Mark Bittman published a very important article last week in the New York Times, entitled, “What is the Purpose of Society?” Important, because in just a few words he gets to the very heart of political action.
He begins with the most basic problem imaginable, food:
In a healthy society governed by democratic principles and the rule of law, news media would be analogous to a powerful telescope, a roving, scrutinizing eye from which little or nothing can hide. Corrupt societies — ones that require the vast majority of the population to be passive, obedient, misinformed, ignorant, distracted and consumptive — require instead a media that acts as a kind of prism, a distorting lens that presents a perversion of reality.
The scale of this distortion varies greatly around the world, with some — mostly independent — media (sometimes lone journalists) laudably aiming to shine a torch as best they can on state and corporate power. At the other extreme, dictatorships like North Korea use state media to portray a false reality to help control their people, who nonetheless are surely aware that their freedoms are strictly limited.
Western corporate-owned media, however, is unique and quite remarkable in that while it depicts a reality as laughably false as that shown to the North Koreans, its readers/viewers — more accurately its consumers — are overwhelmingly unaware that they are being fed a pack of lies, that the picture given to them is — in key areas that concern corporate power and Western control of world resources — diametrically opposite to reality. With a corporate media monopoly over the information that enters people’s brains, information that is crucial to the formation of their worldview, reality is skewed with ease to serve the interests of capital and control. Not only are consumers of such information not aware of this cynical manipulation, they are not even aware that they are not aware.
It is impossible to say what transpires in secret institutional meetings. Perhaps secret meetings are concerned with the orchestration of world peace, cures for disease and the eradication of poverty. Heck, maybe they are deciding when the best time would be to release their perpetual motion machine! But I doubt it. Whatever the subjects, whatever the group, they believe commoners do not need to know. And that in itself is a problem.
The notion of secret institutions and secretive decision-making are in direct opposition to the stated objectives of our free and open society, which employs institutions to serve its needs. For this reason, institutional secrets simply should not be. Institutions make plans within conceptualizations that do not recognize the individual, but which view a society as a single entity that must be controlled and influenced, dividing people according to their location, race, income or other conjured demographic reasoning – thinking which always benefits an institution, never an individual.
