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Mental slavery makes [people] vulnerable to political manipulation for anti-human ends or unable to realize their full human potential. By critiquing cultural and sociological theory for separating culture and society from the material foundations from which they arise and by explaining what has been lost by this sundering from the production relations of political economy, this work hopes to contribute to the recovery and strengthening of that tradition which links intellectual activity firmly to the task of enhancing human development. (Robotham in Society, Culture, & Economy, 2005, p.162)
Is it possible that we're so conditioned to our daily lives so conditioned to the way we create our lives that we buy the idea that we have no control at all? We've been conditioned to believe that the external world is more real than the internal world. This new model of science says just the opposite – It says what's happening within us will create what's happening outside of us. (Dispenza in What the $@! Do We Know?, 2004)
We should treat our minds, that is, ourselves, as innocent and ingenious children, whose guardians we are, and be careful what objects and what subjects we thrust on their attention. Read not the Times. Read the Eternities. (Thoreau, 1863, p.86)
Right now access to our children is greater than children’s access to content. In the motion picture The Corporation, professor of psychiatry Susan Linn (2005), warning against ‘cradle to the grave brand loyalty’ declares, “the use of psychologists in helping corporations market to children is very troubling.” As schools turn to corporations because they are federally under funded, she says, they think they are going to get free computers, “Well you know they’re not free, the children pay for them because of the advertising. Children pay for advertising. They pay with their health. They pay with their sense of well-being. It’s wrong” (Linn, 2005). Medical professor Candace Pert seconds this notion: “I think some of the things we're seeing with the children today is a sign that the culture is in the wrong paradigm and not appreciating the power of thought” (Pert, in Arntz, Chasse, Hoffman & Vicente, 2004). Corporations’ legal status as a person allows them to promote themselves where and whenever they please. Thus, this constant promotional bombardment to children (and adults) in school settings and otherwise – from morning until night – gives humans little room for self-development. Linn leaves us with her conviction: “I will defend the First Amendment up, down and backwards. But a corporation is not a person. And marketing is not free speech” (Linn, 2005).
What are the risks of things going on like they are where corporate interest is placed before human interest? As Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela president Hugo Chavez put it at the 2006 UN General Assembly, holding up Noam Chompsky’s Hegemony or survival: America’s quest for global dominance, "the hegemonic pretensions of the American empire are placing at risk the very survival of the human species".
Shapiro (2004) declares, “Today we live in welfare through warfare societies, which structurally depend on the protection of free markets through violence, but also ones that have organized the aggressive insecurities that consumerism expresses into a larger lifeworld” (p.62). Tocqueville (in Shapiro, 2004) links consumerism to socially constructed unhappiness and externally generated anxiety where psychological doubt, lack of self-esteem, and depression are chief guiding factors in the mass market.
"The corporate message that children are being implanted with is that buying things will make you happy. Things will make you happy. And in fact the research shows that that’s not true. What makes people happy is challenges at work. And good relationships. It’s not what you own. But that’s what children are being taught over and over and over again." (Linn, 2005)
Linking loathing and revenge to a market of violent entertainment and gadgets, Shapiro asserts that the more people consume the more depressed and aggressive they become. Happiness becomes frustratingly unattainable. Insidious enough domestically, Shapiro concludes that by replicating consumerism in the form of chain stores and consumer environments, globalization produces global conflict through trade. Terrorism and Jihad originally considered a rejection of Western lifestyle, then, he concludes, could be considered a product of it.
What Maxine Greene (1971, 1973, 1988) refers to as conventional, or what we all refer to as conventional, is a colluded in program. We are so stagnant in our ways, comforts, behaviors and traditions we can only elect to see things as a stranger if we are shocked to do so by artists or writers and also terrorists. And how long does the shock last? And when privately-owned/agenda’d media (which is most of it and what most people have access to) or government [most of which are far from Marxism or dare I say Neitzchean (please do your reading before you approach me on Neitzche)] treat it, how is it spun? We are in fact student as stranger or even child as stranger or even human as stranger. We are born into a world of robots and put into the personality and professional assembly line. The possible inspiration as other we have for our parents is squandered on the intensification (Apple, 1986) that they are caught up in. The genius and creativity of any child is immediately classified into a job title (“she would make such a great lawyer”) or institutional path (“he is so bright we should get him into a prep school”). We never hear about how someone’s child will be great as a shaman connecting people with nature or as just what the government needs to reform it’s patriarchal policies. Academics need to go beyond making compilations of ideal artists’ quotes and writers’ now-classic struggling outsiders to make the point that things must change. They must demand the changes as the insiders. There has been enough stirring and disturbing. I am set to become another artist retired to the academic swivel chair of compiling. What I need is someone to teach me how to make demands for neutral policies in our institutions and how to make demands for the deconstruction of the agenda’d state. Abstracted state?
References
Apple, M. (1990,1986). Controlling the work of teachers. In D.J. Flinders & S.J. Thornton (Eds.), The Curriculum studies reader, 2nd Ed (pp.183-197). New York: RoutledgeFalmer.
Chomsky, N. (2005). Interview. In J. Bakan, H. Crooks & M. Achbar (Writers) The Corporation [Motion picture, DVD 2]. Toronto: Mongrel Media.
Dispenza, J. (2004). Interview. In W. Arntz, B. Chase & M. Hoffman, M. Vicente (Writers) What the $*! Do We (K)now!? [Motion picture]. Hollywood: Twentieth Century Fox.
Greene, M. (1990, 1971). Curriculum and consciousness. In D.J. Flinders & S.J. Thornton (Eds.), The Curriculum studies reader, 2nd Ed (pp.135-147). New York: RoutledgeFalmer.
Greene, M. (1973). Teacher as Stranger: Educational philosophy for the modern age. Belmont, California: Wadsworth Publishing.
Greene, M. (1988). The Dialectic of freedom. New York: Teachers College Press.
Linn, S. (2005). Interview. In J. Bakan, H. Crooks & M. Achbar (Writers) The Corporation [Motion picture, DVD 2]. Toronto: Mongrel Media.
Pert, C. (2004). Interview. In W. Arntz, B. Chase & M. Hoffman, M. Vicente (Writers) What the $*! Do We (K)now!? [Motion picture]. Hollywood: Twentieth Century Fox.
Robotham, D. (2005). Culture, society and economy: Bringing production back in. London: Sage.
Shapiro, S. (2004). Globalization and power: The Hidden injuries of consumerism. In J. Choi, J. Murphy, & M. Caro (Eds.), Globalization with a human face (pp. 47-64). Praeger: Westport, Connecticut.
What is more intelligent: the sensation and objective observation made by your body or the intellectual rationalization or emotional reaction to previously associated ideas and identifications with the words: intelligence, judgment, cosmic, consciousness, obligation, will and soul. How do we talk about these things? How can we approach anyone, when all our institutions have to offer are courses in collusion to personality programming? Young people's bodies fresher, more sensitive, more intelligent; their natural guidance systems are on alert. What good are we if we show up to teach them with our defunct, desensitized, abused bodies inwardly enslaved by completely programmed and colluded malformed intellects? Luckily, we keep generating, either consciously or unconsciously, new children who bring us fresh cosmically generated intelligence. No sooner than when they begin to express themselves (at about five months, by my experience), we are casting them in a mold to be intellectual consumers as we have been shown to do. We must realize this and become students of this fresh source of intelligence provided for us: to nourish us and guide us. What needs to take place in us to learn how to accept this when it is contrary to our worldview? We, as teachers, parents, and policy makers need to be able to say, for example, I don't know how to talk about race relations, because I am entrenched, insulated, programmed and desensitized.
What does it mean - arriving now after all my education, research, teaching background and experience - to say, "I do not know how to talk about this?" Does it mean I am inept or have no background in the subject? Or does it mean that I am willing to let go of previous pretenses, identifications, and associations to allow a fresh conversation and discussion to begin? Does it also humble me in the eyes of my own ego and personality as well as those of others? How can I possibly approach issues of sexism, racism, class or gender issues if I hold my own perspective as paramount? If to understand is to stand under, how can I really learn something or consider others or develop will, if I am not brave in the face of that which I am learning or in which I am participating? But if what I call self is that which has been developed by my environment and forces acting on me from outside, then my perspective is probably that I already know how to talk about everything including my consciousness, sincerity, prudence, ignorance, piety, humility (or more importantly courage), and will.
Communal Highness,
4XampL