The Decline of Political Awareness in Contemporary America

The Decline of Political Awareness in Contemporary America



Modern American society, as opposed to only a few decades ago, conspires to stifle the political awareness of the modern wage slave. The wage slave works upwards of 70 hours a week for the corporate machine for just enough money so that he will not quit, and has no job security. He may be the CEO or the janitor, it makes little difference. He has little time to read and reflect upon the true state of the society he inhabits; he comes home tired, overworked, and depressed, and tries to drown out his internal monologue of anxieties, insecurities, and suspicions of insignificance by tuning out in front of the television. Subsequently bombarded by thousands of message that correlate consumption with happiness, he is then programmed by corporate America, which spends billions per annum on marketing and mass psychology research, to spend prodigiously on luxury items he scarcely needs nor can he afford. He falls asleep on the couch, awakes the following morn, and repeats the cycle. His children are shuffled of to increasingly mediocre high schools whose main purpose is to streamline its students into college or else staff the local McDonald’s, not to create critical, independent thinkers. The colleges, though they do produce exceptional scholars and conscientious citizens, are intended primarily to mass produce mindless bureaucrats, public servants and cogs in the corporate wheel. Anything else that emerges is a bonus. The teenage youth, whom many believe are the hope of the nation, are far too busy trying to navigate their way out of a complex maze of angst, existential confusion, overmedication, unlimited entertainment and pathological narcissism to pay too much attention to what is going on in Congress. An informed, conscientious citizenry is the foundation of a Republic. The natural tendency of government, when left to its own devices, is to consolidate as much power as possible at the expense of the private citizen, a task made considerably easier when its citizens become disinterested and distracted from the political process.