Do you realize families, friends, strangers all unwitting conspire to use and abuse you?
- Your immediate environment — Our behavior towards family, friends, colleagues and those within our immediate environment is based on what’s ‘good’ or ‘acceptable’ due to social conditioning that we’ve come to accept unthinkingly.
- Religious institutions, governments and corporations — The virtues of a ‘good’ citizen via programmed values and morals that you believe you adopted of your own free choices are in fact carefully constructed to limit what you see or indeed can choose.
Consequently, we are all modern-day slaves to such social conditioning. We are led to believe we live in free societies with free choices. Each moral-rule we adopt about how everyone should live their lives, is consequence-free. Our governments, institutions and society somehow buffer us from mistakes from such collective choices.
For example, if some white Christians, in Birmingham, Alabama act to exclude say, some Muslim immigrants from moving into their neighborhood, each of them might say they are acting morally and in-accordance with their faith even if their collective action is unfair.
In the absence of universal test for fairness across all countries, religions and time, we are going to held-back by local interests, that offer benefits to certain groups of people, at the same time causing inequity to others
Most of our core-beliefs and conditioning comes from early childhood from care-givers: parents, family, teachers, friends, neighbors and other social tribes we are part of. In order to be loved and taken-care of, we instinctually adopt same or similar values to feel secure and protected. These stereotypes, have served our primitive ancestors well, but such rigid definitions definitely need to be modernized to serve us into the future.
Rules about ‘what we eat, when,’ ‘who we have sex with’ and ‘who is in-group’ were created at a time and place many centuries ago when religion was taking the role of science and making bad assumptions about hygiene, safety and how best to sever collective interests. By creating myths and telling exaggerated stories the elders at that time, hoped these lessons would be followed unthinkingly for greatest common good. This conditioning has worked so well, that there are many who take these stories to be literally true.
Their objectives were noble, to prevent harm
Their lessons were based on observations, contemplation by the best minds of their time and anecdotal evidence perhaps, from travelers. The primary objective was to reinforce in-group bonds and create a sense of belonging. They did this with rites, rituals, ceremonies, scriptures and coda to provide a moral framework for justice, security and civic harmony. The framework of sins, commandments or equivalent were developed keep everyone in check for societies mutual benefit.
But, over time these techniques were corrupted by strong and powerful to achieve less noble even questionable objectives. The aristocracy, industrialists, corporations, media, the government and religious organizations each for their own benefit, injected tweaks and interpretations and corrupted by poor implementation of rules. These changes over time, were both deliberate and implicit, served some well and harmed others.
I didn’t know I had a choice
To review each of your core-beliefs, ask:
- Where did that come from?
- What do I think about that now?
- Is that true for all or just for me?
The engine of greed and growth, once switched on became all powerful and consuming demanding to be fed more and more in unsustainable ways. This resulted in excess, waste, artificial structures and barriers conspiring to keep sections of population trapped in poverty and others perpetually well-off.
By observing who and how modern-day propaganda is spread, you can begin to see beacons the media and government that flog party-lines. The repeaters, that spread these messages in their circles of their influence via friends, family, work, play and social media.
Using fear, threats to create sense of urgency and insecurity and demonizing any out-group opinion, the majority gain consensus and achieve their ends. We’ve seen this in action in referendum, elections and to effect policy changes. We see this in advertising, corporate concessions, special interest group petitions or lobbying and to fund religious institutions.
Is it fair?
The walls that we put up and rents that we seek to protect, is invertible when majority, rich, strong and powerful in societies create artificial scarcity of assets and resources in-order to generate ‘action-potential.’ To convert effort (labor) into wealth, the current model requires exploiting young and weak, second-class citizens and migrants and refugees, third-class.
This is not fair, but how societies have evolved to operate
By limiting access to money, societies artificially create inequity allowing the transfer of effort for money. As the rate of conversion of effort to money is variable and asymmetric, for every transaction, there is always one party that ends up with a better deal. Even if both parties think the transaction is fair or privately think that they won the better deal, more often than not, the person forced to make or accept the transaction ends worse-off.
A bit of daily introspection on your individual actions and their consequences of others, would go great way to help solving the current unequal availability of choices to all of us.
