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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsThis is a hell of a paragraph
Right wing America - voting against their own best interests from time
snowybirdie
(5,225 posts)someone generalizes about 350 million people! Pure B.S.
EYESORE 9001
(25,932 posts)and it rings true as a bell.
Roy Rolling
(6,915 posts)Regardless of the numbers, nobody believes 100% of Americans believe all of every word as it is stated. But some elements are 100%we all are subject to the same tax laws, we all have the same healthcare choices, on down the line.
Society is all people. And none of them at the same time. Regardless, many of us follow laws in America. What equal choice is there? Crime?
So referring to all Americans is understandable, whereas referring to all-Americans is not. Its about context.
rainin
(3,011 posts)consider myself one of the "indoctrinated". It says what I want to say, only more eloquently than I could have phrased it.
paleotn
(17,912 posts)Seems it must apply to a large part of that 350M.
Anecdotal, but in my many years I've found most Americans to be grossly ignorant of anything that actually matters in the grand scheme. They can go on and on about the NFL or some prime time talent show, but anything that will impact generations of Americans? Not so much. They know little of the rest of the world and are proud of their ignorance. They hold on to American mythology like it's holy writ, not giving it an ounce of critical thought. And though granted freedom of thought and expression, they're grossly incurious and would rather follow along with with what their told...because....you know...Amurka #1! Amurka #1!
That's not a criticism of our democratic experiment. In my mind, most Americans miss out on what an incredible wonder America really is when stripped of all the cultural BS. We aspire to the absolute pinnacle of Enlightenment thought, we fail more often than not, but still struggle to live up to our ethos all these years later. It's those unvarnished failures and the fact that they didn't end our experiment that really defines us.
Texin
(2,596 posts)We've been told how wonderful governmental penury is since the '80s. The social safety net programs have slowly been hollowed out, along with governmental watchdog agencies that were implemented to prevent or mitigate the dangers of air and water pollution, regulate emissions, protect the public health in respect to the food supply, etc., etc., all the while being told how wonderful this hollowing out of beneficial programs is while the middle class has been whittled down with fewer actual benefits and bearing higher and higher taxes. All in the glorious name of capitalism.
Escurumbele
(3,389 posts)of the citizens are, that is when Roger Aisle got to Nixon and disinformation, manipulation became stronger, we are now at the peak (at least I hope it is the peak, that it cannot get worst) due to the more transparent republican party.
wnylib
(21,438 posts)I was a child in the Eisenhower years, but I remember the indoctrination of those times. The fear of commies, the bomb shelters, the mythic, heroic westerns that taught rugged individualism. The absence of people of color in books, TV, and films. Women expected to be perfect housewives and mothers. Sitcoms that depicted unrealistic white middle class families. I even have a very vague memory of McCarthyism, although it was years before I knew what it was about.
I was 11 when JFK was elected and had just turned 14 when he died. By the time I was 18, Nixon was back, reviving the "old days."
snowybirdie
(5,225 posts)"Who's we, do you have a mouse in your pocket?"
paleotn
(17,912 posts)snowybirdie
(5,225 posts)"There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics."
Escurumbele
(3,389 posts)I know a lot of people from other countries, I have done work for many of them, and one of the common themes during lunch/dinner was exactly what the essay exposes. I hate to say but it is not news to me, that is exactly the opinion of people around the World.
Not sure who wrote the post above, but he/she pointed out the fact that many are proud of their ignorance. I remember when many comedians used to repeat the joke of not learning another language, like who cares to learn another language, THEY need to learn English...the arrogance of that joke, which I never found funny but drew laughter and applauses, that is being proud of your ignorance.
paleotn
(17,912 posts)And why so triggered? Inquiring minds are curious.
yonder
(9,664 posts)monkeyman1
(5,109 posts)uponit7771
(90,335 posts)... general population
intheflow
(28,463 posts)because obviously there is no monolithic white culture, and all lives matter.
Rabrrrrrr
(58,349 posts)And he's spot on, even though many of us are not like that at all and see the issues that plague us.
But "We the people" have a very large void that we have decided (as a people) is okay.
Escurumbele
(3,389 posts)That is the perfect description of most of the citizens of the USA, and the reason why republicans win elections. All they have to do is to place the "socialist" cloud over their opponents and the gullible ignorant USA citizens won't even try to confirm whether it is true or not, they just believe it and run away from the person who actually wants to make their lives better.
Bernie Sanders wants "Universal Healthcare", "Free Education", "Better Wages" but label it "socialism" and the majority run away from it...Lets face it, how much brain does a person need to understand that Sander's proposals are good for everyone? But there you have it, and that is why the short essay is 100% right.
I remember when Barbara Walters went around USA universities interviewing students and asking questions. One of the most notorious questions was "What is Capital of the USA?", the answer "New York" won...
The minority who understands USA history, the history of other countries, knows what "socialism", "communism" are, those are not listened to because they are "elite"...
Sorry if you don't like the person's description of our citizens, but he/she hit the nail on the head.
reACTIONary
(5,770 posts)Celerity
(43,333 posts)social democracy (great) versus democratic socialism (fail). As many surely must know by know, that conflation is a huge pet peeve of mine, especially in regards to Bernie et al. falsely (and disastrously in uber-reactionary America) self-labelling as democratic socialists when they are simply bog standard social democrats.
TheBlackAdder
(28,189 posts)Jim__
(14,075 posts)The full article - Three Cheeers for Socialism.
A little bit longer excerpt than what's in the OP:
Persons of a reflective bent all too often underestimate the enormous strength that truly abysmal ignorance can bring. Knowledge is power, of course, butmeasured by a purely Darwinian calculustoo much knowledge can be a dangerous weakness. At the level of the social phenotype (so to speak), the qualities often most conducive to survival are prejudice, simplemindedness, blind loyalty, and a militant want of curiosity. These are the virtues that fortify us against doubt or fatal hesitation in moments of crisis. Subtlety and imagination, by contrast, often enfeeble the will; ambiguities dull the instincts. So while it is true that American political thought in the main encompasses a ludicrously minuscule range of live options and consists principally in slogans rather than ideas, this is not necessarily a defect. In a nations struggle to endure and thrive, unthinking obduracy can be a precious advantage.
Even so, I think we occasionally take it all a little too far.
Not long ago, in an op-ed column for the New York Times, I observed that it is foolish to equate (as certain American political commentators frequently do) the sort of democratic socialism currently becoming fashionable in some quarters of this country with the totalitarian state ideologies of the twentieth century, whose chief accomplishments were ruined societies and mountains of corpses. For one thing, socialism is far from a univocal term, and much further from a uniform philosophy. I, for instance, have a deep affection for the tradition of British Christian socialism, which was shaped by such figures as F. D. Maurice (18051872), John Ruskin (18191900), Charles Kingsley (18191875), Thomas Hughes (18221896), F. J. Furnivall (18251910), William Morris (18341896), and R. H. Tawney (18801962), though I have also been influenced by such non-British social thinkers as Sergei Bulgakov (18711944), Dorothy Day (18971980), and E. F. Schumacher (19111977). None of these espoused any kind of statist, technocratic, secular, authoritarian version of socialist economics, and none of them was what we today think of as liberal. And yet their socialist leanings were unmistakable.
...
Americans are, of course, the most thoroughly and passively indoctrinated people on earth. They know next to nothing as a rule about their own history, or the histories of other nations, or the histories of the various social movements that have risen and fallen in the past, and they certainly know little or nothing of the complexities and contradictions comprised within words like socialism and capitalism. Chiefly, what they have been trained not to know or even suspect is that, in many ways, they enjoy far fewer freedoms, and suffer under a more intrusive centralized state, than do the citizens of countries with more vigorous social-democratic institutions. This is at once the most comic and most tragic aspect of the excitable alarm that talk of social democracy or democratic socialism can elicit on these shores. An enormous number of Americans have been persuaded to believe that they are freer in the abstract than, say, Germans or Danes precisely because they possess far fewer freedoms in the concrete. They are far more vulnerable to medical and financial crisis, far more likely to receive inadequate health coverage, far more prone to irreparable insolvency, far more unprotected against predatory creditors, far more subject to income inequality, and so forth, while effectively paying more in tax (when one figures in federal, state, local, and sales taxes, and then compounds those by all the expenditures that in this country, as almost nowhere else, their taxes do not cover). One might think that a people who once rebelled against the mightiest empire on earth on the principle of no taxation without representation would not meekly accept taxation without adequate government services. But we accept what we have become used to, I suppose. Even so, one has to ask, what state apparatus in the free world could be more powerful and tyrannical than the one that taxes its citizens while providing no substantial civic benefits in return, solely in order to enrich a piratically overinflated military-industrial complex and to ease the tax burdens of the immensely wealthy?
more ...
Budi
(15,325 posts)Commonweal Magazine
@commonwealmag
A review of religion, politics, and culture since 1924, edited by lay Catholics
fishwax
(29,149 posts)Budi
(15,325 posts)That's all.
Jim__
(14,075 posts)Budi
(15,325 posts)Christianity & Socialism are fine in their own realm, UNTIL they profess that to be a form of Govt.
Tax the Churches
muriel_volestrangler
(101,311 posts)The closest mention of religion to the paragraph in the original is:
So, no, it doesn't belong in religion. It's more about how to provide healthcare than anything else; but in general terms, an argument for government spending for the welfare of the country. In the last third, it makes the argument that this would be far more compatible with the general message of the Christian gospels than typical American religion.
You may disagree with the author that socialism is fine (socialism, of course, always aims to be a form of government - that's the point), but that doesn't mean it belongs elsewhere. It is in its own realm here.
Budi
(15,325 posts)This one that the tiny link takes you to.
https://www.commonwealmagazine.org/three-cheers-socialism
Three Cheers for Socialism
Christian Love & Political Practice
By David Bentley Hart
February 24, 2020
Commonwheel is a Catholic based website.
It belongs in the Religion Group
Religion or Socialism are fine, until they promote it as a form of Government.
Then it becomes the very thing Democracy fights against globally.
TAX the Churches
muriel_volestrangler
(101,311 posts)We're allowed to quote Christians here. Joe Biden, to take an example. The OP is not a religious argument in any form at all. Your attempt to class socialism as anti-democratic is ignorant, too, but that at least is an argument that belongs in GD.
It'd be far more important for the USA to provide single-payer healthcare than to tax churches. Your posts in this thread are the ones most about religion.
ChubbyStar
(3,191 posts)Glad you kicked the thread for exposure!
Budi
(15,325 posts)Glad to 'kick' the thread.
Happy to offer another viewpoint of indoctrination thru Religion in Politics, that any reader can now consider.
Thanks for the space to do so.
~
Jim__
(14,075 posts)From the About this forum of General Discussion:
And, from the more information section:
Religion
- Threads about current events related to religion, and threads about church-state issues are permitted under normal circumstances.
- Threads about the existence/non-existence of God, threads discussing the merits (or lack thereof) of religion in general, and threads discussing the truth/untruth of religious dogma are not permitted under normal circumstances and should be posted under Religion.
- Open discussion of religion is permitted during very high-profile news events which are heavily covered across all newsmedia.
The people in charge of DU make and enforce the rules. I'll follow those rules.
Budi
(15,325 posts)I'll stick to that.
Same as Jewish, to Catholic to Astrology, or any other spiritual based Source.
Jim__
(14,075 posts)ChubbyStar
(3,191 posts)deurbano
(2,895 posts)lapucelle
(18,252 posts)In this provocative book one of the most brilliant scholars of religion today dismantles distorted religious histories offered up by Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins, and other contemporary critics of religion and advocates of atheism. David Bentley Hart provides a bold correction of the New Atheistss misrepresentations of the Christian past, countering their polemics with a brilliant account of Christianity and its message of human charity as the most revolutionary movement in all of Western history.
Hart outlines how Christianity transformed the ancient world in ways we may have forgotten: bringing liberation from fatalism, conferring great dignity on human beings, subverting the cruelest aspects of pagan society, and elevating charity above all virtues. He then argues that what we term the Age of Reason was in fact the beginning of the eclipse of reasons authority as a cultural value. Hart closes the book in the present, delineating the ominous consequences of the decline of Christendom in a culture that is built upon its moral and spiritual values.
https://www.amazon.com/Atheist-Delusions-Christian-Revolution-Fashionable/dp/0300164297/ref=sr_1_1?dchild=1&keywords=Atheist+Delusions%3A+The+Christian+Revolution+and+Its+Fashionable+Enemies&qid=1627080386&sr=8-1
Budi
(15,325 posts)Here's another version:
"The odd trait, uniting the souls in Dantes hell is their refusal to accept that they deserve to be there."
NJCher
(35,661 posts)in the OP?
patphil
(6,172 posts)Budi
(15,325 posts)Christian Love & Political Practice
By David Bentley Hart
February 24, 2020
It certainly belongs in the Religion or SOCIALIST Group.
VOMIT..
lapucelle
(18,252 posts)https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atheist_Delusions
I'll never understand how people here pay so much in taxes but don't care that they don't get at least healthcare in return.
smirkymonkey
(63,221 posts)"FREEDUMB!!"
certainot
(9,090 posts)dominate 40+ states with repeated unchallenged lying to create made-to-order pro-corporate constituencies and push the country 15 points right.
as the point man for that big lie machine limbaugh killed more people than hitler and stalin combined - with global warming, the iraq war, lack of health care, poverty, COVID, and, ironically, lung cancer
Elessar Zappa
(13,975 posts)FrankTC
(210 posts)Clear, succinct, on point. I too have come to believe that Americans are the most indoctrinated people on the planet, or nearly, at least among first-world nations. Not that other countries are perfect. But come on -- the world's worst ratio of life span to health care expense. The world's most expensive crappy internet. The highest rate of gun violence and mass shootings. The greatest inequality. The least social mobility. The lowest rate of small business formation. The shortest vacations and nearly the highest yearly hours worked. The only country with declining lifespan for several years running. But a robust belief that American exceptionalism means deviation from the mean in a positive direction. It's enough to make you want to make America great again.
Sympthsical
(9,073 posts)No serious person can open the paragraph with such obvious silliness.
Most indoctrinated people on earth? China says hey. As do most military dictatorships. Much of the Muslim world. Places like Cuba and Venezuela. Russia is in the running.
A lot of the content of the paragraph is really good. But the opening is so much Amero-centric navel gazing.
It's like when people say, "America is the most racist country on the earth!" I immediately know that person has never left this country and spends too much time on social media.
We have a lot of deep, fundamental, life-destroying flaws that should've been fixed a century ago. So much work to be done.
But that hyperbole makes it hard to take the writer seriously, even though so many of the points are true and solid. My eyes hurt from the hard roll they did in those first few sentences.
Budi
(15,325 posts)Speaking of 'indoctrination'...umm, isn't this OP gif, lifted & circulated from a religion based Catholic site is as indoctinating as it gets, then also?
🙄
Thanks for your post, Sympthsical
Bev54
(10,051 posts)you are the land of the free, that is something us in other countries have never really understood. In the name of that "Freedom" Americans can not get ahead because it is a mind set that anything different would take that away. It is time for everyone to stop and think rationally, and get rid of the attitude that "we are the best" at everything. The opportunity to be a Great Nation is there but the definitions of the labels gets in the way. It is baffling to me why you do not want better. By the way I have travelled the world and yes there is racism is everywhere but the fact that you throw out what aboutism to justify is a big part of the problem. Citizens of other countries are striving to have better lives and cannot because of the governments; in America it is the people who choose the government. Want to be better then first stop being so self righteous.
Sympthsical
(9,073 posts)We're not nearly as free as we think we are, because our actual reality closes off many choices to us by virtue of our capitalist system.
But most indoctrinated on earth. Just, eesh. Who believes that?
Tommymac
(7,263 posts)Then try and make that claim about the opening paragraph. The Truth will set you free.
We've hosted 5, and we astonishingly learned that the US is WAYYYYYYYY behind other Western Democracies in Freedom, Choice, Quality of Life, Worker's Rights, and respect for simple Human Dignities.
There are many reasons Black Lives Matter, the Woman's Liberation Movement, The Rainbow coalition and other groups fighting for Human Rights started and are thriving in our 21st Century "American Paradise".
Unregulated Capitalism actually works very well in a Totalitarian Political environment, much better then in a real Democracy/Republic where the victims have a voice and can help regulate it...see 21st Century China.
Sympthsical
(9,073 posts)I'm familiar with the place. And I doubt people representing their country are coming in and telling you all about the underside of it all - and Europe does have its underside.
But yours is a bit of a non-sequitur. Didn't address what I actually said.
I didn't say America isn't a mess. But "Worst. Country. Ever." nonsense in the opening?
Pfft.
Tommymac
(7,263 posts)And I will say my experiences there back up what I wrote.
Western Democracies in the EU far and away treat their common people with more respect and give them more Human Rights (for example Health Care is a right not a privilege).
The USA in not special, or above any other country in the World. We pat ourselves on the back and shout USA USA USA, but we are no where near the best in most categories that matter.
Nationalism and blind patriotism are alive and well in the good old USA.
We've hosted 4 -- 3 from Japan, 1 from Lithuania and and you're right. I gathered from their reactions, questions and comparisons, that our most noticed freedom was the sheer scale of our consumer brand choices in "super" markets, etc., which is a false freedom, anyway, being tied to our labor value and full time cycle of work, borrow, spend, consume.
frogmarch
(12,153 posts)Budi
(15,325 posts)😬
IronLionZion
(45,433 posts)and even though racists keep telling me to leave, I stay.
I have some hope that electoral politics will shift left as conservatives literally own themselves in this pandemic while trying to own the libs.
Budi
(15,325 posts)2016 was truly the final turning point that failed Democracy as we could have built upon & strengthened.
Pitiful that those howling loudest now, also 'assisted in burning it all down'.
They didn't really want to build the Left leaning Democracy, they chose to hand it over to the main arson instead.
They aren't LEFT, they're the closing ends of the horseshoe.
Know who brought them to this dance of 'burn it all down' & ask why they wanted that in the 1st place.
They were never after Democracy.
DanieRains
(4,619 posts)It's what I get for my money.
Johnny2X2X
(19,060 posts)And I'll generalize like the author too, but the vast majority of the people in this country have no idea what freedom really means. They think freedom is guns, they think freedom from being shot is tyranny. They think freedom is an incredibly powerful and overbearing law enforcement and criminal justice system that tramples on the rights of citizens with impunity.
I tell the story often of being at college in the 1990s and making friends with several German foreign exchange students. They were absolutely stunned at how much power we gave to law enforcement in the US. They couldn't fathom that the police would knock on your door and then enter your home when you opened it, or could demand you answer their questions. They couldn't believe they were allowed to ask for your identification without any reason. They were shocked that people could get their person or cars searched without a court order. And at the time they were shocked at how severe the US looked at weed crimes. In lengthy discussions about this, I decided that Germans were much more free than Americans, in almost every way that really matters.
In Germany, not exactly a country people associate with freedom, you have more rights. And the laws are stronger to protect those rights. And they look at freedom a little differently in some cases. There, drunk driving is looked at much more harshly than it is in the US, so very few people drive drunk, and this in their eyes expands the freedom of the many to be safe from drunk drivers.
In the US, when people talk about freedom, they usually are talking about corporate freedom, or the freedom to put others in danger. We've lost touch with the meaning of the word.
smirkymonkey
(63,221 posts)zentrum
(9,865 posts)......things we are not educated about, in general, among all the other categories, is the history of labour.
Budi
(15,325 posts)OP is from:
Three Cheers for Socialism
Christian Love & Political Practice
By David Bentley Hart
February 24, 2020
bucolic_frolic
(43,146 posts)The best secrets are hidden in plain sight
FakeNoose
(32,634 posts)Just because these statements are true about SOME Americans, doesn't mean that it's true about all of us, or even most of us. The person who wrote this was probably trying to prove some obscure political point.
Lonestarblue
(9,981 posts)but a fair share of our citizens are. Far too many people lack critical thinking skills, have no interest in learning our history, cant tell you how political policies affect them or the country, have no understanding of basic economics, cant do a cause-effect analysis of results of laws passed by elected representatives or their refusal to pass laws such as those addressing climate warming, still believe that the US is an exceptional country (it isnt), and believe that unregulated capitalism will make everyone rich. Yet many of these same people can tell you everything people like the Kardashians or their favorite sports teams have been doing or every song released by their favorite artistand on and on.
We dont even have a means of having important discussions about the future of democracy and what democracy for this country because our political discourse is so filled with disinformation and outright lies. The media doesnt tackle important issues because theyre hungry for profits and dont want to rock any boats. Then theres the other media that just wants to sow discord and promote their conspiracy, white supremacy views. I actually see no way out of this situation unless by some miracle people start rejecting propaganda and start thinking for the country instead of only for what benefits them.
seta1950
(932 posts)A country where the minority sets the rules, think about it.
bringthePaine
(1,728 posts)malaise
(268,967 posts)Rec
NullTuples
(6,017 posts)I'd say pre-WWII based on that mention of the Germans and Danes...yet "military industrial" seems to reflect Ike's infamous lines. Interesting mention of socialism & capitalism but not communism, almost like it's modern but written by someone who is extremely familiar with earlier writings on the topic?
WHO IS IT???
Budi
(15,325 posts)Christian Love & Political Practice
By David Bentley Hart
February 24, 2020
Hey America, don't ya just want some more of that good ol' Christian Socialist Love!!!
Where we must all believe the saaame!
Like other indoctrinated Christian socialist nations.
Yeehaaaaw!!
Nope, I'll stick with saving our Democracy.
Thanks to those who voted YES on the Magnitsky Act.
Thanks Presodent Biden for enacting it for the citizens of, & against the corrupted govts of Venezuela & Cuba.
We see who that NO vote was aligning with.
Blue Owl
(50,355 posts)Ain't that the truth!
Joinfortmill
(14,417 posts)leftstreet
(36,107 posts)Thanks for posting this
Response to Soph0571 (Original post)
Chin music This message was self-deleted by its author.
cachukis
(2,238 posts)calimary
(81,225 posts)Spells it all out.
ecstatic
(32,699 posts)Hortensis
(58,785 posts)he could just as truthfully said that a small fraction of the truth can be a great lie; the more eager a person is to believe, the less basis in reality needed.
trof
(54,256 posts)link?
lunatica
(53,410 posts)I start to become convinced that were all buying into some truly bizarre beliefs about the things we do. During those times of thoughtfulness I feel very strange doing the things we all have accepted as normal. Like jobs and working. Who made up those rules? Really! Who said we have to spend most of our days working in a hierarchical environment just to survive within our society? Its a mass illusion. A pretend game that somehow this is normal and necessary.
Weird! What are we doing that makes us think were better than others or superior? I dont see it.
burrowowl
(17,639 posts)brewens
(13,582 posts)dollars. They don't pay out near as much as they rake in. It's like the ruling class taxing the peasants, we just run it through Congress first.
betsuni
(25,475 posts)NurseJackie
(42,862 posts)(Who wrote this? William Pitt?)