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At President Obama’s recent speech at a Michigan engine plan he stated that the right-to- work legislation being pushed by Republican Governor Rick Snyder is “more about politics than economics.” The same day saw headlines that his Administration shifted position on accepting corporate donations and now is accepting up to $1 million dollars in corporate contributions. We will have a Presidential inauguration sponsored and brought to you by economic interest. Is there a contradiction here, is this some kind of Orwellian doublespeak or is it just an innocuous coincidence?
Let’s say that the President simply made a superficial remark aimed at stoking up his autoworker union base. Does characterizing the battle taking place in Michigan as just “politics” and intimating that it is in no way tied to the wage rates a business will have to pay its workers, seem a wee bit disingenuous? If you agree that there is more going on here than just “politics”, the President missed (or purposely avoided) laying it out in a substantive way – a way in which assumed a capacity on the part of the listener to comprehend the complex, instead of assuming that all that could be expected of the listener is a capacity to feel emotionally uplifted. If it is too much in these times to expect meaningful explanations from political leaders and when the media only serves up the same reheated pablum, what is an isolated citizen to do? If you tune into NPR news you are more likely to get a recipe for Portuguese bread, a review of the new Hobbit film, or a piece on the enduring appeal of Legos. No incite-ful news story is going to be heard driving home listening to NPR’s economic/entertainment show “Market Place?” Couldn’t NPR at least occasionally go beyond the 3 minute attention-span-limiting format and do an in-depth feature? Would it be to much to expect at least a “lite” piece on the interplay between politics and economics.
It seems as though you are on your own; you have to do the homework on your own time. You are not going to get anything worthy of your time listening to the radio driving home. You might as well listen to those mp3 files you downloaded to get through the traffic delays. More than likely after a hard day at work, most people will eat dinner listening/watching the nightly news, put away the dirty dishes and try and draw a bit of release from some form of entertainment, which repeated en mass becomes a form of containment for that little bit of surplus social energy that could be put into progressive social action.
But there is a danger here if things persist. Maybe the political elites should get out their Freud primer. In The Future of an Illusion, Freud begins by laying out a view of life that begins on very basic economics principles and setting those up as a given, before proceeding on to the main topic of religion. Although he uses words like “envy” where a “sense of justice” would be more appropriate, and granted many terms and phrases are laden with psychoanalytical overtones that sound discordant to the modern ear, overall he seems to explain more about what is going on in Michigan than President Obama. Freud writes:
If we turn to those restrictions that apply only to certain classes of society, we must meet with a state of things which is flagrant and which has always been recognized. It is to be expected that these underprivileged classes will envy the favored ones their privileges and will do all they can to free themselves from their own surplus of privation. Where this is not possible, a permanent measure of discontent will persist within the culture concerned and this can lead to dangerous revolts. If, however, a culture has not got beyond a point at which the satisfaction of one portion of its participants depends upon the suppression of another, and perhaps larger, portion – and this is the case in all present-day cultures – it is understandable that the suppressed people should develop an intense hostility towards a culture whose existence they make possible by their work, but in whose wealth they have too small a share. In such conditions an internalization of the cultural prohibitions among the suppressed people is not to be expected. On the contrary, they are not prepared to acknowledge the prohibitions, they are intent on destroying the culture itself, and possibly even on doing away with the postulates on which it is based…It goes without saying that a civilization which leaves so large a number of its participants unsatisfied and drives them to revolt neither has nor deserves the prospect of a lasting existence.
So strikingly dissimilar in many respects and in approach to an atheistic Freud, Walter Rauschenbush in Christianizing the Social Order - a book very much within the early 20th century Social Gospel movement – points to an economic and political order that is similar to Freud. Rauschenbush writes:
In every social order…individuals rise to controlling positions and intrench (sic) themselves in the places they have attained Their effort is to preserve for themselves and their children the power and wealth which they have acquired Knowing the power of the State they seek to control politics. Knowing the power of public opinion, they influence the press and the schools. Their house is built on things as they are; therefore they are against any change – except change that will further fortify their position…The financial and political forces which the upper classes have been able to manipulate in all past eras have been enormous , and the skill with which they handled them was always the best that could be hired…we might expect considerations of justice and mercy to thaw through the icy indifference of class selfishness. But moral suasion is strangely feeble where the sources of a man’s income are concerned…The immense power wielded by the rich is an intoxicant that few can withstand permanently. Men defer to them, smooth their way for them, and make them the center of ever occasion. The morbid curiosity of the masses about their doings is unpleasant, but it is an expression of the sense of their importance….
When politicians and the mass media are unable or unwilling to speak intelligently and truthfully, when they speak to “audiences”, “target markets”, “consumers”, and not to citizens (in the Aristotelian sense – those who participate in the exercise of power), then it is time to stop applauding and repeating trite and misleading clips of speeches. Otherwise, we have to resign ourselves to baking bread, watching the Hobbit and playing with Legos – all of which I plan to do while I still can…
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This morning NPR was hunting for budget cuts to avert the fiscal cliff. They rooted around in Medicare looking for premiums to raise and around in Social Security hunting for savings through a chained CPI. Uncritically. No mention of vast waste in military spending. No connection to sending Patriot missiles and gadzillions of tax payers money to Turkey, Israel ……….Mindless NPR pandering to the Beltway kool aide club, where the elderly and those relying on FoodStamps are considered to be too well off. No mention of 1,000s of military bases all over the world. No mention of subsidizing wages at Walmart and tax cuts for corporations in exchange for nothing in return. Taxes have to go up. Boo hoo. Corporate taxes have to start being paid instead of avoided and Cayman -ized. Boo hoo. Wall Street needs a transaction tax to chill risk taking and to repay taxpayers for the bail outs. Boo hoo.
Obomba’s line seemed to be a throw-away, seriously soulless to boot.
Can you help me out with this bit of Freud’s?
In the US, we’d have to substitute ‘society’ for ‘culture’, wouldn’t we? What ‘prohibitions’? And is he angling toward a concept like voting/acting against one’s self-interest coupled with a deep unconscious loathing for the society that shuts him/her out? Destroy the culture, or replace the misleadership? Freud; argh. (I blame it on his mother) ;o)
Rauschenbush is right, and especially about (paraphrasing) a moral compass can go out the window as the ‘we’ idolize the wealthy and powerful. You see it in this tiny town all the time: the biggest, most hated bastard’s funerals are always the largest.
Interesting; rec’d, pagostino.
Oh: in an interview this morning at Truthout, Chomsky said that 38% of union households voted for Walker (don’t know where he found that fact); that indicates some hearty disconnect. I wonder how widespread that is/was nationally?
I’d meant to add this, and by ‘want’ Shelley may mean: lack, I dunno for sure:
I often get told by friends when I start my diatribes against NPR to chill and just let it go. But it’s like a stone in my shoe, it just bothers the hell out of me. Anyway, thank goodness for Democracy Now! If you didn’t listen to the program this morning, there was a great piece by Dean Baker at the link below. I usually download the mp3 file on their web site and listen in car or mp3 player.
The problem is that too few peoples’ perspective of politics and their Lebenswelt comes from sources like this; instead they are feed the slope that that’s served up by corporate commercial media and quasi-corporate media like NPR News.
http://www.democracynow.org/2012/12/14/dean_baker_the_biggest_myth_in
In reply to wendydavis:
That’s the problem with Freud, one of many, his terms have very specific meaning within the psychoanalytic perspective he developed. But once you understand his terminology, it really opens up a unique approach to studying certain topics.
Freud sees culture, which he uses interchangeable with civilization, as possible only through the suppression of innate instincts common to all of us. He calls this suppression or repression, “frustrations,” which are in turn codified by a society into laws and regulations. These regulations he refers to as “privations”. People only go along with these privations because they are getting something out of it. When they stop getting something out of it, or enough, or the right kind, then there is the risk that people will say “to hell with it, lets just ditch the whole coboodle,” i.e., civilization, and try something new. Once the calculus of privations to benefits becomes clearly unfavorable to the majority, then the potential for revolt becomes very real. The regulations that maintain existing relations of power and dominance and are accepted unquestioningly, like spending billions in foreign countries while half the population in this country is on the edge of economic desperation, lose their force. To Freud this is a bad thing. Civilization is possible only through repression.
Freud also slips in a bit of class analysis. He points out that the distribution of “privations” is unequally distributed. He wrote: “The first step is to distinguish between privations which affect everyone and privations which do not affect everyone but only groups, classes or even single individuals.”
I could go on much longer cherry picking some sweet passages from this slender little gem. But rather than overspending your kind interest, I refer you to the book itself; it’s only 92 pages long and a very enjoyable read – even though the conclusions on religion seem to many, including myself, untenable.
Thanks for reading post and your comment.
Thanks for the Shelly quote. Not sure I digested it all. I had a friend who wrote his doctoral dissertation on Percy. I tried to read it, but it seemed more about argumentation among different Shelly scholars, instead of the work itself…so much written about someone who died at the ripe old age of 29…
Thank you for, in effect, ‘translating’ his terms. It makes much more sense now; i must have it twelve times and felt I was getting no closer.
Now? Voila!
I’ll try to find it online; I can’t read dead tree any longer (some weird brain affliction), but it’s fascinating stuff, and thank you. ;o) I don’t let religion get in the way much. Some of the most fulsome descriptions of what makes human life rich and whole have come from the religious, and often some of that terminology is what we have.
For instance, some friends emailed me about the children killed in Connecticut, for which there is nothing but pain and weeping in response. My wont is to go for The Light. As ever, I don’t let the religious images get in the way of the message of this, to me, sublime song. It’s worthy of anchoring a diary.
Best to you, pagostino.