eThoughts : More About an “Ownership Society.”

I’m driven to take another look at this “Society of Ownership” and the implications and impact on Social Security, especially after the recent fines levied against Merrill Lynch for irregularities in dealing with people’s investments in mutual funds.

Anyone who doesn’t consider the impact of corporate conglomerations on public policy, and hence on the democratic process, might just be a little naïve about the application of democracy and freedom. And where is the evidence that politicos and corporations are looking out for the populace’s best interest? Merck, as one example, certainly has a bundle of clout on health policy, and such a big corporation can impact public perception about what is best, as well as influencing the political process.

In a recent Los Angeles Times (February 27, 2005), there was an article about how marketing strategies and brain scan research are being combined. The implication on the political process was also noted (is it any surprise that marketing and politics are in bed together?). If we’ve got a group of powerful people with an intention of managing perception, then neuro-marketing, the linking of product with reward centers in the brain, in combination with activating threat centers if one doesn’t have the product, will more likely produce a physiological response that results in a “buy” for that particular product—whether it is a politician, an investment instrument, a car, or a candy bar.

All right, is big bad? Not necessarily. It isn’t that multinational corporations are inherently evil. Are politics and politicians bad? Not necessarily. It depends what the politics or the politician are really advocating. Is studying the way the brain works and realizing how pliable it is when we link an image, a product, a philosophy, a religion, or a political agenda with reward and threat centers the road to Robot City? It doesn’t have to be. Is our present evolutionary state, linked to reward and threat centers in our biology (a simplification, but a workable model for now), really more concerned with democracy or manipulation? Is our real concern about power and authority or about attention and awareness? Well, we’ve argued that one needs power to get things done, and that getting things done requires some manipulation.

I’ll argue that our biology is a result of our behavior as well as our environment. And, since our brains do relate to a linking system, if we can change the wiring to “buy” products—be it philosophies, candidates, or candy bars, perhaps we can re-wire ourselves to embrace awareness more than we embrace power and authority.

Until such time, we are not really taking ownership or stewardship of anything—we are simply allowing more programming and calling it choice because we “relate” to it. Until we wonder why there are the relationships there are, until we learn to question what we “know,” we’ll continue to believe that being able to explain our “choices” is really freedom when it might really be conditioning. What we “own” under those circumstances is at best delusion, and at worst, psychosis.