achieving success in offensive goals and defending against rivals. Groups are successful if they establish loyalty as an essential value by which all inside the group must abide. Rules, values, principles, and loyalty are used by power as regulatory attributes.
Power, in this context, means the control and influence of other people. More specifically, it is the influencing, granting of or withholding, or being a causal factor in influencing the opinions of another person or group. Power can involve the disposition of official positions; degrees or span of authority; legitimacy of authorization; degrees of use of financial leverage; access to avenues of opportunity; degrees of freedom to participate or act; granting or recognizing rights. Power can involve access to physical or natural resources. It can entail the manipulation of the means available for social action. Power can mean the control of the engineering or information technology that can shape attitudes; beliefs; values, personality; or even the types and nature of relationships. Power can involve criminal or psychological blackmail. Institutions are imbued with the power to shape mental capacities, knowledge; worldviews, judgments about events or policies, and assessments of public figures. Power is this and it is whatever else might be involved in determining the people’s actions, which they would otherwise not have taken.
Power in this context should be thought of as the ‘exercise’ of power and, typically, it would involve some form of coercion. Coercion can be by physical means through a continuum to extremely subtle, psychological gestures of signals such as even the raising of an eyebrow at just the right moment, or a slight inflection of the voice. In the specific context of government and business, power means the ability to make decisions that influence subordinates and their constituents or customers. Conversely, persons outside of a governmental body or office or corporation or corporate office may have the ability to exercise power over similar types of decisions.
The influencing, being a causal factor in influencing, persons is power. However, more importantly, the power flowing from the top echelon of our nation is the ability to implant the content of other person’s minds, including even their wishes and fantasies, without their being in the least bit aware of this. You can ask anyone where their goals, preferences, taste, or any other genre of choice, come from and they will tell you that they come from within them. If a person has committed something that is considered wrong and you ask them who is to blame, most people will point something external such as some other person or circumstance, or even the devil, made them do it. If you, instead, tell them that something outside of themselves caused them to choose to do what they chose or did, they will invariably insist that they made the choice and no one could influence their choices.
Consider the following examples. If a person believes a certain president is or was wonderful and good, then you will have very difficult time convincing them that the media made them believe that, whereas, in fact, they were just as corrupt and just as much the author of harm on a massive scale as almost all other presidents. You can try to persuade them those you love and those you hate are pretty much the same. However, you are likely to be called crazy.
If a couple says they want a big, beautiful home in an enviable neighborhood and you tell them that they have this desire because they have been systematically brainwashed, they will probably say that that is ridiculous.
If a soldier is told that if he or she goes into a virtual death trap for honor and love of their country and that, if they survive, they will be awarded a medal, they will go with pride. You can tell them the war is illegal and immoral. You can tell them that Napoleon said that you can get a man to do anything, no matter how dangerous, for a mere ribbon on his uniform. If you can tell them that they are being manipulated, as Napoleon manipulated his men, to do something hideous, to participate in a war crime, a crime against humanity, will they believe you and rebel? No, they will likely say you are unpatriotic and do not know what you are talking about.
If corporate executive tells a subordinate, especially one with a family, to cover up the fact that what the company is doing is deadly to people or destructive to the earth’s organic life and if the executive threatens to fire the subordinate if they do not obey, will they refuse and risk being fired? Not likely!
If you consider these examples and if you believe and realize that these are examples of what is going on every day, everywhere in America, then you are beginning to understand the nature of the Culture of Power. This is what this essay is attempting to explore and make as clear as possible.
When power is the primary orientation of the culture, then the attributes rules, values, principles, and loyalty are all subservient to power. Power reigns. A person or group with the most power can alter the other attributes. In the context of a power oriented culture in which assets are at stake, power becomes the major goal of most persons. Let us assume that life and property are major values. Mastery of the means for exercising power becomes of utmost importance. Rules and loyalty are used to standardize and control the way people relate to life and property. Rules become institutionalized through law or a legal system. Religion also regulates relations to life and property. However, religion is differentiated in to subgroups or denominations, each of which can and do have their own variations in these rules. Let us assume that law and religion generally support respect for life and property. Law and religion can alter, with approved exceptions, the treatment of life and property. Lethal force, or the threat thereof, can be allowed to control respect life and property. In other words, in the interest of maintaining power, the institutionalized authority of law and religion can sanction destruction or appropriation of lives and property. A powerful in-group can enforce alterations or exceptions in laws and religious rules as an offensive strategy to gain more power. Even within an in-group that adheres to a strict code of loyalty, power rivalries can arise that rationalize exemptions to all of its other cultural attributes, even loyalty. Of course, this presents the group with an internal crisis since loyalty is its primary defensive strategy. The group will reorganize around the one succeeding rival and eventually reestablish its trust in its code of loyalty or else it will fragment into smaller rival in-groups.
Bellicose POWER AND STATUS
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The person is colliding with today’s mass psychology. Where individualism is expressed in trivial ways and their would-be activism is dissipated through inconsequential outlets like ‘Twitter’. When a well-meaning, activist-oriented, person signs a petition on an activist web site, even a huge number of petitions signers has to compete with enormous monetary bribes from lobbyists who routinely take the legislator for lunch. To which do you think the legislator will be most responsive and feel most accountable?
While the trivia obsessed citizens of democracy are participating in heretofore-unimaginably large numbers, they also are simultaneously increasingly ineffectual. If a legislator’s vote on a Bill is not what their supporters were petitioning for, media masters of deception for both the legislator and the lobbyists are able to obfuscate the issue so effectively as to put a wet blanket over their flaming protests. The media can both inflame and douse the rhetoric regarding the same issue. The people lose most; the legislators lose least; while the media gains greatly.
Civilization is built on deception while the individual secretly longs for authenticity. Civilization is built on power while the individual craves love. The individuals’ aspires to approval, control, and safety. In everyday life, this translates into success in the forms of money, status, and love. People are perpetually comparing what they have, how well they are doing, and how they are perceived by others. People try to create a public personality that guarantees them invulnerability from criticism and rejection. To achieve this, authenticity and the private person must be sacrificed. Our culture is structured to motivate people to strive for the opposite of their inner, hidden longings. People must win friends and deceive other people. People must win by defeating others yet must pretend and persuade others that they want what is best for them. Those who master this paradox have become master deceivers and the loneliest people of all. Civilization convinces people that they are free and responsible and lauds individuals as the masters of their fate while controlling their every thought and action. Civilization is a mass illusion enveloping all while convincing them that they have free will, know truth, and are authentic beings. Civilization creates and maintains the public, false personas of individuals and yet is able to convince them that they are genuine, real, and true.
In our culture, justice is founded on a belief in individualism that includes the belief that people are solely responsible for their actions except in the case of insanity or extraordinary physiological defect.
Corporations and businesses primarily use offensive, such as promotional marketing and advertising, competitive, assertively negotiating, cutthroat aggression, deceptively scheming, and adventurous risk-taking, strategies. Religious groups and other social groups such as professional clubs, chambers of commerce, organizations representing categories of industries that have mutual interests and political parties use offensive, such as competitive, persuasive, strategies. Athletic teams embody these characteristics but they have the added feature of sanctioning overt violence. All of these social groups can influence the legislation of governments that determines the nature of these governmental programs. The leaders of these classes of groups that primarily are either offensive or defensive do overlap to an extent. They typically overlap by forming informal coalitions. These coalitions, in turn, function largely to influence government. Governmental strategies are different for different parts of the government. Some governmental programs have their mandates and policies that involve funding for services and subsidies can influence large segments of the population with monetary incentivizing acts or threats of withholding these. Law and justice systems use defensive, such as controlling, coercive, and punitive, strategies. The military has features of corporate, government, and social groups but they, like athletic teams, sanction violence.
Internationally, each nation attempts to coerce and defend against coercing one another.
It functions to mold the entire population as though it had been hypnotized. All of these kinds of groups, corporate, social, and government, involve some degree of fusions of rules, values, loyalty, persuasion, and, most of all, power. Together they wield enormous power in shaping the minds and personalities of the people in the culture.
The top and widest level contains the most, the most valid, and the most effectual of each facet. There is less and less of each as we descend through the levels down to the individual person. As one descends to each lower level these facets are successively culled, dumbed-down, and diminished. The individual receives the least relevant knowledge, the least amount of information, and has the least amount of power. Voting is merely one, but nonetheless a very effective, means of duping the individual into thinking otherwise. How easily the populace of a democracy is hoodwinked.
Division of labor – the prof and the bureaucrat makes more money
This is true for the struggle for leadership in governmental, corporate, and social hierarchies. Nevertheless, the ambition for superior rank, status, and authority or power must be deftly tempered with interpersonal strategies that can maintain inviolate loyalty. Corporations and businesses share this latter characteristic of loyalty maintenance with governmental agencies and institutions, and social institutions. For leaders, maintaining inviolate loyalty requires extraordinary gifts of verbal dissimulation, duplicity, manipulation, and hypocrisy and the maintenance of appealing but powerful public personalities. There is a great temptation to attribute the cause of the character flaws of our leaders to their personalities, to something within them. This is a grave mistake. Flawed leaders such and CEOs, high level public officials, prominent religious leaders, military generals, coaches, and the like are flawed because they exist within a flawed system that requires that they be that way or get cast out. Note that, as top-level leaders, much of the dynamics of wielding their power while maintaining the inviolate loyalty of their followers is very similar to the dynamics of gangs.
Blind ambition does not refer to retinal degeneration in moguls, magnates, tycoons, and generals, nor of course to industrial robber barons, and let us not forget heads of juntas, and aspirants to the papacy. No, the ambition referred to here is blind to the concerns and interests of anyone below the top rung on the ladder. They know they must never look down.
W
With interpersonal gifts such as those cited above, a leader at the pinnacle of the hierarchy of an organization who can maintain the loyalty of associates and subordinates in their own organization as well in other allied organizations with mutual interests could and do perpetrate heinous acts. They can move masses of men and armies to destroy with impunity lives and property of outsiders and even that of their own and other nations.
These systems are: vertical, horizontal, financial, communication, social, educational, and training, performance of procedures derived from policies and the systems that measure and report progress or degrees of success or failure. All of these systems exist on different levels from local communities to states up to the nation and even exist across the globe, internationally. A culture that is successfully organized around the dynamics of power, at whatever level, can easily get away with gigantic campaigns that decimate whole nations and almost no one will notice or at least will not raise their voices against the glaring inconsistency with the culture’s core values of respect for life and property. Furthermore, in America, this drama is taking place in almost all communities and institutions. That is just the nature of this kind of culture. All individuals unknowingly are caught up in this cultural dynamic. They either conform and live out this American character with naïve enthusiasm or do so with quiet desperation. The remainder joins the ranks of the marginalized, they become homeless, or they become residents of sequestered institutions for the unwanted.
Dear Steve,
Are there records of CIA mind control experiments using chemicals such as LSD as early as the 1960s? I am writing brief essays about the structures and systems of governments, agencies, and institutions and also of the economy and sectors of the economy. One topic I am devoting extensive space to is cultural myths that perpetuate obsolete, ossified, and environmentally hazardous structures and systems. For one example with which I am very familiar, our justice system and its obsolete, highly inefficient and ineffective structures and systems.
I saw the TV History channel’s program on "That’s Impossible" about Mind Control –Technology that allows people to transmit their brainwaves. That reminded me of an encounter with a patient in a mental hospital (there may have been several) who claimed to have been experimented on with LSD and claimed the military and CIA had conducted the experiments. I seem to remember that she said this had taken place in a mental hospital in Louisiana.
Thanking you in advance for your assistance.
Steve emailed confirmation immediately.
In a sense, when referring to our own nation, ‘us’ no longer applies. With the globalization of corporations, each global corporation is more like a feudal state spanning the globe in parallel with numerous other such corporations. The US corporate law has scant power to be imposed on these corporations as their home base can be many countries, even up to a hundred or more. They compete with corporations having similar products in the US. They are competing globally and they may have home bases, or corporate headquarter, in many countries as well.
Consider America’s genocide of Native Americans, our treatment African slaves, and our domination and exploitation of Central American and South American, African, Asian, and Middle Eastern nations. These are open testimonies to this grisly history. This indictment of our culture applies as well to our unconscionable treatment of our own American women and children, those among our population that we made into disenfranchised citizens, our laborers, and the poor, disadvantaged, and handicapped. This conclusion indicting our history is there for all those who would diligently dig into the records beneath the surface of our whitewashed academic textbooks.
People in the highest echelons of the financial world provide financing for lower level operatives who purchase contraband to sell to or trade with outlaw entrepreneurs in other countries. These outlaw traders then sell to rebel groups or illegal narcotics, weapons, and other contraband for carrying out criminal activities locally or for transporting back across borders for distribution. By engaging in and promoting these complex, illegal activities, they play a key role in the exercise of power over the populace. Illegal drug lords supply drugs to the down and out members of society that decommissions them and this prevents them from engaging in violent insurrections against corporations and government bodies. Likewise, selling contraband weapons to gangs keeps them fighting against each other rather than the establishment.
There are organizations in every country that are well meaning, intelligent, have a sense of global responsibility, and possess an understanding of the outlaw, secretive, malicious, worldwide enterprises of top-level, international financiers yet are able to only minimally deter their criminal, inhumane, destructiveness.
If, for example, if we stopped using oil as fuel, the auto industry would be transformed, millions of employees would have to be reallocated from occupations such shipping, refineries, gas stations, land transport, pipeline distribution systems, stock brokers, geologists, engineers, university departments, land owners with oil royalties, communities dependent upon the oil industry, and on and on all around the globe. If the government succeeded in creating a new, universal, single-payer, health system, insurance companies would go bankrupt, health insurance salespersons would cease to exist, hundreds of thousands of bureaucrats in HMOs and managed care companies would be out of work, county and city health clinics for the uninsured, the elderly, undocumented immigrants, and the disabled would no longer be needed, and the pharmaceutical industry would shift its resources to research instead of to its advertising campaigns. Take any major industry and project what would happen if there were major changes or if they ceased to exist and you will discover that there will be a ripple effect through enormous numbers of interrelated industries and massive reallocation of workers of all types.
The people are indoctrinated by organizations funded by the elite with a few beliefs that make it possible for the elite class to escape suspicion and condemnation by the people. Ironically, these beliefs are diametrically opposite to those proclaimed in religious centers of worship and their spokespersons.
Firstly, the elite class consists of a small number of controllers of vast empires or segments of the culture.
Secondly, the elite also maintain a few within their families who are provided the leisure to write and to oversee and administer major publishing enterprises, both private and non-profit. Some of these who are born to privilege are provided the opportunity to own and manage media corporations, broadcast nationally advertized entertainment events. Some are given the funds and leisure to engage in the arts and be art collectors and art connoisseurs, especially of major art museums. Others may become the creators, promoters, and overseers of glamorized forms of recreation and competitive sports.
Thirdly, the elite class taps people among the populace who have demonstrated their admiration of and desire to be or at least emulate the elite class. They are given media coverage and social, political and entertainment doors to prominence are opened for them. For example, the newspaper magnate, William Randolph Hearst (1863-1951), discovered the budding, charismatic, promising, and ambitious young Reverend Billy Graham and gave his editors the charge to "Pump Graham." He saw in Billy a naïve champion of Christian fundamentalism and conservative economic and political values. Hearst’s prophetic vision was fulfilled as Billy became a close confidant and endorser of Republican Presidents like Nixon and Reagan.
With the ability to magnify a select few gifted and malleable people and imbue them with the faux mantle of the élite, they could maintain a constant awe-inspiring presence before and influence over their more humble, less blessed fellow gullible humans. This was an inexpensive way to maintain control over the masses.
Musicians and radio, television, and film personalities gain prominence this way. I doubt that they are aware of their promotion of the agendas of the elite, yet most of them, in fact, do just that. Consider Clint Eastwood,
What is the relationship between the current rampage of rancor in politics, a media dependent upon advertising, and the new political atmosphere of perpetual campaigning?
Who benefits from capitalism?
Does monetizing the healthcare system increase efficiency? Does privatizing correctional institutions reduce costs, reduce crime, and reduce recidivism? Have mergers and acquisitions improved the quality of life for individuals, the general welfare of communities, or does it only benefit the rich?
If a pharmaceutical corporation is publicly owned, it is beholden to stockholders who are only interested in profit. The pharmaceutical corporation is compelled to use unethical practices to comply with the stockholders demands. They must grow or go out of business.
War is a variety of competition and spawns creativity for weapons that are more ingenious than one’s opponents are. This is a most counterproductive form of creativity as both winners and losers of wars make life much worse for all humankind.
Watson and Crick, Einstein, Dostoyevsky, Vermeer, Emily Dickenson, George Washington Carver, Max Planck, Edison, the Wright brothers, Darwin, Benjamin Franklin, Madame Curie, Isaac Newton, Kant, Galileo, Leonardo Da Vinci, Archimedes, and throughout recorded history the thousands of other creative geniuses in science, engineering, art, literature, mathematics, and other fields did what they did not because of competition, nor for profit, but solely out of curiosity. Research on contemporary researchers in both universities and corporate research and development departments concluded that researchers, by a large margin, ranked very low on competition as their driving motive.
Competition, with a very few exceptions, in industry is a waste of effort, time, and resources. In most endeavors, rational people would see competition as moronic and wasteful redundancy.
Appeal to national narcissism, hedonism, affiliation, and status-ism.
a
The growing demand for productivity in which work became frenetic drudgery on treadmills or a competitive business rat race along with the depersonalization created by structured workweeks in enormous, jam packed cities became a soul crushing combination for the male breadwinners. The media provided a life-dominating lure for conspicuous consumption that kept men trudging harder on the treadmill and faster in the rat race. Women left in empty homes were wracked with ennui, loneliness, bitterness, anger, and anxiety. At this stage, both men and women turned to drugs, alcohol, and mind numbing impersonal entertainment. Soon the corporations began to siphon women out of their homes and into the workplace. The media used dissatisfaction to promote corporate interests. The media created a zeitgeist of having to have, having to be, and having to do exacting what the corporations wanted them to need to have, be, and do. The consumer society went hand in hand with the economy’s requirement and unquenchable hunger for growth. Ever-increasing demand for growth led to the promotion of ever-increasing lust for success and ever-increasing materialistic incentives. This has become a vicious cycle with a horrendous by-product of health devouring emotional stress. The corporate world would suffer from this decompensation of the emotional and physical health their employees. A new industry sprang up to take care of this growing problem. This is where the mental health began to skyrocket. Psychiatry and its psychotropic drugs became a booming business. At first, psychotherapy was the treatment of choice. The corporate world soon caught on to the fact that it was far more cost effective simply to rely on the prescription of psychotropic drugs to modulate stress and its effects and keep the otherwise mentally and physically able well medicated. This phenomenon was the progenitor of Big Pharma. The media quickly lent a hand by accepting a deluge of ads for all sorts of psychological and psychosomatic ills; resulting in ad viewers demanding unnecessary medications. Now half of prescriptions are for TV generated bogus illnesses.
America has modeled itself after the Roman’s centralization, rigid hierarchical regimentation, imperious and elitist mentality, and its predilection for violence and brutality. Like Rome, we have a belief in our cultural superiority. Like Rome, our superior military right grants us the right to exert dominance over all non-Romans. Our economic success combines with our governmental success to create a blindly willful, amoral, shallow, profligate, ambition with disregard for consequences. These characteristics have led to America’s dehumanizing, exploitative, regimentation of the populace with a kind of blithe impunity. With the success of our capitalist, free enterprise economy, our corporate leaders have concocted a cult-like endorsement of license to impose a universally standardized mode of management. They have bolstered this with a persuasive rationale that glowingly justifies its psychologically burdensome, physically disabling, socially disintegrating, environmentally destructive consequences as the great American Dream and a modern culture that is the envy of the world.
Looked at without the corporate rose-colored-glasses, startled eyes will see a factory mentality that has been crushingly dispersed to all of our institutions whether it be public schools, mental hospitals, professional organizations, prisons, health care delivery systems, sports and recreational enterprises, religious institutions, and of course the military, and on and on, replicated just exactly as it is on factory assembly lines.
Corporate America sought to maximize the use of the populace for labor. The population was being centralized by urbanization. The next task was to free the employable male population to work in factories, offices, and for construction. Domestic technology began to give wives and mothers more free time. They had to be freed from caring for the elderly, young, and disabled. Schools were succumbing to the mass production mentality. Institutions for the mentally disturbed, retarded, delinquent, disabled, and elderly were created. Legislation provided laws to enforce standards. This led to a litigious society. As suits mounted to correct the ills fostered by massive, regimented institutions, standards became more strict and control oriented. Legalism forced out humanism. Sterilized, medicated, impersonal institutions is leading to a benign cruelty which in turn is turning institutions their residents into zombies and cauldrons of anger with only an impersonal institution to attack. Symptoms multiply and anger is turned against one another and this only leads to a further increase in rigidity of control.
We may now be able to transform our culture into one that is mature, economically altruistic, environmentally responsible, and that applies the same highest ethical principles to our relations with other nations. It would entail a disassembling of our military-industrial complex and replacing it with an aggressive peace offensive and global education of nations in cultural understanding and acceptance. It would entail a complete rewriting of corporate law to end the sociopathic corporate culture. It would entail replacing a growth dependent and growth obsessed economy and life style with an economy that is oriented to mutual facilitation, assistance, and life styles that emphasize simplicity, frugality, and modesty. Neighborhoods would establish educational and training centers that would schedule programs for neighborhood residents so that they could be educated in life skills by professionals in medicine, pharmaceuticals, nutrition, business marketing and advertizing, business law, social services, computer training, money management, employer negotiation, child and teen parenting techniques, and other related disciplines. In a center such as this, ordinary citizens could learn how to be inoculated against the predatory, exploitative practices of free enterprise entrepreneurs. It would entail replacing a punitive justice system with a system oriented to neighborhood organization and positive development with local neighborhood participation in solutions to conflicts and the use of mediation for conflict resolution. Incarceration could be replaced with supervision by neighborhood volunteers who would bring their wards into the neighborhood activities and educational programs. It would entail shutting down nursing homes for the elderly and replacing them with neighborhood centers administered by those in the neighborhood who are mentally and physically able and unemployed yet maintaining certified medical professionals to oversee their operation. It would entail setting up small neighborhood centers for the care of infants and preschoolers whose parents are employed and engaging unemployed parents and grandparents in the operation of the center and yet maintaining certified professional childhood educators to oversee the operation. It would entail replacing an orientation to ranking and grading students that creates Machiavellian competition in a factory-like education system that engenders depersonalization, cheating, and ruthless rivalries between cliques with programs that foster appreciation for individual differences, gifts, and interests and that allows for self-paced progress. It would entail replacing a coercive educational system with a computerized, individualized system. It would include in-school programs for learning empathy, mutual positive regard, personal maturity, and maturity in interpersonal, social, intellectual, and intimate relations. It would entail ending violent athletics and worship of them that leads to worship of violence with cooperative, positive goal oriented events that promote community responsibility.
From the beginning, our government was modeled after the early hierarchical, militaristic, elite dominated government of Rome. With the onset of the industrial revolution, our community-oriented society was replaced with a factory, mass production model. This entailed mass migration into ever-larger metropolitan cities. Long-standing personal bonds common to the rural communities were replaced with depersonalization and institutions designed to treat people impersonally. This was soon followed by legislating laws for corporations that made their owners and employees exempt from prosecution for damages inflicted on communities and individuals. Now, the single individual or small community had to be pitted against the enormous resources of the ever-enlarging corporations. Corporations, under the capitalist system, virtually became owned by stockholders who would begin to demand profits regardless of how ill gotten and damaging their business practices might be. Now, stockholders, like corporation employees, were exempted from suits and prosecution. In essence, legislators had created enormously powerful, ruthless, sociopathic corporations. The now fragmented communities and depersonalized citizens found it impossible to comprehend what had happened and how these new systems worked and they were, therefore, powerless to defend themselves against them. Our legal system, basically the courts and lawyers, particularly the prosecution, had evolved into extremely impersonal entities with an ever-increasing tendency to use mass production strategies to manage the increasing deluge of offenders. Defense lawyers, particularly criminal and corporate, lawyers benefited greatly from the imbalance of clientele demand over supply. They were increasingly able to charge outlandish fees for their services. Consequently, justice was transformed into a market economy in which justice virtually was purchased by the highest bidder. The poor became served by inexperienced and marginally qualified lawyers who typically handed their clients very raw deals of unwarranted prison sentences. Finally, the modern media entered the scene with mesmerizing advertisements and extremely skillful spin-doctors. The media was paid well to serve the interests of the sociopathic corporations.
Judges make decisions on the basis of sending a message, but to whom. Law enforcement, police and probation and parole use policies that apply to groups like the general public or all probationers and parolees rather than individuals and what is appropriate for the individual case.
Vertical, horizontal, financial, communication, social, educational, and training, performance of procedures derived from policies, and measurement systems that spanned our total social, governmental, and corporate world are tightly interwoven and tailored to serve the power culture, particularly the power elite. Let us use the word structure to encompass the configuration of systems. The structure of our power culture has so gradually evolved and so completely permeates our nation that people now see the values, life styles, consumer behavior, recreational preferences, tastes, and on and on promoted by it as unquestionable, natural, and, in fact, as the way things should be. The way things are now is considered ‘reality’. Of course, if you were born two, or even one, centuries ago, there would have been a different reality. Everyone is taught and observes and all that is all one knows, it is each person’s schema of the world. Even if one assiduously studies history, that schema is not budged, maybe nudged for a day or two, but remains the same old reality. People see their choices as coming from within them. Now, with that reality inculcated or incorporated, it is impossible for people to see that everything they think, feel, want, believe, and so forth, so to speak, has been implanted in them. It is impossible for people not to regard their choices as independent, as coming from within.
Now that a few voices have arisen to sound the alarm about the harm our power culture, run amuck, is destroying our environment, and may spell the end of humanity. Now that our Western economic system, which has metastasized over the entire planet, is in crisis, our leaders are scrambling to find ways to patch it up. It cannot be patched up. The paradigm that seemed to have brought about almost miraculous success now must be diagnosed as having, concealed within it, the malignant cell that is poisoning the whole and is about to infect and kill everything it has produced. The power culture paradigm cannot be saved by patching up here and there. The Centurions are offering wise fixes to our broken system but each offer fixes that address parts of the total system. They offer a variety of patches. However, as was pointed out in Thomas Kuhn’s "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions", however many patches there are in a patchwork, they cannot cause a shift to a new paradigm. Instead, what is demanded now is leaders with the vision and strength to forge a completely new paradigm.
To transform the old power culture and transcend to the new natural and humane culture will require gaining a deep and broad insight into the nature of the structure of our vast interwoven and integrated systems. That is where we must begin. From there we must begin an enormous and forceful effort to disassemble that structure and its systems and to create a new structure with new systems. The approach to this endeavor simultaneously must address the largest, the national, structure and systems and the smallest and most localized structures and systems. We have the wherewithal to do this. Fortunately, with the internet and television, we can engage in an ongoing dialogue with millions of American citizens and citizens of almost all other nations. Turning these citizens into activists, while exposing corrupt and obstructionist leaders, the exchanges of information between citizens and between citizens and the media and governmental leaders can become an effective movement to institute changes on both the local and national, and perhaps even international, levels.
Arnold Toynbee (1889-1975; his twelve volumes "A Study of History" began to appear in the 1930s.) predicted that China would be the greatest threat to the future of the western world. Now, it seems, China may actually be its only hope for salvation from the West’s devastating path toward global destruction.
When the secluded tycoon tyrants see the grassroots’ movement to transform the culture becoming successful, they will pull together their trillions and roll out the fiercest weapons from their culture-manipulating arsenal. They will immediately, cleverly, and surreptitiously launch them to fight every grassroots transformation effort. Behind their media-shy, genteel, aristocratic, and expensively hyped, public personalities, their private personalities are as cold-blooded and ruthless as they are narcissistic and megalomaniac. Remember that they can buy the ‘smartest guys in the room’; well make that the world. The populace, which they think they own, is like the proverbial mushroom: raised in the dark and fed bullshit.
Remember, they are the money behind the music industry, movie industry, television, radio, newspapers, and most corporations. Furthermore, they especially dominate our financial institutions including, as well, the World Bank and IMF that stealthily manipulate loans to poor nations for our profit. They are money behind all big social enterprises, including fashion, sports, and even the churches and synagogues. They are the force behind maintenance of an average five percent unemployment rate to keep wages low while supporting a cushioning provision of welfare to prevent widespread, Bastille-like revolt of ‘their’ working class. They modulate and fund private philanthropic foundations so as to soften the otherwise scrooge-like image of our money-grubbing power culture.
They are the force behind the appointments to the justice system. Worst of all, they are the money behind politics and, ultimately, all branches of government, especially the military, and including the CIA and FBI. Their kin are the ambassadors spanning the globe. Their grants determine what research will be pursued in academia, thus, ultimately, influencing the curriculum. They ultimately control who is under their influence and even who gets the majority of the seats on metropolitan city councils and even school boards. Their money has the power to influence and radically alter everything national and international. They are the force behind our strangely contradictory illegal immigrant worker policy. Ghoulishly, they even are the financiers behind both the international narcotic drug trade and the war on it.
Ultimately, they decide which trends will succeed and which fail in our society.
The rich and powerful will be determined not to allow our proposed cultural transcendence to succeed. They will be determined to squash the upstart mushrooms. In defiance, they will blitz all of our culture shaping institutions to regain conformity to their agenda.
We must begin the ruthless examination of our brainwashed minds, cast them off as though they were workhorses’ blinders and flesh lacerating harnesses, and use our intelligence, creative imagination, and passion to embolden a successful coup, ushering out the power culture, and ushering in a new altruistic, humane, environment salvaging, and natural American culture.
LET THE PARADIGM SHIFT BEGIN.
An American Communist Manifesto