Notes on Chomsky's Hegemony or Survival

We connect with words so rarely that when it happens, it sends our perceptions careening out of control. Such was my experience today while reading, during a wait for a doctor's appointment.

What remains of democracy is largely the right to choose among commodities. Business leaders have long explained the need to impose on the population a "philosophy of futility" and "lack of purpose in life," to "concentrate human attention on the more superficial things that comprise much of fashionable consumption." Deluged by such propaganda from infancy, people may then accept their meaningless and subordinate lives and forget ridiculous ideas about managing their own affairs. They may abandon their fate to corporate managers and the PR industry and, in the political realm, to the self-described "intelligent minorities" who serve and administer power (Chomsky, 2003, p. 139).

The preceeding paragraph describes the pervasive sense, in which the agency that so many of us hold as sacrosanct only exists in the commercial realm; beyond that, we exist as automata. It is the nightmare realized to awaken in Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, wherein the most sober among us are relegated to the role of the savage. Pop culture is relentless in its banal march, through which social illusionists redirect our attention away from the men behind the curtain. Through attrition, our surrender is a given; it doesn't matter how hard we try to filter out the distractions: sooner or later we will succumb, until the wildness has been wrung from our minds. As automata, we awaken drugged and conditioned, quelling the savage again and again, until we indifferently brush past our own dangling corpse of agency.

Rock and Roll is replete with legends of rockers who "sold their souls" to the devil for success. Indeed, struggling musicians often refer to established acts that become wealthy and famous after years of struggle as having "sold out." And so they have; for even as their struggle brought them face to face with a reality that connected deeply with their fans, the success they worked so hard to achieve took them out of the smoke-filled dives and run-down, cockroach-infested flophouses--which inspired the words and music that their audience related to in the first place. How can the millionaire who jet-sets around the world and employs trendy clothing designers relate to their fans--who knew them as poor people, like themselves--through the tinted, bulletproof windows of limousines and the army of security that "protects" them from "the crazies"?

And yet, this very kind of isolation from everyday people, whether they patronize a merchant's store or buy a musician's records, is the very measure of success in a capitalist society. For the rest of us (the patrons), there is a sense of both failure and futility. We drag ourselves to work, make posts related to generally unimportant news and events on Facebook or MySpace, and sound off in the comments segment of online "news" stories.

I am troubled by the notion that dissent for many is a limited resource. At what point does the savage surrender for good to the flickering images, awarding his body and what is left of his mind to the corporate managers, business leaders, propagandists and administrators?