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                                                             Introduction

                                            "There is always hope when people are forced to listen to both sides"        

                                                                       John Stuart Mill  (from "On Liberty")

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Organized religion can be a positive force in a variety of ways, from promoting fellowship and comradery to building community and celebrating shared values.  But that it can be a positive force doesn’t mean it has to be.  It is our interpretation that makes the difference.  How much sense does it make to embrace even the inherently contentious, divisive tenets of any ideology, especially when these tenets are not even remotely demonstrable?  Why adopt such a stance?  What is the true nature of this sort of devotion?  Can we not embrace the good aspects of any given ideology while rejecting the blatantly contentious and divisive?  And is the idea of a superior faith nourishing to humanity and to society?   Is language like the "one and only true religion" the language of a benevolent, loving, omniscient God?  Or is this the language of very human demagogues who need to keep the masses conveniently divided?

It is still assumed by many of us that religious orthodoxy is the only way to achieve spiritual fulfillment and that the political apparatus is the only way to fulfill our civic duty.  Does it seem likely that such traditions are even the best way, let alone the only way, in either case?  Isn't spirituality accessible to many people outside of traditional organization and in a variety of ways?  Don't many people function better outside of group process or as members of smaller, more intimate groups?  There are many ways that we can improve the conditions of society outside of the political apparatus.  It would surely be untenable to assert that such traditions are without any value.  But it is equally untenable to claim they possess the only value, or even the most value.

It isn’t our mere association with these traditional value systems, whether the religious or the more political, that is problematic, but rather our doctrinaire attitudes towards them.  Here is the reason our ideological discussions are doomed from their very outset.  We are conditioned to view the world in a black/white, right/wrong, 'us against them,' manner.   Dialogue is plagued by excessive emotion and lack rational cooperation and exploration of nuance.  As a society, we have a tendency to bill our beliefs irresponsibly, as if they are incontrovertible, obvious facts.  Authoritative posturing runs rampant.  Emotions exceed due diligence by a wide margin.  We are far quicker to point out the shortcomings of other belief systems than their value.  Genuine, open minded, resolution oriented, intellectually responsible interactions are unlikely when we act as though our ideals were handed down from on high or are superior for some other reason.  And we are conditioned to do just that, via the education system, mass media, and organized religion.

Religion, politics, and a broad range of "socially responsible" value sets are precisely the places we would expect to find the support, financial or otherwise, of despots looking to promote sectarianism to neutralize the ever feared "will of the people."  These are also the places we would expect to find blue light specials for "civic duty."  Strong belief systems rooted in genuine search and questioning is natural.  It's when strong belief systems develop without that requisite due diligence that the problems arise.  Call this shortcoming what you like.  People call it different things.  'Blind faith' is traditional but somewhat passe.  I think 'pom-pom waving' is a better fit.  As we shall see, it is a problem that extends beyond religious values, running a broad gamut from the toeing of political party lines to extreme nationalism and a variety of (presumably) socially responsible behaviors.  What are the chances that pom-pom waving can ever really be a positive force in the world?   Can becoming obsessed with the actions of other groups, while remaining relatively unconcerned with similar problems in our own affiliations, be good for society?  Why would we take such great pride in casting our votes even with the full knowledge that our lives were never significantly different when the political nemesis was in power?  Doesn’t it raise a red flag  that we fail to make any headway on important issues and ideological dialogues and that we are becoming ever more polarized and hardened by them, languishing in the same old stand-offs?  When our churches ask us to believe that we are "God's chosen people" and our president's State of the Union address has come to resemble a pep rally or revival meeting, isn't it reasonable to ask if our participation really makes sense and if there aren't perhaps better ways to fulfill our civic duty and find spiritual fulfillment?  How can we develop our innate, ideological sensibilities if we, as a society, are conditioned to look in so few places for answers?

We have recently witnessed money printing extravaganzas dubbed "quantitative easing," in line with propaganda of yore, and with trillions upon trillions of dollars being piled onto the taxpayers tab.  We also saw the very fortuitous treatment given the nation's largest banks in 2008 - 2009, and the subsequent government refusal to divulge the recipients of trillions of taxpayer bailout funds.  Surely such events speak eloquently to the utter insignificance of the voice of the people.  But it's important to point out that blaming is tantamount to complicity, for it only gives an air of legitimacy to the system.  If it's the President's fault, there's always a simple solution.  "There's always hope when people are forced to listen to both sides.”  Only when we stop blaming the president, the administration, the party, do we begin looking at the real problem – the system itself.

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During the axial age, somewhat contemporaneous global events precipitated a shift in human values, achievements, and perceptions in many very different parts of the world.  Long held beliefs, attitudes and traditions were challenged.  There was a moving away from superstition value systems towards reason.  Hebrew prophets Elijah, Isaiah, and Jeremiah brought the idea of ethical monotheism to Judaism.   In China, Confucianism and Taoism would also have their roots during this great period, along with the teachings of Confucius, Zhuangzi, and Laozi.  In India, the Upanishads challenged the pantheistic ancient Hindu scriptures, the Vedas, and Siddhartha Gautama sought to reform Hinduism by founding the new sect of Buddhism.   And Greek philosophers, Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle founded western philosophy.  About 2000 years later, a similar phenomenon occurred in the epicenter of world power, Europe, during the Enlightenment period.  In fact, some historians argue that the Enlightenment was a second axial period.  But despite these shifts away from superstition, magical thinking would persist, as it persists today, surviving not only these two pivotal ages of reason and progress, but also the industrial revolution.  Could it be that superstition and even outright deception on the part of leadership are necessary for maintaining the status quo in society?  If so, why?

In the United States today, there is a relatively small group of people who fancy themselves enlightened.  But it's not this group's number that gives it its relevance.  Rather it's the disproportionate power that they wield.   These people have been educated and groomed specifically for positions of power and leadership through various mechanisms in society, including elite prep schools, big fraternities, and secret societies, later segueing into religious institutions and the political apparatus, whether public office, round table groups, research institutes, “philanthropic” foundations, think tanks, and the like.  This system of power has an underlying philosophical basis which can be traced to many influential thinkers.   A convenient entry point is ancient Greece, the "cradle of democracy", and Plato’s concept of the "noble lie," the idea that citizenry are incapable of self-rule and that power should remain in the hands of an enlightened few, or "guardians."  

But this elitist ethic is disseminated on a need to know basis.  Ordinary citizens who attend public schools stand little chance of encountering these more significant and telling aspects of our history, thanks to the importation of compulsory schooling in the nineteenth century.  Those who attend elite prep schools and/or belong to secret societies and important fraternities stand a much better chance.    Though compulsory schooling was new to the United States at that time, it already had strong roots in Europe.  During the Reformation, both Martin Luther (who held that righteousness came only through Christ and that faith alone made people just) and John Calvin (who maintained in "Institutes of the Christian Religion" that the saved are saved and the damned are damned before they're born and no amount of good/bad work can change that) advocated compulsory schooling as a means of ideological indoctrination.  In 1763, Prussia instituted the very first compulsory school system, introduced by the decree of Frederick the Great, with a central objective that aimed "to instill loyalty to the Crown and to train young men for the military and the bureaucracy."   According to Prussian philosopher, Johann Fichte, "If you want to influence [the student] at all, you must do more than merely talk to him; you must fashion him, and fashion him in such a way that he simply cannot will otherwise than what you wish him to will."   According to Fichte, "Education should provide the means to destroy free will."   Like Hume, Fichte believed ordinary people were "slaves of their passions", who could not be allowed to run their own lives, let alone participate in the running of the state.  In 1807, in "Addresses to a German Nation,"  Fichte said, "The new education must consist essentially in this, that it completely destroys freedom of will in the soil which it undertakes to cultivate, and produces on the contrary strict necessity in the decisions of the will, the opposite being impossible. Such a will can henceforth be relied on with confidence and certainty. (5)

In 1852, Massachusetts would become the first US state to adopt the Prussian compulsory schooling, with the help of prominent reformers and "modernizers" including Joseph Cogswell, Henry Barnard, and Horace Mann.  With this system of education came greater emphasis on obedience, allegiance, and realpolitik, with truth and knowledge being secondary.  It is little wonder then that history texts in our public schools read like a Disney movie and that we emerge from high school with such a grievously incoherent view of history and its bearing on our values.  Charles Darwin, for example, is widely viewed as just the godless scientist credited with conceiving the theory of evolution via natural selection.  It is far less known that, as a younger man, Darwin was an Anglican minister who was fond of quoting the bible and did not doubt its literal truth.  And even later, in 1879, twenty years after the publication of "On the Origin of Species," Darwin wrote in a letter;    "In my most extreme fluctuations I have never been an atheist in the sense of denying the existence of a God.— I think that generally (& more and more so as I grow older) but not always, that an agnostic would be the most correct description of my state of mind."  But comprehensive history tends not to read as well as Hollywood versions, the ever popular, black and white versions, the 'believer' vs 'denier' dialectics that provide such useful, distractive crowd control for the establishment.  So our children aren't taught that Darwin married his first cousin or that inbreeding was quite popular with the upper classes at that time.  They never learn that the eugenics movement, which drew heavily from Darwin's works, "extolled the marriage of cousins among the elite as eugenically desired,” (Black) or that Darwin's cousin, Sir Francis Galton, is widely known as the "father of eugenics."  The never learn that after Darwin's “Descent of Man” was published, there was an explosion of elite, private boarding schools in the United States, intended to facilitate selective breeding, and other unfortunate aspects of the eugenics movement, such as the fact that "the Nazis practiced eugenics with the open approval of America's eugenic crusaders" and that "In America, this battle to wipe out whole ethnic groups was fought not by armies with guns nor by hate sects at the margins.  Rather this pernicious white gloved war was prosecuted by esteemed professors, elite universities, wealthy industrialists and government officials colluding in a racist, pseudoscientific movement called eugenics" and that "Using the power of money, prestige and international academic exchanges, American eugenicists exported their philosophy to nations throughout the world, including Germany" ... that  "in Buchenwald and Auschwitz, eugenic doctors like Josef Mengele would carry on the research begun just years earlier with American financial support, including grants from the Rockefeller Foundation and the Carnegie Institution"  and that "Only after the secrets of Nazi eugenics horrified the world, only after Nuremberg declared compulsory sterilization a crime against humanity, did American eugenics recede, adopt an enlightened view and then resurface as 'genetics' and "human engineering."   Nor do we learn Alexander Hamilton's sentiments on self-determination, that  "The voice of the people has been said to be the voice of God; and however generally this maxim has been quoted and believed, it is not true in fact. The people are turbulent and changing; they seldom judge or determine right. Give therefore to the first class a distinct, permanent share in the government.”   Radical historians and intellectuals in academia, like Noam Chomsky and Howard Zinn are not in the curricula, so we never learn that "American elites, this goes back to the Constitutional Convention, have been very concerned over what's sometimes called an 'excess of democracy.'   That is, real participation by the public in formulating policy.  In fact the constitutional system was designed to prevent that.  Madison’s conception was that, what he called the ‘wealth’ of the nation, the responsible set of men, they’re the ones who should set policy.  That’s why the senate, which represented the wealthy, was given most of the power in the constitutional system – least responsive to the public and more consisting of wealth.”  We never hear common preconceptions about the framers characterized as "mythology", or the US Constitution as "not simply the work of wise men trying to establish a decent and orderly society, but the work of certain groups trying to maintain their privileges, while giving just enough rights and liberties to enough of the people to ensure popular support."  

In the 1920s, Harold Lasswell, the influential political scientist and propaganda theorist, whose book "Aim to Indoctrinate," was considered the hallmark of propaganda at that time, maintained that sophisticated governments ruled not by force, but through illusion.  Concurrently, the enormously influential Ed Bernays argued that scientific manipulation of public opinion is necessary to overcome chaos and conflict in society.  In his book, "Propaganda" (1928), Bernays asserts that "we are dominated by the relatively small number of persons ... who understand the mental processes and social patterns of the masses. It is they who pull the wires which control the public mind."   This idea was shared by Sigmund Freud, Bernays’ uncle, as well as prominent  intellectuals like Walter Lippman, who believed ordinary citizens were “ignorant and meddlesome outsiders” and should be "spectators of action" as opposed to actual participants.  More recently, distinguished Research Professor Emeritus at York University in Toronto, Gabriel Kolko, further documents a very similar trend in his "The Triumphs of Conservatism", which outlines how big business interests promoted the government reforms and regulations of the so-called "Progressive Era" (6).   Noam Chomsky maintains that even the ostensibly liberal administrations have been far more aligned with elites than with the people, citing the Roosevelt administration and its "planners" who designated an area called the "Grand Arena" which had to be "dominated" by the US, and speaking of "later liberal administrations" which contended that "if we control the Middle East, we can control the world--that's where the energy resources are." (7) adding that he Trilateral Commission, founded in 1973, as "drawing from Wilsonian progressivism, Woodrow Wilson's own view that an elite of gentlemen, with elevated ideals, should govern in order to sustain stability and righteousness,"   In 1975, the Trilateral Commssion published "A Crisis of Democracy", arguing that too much democracy was posing a threat to society.   In 2010, Zbigniew Brzezinski, co-founder of the Trilateral Commission, echoed the same concern again - that the entire world was becoming increasingly awakened politically, and this was creating problems in managing world affairs.  Brzezinski would go on to be Barack Obama's chief foreign policy advisor in the run up to the 2008 elections. 

But alas, if we commoners learn too much, then the two parties begin to look too much like one.   There ceases to be any point to our beloved mudslinging, cheerleading, log rolling, and magical thinking, the pillars of realpolitik and the status quo.  And we are given plenty of reasons to continue to allow ourselves to be deceived. Enormous energy has been put into maintaining this illusion, from the legions of think tanks on both sides of the political tracks, funded by big business and/or their so-called "philanthropic" foundation counterparts.  These think tanks are often affiliated with (if not housed on) major universities, creating the modern reality of "large swathes of academia are little more than publicly funded mechanisms for disseminating and producing an ideologically-driven world view,"  as one reporter put it. (9)  In 1954, Congress established the Reese Committee to investigate the premier tax exempt, philanthropic foundations (Rockefeller, Ford, Carnegie and a few others) and their efforts to control the US education system.  But the committee was disbanded when it found that our biggest "philanthropists" were promoting "oligarchical collectivism," which  "could not have occurred peacefully, or with the consent of the majority, unless education in the United States had been prepared in advance to endorse it ." (10)   But the committee got a bit too close to the truth and was disbanded, which came as quite a shock to chief congressional investigator, Norman Dodd.  (11)   Meanwhile, thousands of scholars have received fellowships and scholarships from "charitable" foundations.  No wonder then that academia is more than happy to sing their praises and teach their brand of business, in an ongoing process of social engineering to mold the public mind into something more in keeping with the demands of the industrial age. 

Our system of education is failing us.  I would add that what we are getting in lieu of a real education is a propensity for realpolitik and pom-pom waving.  How surprising is that given the system of education that has been set up?   It really should surprise no one that the Rumsfeld Pentagon had the full support of the Bush administration when Rumsfeld reported the Pentagon had "lost" 2.3 trillion dollars back in 2001, just as it supported the "rock solid" evidence that the "evil-doers" were up to no good in Iraq.  It makes perfect sense that the Obama administration fully supported the "sky is going to fall" bailout fearmongering, as well as the FED and the nations largest banks in 2008 when they refused to divulge the recipients of trillions of taxpayer bailout funds.  This is all in keeping with history, with the "war to end all wars" descriptor for WW1 and the "preventing war" ostensible motive for establishing of the League of Nations, which are, in turn, in keeping with "manifest destiny" in the previous century.  There is no shortage of policy and proposed legislation boasting broad value to society.  There is, however, a massive shortage in the results column.  It's not really that difficult to explain the disparity.The same sorts of events will continue to unfold, rest assured, not because the world has gotten more complicated or any other excuse, but because the system was designed to produce such results. 

                                 Next:  The Counterculture and the Advent of Computer Technology

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                       Part One -  notes:

     1 -  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L4_KjUiqg0Q&feature=related  - from 2:23 to 5:00

     2 -  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YQiW_l848t8  -  1:12:30 to 1:17:00

     3 -  http://bigthink.com/ideas/16052

     4 -  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prussian_education_system

     5 -   http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Johann_Gottlieb_Fichte

     6 -  http://word.world-citizenship.org/wp-archive/795

     7 -  http://therealnews.com/t2/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=31&Itemid=74&jumival=5870  ...  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aeMxM6fW_vE

     8 -  http://www.dailymotion.com/video/xgk4e0_david-rothkopf-reveals-the-superclass-elite_news    ...    http://www.amazon.com/Superclass-Global-Power-Elite-Making/dp/0374272107

     9 -   http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2010/06/11/crywolf 

    10 -  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norman_Dodd

    11 -  http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=norman+dodd  

    12 -   http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geostrategy