A culture that idolizes Hollywood actors, pop music artists, infotainment show hosts, sports heroes, that turns into celebrity whoever can function to promote the American cultural colonialism, exceptions confirming the rule that everything must be done to feed the make-believe culture, a culture of massive deception to manufacture consent.
These exceptions are exploited ad nauseam as role models to feed the illusion that success is not only possible, but that it only depends on individual self-determination, self-discipline and character. Thus, personal, professional and business success depends exclusively on personal will, regardless of social origin, realistic economic-financial possibilities and systemic constraints.
Sports heroes, entrepreneurs, innovators, artists, media personalities, influencers and many others are useful tools to motivate ordinary people to believe in themselves and pursue their dreams.
These personalities, who often have prominent social, business, artistic and sporting roles, can be, to a certain extent, examples to be followed, but the main political-cultural role of this class of people is to entertain and divert the attention of the spectator/consumer citizen. of the true causes of the problems that corrode contemporary society, resorting to the solutions of the make-believe culture with the purpose of manufacturing consent. This should be obvious, but it isn't.
We can all be examples to follow, as long as our conduct is motivated and governed by universal principles of justice and honesty.
Compassion and empathy must be inscribed in the code of conduct of everyday life to reward fair and honest behavior, otherwise we have to resort to cognitive dissonance to deal with reality.
If mere survival, socio-professional success, personal and/or business interests oblige us to leave the fundamental principles and values at the door of the office, factory, shipyard, building site, science lab, courtroom, parliament, university, hospital, etc. we should consider that we live in an intrinsically corrupt and evil system.
Citizens are conditioned and coerced to “cooperate” with a system tailored to serve the interests of the ruling classes. The process of cultural indoctrination works through constant cultural-ideological programming to prevent episodes of rejection and revolt or at least keep them sporadic and localized in order to be easily neutralized.
A reality that could and should be replaced is accepted as normal through habituation and a process of cumulative adaptation that culminates in most citizenry believing that humanity is incapable of implementing a better, fairer and more sustainable societal system.
A society based on economic justice, social equality, participatory politics, frugality, simplicity and a deep connection with nature. Techno-scientific advances must follow the precautionary principle, corporate greed, geopolitical agendas and geostrategic interests are the wrong motives behind much of the scientific research and the technological development representing a threat rather than sustainable and balanced solutions for the problems humanity faces.
Agendas determine outcomes, evil agendas will give evil outcomes.
The power principle, the profit motive and the corporate interests centered on accumulating wealth, dominating peoples and territories, controlling natural and mineral resources ensured by a global centralized monetary and financial system symbolize business as usual, what kind of outcome can we expect?
The growing investment in weapons (militarist escalation) with all the negative implications associated with the process portends an inauspicious future for humanity and the biosphere. And we, the citizenry (consumers/spectators) hope for the best!
Which means that we lack political agency and the basic galvanizing capacity to design strategies of organized resistance, which clearly demonstrates how we have been instrumentalized by the powers that be to transform ourselves into our worst enemies, divided, confused and deluded, unable to intervene in the present and shape the future history of mankind. As time went by, we become the useless and disposable class and I don't sense the desire to resist and change the course of events.
This system resorts to systematic propaganda as a means to encourage connivance and complicity in order to ease integration into society.
Deep down, we are encouraged to abdicate the traits of humanity that characterizes human condition in order to have a successful climbing of the social ladder.
A "voluntary" disruptive process of our humane condition as a way to deserving privileges, entitlements that allow us to get closer to the sociopaths and psychopaths that inhabit the top of the pyramid and control the show.
Serving power to fulfill objectives, turning a blind eye to the most sensitive cases, as an old Portuguese saying goes: “tell me who you hang out with and I'll tell you who you are”. Step by step we imitate those we serve and little by little we become just another metastasis of the existing cancer that will end up killing the host (humanity and the planet) after atrocious suffering.
The current system coerces the citizenry to “choose” between successful integration (an increasingly restricted option), competition for crumbs (the most common) or indigence (in full growth).
Voluntary submission requires the alienation of values and structuring principles that form the core of the human condition to make socio-professional integration less traumatic. Education is mainly a long process of suppression of what means to be a human being to become a domesticated desensitized tool to serve a sick system.
The educational system is designed to format young citizens in order to facilitate their integration into the "labor market". A market for human resources distributed among various castes and sub-castes, rewarded according to the relevance of the functions to be performed.
In the other hand, the professional activities that are most useful to society and least harmful to the environment are also the least valued.
The reward is linked to the "usefulness" that each activity, function or role performed has for the chain of control, the more power and wealth added to the top of the social pyramid, the more generous the reward will be. The system is obviously designed to defend the interests of the rentier class (deep state) that represents the top of the social hierarchy and controls society as a whole.
A system that rewards ambitious careerists, exacerbates the role of the innovative entrepreneur and legitimizes greed should not be tolerated but for many seems to deserve veneration and glorification.
Furthermore, ordinary people are encouraged to idolize and emulate the exceptions, especially celebrities who achieve fame, quick success and flaunt luxurious and/or exotic lifestyles, sports heroes, actors and artists.
A mass phenomenon that feeds the dreams of many and fills the bank accounts of a few, a secret kept out in the open but which, in any case, remains oblivious to many. Dreams command life (said the poet) but some dreams reduce existence to voluntary servitude while the exceptions rule the world, profit with it and keep us in the dark.
The media exploitation of celebrity culture has the function of distracting the public from what really matters.
And what really matters is a balanced, fair and sustainable community. A prosperous society across the board, instead of a society that uses exceptions as an example of what has no possibility of becoming reality, but which serves to feed delusional dreams that are nothing more than dead ends.
Wealth and power used as tools of mental and material control of entire populations should never be idolized and emulated as paradigms reproducible by the masses. They are unrealistic, time consuming and absorb energies that should be concentrated on creating counter-narratives and resistance.
The many have nothing to gain from uncritical veneration and if it is true that we are all susceptible to distraction, we cannot allow distraction to become a state of permanent alienation because that is the “option” that the upper echelons of the social hierarchy want us to do.
Dissenting voices are truth tellers who often put their personal well-being at risk to expose individuals, organizations, institutions, corporations and governments responsible for harmful and/or criminal activities, initiatives and policies that only benefit special interests.
Dissident voices are censored, harassed, arrested and even eliminated to become an example not to be followed.
Do we value a comprehensive systemic analysis of what society really is or do we let ourselves to be seduced by fictional narratives that sell us an idea of society as a system constituted by the random amalgamation of individualized choices?
Every existing society is an integrated system of multiple subsystems with different types of institutions controlled by interests and agendas designed and programmed without any involvement of ordinary citizens.
And we are convinced that this is democracy!
What is more valuable to society?
A comprehensive critical analysis or an elaborate program justifying the reward criteria assigned to citizens based on their role in the social hierarchy, rather than based on actual usefulness to society.
Democracy as it exists is a farce. Freedom of expression and movement, the right to free and fair elections, equality before the law and access to justice are guaranteed in theory and enshrined in national constitutions, but it is increasingly evident that society as a whole doesn’t benefit with it and the common citizenry is being pushed to the margins of society and stripped of fundamental rights while being classified as disposable people.
The existing “democratic” regimes, governed by technocrats and corrupt politicians controlled by the rentier class (oligarchs and plutocrats), somehow have our best interests at heart. In fact what this permanent class (deep state) pursues is absolute domination of the sources of wealth and centers of power. What this class has in mind is to strip ordinary citizens of all social and political rights through cultural imbecilization.
The role of democracy is to give citizens the opportunity to choose between the lesser of two evils! Or, alternatively, a colorful menu, to further confuse the voter?!
No, democracy has to be a shared form of power, political, economic and social. Democracy is incompatible with discrepancies in power between different groups, classes and institutions because, over time, people inserted in specific groups representing a set of particular interests develop a legal system that authorizes the concentration of power and the accumulation of wealth. in the hands of the few and create a moral-cultural narrative/code that glorifies the system, which ordinary people must revere as genuine democracy, because we have political regimes legitimized by the ballot box. Other citizens choose a cynical approach and let problems aggravate to the point of no return, which is exactly where we are right now.
Individual success does not depend exclusively on the sum of conscious choices that each one of us makes throughout life but on the confluence, intersection and combination of influences and circumstances transformed into personal experiences initiated within the family context and extended to the sociocultural environment that nowadays includes the electronic means. A multiplicity of factors and variables combined and recombined form the system of implicit and explicit memories that represent the cognitive-affective backbone that shapes personality and character plus the singular idiosyncratic traits.
Individual experience is a dynamic process in which conscious and independent choice plays a very limited role, but is crucial and should not be cultivated.
A complex living organism with the characteristics of the human being has to solve the problems of the present based on past experience and acquired knowledge, projecting the possibilities and expectations that the future can bring while adapting to existing circumstances.
Besides that, there is an army of public relations professionals committed to creating narratives with the aim of shaping the way we perceive the reality. How we interpret the past and project the future, that is, each of us has the staggering task of digging through layers of lies where past, present and future are amalgamated in narratives intended to frame the perception of reality to manufacture acceptance of whatever order the ruling elite intends to impose.
The choices we make are influenced by information designed, framed, produced and propagated by experts, analysts, academics, researchers, media personalities, opinion makers, celebrities and so on... masters on the art of manipulating public perception to manufacture consent.
If you believe you are immune to the manipulative propaganda produced by the brightest minds available in the academic, scientific and cultural human resources market who put their talents at the service of the ruling class that controls the dissemination of propaganda for their own benefit then I have a bridge to sell you.
Capitalist ideologues defend freedom of choice as the epitome of democratic freedoms.
The choices we make occur in a per-existing system, at best we have the right to choose from menus, catalogues, lists or other formularies presented to us on the assumption of informed consent, because freedom of choice must be complemented with the duty of responsibility.
But what is the effective meaning of freedom of choice?
If it is not accompanied by freedom of creative divergence and the right to dissent and demand a different system and the right to fight to make it become reality, it is not freedom of choice is “freedom” to comply.
The freedom of choice presented by neoliberal ideologues, among others, is the “freedom” to conform to an immutable reality, TINA.
If there is no alternative, freedom of choice is a myth, an illusion in which entire societies live submerged, waiting for some political miracle to rescue them from the bottomless neoliberal pit.
It is easy to hold people accountable for the choices they make, as long as one ignores that people do not choose in a political, economic and sociocultural void.
Personal choices always reflect dominant ideological-cultural narratives because societies are not neutral environments, individual choices have collective repercussions following motivations that were planted in supposedly free minds.
It is essential to create homogeneous responses through diversified offer, conditioning individual behavior using group social psychology techniques, inducing predictable and malleable behaviors of present and future choices as spectators/consumers because that is what democracy and free choice seems to be about.
