What fundamentals of humanity are most absent from America’s public consciousness?

The current human population is about 8,300,000,000. (https://www.worldometers.info/world-population/)

We each have a consciousness and inner life. We each know something about the lives of our family, friends, and acquaintances. And we each have some sense of society at large; what people are like in other parts of the world and other branches of society, what power structures exist, how things get done, etc.

There is a chicken-and-egg dynamic to our sense of society. What society is like influences our thoughts about it, but our thoughts about society also influence how we act and therefore shape society itself.

Our sense of society is based a bit on our upbringing, formal education, and direct experience. Increasingly, though, our sense of society is based on the news and culture content we’re fed by massive media networks owned and curated by small number of extremely wealthy individuals. Those few, super-rich people have interests wildly different from our own. Specifically, their interests are vacuuming up all our wealth, monopolizing 100% of our attention, blinding us to their evil, neutering our capacity to resist their control, and forcing us into endless, indentured servitude. (Really!) Of course this affects what they show us, and what they don’t show us. They don’t show us how to organize and resist their control, for example. Sneakily removing important topics and important moral perspectives from news and public discussion may be one of the most effective types of mass manipulation. It’s hard for us to notice what we’re NOT seeing when we’re flooded with so much of everything else. So, what are some of those important topics and perspectives that billionaire media want to erase from the public consciousness? Here’s what I think is missing:

1. The essential moral and practical values of cooperation and sharing- The “game” of our economy is increasingly rigged in favor of the rich, but it’s important to the rich that poor people still struggle to play their game. We oblige by beating the hell out of ourselves and each other just to generate wealth that’s instantly siphoned upward, from the worker class to the owner/investor class. (We are trained to be hyper critical of wealth-siphoning by the government through taxes while being totally oblivious to wealth-siphoning by the rich through all their price gouging and other dirty tricks.) We are also supposed to assume the only reason we’re poor is that we’re not as hard working or skilled as those wonderfully rich people; the mavericks, the disruptors, the stable geniuses. Cooperating and sharing are big no-no’s. Like, what are you, a socialist, a communist, a WIMP!? Everyone knows the true American Way is to bully, cheat, and steal your way to the top of the pile. Forget those antiquated ideas about “the common good,” the only true solutions are individual solutions. Greed is good. Ruthless, selfish, competition is the way – GET WHAT’S YOURS. And who better to lead us than the greediest of the greedy, the champions of the game? What could possibly go wrong with putting pathologically selfish billionaire crooks into the highest seats of government power? (Everything could go wrong, of course. Everything HAS gone wrong.)

Downplaying the value of cooperation and sharing funnels us into seeing life as a “zero sum game” where selfish antagonism is the only way to success. We see the selfishness of society’s “winners” glamourized and fetishized and start thinking that’s the route we should follow, too, not realizing the near-impossibility of that route for anyone not born into wealth and privilege, given the rigged game dynamic. Plus, even if selfishness COULD get you from the bottom to the top, it would only be solving the problem for you, while making it worse for everyone you’d shoved down in your scramble to the top. Really, both individuals and the bulk of society are much better served when we cooperate and support each other, but rich people HATE it when we do that.

It’s sad because cooperation has been and continues to be the KEY to human survival in the long term. It’s the thing that helped our ancestors survive droughts, winters, ice ages, cave bears and lions. Cooperation is not only key to overcoming survival challenges presented by the environment; it’s key to overcoming the oppressive power of the rich over the poor; the excessive stratification of society that we’ve been prone to since ancient times. Of course, cooperation and sharing aren’t easy to get right. There are plenty of examples of societies that, in pursuit of drastically more equal sharing, flipped from a cruel hegemony of the wealthy over the poor straight into a cruel hegemony of former revolutionaries over everybody. Nevertheless, I contend that we need large measures of cooperation and sharing baked into all levels of our society for it to function properly, and I think this every-man-for-himself kick that we’ve been on (since the 1980s maybe? longer?) is self-destructive folly.

Some people are nervous about cooperation and sharing because they’re afraid of being taken advantage of. We worry that our contributions to the public good will be hoarded and wasted by lazy or unscrupulous people; people who are poor like us but less honest and hard-working. Of course, our fear of other poor people is intentionally boosted by rich people. They mix it with potent additives like racism, sexism, xenophobia, etc., generally getting poor white guys to side (against their actual interests) with the rich. It’s not unreasonable to worry about your generosity being taken advantage of. But if our view was less distorted by rich people’s propaganda, we’d see that THEY are the ones most guilty of hoarding and wasting the fruits of our labor, while not being compelled to contribute their share of taxes, clean up the societal and environmental damage they cause, etc. The concept of accountability is important for cooperation and sharing to work, and it IS present in our public consciousness. The problem is that our sense of accountability is hyper-focused on poor scapegoats and steered away from truly culpable rich people.

2. Citizen empowerment- There’s a lot that poor people can do to make society better and advance their collective interests. In a democracy, that includes voting, but there’s a lot more beyond that. Also, as things like partisan gerrymandering, other dirty tricks of disenfranchisement, and big-money-supported candidates on both tickets become more prevalent, its harder for voting (by itself) to fix things. It becomes more important to protest, strike, show up at public hearings, organize at multiple levels, share reliable information outside of propaganda networks, etc. Rich people definitely don’t want us doing this. Like, on the corporate mega-media news channel they’re definitely not going to tell you where to show up for the protest against the corporate mega-media news channel. And while the algorithms of your billionaire-owned social media network may feed you a stream of rage-bait news tuned to your partisan sentiments to keep your engagement high, they’re unlikely to give you any useful instructions of how to effectively channel your rage. Just keep scrolling and they’ll keep getting richer.

3. The downsides of capitalism – None of the economic ‘isms is perfect. They all need to be martialed by rigorous democracy to keep from becoming awful. But the lens of billionaire media always omits or downplays the problems of capitalism, since billionaires are the ones that capitalism benefits most, even when it’s off the rails and everyone else is suffering – especially then. We’re allowed unlimited criticism of socialism, but the inadequacy of capitalism as the sole, steering principal of society is like a forbidden topic. You could write a whole book on the downsides of capitalism (in fact Marx and Engels famously did) but nobody has time to read that so we can summarize the downsides as: 1) Extreme wealth and income inequality. 2) Environmental degradation. 3) Economic instability and boom/bust cycles. 4) Commodification of essential needs. 5) Labor exploitation and alienation.

4. Hope- It’s obvious that things are really bad and it would be dumb to imagine that they’ll just fix themselves. That said, hope is both necessary and warranted. I mean, think about how truly horrific things USED to be. Day 1 of America was mass murder and displacement of indigenous people. Then we had 246 years of slavery. Women didn’t get the right to vote until 1920. But throughout our ugly history, good people have gotten together, fought the oppressive powers for the rights they deserved, and often WON, succeeding in making our society much better for a much larger portion of the populace. There is ALWAYS hope, wherever we can see and bravely use our collective power.