Error 404: the Need for Change

Posted on August 1, 2023 by greg

Georg Hegel (1770-1831) introduced a system to study history – dialectical thinking – a progression in which each successive movement emerges as a solution to the contradictions inherent in the preceding movement with the development of freedom and the consciousness of freedom. Herbert Marcuse (1898-1979), one of the most prominent members of the Frankfurt School, initially turned to Hegel’s ideas in his writing in order to explain their philosophical strength through the dynamics of socioeconomic contradictions. Marcuse uses dialectical thinking to expose the contradictions by which an advanced industrial society is constituted. The problem of concealment occurs here because not only does society produce contraindications in the forms of domination that come with them, it also produces the social and psychological mechanisms that conceal these contradictions. An example of social contradictions is the co-existence of the growth of national wealth and poverty at the same time.

The desire for knowledge, Nietzsche argues, stems from hubristic self-focus and is amplified by the basic human instinct for belonging — within a culture, what is designated as truth is a form of social contract and a sort of “peace pact” among people. Domination is exercised by a particular group in order to sustain and enhance themselves in a privileged position. Marcuse observes that the system doesn’t require force – just introduce one-dimensional thinking – which leads to acceptance of oppression and surplus repression. The system must make the citizen think they are freer than they actually are. This means the economic elite must control the political discourse, not the workers. The ideology in place ensures the oppressed identify with the oppressor. The desires of the individual must conform to the desires of the economic elite. It is necessary to expose the contradictions by which today’s advanced industrial society is constituted.

Marcuse argued that “capitalism and mass culture shape personal desires” so there is no essential or unchanging aspect to human nature. Mass culture results in domination of “the inner world of the human subject”. A man under capitalism is “one dimensional” since he bears no trace of the conflicts which make him multi-dimensional and capable of change. This is why Marcuse believes that people under Liberal Western capitalism are no freer than people under totalitarian role, their oppression is just transparent. For Marcuse the one-dimensional man is closely related to both consumerism and mass media that together serve as an ideological apparatus which reproduces itself through its subjects. This apparatus promotes conformity and is aimed at preventing resistance. The person who thinks critically demands social change. One-dimensional thinking does not demand change nor does it recognize the degree to which the individual is a victim of forces of domination in society.1

An economic system that rewards psychopathic personality traits has changed our ethics and personalities. Freud claims there exists a dynamic balance between the individual and society that consists of aggressive instinctual impulses, but society attempts to oppress the individual into its requirements. Herbert Marcuse noted violence is a pain-causing process present whenever there is a difference between the actual and the potential for a person. It pervades the social fabric in insidious ways now made apparent when relations of repression result in outbursts, with root causes barely understood. Marcuse termed this ‘surplus-repression’ referring to the organized domination in modern society over and above the basic level of repression of instincts Freud believed necessary for civilization. Henry Giroux likens this more extreme form of repression to a widespread system of ‘culture of cruelty’, which tends to normalize violence to such a degree that even the common occurrence of gun violence fails to trigger a systemic analysis or response.

Alfred North Whitehead used the phrase great refusal for the determination not to succumb to the facticity of things as they are – to favour instead the imagination of the ideal. The student protests of the 1960s were a form of Great Refusal, a saying “NO” to multiple forms of repression and domination. This Great Refusal demands a new/liberated society. This new society requires what Marcuse calls the new sensibility which is an ascension of the life instincts over the aggressive instincts. This idea of a new sensibility is yet another move beyond Marxism insofar as it requires much more than new power relations. It requires the cultivation of new forms of subjectivity. Human subjectivity in its present form is the product of systems of domination. We rid society of its systems of domination by ridding it of the forms of subjectivity formed by those systems and replacing them with new forms of subjectivity.

Freud described the reality principle, the ability to evaluate the external world and differentiate between it and the internal world. The reality principle did not replace the pleasure principle, but represses it, such that, a momentary pleasure; uncertain of its results, is given up, but only in order to gain in a new way, an assured pleasure coming later. The reality principle strives to satisfy the id’s desires in realistic and socially appropriate ways. In neoliberalism the reality principle is replaced by the performance principle. The performance principle presupposes particular forms of rationality for domination that stratifies society, Herbert Marcuse observed, “according to the competitive economic performance of its members.” Domination is exercised by a particular group in order to sustain and enhance themselves in a privileged position. The neoliberal performance principle teaches us to conceive of social problems as personal problems – emphasizing individual responsibility while failing to address systemic state violence in all its manifestations – healthcare, education and the war on the poor.

The technological boom has been supported by the idea that there is some fundamental connection between technological development and the human quest for liberation and a better life. However, we were disabused of this idea by Freud and many others. The question now is “does technological advance lead to more repression and domination?” If technologies benefit people in some way, or favour one group over another, then they are not neutral. As Heidegger observes, “The will to mastery becomes all the more urgent the more technology threatens to slip from human control”. The essence of technology is not something neutral, as the technical trends claim, but rather the issue is related to use. In a nutshell, the great danger is that the technological mode of being, which has us unconsciously perceiving everything in the world as a potential resource to exploit for our ends, tends to come at the exclusion of all else.

Technology affects the way individuals communicate, learn, and think. It helps society and determines how people interact with each other on a daily basis. Technology plays an important role in society today How has technology made the world worse? The increase in mobile use has led to more traffic accidents, a rise in eye strain and visual impairment, increased brain activity, and more. Not to mention the mobile Internet has increased the ways cybercriminals can access our personal information and secured accounts. All the while people are glued to their phones. It leads to a loss of focus and decreased productivity. For example, the constant notifications from emails and social media can interrupt work and cause people to switch between tasks, reducing their overall efficiency. There needs to be a distinction between being busy on a device and getting things done. In the extreme, it can lead to addiction issues and/or aggravate psychological disorders.

The Internet, or more broadly, the digital revolution is truly changing the world at multiple levels. But it has also failed to deliver on much of the promise that was once seen as implicit in its technology. If the Internet was expected to provide more competitive markets and accountable businesses, open government, an end to corruption, and decreasing inequality – or, to put it baldly, increased human happiness – it has been a disappointment. The lack of debate about how the Internet should be developed was due, to a certain extent, to the digital revolution exploding at precisely the moment that neoliberalism was in ascendance, its flowery rhetoric concerning “free markets” most redolent. What seemed to be an increasingly open public sphere, removed from the world of commodity exchange, seems to be morphing into a private sphere of increasingly closed, proprietary, even monopolistic markets.

Instead of a new age of enlightenment through easy communication and universal access to information, we see the emergence of an increasingly polluted information environment. Demands from policy makers for change began nearly a decade ago, when the Federal Trade Commission entered into a consent decree with Facebook designed to prevent the platform from sharing user data with third parties without prior consent. As we learned with the Cambridge Analytica scandal, Facebook paid lip service to that consent decree, following a pattern of “apologize, promise to do better, return to business as usual” that persists to this day. The FTC has accused Facebook of breaking antitrust law by gobbling up many smaller social media start-ups and acquiring several large, well-established competitors, in what amounts to a concerted effort to build a social media monopoly. Other platforms, especially Google and Twitter, have also resisted calls to change business models partly responsible for the amplification of hate speech, disinformation, and conspiracy theories.

There are two aspects of safety that require attention: product development and business models.  The challenge with business models is harmful content is unusually profitable. Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and Twitter monetize through advertising, the value of which depends on user attention. Platforms use algorithms to amplify content that maximizes user engagement. Hate speech, disinformation, and conspiracy theories are particularly engaging – they trigger our flight or fight instinct, which forces us to pay attention – so the algorithms amplify them more than most content. Other platform tools, such as Facebook Groups and the recommendation engines of each platform, increase engagement with harmful content. There are at least four areas that need regulation: safety, privacy, competition, and honesty. Only by coordinating action across all four will policy makers have any hope of reducing the harm from internet platforms.

Today the Internet has become controlled by a handful of companies who exercise an unprecedented level of control over people’s lives. When these companies were in their infancy, like the internet itself, they were synonymous with innovation. However, these tech giants are abusing their market power to undermine fair competition and free-market capitalism. Big Tech sympathizers are undermining the long-term welfare of consumers and small businesses because these companies use their market power and low prices to crowd out competition, further perpetuate their monopoly and reduce incentives for innovation. Google and Facebook’s stranglehold on the online news and ad market has allowed them to benefit from journalistic content without paying for it — cutting off revenue needed to pay reporters, photographers, and editors to cover local news in their communities. Over 2,000 newspapers have closed since 2004, in an industry was once among the largest employers in America.

For Marcuse the one-dimensional man is closely related to both consumerism and mass media that together serve as an ideological apparatus which reproduces itself through its subjects. This apparatus promotes conformity and is aimed at preventing resistance. Marcuse introduces the concept of the “one dimensional man” as someone who is subjected to a new kind of totalitarianism in the form of consumerist and technological capitalism. A man under capitalism is “one dimensional” since he bears no trace of the conflicts which make him multi-dimensional and capable of change. This is why Marcuse believe that people under Liberal Western capitalism are no freer than people under totalitarian role, their oppression is just transparent. The struggle that Hegel envisioned is the great tension between ‘is’ and ‘ought,’ between the way things are and the way they ought to be. The necessary ingredient for Hegel’s philosophy was freedom of action, not just freedom of thought.

Hegel who saw a world governed by individual self-interest believed that we are controlled by external forces, and are nothing but pawns in the game. The internal strains today’s system faces includes: increasing income and wealth inequality within economies, declining intergenerational mobility, mounting economic and social polarization, and rising influence of wealth in politics leading to the concentration of both economic and political power in the hands of an elite and a weakening of democratic polity. According to Marcuse, social domination has resulted in social unhappiness which can be alleviated only by a fundamental change in society itself. Hegel stresses a state needs a strong and effective central public authority – and believes reforms should always stress legal equality and the public welfare. Moreover, Hegel repeats the need for strong state regulation of the economy, which if left to its own workings is blind to the needs of the social community.

1 https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/marcuse/#OneDimThiDemRejDem

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Impact of Marginalization On the Social Determinants of Health

Posted on July 15, 2023 by greg

Oxford reference defines marginalization as a spatial metaphor for a process of social exclusion in which individuals or groups are relegated to the fringes of a society, being denied economic, political, and/or symbolic power and pushed towards being ‘outsiders’. Marginalized populations experience discrimination and exclusion (social, political and economic) because of unequal power relationships across economic, political, social and cultural dimensions. When you push people to the edge of society by not allowing them a place within it, you marginalize them. Marginalization can result from intentional campaigns that exclude certain people (like ethnic groups) from society. It can also occur unintentionally due to structures that benefit some members of society while making life challenging for others. Those who are at the centre have benefited from globalization, but those who are already marginalized are often left further behind – with the rich becoming richer and the poor becoming poorer.

Another problem is that people born in a marginalized community lack the required social and cultural capital to participate in mainstream development processes. Their social networks are weak and vulnerable. Lack of social capital deprives an individual of access to resources, such as, economic, educational and cultural and other support systems. This creates social isolation and limits their participation in the development process. The World Health Organization defines social determinants of health (SDOH) as “the circumstances in which people are born, live, work and age, and the systems put in place to deal with illness” (2010). The CDC defined the key domains of social determinants of health in Healthy People 2020 as economics, education, social and community context of living, neighborhoods and the built environment, and their relationship to health. This illustrates the fact that health outcomes are affected not only by environment but also by the experience of the individual in that environment (Havranek et al., 2015).

People who are socially marginalized are largely deprived of social opportunities. They may become stigmatized and are often at the receiving end of negative public attitudes. Their opportunities to make social contributions may be limited, and they may develop low self-confidence and self-esteem. Social policies and practices may mean that they have relatively limited access to valued social resources such as education and health services, housing, income, leisure activities, and work. The impact of marginalization, in terms of social exclusion, is similar, whatever the origins and processes of marginalization, irrespective of whether these are located in social attitudes such as, towards impairment, sexuality, ethnicity, and so on or, social circumstance such as closure of workplaces, absence of affordable housing, and so on. Different people will react differently to marginalization depending on the personal and social resources available to them.

One recent example of the intersection of marginalization and social determinants of health has been evident during the COVID-19 pandemic. A study entitled “Multivariate, Transgenerational Associations of the COVID-19 Pandemic Across Minoritized and Marginalized Communities” by Yip et al. demonstrated that social determinants of health, not preexisting medical or psychiatric conditions, were the primary predictors of the multigenerational COVID-19 experience of families. This occurred for families from marginalized communities despite adherence to mitigation factors. Marginalized people don’t necessarily belong to one particular demographic: Marginalization occurs due to ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, disability status, socioeconomic level, and age. Additionally, the marginalization of certain groups because of ethnicity, race, caste, migrant status, gender, class, or nature and conditions of work, for example, continues to undermine health. In particular, the COVID-19 pandemic has unmasked the inequities and disparities that patients of historically marginalized populations experience. Adverse health outcomes – both physical and mental – resulting from these disparities can be attributed to SDOH.1

Neoliberalism has turned us into competitive individuals. In such a system everyone has to make those choices that turn his life into a professional success or personal happiness; moreover, these choices depend solely on his or her personal efforts. This creates a binary system of winners and losers. As humans are social animals this is a formula for unhappiness. The construction and perpetuation of stereotypes such as abusers of the welfare state, social scroungers, social hammock, is creating strong prejudices in people’s thinking. These ideas are purposely marginalizing the unemployed, the homeless, asylum-seekers, etc. and diverting suspicion from the real culprits. Since the 1980s, the emergence of neoliberalism as a dominant government paradigm has led to increasing instances of accountability failure, resulting in significant challenges to marginalized and lower socioeconomic groups.

Economic marginalization as a process relates to economic structures, in particular, to the structure of markets and their integration. To the extent in the markets that some individuals or groups engage in are segmented from the others in general, these individuals can be said to be marginalized from the rest of the economy. Segmentation and exclusion may, however, have non-economic and non-financial origins, for example in discrimination by gender, caste, or ethnicity. Here, integration takes on a broader meaning. People who are experiencing marginalization are likely to have tenuous involvement in the economy. The evidence indicates that students from low-income families are disadvantaged right through the education system to postsecondary training. The sources of their income will vary. These experiences affect men and women differently and vary with age. Poverty and economic marginalization have both direct and indirect impacts on people’s health and wellbeing.

Poor psychological health can disrupt your ability to think clearly, make healthy decisions, and fight off chronic diseases. Over time, neglecting your mental well-being can lead to feelings of anger, anxiety, fear, depression, self-blame, sadness, stress and isolation. The causes of social marginalization include sexual orientation and gender, religion or ethnicity, geography or history, less representation in political spheres, different cultures or rituals, different language or clothing, caste and class, poverty or race, etc. Impoverished people often don’t have the time or resources to advocate for their interests, either because they live in marginalized communities and lack access to necessary resources or spend excessive time and energy trying to provide for themselves and their families. On a societal level, the marginalization of specific individuals and groups carries a cost for society as a whole. When specific people and groups are shunted to the side and not allowed to make their voices heard, everyone loses out on their perspectives and is poorer for it.

The injustice in the US is systematic; much like family secrets we do not talk about. Decisions are made by well-intended people, in a society that can be described as having cognitive dissonance. The victims are those who are already suffering the most from one discrimination or another. The more acute the driving force behind securing public health, the more marginalized these individuals become. In short, it is not the individuals, but the system that is unjust. “If you’re in an advantaged position in society, believing the system is fair and that everyone could just get ahead if they tried hard enough doesn’t create any conflict for you … [you] can feel good about how [you] manage it,” said Godfrey. But for those marginalized by the system – economically, racially, ethnically – believing the system is fair puts them in conflict with themselves and can have negative consequences. We need to look in the mirror.

A gaslighter’s statements and accusations are often based on deliberate falsehoods and calculated marginalization. The term gaslighting is derived from the 1944 film Gaslight, where a husband tries to convince his wife that she’s insane by causing her to question herself and her reality. Consider Trump’s statement: “What you’re seeing and what you’re reading is not happening.” It makes victims question their reality, becoming even more dependent on the gaslighter as the only source of true information. In relation to hostile online material, the enthusiasts for chaos have no interest in whether it is true, nor even whether it supports their own ideological position. They will share hostile fake material both for and against their ‘side’, not simply for the devilment but because they see it as making collapse and chaos more likely. Social media has provided a huge proselytizing opportunity to those with destructive intentions. Many of Donald Trump’s tweets qualify.

The idea of canceling began as a tool for marginalized communities to assert their values against public figures who retained power and authority even after committing wrongdoing – but in its current form, we see how warped and imbalanced the power dynamics of the conversation really are. Now conservative elites have harnessed cancel culture to “cancel” anyone whose opinions cause controversy. For example, just as populism undermines democracy, “cancel culture” undoes the tolerance such that as you cancel disagreement, you start seeing it everywhere. Cancel culture’s zero-sum game plays off disadvantaged groups against one another, rather as right-wing populism pits the blue-collar “left behind” against groups that remain marginalized, such as Blacks, LGBTQ, low-income individuals and undocumented immigrants. Amid the left’s Twitter micro-wars, its real enemy – neoliberal hegemony – remains safely out of view. While black, queer, transsexual and feminist folk bicker, powerful white dudes carry on running the world.

For many students and their families who are struggling with inequity and social exclusion, poverty is a common marker of their marginalized social status. Poverty engenders a wide range of daily struggles, and can include the denial of a young person’s primary needs, such as homelessness or insecure housing, or facing the day without adequate clothing or nutrition. Poverty isn’t a learning disability, but when we ignore the needs of poor children, poverty can become disabling. Political and economic agendas that underlie conditions of daily life, and thus SDOH, are structurally rooted in lack of opportunity and inequitable access to resources. However, marginalized people are not responsible for ending their own oppression. It more important for the apologists for neoliberal prejudiced views to step out of their echo chambers and see the marginalized as humans than it is for the oppressed to humanize oppressors.

Social determinants of health (SDOH) and marginalization have a cumulative impact on a population in many complex ways. Marginalization forces a group into a position that impacts their experiences, identity, and environment. The resources that the groups will receive in this position such as education, income, and residence are disproportionately distributed, which can result in adverse life conditions and health outcomes. Social and health inequities aggravate one another, with marginalized groups having higher rates of infection, hospitalization, and mortality. While some may lack accessibility to adequate mental health services, the occupations, living conditions, and structural oppression experienced by marginalized groups increase allostatic load and worsen mental health inequities. Understanding how the marginalization of different groups has been established, as well as how it harms the wellbeing of these groups, is the first step we can take toward combating inequality and inequity.2

1https://science.nichd.nih.gov/confluence/display/newsletter/2022/06/10/Deconstructing+Bias%3A+Marginalization

2 Ashley Pratt and Dr. Triesta Fowler, Deconstructing Bias: Marginalization,  https://science.nichd.nih.gov/

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 Authoritarian Capitalism and 1984: How Freedom Dies

Posted on July 1, 2023 by greg

Between the 9th and 15th Centuries, autocratic monarchies and ecclesiastical hierarchies dominated Western society. These systems began to fall away as people increasingly asserted their right to individual liberty. This push for a greater focus on the individual favoured capitalism as an economic system because of the flexibility it allowed for private property rights, personal choice, entrepreneurship and innovation. It also favoured democracy as a governing system for its focus on individual political freedom. The shift toward greater individual liberty changed the social contract. Previously, many resources were provided by those in power (land, food and protection) in exchange for significant contributions from citizens (for instance, from slave labour to hard labour with little pay, high taxes and unquestioning loyalty). With capitalism, people expected less from governing authorities, in exchange for greater civil liberties, including individual, political and economic freedom.

The primary theme of 1984 by George Orwell is to warn readers of the dangers of totalitarianism. The central focus of the book is to convey the extreme level of control and power possible under a truly totalitarian regime. It explores how such a governmental system would impact society and the people who live in it. This includes true horror of totalitarianism, mass surveillance and repressive regimentation of people and behaviours within society. Surveillance is a key part of the novel’s world. Coined phrases outlining manipulation of language as a form of mind control includes: newspeak the method for controlling thought through language; and doublethink the act of simultaneously accepting two mutually contradictory beliefs as correct. One of Orwell’s most important messages in 1984 is that language is of central importance to human thought because it structures and limits the ideas that individuals are capable of formulating and expressing.

The end of the Cold War supposedly signaled the “end of history” and with it the rise of liberal democracy and the demise of authoritarian regimes worldwide. With the economic and political demise of Soviet-style communism, most of the communist regimes supported by the Soviet Union across the world, like Ethiopia, Afghanistan and South Yemen also collapsed. Communist Cuba is a lone exception to this trend. Basically, you can have capitalism without democracy. Rather than transitioning previously totalitarian states toward democracy and deepening it within perceived established liberal states, globalization has instead been theorized as enhancing despotism and repressive policies. Russia is a prominent example of authoritarian state capitalism: Putin has created a super wealthy and loyal plutocracy that owes its existence to authoritarianism. The reemergence of Russian autocracy under Putin, conversely, has coincided with economic growth but not caused it (high oil prices and recovery from the transition away from communism deserve most of the credit).

In the wake of the 1989 crackdown on prodemocracy protesters in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square, the Chinese Communist Party seemed morally bankrupt. Twenty years later, the Chinese Communist Party has built a new popularity by delivering staggering economic growth and cultivating a revived – and potentially dangerous – Han Chinese nationalism. China’s material successes, as seen in its gleaming city skylines and piles of foreign currency holdings, suggest the government’s top priority is economic growth. While growing the economy, it has kept the majority of wealth in the hands of an elite class of business leaders, many of whom have willingly accepted authoritarian rule in exchange for getting rich. Far from forming a middle class that might challenge authority, these groups now have reason to join their rulers in repressing “instability” among the people. Communism has been replaced by authoritarian capitalism, which is the engine of China’s economy. This heralds the return of authoritarian great powers.

A defining characteristic of authoritarian capitalism is the presence of a capitalist economy on one hand along with the absence or erosion of democracy and civil liberties on the other hand. Authoritarian capitalism must be carefully distinguished from public ownership, which is unproblematic insofar as state companies are democratically-controlled and accountable. The contradiction between the freedom of the market and social freedom resulting after the 2008 crash: The inequality in economic status has been turned into inequality in political status. For long time, democracy and free markets were touted as the twin answer to most ills. But while free-market tenets have come under strain in the international financial crisis, with the very countries that espoused the self-regulating power of markets taking the lead to embrace principles of financial socialism to bail out their troubled corporate colossuses, the spread of democracy encounters increasingly strong headwinds. This put democracy in retreat.

Technology and AI are authoritarian capitalism’s largely bloodless methods for extending total control over the population, making sure that every individual toe the party’s line. This compliance is also enabled by the emerging military surveillance industrial complex, which is going to be at the core of successful authoritarian capitalism. Vast databases of citizens’ DNA and irises will make personal identifications impossible to fake, while ubiquitous online, mobile and CCTV monitoring will liquidate privacy and any possibility of organized dissent. In the state’s gaze, each person will stand naked with no choice but to do the autocrat’s bidding or be vanished and die, forgotten by all, out of sight in a “black jail” or in an officially non-existent concentration camp. Unless the world’s democracies come up with attractive and effective solutions to socioeconomic ills such as unemployment, falling living standards and income, and inaccessible medical care, then authoritarian capitalism will win.

Fox News tells viewers they are the only reliable source of political information – re-enforcing the alt-right propaganda in social media. This opens the door to gaslighting – a form of psychological manipulation that seeks to sow seeds of doubt in a targeted individual or in members of a targeted group, making them question their own memory, perception, and sanity.  In post-truth politics social media assists political actors who mobilize voters through a crude blend of outlandish conspiracy theories and suggestive half-truths, barely concealed hate-speech, as well as outright lies. These “populist” voters now live in a media bubble, getting their news from sources that play to their identity-politics desires, which means that even if you offer them a better deal, they won’t hear about it, or believe it if told. We now realize the need to control how social media is manipulated by big money. Friedrich Nietzsche claimed there was no objective fact about what has value in itself – culture consisted of beliefs developed to perpetuate a particular power structure.

Disinformation can be dangerous on social media because, the sheer amount of information there and the length of readers’ attention spans can allow it to go unchecked. Social media platform algorithms are designed for optimized user retention and engagement, and are not looking for misinformation or disinformation. A combination of lies and religion are used to control the people. There is no difference between the fake news, misinformation, disinformation of today – such lies have been churned out for years, but today it is designed to support the plutocracy. Trump’s victim politics is a complete fraud, an old trick used by economic elite to keep working-class Americans fighting each other rather than focusing on processes to counter the plutocrats who are ripping them off. The truth is that present capitalism creates enormous wealth, but it concentrates into oligopolies and monopolies, to the extent the economic elite creates and normalizes a culture of lying to itself leading to its inherent instability.

The Republican Party with its full-throated support of small government and minimal regulations of neoliberalism, embrace the uncertain populist policies of division and misinformation. The trick neoliberals employ is to maintain the myth of democracy through regular elections, but to separate any real power from the hands of those elected. The rise of Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump is a clear symptom of the catastrophic normalization of authoritarian capitalism: based the belief in the need for top-down leadership; nationalism; the friend/enemy scheme; and militant patriarchy (law and order policies; idealization of warfare and soldiers; repression of constructed enemies; conservative gender relations). Trump stands for what can be characterized as authoritarian capitalism. He blames Mexico and China for deindustrialization and social decline without ever mentioning that US capital exploits workers both in the US and in destinations of outsourced capital, including in Chinese sweatshops and Mexican maquiladoras.

Many consider ‘authoritarian capitalism’ to designate any capitalist system where the state plays a more prominent role than has been considered ‘optimal’ since the 1980s. The efforts to repatriate industries creates such a climate. For example, the United States and Europe are providing huge monetary incentives as they try to acquire the building blocks of electric vehicle manufacturing to avoid becoming dependent on China. This includes the construction of battery factories and plants to process lithium and other materials on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean. Volkswagen is also building a factory in Ontario, but the company made the decision to do so only after the Canadian government matched U.S. incentives. These incentives are all consistent with authoritarian capitalism where the state plays a conspicuous role, as the next stage of capitalism – in which a capitalist market economy exists alongside an authoritarian government.

The true value of Nineteen Eighty-four is it teaches us that power and tyranny are made possible through the use of words and how they are mediated. The theme of lies in 1984 is: lying, deception and false appearance is usually connected with the want for power and control, the belief that no one will find out, and avoiding punishment, which are evident in 1984. George Orwell observes: “The further a society drifts from the truth the more it will hate those who speak it.” Orwell demonstrates how a government’s manipulation of technology, language, media, and history can oppress and degrade its citizens. The book was written as a warning of what could happen if people allowed their governments to obtain too much power after Orwell saw what happened to the people in Nazi Germany. Orwell concludes “If liberty means anything at all it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.”

One reason the authoritarianism of the present system has been easy to ignore is that its abuses largely took place out of sight, inflicted on those least able to resist. The dark underbelly of globalization has been the increasingly violent tactics used by states to control and suppress the movement of people across their borders. Authoritarian capitalism is not new, but the use of force is becoming more overt, which is why it is all the more important that progressives expose and resist the appalling treatment of the most marginalized. Authoritarian capitalism is rapidly evolving, intensifying and spreading across the globe. In the process, democracy is being destroyed. This is a crisis that expresses itself in the rising authoritarianism visible in divisive and exclusionary politics, populist political parties and movements, increased distrust in fact-based information and news, and the withering accountability of state institutions.

The fusion of autocratic politics and state-guided capitalism has emerged in the 21st century as leading challenge to international spread of democratic ideas. Blaming citizens for their alleged populist or anti-democratic turn is misleading. Without the active involvement of the economic elite, both foreign and domestic, authoritarian capitalism could not have emerged in Hungary. To satisfy the needs of the economic elite, Orbán not only dismantled crucial democratic institutions, but also silenced those who could get in the way, such as trade unions and NGOs, as enriching this new elite necessarily creates losers. When elites turn neoliberalism into crony capitalism instead of well-functioning free markets, they doom democracies and stabilize authoritarian politics. Recent GOP activities in the US result in resurgence of reactionary nationalist, religious, racist, and antifeminist ideologies and movements. In addition, there are efforts to make voting more difficult. With the possible election of Donald Trump in 2024, the specter of authoritarian capitalism haunts America.

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Urgent Optimism Approach Makes Change Possible

Posted on June 15, 2023 by greg

You know how some gamers just can’t seem to quit. Even when they keep losing the same level over and over…and over again. Why do they waste so much time on a level they can’t seem to beat? Well, it’s actually not a waste of time. They’re actually getting better, gaining skills and “leveling-up.” As with many things in life, progressing through a game comes with almost guaranteed failure. Yet the passion to try over and over again in pursuit of a win is incredibly potent within the gaming community. They demonstrate a nearly unmatched perseverance considering an equally unmatched number of failures. They remain optimistic at the opportunity to succeed. This lesson in grit and perseverance is vital for any creative endeavor, or truly, any path towards success. You must have an uncanny willingness to try, explore, fail and be confident that it will ultimately lead to victory.

Bello argues, neoliberalism continues to punctuate the lexicon of policymakers with their emphasis on free trade, the central role of private enterprises, and a minimalist role for the state. The seeming failure of the present economic paradigm has brought a wave of detractors from all sides, even from among the staunch supporters of neoliberalism. Studies undertaken in recent years by various academics and institutions provide empirical evidence suggesting that neoliberal global capitalism (also known as globalization) or simply capitalism has failed to deliver what it has been preaching for the last two decades. Neoliberalism, by contrast, views life as ceaseless struggle. Agents vie for scarce resources in antagonistic competition in which every individual seeks dominance. This political theory is codified in non-cooperative game theory; the neoliberal citizen and consumer is the strategic rational actor. Rational choice justifies ends irrespective of means. 

The neoliberal project is founded on – and acts upon – the assumption that the average citizen is too confused and ignorant to really know what’s best for society or themselves. With respect to “fake news”, the common practices of social media “sharing” constitute an emerging practice that makes one an especially favorable target for neoliberal strategies of social control. A willful hostility toward established knowledge has emerged on both sides of the political spectrum, one in which every opinion on any matter is as good as every other. The historian Jennifer Burns has this wonderful insight when she describes Ayn Rand as ‘the ultimate gateway drug to life on the right’ – justifying a certain picture of the world is learned at a very early age, that leads them down the path to narcissism. Because the current culture gives them just enough to behave in ways that the neoliberals describe as being the ideal entrepreneur of the self, confusing freedom with imaginary lack of constraint, and so on and so forth.

The concealing aspects of neoliberal ideology are not accidental (i.e. not simply errors) but relate systematically to a set of social and cognitive interests of the elites. Neoliberalism refers to the state of the world wherein almost every aspect of human existence has in some way impacted or controlled by contemporary relations of capital, meaning that global capitalism has achieved governance. Neoliberals, recognizing their waning control of their ideology over the working class, are in the process of replacing it with data points from social media (i.e. Cambridge Analytica). By developing a psychological profile using Facebook likes it is possible to develop algorithms to control and manipulate targeted populations for political purposes. Psychographic profiling of the electorate allows further segmenting of personality types into specific subgroups who are susceptible to precisely targeted persuasion messages attached to an issue they care about.

When stripped of their representational aspects, narratives in video games typically are essentially reproductions of life under neoliberalism, corresponding to the reality of controlled choices and participation. The games fetishize interactivity and glorify agency in the same way that neoliberal capitalism extols the virtues of freedom and deregulation. Galloway (2006) warns that “while it might appear liberating or utopian, don’t be fooled; flexibility is one of the founding principles of global informatics control”. The mobility afforded in the narratives work under this same principle, appearing as play but operating within the structure of informatic control. Furthermore, as games lure players in with greater promises of agency, active play, and nonlinear narratives, they are becoming increasingly better at subtly reinforcing the paradigm shift to a society of controlled flexibility. Narrative choice in video games becomes play that is exploited as a productive force for neoliberal plan, and as such is deeply linked to the systems of control that elites employ.

The question of who controls the text is answered by players as themselves, but this is a prevalent deception in place throughout the culture of trickle-down economics, as the control remains firmly in the hands of the author, the programmer, and the system itself (Aarseth, 1997; Galloway, 2006). Dyer-Witheford and de Peuter (2009) point to this illusion of free will as the most insidious means of control. It is when the subject of neoliberalism believes they have free will and are free from ideology that the inherent ideology is the most effective. The players rehearse the narratives of neoliberalism willingly, believing that they are in control and thus are at the greatest risk of being influenced. The individualism and imperialism of the Western world is apparent in these games as well, featuring the player as a notable wanderer who is able to advance through the ranks of any culture that they please, and conquer the world of the game through exploration.

The pervasiveness of networks, computers, and consoles in contemporary society means that neoliberal thought is plugged into culture in the home, during leisure time, and within personal space. As cultural expression functions as the new locus of identity, people become more deeply invested both intellectually and emotionally in the narratives of video games. Neoliberal capitalism heralds interactivity and agency as empowerment and participatory democracy, while hiding the underlying ideologies and systems of control at work within them. The society of control requires subjects whose identities are fluid and fluctuating, rather than stable. Desirable subject positions are also reinforced through language, media, and the production of meaning. Language organizes and orders subjectivity, while “the communications industries integrate the imaginary and the symbolic within the biopolitical fabric, not merely putting them at the service of power but actually integrating them into its very functioning”.1

Jane McGonigal promotes a solution applying urgent optimism. She is a best-selling author and director of game research and development at Institute for the Future, a non-profit think tank that helps people prepare for the future. Urgent optimism is the desire to act immediately to tackle an obstacle, combined with the belief that we have a reasonable hope of success. The good news is urgent optimism is not a fixed personality trait. It changes throughout our lives and, crucially, it’s changeable – we can purposely build more of it through future imagination training. Urgent optimism means you are not losing sleep over worries about the future. Instead, you are stoked to get out of bed in the morning and do something about it. Your imagination literally switches from a first-person perspective, where you see the world from within your own body, to a third-person perspective where you experience your actions from an out of body vantage point.

An important part of genuine education is realizing that many of the things we think are natural and inevitable (and therefore should accept) are in fact conditioned (and therefore can be changed). The world doesn’t need to be the way it is; there are other possibilities. The now common idea that we can “check facts ourselves” is at best an illusion. The fact we can “look things up on the net” can give people the impression they understand something when in fact they are overlooking important domain-specific details, or are trusting the wrong sources. Jane McGonigal’s psychology around urgent optimism and how to look at the future, and to stay engaged in a difficult problem, harnessing reward activity to create our future offers answers of how to look at the future. By harnessing reward activity of gamers to map out necessary changes over the next ten years to address the difficult problems created by the existing austerity economic policies, it is possible to identify processes to improve social life.

Power is best seen as an invisible force linking individuals and actors, in a state of constant flux and renegotiation. There is a small group who have been made very wealthy by the existing system. Change is a threat to them. It is this group that loves its status quo so much that it sees its own change as an underhanded attack on its way of life. The debate is no longer how fast the ocean is rising, rather how fast will we rise to the occasion to introduce change. This is about introducing equality, justice and fairness so that it not just a perception, but a reality, that the system is no longer gamed for those at the top. To create change we must seek out ideas that make a difference. It is urgent to save globalization from the neoliberal mindset because globalization is reversible. Our outlook must have a sense of urgency as things never stop moving, and we must be optimistic as there is always opportunity.

With the increasing socioeconomic inequality, we recognize the need for change. Often we have to acknowledge that change is sometimes difficult or close to impossible. Empowerment happens when individuals and organized groups are able to imagine their world differently and to realize that vision by changing the relations of power that have kept them in poverty, restricted their voice and deprived them of their autonomy. While none of us can actually “see” the future, we can practice looking into the future and seeing what might be. The path forward is urgent optimism – a mindset that includes mental flexibility, realistic hope, and future power. Hope-reward feedback loop creates a vision of the future we can become. As we practice seeing many different crazy futures, we become more comfortable with the reality of continuous change, and we start to find hope in the possibilities that exist alongside the difficulties.

1 https://macsphere.mcmaster.ca/bitstream/11375/14395/1/fulltext.pdf

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Universal Basic Income Can Provide a Temporary Fix

Posted on June 1, 2023 by greg

Determinants of health reflect underlying forces that are at work in the subsequent development of disease. The World Health Organization has declared poverty to be the single largest determinant of health. Poverty can and does lead to illness (due to poor nutrition, inadequate shelter, greater environmental risks and lesser access to healthcare) but the opposite is also true; illness leads to poverty by reducing household savings, overall productivity, and quality of life for individuals and families. Many people do not realize the cost to the healthcare system that stems directly from poverty. Canadians in the lowest income groups are three times less likely to fill prescriptions and 60% less able to get needed tests because of cost. Living in poverty can double or triple the chances of developing diabetes and complications such as blindness and cardiovascular disease – but it also causes financial problems for the healthcare system itself.

The economy of the 1950s and 1960s was about an unprecedented rise in middle class jobs: there was more room at the top. In 1958, Michael Young wrote a futuristic novel, The Rise of the Meritocracy, a satire on a society stratified by merit. Young coined the term, formed by combining the Latin root “mereō” and the ancient Greek suffix “cracy”, in his essay to describe and ridicule such a society. The story was intended as a warning: if society was viewed as perfectly meritocratic, then disproportionate awards are showered on the elite, and contempt is increasingly shown to those on the bottom. Young mocked the existing education system in Britain, arguing it was simply a centuries-old class system in sheep’s clothing. Typically lacking the best schools, underprivileged children routinely did badly on exams – the standardized intelligence tests that consequently determined their social position.

The cost and pain of poverty in the U.S. is less about basic goods like water and electricity than nonmaterial factors: insecurity, stress, lack of opportunity and discrimination. Also, a study by scholars at Villanova University concluded that mass incarceration has increased the U.S. poverty rate by an estimated 20 percent. Childhood poverty is estimated to cost the United States approximately $1 trillion a year. This is the result of a loss of economic productivity, higher health expenses, and increased criminal justice costs. It is also estimated that for every dollar spent in reducing poverty (in US), the nation would save up to $12 in reduced expenses. The cost-of-living crisis is disproportionately affecting poorer households. With fewer resources to cover rising bills, many are taking on debt just to get by. This has consequences in the short term, but also lengthens the effects of this crisis for the most vulnerable.

Poverty means living with constant worry about having enough healthy food to eat, adequate housing, clothing, not to mention time to get outside, to exercise and to socialize with friends and relatives. This applies not only to those living on incomes in the poorest ten per cent but also to those at each rung up the income scale; the middle class experiences more stress, a higher prevalence of disease and earlier death than high earners, while those with low incomes and living in poverty suffer most of all. Systemic poverty is the root cause of many health and social problems, not to mention the economic toll. People living in poverty face barriers to work such as personal, health, and disability challenges, mental health and addictions issues, a limited number of good jobs, a lack of education and training, discrimination, criminal records, and structural and historical barriers such as those faced by Indigenous people.

Here’s what the evidence tells us. The stress of worrying about the basics of life lowers the body’s defences against disease. As a result, we see a higher and increasing prevalence of all disease (obesity, diabetes, heart disease, stroke, cancer, lung disease, mental illness, addictions and others) among those who are worse off right across the income gradient. Children who go to school hungry and whose parents are under constant stress tend not to learn well and so become discouraged and leave school early. They then are often doomed to repeat the poverty cycle with low-paid work, chronic unemployment, and a greater likelihood of becoming involved in crime and drug addiction as well as early pregnancy. Real life is nothing like the neoliberal narrative. Support for neoliberalism comes from enabling the myths of privatization, deregulation, and retrenchment of the welfare state.

In the late 80s, in Canada, as in many developed countries, the trend began toward smaller government, lower taxes, fewer social supports, privatization, and a reliance on continued economic growth with “trickle down” economics to “raise all boats.” The result has been a flattening of income tax with greater relief for the wealthy, fewer social supports in the way of welfare rates, child benefits, employment insurance (EI) and other income supplements for the poor, and inadequate government investments in social housing, child care and development, education and skills training. The increasing income gap in society is alarming because it erodes social cohesion – a basic sense of trust between people who do not know each other. A reasonable degree of social cohesion is needed so that a society (and the world) can function, and for people to have the chance to increase their opportunities in life. Inequality tests our ethics.

Poverty limits choices. Poor people have limited choices for their diet. They often lack shops in their area where they live, or have trouble reaching them. In particular, the poor have the lowest intake of fruits and vegetables. This leads to consumption of an overabundance of cheaper junk food (high fructose corn syrup drinks and processed foods), leading to more obesity and chronic disease than the general population. Few courageous politicians exist today, as they all look over their shoulders to check that the crowd is following them (to make sure they are still leading), especially as elections approach. They introduce fear tactics, and then check to see if it resonates with voters. It falls to the general public to be the agents of change. We realize we have become disillusioned not because our expectations failed, but because they were false.

Data consistently show that poverty destroys opportunity and causes worse health outcomes. The poorer you are the more likely you will die early. Creating lasting and meaningful plans that use a human rights framework to address poverty would be costly, but not nearly as expensive as doing nothing. Taxpayers’ dollars (federal, provincial and local) are being wasted. Research by economists for the Ontario Association of Food Banks demonstrated that the cost of poverty in Canada is between $72-86B annually (healthcare, soup kitchens, shelters, police, corrections). Poverty could be eliminated for just a fraction of this amount. Enacting policies to end poverty is the best step forward legally, morally and economically. That same report pegs the national health care costs attributable to poverty at $7.6 billion. A 2008 report from the Public Health Agency of Canada estimates that $1 invested in the early years saves between $3 and $9 in future spending on the health and criminal justice systems, as well as on social assistance.

The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) were adopted by the United Nations in 2015 as a universal call to action to end poverty and protect the planet; provide the blueprint to achieve a better and more sustainable future for all. The global challenges we face include poverty, gender equality, climate change, food security, sustainable agriculture.  Give poor people cash without conditions attached, and it turns out they use it to buy goods and services as well as improve their lives and increase their future earnings potential. This would buy time for the necessary long-term change: increase pay for low-wage workers (a living wage); increase welfare rates, EI and child benefits; provide universal subsidized child care; invest in social housing, education and skills training; improve healthcare access; and specifically focus on First Nations’ issues. How? reduce the tax breaks, loopholes and offshore shelters for the wealthy, and ensure that our natural resource revenue is used to improve the well-being of all.

The small government and minimal regulations mindset has heralded the globalization of indifference that prevents progressive government initiatives to address the issue. The purpose of UBI on the surface is to prevent or reduce poverty and increase equality among citizens, in reality, it is to control the restless mob. We need to adopt policies that have science behind them. The trickle-down economic theory was rebranded in the 1970s to an ideology – supply side economics – the doctrine that tax cuts could be had for free (incentive effects would generate new activity hence more revenue) without causing budget deficits. An ideology is a set of ideas proposed by the dominant class of a society to all members of this society (that is normative or based on what is considered the normal or correct way of doing something). We must not let laissez-faire apologists explain away various failures during the pandemic by the (false) existence of a vast left-wing conspiracy.

With ongoing deterioration of the economy, it is becoming clear for stability in the community we need to ensure the availability of bread. Universal basic income (UBI) is an answer – perhaps the answer – to long-term economic stagnation – a trickle-up form of Keynesianism that would stimulate our economy through increased household spending. Moreover, if funded by fees on unproductive activities like pollution and speculation, it would help solve two other deep problems of 21st – century capitalism: climate change and financial instability. And it wouldn’t need to replace or reduce spending on current programs that benefit the poor, a regressive trade-off that conservatives favor but most progressives oppose. If the amount is significant enough it could replace a large part of existing welfare and social programs. A lifelong base income, along with health insurance for all, are the next pieces.

With the present economic model now discredited, it’s time to devise a new narrative to guide our economies in a way that prevents neoliberalism’s excesses, promotes universal well-being as an economic imperative and ensures nationalism doesn’t once again win the battle of ideas. Donald Trump’s appearance on the world stage is accelerating our understanding of the scope of failure of the neoliberal version of globalization and the risks associated with not addressing it. This flags the urgency for structural changes in society that need to be taken in order to overcome social problems, as well as avoid the easy-sounding solutions (surveillance, censorship, control, policing, law and order) of creeping fascism, that are now advanced. The need for a steady income among middle-class Americans and Canadians is accelerating as the labor-market changes. The UBI approach buys time for progressives to reform neoliberal capitalism.

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How to Respond to Monopolies Today

Posted on May 15, 2023 by greg

Since the beginning of the Republic, Americans have used antimonopoly policy not only to preserve market competition, but to preserve the economic opportunity of the individual citizen and to guarantee that power and property would not become concentrated in the hands of the few. Indeed, America was born out of rebellion against monopoly. During the Boston Tea Party of 1773, revolutionaries like Samuel Adams struck a blow against the British East India Company precisely because it was a monopoly, which they viewed as “forever dangerous to public liberty.” After a public meeting led by Samuel Adams and attended by thousands of Boston citizens to protest the tax, a group of disguised Sons of Liberty boarded the ships holding tea cargoes in Boston harbor and threw every chest of tea overboard. On the other hand, the Tea Party movement that began in 2009 was a fiscally conservative political movement called for lower taxes and for a reduction of the national debt and federal budget deficit through decreased government spending.

Executives at some of the largest monopolies in the US economy are using their market power to jack up prices on consumers. Their means is market power. There is an opportunity for profit. The opportunity is for CEOs to pocket the revenue from price hikes while blaming inflation on the increases. “The price hikes that we are seeking now are building on decades and decades of disinvestment, corporate consolidation, and deep deregulation,” observes Rakeen Mabud. The history of mergers and acquisitions … has really contributed to the loss of our productive capacity, notes Ron Knox. Monopolies contribute to market failure because they limit the efficiency, innovation, and healthy competition. In an efficient market, prices are controlled by all players in the market because supply and demand swing more toward equilibrium. Society is worse off under monopoly because a monopolist charges a higher price and supplies a lower quality than a perfectly competitive market.

Born in 1866, Elizabeth Magie often spoke out against the railroad, steel, and oil monopolists of her time. In 1904, she invented and patented what she called “The Landlord’s Game”. The original patent on The Landlord’s Game expired in 1921. Parker Brothers then took the hand-made game which had become known simply as Monopoly, and adapted it as the polar opposite of what Magie had intended. Monopolies create a social cost, called deadweight loss, caused by a mismatch between goods consumption and demand, as some consumers who would be willing to pay for the product up to its marginal cost, are not served. In a monopoly there is no supply curve, because monopolists are price setters and not price takers. This is because the monopolist has market power that exploits. The higher price and lower quality contribute to an ongoing deadweight loss for society.

The Sherman Act (passed 1890), the Federal Trade Commission Act (passed in 1914), and the Clayton Act (passed in 1914) are the three pivotal laws in the history of antitrust regulation – to limit monopolies in the market. Today, the Federal Trade Commission, sometimes in conjunction with the U.S. Department of Justice, is tasked with enforcing federal antitrust laws. This newly created Federal Trade Commission enforced the Clayton Antitrust Act and prevented unfair methods of competition. Aside from banning the practices of price discrimination and anti-competitive mergers, the new law also declared strikes, boycotts, and labor unions legal under federal law. There are three main ways in which the Federal antitrust laws are enforced: Criminal and civil enforcement actions brought by the Antitrust Division of the Department of Justice. Civil enforcement actions brought by the Federal Trade Commission. Lawsuits brought by private parties asserting damage claims.

Antitrust laws have to do with regulating monopolies, or companies that grow too large so as to stifle competition and harm consumers. In the 1800s, American firms used legal loopholes to grow larger than they otherwise could have by establishing entities known as trusts. These trusts would then hold assets amounting to, for example, the entirety of the nation’s railways or coal mines. Thus, the laws enacted to break up and prevent these monopolistic entities were called “anti-trust.”  At their core, antitrust provisions are designed to maximize consumer welfare. Supporters of the Sherman Act, the Federal Trade Commission Act, and the Clayton Antitrust Act argue that since their inception, these antitrust laws have protected the consumer and competitors against market manipulation stemming from corporate greed. Through both civil and criminal enforcement, antitrust laws seek to stop price and bid rigging, monopolization, and anti-competitive mergers and acquisitions.

The Federal Trade Commission Act prohibits unfair or deceptive advertising in any medium. That is, advertising must tell the truth and not mislead consumers. The FTC’s Bureau of Consumer Protection stops unfair, deceptive and fraudulent business practices by collecting reports from consumers and conducting investigations, suing companies and people that break the law, developing rules to maintain a fair marketplace, and educating consumers and businesses about their rights. FCC goes after market allocation – a scheme devised by two entities to keep their business activities to specific geographic territories or types of customers. In 2000, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) found FMC Corp. guilty of colluding with Asahi Chemical Industry to divide the market for microcrystalline cellulose, a primary binder in pharmaceutical tablets. The Commission barred FMC from distributing micro-crystalline cellulose to any competitors for 10 years in the United States, and also banned the company from distributing any Asahi products for five years.

In spite of this existing legislation, the US has become a country of monopolies. Three companies control about 80% of mobile telecoms. Three have 95% of credit cards. Four have 70% of airline flights within the U.S. By 2023 Google handles 90% of all search queries worldwide. In agriculture, four companies control 66% of U.S. hogs slaughtered in 2015, 85% of the steer, and half the chickens, according to the Department of Agriculture. Similarly, just four companies control 85% of U.S. corn seed sales, up from 60% in 2000, and 75% of soy bean seed, a jump from about half. Monopoly capitalism has shifted power from the 99% to the 1% and undermined American democracy, making it harder to tackle their most existential crisis – climate change.

Monsanto is an American agrochemical and agricultural biotechnology corporation that was founded in 1901; generally known for producing genetically modified organisms (GMOs), having a bad environmental record, using dangerous pesticides, and clashing with local farmers. Monsanto was one of the original producers of both Agent Orange (dioxin), a toxic herbicide that caused serious health issues after use during the Vietnam War, and DDT, a pesticide that’s devastating environmental effects were detailed in the best-selling book Silent Spring. The new crop system developed by Monsanto and BASF was designed to address the fact that millions of acres of US farmland have become overrun with weeds resistant to Monsanto’s glyphosate-based weedkillers, best known as Roundup. Both Monsanto and the German chemical giant BASF were aware for years that their plan to introduce a new agricultural seed and chemical system would probably lead to damage on many US farms.

Glyphosate, the active ingredient in the world’s most popular herbicide is literally everywhere: our soil, our water, our air, our food, and in our bodies. Chronic toxicity – the effects of continually ingesting glyphosate residues in food – is cause for concern. Glyphosate interferes with fundamental biochemical reactions and may predispose humans to obesity, Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, and other health problems. It’s easy to overlook these effects. For example, brain glyphosate correlates with increased TNFα levels, suggesting that exposure to this herbicide may trigger neuroinflammation in the brain, which may induce changes that are seen in neurodegenerative disorders. One cause of European opposition to GMOs is that the advantage to agriculture and food production is often considered weak or non-existent, while the risks are considered substantial. Roundup is banned in more than 20 countries because the herbicide has been linked to an increased risk of non-Hodgkin lymphoma and other types of cancer.

Monopolies, of course, raise prices. This reduces the purchasing power of households, or the value of their income. But monopolies, in fact, reduce the purchasing power of low-income households much more than high-income households. Society is worse off under a monopoly because a monopolist charges a higher price and supplies a lower quantity than a perfectly competitive market. This is because the monopolist has market power that it exploits. Excluded from markets by both excessive cost of conventional goods and elimination of substitutes, the poor suffer doubly. The higher price and lower quantity result in a deadweight loss for society. Never the less, the march goes on. Between 1995 and 2015, 60 US pharmaceutical companies merged and became just 10. Some 25 years ago, 10 corporations controlled 40% of the global seed market; today it is just two. The five biggest corporations together earned more than the income of the poorest two billion people – or nearly a quarter of the world’s population.

To date, the most famous United States monopolies, known largely for their historical significance, are Andrew Carnegie’s Steel Company (now U.S. Steel), John D. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil Company, and the American Tobacco Company. American monopolies date back to colonial administrators who awarded large companies exclusive contracts to help build the New World. From the late 19th to the early 20th century, the three organizations mentioned above maintained singular control over the supply of their respective commodities. Without free-market competition, these companies could effectively keep the price for steel, oil, and tobacco high. AT&T, once deemed a monopoly, was forced by the U.S. government to spin off most of its assets. 2022 has been a big year for enforcement of the antitrust laws against tech companies, with the five largest (Apple, Google, Meta/Facebook, Amazon, and Microsoft) all facing lawsuits or investigations in the US.

A second reason these firms have become dangerous is that they control the flow of ideas and information – an arrangement no democracy can tolerate. They mediate our interactions, and they decide which sites show up when we search; which news stories, real and fake, we encounter in our feeds; and which books we run across. Surveillance is a central strategy of all three of these tech monopolies. And they all use the extensive data they’ve gathered about us to hinder upstart competitors, keep us tuned into their services, and otherwise sustain their dominant positions. For example, these pervasive digital platforms constitute an existential danger is that they control the fates of so many other businesses. Retailers and manufacturers at once compete with Amazon and depend on it to reach the market. Media companies are beholden to the algorithms of Facebook and Google. Google has used its control of search to privilege its own travel and shopping services, while marginalizing those of rivals.

It seems strange, but it shouldn’t. Governments and central banks around the world took exceptional measures to support the financial system during the pandemic, and it worked to excess. Fantastic amounts of money were made in stocks, housing, cryptocurrency and more during a pandemic that killed 6.2 million people and rocked the global economy. Billionaires’ wealth has risen more since COVID-19 began than it has in the last 14 years. At $5 trillion dollars, this is the biggest surge in billionaire wealth since records began. A one-off 99 percent tax on the ten richest men’s pandemic windfalls, for example, could pay: to make enough vaccines for the world; to provide universal healthcare and social protection, fund climate adaptation and reduce gender-based violence in over 80 countries. All this could be done, while still leaving these men $8 billion better off than they were before the pandemic.1

Government backed monopolies are’t just a statement about income inequality in the U.S. today. It’s also an acknowledgement that the 1 percent largely controls the government and is therefore able to rig laws, taxes and regulations in its favor. Despite the free-market ideologues’ rhetoric about “big government” pitted against “big business,” the truth is that big business has always found it useful to invest in politicians and their political parties to influence government policies that improve their bottom lines. Because of their control over the key institutions in U.S. society, the power elite need not resort to harsh physical coercion in order to maintain their interests and achieve their goals. Only by reclaiming, breaking, decentralizing and dispersing this power can we hope to make democratic decisions that are in the public interest. It is necessary to preserve the economic opportunity of the individual citizen and to guarantee that power and property not become concentrated in the hands of so few.

1 https://www.oxfam.org/en/press-releases/ten-richest-men-double-their-fortunes-pandemic-while-incomes-99-percent-humanity

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How to Address Inequities in the Era Woke Capitalism

Posted on May 1, 2023 by greg

Social justice as a concept arose in the early 19th century during the Industrial Revolution and subsequent civil revolutions throughout Europe, which aimed to create more egalitarian societies and remedy capitalistic exploitation of human labor. Social justice refers to a political and philosophical theory that focuses on the concept of fairness in relations between individuals in society and equal access to wealth, opportunities, and social privileges. The five main principles of social justice include access to resources, equity, participation, diversity, and human rights. From access to healthcare to safe spaces to live, social justice aims to level the playing field and eliminate discrimination. This is about introducing equality, justice and fairness so that it not just a perception, but a reality, that the system is no longer gamed for those at the top. Social justice is the assertion of the ideal that all humans should have the same rights and opportunities.

The public health reformer Sir Edwin Chadwick is best known for highlighting the link between poor sanitation and outbreaks of disease in urban environments. Chadwick became involved in social reform in 1832, when he joined the newly formed Royal Commission into the Operation of the Poor Laws as an assistant. Appointed a commissioner the following year, Chadwick played a key part in the passing of the Poor Law Amendment Bill in 1834. It led to the first Public Health Act of 1848 and the creation of a General Board of Health, with Chadwick being made a commissioner. When cholera struck London in the board’s first year of operation, they responded with the emergency measures of waste removal and street cleaning. Chadwick took the handle off of the Broad Street pump to no longer allow the use of the water for cooking. drinking or washing. His theory was proved true because the rate of cholera did decrease in that area closest to the pump.

According to a recent study by the prestigious Brookings Institution, published in 2019, 44% of workers in the United States (more than 53 million workers) have low salaries, with the average salary being less than $18,000 (all figures in U.S. dollars) per year. As such, the report concludes that “almost half of U.S. workers earn salaries which are insufficient for providing economic security.” This percentage significantly increased during the Trump era. One indicator of scarce social protection is that the large majority of workers do not have sick leave, meaning that if they cannot work as a result of being ill, they do not receive any income or financial help – whether that be private (provided by their employer) or public (from social security). As a consequence, workers were resistant to stopping working or taking days off, as doing so would halt their income. This is why many individuals who became ill with the Coronavirus kept working and, therefore, infecting others.

The strategy of President Trump’s government was centered around denying that there is a problem and accusing the Democratic Party of creating a nonexistent epidemic, through – according to President Trump – dissemination of “fake news.” The administration even ordered the top federal authority on public health, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (whose budget was been cut by 18% annually by the Trump government), to prohibit the distribution of tests that show whether a person is infected with COVID-19 by any institution other than the CDC. This limited the number of tests to a minimum: Only 26 tests for COVID-19 per 1 million inhabitants were carried out between January 3 and March 11 of 2020 (according to data from the BBC), while in the same period, South Korea had carried out 4,000 tests per 1 million inhabitants. The United States has more than 300 million inhabitants.

Schrecker and Bambra focus on four ‘neoliberal epidemics’ – obesity, insecurity, austerity and inequality – which they portray as the latter-day equivalents of cholera and tuberculosis (in early 19th century TB accounted for one-third of all deaths). Strikingly, none of these ‘epidemics’ are diseases in a medical sense. Obesity and stress are risk factors for disease; inequality is a contributing factor of health inequities; and ‘austerity’ is a hyperbolic term for balancing the budget through fiscal restraint. Schrecker and Bambra concede that these diseases are not confined to market economies, but they claim that ‘the changes associated with neoliberalism increase our susceptibility’ to them. Poverty is inversely related to life expectancy. Individuals living in poverty in the US had 10.5 years lower life expectancy at age 18 than those with incomes ≥400% of the poverty threshold. COVID-19, drug overdoses, and accidental injury accounted for about two-thirds of the decline in life expectancy, according to the 2022 report.

The ideology behind America’s economy has failed the most vulnerable, although lay people believe that lifestyle and environmental factors such as smoking and air pollution are the most important determinants of mortality. Recent research suggests that social factors have the same or even a greater impact on health. Indeed, while their importance tends to be underestimated (Haslam, McMahon, et al., 2018), meta-analytic evidence suggests that social isolation, loneliness, and living alone are among the most potent determinants of mortality. Loneliness is also related to stress hormones, immune, and cardiovascular function. In this way, the link between social disconnection and poorer health outcomes has been validated across multiple studies. Neoliberal reforms lead to deep changes in healthcare systems around the world, on account of their emphasis on free market rather than the right to health. People with disabilities can be particularly disadvantaged by such reforms, due to their increased healthcare needs and lower socioeconomic status.

It has been argued that inequality is not an unintended result but itself an important feature of neoliberal politics because it is supposed to serve as a mechanism to increase competition and productivity (Foucault, 2008; Mirowski, 2014). Rising inequality, in turn, is related to lower levels of social cohesion and trust and a decline of community life. In line with this, researchers have shown that happiness declines as social inequality rises. This relationship between inequality and happiness is explained statistically by lower perceived fairness and lower generalized trust rather than by lower household income (Oishi et al., 2011). Accordingly, there is already evidence that by fostering social inequality neoliberal politics can have a negative impact on well-being at a societal level. Neoliberalism also encourages consumerism and when people adopt materialistic values, they are more likely to have symptoms of anxiety and depression with poorer relationships and lower self-esteem.1

The more wealth and power are concentrated in a society, the more racial and other exclusivist discourses will be deployed and the more criminal its government system, and ultimately the society, will become. As German philosopher Max Horkheimer first diagnosed it, the inherently criminal dynamics of modern governance in a capitalist system rest on a relationship of dependency between ruler and ruled, in which those in power both “[protect] and at the same time [exploit] their clients.” Precarity is that condition of uncertainty and insecurity that threatens violence, exclusion, and/or poverty. And precarity is politically induced. This means that conditions of life that make it more difficult are the result of political decisions, despite the fact that we are made to believe that such struggle is a natural and inevitable part of life. This trope of personal responsibility has the effect of concealing the political motivations for allowing and inducing precarity.

Under neoliberal logic, wellbeing and security are linked to how hard one works to earn the supports that make a good life possible. So that means that people struggling in precarity often feel responsible for their condition and believe they are not living up to the American Dream, a feeling of perceived “failure” that can induce a lot of shame. Have you ever had to make a difficult decision like choosing between paying for child care for your kids or going back to school to get a degree? These are just some of the everyday struggles that a social existence defined by precarity brings. Precarious work is the new norm as more and more people in the United States enter work in the gig economy, taking temporary or one-off jobs that pay little and offer no job security. Precarious work is also becoming normalized in salaried jobs like teaching, where teachers are left in positions of uncertainty and insecurity year after year as conservative governments gut the power of labor unions to collectively bargain and organize.

As the World Health Organization concludes, mental disorders are shaped by social and economic factors, with inequality being chief among them. Over the past 15 years, antidepressant use has increased in the United States by nearly 65%. From 2017 to 2018, 19% of adults in the United States experienced a mental illness – an increase of 1.5 million people when compared to the previous year (State & of Mental Health in America, 2021). These do not include the increases in distress after COVID-19, which has resulted in heightened rates of moderate to severe depression, anxiety, and suicidal ideation. Additionally, life expectancy, which has increased yearly since 1918, has decreased over the past several years in the United States due to dramatic rises in deaths from suicide, alcoholism, and drug overdoses (Case & Deaton, 2020). Over the past decade, sociologists, and mental health practitioners have posited that the increases in mental illness and distress are due to neoliberal economic policies and ideologies.2

Today, social justice has shifted towards a stronger emphasis on human rights and improving the lives of disadvantaged and marginalized groups that have historically faced discrimination in society. Many of these groups have been discriminated against on the basis of factors such as sex, age, wealth, ethnicity, heritage, social status, religion, and others. Woke nowadays refers to being aware or well informed in a political or cultural sense, especially regarding issues surrounding marginalised communities – it describes someone who has “woken up” to issues of social injustice. Woke capitalism, also referred to as woke capital or stakeholder capitalism, is a term referring to forms of marketing, advertising and corporate structures that pertain to sociopolitical standpoints held by millennials and Generation Z, including social justice and activist causes. We need to shift the cancel culture of censorship, ostracism, anathemas, threats, destruction or vandalism of works of art, attempts at linguistic and historical revision, and media lynching campaigns on social networks response to woke capitalism.

Woke, or stakeholder capitalism is the idea that businesses have a responsibility that extends beyond their shareholders. Employees, the media, and investors are urging businesses to take a stand on issues that affect their wider communities and create greater equality. The real issue is the trade-offs between short-termism and long-termism. Stakeholder and shareholder interests do align in the long term. If you have happy employees, collaborative suppliers, satisfied regulators, and devoted consumers, then they will help you deliver higher benefits over a longer-term period. ESG metrics are used to screen investments based on corporate policies and to encourage companies to act responsibly. This only includes the risks to its business and shareholders, not the risks the business creates for the outside world, to people and planet. All people, regardless of their backgrounds, have rights and responsibilities to fulfill their potential in life, and lead decent, dignified and rewarding lives in a healthy environment. With no good definition there is no way to determine whether goals or targets of present system are being met.

The problem is, without goals or targets we are unable to measure progress, there can be no way to engage in serious debate. We need a new system to counter the attack from the right wing on “Woke” capitalism. Social justice is the view that everyone deserves equal rights and opportunities. The inequities of health are measured by the spread in life expectancies between poor and rich neighborhoods. Let’s replace ESG with the social determinants of health. The social and economic factors that influence people’s health are apparent in the living and working conditions that people experience every day. Inequalities in the distribution of the social determinants of health are now a widely recognized problem. We need to take the handle off the pump, and introduce significant upstream public policy interventions. This requires us to filter social and economic policies through the lens of the social determinants of health before they are implemented to ensure they support actions that reduce inequities in the system.

1 https://bpspsychub.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/bjso.12438

2 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8145185/

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On the Relationship Between Truth and Power

Posted on April 15, 2023 by greg

Michel Foucault observed: “we are subjected to the production of truth through power and we cannot exercise power except through the production of truth” (Foucault, 2003:93). Foucault argued that knowledge and power are intimately bound up. So much so, that that he coined the term “power/knowledge” to point out that one is not separate from the other. Every exercise of power depends on a scaffold of knowledge that supports it. For Foucault, the idea of justice … has been invented and put to work in different types of societies as an instrument of a certain political and economic power for control. For Foucault, to challenge power is not a matter of seeking some absolute truth, but of detaching the power of truth from the forms of hegemony, social, economic and cultural, within which it operates at the present time. There is truly no universal truth at all, only systems of power creating a regime of truth.

Søren Kierkegaard (1813-1855), a philosopher and social critic, emphasized the importance of subjectivity, which has to do with the way people relate themselves to (objective) truths. What he means by this is that most essentially, truth is not just a matter of discovering objective facts. While objective facts are important, there is a second and more crucial element of truth, which involves how one relates oneself to those matters of fact. Since how one acts is, from the ethical perspective, is more important than any matter of fact, truth is to be found in subjectivity rather than objectivity. Truth, much like knowledge, is bound to power and similarly operates amidst the individuals and institutions that generate and sustain it. The economic elite do not hesitate to present their ideology as interpretation of truth. In the ‘war on truth’ political elites spread conspiracies and ‘flood the zone’ with versions of events.

Jean-François Lyotard notes: Knowledge has become an irreplaceable commodity in the production process and has a definite role in the global dispute for power. Postmodernism can also be a critical project, revealing the cultural constructions we designate as truth and opening up a variety of repressed other histories of modernity, such as those of women, homosexuals and the colonized. The modernist canon itself is revealed as patriarchal and racist, dominated by white heterosexual men. As a result, one of the most common themes addressed within postmodernism relates to cultural identity. Under the terms of this outlook, all claims on truth are relative to the particular person making them; there is no position outside our own particulars from which to establish universal truth. In this respect, for as long as we have been postmodern, we have been setting the scene for a “post-truth” era of today’s metanarrative.

Billionaires do not hesitate to present their ideology as interpretation of truth. Hedge fund billionaire Bob Mercer and his family spent millions in GAI (Government Accountability Institute), Breitbart and Cambridge Analytica during the 2016 campaign to get Trump elected. Hillary Clinton did propose a tax on high-frequency trading of securities, which is reportedly a favorite of Mercer’s Renaissance Technologies. The Mercer Family Foundation gave nearly $3.6 million to Citizens United between 2012 and 2014, which sued for access to Clinton Foundation-related emails and whose president David Bossie also got a senior job on the Trump campaign. Cambridge Analytica was a data mining and data analysis company that obtained the data of 50 million Facebook users, constructed 30 million personality profiles, and sold the data to US politicians seeking election to influence voters, without the users’ consent. Mercer’s investments helped Trump win the 2016 election.

The digital merging and melding of text, sound and image, the advent of cheap copying and the growing ease of networked information spreading across vast distances in real time are powerful drivers of post-truth decadence. The present-day political irruption of populism is fueled by the institutional decay of electoral democracy, combined with growing public dissatisfaction with politicians, political parties and “politics”. Reinforced by the failure of democratic institutions to respond effectively to anti-democratic challenges such as the growing influence of cross-border corporate power, worsening social inequality and the dark money poisoning of elections, the decadence is proving to be a lavish gift to leaders, parties and governments peddling the mantra of “the sovereign people”. Among the strangest and most puzzling features of the post-truth phenomenon is the way it attracts people into voluntary servitude because it raises their hopes and expectations of betterment.

Social media gives populist actors the freedom to articulate their ideology and spread their messages. Politics of fear is used to get people to vote a particular way, allow excesses in spending, or accept policies they might otherwise abhor. In post-truth politics social media assists political actors who mobilize voters through a crude blend of outlandish conspiracy theories and suggestive half-truths, barely concealed hate-speech, as well as outright lies. These “populist” voters now live in a media bubble, getting their news from sources that play to their identity-politics desires, which means that even if you offer them a better deal, they won’t hear about it, or believe it if told. Trump sabotages democracy by creating his own swamp where one cannot tell truth from fiction, where rational debate evaporates as he diverts, distracts, and deflects accountability. The purpose of such activities is to turn the country into warring tribes by creating unyielding one-sidedness and enemies.

The institutions of ‘civil society’ or the structures and organization of everyday life have the ability to control the social progress achieved in the past by various minorities, a buffer against potentially turning back the clock. In 2000, the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved mifepristone as a method of abortion. Taken along with misoprostol, the two-drug combination is known as medication abortion or the “abortion pill.” New research from the Guttmacher Institute shows that 20 years after its introduction, medication abortion accounted for more than half of all abortions in the United States. The composition of US Supreme Court will determine which variants of behaviors and ways of thinking that are acceptable to the Religious Right, in the process defining social truth.  Judges with conservative social views have the potential to roll back past decisions that will affect social changes such as defunding reproductive rights and support for gay marriage – we are living in a post-truth society.

Nietzsche believed, one should be conscious of the illusory nature of what is considered truth, thus opening up the possibility of the creation of new values. It is necessary to create the social environment or milieu to support good governance to control cognitive dissonance and the consequent balancing of perception that leads to misperception. The truth is that capitalism creates enormous wealth, but it concentrates into oligopolies and monopolies, to the extent that it undermines that very wealth production it relied on. Disinformation often layers true information with false – an accurate fact set in misleading context; a real photograph purposely mislabeled. The key is not to determine the truth of a specific post or tweet, but to understand how it fits into a larger disinformation campaign. Effective disinformation campaigns involve diverse participants; they might even include a majority of ‘unwitting agents’ who are unaware of their role, but who amplify and embellish messages that polarize communities and sow doubt about science, mainstream journalism and Western governments.

Donald Trump knows how to use emotional panic to shut down the rational thinking part of our brains. In other words, when we are consumed by fear, we stop thinking. Now the culture war has united with the class war. The class war has to do with the lower middle class: wages are stagnating for middle and low wage workers, union membership and its traditional benefits are on the decline, income inequality is on the rise, and manufacturing jobs have been lost to technology and other countries. The culture war from abortion to same-sex marriage, what was considered reasonable and justifiable governance and policy for one side, came to be viewed as irrational and indefensible by the other. A populace that stops thinking for itself is a populace that is easily led, easily manipulated and easily controlled. Trump ran as a populist; but governed as a plutocrat. Conservative populists target those with a monopoly on representation (journalists, scholars, established political parties) rather than those with a monopoly on production.

According to Foucault ‘knowledge’ and ‘truth’ are created by those in power. What we take to be true is the dominant worldview that we have been provided with: it is received wisdom, not truth. Foucault rejected the idea that society was progressing. The world is not getting better or getting closer to truth, it is just moving through different worldviews. Foucault adds that the essential political problem for us, today, is trying to change our “political, economic, institutional regime of the production of truth” (where truth is modeled on the form of scientific discourse), in order to constitute a new ‘politics of truth’: “The real political task in a society is to criticize the workings of institutions that ‘appear’ to be both neutral and independent, to criticize and attack them in such a manner that the political violence that has always exercised itself obscurely through them will be unmasked, so that one can fight against them.”

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The Relationship Between Religion and Ideology

Posted on April 1, 2023 by greg

Both religion and ideology are sets of beliefs or ideas which try to explain how things work in the world and society and based on it create a set of rules people may follow. Both espouse world views that are seen as complete by their followers: as “total” systems, concerned at the same time with questions of truth and questions of conduct. Both consider opposing views as incorrect. Both tend to impact human psychology in similar ways through creating an ‘us and them’ mentality. Louis Althusser argues that religion is a part of the ideological state apparatus. Along with education and the media, it transmits the dominant ideology and maintains false class consciousness. False consciousness denotes people’s inability to recognize inequality, oppression, and exploitation in a capitalist or authoritarian society because of the prevalence within it of views that naturalize and legitimize the existence of social classes.

People can polarize into various ideologies, including tendencies towards political left- and right-wing extremism, and religious fundamentalism. If sociologists refer to religion as being ‘ideological’, they typically mean the beliefs and practices of that religion support powerful groups in society, effectively keeping the existing ruling class, or elites, in power. Thus, while remaining rooted in a lived culture, religion can become an ideology, an organizing principle for the reordering of society (or at least, for mobilizing collective action), clothed in the universalist language of God’s will and transcendent justice. Someone who may have seen a connection is the psychologist Carl Jung (1875-1961) who argued that humanity has “religious instinct” – a deep need to worship something, make sense of the world and develop world-views. Secularists might argue this instinct is a by-product of evolution and our desire to understand our surroundings.

Ideology can act as a supplement to religion, or as its replacement. Indeed, the interpretation of freedom suggested by the church can be a way to resolve some social and political tensions in modern society. However, the problem is that there is no single theological interpretation of what freedom is. Another problem is that it is difficult to translate a healthy theological interpretation of freedom into a political praxis. In other words, even though the churches have a huge potentiality to overcome ideologies, they often get trapped in them. Ideologies function in the realm of theology in the same way as they do everywhere else: they stereotype the truth; make it more comprehensible and translatable into social and political action. This comes at the expense of various aberrations in the perception of truth. When the church identifies itself with one of the ideologies, it dramatically reduces the truth, which it expresses.

Ideologies reduce the relationship of human beings with God to moral and civil values, and turn metaphysics into a civil religion. Ideologies polarize religious groups. They make the church, in the description of Daniel Izuzquiza, “divided between traditionalists and progressives, conservatives and liberals, those accentuating identity and those stressing dialogue, ‘Christians of presence’ and ‘Christians of mediation,’ and so on.” The church cannot create an ideology-free zone, but it can disarm ideologies. It can provide a framework where ideologies would not harm. The first step to the disarmament of ideologies would be to recognize that there are ideologies in the church and they are different from the church as such and from theology. “The terrible paradox,” as Olga Sedakova puts it, is that “ideology penetrates into Christianity and is not recognized as opposite to it.” Ideologies thus should be recognized in the church, and the church should accept that it is dangerous to be identified with them.1

Evolutionist Richard Dawkins hypothesized a similar reason why religion has created such a lasting impact on society. His theory is explained by the creation of ‘memes’. Comparable to genes, memes are bits of information that can be imitated and transferred across cultures and generations (Dawkins, 2006). Unlike genes, which are physically contained within the human genome, memes are the units or “genetic material” of culture. As a vocal proponent of atheism, Dawkins believes the idea of God is a meme, working in the human mind the same way as a placebo effect. The God meme contains tangible benefits to human society such as answers to questions about human transcendence and superficial comfort for daily difficulties, but the idea of God itself is a product of the human imagination (Dawkins, 2006). Although a human creation, the God meme is incredibly appealing, and as a result, has continually been passed on through cultural transfusion.

One of Weber’s explanations for the origin and persistence of religion in society concerns its role in providing a meaningful explanation for the unequal “distribution of fortunes among men” (Weber, 1915 (1958)). This is religion’s unique ability and authority to provide a theodicy – an attempt to construct and deal with how belief systems work – an explanation for why all-powerful Gods allow suffering, misfortune and injustice to occur, even to “good people” who follow the moral and spiritual practices of their religion. Religious theodicies resolve the contradiction between “destiny and merit” (Weber, 1915 (1958)). They give meaning to why good or innocent people experience misfortune and suffering. Religions exist therefore because they (successfully) claim the authority to provide such explanations. Each form of theodicy provides “rationally satisfying answers” to persistent questions about why gods permit suffering and misfortune without undermining the obligation of believers to pursue the religion’s values.2

The Black Death altered the fundamental paradigm of European life that included socio-economic and religious belief and practice, unleashing the forces that made the Renaissance possible. The Renaissance yielded scholars the ability to read the scriptures in their original languages, and this in part stimulated the Protestant Reformation. The 16th century reformers considered the root of corruptions to be doctrinal rather than simply a matter of moral weakness or lack of ecclesiastical discipline. Kuhn denied that science is constantly approaching the truth. Kuhn observed, “each paradigm will be shown to satisfy more or less the criteria that it dictates for itself and to fall short of a few of those dictated by its opponent … no paradigm ever solves all the problems it defines…” Instead of recognizing that a paradigmatic change is necessary in mainstream economics, the economic profession stubbornly sticks to their existing mathematical models.

Kierkegaard describes truth as a leap of faith, and as the becoming of the individual’s subjectivity. While speculative thinking reflects on concrete things abstractly, subjective thinking reflects on abstract things concretely. Kierkegaard made a distinction between objective and subjective truth. For Kierkegaard objective truth merely seeks attachment to the right object, corresponding with an independent reality. On the other hand, subjective truth seeks the achievement of the right attitude; an appropriate relation between object and knower. For Kierkegaard it was subjective truth that counts in life: how we believe is more important than what we believe. It doesn’t matter what you believe so long as you are sincere. Kierkegaard argues that the falsehood of objectivity may be revealed by a lack of need for personal commitment, and by lack of need for decision-making, while the truth of subjectivity may be revealed by a need for personal commitment, and by a need for decision-making.

Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) believed that human reason is rationalization, and truth is simply the name given to the point of view of the people who have the power to enforce their point of view. Whatever man can make work in order to achieve his purposes becomes the truth in the system. There is no objective reality behind truth – different perspectives produce different truths. Nietzsche believes that science at its best keeps us in a simplified suitably constructed and suitably falsified world, and that the artificial world that concerns us is a fiction. Instead of using truth as the highest standard of value, Nietzsche argues, individuals need to develop their own powers of judgment and to produce ideas and ethics that will strengthen them and help them to live. Nietzsche believed, one should be conscious of the illusory nature of what is considered truth, thus opening up the possibility of the creation of new values. 

Neoliberalism as an ideology contemporarily refers to market-oriented reform policies such as “eliminating price controls, deregulating capital markets, lowering trade barriers” and reducing, especially through privatization and austerity, state influence in the economy. Inequality is recast as virtuous. The market ensures that everyone gets what they deserve. So pervasive has neoliberalism become that we seldom even recognise it as an ideology. We appear to accept the proposition that this utopian, millenarian faith describes a neutral force; a kind of biological law, like Darwin’s theory of evolution. This ideology was developed as a conscious attempt to reshape human life and shift the locus of power. In reality, neoliberalism increases income inequality by rewarding those who are already wealthy, while providing fewer nets for poorer populations to fall back on. It is necessary to rebalance the power of corporations supported by an ideology serving the interest of financial capital and globalized elites – in order to create a successful society.

Neoliberal ideology is so useful to society’s most powerful people – as a scholarly veneer to what would otherwise be a raw power grab. Truth, much like knowledge, is bound to power and similarly operates amidst the individuals and institutions that generate and sustain it. The economic elite do not hesitate to present their ideology as interpretation of truth. The “truth” the market reveals is never in actuality some eternal, given fact. The market is never a neutral arbiter of truth, so the “truth” it reveals about government practice has always required interpretation. Social computing shows that you don’t necessarily have to read people’s brains to influence their choices. It is sufficient to collect and mine the data they regularly – and often unwittingly – share online. Nietzsche observed: “Sometimes people don’t want to hear the truth because they don’t want their illusions destroyed.”

Ideology is a form of social or political philosophy in which practical elements are as prominent as theoretical ones. It is a system of ideas that aspires both to explain the world and to change it. Ideology is the set of personal values about politics, while philosophy is the set of values about life in general. Philosophy has a pragmatic approach in its theories, whereas ideology is all about beliefs belonging to a particular group of people. Another important difference between philosophy and ideology is that philosophy is objective in its approach, whereas ideology is dogmatic in its approach and beliefs. Ideology is a set of beliefs that favours the interests of a group. For example, beware of the green high-tech entrepreneurs and their allies in finance who are part of the capitalist elite that is enriching itself at the expense of the middle class. Neoliberalism – the ideology at the root of all our problems – is a system of abstract thought applied to public matters and thus makes its concepts central to politics.

1http://ekmair.ukma.edu.ua/bitstream/handle/123456789/11060/Hovorun_Ideology_and_Religion.pdf?sequence=1
2https://opentextbc.ca/introductiontosociology2ndedition/chapter/chapter-15-religion/

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Disinformation and Disillusionment of Today’s Politics

Posted on March 2, 2023 by greg

With tax cuts, expanded opportunities for investment in low-wage economies and for speculation in financial markets and almost unlimited opportunities for luxury consumption, the top 1 per cent of income earners in the developed countries captured an ever-increasing share of income. The financial crisis of 2007 – 08 marked a turning point in public awareness, particularly in the rich countries, about the extent of inequality that had evolved in the decades of accelerated globalization. The measures taken to avoid economic meltdown after the financial crisis hardly had an impact on the privileged position of the beneficiaries of globalization. The sharp rise in inequality and the destruction of old sites of stable industrial employment that had accompanied globalization and the financialization of capitalism, led to widespread popular resentment, and this provided a fertile terrain for the rise of disillusionment and right populist politics. The 1% of the 1% are the gatekeepers of American politics.

Decision-makers on Wall Street with extreme individualism and a sense of entitlement chose not to apply critical thinking, but to intentionally take advantage of people, which led to the meltdown of the economy in 2008. Many in the middle class saw their comfortable retirement, their home equity, and their dreams destroyed. With rising financial integration, world economic growth has lessened in the last three years. The threat to individual freedom and opportunities to pursue one’s goals today comes not from political oppression, but from economic failure. Because of growing disillusionment and anger students and workers voted for leaders outside the mainstream party candidates during the 2016 presidential primary elections – the consequence of being left behind by soaring inequality and the failure of government to deliver. Donald Trump – figured out how to harness their disillusionment and growing anger – is superior to the others in exploiting the narcissism of small differences to recruit the Republican base.

Leading up to the 2016 election, many were becoming aware that workers were growing restless with the increasing inequality between the wealthy and the rest of society. This included pundits like Steve Bannon who were looking for a platform to spread their ideas. Bannon came as a customer – looking for a place to bring his conspiracy-tinged ideas, and messages for right-wing Americans disillusioned with mainstream politicians. When he left, his economic nationalism message remained. A new church needs people willing to serve as officials of the corporation (church). Donald Trump appointed economic elite as stakeholders with the appropriate belief systems and practices – assembling the wealthiest cabinet in history. These stakeholders included Wilbur Ross and Steve Mnuchin, profiteers of the great foreclosure machine who know what it takes to effectively deliver ongoing massive upward redistribution of wealth. They understand how the neoliberal system works to create working-class indebtedness.

The root meaning of “church” is not that of a building, but is defined by people. One reason people raise questions within a church is to address issues of concern. One of today’s issues is the disillusionment with a ‘system’ that creates increasing economic inequality for most. The term postmodernism appears to have currency for many browsers and customers in the neoliberal church. Postmodernism is defined as the reaction to assumed certainty of scientific, or objective, efforts to explain reality. The postmodernism in political science is the observation people resist realistic concepts of power which is repressive. Foucault claims individuals engage in daily practices and routines of self-discipline that subjugate themselves in order to maintain a claim on their own identity and happiness. Remember the greatest fault of postmodernism is that it lacks an agenda for social change. Kierkegaard observes, “Everyone one wants progress, no one wants change.”

The term cognitive dissonance is used to describe the mental discomfort that results from holding two conflicting beliefs, values, or attitudes. In the moment, cognitive dissonance can cause discomfort, stress, and anxiety. And the degree of these effects often depends on how much disparity there is between the conflicting beliefs, how much the beliefs mean to that person, as well as with how well the person copes with self-contradiction. This cognitive dissonance can be seen particularly in economists – scholars, politicians, media commentators. Paul Murawski notes: Neoliberal theories are unable to explain the financial crisis, there is a gap between the accepted theory and reality. Instead of recognizing that a paradigmatic change is necessary in mainstream economics, the economic profession stubbornly sticks to their mathematical models. On the other hand, more and more people understand this ideology supporting individualism – less government and regulations – can no longer be falsified by anything as trifling as data from the “real” economy.

Cognitive dissonance causes the feeling of uncomfortable tension which comes from the brain’s inability to handle two conflicting realities, so it creates an alternative one that often defies reality. It appears in virtually all evaluations and decisions and is the central mechanism by which we experience new differences in the world. Many middle-class white folks have become disillusioned and angry about wages stagnating and good jobs disappearing over the past two decades. The neoliberals knew from the beginning that the theory tax cuts for the rich along with deregulation would provide good jobs for the rest of society is a lie. The result of the cognitive dissonance this creates is a picture of the world that’s deceptive in the extreme. It is necessary to come to terms with the fact cognitive dissonance is a feature of humans that predisposes us to self-delusion, bias and blindness to our errors and biases.

While all men and women suffer from disillusionment, few know that their state of disillusionment is the result of the breakdown of an illusion they themselves had manufactured. Disillusion is never possible without fantasy – and the destructive strength of the disillusionment can never exceed the strength and energy that was used to create the fantasy in the first place. The adverse effect is that man places values on his illusions, and over values what is not true, or no longer exists. In order to clear these errors of thinking, man must release the emotion that keeps him tied to this false reality. The removal of illusion or fantasy involves understanding that expectations are not failed, but false. With this recognition comes an opportunity for change. Tea party adherents understand expectations that the Republican elite would deliver have not failed, but were false. Recognizing this, they seek change in the Republican Party. Donald Trump remains relevant because he knows how to tap into these forces.

When we’re involved with a narcissist, cognitive dissonance is a psychological state that keeps many clinging to a narcissistic person like Trump, who has succeeded in creating two camps. The narcissist is his own creator. Hence his grandiosity. Moreover, the narcissist is a man for all seasons, forever adaptable, constantly imitating and emulating, a human sponge, a perfect mirror, a non-entity that is, at the same time, all entities combined. To the narcissist, every day is a new beginning, a hunt, a new cycle of idealization or devaluation, a newly invented self. There is more to it than the profound effect he has had on the Republican party, but also the long-lasting damage he has inflicted. Like carriers of a virus, narcissistic leaders “infect” the very cultures of their organizations, leading to dramatically lower levels of collaboration and integrity at all levels – even after they are gone.

Nietzsche argues “concepts are metaphors which do not correspond to reality.” Although all concepts are metaphors invented by humans (created to facilitate ease of communication), Nietzsche observes, humans forget this fact after inventing them, and come to believe they are ‘true’ although they do not correspond to reality. Nietzsche believed, one should be conscious of the illusory nature of what is considered truth, thus opening up the possibility of the creation of new values. It is necessary to create the social environment or milieu to support good governance to control cognitive dissonance and the consequent balancing of perception that leads to misperception. Nietzsche argued that one of the most powerful forces in society was “ressentiment [French for resentment].” According to their use, ressentiment is a sense of hostility directed toward an object that one identifies as the cause of one’s frustration, that is, an assignment of blame for one’s frustration. The resentment that grows in the weak turns eventually to be evil, deceitful and hateful.

Truth, much like knowledge, is bound to power and similarly operates amidst the individuals and institutions that generate and sustain it. The economic elite do not hesitate to present their ideology as interpretation of truth. The “truth” the market reveals is never in actuality some eternal, given fact. The market is never a neutral arbiter of truth, so the “truth” it reveals about government practice has always required interpretation. Nietzsche argued that truth is impossible – there can only be perspective and interpretation – an opinion driven by a person’s interests. The removal of illusion or fantasy involves understanding that expectations are not failed, but false. The political legacies of neoliberalism, which involved the commodification of politics and social services, have led to widespread popular cynicism towards established political elites, rendering societies much more susceptible to the demagogic politics of the populist right.

Rent-seeking is the act of growing one’s existing wealth by manipulating the social or political environment without creating new wealth. Rent-seeking activities have negative effects on the rest of society. They result in reduced economic efficiency through misallocation of resources, reduced wealth creation, lost government revenue, heightened income inequality, and potential national decline. The most important rent-seeking behaviours include the underwriting of the campaigns of legislators, bribery, lobbying, and political violence. In societies with democratic political systems, lobbying, bribery and campaign contributions represent the primary methods used to influence the government or affect policy outcomes. Beware of the rising tide of the 1% of the 1% in America. Basically 1% (30,000+) of Americans donate money to support elections. Of this thirty thousand plus, in first decade of 20th century 1% of this group (.01% of population) averaged 17% of donations; by 2012 the amount increased to 28.1%.1

In today’s hyper-connected world, there is an overwhelming amount of information available: some of it is true, some of it is false, some are opinions, and some is deliberately misleading. While the internet has increased access to useful, factual information, it also enables business models that allow disinformation driving disillusion driving increasingly disengaged from the political process. The business model upon which many internet companies, social media in particular, rest, is one that thrives on anger and outrage. These reactions keep people engaged and create attention that can be used to place ads and other pieces of information to generate revenue – allowing disinformation to be disseminated on a profitable scale. This coincides with the rise of politics of disinformation and populism. Disinformation – exacerbates the gap between attitudes in society – cannot be left unchallenged. Protecting the election system from the 1% of the 1% is key to countering disinformation and disillusionment of today’s politics.

1https://sunlightfoundation.com/2013/06/24/1pct_of_the_1pct/

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