I was just having the same conversation I’ve had a thousand times before, this time with a colleague, about the strange way it seems that modern societies never seem to be able to learn from history. We can see the same genocidal crimes being perpetrated over and over, decade after decade. We have some of the masterminds, like Robert McNamara in Fog of War , admitting the mistakes and imploring present day leaders not to follow in their footsteps, but to no avail. We ask ourselves, how can this be?  Why does history repeat itself? Perhaps it is a grand conspiracy of elites who employ a Hegelian dialectical method (thesis-antithesis-synthesis) when they model the geopolitical process in a constant game of right versus left, capitalism versus communism, democracy versus tyranny, good versus evil.  There is good reason to believe that this is so.

My colleague pointed to the philosophical writings of Ernst Cassirer, who asserted that, “the Fascist regimes of the 20th century were symbolised by a myth of destiny and the promotion of irrationality.” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ernst_Cassirer ) So world leaders seem to be caught up in a drama of unfolding historical events, unable to break free of the ideological matrix because their Western democracy is seen as an ultimate Hegelian synthesis. It is seen as the defeat of irrationality: the only logical path and system for (global) society. I remember reading a book in university by Francis Fukuyama called The End of History and the Last Man .  In it, he drew upon Hegelian philosophy to argue that western capitalist (read: neo-liberal economic) democracies were the final and ultimate stage of historical development.  To him, there was no higher achievement than what these shining examples of human history had achieved.  It was no wonder to me that he could have his head so deeply buried in the clouds when I learned years later that he was a affiliate of the Neoconservative thinktank known as the Project for a New American Century .  In that document, members proclaim the need for the US to assert itself by all means necessary as THE global military power, and to increase defense spending to that aim.

Trapped in their ethnocentric, ideological prison, world leaders such as Fukuyama envision an antagonistic world of dualisms on the one side of which is democratic process and rational thought, and which has to be defended (read: forced down everyone’s throats), and on the other side any dissenting view.  Hence, we have an ideology that gives birth to a kind of Frankenwehrmacht, a whole miscellany of rogue “defense forces” and ministries of propaganda, thinktanks and lobby groups, bureaucracies of ’security’, which in turn manufacture a history more palatable to Western tastes.  The chaos we all see and disagree with ensues, with very few dissenting voices.

I believe Erich Fromm identified the source of this destructive ideological zealotry and its concomitant acceptance by the majority of developed-world bourgeoisie.  A humanist and psychological theorist, he pinpointed, “automaton conformity, authoritarianism, and destructiveness” as three key psychological mechanisms that are utilized in individuals who turn away from the responsibility that freedom entails.  People turn to these escape mechanisms because it is easier to lose oneself, be controlled or damn it all to hell, rather than face up to the “hard work” that freedom requires. These think tank partisans have never had the courage to face responsibility for the cost their ideology extracts from the global citizenry. Pundits of this kind always claim that their ideologies have improved the standard of living of people everywhere, and their message dominates the airwaves, because of the monopolization of media.

And herein lies the malevolent aspect of this untenable situation.  Aldous Huxley, in the interview posted previously, said that children are ideal targets of propaganda, not only for the purposes of “branding”, but because once they are, in a sense, “brainwashed” through advertising and media manipulation, they will be “ideology-buyers” in their adult life.  And so we see an escapist philosophy engendering a society of diversion-seekers, a pseudo-democracy which cannot function because the populous is fascinated by the spectacle, the brand, the product. Marx called it “commodity fetishism”.  It has eroded any real democratic foundations that might have existed before.  The commodity in this case is the minds of people, and they’ve been infected with ideology.

But, there is a cure found right inside the disease. Like the Sword of Damocles, technology hovers over us like a UFO, threatening to sweep away our freedom in a grand act of legislation on Internet control or biometrics, or as Zietgeist contends, RFID chip implants, or so the controllers and Alex Jones would have us think. But actually, in technology lies our immunization to these corporatist machinations.  It is already undermining the grand schemes of the elite. As the late, great Marshall McLuhan said in his Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man , “the effect of any kind of technology engenders a new equilibrium in us that brings quite new technologies to birth.”  That new equilibrium could be the awakening of a biological device within us, a new brainwave.

The question is, will people just passively sit back and watch as technology is used against them, or will they adopt it and use it to their advantage? Take these extreme sport base jumpers.  What new insights are they afforded as they put technology to use?  What new environments have they brought into being?  Are they “automaton conformists”?  Are they victims of the modern ideological propaganda or are they forging their own perspectives?  What’s going on in their brains as they soar as no man has done before?  Perhaps the ideologies of yesteryear will prevail on our weak consciousnesses, but somehow, after I watch this,  I really doubt it.