Econ 101: Control

You and I, dear reader, are products of the environment we grew up and live in. We're constantly bombarded by sensory inputs, chief among which are sight and sound; we listen, we speak and we read, we go to school and we listen to public figures, so surely we're mostly shaped by language and the ideas transferred through language. Right?

Yes, that's true, but it's not the full story. Karl Marx remarked that "the leading ideas of any age, are the ideas in the leaders of that age", which is true. Leaders, rulers and ruling classes have always been distrustful of the population they sit on top of. They don't trust the masses to not rise up against them, to not steal their riches, burn down their houses or depose them from their positions of power. I suppose it's only natural to develop a paranoid mindset when you're lonely at the top and outnumbered 99 to 1. So what do you do? Well, you justify your position of wealth and power by making up elaborate stories about how special you are, and because you control the means of mas-communication, these stories become the leading ideas of your age.

Whether it's the king who is made special by divine command, or the class of capitalists who are made special by meritocratic principles, rulers have always propagated some story to place themselves above the commoners. "You keep them poor, and I'll keep them ignorant", said the bishop to the king. "I'll tell them that it's good to be poor, to be obedient and to not question the authority of your divine right to rule over them". Maybe I'm wrong, but I think the Catholic Church is still the richest global institution, and much of their wealth is in the stones and tainted glass of the monumental churches and cathedrals they've built, paid for by the commoners and through a centuries long partnership with the rulers of yesteryear. The leading idea throughout those centuries were from the Bible. The superstar role-model of the day was Jesus Christ, whose story was one of suffering and poverty. Physical suffering and material poverty were thereby made the norm for the commoner, as it was the way to reach eternal bliss in the afterlife.

Today we have a different story, a different leading idea, from a different ruling class. If you haven't read yesterday's post about the Gospel Of Wealth, follow the link and do so now. Our contemporary ruling class of capitalists have instilled in us the idea that they're deserving of their position of wealth and power through the story of capitalism. Because we live in a capitalist world, it's all too easy to forget that it's much more than just a economic and political model; it's an ideology. To explain the core fallacy of this ideology, I'll quote Michael Parenti:

Capitalist theorists present capital as a creative providential force. As they would have it, capital gives shape and opportunity to labor; capital creates production, jobs, new technologies, and a general prosperity. Marxists turn the equation around. They argue that, of itself, capital cannot produce anything; it is the thing that is produced by labor. Only human labor can create the farm and the factory, the machine and the computer. And in a class society, the wealth so produced by many is accumulated in the hands of relatively few who soon translate their economic power into political and cultural power in order to better secure the exploitative social order that so favors them.
_{source: Blackshirts and Reds - p. 123}

Remember how I said that we're the product of our environment? Well, you can take that in the most literal way possible. We, as a species, are controlled by the environment, the planet, the nature we've evolved in. And in turn we control that environment to a large extent. That, my friends, is the basis of economics: it's how we use our labor to transform nature into the stuff we need to survive and thrive. Capital only comes into existence after that applied physical and mental labor. There are only two primary conditions of human existence: labor and nature. That's the material and scientific truth. Capital only becomes a primary condition after this truth is poisoned by an ideology that's disseminated from above, from the capitalists themselves. There are no material or scientific reasons why poverty should exist; those reasons are only found in the ideology of capitalism.

This is the main message of this post: the language and ideas of capitalism are rooted in the rejection of the material and scientific truths of human existence, and those ideas are so pervasive that they've become common sense (sense of the commoners?). Our behavior is primarily determined by the material conditions we find ourselves in. There would exist no sculptors if there was no wood or stone to sculpt. Our scientific and cultural vanguard consists mostly of individuals who live in relative affluence, for that affluence grants them the time, the books, the materials needed to pursue their topics of interest, and it frees their minds by not having to constantly worry about putting bread on the table. How many creative geniuses have we missed out on, as a species, just because they were born into relative poverty? What different world would we live in if humanity hadn't been held back by the ideologies of the ruling class?

The narrative of the capitalist economy and the capitalist economy itself work together to shape the world, and the people in the world, much more than any other form of propaganda. However egregious and important all the fake news about transgender child groomers and liter boxes, the narrative of economy overshadows them all in terms of shaping our daily lifes and conversations. Just ask yourself, honestly, how much of your life, your conversations with friends, colleagues and family, is concentrated around money, costs, wages and so on? "Have you seen the gas prices lately?" "Wow! What a nice dress! Must have cost an arm and a leg?" "Wages don't keep up with inflation!" "Have you heard what Jeff Bezos makes in an hour?" "Welfare is nice and all that, but who's going to pay for it?" And so on and so forth... Let me put it this way: the existence of transgenders doesn't affect my or your life in any way, but the phenomenon of austerity and inflation does. And all the language used to make those ideas prominent in your mind, as well as in your real material life, is based on the lies that money is real and that concentration of capital wealth is as natural as it is necessary.

So, just for a minute, set aside all your ideas about the culture war and war propaganda, and realize that the main means of control over your life and mind is capitalism, the ideology as well as the economy. It still amazes me how many people truly believe that competition is what drives technological and scientific advancements, rather than just plain human curiosity. It astounds me when people come to the defense of the existence of a few billionaires, rather than the billions of people who have to make do with a few dollars per day. And how easy do the masses fall for for obvious lies like "a rising tide lifts all boats" because of the "trickle-down economy". No, it's a "trickle-down ideology", which makes you accept as natural, and necessary for human progression, the existence of a few "deserving" men, right beside countless poverty-stricken "undeserving" men.

The overarching story weaved by their rhetoric assures that most of us have someone to kick down on, and someone to look up to, thereby cementing in our minds the strict "natural" hierarchy in the society of humans. Other ideologies they demonize, claiming that anarchism is chaos, or socialism makes everyone the same. The truth is that anarchism doesn't reject the notion of leaders and followers, for that is natural, but does reject the notion of rulers and subjects; it rejects unjust hierarchies, not all hierarchies. And socialism doesn't try to make everyone the same, but equal: "Genuine equality means not treating everyone the same, but attending equally to everyone's different needs" (Terry Eagleton, "Why Marx was right").

If you understand all this, you'll understand why democracy is in such a bad shape, and why it's constantly attacked and undermined; the leading ideas of our age don't allow for true democracy. The ideology of capitalism allows for the concentration of wealth and power, and makes people believe that's only natural, whereas democracy assumes the exact opposite, namely that we all have equal power, an equal say in the decisions that shape our daily lifes. Just like Loki claims in the above linked video: we're made to be ruled, not out of necessity or out of some evolutionary condition, but because of the ideologies disseminated from the rulers of our age. The economy as we know it isn't grounded in any form of material truth or necessity, and its language as well as its effects are the main tools used to make us accept our miserable lifes. The meritocracy is as big of a lie as the divine right of kings, and they both do not allow for true democracy or true freedom. Watch the below linked video on how the modern day clergy, economists, have invented austerity, and how it's used to define our lives in times when billionaires double their wealth.

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