are increasingly burdened by crushing debts. The average US college graduate amasses nearly $30,000 of debt.14 More and more, parents are co-signing their children’s loans, making them liable if their children cannot meet their payments. In one case, parents grieving the death of their daughter Lisa learned that they still had to pay back her student loan worth over $100,000.15 This was in addition to taking in their daughter’s three children. As Lisa’s father points out: ‘It’s just impossible on a pastor’s salary raising three kids to pay $2,000 a month on loans.’ Today, Americans owe a total of $1.2 trillion in student loans. In the UK, university fees are so high that financial experts estimate that nearly two-thirds of students will never fully pay them off.16
The harder it gets for people to meet their basic needs, the more amenable they will be to the demands of a prospective employer, client or creditor. With enough currency in your bank account, the minds and bodies of others – the builder, the artist, the prostitute, the lawyer – are then suddenly at your disposal. Money buys labour power. Some will argue that the poor are still making ‘free choices’ – after all, no one is holding a gun to their head. But not being able to pay bills, make rent or even eat is as good as a gun to the head for many people, coercing them into agreeing to arrangements of control and compliance: they do so in order to secure their children’s education, their parents’ health and the roof over their head.
Separated from almost every resource by a price tag, our options expand and contract with our bank balance. Poverty diminishes freedom by reducing the number and appeal of our options. It determines the context of our choices and functions as a remarkably effective mechanism of control.
Shaping identities
Given the circumstances we find ourselves in, we make the choices we do because of who we are. But who we are has already been shaped by our circumstances. From infancy, the conditions created by our natural, built and social environments send us down a particular path of development, one of many permitted by our genetic inheritance. We adopt a way of life through a process of socialisation. This shaping of our identity is unavoidable – every community socialises its young according to dominant ideas about what is valuable or necessary – but socialisation can take many forms. It can enlighten or suppress, empower or tame, control or liberate.17
The shaping of a person’s identity – their beliefs, values, fears and desires – can be an extremely effective form of control. Coercion based on force alone requires extensive resources. On a large scale and for extended periods of time, it is almost impossible to sustain. It will always provoke resentment and risk rebellion. However, through the shaping of identities, people can be channelled down paths without ever coming into contact with the forces guarding their boundaries. They may even cease to notice these boundaries, and forget the harsh reality of batons and guns, censure and violence awaiting those who veer too close to their edge. As philosopher and revolutionary Rosa Luxemburg is often credited as saying: ‘Those who do not move, do not notice their chains.’
Unlike the lancet fluke, humans cannot plant themselves in the brain of another being in order to take control – but they can plant ideas and desires, cultivate habits and values, and instil fears and insecurities, loyalties and beliefs. They can plant them young and from the exalted position of religious, cultural or familial authorities. By the time we have the conceptual tools necessary to question them, the world is already perceived, categorised and interpreted from within the framework of our particular identity.18 History tells many a tale of people acting against their own interests as a result of such conditioning. Again and again, men and women have upheld ideologies, supported systems and accepted lies that disempower them; over and over, subjugated groups have internalised their oppressor’s perspective, accepting as right and proper their subordinate role. The ant sacrifices itself because its brain has been changed by a lancet fluke. The soldier sacrifices himself because his brain has been changed by a belief. Both end up dead.
Social conditioning provides us with a common set of assumptions that colour the way new information is interpreted. From one perspective, a war can look like an act of justice and liberation; from another, an act of theft and murder. To one group, a natural disaster may signify the wrath of God; to another, a symptom of global warming. Within some ideologies, poverty looks like inferiority; within others it looks like exploitation. Dominant narratives tell us what is worth striving for and what can be sacrificed. They tell a story about why things are the way they are, what problems must be addressed, who is to blame, and how the problems should be solved.
Maintaining a highly unequal social order requires the propagation of justifying beliefs and the stamping out of dissent. The domination of Western Europe by the Catholic Church saw not only books burnt but heretics too. According to some scholars, the invention of the printing press in the fifteenth century played a key role in breaking the hold of the Catholic Church and bringing about the Reformation.19 In part, this was due to the proliferation of different interpretations of the Bible, which cast doubt over the idea that there was one infallible text. Violent suppression of dissenting narratives in the work of scholars, artists or scientists has been a regular occurrence since the first publications. Book-burning and the persecution of scholars goes back at least two thousand years to China’s Qin dynasty, when special emphasis was placed on the dangers of non-conformist poets, philosophers and historians.
The battle to control narratives is continuous. Starting in 2011, the Occupy Wall Street movement struggled to highlight the power of ‘the 1 per cent’, the corruption of the financial industry, and the extreme inequality produced by the present economic system. Leading Republican strategist Frank Luntz conceded that he was ‘frightened to death’ by the impact of Occupy on the ideas of ordinary Americans.20 In a bid to neutralise the threat and retake control of the narrative, Luntz tutored Republicans on how to ‘talk about Occupy’. He warned against the word ‘capitalism’, preferring instead either ‘economic freedom’ or ‘free market’. He advised against talking about ‘raising taxes on the rich’, preferring the phrase ‘taking money from hardworking Americans’. He disliked talk of ‘bonuses’, offering instead the term ‘pay for performance’. He discouraged the term ‘government spending’, recommending the alternative ‘government waste’. Most tellingly of all, he advised Republicans to deflect blame for the crisis away from banks and onto government by declaring ‘You shouldn’t be occupying Wall Street, you should be occupying Washington. You should occupy the White House because it’s the policies over the past few years that have created this problem.’
The moulding of beliefs to meet the needs of a political system, although ubiquitous, is most apparent when the reins of power are seized to take society in a radically new direction. Times of revolution are invariably accompanied by attempts to transform the process of socialisation in order to produce the kind of people suitable for the new system. It makes sense: deep social change requires deep shifts in beliefs and values. An oppressive, violent past can leave its scars on whole continents, inhibiting free thought and perpetuating insidious forms of oppression. The decision to change the socialisation process may be motivated by a genuine impulse for greater freedom. On the other hand, it may be little more than a cynical ploy to consolidate power. The twentieth century offers a variety of examples.21
When Hitler took power in 1934, significant resources were expended on shaping the beliefs and values of the German population. Censorship was extreme, and the messages conveyed by the media – from films to books – were tightly controlled. Hitler, who devoted three chapters of Mein Kampf to the subject of propaganda, was acutely aware of the importance of shaping belief and opinion as a means of control. When the Nazis took power, the German education system was comprehensively revamped so that subjects were approached from within the state’s ideological framework. History lessons focused on German military achievements, biology classes taught Aryan superiority and, across the board, Jews were demonised and blamed for the economic hardships Germany had experienced. Outside school, millions
