The seething materialistic and business vortices of the United States, in their present devouring relations, controlling and belittling everything else, are, in my opinion, but a vast and indispensable stage in the new world’s development, and are certainly to be followed by something entirely different — at least by immense modifications. Character, literature, a society worth the name, are yet to be established, through a nationality of nobles spiritual, heroic and democratic attributes — not one of which at present definitely exists — entirely different from the past, though unerringly founded on it, and to justify it.
Nu intellectuelen in de Verenigde Staten waarschuwen voor de ondergang van het Amerikaanse rijk, is het belangrijk vast te stellen dat de elites in Washington en op Wall Street er nooit in zijn geslaagd het bestaan van de Verenigde Staten moreel ‘te rechtvaardigen,’ en dat dus Walt Whitman’s hoop dan wel verwachting tevergeefs is geweest.
Terwijl de mainstream-opiniemakers van de ‘corporate press’ dagelijks druk doende zijn met het produceren van oorlogszuchtige propaganda, blijft desondanks elders de waarheid overeind. In dit verband schreef de Amerikaanse dissident Chris Hedges, 15 jaar lang buitenland-correspondent van The New York Times, tot hij teveel gecensureerd werd:
The Roman empire, which at its height lasted for two centuries, created a military machine that, like the Pentagon, was a state within a state. Rome’s military rulers, led by Augustus, snuffed out the remnants of Rome’s anemic (vermoeide. svh) democracy and ushered in a period of despotism that saw the empire disintegrate under the weight of extravagant military expenditures and corruption.
https://scheerpost.com/2021/04/19/hedges-the-unraveling-of-the-american-empire/
Aldus Hedges in een artikel van 19 april 2021, onder de kop ‘The Unraveling of the American Empire,’ dat door de social media werd verspreid. Bijna tweeënhalf eeuw eerder noteerde de grote Britse historicus Edward Gibbon in zijn nog steeds veel geraadpleegde standaardwerk The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire met betrekking tot de eerste Romeinse keizer:
Augustus was sensible that mankind is governed by names; nor was he deceived in his expectation, that the Senate and people would submit to slavery, provided they were respectfully assured that they still enjoyed their ancient freedom.
Gibbon’s meesterwerk, in delen uitgegeven tussen 1776 en 1781, is nog steeds actueel omdat het uiterst helder de ondergang beschrijft van alle imperia die van nature lijden aan wat de Britse historicus Paul Kennedy ‘imperial overstretch’ noemt, en dat onvermijdelijk ontstaat door de onverzadigbare begeerte van ‘the imperial elites.’ Washington en Wall Street, de politieke, militaire en financiële machtscentra van wat Ian Buruma lovend de ‘Pax Americana’ noemt, naderen nu hun onafwendbare einde. Voorafgaand daaraan voltrekt zich een proces waarbij de instituten weliswaar nog bestaan, maar in werkelijkheid alleen in een uitgeholde vorm, zoals vandaag de dag het parlement, de uitvoerende- en rechterlijke macht demonstreren. In 1958 beschreef de van origine Britse auteur Aldous Huxley deze ontwikkeling in zijn essaybundel Brave New World Revisited:
Under the relentless thrust of accelerating over-population and increasing over-organization, and by means of ever more effective methods of mind-manipulation, the democracies will change their nature; the quaint old forms — elections, parliaments, Supreme Courts and all the rest — will remain. The underlying substance will be a new kind of non-violent totalitarianism. All the traditional names, all the hallowed slogans will remain exactly what they were in the good old days. Democracy and freedom will be the theme of every broadcast and editorial — but Democracy and freedom in a strictly Pickwickian sense. Meanwhile the ruling oligarchy and its highly trained elite of soldiers, policemen, thought-manufacturers and mind-manipulators will quietly run the show as they see fit.
Augustus voelde goed aan dat de mensheid nu eenmaal door titels worden geregeerd, en evenmin werd hij teleurgesteld in zijn verwachting dat de senaat en het volk zich aan slavernij zouden onderwerpen mits ze de eerbiedige verzekering kregen dat ze nog steeds huh oude vrijheden genoten.
Gibbon’s beschrijving lijkt sprekend op de ‘virtuele werkelijkheid’ waarin het postmoderne bestaan van de massamens zich voltrekt. Men handelt alsof alle instituten nog functioneren, terwijl men tegelijkertijd onophoudelijk wordt voorgelogen door de zogenaamd ‘democratisch’ gekozen volksvertegenwoordiging, die samen met hoge bureaucraten de belangen van de oligarchie behartigen. Ondertussen negeert de ‘burger,’ die geen burger meer is maar een consument, en die door de overheid, zoals in Amsterdam, de burger dan ook ‘cliënt’ noemt, en hem of haar ook als ‘klant’ behandelt, met alle tevens negatieve gevolgen van dien. Tussen de overheid en de burger bestaat een groeiende kloof, zoals de maatregelen rond de Covid-pandemie aantoont. En burgers die zich publiekelijk verszetten tegen dit beleid kunnen rekenen op grof geweld van de politie, waarop geen serieuze rechterlijke- of parlementaire controle bestaat. De parlementaire democratie is in de fase aangekomen dat de staat met zijn geweldsmonopolie de heersende ‘orde’ moet handhaven, nu de drie gescheiden staatsmachten er steeds minder in slagen om de wispelturige ‘cliënten’ met zachte hand in het gareel te houden. Ook op die manier worden onontkoombaar de in consumenten getransformeerde voormalige burgers een totalitair systeem ingedreven. Deze ontwikkeling werd al in 1840 voorzien door de Franse aristocraat Alexis de Tocqueville toen hij na zijn verblijf in de Verenigde Staten in het uitgebreide verslag Democracy in America ervoor waarschuwde dat:
A nation which asked nothing of its government but the maintenance of order is already a slave at heart — the slave of its own well-being, awaiting the hand that will bind it.
By such a nation, the despotism of faction (een partij. svh) is not less to be dreaded than the despotism of an individual. When the bulk of the community are engrossed by private concerns, the smallest parties need not despair of getting the upper hand in public affairs. At such times, it is not rare to see upon the great stage of the world, as we see at our theaters, a multitude represented by a few players, who alone speak in the name of an absent or inattentive crowd: they alone are in action, whilst all others are stationary; they regulate everything by their own caprice; they change the laws, and tyrannize at will over the manners of the country; and then men wonder to see into how small a number of weak and worthless hands a great people may fall.
Het is dan ook niet vreemd dat ruim 220 jaar later de Amerikaanse schrijfster Mary McCarthy opmerkte dat:
This republic was founded on an unworldly assumption, a denial of the ‘facts of life.’ It is manifestly untrue that all men are created equal; interpreted in worldly terms, this doctrine has resulted in a pseudo-equality, that is, in standardization, in an equality things rather than of persons. The inalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness appear, in practice, to have become the inalienable right to a bathtub, a flush toilet, and a can of Spam (ingeblikte ham. svh). Left-wing critics of America attribute this result to the intrusion of capitalism; right-wing critics see it as the logical end of democracy. Capitalism, certainly, now depends on mass production, which depends on large-scale distribution of uniform goods, till the consumer today is the victim of the manufacturer who launches on him a regiment of products for which he must make house-room in his soul. The buying impulse, in its original force and purity, was not nearly so crass (grof. svh), however, or so meanly acquisitive (verachtelijk egoïstisch. svh) as many radical critics suppose. The purchase of a bathtub was the exercise of a spiritual right. The immigrant or the poor native American bought a bathtub, not because he wanted to take a bath, but because he wanted to be in a position to do so. This remains true in many fields today; possessions, when they are desired are not wanted for their own sakes but as tokens of an ideal state of freedom, fraternity, and franchise. ‘Keeping up with the Joneses’ is a vulgarization of Jefferson’s concept, but it too is a declaration of the rights of man, and decidedly unfeasible (onhaalbaar. svh) and visionary. Where for a European, a fact is a fact, for us Americans, the real, if it is relevant at all, is simply symbolic appearance. We are a nation of million bathrooms, with a humanist in every tub. One such humanist I used to hear of on Cape Cod had, on growing rich, installed two toilets side by side in his marble bathroom, on the model of the two-seater of his youth. He was a clear case of Americanism, hospitable, gregarious, and impractical, a theorist of perfection. Was his dream of the conquest of poverty a vulgar dream or a noble one, a material demand or a spiritual insistence? It is hard to think of him as a happy man, and in this too he is characteristically American, for the parity (gelijkheid. svh) of the radio, the movies, and the washing machine has made American sad, reminding them of another parity which these things were to be but emblems.
Dat de ‘dream of the conquest of poverty a vulgar dream’ bleef, slechts ‘a material demand,’ is, op een handjevol opiniemakers na, algemeen bekend. En wie nog mocht twijfelen, doet er goed aan zich af te vragen waarom het neoliberale kapitalisme volkomen tekort schiet om de gevolgen van enerzijds de ‘global warming’ adequaat op te vangen, en anderzijds de groeiende kloof tussen arm en rijk te stoppen. De Amerikaanse elites hebben niet geluisterd naar Walt Whitman, die zijn landgenoten in 1878 voorhield:
Go on, my dear Americans, whip your horses to the utmost — Excitement; money! politics! — open all your valves and let her go — going, whirl with the rest — you will soon get under such momentum you can't stop if you would. Only make provision betimes, old States and new States, for several thousand insane asylums. You are in a fair way to create a nation of lunatics.
Tien jaar later constateerde de fameuze Britse dichter en literatuurcriticus Matthew Arnold dat de Amerikanen als volk het nu eens zijn geworden zichzelf wijs te maken:
that they have what they have not, to cover the defects in their civilization by boasting, to fancy that they well and truly solve, not only the political and social problem, but the human problem too. One would say that they do really hope to find in tall talk and inflated sentiment a substitute for that real sense of elevation which human nature, as I have said, instinctively craves — and a substitute which may do as well as the genuine article. The thrill of awe, which Goethe renounces to be the best thing humanity has, they would fain create proclaiming themselves at the top of their voices to be ‘the greatest nation upon earth,’ by assuring one another, in the language of their national historian [George Bancroft], that American democracy proceeds in its ascent ‘as uniformly and majestically as the laws of being, and is as certain as the decrees of eternity.’
Nog geen tweeënhalf eeuw later is duidelijk dat ook de Amerikaanse hoogmoed tern val is gekomen. Inmiddels is ‘de gelijkheid’ in de VS totaal verdwenen, de sociale mobiliteit is er lager dan in Europa, en de consument denkt niet langer meer over die andere ‘parity,’ waarvan alle materiële bezittingen slechts ‘symbolen’ waren, namelijk vrijheid en geluk. Wat rest is de beklemmende leegte van een totalitair functionerend systeem. Het zijn de meest gevoeligen en vanzelfsprekend de verliezers die onmiddellijk begrijpen waar de Amerikaanse auteur John Dos Passos het over heeft in zijn romans die de ‘hypocrisie en het materialisme van de Verenigde Staten in de jaren 1920 en 1930’ bloot leggen.
Maar wat weten de huidige broodschrijvers, in dienst van de corrupte massamedia, over wat zich op straat voltrekt? En waarom zijn de rijken nog steeds zo bang, nu ze werkelijk alles hebben gewonnen? In The Big Money (1936), het laatste boek van de driedelige ‘fable of America's materialistic success and moral decline’ — volgens het tijdschrift Time 'one of the most ambitious projects that an American novelist has ever undertaken’ — schreef Dos Passos ‘all right we are two nations,’ te weten: de winnaars en de verliezers, de machtigen en de machtelozen, de rijken en de armen. Met betrekking tot eerst genoemden stelde hij:
They have clubbed us off the streets they are stronger they are rich they hire and fire the politicians the newspaper-editors the old judges the small men with reputations the college-presidents the ward-heelers (onbelangrijke politici. svh) (listen businessmen college-presidents judges America will not forget her betrayers) they hire the men with guns the uniforms the police-cars the patrol-wagons all right you have won you will kill the brave men our friends tonight.
They have won why are they scared to be seen on the streets? on the streets you see only the downcast faces of the beaten the streets belong to the beaten nation all the way to the cemetery where the bodies of the immigrants are to be burned we line the curbs in the drizzling rain we crowd the wet sidewalks elbow to elbow looking with scared eyes at the coffins we stand defeated America.
Dankzij de door politici zo geprezen ‘bevrijdende werking’ van het neoliberalisme zagen:‘U.S. billionaires their fortunes soar by $434 billion during the nation’s lockdown between mid-March and mid-May (2020. svh), according to a new report,’ aldus berichtte de Amerikaanse omroep-organisatie CNBC op 21 mei van dat jaar.
Op haar beurt liet eind januari 2021 NBC weten dat ‘World's richest become wealthier during Covid pandemic as inequality grows. Almost every country in the world is likely to see an increase in inequality because of the pandemic, according to a new report.’ Volgens dit Amerikaanse netwerk, in handen van Comcast Corporation — ‘an American telecommunications conglomerate’ en ‘the second-largest broadcasting and cable television company in the world’ — contrasteerden de ervaringen van de superrijken:
sharply with those of the world’s less fortunate, who have hit on hard times and whose recovery from the pandemic could take over a decade, according to the report, titled ‘The Inequality Virus.’
Bovendien constateerden de onderzoekers van de niet-gouvernementele organisatie voor ontwikkelingssamenwerking, Oxfam:
how the pandemic has unequally affected people’s health outcomes. For example, in the U.S., close to 22,000 Black and Hispanic people would still be alive as of December 2020 if Covid-19 mortality rates were the same as for white people.
Covid-19 is not unique in the way it has affected different populations, said Melissa Leach, the director of the U.K.-based research organization, the Institute of Development Studies.
‘Epidemics are always mirrors to society, and what this has revealed is a highly unequal world,’ she said.
‘We are seeing rises in wealth amongst very few, rises in poverty, and gaps between the rich and poor. And what we’ve learned over many decades is that the gaps in themselves also matter because they have knock-on effects not just for the poor but for the way democracies function and the ways economic policies unfold,’ she added,’ met als gevolg dat: ’It’s more difficult to have a stable society, a healthy society, a secure society, a peaceful society, and to have a functioning democracy.’
De technology van ook het consumptie-kapitalisme bracht de massale vervreemding van de natuur, van de maatschappij, en uiteindelijk van het individu zelf:
Consumption is the fuel in the engine that helps keep the capitalist system running. We live in a world dominated by commodities. This leads people to the false idea that the ethical choices we make as consumers can lead to a fundamental change in society. The reality is, that in the battle against commodities, capitalism will always win…
What is also evident is how commodification is creating uniformity within urban spaces by redefining them in the corporate image. The academic, Elizabeth Wilson argues that the ‘consumerization’ of space such as airports and art galleries appear to have led:
‘Not to a diversification but rather to a uniformity of the kind that was always feared in the traditional anti-socialist critiques. This is not the uniformity of scarcity but plenty where the high street, airport, shopping mall, museum and art gallery are increasingly speaking corporate culture rather than aesthetic pleasure.’ […]
But under a system of capitalist commodity production, humans are encouraged to see everything through the prism of profit and loss in which our abilities and needs are translated into money-making opportunities. We consider other human beings as competitors, as inferiors or superiors who make and buy ‘things’ as if somehow they have nothing to do with us. In effect, therefore, humans under capitalism tend to fetishize ‘things’ that we consider being separate and outside of ourselves.
One of the most recent attempts at making sense of twentieth-century capitalism through the conceptual lens of commodity fetishism, was the analysis developed by Guy Debord and the other members of the Situationist movement in the 1960s. Parodying the opening sentence of Capital, Debord announced: ‘The entire life of societies in which modern conditions of production reign announces itself as an immense accumulation of spectacles.’ The spectacle ‘in all its specific forms, as information or propaganda, as an advertisement or direct consumption of entertainments,’ must be seen as ‘a social relation among people mediated by images.’ As such, ‘the society of the spectacle is the absolute fulfillment of the principle of commodity fetishism.’ […]
What Marx is saying is that it is not only products that become commodities under capitalism but also the individual human being. In going to work, the worker is in effect selling his or her ability to work.
In such a situation labour-power is being sold and therefore becomes in itself a commodity. In referring to the process of alienation, Marx says that ‘the worker sinks to the level of the commodity’ and is alienated in two senses — from the product of his labour and also from the labour process itself.
This all-pervasive process is symptomatic of a system whose entire logic is predicated on the notion that everybody is a customer whose sole purpose is to help generate profit irrespective of whether they happen to be a passenger on a train or a patient in a hospital. All utilities and services, whether ostensibly in the public or private sectors, are driven by financial targets and efficiency savings.
Over the last four decades, under neoliberalism, we have witnessed the complete freeing up of the market. It is hard to think of anything that has not been commodified — whether it’s the trade in children and human organs, or the privatization of torture. Under capitalism, everything becomes a commodity.
Commodificatie (tot een verhandelbaar product maken. svh) is het proces waarbij steeds meer aspecten van het menselijk handelen en de resultaten daarvan worden uitgedrukt in een geldwaarde in plaats van de intrinsieke of inherente waarde… Ook menselijke arbeid is vooral sinds de industriële revolutie verhandelbaar geworden op de arbeidsmarkt. Kennis en informatie — inclusief persoonsgegevens — worden in toenemende mate verhandelbaar gemaakt.
Door commodificatie verkrijgen menselijke handelingen een economische waarde. Doordat goederen, diensten en denkbeelden een commodity of koopwaar worden, krijgen menselijke relaties een steeds zakelijker karakter, wat zijn weerslag heeft op de samenleving. Een toenemende commodificatie’ werkt sociale ongelijkheid in de hand dat op zijn beurt weer ‘vervreemding’ veroorzaakt.
https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commodificatie
De ‘corporate press’ als geheel is een voorbeeld van deze ‘commodificatie.’ Zij biedt haar:
customers neither an emotional catharsis nor an aesthetic experience, for these demand effort. The production line grinds out a uniform product whose humble aim is not even entertainment, for this too implies life and hence effort, but merely distraction. It may be stimulating or narcotic, but it must be easy to assimilate. It asks nothing of its audience, for it is ‘totally subjected to the spectator.’ And it gives nothing.
In 2008 stelde Terry Eagleton, voormalig hoogleraar Engelse literatuur aan de Universiteit van Manchester:
By and large, academic institutions have shifted from being the accusers of corporate capitalism to being its accomplices. They are intellectual Tescos (supermarkten. svh), churning out a commodity known as graduates rather than greengroceries.
https://www.redpepper.org.uk/death-of-the-intellectual/
Globalized capitalism has not only exploited human beings, it has exploited resources that sustain the human species. All sort of people who have spent their lives studying climate change have warned us that that we don’t have a lot of time left. So, it’s not just that capitalism has destroyed our economic system and hijacked our political system, but is literally is extinguishing the system that sustains life. If that is not thwarted soon — and we already know that the planet will continue to heat up, no matter what we do, even if we were to stop 60 percent of our emissions now, which is sort of the minimum that most people are calling for who follow the degradation of the planet — then we will see massive dislocations. Environmental refugees, further depletion of natural resources. Overpopulation is also an issue. I mean the UN estimates that by 2050, the number of older people will double, and that kind of a world will not be a peaceful world. We think, in the industrialized world, that we are not overpopulated, but that is only because we consume such a disproportionate share of the world’s resources. We as Americans, 4 percent of the world population, consume 25 percent of the world’s petrol. Once those resources become harder to get and more expensive — Great Britain with roughly 66 million people had to sustain it’s population on its own resources, it could sustain a population of only 18 million people. Some 48 million Britons could not be sustained.
So that means they have to take from someone else?
That is what we do now, but it may become harder and harder to take from somewhere else, as these nonrenewable resources are destroyed and decimated. So, I think it gets back to the whole ethic of capitalism in which everything is a commodity to be exploited. We are seeing the consequences of the exploitation of human beings and the suffering that this entails. Twinned with that is the exploitation of the natural world. Just as they are destroying lives, they are destroying the ecosystem.
Bill Clinton and his two treasury secretary enablers, Robert Rubin and Larry Summers instituted a system of unregulated capitalism that has resulted in financial anarchy. This anarchic form of capitalism, where everything, including human beings and the natural world, is a commodity to exploit until exhaustion or collapse, is justified by identity politics. It is sold as ‘enlightened liberalism’ as opposed to the old pro-union class politics that saw the Democrats heed the voices of the working class. Financial anarchy and short-term plunder have destroyed long-term financial and political stability. It has also pushed the human species, along with most other species, closer and closer towards extinction.
Begin 2021 wees de Amerikaanse socioloog, dr. Richard Widick erop dat aangezien het neoliberalisme ‘within the global system of modern capitalism [rises],’ en dit systeem, desnoods met geweld, almaar universeler maakt ‘by its own inexorable logic of continuous exploitation, reinvestment, and expansion — into ever greater scales of commodity production, it also drives deeper the world contradictions of economy, ecology, and social justice and pushes social actors everywhere into increasing conflict.
https://iicat.org/richard-widicks-iicat-research-portal
Zo berichtten op 8 december 2020:
several media sources that fresh water started to be traded on Wall Street as a commodity such as gold and wheat. This comes as water scarcity is increasing in California and many parts of the world and as we near a global water crisis. A water crisis is worrisome enough, yet more alarming is the fact that our Mother Water will be controlled by a privileged group of people who will determine its value to the world… This time, we cannot stand by as Mother Water becomes one more commodity on the capitalist market.
Alles wordt uiteindelijk een ‘commodity,’ zodra het winst kan opleveren, van voetbalclubs tot water en zzp-ers. Hoewel bewust levende burgers de gevaren van deze levensstijl beseffen, blijven opiniemakers als de wedergeboren christen Geert Mak laaiend enthousiast over deze alles vernietigende materialistische pathologie. Een treffend voorbeeld gaf hij op vrijdag 24 augustus 2012 tijdens het programma VPRO Boeken. Over ‘Amerika’ als ‘droomland’ verklaarde mijn oude vriend doodleuk:
Die huizen vol met koelkasten, het was ongelooflijk… alsof het van een andere planet kwam… het geloof en het optimisme knalt ervan af… de huizen vanaf midden jaren vijftig [werden] van de weg af gebouwd, die hadden geen ‘porch’ meer, maar die hadden een zwembad en het hele leven begon zich achter de huizen af te spelen.
Wat Mak niet beseft is dat dit allemaal beelden zijn, niet de werkelijkheid zelf, maar een beeld ervan. De meeste Amerikanen hebben nog steeds geen zwembad; het zwembad is slechts een beeld van de 'winners.' Mak en Buruma gebruiken reclamebeelden uit glossy brochures om propaganda te maken voor de gewelddadige consumptie-ideologie. Daarentegen schreef de beroemde Amerikaanse historicus, Daniel Boorstin, in zijn boek Hidden History. Exploring Our Secret Past (1987) met betrekking tot ‘The Rhetoric of Democracy’:
Advertising, of course, has been part of the mainstream of American civilization, although you might not know it if you read the most respectable surveys of American history. It has been one of the enticements to the settlement of this New World, and in its modern form, in its worldwide reach, it has been one of our most characteristic products.
Never was there a more outrageous or more unscrupulous or more ill-informed advertising campaign than that by which the promoters for the American colonies brought settlers here. Brochures published in England in the seventeenth century, some even earlier, were full of hopeful overstatements, half-truths, and downright lies, along with some facts which nowadays surely would be the basis for investigation by a Better Business Bureau. Gold and silver, fountains of youth, plenty of fish, venison (wildbraad. svh) without limit, all these were promised, and of course some of them were actually here. How long might it have taken to settle this continent if there had not been such promotion by enterprising advertisers? How has American civilization been shaped by the fact that there was a kind of natural selection here of those people who were willing to believe advertising.
Advertising has taken the lead in promising and exploiting the new. This was a new world, and one of the advertisements for it appears on the dollar bill on the Great Seal of the United States, which reads ‘novus ordo seclorum,’ one of the most effective advertising slogans to come out of this country. ‘A new order of the centuries’ — belief in novelty and in the desirability of opening novelty to everybody has been important in our lives throughout our history and especially this century… as expansion and novelty have become essential to our economy, advertising has played an ever-larger role: in the settling of the continent, in the expansion of the economy, and in the building of an American standard of living. Advertising has expressed the optimism, the hyperbole, and the sense of community, the sense of reaching which has been so important a feature of our civilization… the main role of advertising in American civilization came increasingly to be that of persuading and appealing rather than that of educating and informing.
Deze langdurige hersenspoeling verklaart tevens waarom Ian Buruma zonder een greintje intellectuele terughoudendheid kan beweren dat gezien ‘het einde van Pax Americana’ de gehele mensheid zich zal ‘moeten voorbereiden op een tijd waarin we met weemoed terugkijken op het betrekkelijk goedaardige imperialisme uit Washington.’ Niets lijkt voor de westerse commerciële pers erger dan de val van het Amerikaanse rijk. Liever een nucleaire oorlog met Rusland en China dan het verlies van de ‘Amerikaanse’ hegemonie. Dankzij de voortdurende reclame- en propaganda-campagnes functioneert de virtuele wereld, waarin alleen nog tot consumenten getransformeerde mensen leven. De schijn is belangrijker geworden dan de werkelijkheid, waarbij de regel geldt dat ‘you must write your advertisement to catch damned fools — not college professors.’ De inmiddels overleden Boorstin zette over deze massale nivellering uiteen dat:
They no longer sprout from the earth, from the village, from the farm, or even from the neighborhood or the city. They come to us primarily from enormous centralized self-consciously ‘creative’ (an overused word, for the overuse of which advertising agencies are of no small part responsible) organizations. They come from advertising agencies, networks of newspapers, radio and television, from outdoor-advertising agencies, from the copywriters for ads in the largest-circulation magazines, and so on. These ‘creators’ of folk culture — or pseudo-folk culture — aim at the widest intelligibility and charm and appeal.
In deze kermis wordt de massa niet gedreven door rationalisme, maar door begeerte, niet door de hersenen maar door de sentimenten. Daarom geldt ook hier dat:
Whilst the natural instincts of democracy induce the people to reject distinguished citizens as their rulers, an instinct not less strong induces able men to retire from the political arena, in which it is so difficult to retain their independence, or to advance without becoming servile.
Dit is een belangrijke verklaring waarom de huidige parlementen bevolkt worden door praatjesmakers die uit zijn op eigen gewin. Ik hoef hier niet verder op in te gaan, aangezien iedere lezer zelf tientallen voorbeelden hiervan kan geven. Hetzelfde gaat op voor de hier besproken opiniemakers van de commerciële pers.
Geen opmerkingen:
Een reactie posten