The U.S. government-corporate partnership has used its share of guns and terror to break Native Americans, labor union organizers, and other dissidents and activists. But today, most U.S. Americans are broken by financial fears—legal debt—if we speak out against a powerful authority; and all kinds of other debt if we do not comply on the job. We are also broken by a corporate-government partnership that has rendered most of us out of control when it comes to the basic necessities of life, including our food supply. (I think this is why Africa has taken so long to break. Her wealth of resource has made domination of her people a long and arduous process. Self sufficiency Saves.) And, like many other people in the world, we are broken by socializing institutions that alienate us from our basic humanity. A few examples include:
On schools and Universities
In The Night is Dark and I am Far Away From Home (1975), Jonathan Kozol focuses on how school breaks us from courageous actions through a series of disconnections: “The teacher informs us that it is our obligation to obey our orders and to channel our dissent into innocuous patterns of polite ‘discussion and investigation.’” Instead of direct action, Kozol explains how our schools, especially elitist institutions, teach us a kind of “inert concern”—that “caring,” in and of itself, without risking the consequences of actual action, is ethical.
Mental Health Institutions
Oppositional defiant disorder (ODD) is an increasingly popular diagnosis for children and teenagers. The official symptoms of ODD include, “often actively defies or refuses to comply with adult requests or rules,” and “often argues with adults.” An even more common reaction to oppressive authorities than the overt defiance of ODD is some type of passive defiance—for example, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). Studies show that virtually all children diagnosed with ADHD will pay attention to activities that they actually enjoy or that they have chosen. In other words, when ADHD-labeled kids are having a good time and in control, the “disease” goes away.
Television
In his book Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television (1978), Jerry Mander (after reviewing totalitarian critics such as George Orwell, Aldous Huxley, Jacques Ellul, and Ivan Illich) compiled a list of the “Eight Ideal Conditions for the Flowering of Autocracy.” Television, Mander claimed, helps create all eight conditions for breaking a population:
- (1) occupies people so that they don’t know themselves—and what a human being is
- (2) separates people from one another
- (3) creates sensory deprivation
- (4) occupies the mind and fills the brain with prearranged experience and thought
- (5) encourages drug use to dampen dissatisfaction (while TV itself produces a drug-like effect, in 1997 the U.S. Food and Drug Administration compounded this by relaxing the rules of prescription-drug advertising)
- (6) centralizes knowledge and information
- (7) eliminates or “museumizes” other cultures to eliminate comparisons
- (8) redefines happiness and the meaning of life
Consumerism
The primary societal role of U.S. Americans is no longer that of “citizen,” but that of “consumer.” Consumerism breaks people by devaluing human connectedness, socializing self-absorption, obliterating self-reliance, alienating people from normal human emotional reactions, and by selling the idea that purchased products—not themselves and their community—are their salvation.
There’s a link to the source material here. Thanks for the attention. I’m interested in your comments 
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