Are Americans Too Broken for the Truth to ‘Set Us Free’?
December 7, 2009 by politicaltheatrics
Filed under Western Imperialism
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?
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.
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.
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.
Commercialism 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.
Notes/Sources:
The article, as written by Bruce E. Levine, can be found at CounterPunch entitled: “Are Americans Too Broken for the Truth to Set Us Free”
Demoralized? No, maybe weak-kneed, drug infested small minds are. Not me, just more determined to fight, destroy and eliminate the tyrants! Are you listening Goldman Sachs, Central Bankers et al? Why anyone 'sheeple' can whip 100 elitists and the masses are not as 'dumb' as you think.
Remember this, prey fights harder than any predator. We out number you a 100,000,000 to 1 and your sycophants will turn on you when we attack!
The internet is the key to combating psyops. ' We the People' are biding our time, the 'Economic Collapse' effects those that have the most, I have always had the least, why my entire life I have not even earned half a million dollars and I am now over 50 years old and there are a lot of us! Those with the most to lose have the most to fear!
Tyrants and international bankers beware our time is close!
Americans Abused? by whom for God's sake? By their own affluence-generated apathy, selfishness and narcissism? Pardon me for being tired of feeling sorry for the super-rich most fortunate citizens in the world. Its a culture of infantile, superficial, arrogant cretins. All the third world victims we've butchered for decades and the impoversihed we've raped and swindled to support our fat, lazy lifestyle are the victims- not the perps.
give the "poor victim act" a rest- its repulsive.
I used to think that Americans were rich fat assed morons too – when I was twelve. Once you read and investigate the sociology of the place even to a very small degree, you see that what this guy has to say makes a lot of sense. America is an extrememly unequal society with a massive amount of poverty and social breakdown. Why don't people react to this and do something? Part of the answer is what the blogger is saying. So your critique misses the point – American politics is as scuzzy as you suggest, but the American people, the working class, are down trodden in the classical sense and don't deserve your dreary abuse.
Like a women who has been raped and does not want to suffer the humiliation again by making a report.
" no outpouring of millions of U.S. citizens on the streets of Washington D.C. protesting this betrayal."
TOTALLY UNTRUE.
This article really makes a powerful point. As a collective culture americans are basically doomed, and the thing to remember above all else is that they have done it to themselves. The proliferation of ignorance and apathy never ceases to amaze me. It has gotten to the point where I cannot have any sort of a reasonable let alone intellectual conversation with basically anyone I meet. In our culture real rational functioning humans are a very tiny minority. People here have debased and stupified themselves for so long that they can no longer differentiate reality from illusion. Most choose to live in a bubble of ignorance that is utterly astounding. I think one day when people look back in history contemporary americans will be among the most loathed group of people to ever have existed on earth. People so caught up in narcissistic fantasies that their entire inner cognitive world has become one big reality show, a magazine cover with them on the cover. It is all about me and screw anyone who may cause me to actually think and upset my fragile childish reality that was created by ad designers and marketers. I once thought similarly to what Ken stated above, but how do people recognize an external enemy that they themselves have become. (In their deluded worlds they are the mini titans of trade, the leading men and women ) America is about to get a much deserved brutal wake up call, and before any fingers are pointed at any elitist groups (who are doing exactly what Joe Average thinks he should or could be doing) or any special affiliations of the super wealthy we first need to learn as a society to decipher and value truth and logic above all else. If we are to far past that then certainly we are deservedly doomed. No more big macs and hummers and childish egocentric view points. No more me me me, fuck you you and you, its me mine. Wouldn't the future of the world be better off without millions of these kinds of people? It can not continue very much longer. Just imagine this society projected 200 yr's from now. Now that really is scary.
Wow! Couldn't agree more!
The leaks are out of control
By Tom Dennen, author of 'Grand Theft, Planet or Heidi's Free Bar & Grill)
It's beginning to become clear how the 'matrix' – the system – works, and how the Internet is the leaky bucket through which the truth is spraying out.
Since the early goldsmiths discovered fractional lending and made money out of thin air, they were thrown out of every courntry they set up after which those countries returned to resource-based economies after several years of economic recovery.
Until the sixteenth century, in Holland.
Then and there, when the goldsmiths were discovered, the already wealthy government and merchant classes joined them in their usurious vampirism.
Holland was the site of the first experiment in money market manipulation, today called 'Tulip Mania', also a generic phrase given to an 'out-of-control' Bull Market.
'Tulip Mania' is however, just the opposite – it's a controlled boom situation; controlled by those who run the Great Wealth Shift every generation, starting with the South Sea Bubble crash in 1720.
Every fifty years or so since then, the markets have peaked – and exactly nine years later, crashed – followed by a depression during which vast amounts of properties were foreclosed and the 'masters' transfered huge amounts of the wealth accumulated by the working class – all wealth is created by work – who were left to starve.
Just like today.
The most significant leak in Ellen Brown's 'Web of Debt' is coming from the Global Warming lies now out in the open.
The Bilderbergs / governments / banks / merchants / landowners / fake scientists / Big Pharma and the rest are now too big to fail at keeping their secrets.
Solution? This will set you free:
Return to resource-based economies. Do not borrow unless it's from a state bank that does not charge interest. Gather together and itemize all the resources of you community and barter.
Keep your wealth to yourselves.
Above all, don't listen to snake oil salesment like Obama and Al Bore who are just stealing while callously killing your children for money.
(Required reading: http://www.lexrex.com/enlightened/articles/wari...,)
(Optional: http://whatreallyhappened.com/WRHARTICLES/grand...)
Ertae is right on the money! What's left of it, that is. USAians have, indeed, been infantilized.
They don't react because they've lost all grasp of reality and, en masse, suffer from a deep-rooted, utterly false belief (emphasized since WWII), that they are "the best" and, hence, will come out victorious. .
TV tells them so.
CimateGate scandal will not stop the elites from ramming through their carbon credit tax because many USAians are rabid "green living" cultists who don't care the leaked e-mails reveal fraud.. How does one get through those thick heads that reducing "carbon footprints" means evenutally reducing THEM!
The military-pharmaceutical-corporate/zionist bankster beast with Chemtrails, HAARP, WMDs, bioweapons and their toxic vaccines, INVASIONS, economic collapse and on and on leave NO "carbon footprint." Nor do the "elites"in their limos and mansions.. Right?
Guess all those ridiculous "soccer moms" who wasted precious time organizing their garbage in neat little compartments to "save the planet" are in for a shocker.
Hi You eternal beeings,
remember who you are, we are not colours, countries, titles, €€€wealth, experts etc. majority of us is real human beeings, the minority who lacks all desent capabilities are the psychopats that deceived us for much to long. It´s time to say no, to money, politics and " organized religion " We don´t need external " misleaders " we just have to take full responsibility for all the aspects in our lives and not to blame some outside source like, God, Devil. King, Wife/Husband, Parents, President.etc.
That´s just exuses. The red pill is not so tasty from start but after a while it feels real good, please have a taste.
Focus on this for 21 days: Truth, Wisdom, Humility, Self-sacrifise, Compassion,Freewill, Justice
Say No, and lead by example. Remember this 3 D experience called life is all about learning, please let go of the brakes and feel your true potential.
Your eternal brother.
ps. wisdom is power, knowledge is the bumpy road to wisdom ds.
Thanks for an article!!
One merely needs a good lawyer…which requires lots of money. Too bad there's no such thing as a "public option" for LEGAL DEFENSE insurance. Anyone care to set-up a co-op?
Thanks for a thought provoking piece. I appreciate it. Now to action.
This concept is not new. Propagandists have long known the reaction of confusion and lies about anything – resulting in a public that is told it will snow, and has no reason to doubt other than their sky is blue. In our morning paper is a story about "environmentalists" noting concern about soft toilet paper. Is that true? I know of no environmental group with any concern about soft toilet paper, and I've been an active environmentalist for fifty years. Or, could this story have an ulterior motive? Tell something an environmentalist concerned about cutting old growth trees for toilet paper – which is not true, extend it to the use of recycled paper to make toilet paper (which is true) and discount its quality as being too rough for the human butt, (which is not true), and paint with a wide brush all environmentalists concerned with air pollution, contaminated drinking water and a host of serious environmental issues, and with a subtle connection to all who use toilet paper, the message is that environmentalism is going to change the way you wipe!
Environmentalists are discounted, and polluters and rapists of the natural resources are the good guys protecting you ass!
Of the group of totalitarian critics such as George Orwell, Aldous Huxley, Jacques Ellul, and Ivan Illich, I've read each of them. However this author leave out Albert Bernays, a wizard at discounting and manipulating society – the master propagandist who sold the assassination of Salvador Allende as good for American business.
Worst of all, we set this complex topic into a society with a mixture of intellectual skills. As pointed out, there are the haves, the haves more, and the haves not. We are dealing with environmental science with folks who study ice 20 million years old, while some of the most vocal critics think the earth is only 6000 years old and humans had dino as a pet.
Gekokujo (part I)
The national essence of the United States of America, as a land of the people, exists in the fact that the We the People reign with undiminished power from the time of our Revolution into the farthest future in order that the natural beauty of the country may be propagated throughout the universe, so that all men and women under the sun may enjoy their lives to the fullest extent…
In recent years however, there have appeared many persons whose chief aim and purpose have been to amass personal material wealth, disregarding the general welfare and prosperity of the American people, with the result that the sovereignty of the Republic has been greatly impaired. These people of the United States of America have suffered deeply as a result of this tendency and many vexing issues now confronting America are attributable to this fact.
Gekokujo (part II) The administration, the senior statesmen, military cliques, plutocrats, bureaucrats and political parties are all traitors who are destroying the national essence… It is our duty to remove the evil retainers from around the Hallowed Halls of the Republic and to smash the group of senior statesmen. It is our duty as subjects of the Republic to defend our Constitution. May God bless and help us in our endeavor to save the land of our ancestors from the worst that confronts it.
Daily we submit to hypocrisy and lies,
While national honor lingering dies.
Arise ye! O patriots, arise!
Onward we march, defying death!
Come prison bars! Come gory death!
Damn straight! This is where the debate needs to go. We lived through the tyranny of the "stop whining" free market globalization brought by the Right. Now we have the equally hostile to the country slams of "whining bitches USans deserve whatever they get" from the Left. Two sides of the same propaganda war against US.
I "took to the streets." Did you see me? I have written a stack of letters and made phone calls. Did you hear them? No. How do people know that their fellow citizens "don't care"? How can you know what we think when all we have access to is a controlled public sphere?
Acts. Little acts if it is all we can muster, will help break the spell. But be kind to each other. Stop beating up the citizen as the cause of all of this. This was not our agenda.
Thanks, for shifting the debate to where it belongs.
one thing though, in my humble and uninformed opinion, we are past the looking glass now, vis-a-vis non-violent protest and the rule of law. I knew this would happen when i came here over 30 years ago and saw that the images of McDonalds and Disneyland as 'America' were really lies. the illusion of freedom. free as long as you keep guying those nikes, cokes, and trucks. the snake eating itself was the image that stuck in my mind, sure it feels good and full for a while but it is eating itself and does not care because it is full. that was the biggest shattering for me. the realization that the rule of law, while seeming to be relatively more so that other countries was in reality the same corruptions marketed better. read: its not a bribe, its a political donation. words, words, playing with words. words are so powerful. images just the same if not more so on another level. America is Oedipus Tyrannus in the age of spectacle. killing his father "law" and incestuously mating with his mother "liberty" in some grotesque and absurd fate. For me, when I read about the so called 'founding fathers' and who they were vs. the shays' of that time, I realized that the bill of rights had to be incorporated into the constitution and the document is elitist to begin with. Norman Livergood has it right and I believe what must be done is the completion of Shays' Rebellion, the second American revolution. I always thought that is where the 'oracle' had destined this country for. Unfortunately, because we have been cowed, I always thought things will have to get much much worse, before anything substantial happens. The snake will not stop eating itself until we put a stop to it. If revolution is in your blood as it is in mine, then these are heady times indeed. I am with Ken. Been waiting not so patiently for the Kens of the world to speak up for a long time it seems. I do not see another solution. America will survive, but not in its present form for long. It cannot go on like this, it just can't. can it? defiling all its ideals shatters the illusion for the masses, why would the elite do this? not rational, just hubris, non-rational, not irrational, but non-rational, quite human.
http://www.hermes-press.com/completing.htm (Norman Livergood)
http://www.objectivistcenter.org/cth-32-2203-Comp... (not a Rand fan per se but makes good points)
http://www.cooperativeindividualism.org/finkelste...
BOOK : Complete the American Revolution!: what 9-11, corporate scandal and the 2000 presidential election have in common and what we can do about it By Albert Piacente. (google books)
i am very surprised by the comments here. it is validating and helps keep my sanity. about time people are beginning to wake up.