The Indoctrination of American Society

[EspirituDeAmaru]

Can we talk about how this society does everything to control its people? From media to commercializing to industries and politics. Only in this country can the people remain so ignorant and religious while the elite gain more power. When will we wake up? What does it take? Truly are manufacturing consent...

[Toppler]

I personally think that present day "Western society" is far more of an example of totalitarianism than Eastern Bloc ever was. There are dogmas so untrue but so often repeated they are repeated even by the enemies of capitalist society. At last, those "enemies" think they are enemies. Communism = starvation. Free market = Salvation. Imperialism = War on Terror and spreading liberal democracy, poverty = your fault etc.

The modern day capitalist leaders are proud disciples of Goebbels indeed. A lie repeated a hunded times becomes the truth.

[EspirituDeAmaru]

I completely agree. I mean this country has a history or public control. I mean it comes down to the government fearing democracy. Alexander Hamilton called the public the "great beast". Therefor there is no direct elections in this country.

From sedition acts and espionage bills passed to quell human emotions and sentiments. Nazi Germany envided the propaganda in this country. more harsh techniques were MKULTRA and others. This country is the most ignorant in geography and political studies for a reason. This is how capitalism has triumphed..for the time being..

[EspirituDeAmaru]

I completely agree. This country tries to suppress its people by indoctrinating them from childhood. They control the media and influence us with capitalistic materialism. It sub consciously perverts our minds. They tell us who to hate and where to follow. It is not by accident that this population is the most ignorant in geography and politics. Since the beginning even Alexander Hamilton called the public "the great beast". The trilateral commission wrote a report on the fear of democracy; this is why there is no direct vote in this country. Instead of taking away democracy they put an invisible Vail over and sell us this fake notion of democracy which they basically control. Either through propaganda (that even nazi germany envided) or physical suppression such as sedition acts or espionage bill masked as protecting americans.

[The Man]

I personally think that present day "Western society" is far more of an example of totalitarianism than Eastern Bloc ever was. There are dogmas so untrue but so often repeated they are repeated even by the enemies of capitalist society. At last, those "enemies" think they are enemies. Communism = starvation. Free market = Salvation. Imperialism = War on Terror and spreading liberal democracy, poverty = your fault etc.

The modern day capitalist leaders are proud disciples of Goebbels indeed. A lie repeated a hunded times becomes the truth.

Unfortunately, your 100% right. A lie repeated a hundred times becomes the truth. From the moment of our birth, we are told over and over again, that the evils in this world, are the Communists, and the people who want well-being for all. We are told this our entire educational life, from 1st grade to College. We are told that only true freedom lies in Capitalism, and if you worked hard, and didn't get by, it's your 'damned fault' (As someone I know calls it). It really is sickening, on how we have been indoctrinated into criticisms that aren't even true.

[EspirituDeAmaru]

And we are made to believe that capitalism is synonymous with democracy and freedom.

He who controls the past controls the future

[TheCommonGood]

Can we talk about how this society does everything to control its people? From media to commercializing to industries and politics. Only in this country can the people remain so ignorant and religious while the elite gain more power. When will we wake up? What does it take? Truly are manufacturing consent...

Indoctrination isn't a negative or a positive thing. Essentially any form of information that is delivered in any manner is indoctrination of some sort. We pick and choose what indoctrination we will investigate and which ones we will dismiss.

[EspirituDeAmaru]

In this country indoctrination is highly negative and helps build an ignorance and animosity towards others. This indoctrination promotes Americanism and ethno centric notion that we we see ourselves being superior than everyone and immune to international laws and repercussions for our actions. For instance Italians dont label something as being unitalian that way we label things unamerican. The indoctrination causes the weak mind to believe that people around the world are trying to be like us, emulate our policies and those who dont hate us for no reason. Since childhood we are kept from the truth and bombarded with thoughts of commercialism and capitalism. It starts in the classroom.

[Jose Gracchus]

I posted this before, but I think it remains relevant:


There are several factors at work. First of all this question must be poised, like all truly leftist analysis, from a historical point of view. Why is it that Kansas and Oklahoma were insurgent bases of left-wing agitation and third party insurgency - including the agrarian People's Party and the Socialist Party of America of Eugene Debs - and today are backward and right-wing in many cases? Well I think it can be reduced to several major factors:



The collapse of an oppositional political culture and communities of struggle. Factories, slums, poor farming communities were actively political, and people perceived themselves socially and as belonging to a maligned or oppressed social group. This naturally suggests popular action. Compromises by some sectors of white industrial male labor through labor unions and left-liberal policies diffused some resentment and palpable marginalization. The farming communities were destroyed by agro-business. By the point the tide rolled back in the 1970s, the urban blight and abandoned communities had a racial angle, and left-liberal co-option has served to continue to frame this as a 'black' or 'minority' issue, rather than a 'poor labor' issue with 'people of color' shades to it. The 1950s spelled a mass purge and repression of the CPUSA and other major left-wing parties from unions and schools and government. Institutions were already purified for the Establishment by the time the New Left came around, and its failed to make a major institutional impact aside from maybe some changes in academia. However it made major ideological impacts. Riding on this trend is the end of 'community life' and 'civil society' in many ways. Consumerism and entertainment culture eroded traditional communities and their functions, and as hours at work increased, so did bowling leagues, union locals, and other major institutions slip away. People may feel a lot of ways about themselves and their neighbors struggling - however they are unlikely to infer this in a broadly social, much less class or class-political, way. A major sociological work on this in the late 20th century is Bowling Alone by Robert Putnam. In the place of authentic and social communities, we have the rise of niche consumerism and obsessions, all kinds of pathologies - porn addiction, crazy cults, etc., etc. - we're a lonely culture of lonely people relatively isolated in a sea of social life that offer you no role other than consumer or follower or worker. A major side-effect of this is the triumph of well-organized religion revivalism in the U.S., especially in the South and ruralities nation-wide. Only thing left of the community other than the Super Wal-Mart. Corporate and far-right nationalist co-option is also a major ancillary problem developing from this.
Mass propaganda. The United States invented modern public relations and mass media technology and industrial techniques. Correspondingly, the U.S. population is the most passively and actively business-state-propagandized population, dollar per head, in the world. The consumer and pop and media culture is all-encompassing, and regardless of people's 'individualistic' ethos or skepticism, simply crowds out all other potential sources of information. Therefore, without intensive work and study and effort, it is very hard to even have the opportunity to construct counter-narratives. When in conjunction with the fact that social and community life is so evacuated of authenticity or even existence in many people's lives, and what you get is just crude conformity in small groups all propagandized by the very narrow, very well-funded mass media center. Passive propaganda refers to the thorough social and ideological information apparatus; it is the consumer and pop culture, alienating and often nihilistic and encourage hero and wealth worship. Commercials, mass media stereotyping, broad narratives of culture - the message today is most problems are questions of pop psychology, enthusiasm, New Age touchy-feely; your problems are anything so long as they are not social, political, class. Furthermore, the active apparatus propagandizes both the disaffected right with near-fascist propaganda and agitation and tawdry yellow journalism on the other hand. The well-off, well-educated, cosmopolitan political class is serenaded by Orwellian liberal propaganda like the New York Times or dry science of exploitation from the Wall Street Journal. There is near zero room for truly subversive narratives and values in the mass information society. So far informal connections through social groups, workplaces, colleges, and the Internet is the only place one can even hope to see presentation of our ideas.
Electoral Constraints. The U.S. is unique in having retained without substantial modification, basically an 18th century radical Whig constitution. The system conforms to Duverger's Law more thoroughly than any other advanced 'capitalist democracy' that I know of. Furthermore, the courts and statute have tended to raise barriers yet further to any possible insurgent candidacies, third party insurgencies, or fusion tickets. Only once has an insurgent party legitimately came to power, and that was the Republican Party in the 1850s and 1860s. The problem of this stacks even higher barriers on the other problems. It is simply extremely difficult to organize any visible alternative or opposition against the two party establishment; therefore very difficult to organize in a way that self-propagandizes, as well as has reasonable likelihood of making substantial gains, much less actually ever winning. It would be a major step forward merely to create a responsible executive, instant-run-off or multi-member proportional representation versus single-member plurality elections. Lower barriers to entry. A more passive means of restriction is via the investment model of party competition, whereby due to funding sources and the weakness of labor/rigidness of the two-party system, the parties basically cannot be anything but the competitive fanclubs of corporate donors, representing different policy "baskets" for different "clubs" of capital, within the framework of a class consensus on politics between both "parties".
Repression. Active repression has abated considerably, but it still a problem, especially following 9/11 and with the arrest of the Palestinian and Colombian solidarity activists. Still, things are not as bad as they were when Fred Hampton and comrades were executed in their sleep (having been drugged by a spy) by a Chicago PD-FBI death squad. Passive repression is considerable though. Provided organized labor or left-wing activists or community organizations actually do anything, then massive corporate spending, media flacks, "patriotic" groups and PACs, often with corporate funding, and astroturfing will be directed on them to repudiate, isolate, and disrepute them. University professors excessively radical will be show-trialed like Ward Churchill or simply denied tenure and pauperized and humiliated like Norman Finkelstein. Keep in mind, both of those professors great crime was impugning the nobility of our imperialism and our complicity in our client's imperialism, not even direct assaults to the class society and state. Look at even a group like ACORN - it paid dearly for trying to make the United States even a real bourgeois democracy, where working people and urban poor and people of color actually are registered and encouraged to vote. After all, in our fake popularity-poll-based-on-corporate-financed-PR type elections - substantially so even relative to European bourgeois democracies -, you can't offer people real choices, and if too many poor people petition the apparatus, and one party can't win anymore since its victories are more or less a function of working people's demoralization (Republicans), it might undermine things.


Right-wing beliefs among the working class are just one more weird fad or lifestyle or clique or cult that the disaffected mass, left only to consume and pick between two choices allowed by the finance and propaganda committees called "the two parties" every couple years. It just another amount of pablum served up by the passive and active propaganda system, finding fertile ground where real revolutionary or even real reformist movements are outright repressed, authentic communities obliterated, and any cultural memory other than Forrest Gump-style media sentimentalism over Americana totally obliterated from public memory.

[Toppler]

The "old West" also maintain a fortress mentality, are taught about the "division of the world into the Western World and Third World" (implying the past communist and post-communist countries were third world, by the way, we never learned at school about any "worlds", we were simply told that some countries are poorer than the others), are taught that people in post-communist countries live in "terrible conditions" when they want to insinuate "how communism ruins countries" and at the same times talk about how the post-communist countries are "booming economies" (doublethink straight from the 1984, we are poor or rich for Western propagandists, depends on what they need to claim to manipulate their masses, neither of these things is true, we live in good conditions but our economies aren't exactly "booming") .

In short, it creates the "us and them" mentality. Also, it inspires neo-colonial thinking about how "West" must bring "civilization" to the "others".

This was in a way similiar to the mentality that was promoted during the communist era (we live in a super-good country and everybody else suffers in unimaginable poverty), except that the communist mentality was at least more inclusive (a belief in a change of socities through socialist revolution vs. the membership in the ambigious "Western civilization")

[Omsk]

The struggle of a modern day socialist is hard indeed,not only does one face fascism and nazis,but also mistrust and hate carried on by the generations that were brainwashed by their propaganda.
And this basically starts in high-school..
Tell me,forum members from the west,have you ever watched an tv documentary about anything related to communism or socialism that was not highly negative and full of lies?I don't think so.
Do your national libraries have copies of some of Lenin's work,about the great revolution and the toppling of the hellish Tsarist and cossack regime? I don't think so.
And even in schools,the history books are filled with 'saving democracy' and 'liberating'
This indoctrination is also supported by the eduactional system,which is in now post-socialist countries terrible,as the kids dont have nor the motivation nor do they poses the spirit and enthusiasm which the previous (socialist) generations had.

Another great thing,the comradry of the socialist nations existed,for example,during the work - activities (large scale,1.000.000 participants) youth from both the Soviet Union,Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia participated in them and worked by the standards of professional workers!
It was not about the money,there was no reward other than the little badge or a belt,but the motivation was so great,that the Soviet,Slovak,and Yugoslav youth activists built and entire town !! (now city area!650.000 people live in it)
And did they have any kind of a reward?
No.
Were they forced to do it?
NO. (it was popular,as the kids competed in building and construction)
Were they happy.
Yes.
Do they still talk of it as one of the best expiriences of their life?
YES!

For more info,check my thread.

Wikipedia article - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Youth_work_actions

[Jose Gracchus]

I personally think that present day "Western society" is far more of an example of totalitarianism than Eastern Bloc ever was. There are dogmas so untrue but so often repeated they are repeated even by the enemies of capitalist society. At last, those "enemies" think they are enemies. Communism = starvation. Free market = Salvation. Imperialism = War on Terror and spreading liberal democracy, poverty = your fault etc.

The modern day capitalist leaders are proud disciples of Goebbels indeed. A lie repeated a hunded times becomes the truth.

This.

I think the major problem of left politics is breaking through the manifest ideological hegemony of the capitalist class in the modern information society. It is increasingly difficult to articulate anything they don't spoon feed you in a public setting. It was not always this way.

[ExUnoDisceOmnes]

As a bit of an aside, I'd recommend reading the book War is a Force that Gives Us Meaning... it does a really interesting analysis of perceptions of good and evil and the way that twisted perception is necessary to sustain war.