Class conflict cannot exist in a society without classes, which is what we’re told we have as citizens of the world’s greatest democracy, its most exceptional nation, and other political-religious beliefs to accompany the big economic one about our magnificent free market where nothing is free.
We used to have a middle class and there is an upper middle class living in luxury towers and dining at fine restaurants, and we certainly have poor and rich people, but that doesn’t make us a class society. Does it? Many foreigners think Americans have no class at all but they may be giving the word another meaning. When it comes to economic stratification and wealth inequality, true believers in an alleged democracy that makes us all equal will swear that despite differences in personal bankrolls, by george, we are the same in having free choice. Especially in that fantastic free market where rich or poor, the same products are available to all of us if we just choose them.
Which is why poor people can live in gated communities, penthouses, large estates and lavish mansions, and rich folks can live in slums, housing projects, under freeways and on the street. It’s completely up to them and the educated choices they make at that free market where nothing is free. That’s why some of us eat gourmet as opposed to junk food, ride limos as opposed to bikes, and why some of us visit low-end emergency rooms for common illness while others visit high-end specialists for uncommon ills. Free choice, right?
If you believe any of that, it’s amazing you’ve been able to read this far since you either dropped out of elementary school in fourth grade, or you’re employed by the ruling rich as a professional member of their body, mind and soul servant class. Even if you are a member of both those groups, joining with your fellow citizens to create real democracy would bring about a much better world than the one we live in, but if you really believe continued worship of minority wealth is what’s best for us all, you are anti-democratic and possibly fascist no matter how perversely patriotic you may think yourself for standing for the national anthem after lying about your taxes, cheating at your business, or discriminating against other alleged minorities as alienated as you are.
Obedience to symbols can be a sincere and heartfelt behavior but when it’s accompanied by hateful bigotry that would embarrass Nazis it’s a meal to make jackals and hyenas vomit. And hungry people cannot eat symbols of food, nor can homeless people reside in symbolic housing. But symbol worship is another religious observance forced upon good people in hopes that they won’t notice the material ugliness those symbols too often cover for.
The growing pro-democracy movement is learning that the way ruling class minority control of everything is maintained is by reducing the majority to identity group minorities and having them battle over getting a part of the professional class semi-luxury available by obeying the rules of the market religion and thus having some special members of their groups prayers answered by being allowed entry into that privileged group of servants. Unfortunately, it still works for many who not only stand for the anthem but symbolically bend over for their rulers at the same time.
While some of us are terrorized by racism, Trump, staggering debt, Trump, a warfare state, Putin, unemployment, Trump, climate change, Assad, poverty, Trump and a host of other real and imagined menaces, especially the one with which Consciousness Control is obsessing much of the nation, Donald Trump, a host of all too real problems are depicted as only those of certain groups, certainly not all of us. Alleged minorities of beings are Balkanized into believing ourselves separate ethnic-racial-religious-cultural-gender identities which somehow categorize us as different in human substance. Once we are beaten into mental submission that accepts our minority status, the rest is easy for our rulers.
While recent stories of a seemingly disgusting trend towards rape of unconscious women are shocking, more of us will die in automobile crashes and the fatalities will not be sexually segregated or only befall minority subsets of the nation. Yet, we are not terrified by media harping on that story about a menace that kills more than thirty thousand Americans every year, but rather a disgusting crime which, thankfully, the overwhelming majority of women will never suffer. Why are some menaces hyped to the point of giving us nightmares even if the odds of our enduring them are tiny, while other, real dangers are hardly spoken of at all? Could the fact that automobiles, fossil fuels, health insurance, and related businesses are multibillion dollar profit makers have something to do with it? Duh?
All of us are endangered by the intellectual rape of an unconscious public kept “drugged with religion and sex and TV,” according to John Lennon in song back in the sixties. What might John be singing now, with 24-hour cable news mind assaults convincing us that perpetual war is normal, online anti-social media lynch squads aroused over almost anything, narrower minded and louder than ever pundit pinheads, richer and more powerful than ever big Pharma joining the orgy of weapons, drugs, gossip, scandal and the further reduction of passive citizens in an idealized democracy into a fanatic mob of zombie consumers at a realized dystopian mall?
Many of us are so mentally abused by the lies of ruling power that we believe only the most far-fetched tales of plots seemingly conducted by forces of evil invisible to all but the anointed who can spot false flags a mile away, but are blind to political economics staring them in the face. Reduced to an endless mob of consumers buying bullets, cosmetics, pizza, fashion, beer or pet food, and a parade of proles carrying plastic bags filled with merchandise, garbage or dog poop, most of us are innocently swept up in whatever trend of the moment comes via our networks of believability. And all those networks are directly or indirectly owned by the same financial powers, which have nothing to do with fantastic schemes or the illuminati but everything to do with what is quite visible, material and threatens the world we all live in, whether compelled to wave fabric painted red white and blue or coerced to carry truly false banners denoting a sub-human status forced upon us as alleged minorities.
The real and most threatening minority is that of the relative handful of billionaires—just over 400 in America—whose domination of the global economy is growing more critical and dangerous as unemployment, poverty and mass murder is suffered by more people while prosperity is enjoyed by a much smaller upper-middle class of servants clinging to the belief that it’s status not only reflects a general condition, but is entirely justified by the rules and regulations of the religious economy: the alleged free market under the control and dominance of a tiny minority growing obscenely richer by the day as a global majority carries the massive public loss caused by their private profits. How can they get away with this?
The tactic of dividing and conquering the opposition is among the oldest known to minority power, but in the age of instant electronic communication, it has become a tool for wielding more power than ever in the past. Royalty, feudal lords, slave owners and other deities of bygone eras would have been orgasmic if they could have had such instantaneous control over what reached the minds of their vassals, peasants, slaves and armies. While the digital age has made possible more direct communication among the people than was ever imaginable before, it has also placed incredible power of consciousness control and mind management in the hands of ruling classes never before as rich, dominant or dangerous.
Great masses of people under the heel of minority rule in what were called empires of the past were no more than national neighborhoods. Now, private capital’s continued and faster rape of the earth and its people in pursuit of ever greater profit for some at ever greater loss for most threatens the planet itself, and not just one or another fiefdom, kingdom or community. While the degradation of poorer and less developed nations is more criminal than ever, what is called the developed world suffers not only a spiritual and moral epidemic of social degeneracy but a vast material breakdown as well. All the more reason for ruling power to keep people relatively isolated on the equivalent of mental plantations, kept from any notion of the potential for global democracy and chained to the idea of national, cultural and most ignorant of all, racial difference making it necessary to band together in only the smallest possible groups which guarantee the ruling minority its continued power and make the collective danger much worse.
This continued rule division plays out in the lesser evil politics employed by regimes of capital in supposed democracies like America that allows their subjects to choose between a demublican representative of Goldman Sachs and the Israeli Lobby or a republicrat representative of the Koch Brothers and the Gun Lobby, with full assurance that whether the selected lesser evil needs a proctologist to conduct a brain scan or a pus removal from veins to allow a blood test, Goldman Sachs, the Israel lobby, the Koch Brothers and the Gun Lobby will maintain their control. They will serve and maintain a system by appealing to fictional minorities that insure the tiniest, richest and only real minority still dominates.
That system needs to be radically transformed by a unified, organized majority that acts for the common identity of humanity, which is all the more reason ruling regimes need to keep it divided. More of us seem to be moving in the direction of such organization and that is making capital’s minority rulers, like rats on a sinking ship, more desperately dangerous than ever. Which means the people need to find our identity as a human race sooner than ever or it will be stripped from all of us, no matter what hyphens, accents, beliefs, skin tones or other divisions we have been conditioned to accept as making us somehow un-human, less-human, more-human, super-human or sub-human.
Nature’s hurricanes, tsunamis, droughts and other events, and societies’ wars, pollution and poverty are all tending to get worse and do not differentiate among humans when they become all encompassing. The way to avoid the fire next time is to stop the fire hazard now. That hazard is anti-democratic, minority-controlled capitalism and the only way to stop it is with democracy. That means the only identity group that is real, humanity, needs to un-divide, unite, and conquer. Period.
Frank Scott‘s political commentary and satire is online at legalienate.blogspot.com . Email: fpscott@gmail.com.
Nice rant, utterly devoid of an actionable remedial proposal.