Swallowing the lie

How a global elite have captured us all

Sociologists have written volumes to offer insights about the nature of how societies are structured. A common thread points to each of us being framed within a social stratum that affords power and privilege according to a set of expectations or ‘Habitus’. According to the writings of Loic Wacquant this denotes the way society ‘becomes deposited in persons in the form of lasting dispositions, or trained capacities and structured propensities to think, feel and act in determinant ways, which then guide them’ (2005: 316, cited in Navarro 2006: 16). Birthright is not a given but rather constrained by pre-existing limits according to the hand society deals us. It will be argued that each of us are born as blank slates having the capacity to become what we choose so long as we persevere, however a person born within a deprived social milieux has a harsher journey to negotiate compared to one born to wealth. This imbalance, mostly ignored by those with privilege, plays a central role in societal power relations.  In his Outline of a Theory of Practice (1972), Bourdieu uses the term ‘Doxa’ to denote a society's unquestioned truths. In its simplest form it represents the yoke that binds us all to a grindstone that govern our interactions with others and sets our place within that hierarchy. The way we perceive and react to the world around us depends largely on our social position/habitus. These socialised norms and expectations shape who we are, what class we’re from, our behaviour and thinking. They constitute a set of unwritten truths that govern how we think, feel, and act.  The demonstration of these norms is not something we deliberately act out, but is posited as – the unstated, taken-for-granted assumptions or ‘common sense’ behind the distinctions we make, occurring when we ‘forget the limits’ that have given rise to unequal divisions in society. ‘an adherence to relations of order which, because they structure inseparably both the real world and the thought world, are accepted as self-evident’ (Bourdieu 1984: 471).

As we grow up in the environment, we tend to believe what society tells us is correct. Bourdieu contends that it is a socially-accepted misconception that if you do not score as high as someone else, then you are obviously not as smart as they are. These societal ‘constructs’ are deliberately engineered to contain the vast majority of a population within a status quo of subservience to a power elite.

Education along with adherence to a religion are two traditional and fundamental constructs that have bound individuals to unquestionable societal norms. The first historically serving as a training for clergy and only latterly becoming a domain for ordinary folk and then only at elementary level. The second, that of religious adherence, unquestionably the product of happenstance, has constrained thought, actions, and habit for countless billions across all societies since forever! Access to education was always an elitist activity first to celebrate and proselytise a particular faith. Here in New Zealand prior to the 1877 Education Act schooling was offered only at elementary level and often through religious mission schools. The passing the the bill established a compulsory, secular, and free system of junior state education, but only for white children! Māori could attend if they chose. Difficulty arose for children in rural areas especially where children’s manual labour was required to help families. Secondary education was an elusive commodity and available only to a select rich elite. Nelson College, opened in 1856, was the first state secondary school yet by 1901 less than 3% of the eligible population attended secondary school education. By the 1920’s and 30’s within western educational systems the move to vocational education and preparation for the training of a work force became the driving imperative. This new direction was conceived to separate a majority of individuals onto a conveyer belt of menial low skills factory work, whilst allowing a select few onto a skills/ middle management pathway. For a very brief period, certainly within Britain in the 1960’s it morphed into a levelling opportunity between the privileged and poor. However since the Labour Prime Minister Tony Blair’s introduction of ‘Further Education’ fees in Britain in the late 80’s, and Phil Gogh’s similar moves in New Zealand, education has once more been been relegated to vocational training where the development of individualism and original thought are subservient to pursuing a career option pathway. Once more the ability to finance study became problematic and remains a limiting factor for a working class demographic. Meanwhile, currently, at secondary level standardisation and testing regimes are reintroduced as sticks to beat the lower and middle classes into submission and comply with programs designed to control what we think and believe. ‘No child left behind’ remains a monstrous and demonstrable lie perpetuated in America by the Obama administration, the methodology of which is now being championed by elitist fools in New Zealand.

The most galvanising factor in perpetuating societal attitudes and constructs is the complicity of ‘the fourth estate’ to narrate what are essentially ‘contestable truths’ into an ‘elitist reality’. Globally it has become virtually impossible to inform oneself of a truth that is not situated within a Western/American/European, imperialist, colonial hegemony. Whilst we have been socialised to no longer refer to indigenous populations from Africa, the Middle East and Indian Subcontinent as Wogs, Niggers, Coons, Kafirs, Nig-Nogs, Darkies or other racist epitaphs, we pay lip service to these social mores, since imperialist, colonial and institutional racism remains rampant in virtually every aspect of western society as we daily ignore, gloss over or attempt to erase the benefits of the enormous wealth in intellect, culture, art, science and mathematics that such populations, ethnicities and societies have contributed to the advancement of, not just ‘western civilisation’ but, the whole world. The western hegemony of, ‘the dark continent’ and ‘third world’  were, and largely remain, defacto western owned ‘allotments’ of raw materials to supply a rapacious industrial machine. The war machine headed by America is ready and primed to crush any attempts by independent nations who attempt to upset this equilibrium.

Within my lifetime the fourth estate has remained largely silent and unconcerned, if not complicit, not just to the casual pillaging of natural resources of foreign sovereign states but, of the demonisation, casual racism and attempts by the west to destroy indigenous societies that are considered to threaten American or western interests. This silence and complicity is not confined to the middle east and the Indian subcontinent. Since the end of WW2 a power elite has systematically: murdered elected officials of foreign sovereign states; disappeared hundreds of thousands of civilian populations; bombed, killed and maimed hundreds of thousands of civilians in Burma, The Dutch East Indies, Korea, Vietnam, Angola, The Belgian Congo, South Africa, Nicaragua, Guatemala, Argentina, Northern Ireland, Tunisia, Egypt, Palestine, The Gaza Strip, Israel, The West Bank, The Phillipines, El Salvador, Panama and countless other countries. How many of us know for instance that at the conclusion of the war against Japan the British rearmed Japanese POW’s to help a colonial power restore order in Vietnam? This same estate, via copy and editorial narrative, has propped up the elitist narrative as they actively sought to demonise, silence and in some cases condone, the murder of any individual who dared to whisper an alternate to their choreographed reality. Malcom X, Martin Luther King, Rosa Parks, Mohammad Ali, Hugo Chavez, Chez Guevara, Arther Scargill, Nelson Mandela, Edward Said, Noam Chomsky, John Pilger, Julian Assange, Alexandria Ocasio Cortez, President Allende, Yasser Arafat, Mahatma Gandhi, Steve Biko, Tony Benn, Jeremy Corbyn, Dame Whina Cooper, Tama Iti, Helen Kelly, are just specs of sand in the whirlwind of the silenced or cancelled people.

By following mainstream western media we are lead to believe that: Elon Musk, Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos and their kind are the quintessential modern heroes doling out largesse and patronage to their pet projects, and lauded by humanity, whilst if a low paid worker seeks a raise, they are to be rightly castigated for their greed, ungratefulness , and for endangering their billionaire bosses lifestyles and businesses; all Palestinians are murderous terrorists whilst all IDF soldiers and Jewish settlers are defending their right to exist at whatever cost to the rest of the Levant region; Islam is a dangerous religion; Iran is a warmonger; Māori is a lazy, entitled ethnicity; America is the bastion of democracy and freedom in the world; there is a real difference between The Democratic Party and The Republicans; Keir Starmer is a man of the people; Paddy Gower, Samantha Hayes, Ingrid Hipkiss, and John Key have ANYTHING to say worth listening to; Israel via the IDF is not committing genocide in Gaza……and so on……..

In the dog eat dog world created in Britain under Thatcher, in America under Reagan and subsequently Trump, also New Zealand under Lange then Bolger and now Luxon scapegoats are always needed  to explain the malaise that has befallen these countries. If business were failing, or the cost of living soared, blame has always been pointed at unionism, and the working poor, never at a lack of investment in building resilient modernised industries, nor, as happened under privatisation or the introduction of state owned enterprises, the excessive profiteering by the new owners. As differing voting publics struggle to understand the real implications for their increasingly impoverished lives against a background of lies and misinformation by a Murdoch controlled press, Britain, America, and New Zealand have lurched between Tory and Labour, Democratic and Republican and Labour and National governments in a futile hope that one or the other would or could provide a respite from the downward financial spiral that many families across these democracies have suffered under since the early to mid 80’s. For Britain the Brexit debate offered a villain, as did the ‘Mexican invasion’-‘Build that wall,’ of the Trump administration. Something that could explain in concrete terms why so many people in the UK and the ‘rust belt’ of America were struggling to keep financially afloat. ‘The Alien’ the foreigner who were flooding into both countries and ‘stealing’ locals jobs.

Anyone who studies history and politics knows none of these things are entirely to blame, either singly or collectively, for the ruinous state of economies or of the social division created. What is clear is the absence of any finger pointing at the asset stripping and profiteering of public services under privatisation, the huge disparity between a waged salary and CEO’s, the deliberate disestablishment of union powers and influence, and the casualisation, reduction of benefits, and disgraceful wages forced upon workers by this.

These circumstances pervade Britain, America and New Zealand and each are prey to the same excesses and inequities. Australia in this respect stands as an outlier, as I suspect does France (although I am less informed regarding France) because in both countries unionism are strong competing and moderating factors in wealth distribution. What is common in all countries has been the move towards victim blaming for the plight that the dispossessed think is the answer to their condition.

For New Zealand our constructed lie by the elite is not directed at the foreigner but at Māori. The Luxon government with a complicit fourth estate is content to ‘distance’ himself from David Seymour’s racist narrative that cast Māori as an undeserving, entitled, and separatist ethnicity determined to ‘drain’ a disproportionate financial slice of the economic wealth of the country. And of course this dog-whistling resonates with those Europeans struggling under a collapsing economy. It is axiomatic that providing the maximum length of time for Seymour’s bill to pass through the select committee process will fuel further resistance to Māori being treated any differently to all other citizens.

The very worst and most bankrupt construct of all is the smoke and mirror sham of our democratic process as it manifests itself across all of the western nations. Who ever controls the media, controls the message. For real democracy to flourish a public needs unfiltered access to information. This is impossible where a private elite controls all major sources of news output. When only the richest in the land are able to run for office and when private interests and lobbyists are able to disproportionately fund party politics the first casualty is truth. The evidence for this is as plain on the nose of everyone’s face, yet because we inhabit a world of ‘post truth’ where the apparatus of misinformation is so firmly embedded in every facet of our lives we are incapable of filtering ‘reality’ from ‘construct’.

The children’s nursery rhyme ‘The Emperors New Clothes’ by Hans Christian Andersen remains a lasting and prophetic realisation of the power of manipulation. A collective public across the ‘civilised’ world have swallowed so many lies post WW2 that to wake up and confront their complicity would require more courage, action and involvement than is conceivable. Only a psychopath would remain unmoved by the death of one innocent in one conflict of one corner of this tiny world, yet by the time you have read this article you and I will be complicit by omission, if not commission, in the continuing slaughter in Gaza. Meanwhile the American war machine aided and abetted by a corrupt fourth estate is plotting the destruction of yet one more sovereign state, that of Iran. Heaven help us all!