In a BBC interview in 1996, American intellectual Noam Chomsky was asked by presenter Andrew Marr how he could know that his interviewer was censoring himself. He replied: “I’m not saying that you are self-censoring. I am sure you believe everything you are saying. But what I am saying is that if you believed something different you wouldn’t be sitting where you are sitting.”
The voluntary internalisation of hegemonic views and the firm belief in them not only turn people into journalists in liberal media but also promotes them to the elites of society.
In light of the genocide of the Palestinians in Gaza, Germany is an excellent example of how this general social mechanism works and what catastrophic consequences it has. Germany’s “elites” in culture, the media, academia, politics, churches, trade unions, and social organisations would not be where they are if they did not submissively follow those in power.
Their loud and enthusiastic approval of the abominable crimes carried out by the Wilhelmine Empire and the Nazis is matched today by their collaborative silence when Germany denies and finances the genocide perpetrated by the Zionist regime against the Palestinian people
As Paul Fussell noted, middle class identity is validity-of-institution.
The more status the institution has, the more status the middle-class-who-works-there has.
Therefore, it becomes a validity/identity problem, not a political-problem, at root.
So long as middle-class instinct is that institution is the root of validity, THEN institutions use that to their advantage.
So, it’s a feedback-loop: self-reinforcing.
Being “one of the elites” is sooo profound an identity-value, that having objectivity competing against it, including having others’ actual lives being lost, but one’s identity protects the underlying-machine which is doing the destroying, because to attack that, is to attack one’s own more-precious-than-life identity…
objectivity is less-significant than identity…
( that is actually a cultural-choice, but middle-class culture made its choice, & I’ve made mine, so … so long as I keep evolving into becoming more-objective in perspective/view, then I’m OK.
Middle-class … & upper-middle-class … values its superiority over its class-“inferiors” sooo fundamentally, that … nothing will change, in my lifetime. )
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