Partial redaction. Of course, any person with half a wit could play devil’s advocate and rip a lot of my arguments in the previous three sections apart. And that’s partly the point as John Perkins points out in Confessions of an Economic Hit Man. The new order is covert, not overt. It co-opts aspects of real cultures and human relationships and perverts them rather than replacing them. And aspects of real culture and real economic transactions will be intermixed with all the junk, as they will have to be. Thus the current order will always appear defensible.
That does not change my position however. I judge partially based on how mass culture makes me feel, and partly based on everything I’ve read. It is an amalgamation of all my knowledge and experiences, guided by my deep desire to understand human nature and the prevailing order, as well as the numerous problems faced by our world.
I’ve always had a visceral aversion to a lot of our mass culture. To me it is vapid and insipid. But then there are some aspects which I readily consume. The critical role that mass culture (or perhaps we should call it negative culture) plays in the preservation of the prevailing order is a piece that has only recently slid into place for me. And it is anaesthetica’s reivew of The Dark Knight on Kuro5hin which hammered these thoughts home.
One comment on this. John Perkins finds the new methods of making countries subservient far more sinister than the old ways of directly taking a place by force. After reading about the brutal conditions visited upon the native peoples in Potosi who forced to work the silver mines by the Spanish... I am not so sure I agree. The oppression is more covert, but it is also to a lesser degree.
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