Uncle Sam Wants You... to Take the Blue Pill

Why is it so important that the federal government creates minions instead of sages? Why is an education so expensive and difficult to attain? Why is the media from which we glean information about the world that surrounds us so filtered into flashy pop culture frames?

From a logical perspective, it stands to reason that a country of highly educated and well informed academics would be a country that possesses superior strategies for homeland security, foreign relations, energy solutions, etc. I doubt that America disagrees with that. However, the forces that be also understand that a well informed populous may be more reluctant to allow for convoluted legislation to emerge and pass without citizen consent, and may take umbrage with their parent nation attempting to manipulate world markets. Therefore, our Good Uncle has weighed the options and spoken in favor of an elite few as opposed to an equal mass.

College will not be offered debt free (just wait and watch); the nation will not adopt a news-sharing program that will inform the masses of the goings-on in the political sector; there will be no transparency introduced into large-scale legislation, especially not that associated with education, homeland security, or the courts system. While some will say that this is an attempt to strictly maintain the hierarchy, to make a sociopolitical statement about rank and position as a privilege one is born into or earns from a set of very specific and highly scrutinized circumstances, I tend to disagree.

The reason for keeping status quo as a static demographic is simple: people are afflicted by that troublesome aspect that seems to be incorporated into so many of us…the conscience. If we are informed enough to believe that we are producing fiscal incentives via taxation to a machine that inherently goes against what our standards of morality dictate, that is the point at which revolution becomes dangerously possible.

And it seems that the feds have met and concurred that the best method for avoiding an ethical uproar is to facilitate a very short scope of vision. This was voted upon and deemed worthy. Then the second question arises: What instrument is used to dampen the formation of a long-term vision in the public sentiment? And the answer is simple: macroeconomics.

By constant and unrelenting manipulation of what is within a person’s wallet, a sense of “cyclic nature” begins to blossom. If it is within our relevant experience that oil prices are highly variable, and will, without fail, go through periods where they fall drastically and allow for cheap transportation, development of petrochemicals, machining, etc., then the public is loathe to look for an alternative.

This allows for the government to engage in practices that would be suspect to the ethical mind if prices were consistently low, providing for a more complete evaluation of the product. These practices include pacifying Arab nations in the short-term while we exploit (for many of them) their single means of maintaining any form of a positive gross domestic product, keeping Arab allies vigilant to ensure against uprisings of Arab enemies (i.e. Iraq and Saudi Arabia will not easily let Iran close the Straight of Hormuz, as America has dictated that the waterway is a lifeline for their national prosperity). It also justifies war (Operation Iraqi Freedom and nothing more need be said). All of these are actions that the layperson’s conscience does not endorse.

How then is manipulation of commodity prices so effective at maintaining a short scope of vision and numbing our collective morals? It is simple: the process enforces the emergence of a narrower range of morality that is not a threat to the federal government. For the sake of this paper and revelation of sentiment, I will refer to this as “moral immediacy.” That is, when an individual with a family is constantly waging a war against fluctuating prices, where at times she is an adequate provider for her family, and at times she is less able to provide for a spouse or a child, the development of a familial conscience takes over. If the government can keep you concerned with feeding and providing for your children via market devices, then there is no surplus of ethics left over to be much concerned with actions in far off nations, or even on far off Capitol Hill. This is maintained by escalating prices. But lowering prices intermittently also serves a critical function, as it keeps revolution at bay.

Moral immediacy is a dangerous and heartless form of federal genius. If we were to use the blockbuster film “The Matrix” as a philosophical model for the United States of America, and the role of Morpheus played by Uncle Sam (admittedly one of the most versatile actors of all time), then there would be only an offer of a Blue Pill. The Red Pill would be effectively quarantined and sequestered in the deepest ice bores of the Arctic. Do not wake up. Look…gas is cheap today…take a trip….take your family somewhere nice….grill some steaks…your country loves you…………


After Note: