Sunday, August 20, 2006
Consumerist Confusion
A recently related conversation about shockingly different socioeconomic systems encountered by a friend and her workmate during their respective European vacations, pointed up just how far we have to go in reeducating our fellow citizens here in the US. One was pleasantly surprised to find universal healthcare and first-rate education available as a right of citizenship, the other was appalled at the idea of any form of economic support to the non-traditionally employed.
Key to understanding this dichotomy, I suspect, is that the former does not watch television news programs, while the latter does. Yet, poor public education and commercial media alone cannot account for the degree of hostility felt by the latter toward the public benefits of living in a socialist country. That, I imagine, is more of a cultural legacy of a hyper-consumerist society that rewards wage slavery with useless junk, thereby infusing consumerists with resentment toward unconventional social producers.
At a fundamental level of comprehension, it occurs to me that many Americans conflate socialism with communism, rather than distinguishing between civil and criminal societies. Were they able to make that demarcation, they would be capable of perceiving the criminal commonality of communism and capitalism--where the benefits from public resource use and extraction benefit the few--and thus have a basis of comparison with socialism, where the benefits from public wealth are distributed more equitably.
Key to understanding this dichotomy, I suspect, is that the former does not watch television news programs, while the latter does. Yet, poor public education and commercial media alone cannot account for the degree of hostility felt by the latter toward the public benefits of living in a socialist country. That, I imagine, is more of a cultural legacy of a hyper-consumerist society that rewards wage slavery with useless junk, thereby infusing consumerists with resentment toward unconventional social producers.
At a fundamental level of comprehension, it occurs to me that many Americans conflate socialism with communism, rather than distinguishing between civil and criminal societies. Were they able to make that demarcation, they would be capable of perceiving the criminal commonality of communism and capitalism--where the benefits from public resource use and extraction benefit the few--and thus have a basis of comparison with socialism, where the benefits from public wealth are distributed more equitably.
