There is a lot
of seriously flawed thinking in this article, but it is worth reading for the
points listed and consideration.
What is
blindingly obvious is that our society is in transition and has been so for a
long time. Not surprisingly, old institutions
and ideas do get left behind and many do lose their way as well. What that does mean is that we need to
strive to do better as a society to achieve superior results. Our forefathers had clear ideas that they
vigorously implemented. We need to
think out our available options and apply them and vest them properly inside
the community and family.
This writer
surely thinks that youthful resistance should focus of his own agenda and that
is surely not true. Resistance always
needs to mature and be applied at the fulcrum for effect. We are watching this happen worldwide now and
it is all leading to a more egalitarian society.
8 Reasons Young
Americans Don’t Fight Back: How the US Crushed Youth Resistance
March 19, 2014
Traditionally, young people have energized
democratic movements. So it is a major coup for the ruling elite to have
created societal institutions that have subdued young Americans and broken
their spirit of resistance to domination.
Young Americans—even more so than older
Americans—appear to have acquiesced to the idea that the corporatocracy can
completely screw them and that they are helpless to do anything about it. A
2010 Gallup poll asked Americans “Do you think the Social Security system will
be able to pay you a benefit when you retire?” Among 18- to 34-years-olds, 76
percent of them said no. Yet despite their lack of confidence in the
availability of Social Security for them, few have demanded it be shored up by
more fairly payroll-taxing the wealthy; most appear resigned to having more money
deducted from their paychecks for Social Security, even though they don’t
believe it will be around to benefit them.
How exactly has American society subdued young
Americans?
1. Student-Loan
Debt. Large debt—and the fear it creates—is a pacifying force. There
was no tuition at the City University of New York when I attended one of its
colleges in the 1970s, a time when tuition at many U.S. public universities was
so affordable that it was easy to get a B.A. and even a graduate degree without
accruing any student-loan debt. While those days are gone in the United States,
public universities continue to be free in the Arab world and are either free
or with very low fees in many countries throughout the world. The millions of
young Iranians who risked getting shot to protest their disputed 2009
presidential election, the millions of young Egyptians who risked their lives
earlier this year to eliminate Mubarak, and the millions of young Americans who
demonstrated against the Vietnam War all had in common the absence of pacifying
huge student-loan debt.
Today in the United States, two-thirds of graduating
seniors at four-year colleges have student-loan debt, including over 62 percent
of public university graduates. While average undergraduate debt is close to
$25,000, I increasingly talk to college graduates with closer to $100,000
in student-loan debt.
During the time in one’s life when it should be easiest to resist authority
because one does not yet have family responsibilities, many young people worry
about the cost of bucking authority, losing their job, and being unable to pay
an ever-increasing debt. In a vicious cycle, student debt has a subduing effect
on activism, and political passivity makes it more likely that students will
accept such debt as a natural part of life.
2. Psychopathologizing
and Medicating Noncompliance. In 1955, Erich Fromm, the then widely
respected anti-authoritarian leftist psychoanalyst, wrote, “Today the function
of psychiatry, psychology and psychoanalysis threatens to become the tool in the
manipulation of man.” Fromm died in 1980, the same year that an increasingly
authoritarian America elected Ronald Reagan president, and an increasingly
authoritarian American Psychiatric Association added to their diagnostic bible
(then the DSM-III) disruptive mental disorders for children and teenagers such
as the increasingly popular “oppositional defiant disorder” (ODD). The official
symptoms of ODD include “often actively defies or refuses to comply with adult
requests or rules,” “often argues with adults,” and “often deliberately does
things to annoy other people.”
Many of America’s greatest activists including Saul
Alinsky (1909–1972), the legendary organizer and author of Reveille for Radicals and Rules for Radicals, would today
certainly be diagnosed with ODD and other disruptive disorders. Recalling his
childhood, Alinsky said, “I never thought of walking on the grass until I saw a
sign saying ‘Keep off the grass.’ Then I would stomp all over it.” Heavily
tranquilizing antipsychotic drugs (e.g. Zyprexa and Risperdal) are now the
highest grossing class of medication in the United States ($16 billion in
2010); a major reason for this, according to the Journal of the American
Medical Association in 2010, is that many children receiving antipsychotic
drugs have nonpsychotic diagnoses such as ODD or some other disruptive disorder
(this especially true of Medicaid-covered pediatric patients).
3. Schools
That Educate for Compliance and Not for Democracy. Upon accepting the
New York City Teacher of the Year Award on January 31, 1990, John Taylor Gatto upset many in attendance by stating: “The
truth is that schools don’t really teach anything except how to obey orders.
This is a great mystery to me because thousands of humane, caring people work
in schools as teachers and aides and administrators, but the abstract logic of
the institution overwhelms their individual contributions.” A generation ago,
the problem of compulsory schooling as a vehicle for an authoritarian society
was widely discussed, but as this problem has gotten worse, it is seldom
discussed.
The nature of most classrooms, regardless of the
subject matter, socializes students to be passive and directed by others, to
follow orders, to take seriously the rewards and punishments of authorities, to
pretend to care about things they don’t care about, and that they are impotent
to affect their situation. A teacher can lecture about democracy, but schools
are essentially undemocratic places, and so democracy is not what is instilled
in students. Jonathan Kozol in The Night Is Dark and I Am Far
from Home focused on
how school breaks us from courageous actions. Kozol explains how our schools
teach us a kind of “inert concern” in which “caring”—in and of itself and
without risking the consequences of actual action—is considered “ethical.”
School teaches us that we are “moral and mature” if we politely assert our
concerns, but the essence of school—its demand for compliance—teaches us not to
act in a friction-causing manner.
4. “No
Child Left Behind” and “Race to the Top.” The corporatocracy has
figured out a way to make our already authoritarian schools even more
authoritarian. Democrat-Republican bipartisanship has resulted in wars in
Afghanistan and Iraq, NAFTA, the PATRIOT Act,
the War on Drugs, the Wall Street bailout, and educational policies such as “No
Child Left Behind” and “Race to the Top.” These policies are essentially
standardized-testing tyranny that creates fear, which is antithetical to
education for a democratic society. Fear forces students and teachers to
constantly focus on the demands of test creators; it crushes curiosity,
critical thinking, questioning authority, and challenging and resisting
illegitimate authority. In a more democratic and less authoritarian society,
one would evaluate the effectiveness of a teacher not by
corporatocracy-sanctioned standardized tests but by asking students, parents,
and a community if a teacher is inspiring students to be more curious, to read
more, to learn independently, to enjoy thinking critically, to question
authorities, and to challenge illegitimate authorities.
5. Shaming
Young People Who Take Education—But Not Their Schooling—Seriously. In
a 2006 survey in the United States, it was found that 40 percent of children
between first and third grade read every day, but by fourth grade, that rate
declined to 29 percent. Despite the anti-educational impact of standard
schools, children and their parents are increasingly propagandized to believe
that disliking school means disliking learning. That was not always the case in
the United States. Mark Twain famously said, “I never let my schooling get in
the way of my education.” Toward the end of Twain’s life in 1900, only 6
percent of Americans graduated high school. Today, approximately 85 percent of
Americans graduate high school, but this is good enough for Barack Obama who
told us in 2009, “And dropping out of high school is no longer an option. It’s
not just quitting on yourself, it’s quitting on your country.”
The more schooling Americans get, however, the more politically ignorant
they are of America’s ongoing class war, and the more incapable they are of
challenging the ruling class. In the 1880s and 1890s, American farmers with
little or no schooling created a Populist movement that organized America’s
largest-scale working people’s cooperative, formed a People’s Party that
received 8 percent of the vote in 1892 presidential election, designed a
“subtreasury” plan (that had it been implemented would have allowed easier
credit for farmers and broke the power of large banks) and sent 40,000
lecturers across America to articulate it, and evidenced all kinds of
sophisticated political ideas, strategies and tactics absent today from
America’s well-schooled population. Today, Americans who lack college degrees
are increasingly shamed as “losers”; however, Gore Vidal and George Carlin, two
of America’s most astute and articulate critics of the corporatocracy, never
went to college, and Carlin dropped out of school in the ninth grade.
6. The
Normalization of Surveillance. The fear of being surveilled
makes a population easier to control. While the National Security Agency (NSA)
has received publicity for monitoring American citizen’s email and phone
conversations, and while employer surveillance has
become increasingly common in the United States, young Americans have become
increasingly acquiescent to corporatocracy surveillance because, beginning at a
young age, surveillance is routine in their lives. Parents routinely check Web
sites for their kid’s latest test grades and completed assignments, and just
like employers, are monitoring their children’s computers and Facebook pages.
Some parents use the GPS in their children’s cell phones to track their
whereabouts, and other parents have video cameras in their homes. Increasingly,
I talk with young people who lack the confidence that they can even pull off a
party when their parents are out of town, and so how much confidence are they
going to have about pulling off a democratic movement below the radar of
authorities?
7. Television. In
2009, the Nielsen Company reported that TV
viewing in the United States is at an
all-time high if one includes the following “three screens”: a television set,
a laptop/personal computer, and a cell phone. American children average eight
hours a day on TV, video games, movies, the Internet, cell phones, iPods, and
other technologies (not including school-related use). Many progressives are
concerned about the concentrated control of content by the corporate media, but
the mere act of watching TV—regardless of the programming—is the primary
pacifying agent (private-enterprise prisons have recognized that providing
inmates with cable television can be a more economical method to keep them
quiet and subdued than it would be to hire more guards).
Television is a dream come true for an authoritarian
society: those with the most money own most of what people see; fear-based
television programming makes people more afraid and distrustful of one another,
which is good for the ruling elite who depend on a “divide and conquer”
strategy; TV isolates people so they are not joining together to create
resistance to authorities; and regardless of the programming, TV viewers’
brainwaves slow down, transforming them closer to a hypnotic state that makes
it difficult to think critically. While playing a video games is not as
zombifying as passively viewing TV, such games have become for many boys and
young men their only experience of potency, and this “virtual potency” is
certainly no threat to the ruling elite.
8.
Fundamentalist Religion and Fundamentalist Consumerism. American
culture offers young Americans the “choices” of fundamentalist religion and
fundamentalist consumerism. All varieties of fundamentalism narrow one’s focus
and inhibit critical thinking. While some progressives are fond of calling
fundamentalist religion the “opiate of the masses,” they too often neglect the
pacifying nature of America’s other major fundamentalism. Fundamentalist
consumerism pacifies young Americans in a variety of ways. Fundamentalist
consumerism destroys self-reliance, creating people who feel completely
dependent on others and who are thus more likely to turn over decision-making
power to authorities, the precise mind-set that the ruling elite loves to see.
A fundamentalist consumer culture legitimizes advertising, propaganda, and all kinds
of manipulations, including lies; and when a society gives legitimacy to lies
and manipulativeness, it destroys the capacity of people to trust one another
and form democratic movements. Fundamentalist consumerism also promotes
self-absorption, which makes it difficult for the solidarity necessary for
democratic movements.
These are not the only aspects of our culture that
are subduing young Americans and crushing their resistance to domination.
The food-industrial complex has helped create an epidemic of childhood
obesity, depression, and passivity. The prison-industrial complex keeps young
anti-authoritarians “in line” (now by the fear that they may come before judges
such as the two Pennsylvania ones who took $2.6 million from private-industry
prisons to ensure that juveniles were incarcerated). As Ralph Waldo Emerson observed: “All our things are right and wrong
together. The wave of evil washes all our institutions alike.”
About the Author
Bruce E. Levine is a clinical psychologist and
author of Get Up, Stand Up: Uniting Populists, Energizing the
Defeated, and Battling the Corporate Elite (Chelsea Green, 2011). His Web site is http://www.brucelevine.net/
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