you me and the elite

Our society is a complex maze of interaction and insular activity in front of the television or the computer screen that is engineered to maintain the status quo and butress the elite's hold on power. Social institutuions and the media play pivotal roles in this daily manipulation in which our thinking is channeled in specific directions by the blatant and subtle suggestions of advertizers, politicians, journalists, educators,and clerics. They all have behavioral agendas they want us to adopt, and their work is litterd with visiual, verbal, and written clues about where our behavior should lead us.. From the images they show to the vocabulary they choose, they are reinforcing social structures and framing debate in way that will allow us to reach only conclusions that leave us subject to their authority. This directional control is obscured by by an apparent wealth of social and consumerist choices. You can be a Democrat or a Republican, a conservative or a liberal, a Catholic or a Baptist, a worker or a manager, a student or a teacher. You can drive a Honda or a a Ford, eat at home or at Olive Garden, listen to rap or country, watch the News Hour or TMZ. In the end all those choices lead to the same place...safely within the boundaries of extant social constructions. Limited disorder can be tolerate or even encouraged to vent growing frustration or resentment, but all the behaviors society positively sanctions serve to enhance the control exercised by the elite.
Social manipulation that directs us to insular activites such as consumerism or the pursuit of economic statis serve to short-circuit collective thinking that could endanger the status-quo. A veneer of "rugged individualism" and "enlightened self-interset" serves as a mechanism that divides collective thinking by focusing thouight on personal agendas. The aquisiton of material status serves the dual purpose of enriching the elite who profit from consumerism and curtailing the recognition of shared needs and desires. Moving forward as a group towards a collective goal usually means giving up some individual desires and initiatives in order to support a broader agenda. Engineered self-interest and desire are an effective damper on the necessary compromise inherent in group actions.
For the elites of society then, "character" is subservience to the social institutions, and belief in the overall wisdom and good intentions, if not ethical goodness, of the system. Genuine criticism that coulf lead to real change must be co-opted and marginalized or repressed as alien and dangerous. Substantive change is not possible friom within the system. Any attempt to do so will inevitably run into the legal and philosophicalconstraints promulgated by the system for its own survival. Real change must start with a change of viewpoint and an effort to think outside of institutional limits.
Like Roosevelt a generation ago (for me anyway) Obama and congress seem bent on rescuing what was. I have little interest in that. We need a social system that considers the needs of all its members on an equal basis and acts on them before even considering rewards for innovation or excellence ( those do need to recognized, but there must be limits). A sustainable and innovative economy doesn't need to be one that generates increasing wealth for an elite. A stationary economy can sustain a burgeoning poulation...it simply needs to grow at a pace that can absorb the new levels of need...a balance of need and resources is going to have to come...the sooner the better...the alternative is misery and death for billions...and that may happen anyway if the climate ceases to be supportive...but it shouldn't happen because we can't...or won't... discard unsupportable patterns of thought about what is important.