Dark Affinities: Liberal and Neoliberal

Monday, 20 January 2014 10:37  
By Joseph Natoli, Truthout | Op-Ed 

Each society determines which thoughts and feelings shall be permitted to arrive at the level of awareness and which have to remain unconscious. Just as there is a social character, there is also a "social unconscious."
- Eric Fromm

Newly elected Mayor Bill de Blasio's "tale of two cities," referring to the wealth divide in New York, sounds nicely Dickensian, but the "boots on the ground" reality is not divided so clearly. Roughly speaking, the bottom 40 percent of Americans are what Dickens' Noddy Boffin called "scrunched" while a top 20 percent, if we follow the counsel here of "Scrunch or be scrunched," are doing the scrunching. A middle 40 percent, are, as Gradgrind facts show, decidedly more of the scrunched class than the scrunching class, although their confusions, misrecognitions and dreams of former well-being render them as liable to identify with the scrunchers as with their fellow scrunched.

So, we have some 80 percent of the American population in need of legislative action that 20 percent of the population either does not require or requires precisely the opposite. The numbers are on the side of Have Less Each Day and Have Nothing at All and not on the side of the Have Mores. However, the top 20 percent are holding positions of power, while the 80 percent are fractured, disillusioned, disinterested, confused and pliable. So our expectations of victory by overwhelming numbers fade.