For manipulation to be most effective, evidence of its presence should be non-existent. When the manipulated believe things are the way they are naturally and inevitably, manipulation is successful. In short, manipulation requires a false reality that is a continuous denial of its existence.
It is essential, therefore, that people who are continually manipulated believe in the neutrality of their key social institutions. They must believe that government, the media, education, and science are beyond the clash of conflicting social interests. Government, and the national government in particular, remains the centerpiece of the neutrality myth. This myth presupposes belief in the basic integrity and nonpartisanship of government in general and of its constituent parts--Congress, the judiciary, and the Presidency. Corruption, deceit, and knavery, when they occur from time to time, are seen to be the result of human weakness, passing aberrations that do not deny the essential wholesomeness of the system.
The Presidency, for exampled--is beyond the reach of special interests, according to this mythology (accidentally weakened by the Watergate revelations). The first and most extreme manipulative use of the presidency, therefore, is to claim the nonpartisanship of the office, and to seem to withdraw it from class interests and clamorous conflict. In the 1972 elections, the Republican candidate campaigned under the auspices and slogans of the Committee to Re-elect the President, not as the flesh and blood Richard Nixon.
The chief executive, though the most important, is but one of the many governmental departments that seek to present themselves as neutral agents, embracing no objectives but the general welfare, and serving everyone impartially and disinterestedly. For half a century all the media joined in propagating the myth of the FBI as a nonpolitical and highly effective agency of law enforcement. In fact, as congressional hearings confirmed, the Bureau has been used continuously to intimidate and coerce social critics, and is itself a major lawbreaker.
OF COURSE, THE MASS MEDIA, too, are supposed to be neutral and, according to some observers, in an adversary position with regard to the powers that be. Departures from even handedness in news reportage are admitted but, the press assures -us, result from human error and.cannot be interpreted as flaws in the basically sound institutions of information dissemination. That the media (press, periodicals, radio, and television) are almost without exception business enterprises, receiving their revenues from commercial sales of time and space, and. sharing the mainstream business ideology of its owners is not recognized as a major problem by those defending the objectivity and integrity of the informational services. Ironically enough, but quite logical when we consider the upsidedown way of looking at things favored by right-wingers, in the Nixon years the media fell under audible criticism and were repeatedly questioned in their patriotism, "sense of responsibility," etc., but only because they did not tilt far enough to the right.
Science, which more than any other intellectual activity has been integrated into the corporate economy, continues also to insist on its value-free neutrality. Unwilling to consider the implications of the sources of its funding, the directions of its research, the applications of its theories (just consider the idea of DNA for profit, recently sanctioned by the Supreme Court), and the character of the paradigms it creates, science promotes the notion of its insulation from the social forces that affect all other ongoing activities in the nation.
The system of schooling, from the elementary through the university level, is also, according to the manipulators, devoid of deliberate ideological purpose. Still, the product must reflect the teaching: it is astonishing how large a proportion of the graduates at each stage continue, despite all the ballyhoo about the counterculture and "radicals on campus," to believe in and observe the competitive ethic of business enterprise. Or is it just simple realism?
Wherever one looks in the social sphere, neutrality and objectivity are invoked to describe the functioning of value-laden and purposeful activities which lend support to the prevailing institutional arrangements. Essential to the everyday maintenance of the control system is the carefully nurtured myth that no special groups or views have a preponderant influence on the country's decision-making processes. Conventional economics, for example, has long contended that all agents enter the market more or less equal as buyers and sellers, workers and employers, and take their chances in an uncontrolled arena of independent choicemaking. (An article on this topic is now in preparation. Eds.) Manipulation in market economics is an aberration which everyone abhors and does his best to eliminate, usually by not acknowledging it, as most students taking a conventional intro course will testify. (Naturally, power, which determines so many economic relationships such as wages, prices, terms of trade between poor and rich nations, is never accepted as relevant by the economic purists.)
Similarly, in the marketplace of ideas, manipulators insist that there is no ideology that operates as a control mechanism. There is only, they claim, an information-knowledge spectrum, from which the neutral scientist, teacher, government official, or individual picks and chooses the informational bits most useful to the pattern of truth he or she is attempting to construct. Daniel Bell, at the beginning of one of the most spectacular decades of social conflict and manipulative control in the United States' history, published a book proclaiming the "end of ideology."
The Myth of Unchanging Human Nature
Human expectations can be the lubricant of social change. When human expectations are low, passivity prevails. There can, of course, be various kinds of images in anyone's mind concerning political, social, economic, and personal realities. The common denominator of all such imagery, however, is the view people have of human nature. What human nature is seen to be ultimately affects the way hurnan beings behave, not because they must act as they do but because they believe they are expected to act that way. One writer puts it this way: "...the behavior of men is not independent of the theories of human behavior that men adopt ... what we believe of man affects the behavior of men, for it determines what each expecis of the other ... befief helps shape actuality. " (italics ours)
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Media critic and former economist P. Greanville is The Greanville Post's founding editor (http://www.greanvillepost.com/).
He also serves as publisher for Cyrano's Journal Today. He has a lifelong interest in the triumph of justice and (
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