A Critical Pedagogical Analysis of Hegemonic Culture

Although literacy is often thought of as the ability to read, comprehend, and write, ninetytwo million Americans are functionally illiterate and struggle to complete basic tasks like filling out job applications (1). Even those who are literate rarely make use their abilities with enthusiasm, as shown by a survey that reveals nearly half of college graduates never read another complete book in their post-college lives (2). In contemporary American culture, with its emphasis on instant gratification, literacy is not a value of mass culture. Our collective intellectual abilities have, in important ways, degenerated substantially since the American

Revolution, when America could lay claim to the highest literacy rate in the world. A linguistic analysis of presidential debates from the 1860s until today reveals that even presidential debates use language at a 7th to 8th grade level. (2) If literacy is understood to transcend reading and writing, and comprise a relationship with one's culture, then it should follow that to be comprehensively literate is to have a healthy and functional relationship with modern culture. Under this definition, literacy encompasses a substantially greater skill set than functional reading and writing. It requires substantial motivation to achieve, because culture is diverse, nuanced, and challenging to understand. Over the past few years, I've invested hundreds of hours in developing a broad and historical view of the most prominent aspects of our culture, and this effort is a core part of my literacy. While there were a confluence of events that lead me to pursue a self-education in comprehensive cultural literacy, stumbling onto little known events of profound geopolitical significance lit the fires of inquiry. The discovery that a hedge fund manager collapsed the value of a sovereign currency in just 24 hours back in 1992, and made so much money that it would take an average family 28,000 years to earn the same income, was a pivotal gem of knowledge (21). Later experiences introduced me to people at the outer circles of the elite. I worked with marketing directors at a company that reports on $500bn assets, had lunch with Obamas Analytics Advisor, and received an offer to contribute to a congressional election campaign for the economist who was the earliest and most vocal in predicting the housing market collapse. With personal relationships, honesty and transparency are crucial for longevity and health, and so it should be with cultural relationships. This begs the question: what is our culture? To narrow the scope and provide value, it is necessary to focus on the dominant culture: the culture of power. While there exist innumerable subcultures in America, they stand

in relation to the culture of power as celebrity athletes do to the owner of their team. While the owner did not invent the sport and is largely hidden from the public view, the athletes are dependent upon her for their incomes and subject to a hierarchy of rules, regulations, and expectations that they rarely can change or object to. With the above considerations, it is imperative to understand the power center, or owner, of contemporary American culture. This center can be understood by applying techniques used in rhetorical analysis. Power culture has a purpose, it communicates with an audience, and it employs strategies to achieve its goals. The central purpose of power culture is to maintain or increase power; if it were otherwise, the culture would evaporate! As Frederick Douglas stated, "power concedes nothing without a demand. It never has been and it never will."(3) In the modern world, social mobility has increased relative to the era of feudalism and money rather than bloodlines are the new asset of power. Like power, if money were given away freely, the culture of money would evaporate. Since money is the new asset of power, it follows that the culture of power seeks to maintain and increase its monetary assets. The mainstream rhetoric of apologists of power culture insists the complementary values of self-interest and competition are responsible for the standard of living increases ostensibly enabled by state capitalism over the past two centuries. This logic, by virtue of its interest in the common welfare, seems to justify extreme concentrations of wealth and power and is often repeated by those who are not, and never will be, members of the plutonomy. The value of cooperation or education for its own sake, especially in American culture, is downplayed and not widely regarded as profitable. This fact must be seen as one of the central tragic oversights of

the wealthiest nation in the world because the evidence shows that Machivellian obsession with competition and self-interest are tremendously detrimental to the majority. The Spirit Level: Why Equality Makes Societies Stronger, explores World Bank, W.H.O., and U.N. data on social health indicators for 21 of the most developed nations in the world (4). By making a detailed examination of metrics that span infant mortality, incarceration, drug abuse, mental illness, life expectancy, obesity, educational attainment and more, and then relating these metrics to income inequality, a striking discovery is produced. In nearly every measure examined the United States ranks last among the other top 20 industrialized nations for measures of social health and is first for income inequality and GDP per capita. For instance, the incarceration rate in the United States is the highest in the world, and greater than in Russian and China combined (5). Infant mortality is 34th in the world, and lags behind the comparatively impoverished nation of Cuba (6). Homicide rates are three times higher than 18 of the 20 other nations in the study (7). Therefore, one must conclude that the philosophy and culture of power, which is enshrined by a neoliberal economic doctrine that governs international trade and global financial institutions is an utter failure at providing for the general wellbeing of humanity. It will be shown that these failings are irrelevant to the dominant culture because they happen to provide exemplary results for the plutocracy.

Just two of the many samples of income inequalitys impact on social health

A careful consideration of American politics, international relations, business, the monetary system, mainstream media, and the military revels that all of these systems of human behavior are predominantly influenced by the culture of power. Domestically, American politics

have been heavily influenced by campaign contributions and the largest corporate campaign contributors regularly donate heavily to both parties (8) as a way of hedging their bets and maximizing political favors. Internationally, Wikileaks has exposed American diplomats acting as lobbyists and salespeople for multinationals like Monsanto and G.E (9). In business, popular periodicals celebrate "capitals clear subjugation of labor"(10). In the monetary system, all money is created as debt with compounding interest paid to private corporations (11); the monetary system itself is a private entity that demands perpetual economic growth and the inherent, systemic instability perpetuated by the necessity of ever increasing loans to stem economic collapse. Media has been tremendously consolidated since the 1950's and the majority of mainstream American media is now owned by just 5 corporations (12) that have close ties to the highest offices of political power and censure or downplay stories that are critical of the narratives that support the dominant culture (13). From a historical perspective, this is only a continuation of the ambitions of Edward Bernays, himself a distinguished member of the hegemony, who bodly declared that it was possible to "regiment the public mind every bit as much an army regiments their bodies." Given the circumstances, it should not be surprising that when a former FCC commissioner found the overwhelming majority of citizens wanted a minimum level of airtime for all presidential candidates, Washington insiders notified him any further action on such popular aspirations would end his career. (22)

A visual guide to media consolidation

The American military uses force to impose gains for investor classes at the expense of the inhabitants of the third world. As Smedly Butler, one of the most decorated generals in American history put it, I spent most of my time as a high class muscle man for Big Business, for Wall Street and the bankers. I helped make Mexico safe for American oil interests. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in. I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefit of Wall Street Looking back on it, I might have given Al Capone a few hints. The best he could do was to operate his racket in three districts. I operated on three continents. (23) Twenty years later, the modus operandi remained the same. The New York Times reported that the C.I.A. handpicked the democratically elected Mossadeghs successor and funded a cover coup because of fear of Irans plans to nationalize its oil industry. The resulting legacy of decades of totalitarian rule and torture of political dissidents, propped up by U.S. foreign aid, bears a direct parallel with the more recent history of Egypts Mubarak. When large scale human atrocities in Cambodia and Darfur fail to result in the consistent application of interventionist foreign policy for the sake of freedom and democracy, it becomes eminently clear that such failures of action are in truth due to the lack of profits to be had from natural resource dominance.

Binding all of these systems together are what Brzezinski, a high-level insider Obama called one of our greatest minds, defined as interlocking (private) directorates that obscure relationships of power (14) and private, invite-only steering committees such as the Council on Foreign Relations, which recently published a document heralding the return to feudalism(15). It is notable that Hillary Clinton is on video record at the Council on Foreign Relations expressing her joy over the new D.C. location because she wont, in her own words, have to go as far to be told what we should be doing and how we should think about the future. (16)

Hillary Clinton addresses the C.F.R.

These revelations are far from red herrings; Citibank published a document on the plutonomy which boldly declared that there are only two classes: the plutonomy and everyone else. They went on to forecast an increase in the wealth of the plutonomy while noting that the top 1% of people own approximately the same wealth as the bottom 90% combined. Members of the plutonomy inhabit in a distinctly different world where wealth is acquired through covert agreement, state intervention (at tax payer expense), and ownership enforced through supposedly legitimate legal processes while the majority labor for subsistence and have their surplus transferred away into the pockets of the elite. While the elite do not all represent a

unified worldview and occasionally have conflicting objectives, the institutions they control broadly work together to enforce the status quo at the expense of lives and liberty around the globe.

While nave optimists may still cling to hope for democratic reforms exercised through the electoral process, they would be wise to heed the words of Bill Clintons mentor, the Georgetown professor who wrote, The argument that the two parties should represent opposed ideals and policies, one, perhaps of the Right and the other of the Left, is a foolish idea. Instead, the two parties should be almost identical, so that the American people can throw the rascals out at any election without leading to any profound or extensive shifts in policy.(17)(18).

By taking a broad view of the culture of geopolitical power and the institutions that serve it, one discovers C Wright Mills analysis of 60 years ago still rings true today. The higher immorality is a systematic, institutionalized feature of the US power elite. The public is the essence of 18th century theory of democracy. This is a fairy tale: it is not even close to how the US system of power works the issues that determine their fate are neither discussed nor determined by the public. The public opinion became the target of intense efforts of control, manipulation, and intimidation. These higher circles are increasingly coordinated.. this is one basis of their unity, and at times--as during the wars--such co-ordination is quite decisive (19)." A psychologist once said that if you ask a fish about their environment, the last thing they'll notice is water. A parallel can be drawn with regard to the human environment of powerful institutions and the cultural realities they impose. As with personal relationships, relationships with culture require transparency for healthy functioning. A clear and sober analysis of the cultural hegemony reveals abuses that are systemically enforced and highly resistant to change; once it is understood that this culture persists in its faults and immorality not due to lack of

solutions or by accident, but rather because the abuses entail clear historic winners and losers and the winners continue to set the agenda, the individual, if not disparaged by the scale of the situation and the dire consequences of the status quo, has an opportunity to begin working for transformative change. With this change emerges the possibility of self-actualization (20): the fullest development of the individual. The cultivation and realization of this opportunity for transformation should be one of literacy's most celebrated outcomes because it offers an opportunity to improve ones lot in life by bridging the divide between intellect and action. Without literacy, one is lost in the storm of mass consumer culture, oblivious to its underlying motives and subject to the intense efforts of "control, manipulation, and intimidation" resulting form the systemic immorality of the elite. In the past, direct violence was used to prevent slaves from reading and writing. Today, means of control in the developed world covert but just as pernicious, while the inhabitants of the third world are crushed by a fate little different from the bondage of past centuries. As Goethe wrote, none are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free. In the final analysis, the gift of literacy is that it holds open the door to liberation in spite of impossible odds.

Bibliography
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