I admit it. I’ve become a cynic

waterfield wrote:

Where we part is your belief that this was all a result of a “system” for profit.
If the system influences people how is that you, me and others here are not so influenced ?

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Well yes that is where we diverge. I blame systems for how the system’s people are ‘treated’ and how the system’s people ‘turn out.’ If the people of a nation are ignorant and/or greedy, yeah i will blame the circumstances they grew up in. Ie., the system.

I do that for every system, not just the corporotacracy in America. Just seems natural to me to look at ‘the conditions.’ And the conditions are set up by the ‘System’ whether its the Nazi system or Rwanda or Finland or the US or whatever.

At any rate, I know I’m being totally reductionist and over-simplifying, but ya know, its a message board.

Also, i dont blame ‘everything’ on the system. There’s always human biology. Though the system even morphs that, at least somewhat. There’s also god-knows-what random, unknown, weird factors involved, I would think. But who can talk about those?

As to this: “If the system influences people how is that you, me and others here are not so influenced ?”

We ‘are‘ influenced by the system. We are products of it.
But, when i talk about the system shaping people I dont mean it in some black-and-white cookie-cutter way. I dont mean that the system just stamps people out in exactly the same shapes. I think it ‘nudges’ people, to various degrees. The system isnt like a ‘hammer.’ Its much much more subtle/pervasive than that.

I mean…oh…. just think about that whole Kaepernik incident. The National Anthem. The Kneeling. Look at how the system handled that.
Think about the mainsteam tv and mainstream radio and government and business and advertising responses to that whole thing. The way that all turned out was very predictable. It was a microcosm of the way corporate-systems work/handle-things.

There were indeed various kinds of resistance to the corporate-influences during the Kaepernik thing. There’s always resistance. There was resistance to the Nazi-Capitalist-System in Germany.

There’s systems. And there’s resistance to systems. The systems are dominant though. …until they’re not.

Btw, Waterfield let me ask you this — WHY do YOU think the far-left is so very small in America? I mean compared to Italy, Spain, France, Central and South America, etc? I’m talking about actual Socialist Parties. Social-Democrats. That sort of thing. In America its just Corpoate-Dems and Corporate-Reps, and a very very small number of everything else. You said it was natural for Americans to be scared of Communism, etc. Why was it so natural for Americans to be frightened away from socialism when the Europeans, African, South and Central Americans were, apparently NOT so ‘naturally’ scared of the Red-Beast?

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“School is the advertising agency which makes you believe that you need the society as it is.”
Ivan Illich in his book Deschooling Society

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“Far from creating independent thinkers, schools have always, throughout history, played an institutional role in a system of control and coercion. And once you are well educated you have already been socialized in ways that support the power structure, which, in turn, rewards you immensely. Noam Chomsky
“What’s public opinion? It’s the education system plus the media.”
-Mark Green (President of Air America radio)

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“…Because the schools serve an economic system rather than a
political or philosophical idea, they promote, not unreasonably
, the habits of mind necessary to the preservation of that system,
which is why an American education resembles the commercial
procedure that changes caterpillers into silkworms instead of
butterflies. Silkworms can be turned to a profit, but butterflies
blow around in the wind and do nothing to add to the wealth
of the corporation or the power of the state. “ L.Lapham

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“The assault on education began more than a century ago by industrialists and capitalists such as Andrew Carnegie. In 1891, Carnegie congratulated the graduates of the Pierce College of Business for being “fully occupied in obtaining a knowledge of shorthand and typewriting” rather than wasting time “upon dead languages.” The industrialist Richard Teller Crane was even more pointed in his 1911 dismissal of what humanists call the “life of the mind.” No one who has “a taste for literature has a right to be happy” because “the only men entitled to happiness… is those who are useful.” The arrival of industrialists on university boards of trustees began as early as the 1870s and the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School of Business offered the first academic credential in business administration in 1881. The capitalists, from the start, complained that universities were unprofitable. These early twentieth century capitalists, like heads of investment houses and hedge-fund managers, were, as Donoghue writes “motivated by an ethically based anti-intellectualism that transcended interest in the financial bottom line. Their distrust of the ideal of intellectual inquiry for its own sake, led them to insist that if universities were to be preserved at all, they must operate on a different set of principles from those governing the liberal arts.”
― Chris Hedges, Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle
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“Ideally, what should be said to every child, repeatedly, throughout his or her school life is something like this: ‘You are in the process of being indoctrinated. We have not yet evolved a system of education that is not a system of indoctrination. We are sorry, but it is the best we can do. What you are being taught here is an amalgam of current prejudice and the choices of this particular culture. The slightest look at history will show how impermanent these must be. You are being taught by people who have been able to accommodate themselves to a regime of thought laid down by their predecessors. It is a self-perpetuating system. Those of you who are more robust and individual than others will be encouraged to leave and find ways of educating yourself — educating your own judgements. Those that stay must remember, always, and all the time, that they are being moulded and patterned to fit into the narrow and particular needs of this particular society.”
― Doris Lessing, The Golden Notebook
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For if you suffer your people to be ill-educated, and their manners to be corrupted from their infancy, and then punish them for those crimes to which their first education disposed them, what else is to be concluded from this, but that you first make thieves and then punish them.”
― Thomas More, Utopia

waterfield wrote:

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The reason I decided to even begin this post was in reality to explore the attitude of selfishness that is so obvious in our responses to COVID-19. Of course not everyone has displayed a “me,me,me” -and “you can go to hell” attitude but enough to cause me to ask -how did we get to that. Maybe I’ve answered my own question herein.

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Well if you aren’t a system-blamer, I would think about the only alternative is to say, “well, lots of people just ‘decided’ to be more selfish.”

In that view there is no real ‘why’ to it. People just free-willed their rugged-individual-selves into more selfishness.

I’m exaggerating, but it seems like thats the only way a nonsystem-blamer could go. There’s no ‘why’ to it — people just ‘became’ more selfish.

Prosecutors tend to think that way. Poor people just ‘decided’ to commit more street crimes.

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https://www.huffpost.com/entry/textbook-investigation-climate_n_5ec6d26dc5b69106a7355661

Do you think this ^^^ doesn’t lead to skepticism?

waterfield wrote:

I wouldn’t call Eisenhower a “corporate overlord” or even a tool of them-whoever they are-but he was so concerned about the “red scare”-as you call it-that he began protecting the US interests in south east asia. It was an honest but misguided attempt at preventing the fall of a strategic part of the world to communism. ( can you say China) It had squat to do with “corporate overlords”…
And even if your corporate warlord notion is correct the questions are: Why are people so vulnerable to the propaganda?. Why aren’t you ? How come I’m not. Why do some have the ability to critically analyze issues while others don’t. How did we become a country of minions ? To me that is at the core of these issues-not- we are all at the mercy of “corporate warlords”. The latter is a simple response because we can use that to answer anything we dislike about our country. The former is a very, very complicated social issue .

It’s interesting that you bring up Eisenhower–Wendell Berry traces America’s problems back to his administration as millions and millions of farmers disappeared because of the Eisenhower policies.

Eisenhower’s head of the Department of Agriculture, Ezra Benson, told farmers “To get big, or get out.” which has led to our corporate agribusiness that we have today and has led to millions and millions of farmers leaving their farms.

I’m sure making farming more efficient and re-allocating millions of people to factories instead of farms helped make the US stronger against the Red Scare and communist ideology. But the efficiency of corporate agribusiness has had a huge toll on America.

Google Benson–he sounds like a guy who would be perfectly at home in the Trump administration. And yet Eisenhower is hailed as an anti-Trump, Republican hero.