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When we think of elections we imagine millions of individuals making self-referential, independent decisions about the issues and the candidates for office. We assume that we are a nation of independent individuals, and are therefore free to influence the outcome. An individualist feels that he is in control of his life, that he, freed from the drag of the group, is uniquely powerful. This may be true of trivial decisions, such as what to eat for a snack, but is quite untrue of larger societal matters that ultimately affect the individual more than the trivial decisions. While thorough surveys perennially show that Americans want socialistic measures such as national health insurance, the government is more anti-communal than ever, against the wishes of the people.
Jacques Ellul, in his book, Propaganda, says that the breakup of the influence of traditional social groupings, such as family, church, strong local and ethnic communities, leaves a person uprooted from any kind of solidarity. He is “no longer geographically attached to a fixed place, or historically to his ancestry.” He can then only be an individual in a mass of individuals. He must “become the measure of all things.” This becomes a daunting burden. “He is clearly responsible for his own decisions, both personal and social. He becomes the beginning and end of everything.” While he is, on the one hand, burdened with this total responsibility, he is, on the other, a minority of one, essentially powerless, and his labored decisions have less significance than he believes. Without group support he becomes more influenced by the state, more swayed by its propaganda favoring “rugged individualism.”
An amorphous mass society of basically impotent individuals, Ellul goes on to say, will tend to generate conceptual oversimplifications in order to make some kind of sense of an environment that doesn’t honor or respond to the impotent individual. Thus are formed symbols and stereotypes, icons and narratives, that then facilitate propaganda. A flag becomes far more exalted than the citizens the piece of cloth at most merely symbolizes. Its use as a funeral shroud, the juxtaposition of the flag and death, is a heavy-handed suggestion of the power of the state. Cynically crafted political narratives to manipulate the people take the place of traditional group lessons for living,-the wisdom derived from the accumulated life experiences of generations of people. And since a mass society is easily turned into a strongly organized and controlled one, its propaganda takes on the power, virtually, of law of the land.
In an atomized society of individuals, propaganda acts on the masses, Ellul says, by addressing itself to the individual. While the masses would be best served by communal measures, to control these masses propaganda (in the west) glorifies an isolated independence that prevents public acquisition of communal power. Thus “freedom” enslaves. If there were no propaganda, it would be conspicuous to everyone that when a society of tightly-knit traditional social groups atomizes into powerless individuals, the best future for the individual then is in a return to community, now on a larger scale, mutual aid, cooperation for the common good, and the power of mass unity. Not a politically imposed “unity” of obedience to the state, but communal consensus,-true democracy.
Ah, but propaganda “does not seek to create wise or reasonable men, but proselytes and militants.” (Ellul) By acting on the masses through appeals to the proselytized individual, propaganda succeeds in turning the minority opinion of a power elite into the majority opinion of the masses. (Alternatively, it’s obvious that an effort to act on the individual by addressing the masses would end in the individual coming into conformity with the masses, a result that does nothing for the power elite.) Power for the elite requires an atomized society of “rugged individuals” disdainful and suspicious of community, and hence weak and alone. The ultimate evil, therefore, in this controlled society ruled by a corporate government, is, naturally, anything that could conceivably be termed socialist, or “for the people.”
But when entire nations are nearly sent back to the stone age by WTO/World Bank practices, as Argentina experienced in the 1990s,-and when a quarter million farmers in India committed suicide (viz Vandana Shiva) after millennia-old family farms were run into the ground by trans-national agribusiness giants,-when, at last, Americans themselves are left homeless and broke by unregulated, government encouraged and protected, publically subsidized predatory capitalism,-then, at that tipping point, worldwide backlash will radically transform the financial and political and social landscape. What was once dismissed as the grumblings of odd malcontents is now the real experience of hundreds of millions of people all over the world, and the lies can no longer be polished up, fine-tuned, and put back into play.
We Americans will be doing our part in bringing about that transformation during the next few years. Voting against the old paradigm and for even the remote chance of real change will only be prelude to the beginning of the struggle to remake the world into a sane and balanced and sustainable home for our grandchildren. The prospect of this humane world can be a source of chagrin only to those who are still in favor of profiting from the destruction of their fellow humans.
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