Survival__ Structuring Prosperity for Yourself and the Nation - Charles George Smith [7]
As a free-lance writer in the mainstream media, I witnessed how such mechanisms work in the real world. Media organizations depend on large advertisers for their income, and even though "editorial" (news and commentary) is separated from "advertising/marketing," everyone is aware that negative reporting could influence income and thus eventually detract from each individual's ability to pay their child's tuition, make the car payment, etc.
Thus stories which reflect poorly on major advertisers like realtors and builders are not killed outright--they are merely strangled by demands for more evidence, more documentation, etc., or watered down in the name of "fairness" and placed in little-seen areas of the media outlet's offerings.
In some cases, otherwise independent-minded people have never encountered a serious critique of the status quo's conceptual foundation and thus they believe that understanding of the world is "obvious." Without a skeptical accounting of cui bono (to whose benefit?) then what is "obvious" will naturally tend to defend and support a status quo which has labored to construct and defend an "obviousness" which protects its own wealth, ownership and influence.
As its own interests diverge from those of the society at large, the Plutocracy has an irresistible incentive to foster the illusion that policies which benefit the Elites also benefit the middle class. Thus while the Plutocracy and its mass media minions trumpet the benefits of the free market, these same Elites work with unremitting zeal to exempt themselves and their State factotums from these very same free market forces.
Lastly, the status quo understanding of the world is that any problem is inherently "fixable" with minor policy adjustments. Thus even as the global financial pyramid of highly leveraged bets and debts unravels, the status quo response is bureaucratic shuffling of oversight duties, minor tweaking of regulatory rules trumpeted as "major fixes" and behind the scenes, trillion-dollar bailouts of the Plutocracy funded by the non-Elite taxpayers.
When the non-Elite citizen comes to understand this, a new mechanism takes hold that I call when belief in the system fades.
This is how empires fall: complacency joins hands with self-aggrandizement.
There are four other subtle processes at work in the dissolution/erosion of the system's intellectual foundation:
1. As we shall see in the following chapters, Elites and underclass alike respond to the visible crumbling of the empire with a sublime complacency grounded in vague appeals to some mythical past spirit which will magically arise to enthuse a torpid, self-absorbed Elite and populace. In the U.S., appeals are made to "the can-do spirit" which powered America's past confidence and resolve.
Unfortunately for both the Elite and the underclass (both of whom depend on State largesse and a vibrant middle class paying high taxes), rousing but ultimately empty incantations are no substitute for difficult choices, tradeoffs and sacrifices.
2. Even as interconnected crises afflict the empire, the Elite moves deeper into an increasingly visible self-aggrandizement marked by pervasive over-reaching. Having mastered its influence over the State, the Plutocracy finds few limits or obstacles to its over-reach.
This over-reach has the characteristics of a positive feedback loop: the more wealth the Elite controls, the greater its influence, which then enables even more wealth acquisition and ever greater influence, and so on.
3. As a result, the interests of the Plutocracy and thus the State diverge from the common interests of the citizenry as a whole. This widening structural imbalance of power creates cynicism and a profound political disunity that cripples any attempt at structural solutions.
Given that any real solution would reduce the Plutocracy and State's