To students of real history, corruption doesn’t look worse today

People who believe widespread social problems are new to the United States come from ethnic backgrounds of privilege, or didn’t learn true history at home or in school. A Facebook friend and Green Party member thinks he is trying to explain to me that ethnicity does not affect a person’s belief about whether there is more corruption today than in the past. But, what Mark is really doing is demonstrating that he hails from a background where White male privilege is so much part of his personal culture that he is unaware that any other reality exists.

Like most people, Mark has accepted a version of reality based on selected facts provided to him through the influence of family, community and schooling. Perhaps he doesn’t know how many millions of born United States residents have been denied citizenship and voting rights because of ethnicity, gender, literacy and intentional voter disenfranchisement through various means. People excluded from voting rights have been denied full citizenship rights in other ways as well. It’s also possible that Mark has encountered these facts, but doesn’t see them as a corruption issue. If this is true, it will be because his family, community and education did not teach him to view corruption with an objective eye.

The voting rights timeline in the United States reveals historical data more people should become intimately familiar with. Until 1965, for example, Black Americans did not have the right to vote and Mexican-Americans only gained full voting access in 1975. And voter disenfranchisement has reached epidemic proportions in our society: learn more through watching this discussion with TransAfrica founder Randall Robinson and New Jim Crow author Michelle Alexander, “about the mass incarceration of African Americans that has rolled back many achievements of the civil rights movement. Today there are more African Americans under correctional control, whether in prison or jail, on probation or on parole, than there were enslaved in 1850. And more African-American men are disenfranchised now because of felon disenfranchisement laws than in 1870.” Doesn’t this sound like societal corruption to you?

Formal education always carries within it a subtle form of brainwashing. By selectively choosing the information and facts that students will be exposed to, formal education indoctrinates students into belief in a certain version of history and teaches them to adhere to select cultural norms and behaviour modalities. Schools teach a popularized version of history, one which inevitably reflects a belief system those who dominate society through the power of wealth or politics which to disseminate: either their own beliefs, or one which reinforces beliefs they want the general population to regard as reality. Only individuals who are deeply rooted in broad-based factual learning and whom become committed to apply analytic thinking and critical questioning to everything they learn, can escape coming to accept as real the slanted view of history and what good behaviour is, that is taught in most schools.

In other words, although we believe we are free to do and think anything, we are all products of our upbringing, educations and society; and together with genetics, these factors determine our likes and dislikes. This is explained neatly by contributors who responded to Philosophy Now’s Issue 76 Question of the Month: “How Are We Free?”
Colin Brooks of Leicestershire, England writes,

We are free to the extent that we are knowingly and intentionally able to make choices. To do so depends upon a), our choice-making capacities, and b), our awareness of the possible options. Both are inevitably limited. Our choice-making capacities may be impaired and can malfunction, but even in optimum condition our capacities are influenced by, if not the result of, our individual histories and environments – biological, social and cultural. These also affect our awareness of possible alternatives, and predispose us to veer toward some in preference to others. Of course we can reflect, attempt to compensate for limitations, but we cannot step outside of ourselves.

Sebastian Fisher of Wien, Austria asserts,

We are free if we lose our programming and start afresh. We must question everything inside us that seems to have been put there by our upbringing or by our environment and replace it if necessary, with values we’ve established by our own reasoning. Without deep and constant introspection we can’t hope to be much more than automatons doing what our tribe’s customs declare fit for a person to do. To quote Aristotle: “I have gained this by philosophy: I’m doing what needs to be done not out of fear of the law but because I think it right.” We’re free if we strive for knowledge every day. The constraints of the world manifest themselves mostly on the uneducated.

Freedom is a path not a destination. It is more often than not the most difficult path we can choose. It is a constant battle with conventional wisdom, with society and its huge inertia, and most importantly, it is a fight against our own nature. We want to conform and fit in with our tribe, and we feel inclined to give up our freedom for a sense of security and comfort. To be free is to be constantly on the alert against your own impulses, therefore; and reason is the tool for freedom.

Greg Studen of Novelty, Ohio explains,

Although we commonly believe that we have chosen our attitudes, desires, and beliefs, and that we are hence ‘self-created’, if we reflect on the causes of our character, we ‘discover’ we are the product of forces totally beyond our control. From our evolutionary heritage, through the culture we are born into, and finally to the circumstances of our family and social life, we are molded by forces that make us who we are: we seem to be no more than living robots, manufactured by history and culture to act in a certain way. Is there any way, then, that we can create an authentic self that is free from the power of these controlling influences?

…Although our minds will be shaped our whole lives by ideas from others, we may be lucky enough along the way to develop a critical facility. Criticism is the function of understanding ideas, comparing them, working out their implications, seeking experiences against which we can test their claims, and constantly winnowing out the contradictory and the unverifiable. Freedom is not a just a lack of physical constraint; nor is it a mind independent of history and culture. Rather, freedom lies in our willingness to engage and criticize the conventional and to seek the truth.

How can this critical facility be developed? In the beginning it starts with luck – a good teacher, a book we read, a challenging conversation, a cross-cultural experience – each of these may begin to erode the grip of convention and authority…

And Kevin Andrew of Tadcaster, North Yorkshire, says

Although we can do what we want, we are not free to choose what we want. Our wants are dictated by what we like or dislike, and our likes are programmed into us by nature and nurture. Just like the birds, which are programmed to like and therefore want certain foods and habitats, we too are programmed to like and want what our genes and our cultures deem acceptable. Furthermore, it is impossible to want to do anything other than what we want to do. There is no way to turn it off. Our wants are a constant driving force, as persistent as gravity, compelling us to do what we do day after day. So we are all slaves serving the force – the force of our own free will.