First, your writing: Platinum stuff in
both words and conveyance!
Second, your question: The labor is
long, and the seeming deaf, legion, but the consciousness is a mysterious
thing. Just when it seems nothing has
been achieved, and nothing has been internalized, the light is visible when it
comes on—for one, and sometimes many!
When that day comes, we will find that
positive psychology in service to corporate fascism are both more brittle than
they appear.
Are we up to the challenge? I don’t know, but would still be trying to
awaken my fellows even if I believed we weren’t. The future can be full of surprises, but
regardless, being true to one’s self is of mega-high importance.
I sense that Divine Madame M is anxious
to proceed to the next chapter. Permit
me to continue on this one for a bit (indulge! Lol), for Hedges is making
salient points:
“Psychologists, in and out of
government, have learned how to manipulate social behavior. The promotion of collective harmony, under
the guise of achieving happiness, is simply another carefully designed
mechanism for conformity. Positive
psychology is about banishing criticism and molding a group into a weak and
malleable unit that will take orders.
Personal values, those nurtured by an independent conscience, are gently
condemned as antagonistic to harmony and happiness. Those who refuse under group pressure to
become harmonious are deemed a drag on the corporate body and, if they cannot
be reformed, expunged. Those who are
willing to surrender their individuality are granted small rewards doled out by
the corporate structure. They can feel,
at least until they lose their jobs, that they belong to an important and
powerful collective. They can adopt a
corporate identity. They feel
protected. The greatest fear becomes the
fear of disrupting the system, of becoming an impediment to the harmony of the
corporate collective.” (129) In other words, Hedges says, we become a
society of sleepwalkers, with our critically thinking minds and independent
wills turned off.
Treating workers as expendable things,
as organic machines, did lead to dehumanization. But while the classic capitalist exploiters
took the standard “get as much out of them as possible while paying them the least”
(and all the clever tricks that can be done to help do that), the maligned (but
capitalist) progressives (one of Glenn Beck’s least favorite words) “sought to
establish a stable corporate state…collective bargaining, profit-sharing,
company magazines, insurance, pension plans, safety reform, workmen’s
compensation, restricted work hours and the ‘living wage.’” (130) Not necessarily for egalitarian or
philanthropist purposes either, but to stabilize and make palatable “working
for the man.”
Whatever progress was made in these
areas would be eroded by the underlying capitalist imperative for profit, and
the accompanying pressures of global competition and quarterly impulses of
greed and short-term shock jumps.
Workers would return to being worked—amidst a culture of expectation,
even among their fellows—far in excess of what is reasonable to have a meaningful
non-work life, or even, as Hedges gives us glaring examples, just to sleep
enough.
Drives for quality and continuous
improvement, while worthy goals, would become vehicles for corporate
manipulation of workers who rarely shared in the productivity gains made.
And that’s even when companies and their
employees weren’t being pressured (as in, do if you want to keep holding your
job) “to push merchandise and services onto customers that they didn’t want.”
(137)
One corporate worker, Hedges records, says
that “’positive psychology’ is a euphemism for ‘spin’…They try to spin their
employees so much they can’t tell right from left, and in the process they
forget they do the work of three people, have no health insurance, and
three-quarters of their paycheck goes to rent” (the receivers of which are
often another group of exploiters). (137) [Professor’s Note: And these workers
will be further “spinned” by being turned against government workers who still
have health insurance and other things that corporate workers USED to have.]
Hedges points out that our material
progress and material “wealth” do not serve us all that well, because of what
we have brought along for the ride: “Positive psychology, like celebrity culture,
the relentless drive to consume, and the diversionary appeals of mass
entertainment, feeds off the unhappiness that comes from isolation and the loss
of community. ” (137)
The rapacious corporate capitalism, the
maniacal global competition and greed accompanying it, have, as Robert Lane
tell us via Hedges, resulted in “a postwar (WW2) decline in the United States
in people who report themselves as happy, a rising tide in all advanced societies
of clinical depression and dysphoria (especially among the young), increasing
distrust of each other and of political and other institutions, declining
belief that the lot of the average man is getting better…a tragic erosion of
family solidarity and community integration together with an apparent decline
in warm, intimate relations among friends.” (138) All of which serves the corporate power
structure and its perpetuation.
And which brings us to Hedges’ closing
thoughts on this chapter: “The nagging undercurrents of alienation and the
constant pressure to exhibit a false enthusiasm and buoyancy destroy real
relationships. The loneliness of a work
life where self-preservation is valued over authenticity and one must always be
upbeat and positive, no matter what one’s actual mood or situation, is
disorienting and stressful. The awful feeling that being positive may not, in
fact, work if one is laid off or becomes sick must be buried and
suppressed. Here, in the land of happy
thoughts, there are no gross injustices, no abuses of authority, no economic
and political systems to challenge, and no reason to complain. Here, we are all happy.” (139)
Do we need a better indication of how
insidiously strong untraceable and unaccountable corporate money is when such
shadowy, accusatory (with twisted information or outright deliberate
misimpressions) ads come on right before a President’s State of the Union
address, as they just did last month?
But we’ve been conditioned not to blink
at that. Oh, legions of emus and
ostriches, please don’t stick your heads back in the ground, even if you are
looking for some nourishment!
And yes, Madame, I have WAY blown my
self-restraint on paragraphs, but your wish for this chapter to close is hereby
granted! LOL, LOL, LOL!
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