@approxinfinity
This is a marvelously insightful take. My favorite line was:
"We have a society of people who have bought into us vs them, but we don’t wonder if our games have conditioned us to think this way"--@approxinfinity
I think our games definitely condition us to think this way. And in a lot of other even more problematic, and dysfunctional ways, too.
The oligarchies of cultures have always used whatever media, sports and arts (MSR) were available at the time to inform their people and when possible to increase their subordination to the order desired by the oligarchy. They use the conditioning of games to shape their people into what they need them to be. If you encourage gambling with long odds and substance abuse you are encouraging your people to be losers--to see themselves as losers, and so become losers. Games have an aspect of predictive programming to them. They get you ready (and so not surprised) by what they want you confront you with being one day. Sometimes the game expresses it mythically in symbols and signs rather than literally. But games program you one way or another. Games can encourage and bias toward civility, or barbarism, swagger, or tail tucking, creativity, or rote following. You name it games can condition it.
It appears (I think its actually a fact that is written down somewhere but I forget where now) that the Anglo-American private oligarchy that ascended to power during the second half of the 19th Century decided to indoctrinate the British and American peoples in many new ways, after a series of violent uprisings both domestic and abroad in their respective empires/spheres of influence. The Populist uprising of the 1890s in America contributed mightily to spurring the decision. After these uprisings left in their wakes a growing infrastructure of fundamentally hostile ideological social movements, the Anglo-American private oligarchy heavily subsidized amateur sports, professional sports, study of advertising/public relations, intense study of the new fields of psychology, sociology and psychiatry to in bids to learn to control their nations much more effectively, from their POV anyway. They wanted workers and soldiers obedient to authority and conditioned to team work, not a bunch of free thinking, liberal arts educated citizens of a republic thinking they were able to organize politically and govern themselves based on their own best interests. The hell with that noise, was probably heard at University Club and Bohemian Grove and the Skull and Bones meetings and Cecil Rhodes Round Table meetings more than once. Games (analog sports) were basic to their new indoctrination. But so were board games like Monopoly. And there were many many more games created. The games were reputedly meant to instill a kind of winner take all mind set by worker/warriors willing to subordinate to a coaching staff of executive/officer types run by their private oligarchy. And so were movies and drama and literature used to produce "useful" narratives and imagery. Everywhere success was prized and praised above all. Speak softly and carry a big stick as you contrive a war to take over the Carribean and the Philippines from Spain, and then contrive a revolution to take over a canal zone and finish building the Panama Canal. Whatever it takes, as they say, and bully for you. Fitness and manliness. The world belonged to the fittest. Bully. And the man from the Dutch political oligarchs from the Hudson River valley who loved Bully also loved Rock Chalk and thought it the finest school cheer of all.
Every art form and form of entertainment was planted with government and Pinkerton spies and informants and money was intentionally spent to support arts that undermined the old orders of family and devotion as well as those devoted to democratic consensus and independent freedom of all citizens, not just those that have the great industrial corporations, or the biggest inheritances, or flashiest yachts. Logic was begun to be removed from much of educational curriculum in public schools in this era. Education was streamlined to build the vigorous minds and knowledge that workers/soldiers and executive officers might need. No more of that Aristotilian liberal arts gibberish, boys. Sacrifice and service to the state, not to liberty and freedom of the republic, were foremost. The idea was ease off from Jeffersonian citizen farmer production and to produce an order of worker/soldiers and an executive/officer class that could swing back and forth from efficient industrial production to wars of colonial conquest and back again, with occasional forays into tropical genocides to show the conquered "gooks" (a slur supposedly inherited from Euro colonials) that the Americans could be just as tough as the Europeans as masters (the US-Philippine War of 1900-1908 in which we crushed the Philippines independence forces we had just liberated from Spain in the Spanish American war of 1898...think discovering ISIS were our terrorists was tough, eh?). Hostile political parties were targeted for cooption and absorption into previously existing parties to both neutralize the hostile parties and to balkanize the Democratic and Republican parties into conflicted organizations that could not achieve political consensus without the money of the private oligarchy bribing away conflict into consensus. Mass in-migration was used to destabilize the old political machines in the big cities and progressive reform of politics was promoted, but it meant the installation of new crime bosses willing to be loyal to the new world order 1.0 progressives up town. Sweeping imposition of rational empiricism, induction, statistics, net benefit accounting, evolution theory, and massive historical revision were imposed starting the late 1890s and first two decades of the 20th Century to dilute the organized religions ability to advocate for peace, de-emphasize the importance of the individual, and normalize within college education the notion of the state existing to promote the corporate interest. Progressivism, which was sold as broadening and improving the lives of the workers (to steal the thunder from the Populist movement the 1880s and mid 1890s) was actually a name for corporatization that transferred persons from farmers and small business men into corporate employees with an eight hour work day, two days off, and maybe some benefits, but no protection from layoff, if they went along with corporate autocracy at home and wars of conquest abroad--first the war wth Spain, then the gun boat occupation of Yang Tse river basin China, then the Philippine uprising, then the Banana Republic Wars. An era of intermittent war quite like ours of today. Progressivism persists to this day. Obama and Hillary like to talk progressivism. We came. We saw. Moammar is deader than a Teddy Roosevelt era door nail. Gun boat diplomacy 2.0 with drones. But I digress. Back to the market progressive era. Institutional economics were born under progressivism and its conception was that economies were essentially cornerstoned on huge firms and huge government agencies and regulations of both favoring the efficiencies of these two great institutions. These two cornerstones were both largely run and organized to take over most of the economy from small scale entrepreneurialism and stampede farmers off the homestead and into the "shame of the cities" that was being progressively reformed, too. In this era, the private central bank was imposed in 1913 and the income tax was imposed in 1914 to pay its interest to the private oligarchy and all sorts of regulations sold as protecting the worker but that in fact enabled the emergence of producer oligopolies financed into existence by mergers and aquisitions using increased money supply printed by the central bank for war and dished to friends specifically to "scale up" institutional economic players. WWI started (1914) over there in this era, seemed to go on forever, even before USA entered (1917), and among other things stopped Henry Ford and Thomas Edison from converting the Model T to a battery electric to escape Rockefeller's and Rothschild's Anglo-American oil refiners octopus. But Ford was offered massive war contracts by members of the lead acid battery monopoly working now in the war procurements in Washington, if he would forget an electric Model T powered by Edison's newly patented battery and keep building gasoline Ts, drop his magneto (which he used to avoid having to deal with the lead acid battery monopoly), and install their lead acid batteries and a generator. He did not hesitate. He sold out Edison. In this era, Freudian psychiatry was imported from Vienna and combined with behavioral and industrial psychology and old fashioned mesmerism (hypnosis) to find ways of controlling civilization and its discontents, i.e., industrial workers stuck on mind numbing assembly lines and having crack ups, as well as soldiers getting shell shocked. Medical experimentation on prisoners and lab rats was greatly expanded to search for means of reducing the days out sick and ways to mend injuries to workers invested with costly to train skills and get them back on the job. In this era eugenics was started first in America and many criminals and psychologically flawed citizens were sterilized without any rights being declared violated. In this era national socialism was started in America by an American. What we now think of as the one armed German Nazi salute was started first in America and was combined with the newly written Pledge of Allegiance (written by the man that started American National Socialism) and public schools of the 1920s to mid 1930s were unofficially required to begin each day with the national socialist one armed salute and the pledge of allegiance. American national socialism was built on the idea that the state and the institutional corporation were the new order of America and a nation shocked to its core by the horrors of 17 million Americans dying of the Spanish Flu in the midst of the greatest slaughter in military history (WWI) were desperate for togetherness and security from above. In this era women got the vote, booze was prohibited, and a new Ku Klux Klan was born to terrorize not only Negros, but Jews and Catholics and any protestants that resisted the new American National Socialism. National Socialist clubs were formed all over America and their purpose was to encourage national socialist values across America. They don't teach this much anymore for obvious reasons. By 1929-1932 the Great Depression lead to the retreat and eventual demise of American National Socialism as its endorsement of state-corporate fascism (albeit with a friendly face state side) had failed the economy in the minds of 25% of Americans suddenly hungry and being thrown off their farms and standing in soup lines. By the mid 1930s the one armed salute was dropped from public schools, out of embarrassment that Hitler had copied the salute, and had embraced the idea of the national socialist clubs and appropriated the term "national socialism" for his brand of fascism that was sweeping Germany under beer hall clubs of brown shirts forming into militias across the country. Hitler embraced eugenics and the state corporate partnership of governance, same as American national socialism had. And he added the gestapo to be his version of the FBI, as progressivism and conservatism had enabled the FBI. And he copied the American emphasis on use of techniques of mass advertising and public relations and mass marketing to produce propaganda capable of making persons buy things and ideas, whether they were good for them or not. And he insisted on a NAZI film industry that could propagandize Nazi Germany as effectively as he believed the American film industry had propagandized the American nation during WWI. The evil bastard was impressed that American propaganda had been able to make Americans fight a war in Europe that mattered only to the Anglo-American private oligarchy and not to the ordinary American. Talk about mind control. At least the Crusades as being part of what could save your mortal soul.
American national socialism and German national socialism were not the same, of course. They had different cultural and historical origins, but they were related by Hitler having studied and borrowed from the American brand for his own particularly virulent interpretation. But ours certainly did a lot of bad things and had the potential of going to a very deep, dark place in a hurry, too. German national socialism was overtly virulent and aimed at throwing off the old Weimar republic from the beginning. In contrast, American National socialism achieved prominence AFTER Texas oil man and US diplomat Colonel Edwin House had written a little known novel called Philip Drew: Administrator (note: that novel told the story of an advisor to a President that leads a fascist coup d' estat that suspends the US constitutional government and the former advisor and now dictator Philip Drew remakes America along rationalized, progressivist, state-corporate and American national socialist lines, then steps down and restores the republic). In one of the great tongue in cheek acts public irony of an Anglo-American private oligarchy known for such wry antics, House was catapulted to the fore of American politics and it was House that selected and shepherded Woodrow Wilson into the White House, then "advised" Wilson into endorsing the creation of the Federal Reserve, then became Wilson's unofficial "advisor"on unnecessary war (think the prototype for Henry Kissinger, Zbig Brezschinski, and more recent NSC advisors), then advised Wilson to take America into war war profiteering neutrality before advising America into heavily propagandized mobilization and then into waging WWI, until Wilson decided on the eve of Versaille that he had been House's dupe and tried unsuccessfully to undue some of the most shocking things House talked him into regarding how to conduct the peace agreements and control of Europe post war. Life imitates art, especially when the fictional advisor to the fictional President shortly after just also happens to be the real advisor to the real President!
And all of the above started with among other things the decision of a private oligarchy to impose amateur games to get the country ready for a new order, and vast new military expeditions and conquests, and vast new industrial production.
Imagine what must be going on and what will soon begin to be going on in China.
Run for the hills, if they start to institute new games.
Those games that you mentioned that maybe programming in all sorts of social dysfunction for our culture.
They are harbingers of things to come.
Why would the private oligarchy choose to enable such dysfunctional games at a time, when America is in such jeopardy from economic eclipse by China and military first strike by Russia, China and North Korea?
Could it be for an reverse reason that they invested so heavily in games to build a worker/warrior class and an executive/officer class back in globalization 1.0? Could it be they dumb us down and dysfunction us up so much because they intend to drive us back into the dirt from which they raised us once in order to make room for their massive investment in China to pay back dividends for a few centuries?
Inquiring minds, if they love America as I do, should want to know.
I'm not partial to full scale thermo nuclear war on American soil, where we all end up as smores without warning.
