July 4, 2014 Rota, Cádiz, España
If you're like me, you frequently see
images on Facebook with pictures of Ronald Reagan standing in front
of an American flag with the caption in big type - “Freedom”.
And probably down at the bottom there will be some smaller text with
the message the authors really want you to accept.
And when I read the comments, I see
quite a few knee-jerk reactions to the word “Freedom”.
OK duhh, who is against freedom? Not
many of us, and yet we seem to take the word at face value without
examining what it means. So let's look at it a bit.
Here in Europe, the word Freedom
doesn't seem to come up nearly as often. But America was born as a
nation of small merchants feeling strangled by the taxation and
control of England. So the word got into our vocabulary and has
remained as a high expression of patriotism.
So what does it mean? Well, I suppose
the highest form of freedom is the ability to do whatever you want
whenever you want. Sounds good, no? But what kind of world would
that give us? To paraphrase Abraham Lincoln, your right to swing
your fist ends just short of your neighbor's nose. Yup, the other
side of Freedom is Responsibility. The study of Ethics is all about
resolving the right of the individual to act freely and the right of
everyone else not to be harmed by that action. It is not a simple
conversation...
It gets even more complicated when we
move to “do whatever you want”. Hang with me on this one,
please. Whatever we want should be pretty simple, no? I
assert that what we want doesn't happen in a vacuum. It comes
from the possibilities in our culture. Alas, ever since the
emergence of mass culture supported by the media, maybe starting in
the 1950's, Americans have been bombarded by misinformation provided
by the public relations industry. Perhaps you have seen the series
Mad Men? It shows the advertising industry as it began to
feel its power at the beginning of the television age. The
characters discuss ways to influence the thinking (and feelings) of
the public about their products. I hate to say it, but public
relations is all about distorting the truth to favor the client of
the moment. That's a nice way of saying “lying”.
Now here is when we get back to the
topic of Freedom again. I assert that during the Nixon years, when
the flower children were taking to the streets, the Powers That Be
got seriously alarmed at the radical change in public thought. And
it didn't take a handful of millionaires very long to figure out
that, for a few paltry millions each, they could fund activities of
the new public relations industry and begin to influence public
thought. I doubt that they ever really appreciated how powerful
their efforts would be.
We have now seen three generations of
Americans who have been subjected to an increasingly manipulated
reality (at times Brainwashing is too strong a word, but in other
cases it seems spot on). Having grown up in this brave new world, it
always seemed natural to us and we cheerfully accepted the Orwellian
social class – consumers. We were born into consuming and never
thought to question whether materialism leads to a life we would like
to live. Well, most of us didn't question it. So now we are
conditioned to want things that our grandparents could have
cheerfully lived without.
And just as surely as we have been
taught to want products, we have also been taught to want certain
political outcomes. Few of us are political scientists or
sociologists and so the political outcomes that are paraded in front
of us as the solution to all the nation's problems just get accepted,
largely because they come from the media. We have an irrational
trust for things that come from the media. This is strange because
almost everything that comes from the media is a lie! Does X brand
soap really get our clothes whiter than Y brand? Probably not, but
they say it will.
So even what we think we want is shaped
by the public relations industry. That is sobering, but to fully
appreciate the truth of that statement is to begin to regain some
freedom. So paradoxically, when we see the picture of Ronald Reagan
in front of the American flag with the banner FREEDOM across the
front, real freedom is the ability to realize that we are being
manipulated and that reality is probably quite different than what
the caption at the bottom of the graphic would assert.
