Democratic Unfreedom - Social Technique and the Manufacture of Control

Tuesday, 19 June 2012 10:32  
By Kingsley Dennis, Truthout | News Analysis 

A comfortable, smooth, reasonable, democratic unfreedom prevails in advanced industrial civilization, a token of technical progress. - Herbert Marcuse

As Noam Chomsky pointed out, in both "old" and "new" world orders the central goal has pivoted around the issue of control: "Control of the population is the major task of any state that is dominated by particular sectors of the domestic society and therefore functions primarily in their interest ..."[1] Such "particular sectors" as referred to are the minority elite, who pursue controlling strategies to "engineer" national and international affairs in line with their aims. And these aims are for the most part based on greed and power; and the need to keep the masses contented and docile.

The construction of what Marcuse refers to as democratic unfreedom is often implemented through scientific rationalism. The pattern often adopted is in parading rational thinking as the vehicle in which to present specific agendas most suitable to hierarchical power structures. And it is through the rationalism of the elite technocratic establishment that global governance has found its most articulate expression. One of these forms is corporatism and the rise of the conglomerates (media conglomerates were explored in a previous Truthout article). A particular example of corporatism and social control can be found within global food systems, the ways they are monopolized and managed.