[lbo-talk] The Most Hellish Hell Of All? (was, school uniforms)

Dwayne Monroe idoru345 at yahoo.com
Tue Aug 26 11:34:26 PDT 2003


Wojtek wrote:

you are being defeated by the biggest propaganda machine that have ever existed on the face of the earth.

........

Brian wrote:

...it's really frustrating to run into the melodramatic we-live-in-hell tendency among much of the Left, which is what runs through Wojtek's comments.

**********

Many Americans live in conditions so terrible that the word hell can fairly be used to describe their daily situation. Many others enjoy lives of tremendous prosperity, particularly when compared with the poorest regions of the world.

But the 'hell' being debated is not made from material impoverishment, but the alleged total manipulation of the US' cultural, informational and mental spaces by corporatations. The attempts at manipulation are beyond debate.

So, the real questions are:

* How deep does the manipulation truly go?

* How successful is it?

* In what ways would the US, given its history prior to the rise of corporations, be different if this manipulation apparatus was not online?

This is actually a question of cognition and, properly pursued, would lead a researcher down all sorts of paths - sociological, personal, interpersonal, political and right into the mysterious heart of the mind itself.

Have you noticed how Chomsky, in moments when these sorts of questions come up, will mention some deep and intriguing bit from, for example, Descartes then return to a listing of foreign policy sins or media manipulation?

I think he does this because he recognizes the essentially unknowable nature of the mind/manipulation question. Better to focus, during a lecture, on the knowable rather than scramble through an infintitely complex maze.

Wojtek says, more or less, that we're living in a biz dominated thought trap that's a sort of hell - and he's not wrong. Brian replies that we have all sorts of freedoms and material goods, the acknowledged problems granted, that make life in the US far from the continent-wide mind gulag Wojtek seems to perceive.

Brian's right too.

It's not an easy topic to settle on.

DRM

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