***- Fund Raising Status - We just had a most generous donor contribute more than enough to meet the balance of our deficit and then some and did so early. I can't thank that person enough. The difference will aid us in other things that we needed to do but could not due to the lack of funds. We thank you from the bottom of our hearts. I swear we have the best readers and supporters in the entire bloggersphere. I thank everyone of you who helped us this month and wish you all blessings, and the fulfillment of all your desires. We are up for another month..... I thank you all.
Vatic Note: This is a good article, but I have a belief after all these past 12 years of research, That the bogus ADD and ADHD diseases and the drug treatment required, are a major part of the reasons why our Youth have been crushed. Those diagnosed are the ones who are independant thinkers, do not automatically succumb to authoritarian rule, and who question authority that does not make sense.
They are then drugged to take away the critical thinking skills and resistance of our youth by changing chemically the way the brain functions. Its very clever indeed, and effective. Once taken off the legal drugs, the child does not feel what he is experiencing as "normal" and thus turns to illegal drugs, thereby replenishing the Bush cabal bank account and khazar bankers money laundering income.
Its a form of soft kill of the species called "humanity", since these children can never go back to normal. The brighter they are, the more capable of their thought processes to see the reality of the authoritarian masters, the more likely they will be diagnosed as ADD etc.
We do not have the experience, training or ability to stop it except through resistance to the system to drugging your children without permission and that is where the fight has to take place. It requires a deep love of your children and a ton of courage. But without it, we are doomed as a species. That and home schooling are the only way, especially after common core gets shoved down our throats. Your choice.
There is some truly excellent history in here that we know nothing about, that shows that school is not synonymous with "Education", as our farmers proved back in the 1800's when they created some truly great systems for aiding farmers back then. This is truly worth the read, just for the history alone.
8 Reasons Young Americans Don’t Fight Back: How the US Crushed Youth Resistance
http://beforeitsnews.com/alternative/2014/03/8-reasons-young-americans-dont-fight-back-how-the-us-crushed-youth-resistance-3-2921804.html?currentSplittedPage=0
By Bruce E. Levine, Alternet
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.
They 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/
gized 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/
gized 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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