Beyond the Pale
It's simply a matter of historical fact that the dominant intellectual culture of any particular society reflects the interests of the dominant group in that society. In a slave-owning society the beliefs about human beings and human rights and so on will reflect the needs of the slave owners. In the society, which again is based on the power of certain people to control and profit from the lives and work of millions of others, the dominant intellectual culture will reflect the needs of the dominant group. So, if you look across the board, the ideas that pervade psychology, sociology, history, political economy and political science fundamentally reflect certain elite interests. The academics who raise concerns over this tend to get shunted off to the side or labelled as ‘radicals’, or worse.
The dominant values of a culture tend to support and perpetuate what is rewarded by that culture. And in a society where success and status is measured by material wealth - not social contribution - it is easy to see why the state of the world is what it is today. We are dealing with a value system disorder, completely denatured, where the priority of personal and social health have become secondary to the detrimental notions of artificial wealth and limitless growth. And, like a virus, this disorder now permeates every facet of government, news media, entertainment - even academia.
Built into its structure are mechanisms of protection from anything that might interfere. Disciples of the monetary-market religion and the self-appointed guardians of the status quo constantly seek out ways to avoid any form of thought which might interfere with their beliefs. The most common tactic employed is the use of ‘projected dualities’. If you're not a conservative, you must be a socialist; If you are not Christian, you might be a Satanist; and if you feel society can be greatly improved to consider, perhaps, taking care of everyone? You're just a ‘Utopianist’. And the most insidious of them all: if you are not for the ‘free market’ you must be against freedom itself.
Regarding media coverage, every time you hear the words 'freedom', ‘progress’, ‘development’ or 'government interference' said anywhere, it means, in decoded form: blocking maximization of turning money into more money for private money possessors. That’s it. Of course, when you hear the word 'freedom' it also tends to be in same sentence with something called 'democracy'. It's fascinating how people today seem to believe that they actually have a relevant influence on what their government does, forgetting that the very nature of our system offers everything for sale. The only vote that counts is the monetary vote and it doesn't matter how much any activist yells about ethics and accountability.
In a market system, every politician, every legislation and hence every government is for sale. Even with the 20 trillion dollar bank bailouts starting in 2007 - an amount of money which could have changed say, the global energy infrastructure to fully renewable methods, instead going to a series of institutions that do nothing to help society, institutions that could be removed tomorrow with no recourse - the blind conditioning that politics and politicians exist for the public well-being still continues. The fact is, politics is a business - no different than any other in a market system, and they care about their self-interest before anything else.
George Carlin, comedian, social critic, 1937-2008:
I don't really, honestly, deep down believe in political action. I think the system contracts and expands as it wants to. It accommodates these changes. I think the civil rights movement was an accommodation on the part of those who own the country. I think they see where their self-interest lies; they see a certain amount of freedom seems good - an illusion of liberty - give these people a voting day every year so that they will have the illusion of meaningless choice. Meaningless choice - so that we go, like slaves, and say “Oh, I Voted.” The limits of debate in this country are established before the debate even begins, and everyone else is marginalized and made to seem either to be communist or some sort of disloyal person - a “kook”, and now it's “conspiracy”. Something that should not be even entertained for a minute: that powerful people might get together and have a plan! Doesn't happen! You're a “kook”! You're a “conspiracy buff”!
Of all the mechanisms of defence of this system, there are two that repeatedly crop up. The first is this idea that the system has been the “cause” of the material progress we have seen on this planet. Well, no. There are basically two root causes which have created the increased so-called “wealth” and population growth we see today.
One: the exponential advancement of production technology; hence scientific ingenuity, and
Two: the initial discovery of abundant hydrocarbon energy - which is currently the foundation of the entire socio-economic system.
The free-market / capitalist / monetary market system - whatever you want to call it - has done nothing but ride the wave of these advents with a distorted incentive system and a haphazard, grossly unequal method of utilizing and distributing those fruits. The second defence is a belligerent social bias generated from years of propaganda, which sees any other social system as a route to so called ‘tyranny’ with various name-droppings of Stalin, Mao, Hitler, and the death tolls they generated. Well, as despotic as these men might have been along with the societal approaches they perpetuated, when it comes to the game of death - when comes to the systematic daily mass murder of human beings - nothing in history compares to what we have today.
The famines that have occurred throughout at least the last century of our history have not been caused by a lack of food. They have been caused by relative poverty. The economic resources were so inequitably distributed that the poor simply didn't have enough money with which to buy the food that would've been available if they could have afforded to pay for it. This is an example of structural violence. Another example: in Africa and other areas, tens of millions of people are dying of AIDS. Why are they dying? It's not because we don't know how to treat AIDS. We have millions of people in the wealthy countries getting along remarkably well because they have the medicines that will treat it. The people in Africa who are dying of AIDS are not dying because of the HIV virus, they are dying because they don't have the money with which to pay for the drugs that would keep them alive. Gandhi had similar examples to this in mind when he said that “the deadliest form of violence is poverty.”