[ Beyond The Pale ]
It's simply a matter of historical fact
that the dominant intellectual culture
of any particular society reflects the interests
of the dominant group in that society.
In a slave owning society
the beliefs about human beings and human rights
and so on will reflect the needs of the slave owners.
In the society, which again is based on
the power of certain people to control and profit from
the lives and work of millions of others,
the dominant intellectual culture
will reflect the needs of the dominant group.
So, if you look across the board,
the ideas that pervade psychology and sociology
and history and political economy and political science
fundamentally reflect certain elite interests.
And the academics who question that too much
tend to get shunted to the side or to be seen as sort of “radicals”.
The dominant values of a culture
tend to support and perpetuate
what is rewarded by that culture.
And in a society where success and status
is measured by material wealth- not social contribution-
it is easy to see why the state of the world is what it is today.
We are dealing with a value system disorder
- completely denatured -
where the priority of personal and social health
have become secondary to the detrimental notions
of artificial wealth and limitless growth.
And, like a virus, this disorder now permeates every facet of
government - news media - entertainment - and even academia.
And built into its structure are mechanisms of protection
from anything that might interfere.
Disciples of the Monetary-Market religion-
the Self-Appointed Guardians of the Status Quo-
constantly seek out ways to avoid any form of thought
which might interfere with their beliefs,
the most common of which are Projected Dualities.
If you're not a Republican, you must be a Democrat.
If you are not Christian, you might be a Satanist.
And if you feel society can be greatly improved
to consider, perhaps - I don't know - taking care of everyone?
you're just a “Utopianist”.
And the most insidious of them all:
If you are not for the "free-market"
you must be against freedom itself.
I'm a believer in freedom!
Every time you hear the word 'freedom' being said anywhere
or 'government interference' said anywhere, it means, decoded:
blocking maximization of turning money
into more money for private money possessors.
That's it. Every other thing they'll say:
'Oh, we need more commodities for people';
'Oh, this is freedom against tyranny' and so forth,
every time you see it, you can decode it down to that.
And I think you'll find a one-to-one correlation
with every time they use it.
And this, in a sense, in which we might call- ...
It's a Syntax. A governing syntax of understanding and of value.
So it governs beneath their own recognition of it.
So they might say: 'Oh, I didn't mean that at all!'
but in fact, that's what they do.
Just like you may speak a grammar
and you have rules of grammar you follow
without recognizing what the rules are...
and so what we have is what I call the “Ruling Value Syntax”
that underlies this. So, every time they use these words:
'government interference'; 'lack of freedom' or 'freedom'
or 'progress' or 'development'
you can decode them all to come back to mean that.
Of course, when you hear the word 'freedom'
it tends to be in same sentence with something called 'democracy'.
It's fascinating how people today seem to believe
that they actually have a relevant influence
on what their government does,
forgetting that the very nature of our system
offers everything for sale.
The only vote that counts is the monetary vote
and it doesn't matter how much any activist
yells about ethics and accountability.
In a market system, every politician, every legislation
and hence, every government- is for sale.
And even with the $20 trillion bank bailouts starting in 2007-
an amount of money which could have changed say,
the global energy infrastructure to fully renewable methods-
instead going to a series of institutions
that literally do nothing to help society,
institutions that could be removed tomorrow with no recourse...
the blind conditioning that politics and politicians
exist for the public well-being still continues.
The fact is, politics is a business,
no different than any other in a market system,
and they care about their self-interest before anything else.
And of all the mechanisms of defense of this system
there are two that repeatedly come up.
The first is this idea that the system has been the “cause”
of the material progress we have seen on this planet.
Well...No.
There are basically two root causes
which have created the increased so-called “wealth”
and population growth we see today.
One: the exponential advancement of production technology;
hence scientific ingenuity.
And Two: the initial discovery of abundant hydrocarbon energy-
which is currently the foundation of the entire socio-economic system.
The free-market / capitalist / monetary market system
- whatever you want to call it -
has done nothing but ride the wave of these advents
with a distorted incentive system and a haphazard
grossly unequal method of utilizing and distributing those fruits.
The second defense is a belligerent social bias
generated from years of propaganda
which sees any other social system
as a route to so called "tyranny”
with various name droppings of Stalin, Mao, Hitler,
and the death tolls they generated.
Well, as despotic as these men might have been
along with the societal approaches they perpetuated,
when it comes to the game of death-
when comes to the systematic
daily mass murder of human beings-
nothing in history compares to what we have today.
Famines- throughout at least the last century of our history-
have not been caused by a lack of food.
They have been caused by relative poverty.
The economic resources were so inequitably distributed
that the poor simply didn't have enough money
with which to buy the food that would've been
available if they could have afforded to pay for it.
That would be an example of Structural Violence.
Another example: in Africa and other areas-
I'll particularly focus on Africa-
tens of millions of people are dying of AIDS.
Why are they dying?
It's not because we don't know how to treat AIDS.
We have millions of people in the wealthy countries
getting along remarkably well
because they have the medicines that will treat it.
The people in Africa who are dying of AIDS
are not dying because of the HIV virus.
They are dying because they don't have the money
with which to pay for the drugs
that would keep them alive.
Gandhi saw this. He said:
“The deadliest form of violence is poverty.”
And that's absolutely right.
Poverty kills far more people than all the wars in history,
more people than all the murderers in history,
more than all the suicides in history.
Not only does Structural Violence kill more people
than all the Behavioral Violence put together,
Structural Violence is also the main cause of Behavioral Violence.