U.S.: A Third-World Future?
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deep
Blue Crack Addict
I don't see our stardard of living improving anytime soon.
and by many measures it has been declining since the 1970s.
There is a bigger gap between the wealthy and the poor.
It seems many young people, under 30, will not have the same standard of living that their parents and grand parents enjoyed.
and by many measures it has been declining since the 1970s.
There is a bigger gap between the wealthy and the poor.
It seems many young people, under 30, will not have the same standard of living that their parents and grand parents enjoyed.
AliEnvy
Refugee
mmmhmm.
Newsweek has a cover story this week on the U.S's future. It is predicting that the economy might bring its downfall.
Ferguson: How Economic Weakness Endangers the U.S. | Newsweek National News | Newsweek.com
Ferguson: How Economic Weakness Endangers the U.S. | Newsweek National News | Newsweek.com
I generally like to avoid overly pessimistic views, mindful of the litany of histrionic headlines written in the last major recession of the 1970s that didn't turn out to be true. On the other hand, when it seems like it is impossible for there to be anything more than a superficial discourse about any serious challenge the West faces, I can't help but wonder what we'd do about a serious challenge that requires more than the usual weak-willed response we get from politicians.
diamond
ONE love, blood, life
I'm not surprised by the article, and I dont think the condition our country is in even close to paralleling the 70s-it's much worse.
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AliEnvy
Refugee
Can you be specific on what you'd consider a serious challenge?
Not to be glib, but crisis after crisis we have shown a consistent track record of allowing politicians to scare us into submission.
What do you think might change that pattern?
ntalwar
Rock n' Roll Doggie Band-aid
Gold prices at $1218 an ounce doesn't bode well. The dollar is turning into the peso.
diamond
ONE love, blood, life
Had he been elected the country would be on the mend about now and not sinking into the abyss.
INDY500
Rock n' Roll Doggie Band-aid
Si, Se Puede!
ntalwar
Rock n' Roll Doggie Band-aid
That was Bernanke's slogan?
maycocksean
Rock n' Roll Doggie Band-aid
Had he been elected the country would be on the mend about now and not sinking into the abyss.
I've always been skeptical of how much difference a particular person in the White House makes.
Bush made me reconsider that view, but even he didn't act alone.
So far, I don't think Obama has really done anything that radical. This might be heresy to say here, but I think most of the big decisions he made probably wouldn't have been that different if a Republican had been in office. The one exception would be the attempt at health care reform, which definitely would NOT have happened under a Republican administration. But health care reform hasn't actually "happened" yet, and it's debatable as to how much reform will actually come to pass when the final bill appears on Obama's desk.
The rest--his plan on Afghanistan, his bailout and stimulus spending and so on would have been done by a Republican.
A lot of the stuff he gets flack and praise for ("We're shutting down Guantanimo", "We're trying the terrorist in New York", "We're reaching out to the Muslims") is mostly cosmetic stuff.
Obama's tone is different, that's for sure--and that in itself could be important. But running a country requires too much pragmatism for his actual actions to be that different from, say, a President Romeny.
Kieran McConville
ONE love, blood, life
All fair points Maycocksean, to be honest I couldn't really disagree. Although if there's another thing Bush made me reconsider it's the bit about running a country requiring pragmatism. It is possible to run it as an idealogue. Not well, but possible.
maycocksean
Rock n' Roll Doggie Band-aid
I'm actually not convinced that Bush was that much of a hardcore idealogue either though. He definitely never struck me as being as radical as say Palin or even Huckabee. And he never came across to me like the right wing radio types do. I always felt (without any real proof, I admit) that any of his Christian rhetoric, for example, was more of a sop to the base than any fiery personal commitment. I might say he adopted a neocon foreign policy, but I think that was more the influence of those around him (Cheney/Rumsfeld) in the wake of 9/11 than anything else.
I think he did put a more belligerent stance on America's posture towards the world, but that seemed to be more about his personal style than some sort of Limbaugh-influenced ideology.
Where I question my own philosophy on presidential power and influence is on how Bush got us into Iraq. I had to revise my view that it was impossible for the president to really mess up the country.
Kieran McConville
ONE love, blood, life
No, but I'm thinking here about the reality that a government is made up of many people.
I'm actually not really singling out Bush per se, as a human individual, since he seemed ineffectual a lot of the time. But, he was surrounded by some pretty shady characters who had their own strongly held ideas which, it seems, they played to his mindset to advance. Cheney, for one. An incredibly powerful figure, scandalously so.
So, I think his administration was pretty ideological, and pretty extreme, and Bush was mostly along for the ride. He certainly wasn't the 'great dictator'.
I'm actually not really singling out Bush per se, as a human individual, since he seemed ineffectual a lot of the time. But, he was surrounded by some pretty shady characters who had their own strongly held ideas which, it seems, they played to his mindset to advance. Cheney, for one. An incredibly powerful figure, scandalously so.
So, I think his administration was pretty ideological, and pretty extreme, and Bush was mostly along for the ride. He certainly wasn't the 'great dictator'.
phillyfan26
Blue Crack Supplier
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Had he been elected the country would be on the mend about now and not sinking into the abyss.
Name one reason this isn't absurd propaganda.
diamond
ONE love, blood, life
BVS
Blue Crack Supplier
Had he been elected the country would be on the mend about now and not sinking into the abyss.
Besides your cut and paste fail...
How would Mitt deal with this NATIONAL economy?
If you answer this I'll be amazed.
diamond
ONE love, blood, life
diamond
ONE love, blood, life
A stor
Refugee
I agree.......the standard of living for America's working class was better during the 1970's than it is right now. We didn't make as much income, but your "dollar" stretched much, much farther. Because, the cost of living was cheaper.
I started my education at a local community college in 1979. At that time, a full time student payed eleven dollars per credit hour, per course. It is now almost five times that amount for the same required freshman english class. At the same community college.
I was able to pay for college, earn my degree, graduate with a 3.25 grade average and did not have any student loans, which I had to pay back. This is unheard of in today's economy.
I would say basically anything that requires long-term planning: health care, alternative energy, infrastructure (repair) projects, creating a 21st century energy grid, etc. The best we seem able to do, at this point, is organize bureaucracies to manage the current infrastructure and issue policy-related rulings. But, for example, when the telecom companies had been given billions in the early 1990s to create a nationwide fibre-optic infrastructure, not only did they take the money and not build anything, but government has also not bothered to hold them accountable whatsoever. I feel that this is a consistent pattern of incompetence and corruption.
Economically, probably some form of ordoliberalism, and, politically, some resurgence of procedural liberalism, whereupon there is added emphasis on government ethics preventing conflicts of interest between the private and public sectors. I think one of the major problems is that there has been too much abandonment of liberal political philosophy, as the right has been too conservative--thus, due to their contempt for government, having bred many inefficiencies into the system--and the left has been too socialist--hence, being too preoccupied with social welfare programs.
And, although I generally dislike Marxism, I do like to borrow from Gramsci his ideas regarding hegemony and the importance he ascribed to education as a means of keeping the hegemony in check. I don't think that this point can be underscored enough; if the public is too stupid to effectively participate in a representative democracy, then we are ultimately responsible for breeding a system that is ineffective. I think we are suffering, at its core, a major crisis in intellectualism in our culture, and I believe that the right, because of its embrace of nonsense to placate fanatics, and the left, because of its embrace of postmodernism--and, again, compulsive preoccupation with social programs--have made it impossible to have a rational, erudite and civil national discourse. Until we start reemphasizing, for instance, critical thinking in education, we're always going to be vulnerable to pseudo-philosophical and pseudo-scientific demagogues.
phillyfan26
Blue Crack Supplier
- Joined
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Again, conservative propaganda. I'd like to hear your thoughts in detail, not some Republican hack that you like because he's the same religion.
BVS
Blue Crack Supplier
AliEnvy
Refugee
Currently we're not structured for any type of long-term planning. We measure results quarter to quarter. I'm not sure how we get out of that cycle.
Are people too stupid or too demoralized? I agree critical and conceptual thinking seem to have taken a back seat to grandstanding. Are people not capable of sound thinking due to the education system or are they just broken? I thought this was an interesting article - hadn't thought about it this way before.
Are Americans Too Broken for the Truth to Set Us Free?
By BRUCE E. LEVINE
Can people become so broken that truths of how they are being screwed do not “set them free” but instead further demoralize them? Has such a demoralization happened in the United States? Do some totalitarians actually want us to hear how we have been screwed because they know that humiliating passivity in the face of obvious oppression will demoralize us even further? What forces have created a demoralized, passive, disCouraged U.S. population? Can anything be done to turn this around?
Can people become so broken that truths of how they are being screwed do not “set them free” but instead further demoralize them?
YES. It is called the “abuse syndrome.” How do abusive pimps, spouses, bosses, corporations, and governments stay in control? They shove lies, emotional and physical abuses, and injustices in their victims’ faces, and when victims are afraid to exit from these relationships, they get weaker; and so the abuser then makes their victims eat even more lies, abuses, and injustices, resulting in victims even weaker as they remain in these relationships.
Does the truth of their abuse set people free when they are deep in these abuse syndromes? NO. For victims of the abuse syndrome, the truth of their passive submission to humiliating oppression is more than embarrassing -- it can feel shameful; and there is nothing more painful than shame. And when one already feels beaten down and demoralized, the likely response to the pain of shame is not constructive action but more attempts to shut down or divert oneself from this pain. It is not likely that the truth of one’s humiliating oppression is going to energize one to constructive actions.
Has such a demoralization happened in the U.S.?
In the United States, 47 million people are without health insurance and many millions more are underinsured or a job layoff away from losing their coverage. But despite the current sellout by their elected officials to the insurance industry, there is no outpouring of millions of U.S. citizens on the streets of Washington D.C. protesting this betrayal.
Polls show that the majority of Americans oppose U.S. wars in Afghanistan and Iraq as well as the taxpayer bailout of the financial industry, yet only a handful of U.S. citizens have protested any of this.
Remember the 2000 U.S. presidential election? That’s the one in which Al Gore received 500,000 more votes than George W. Bush. That’s also the one that the Florida Supreme Court’s order for a recount of the disputed Florida vote was over-ruled by the U.S. Supreme Court in a politicized 5-4 decision, of which dissenting Justice John Paul Stevens remarked: “Although we may never know with complete certainty the identity of the winner of this year's presidential election, the identity of the loser is perfectly clear. It is the nation's confidence in the judge as an impartial guardian of the rule of law.” Yet, even all this provoked few demonstrators.
When people become broken, they cannot act on truths of injustice. Furthermore, when people have become broken, more truths about how they have been victimized can lead to shame about how they have allowed it. And shame, like fear, is one more psychological way we become even more broken.
U.S. citizens do not actively protest obvious injustices for the same reasons that people cannot leave their abusive spouses. They feel helpless to effect change. The more we don’t act, the weaker we get. And ultimately to deal with the painful humiliation over inaction in the face of an oppressor, we move to shutdown and escape strategies such as depression, substance abuse, and other diversions, which further keep us from acting. This is the vicious cycle of all abuse syndromes.
Do some totalitarians actually want us to hear how we have been screwed because they know that humiliating passivity in the face of obvious oppression will demoralize us even further?
Maybe.
Shortly before the 2000 U.S. presidential election, millions of Americans saw a clip of George W. Bush joking to a wealthy group of people, “What a crowd tonight: the haves and the haves more. Some people call you the elite; I call you my base.” Yet, even with these kind of inflammatory remarks, the tens of millions of U.S. citizens who had come to despise Bush and his arrogance remained passive in the face of the 2000 non-democratic presidential elections.
Perhaps the “political genius” of the Bush-Cheney regime was fully realizing that Americans were so broken that they could get away with damn near anything. And the more people did nothing about the boot slamming on their faces, the weaker people became.
What forces have created a demoralized, passive, disCouraged U.S. population?
The U.S. government-corporate partnership has used its share of guns and terror to break Native Americans, labor union organizers, and other dissidents and activists. But today, most U.S. citizens are broken by financial fears. There is potential legal debt if we speak out against a powerful authority, and all kinds of other debt if we do not comply on the job. Young people are broken by college-loan debts and fear of having no health insurance.
The U.S. population is increasingly broken by the social isolation created by corporate-governmental policies. A 2006 American Sociological Review study (“Social Isolation in America: Changes in Core Discussion Networks over Two Decades”) reported that 25 percent of Americans did not have a single confidant in 2004 (10 percent of Americans lacked a single confidant in 1985). Sociologist Robert Putnam in Bowling Alone (2000) describes how social connectedness is disappearing in virtually every aspect of U.S. life. For example, there has been a significant decrease in face-to-face contact with neighbors and friends due to suburbanization, commuting, electronic entertainment, time and money pressures and other variables created by governmental-corporate policies. And union activities and other formal or informal ways that people give each other the support necessary to resist oppression have also decreased.
We are also broken by a corporate-government partnership that has rendered most of us out of control when it comes to the basic necessities of life, including our food supply. And we, like many other people in the world, are broken by socializing institutions that alienate us from our basic humanity. A few examples:
Schools and Universities: Do most schools teach young people to be action-oriented—or to be passive? Do most schools teach young people that they can affect their surroundings—or not to bother? Do schools provide examples of democratic institutions – or examples of authoritarian ones?
A long list of school critics from Henry David Thoreau to John Dewey, John Holt, Paul Goodman, Jonathan Kozol, Alfie Kohn, Ivan Illich, and John Taylor Gatto have pointed out that a school is nothing less than a miniature society: what young people experience in schools is the chief means of creating our future society. Schools are routinely places where kids -- through fear -- learn to comply to authorities for whom they often have no respect, and to regurgitate material they often find meaningless. These are great ways of breaking someone.
Today, U.S. colleges and universities have increasingly become places where young people are merely acquiring degree credentials -- badges of compliance for corporate employers -- in exchange for learning to accept bureaucratic domination and enslaving debt.
Mental Health Institutions: Aldous Huxley predicted, “And it seems to me perfectly in the cards that there will be within the next generation or so a pharmacological method of making people love their servitude.” Today, increasing numbers of people in the U.S. who do not comply with authority are being diagnosed with mental illnesses and medicated with psychiatric drugs that make them less pained about their boredom, resentments, and other negative emotions, thus rendering them more compliant and manageable.
Oppositional defiant disorder (ODD) is an increasingly popular diagnosis for children and teenagers. The official symptoms of ODD include, “often actively defies or refuses to comply with adult requests or rules," and "often argues with adults.” An even more common reaction to oppressive authorities than the overt defiance of ODD is some type of passive defiance -- for example, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). Studies show that virtually all children diagnosed with ADHD will pay attention to activities that they actually enjoy or that they have chosen. In other words, when ADHD-labeled kids are having a good time and in control, the “disease” goes away.
When human beings feel too terrified and broken to actively protest, they may stage a “passive-aggressive revolution” by simply getting depressed, staying drunk, and not doing anything – this is one reason why the Soviet Empire crumbled. However, the diseasing/medicalizing of rebellion and drug “treatments” have weakened the power of even this passive-aggressive revolution.
Television: In his book Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television (1978), Jerry Mander (after reviewing totalitarian critics such as George Orwell, Aldous Huxley, Jacques Ellul, and Ivan Illich) compiled a list of the “Eight Ideal Conditions for the Flowering of Autocracy.”
Television, Mander claimed, helps create all eight conditions for breaking a population. Television: (1) occupies people so that they don't know themselves—and what a human being is; (2) separates people from one another; (3) creates sensory deprivation; (4) occupies the mind and fills the brain with prearranged experience and thought; (5) encourages drug use to dampen dissatisfaction (while TV itself produces a drug-like effect, this was compounded in 1997 the U.S. Food and Drug Administration relaxing the rules of prescription-drug advertising); (6) centralizes knowledge and information; (7) eliminates or "museumize" other cultures to eliminate comparisons; and (8) redefines happiness and the meaning of life.
Commericalism of Damn Near Everything: While spirituality, music, and cinema can be revolutionary forces, the gross commercialization of all of these has deadened their capacity to energize rebellion. So now, damn near everything – not just organized religion -- has become “opiates of the masses.”
The primary societal role of U.S. citizens is no longer that of "citizen" but that of "consumer." While citizens know that buying and selling within community strengthens that community and that this strengthens democracy, consumers care only about the best deal. While citizens understand that dependency on an impersonal creditor is a kind of slavery, consumers get excited with credit cards that offer a temporarily low APR.
Consumerism breaks people by devaluing human connectedness, socializing self-absorption, obliterating self-reliance, alienating people from normal human emotional reactions, and by selling the idea that purchased products -- not themselves and their community -- are their salvation.
Can anything be done to turn this around?
When people get caught up in humiliating abuse syndromes, more truths about their oppressive humiliations don’t set them free. What sets them free is morale.
What gives people morale? Encouragement. Small victories. Models of courageous behaviors. And anything that helps them break out of the vicious cycle of pain, shut down, immobilization, shame over immobilization, more pain, and more shut down.
The last people I would turn to for help in remobilizing a demoralized population are mental health professionals—at least those who have not rebelled against their professional socialization. Much of the craft of relighting the pilot light requires talents that mental health professionals simply are not selected for nor are they trained in. Specifically, the talents required are a fearlessness around image, spontaneity, and definitely anti-authoritarianism. But these are not the traits that medical schools or graduate schools select for or encourage.
Mental health professionals’ focus on symptoms and feelings often create patients who take themselves and their moods far too seriously. In contrast, people talented in the craft of maintaining morale resist this kind of self-absorption. For example, in the Question & Answer session that followed a Noam Chomsky talk (reported in Understanding Power: The Indispensable Chomsky, 2002), a somewhat demoralized man in the audience asked Chomsky if he too ever went through a phase of hopelessness. Chomsky responded, “Yeah, every evening . . .
If you want to feel hopeless, there are a lot of things you could feel hopeless about. If you want to sort of work out objectively what’s the chance that the human species will survive for another century, probably not very high. But I mean, what’s the point? . . . First of all, those predictions don’t mean anything—they’re more just a reflection of your mood or your personality than anything else. And if you act on that assumption, then you’re guaranteeing that’ll happen. If you act on the assumption that things can change, well, maybe they will. Okay, the only rational choice, given those alternatives, is to forget pessimism.”
A major component of the craft of maintaining morale is not taking the advertised reality too seriously. In the early 1960s, when the overwhelming majority in the U.S. supported military intervention in Vietnam, Chomsky was one of the few U.S. citizens actively opposing it. Looking back at this era, Chomsky reflected, “When I got involved in the anti-Vietnam War movement, it seemed to me impossible that we would ever have any effect. . . . So looking back, I think my evaluation of the ‘hope’ was much too pessimistic: it was based on a complete misunderstanding. I was sort of believing what I read.”
An elitist assumption is that people don’t change because they are either ignorant of their problems or ignorant of solutions. Elitist “helpers” think they have done something useful by informing overweight people that they are obese and that they must reduce their caloric intake and increase exercise. An elitist who has never been broken by his or her circumstances does not know that people who have become demoralized do not need analyses and pontifications. Rather the immobilized need a shot of morale.
It's a very interesting article, and it certainly offers very meaningful food for thought. One thing I've noticed is that Levine's definition of "knowledge" and mine are really quite different. Levine's notion of "knowledge" is more like making matter of fact statements; that is, outlining what's wrong with society without offering hope/solutions. I, on the other hand, am primarily interested in critical thinking and the philosophy of thought; that is, knowing that there is something wrong with society, what is the best course to correct it?
That is not to say that there are easy answers, because there isn't. And that's not to say that people aren't demoralized, because they are. But I find it very interesting that Levine's solution effectively centres around the mental health professions, which he admits is grossly corrupted by referring to the "uncorrupted" in this field, and mine around education, which can be university-centred (and, like the mental health arena, is also grossly corrupt) or a course of self-study. Or, even at that, group study. But that does come back to "social isolation," which I'd agree with him is a problem.
The conundrum appears to be "how to dismantle a culture and rebuild it." And cultural revolutions are very difficult propositions.
That is not to say that there are easy answers, because there isn't. And that's not to say that people aren't demoralized, because they are. But I find it very interesting that Levine's solution effectively centres around the mental health professions, which he admits is grossly corrupted by referring to the "uncorrupted" in this field, and mine around education, which can be university-centred (and, like the mental health arena, is also grossly corrupt) or a course of self-study. Or, even at that, group study. But that does come back to "social isolation," which I'd agree with him is a problem.
The conundrum appears to be "how to dismantle a culture and rebuild it." And cultural revolutions are very difficult propositions.
INDY500
Rock n' Roll Doggie Band-aid
That article comes across as nothing but left wing navel gazing.
Excuse me but many Americans did protest in Washington D.C. and at their representatives town hall meetings. But then they were against government spending and increased control so they don't count. In fact, they were called "mobs" and "astroturf." Apparently the author only laments that advocates have not mobilized.
Who says citizens can only protest in the streets? In a few short years we've gone from Republicans in charge of Congress and the White house to Democrats. We are not South America, sometimes we protest at the ballot box. In a free market economy we also vote with our checkbook.
That's not what they called it when I was a kid.
There are more but you get the idea. But he is right about television.
Excuse me but many Americans did protest in Washington D.C. and at their representatives town hall meetings. But then they were against government spending and increased control so they don't count. In fact, they were called "mobs" and "astroturf." Apparently the author only laments that advocates have not mobilized.
Who says citizens can only protest in the streets? In a few short years we've gone from Republicans in charge of Congress and the White house to Democrats. We are not South America, sometimes we protest at the ballot box. In a free market economy we also vote with our checkbook.
Mmmmm, gosh, no mention of an increasing tax burden and the generational national debt that is being thrown on them in the form of unfunded liabilities in Social Security, Medicare and government pensions.
That's not what they called it when I was a kid.
There are more but you get the idea. But he is right about television.
AliEnvy
Refugee
His solution for a demoralized, immobilized population is to boost morale through encouragement, small victories and models of courageous behaviour.
Actually he said the mental health professions were the LAST to turn to...
27% of the US population goes to university. Perhaps high school is the place to start.
Although I bet if you examined a few cultural revolutions, you'd find changes happen in small steps (small victories) reinforced by encouragement of models of courageous behaviour that reach a tipping point then go viral and spread.
maycocksean
Rock n' Roll Doggie Band-aid
I felt the same.
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