Everyone wants a good future for their children, grandchildren and students. Most would say a better future.
A quality education. Good work they are interested in. A peaceful community of well-being. Some kind of dignity in all arenas of life.
The more time passes the clearer the demand becomes on all of us to begin to elucidate what good education, work, peace, dignity and so much else actually mean to us. Without the collective search to deliberate on the institutions which would embody what we extol the virtues of, is it not fair to ask where the substance is in all of the talk of values?
So then what do you hope for your kids and students? And what do you teach them? Actually, what are they teaching you and hoping from you? Are you listening to them? What lasting lessons would you like to remain with them and what have they taught you?
Are those lessons part and parcel of the values we say we hold? Do the goals we might envision for youth align with those values? What about the process of attaining those goals as it relates to those values?
What do youth hold dear? What do we think youth should hold dear? Is it how to get ahead in a dog-eat-dog world? How to earn enough to support a certain lifestyle? How to get the promotion? How to be competitive?
Or was it rather what we try to encourage in their younger years, like how to treat others like you wanted to be treated? How to share what you have. How not to gain at the expense of others.
Maybe it was the value of being reflective instead of uncaring and rash. The value of being introspective rather than thoughtless and one-dimensional. Empathetic rather than insensitive and ruthless. Free-thinking, not conformist. Open-minded. Inquiring and curious, not cursory and indifferent. Intuitive but searching, not passive and apathetic.
Looking for new horizons, not complacent. Aware of and looking to further your own agency and that of others, not resigning or domineering. Able to see real possibilities for progress, and how we have progressed, not cynical. Listen, and listen again. Then listen some more.
But with all that, do we talk with youth about what it means not to be subservient, but possessing independence of thought and will, not blindly accepting doctrine and orthodoxy? How about being able to spot those conventional assumptions in ourselves and around us in our everyday lives? Understand the inevitable servility they invoke. Be aware of that subservience in yourself and others.
Understand the importance of questioning whether you are on the right track. That we all have blind-spots, and no one person, group or ideological framework has all the answers.
But, let’s ask ourselves if we also talk to our youth about the real possibility that this inquiring spirit is of marginal value if it does not connect our individual consciousness and personal challenges with systemic crises and the structures of power that produce them. Society’s institutions at every level from the family to global entities have more than a lot to do with the well-being of ourselves, our neighbors and communities.
Likewise, for all these noble values are worth, they will ultimately be of negligible merit and utility as long as the person in possession does not use their consciousness to contribute to sustained educational initiatives and strategic organizing with others in pursuit of a better world. Otherwise, how are we to encourage the raising of consciousness in others and consequently improve or see the need to even replace current societal institutions? It is hard to imagine advances in human well-being without this initiative, as popular consciousness raising and organizing have laid the basis for any and all human progress over the past two centuries. If we care about the other, then our values cannot be limited to our own consciousness or even personal sphere.
Finally, it would behoove us to illustrate in word and deed that there is no contradiction on the one hand between being independent-minded and challenging doctrine, and on the other being cooperative and encouraging of the agency of others. Quite the contrary. Any modicum of achieving progress, equity and justice requires these values operating in unison in an ever-expanding sphere.
Parents and teachers, are your youth inspired? Are they feeling empowered? Are we allowing – let alone encouraging – them to pursue their own interests, inquire and develop their own ideas? Through dialogue and with empathy are they encouraged to explore and gain deeper insights into themselves and the world both on their own and in sustained cooperation with their peers?
Or rather do they have to pass that next test? Regurgitate what they have been told and had to read, to hell with their own inquiries and interests? Become listless. Follow that convention. Perceive what it is you do not question. Bury your inquiry. Travel that well-worn road. Be oblivious to the tight connections between that well-worn road and the insidiousness of power inherent and manifested in social, political and economic systems we are all subject to?
Are we allowing youth to make up their own minds? Are they encouraged to recognize doctrine and find the links between it and the systemic challenges in front of us today?
Most adults and many adolescents, without degrees, understand very well that the reigning institutions and systems in society prevent these values from being actualized across a broad range, from our individual interactions to a societal scale, and that this is not casual. None of us are excluded from this treacherous filtering system in which you will have come not only not to speak up but not to think certain thoughts. The thoughts you quell, that is, the values you would like for your children or students to exemplify, stand at odds with the roles you must carry out. Furthermore, the system’s perniciousness is at its most pronounced in those who go through the process of attaining doctrinal level or even coordinator level roles.
So are the values we attempt to convey in words to our youth just that – words and rhetoric? Are we lying to youth? What does it mean for those messages and lessons to have real substance? How can we get to a place where our values actually translate into institutions?
In the face of a set of institutions subverting the values that youth are told to uphold at every turn, today’s kids must be encountering, just for starters, a towering level of cognitive dissonance.
Imagine this: You’re somewhere such as Washington DC, New York, London, Paris or Rome. Out of nowhere in the night, bombs, from let’s say a nation such as Russia or China or Venezuela, begin to fall on your city or indeed an “ally’s” city such as Boston, San Francisco, Berlin, Geneva or Milan. Explosions, fire and destruction all around. Death. Panic, terror and chaos. What the hell is going on and why? The presidential palace is invaded, the president and first lady are abducted and sent off to the invaders’ nation faraway land to stand trial – another gross violation of international law – for so-called crimes against the invading country’s laws that the invading country’s government say the abducted president committed while in office.
If 2 + 2 = 4, then in response do governments, the mainstream media as well as intellectual classes of the invading state or its allies, through their television and online outlets, journals, think tanks and universities, express utter outrage at a foreign power’s clear as day, stupendous and murderous violation of international law and national sovereignty? Does the overarching thrust of commentary condemn it as the “supreme” international crime of aggression as established at Nuremberg in that it contains the act itself as well as all of the accumulated evil that follows it? Do they call on the United Nations and other international law organs to condemn the blatantly illegal actions and bring sanctions and other penalties onto the invading state’s government and economy? Do they call for the arrest of the invading state’s political leaders, military officials and soldiers responsible for the planning and execution of this brazenly criminal act?
In the actual case of the US invasion of Venezuela, do those same classes and institutions point out how this criminal act is yet another of countless severe violations by the US to further imperil existing international law and further erode security in an already severely imperiled international nation-state system? Have they pointed out the chronic inability of these international organs to prevent the most serious crimes of aggression and apply justice to the criminal actors in cases in which these actors are the most powerful states?
Perhaps more importantly, have they underlined the fact that these acts, beyond the fact of being legal adominations, and whether international law existed or not, are moral abominations which the public abhors and which a moment’s thought or deliberation with others can tell us?
Still more, have they made evident that these are to a substantial extent not out of the ordinary tendencies but the normal predilection of foreign policy as practiced by the most powerful nation-states through the logic and self-interest of power itself? Have commentators pointed out the logic of the market system itself as well in further entrenching these insidious workings of power?
Have they emphasized that, transcending time and place, the proclivities and actions of power consistently demonstrate themselves to be opposed by popular opinion?
And have they talked about the fragilities of power? The desperation inherent in such acts on the part of the most powerful?
Or has the thrust of commentary, from our “best and brightest” in government, media, the corporate world and in positions of influence continued to play their traditional privileged roles of distorting reality for the benefit of the powerful at the expense of the vast majority?
The NY Times, the most influential media institution in the western world, in reaction to the immoral and illegal Trump administration crimes in Venezuela: “US captures Venezuelan leader Nicolas Maduro..” (January 4th) or “Can the US legally run Venezuela after Maduro’s capture?” (January 3rd)
When the NY Times runs articles like these, are the editors and writers willfully distorting or dishonestly reframing the crimes by design? Or are they doing what got them to those privileged positions, that is, internalizing what not to say and what not to think? In other words, not disturbing the prerogatives of powerful institutions in the public and private sectors and the doctrines and assumptions which buttress them.
Disgraceful journalism such as this is not excused when the Times Editorial Board runs “Trump’s Attack on Venezuela is Illegal and Unwise.” (January 3rd) For one, the great preponderance of their consistent long-running reporting and editorials utterly belies the apparent sentiment taken here. For another, the content of this article assumes, since it was “unwise” to do what the Trump administration has done, that it is naturally in the rights of the US government to illegally invade another country. And “wise” to do so if conditions are favorable and likely consequences not so dire. This was not the case for the Times so therefore it was “unwise.” Credit the Times for alluding to international law, not by any means a given, but any principled case here is eviscerated through their expected jingoistic and deeply cynical grounds for opposition, laid out through doctrinal assumptions, misrepresentations of facts on the ground, selectivity and omission. Not lying, but carrying out, in servility to power, the reflexive lessons which brought them there.
As is the standard, reactions like that of the Times, subservient to power, characterized the great bulk of the commentary on the US crimes in Venezuela across the board among big private and “public” media in North America and Europe, including here in Italy, most notably in the leading daily Corriere della Sera.
Likewise, the predominance of mainstream media reaction to the ICE murder of Renee Good in Minnesota, as have all the other ICE murders and horror inflicted on the population (if covered at all), has been typically marked by distortion, conflation and equivocation. Not only are you not to believe your own eyes as to the murder, but you are to “balance” reality with false statements from the powerful and “views” from “expert” pundits. We must be what’s called “objective,” which has the effect of appearing fair, impartial, “non-ideological” and serious. Being “objective” for the mainstream press in actual fact mean quelling critical faculties, thereby eradicating empathy and the impulse to intervene.
The convenient result of all this is that orthodoxy is untouched, institutions unchallenged and power maintains itself in perpetuity. Some courts, fortunate for us and to their credit, may decree that ICE cannot detain protestors and violate various constitutional protections of citizens and observers, but they, along with media, do not in the least fundamentally call into question the doctrinal assumptions behind the presence and acceptance of a 21st century fascist paramilitary force on the ground. A force which violates in the extreme not only every sense of moral decency but every advance in civil rights since the Magna Carta. Namely, that human beings can be “illegal,” a top candidate for the most vile tenets in modern history.
Described here is a set of institutions in power and the classes that occupy them in positions of great influence whose role is to pervert to the extreme an educational approach. That is, they ask questions not in order to beg curiosity for deeper questions. Not to allude to collective, popular responsibility outside of the so-called educated classes. Not to call into question even a bit the legitimacy of institutions whose hallmark is domination and systemic crises. Not to appeal to anyone’s values or the moral dimensions of an issue. Certainly not to appeal to anyone’s sense of agency. Rather, they ask questions in order to distort through a false sense of what they call “balance.”
Perverting a genuine educational approach means insidiously exploiting the good sense innate to all of us that dialogue based on differing understandings and experience will allow us to gain deeper insights and appreciation of multiple perspectives. Good dialogue exists for the purpose, however, that these deeper understandings will allow us greater awareness of the sources of our own understanding of ourselves and the world, as well as the relationship between our own sense of agency and the institutional structures we interact with on a daily basis. That is, the relationship between our values and power.
For the privileged and powerful in government and big media, multiple perspectives means that the US did not plainly commit a stupendously criminal act in illegally invading a sovereign country, bombing it and kidnapping its leader since US administration leaders and representatives say what they did was justified, as do many of their counterparts around the world. This is regarded as an “opinion” in the face of transparently clear international law, and counts as one of the “perspectives” or “sides” juxtaposed with reality.
It means you are not supposed to believe your eyes in the video of the modern gestapo – the US federal immigration “police” ICE – murdering a peaceful protestor, shot in the head while attempting to protect immigrants from being attacked, deported and their families destroyed. Why not? Big media dedicates a prodigious amount of coverage to the “perspective” of the federal administration defending the murder as an “opposing viewpoint” to that of the public.
Pundits do not fundamentally question why a fascist administration is waging sustained authoritarian attacks on immigrants in the first place. It is not covered as a malignant situation born out of establishment policy transcending administrations and generations which is in turn based on unquestioned totalitarian doctrinal assumptions. These assumptions essentially boil down to visceral contempt for the popular participation in decision-making. This is exemplified through, but not limited to: reflexive deference to “authority,” i.e., the military, police, government officials and the intellectual classes, popular protest as activity of marginal importance, the preeminence of the vote as the maximal public instrument of political expression, the idea that citizens have more intrinsic worth than immigrants, the totalitarian concept of an “illegal” human being, the inherent righteousness of law and order and their preeminence over dissent and popular agency.
What we can say soberly in regards to mainstream media – and intellectual classes on the whole – is that the material it produces, in the end, is not based on any discerning values. While it may say something about the ways in which the most egregious crimes of the powerful are committed, and it may often get facts right, is this what is most significant as regards our values and the possibility of generating vision for what we want? The great mass of what is put out does not question the underlying doctrinal assumptions which allow powerful institutions and classes to go on fulfilling the prerogatives of power at the expense of populations. In essence, it is pure unadulterated opportunism, featuring all sorts of impressive ways to tie itself into knots in order to make itself seem “objective,” independent and contesting, all the while with its finger in the air so as to contour to where the winds of power are blowing.
In this regard, do we have to talk about the institutional roles carried out by those in power, namely at the managerial level in corporations, governments and state bureaucracies? The structural and compositional makeup of those institutions, as exhibited on a daily basis, appeal to the kinds of characteristics and tendencies that stand diametrically opposed to those we encourage our youth to embody.
In those places 2+2=5, so we are not committing genocide in Gaza, we are not destroying the futures of our children and grandchildren with our inaction on the climate crisis, we have only made “mistakes” in the millions of civilians we have killed around the world in current and past wars of aggression. We cannot fund healthcare and education adequately. We cannot fix those potholes. We must apply austerity. Our best energy must be applied 8 hours a day 5 days a week to that job. There is no alternative to the institutions and systems we have. Markets are like the air we breathe, and any alternative without them is out of the question. And on and on. We need balance. We need to be spectators. We mustn’t intervene. So it goes in our workplaces. So it goes much too often and far more perilously in our schools.
Are these the attitudes, tendencies, roles and institutions we want the youth of today to aspire to?
The omission, distortion, equivocation is clear enough, on display across the entire spectrum of social issues. Underlying the equivocation however is that high-jacking and perversion of those actual values of empowering education –listening, dialogue, open-mindedness, questioning doctrinal assumption, confronting power – which is the damning and defining characteristic of big media, and which is most pernicious.
Resentment at these institutions cannot be the endgame of what is in order. For how can institutions of such privilege and authority – big media and big government – not embody such malevolence and toxicity? Writers for millennia have articulated what we already know ourselves to be the case. Power corrupts. Financial rewards are simply an addendum to real illusory reward of feeling to be among the “educated,” “responsible” classes who set the agendas and run things. (Powerful institutions and the most powerful roles appeal to the most insecure among us.) The lessons one learns on the way to entering those classes almost inevitably get you to not to think certain thoughts. Those buried thoughts invariably contained, in the end, actual critical capacity and empathy, long since distorted and perverted by the time you take on those roles. This distortion and perversion of values are ultimately outgrowths of not only individual opportunism and deep cynicism. They are also the outcomes one might expect from institutions with profound democratic deficits whose ultimate aims must be to further their own standing and prevent change by appealing to fear, ignorance, binary thinking and cynicism, amongst much else. The essence of power is manifested through these institutions. From small scales to the top of society.
It does not have to be like this.
Perhaps, then, newly envisioned institutions with other defining features are in order.
Unrealistic and delusional? Not so much. We do not need the words of any past “wisemen” to guide us. We do not require any special talents or expertise. We need to look at ourselves through our own collective values. What concepts and institutions would naturally flow out of those values? Whatever they turn out to be, a moment’s thought tells us that current institutions and their makeup fly in the face of what we value.
How can we look our kids and students seriously in the eye and talk about values – fairness, justice, equity, democracy, compassion and lots more, much less the value and meaning of education itself – if we do not begin a dialogue about how current institutions in their typical functioning violate to the extreme our values. Plainly, we want our own words and our own institutions to encourage doing and not just saying. And clearly we want to dissuade youth from empty rhetoric and pretending.
Speaking of pretending, every time schools evade discussion of, let alone action on, the crises going on in the world – fascism, climate, market economies, education, health, nuclear weapons, lack of vision, among others – in which our societies’ institutions are wholly complicit, we are contributing profoundly and at our peril to their perpetuation. We can kid ourselves as much as we like, but this is what is happening. No class or area of the world will remain immune to the consequences of evasion of responsibility.
Let’s talk with youth about the meaning of our values, the meaning of achievement and the meaning of progress. What it means to have a vision for what we collectively want, as opposed to endlessly suffering what we are made to believe is inevitable. Getting beyond the personal and expanding our notion of well-being is long overdue, and not optional.
