The use of power or threats of power to force,
control, or coerce submission are the way the state, military, corporations,
institutions, and capitalism function. You don’t have to look any further than Donald
Trump. Trump’s pugnacious threats toward women, gays, the disabled, people of
color, Muslims, and countries like China and Mexico are illustrations of this archetypal
behavior. It epitomizes the bully and demagogue.
Trump should not be the most likely
presidential candidate, yet he has the number of delegates necessary for
nomination.
Why? Significant to life in the United
States, despite all the rhetoric of how we despise the school and street bully,
is the power of the bully.
The state attains its power to bully by
way of our compliance with the Social Contract, an unwritten agreement we have
with government in which we honor the legitimacy of the authority of the state.
Further, the government’s “power of the purse” incentivizes compliance. Whether
right or wrong, good or bad, moral or immoral, we obey.
Americans admire their military forces,
even though it employs its authority and threats of power to control—essentially
bully—its members.
Corporate media is a “bully pulpit," in
subtle ways. These corporations control what we see and hear compliant with
their ideology (political/social).
Businesses, corporations, and institutions
use their hierarchical authority to control those subservient to them. In effect,
it’s a system of bullying.
Capitalism is our economic system. Under capitalism,
people must sell their ability to work in return for a wage or salary. In
capitalism, the motive for producing goods and services is to sell them for a
profit, not to satisfy people's needs.
Moreover, capitalists’ decisions to
produce certain products are not based on what consumers can pay to meet their
needs but by what the capitalists calculate can be sold at a profit. Sometimes,
without consumers realizing it, capitalist create a need. The goods may, or may
not, benefit human needs, but in any case, any benefit will not be realized if
people do not have the money to pay for them.
All of that is significant because if we
don’t comply with the political and economic powers that manipulate and control
us, we lose. That’s what we need to change.
Copyright © Horatio Green 2016
How
Unchecked Capitalism and Massive Inequality Made America the Bully Nation
A guide to the systemic origins of America's bully culture.
A guide to the systemic origins of America's bully culture.
