{"id":261705,"date":"2024-05-06T12:01:59","date_gmt":"2024-05-06T11:01:59","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=261705"},"modified":"2024-05-04T09:58:25","modified_gmt":"2024-05-04T08:58:25","slug":"the-hidden-messages-of-the-power-elites-cultural-apparatus","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2024\/05\/the-hidden-messages-of-the-power-elites-cultural-apparatus\/","title":{"rendered":"The Hidden Messages of the Power Elite\u2019s Cultural Apparatus"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>

Photo by Jeanne Lemlin<\/p><\/div>\n

2 May 2024 <\/em>– To be crucified is to suffer and die slowly and agonizingly.\u00a0 It was a common form of execution in the ancient world.\u00a0 It is generally associated with Rome\u2019s killing of Jesus and carries profound symbolic spiritual meaning for Christians.\u00a0 In its figurative sense, it refers to many types of suffering and death inflicted on the weak by the strong, such as the ongoing genocidal slaughter of Palestinians by the Israel government.<\/p>\n

Twenty or so years ago when the wearing of crosses by all types of people was the cultural rage, a woman I know said she was thinking of getting one.\u00a0 When I asked her why, since she was Jewish, she said it was because she thought they were beautiful.\u00a0 She seemed oblivious to the fact that to Christians they were gruesome but revelatory spiritual symbols, the equivalent of the electric chair or a noose, but linked to the Easter Resurrection and the non-violent triumph over death that is at the core of Christianity.<\/p>\n

Her focus on beauty forcibly struck me that secular culture had triumphed in its establishment of an anti-creed creed wherein the pursuit of a sense of well-being and aesthetic tranquility had trumped traditional belief, while it used all faiths in its pursuit of a self-centered nihilism through a faux-spirituality linked to a precious aesthetic of beauty.<\/p>\n

Philip Rieff noticed this in the mid-1960s when he wrote in The Triumph of the Therapeutic<\/em>:<\/p>\n

To raise the question of nihilism, as sociologists since Auguste Comte have done, demonstrates a major change in tone: the note of apprehension has gone out of the asking. We believe that we know something our predecessors did not: that we can live freely at last, enjoying all our senses \u2013 except the sense of the past \u2013 as unremembering, honest, and friendly barbarians all, in a technological Eden. . . . this culture, which once imagined itself inside a church, feels trapped in something like a zoo of separate cages. Modern men are like Rilke\u2019s panther, forever looking out of one cage into another.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

While today those cages would better be described as cells \u2013 as in cell phones \u2013 Rieff\u2019s point was prescient in the extreme, echoing in its way Max Weber\u2019s 1905 prophecy in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism<\/em> of the coming \u201ciron cage.\u201d<\/p>\n

It would be understandable if you assumed the photograph of the crucifix that precedes my words was taken in a church since its foregrounding before the apse of the Medieval Spanish church of San Martin at Fuentidue\u00f1a makes it seem so.\u00a0 It was not, except if you realize that museums have become the modern churches, where people flock to revere art for art\u2019s sake and perhaps to find some consolation they have lost at a deeper level.<\/p>\n

Museums that have been built and maintained by the very rich to serve as their own churches to the glory of mammon and their own self-deluded immortalization.<\/p>\n

Mammon that has been built on the backs of the poor and working class, just as these edifices have.<\/p>\n

Beneath all high cultural institutions such as museums and arts venues like The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, Lincoln Center in New York, etc., lies the expropriated labor and land of the lower classes, the same classes whose sweat and blood was exploited throughout capital\u2019s historical transmutations from commercial to industrial to financial to create the immense wealth of the super-rich.<\/p>\n

There is a reason the nineteenth-century America industrialists such as Vanderbilt, Mellon, Carnegie, Rockefeller, et al. were called \u201cThe Robber Barons.\u201d \u00a0They were crooks. \u00a0They are still with us, of course, aided and abetted by today\u2019s latest billionaire class.\u00a0 They build and finance the aforementioned cultural institutions as well as own and operate the major institutions of mass communication and entertainment, such as newspapers, television networks, telecommunication corporations, film studios, etc. \u2013 the entertainment industrial complex.\u00a0 In this direct communication capacity, they control the mediation of \u201creality\u201d to the general population.\u00a0 They serve the interests of what the great crusading sociologist C. Wright Mills called the power elite in and out of government, of which they are an interlocking part, and through which they move smoothly in a game of revolving chairs.\u00a0 They operate the great Spectacle for the general population while moving the levers of power backstage.<\/p>\n

When he died, Mills was working on a massive book exploring what he provisionally titled The Cultural Apparatus<\/em>.\u00a0 He defined this complex as follows:<\/p>\n

The cultural apparatus is composed of all the organizations and milieux in which artistic, intellectual, and scientific work goes on and of the means by which such work is made available . . . it contains an elaborate set of institutions: of schools and theaters, newspapers and census bureaus,\u00a0 studios, laboratories, museums, little magazines and radio networks. . . Inside this network, standing between men and events, the images, meanings, and slogans that define the worlds in which [we] live are organized and compared, maintained and revised, lost and cherished, hidden, debunked, celebrated.\u00a0 Taken as a whole the cultural apparatus is the lens of mankind through which men see; the medium by which they report and interpret what they see.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Columbia University, where he taught and is today in the news headlines for its police crackdown on student dissent for their pro-Palestinian protest, is one of those elite cultural institutions, a place Mills was never comfortable at and whose colleagues looked at him askance for his critique of the power elite\u2019s warfare state.<\/p>\n

Columbia, with its racist history as it saw its elite status threatened by the growth of the neighboring black community in Harlem in the 1920s and 1930s, and Columbia\u2019s further expansion into these neighborhoods since.<\/p>\n

Columbia, like all elite cultural institutions, born in its own mind sui generis<\/em> and raised to the heights in purity and innocence, but whose foundation is rotten with dirty money.<\/p>\n

Yet, as Terry Eagleton recently wrote<\/a> in the London Review of Books,<\/em> \u201cThis is not the way culture generally likes to see itself. Like the Oedipal child, it tends to disavow its lowly parentage and fantasise that it sprang from its own loins, self-generating and self-fashioning.\u201d\u00a0 Like Columbia and all the elite universities of \u201chigher learning\u201d \u2013 \u00a0Harvard, Oxford, Yale, Princeton, Stanford, etc. \u2013 that serve as legitimating tools for the power elite and their mendaciousness, the museums and other well-known arts institutions exert an enormous influence, not only over culture in the high cultural sense, but over the transformation of society as a whole, often in ways that go unnoticed.\u00a0 Eagleton again:<\/p>\n

There\u2019s an irony here, since few things bind art so closely to its material context as its claim to stand free of that context. This is because the work of art as autonomous and self-determining, an idea born sometime in the late 18th century, is the model of a version of the human subject that has been rapidly gaining ground in actual life. Men and women are now seen as authors of themselves . . .<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The photo of the crucifix and the apse that precedes my words was recently taken in The Cloisters<\/strong><\/a> in upper Manhattan, New York City, where the ghosts of dead religious beliefs prowl about the rooms. \u00a0It is meant to present a \u201cchapel-like gallery.\u201d\u00a0 The Cloisters is a museum owned by the Metropolitan Museum of Art and is now known as The Met Cloisters.\u00a0 It, and the beautiful 67 acre Fort Tryon Park upon which it sits, was created and financed by John D. Rockefeller, Jr. who, according to The Met\u2019s website<\/a> was fascinated with the past.\u00a0 \u201cThe expert artistry of medieval art as well as its innate spirituality strongly appealed to this philanthropist and collector,\u201d we are told.<\/p>\n

Spirituality from the Middle Ages, I will amend, that when it had been transported to the museum was devoid of its living context and could be presented as a gift from a Robber Baron family to the people of NYC who needed to be uplifted by the noblesse oblige kindness of the Rockefellers.\u00a0 Dead spirits devoid of living inner religiousness who smuggle secret messages to a public hungry for meaning.<\/p>\n

Like my friend who considered getting a cross, Rockefeller no doubt found the crucifix and apse that frames it quite beautiful and spiritually uplifting, but not the living spirituality of the criminal Jesus whose message about wealth never informed the Rockefellers\u2019 ruthless exploitation of others on their rise to power.<\/p>\n

In years long past, when I first visited The Cloisters, being a native Bronx New Yorker, it was known simply as The Cloisters, even though The Met owned it since its inception in the 1930s.\u00a0 Before I visited it as a young man, I had the impression it had some religious significance, as the name cloister suggests (early 13c., cloystre<\/em>, \u201ca monastery or convent, a place of religious retirement or seclusion\u201d).<\/p>\n

But I was wrong; it is a museum, a beautiful museum build with stones from European monasteries, churches, and convents transported long ago across the Atlantic and reconstructed on the heights above the Hudson River.\u00a0 It is filled with medieval art collected by Rockefeller, George Gray Barnard, and other wealthy art collectors.\u00a0 For those so disposed to wondering what royalty prayed for in medieval days \u2013 was it to slaughter as many Muslims as possible in the Crusades? \u2013 one can view the tiny prayer book once owned by the Queen of France \u2013 and imagine. \u00a0Such imagining might cause one to realize how little things have changed and how little things mean a lot.\u00a0 The trick is to notice them.<\/p>\n

Political power needs cultural power to operate effectively.\u00a0 The elites can\u2019t just slam people around and expect no response.\u00a0 They need to worm their ideological messages into the public consciousness in pleasing ways.\u00a0 Writing of Edmund Burke, Eagleton says, \u201cInstead, he recognises that culture in the anthropological sense is the place where power has to bed itself down if it is to be effective. If the political doesn\u2019t find a home in the cultural, its sovereignty won\u2019t take hold.\u201d<\/p>\n

Thus, for an example from Hollywood and the pop-cultural realm, we might notice<\/a> how many movies and TV shows were secretly co-written by the Pentagon.<\/p>\n

Another name for this is propaganda<\/p>\n

Cultural messaging is where the power elite need to seduce regular people that power is being exercised for their own good and everyone is in bed together.\u00a0 Soft power.\u00a0 Nice power.\u00a0 Power that is disguised as beneficial for all.\u00a0 Beautiful power.\u00a0 \u201cSpiritual\u201d power.<\/p>\n

As I said, Fort Tryon Park (designed by the Olmsted brothers, sons of the designer of Central Park, Frederick Law Olmsted) and The Cloisters are spectacularly beautiful.\u00a0 Walking through the park on a sunny spring day to reach the museum on its northern end \u2013 the flowers and cherry blossom trees dazzling and the Hudson River glistening below \u2013 one is overwhelmed by the beauty and grateful to its human gift giver \u2013 John D. Rockefeller, Jr.\u00a0 It takes a little mental stretching to grasp the paradox or the delusional dream of such thankfulness.\u00a0 But it cuts to the heart of the power of the cultural complex and the ways it works to soften the ruthlessness of its ultra-rich capitalistic controllers.<\/p>\n

First they rob you, then they gift you with a walk in the park.<\/p>\n

And when you step inside their institutions, you are provided with opportunities to think within controlled parameters, while also getting a whiff of the theatrical nature of your experience.\u00a0 The whiff is as important as the thinking, for it is a reminder to keep your mouth shut and you too will flourish.\u00a0 The fraudulence of the cultural entertainment-educational complex can dawn on some who have been invited into the inner sanctums of power and prestige, as it has done presently for many college students (and some faculty) whose consciences do not allow them to sit still while Palestinians are slaughtered.\u00a0 But if you dare to act upon your sense of being taken for a ride, watch out!\u00a0 \u00a0You will be banned from the pleasures that are offered for your acquiescence, as these students are now finding out.<\/p>\n

They have rejected that part of the learning experience that George Orwell called Crimestop<\/em>:<\/p>\n

. . . [it] means the faculty of stopping short, as though by instinct, at the threshold of any dangerous thought.\u00a0 It includes the power of not grasping analogies, of failing to perceive logical errors, of misunderstanding the simplest arguments if they are inimical to Ingsoc, and of being bored or repelled by any train of thought which is capable of leading in a heretical direction. Crimestop<\/em>, in short, means protective stupidity.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Sometimes real thinking and conscience win the day, for the power of the elite\u2019s cultural institutions is not omnipotent.\u00a0 Everyone is not for sale, even those invited into the banquet.\u00a0 Teach people to think and meditate on history and they just might think outside the cage of your expectations.<\/p>\n

While the genocide of the Palestinians is transparent for everyone to see, the leaders of these elite universities, unlike the rebellious students, turn a blind eye to the obvious.\u00a0 They follow the script they were handed when they accepted their prestigious positions of power, living up to Julian Benda\u2019s famous appellation \u2013 The Treason of the Intellectuals<\/em>.<\/p>\n

But \u201cbeautiful\u201d power becomes the iron fist when the plebes get too uppity and actually take seriously their studies and rebel as human beings with consciences.\u00a0 This is the flip side to the hidden messages of the elite cultural institutions.<\/p>\n

This two-sided process of hidden and obvious messages operates also in the media complex (see this<\/a>).\u00a0 \u00a0While the so-called liberal and conservative media \u2013 all stenographers for the intelligence agencies \u2013 pour forth the most blatant propaganda about Palestine, Israel, Russia and Ukraine, etc. that is so conspicuous that it is comedic if it weren\u2019t so dangerous, the self-depicted cognoscenti also ingest subtler messages, often from the alternative media and from people they consider dissidents.\u00a0 They are like little seeds slipped in as if no one will notice; they work their magic nearly unconsciously.\u00a0 Few notice them, for they are often imperceptible.\u00a0 But they have their effects and are cumulative and are far more powerful over time than blatant statements that will turn people off, especially those who think propaganda doesn\u2019t work on them.\u00a0 This is the power of successful propaganda, whether purposeful \u00a0or not.\u00a0 It particularly works well on \u201cintellectual\u201d and highly-schooled people.<\/p>\n

Some people think that if you see more than is apparent when visiting sites such as The Cloisters in Fort Tryon Park, you are incapable of enjoying the beauty of these \u201cgifts.\u201d\u00a0 This is not true.\u00a0 They are not mutually exclusive.\u00a0 The great African-American scholar W. E. B. DuBois coined a term double-consciousness which I think can be used in this context to describe some people\u2019s experience, not just that of African-Americans.\u00a0 They see at least two truths simultaneously. \u00a0Their unreconciled double-consciousness prevents them from single vision when visiting the power elite\u2019s beautiful creations.\u00a0 William Blake\u2019s words \u2013 \u201cMay God us keep from single vision and Newton\u2019s sleep! \u2013 inform their perspective.<\/p>\n

On the same trip to The Cloisters, my wife and I walked extensively through Central Park, surely one of the most beautiful parks in the world.\u00a0 It was spectacularly aflame with Cherry Blossom trees and people from all over the world enjoying its pleasures, as did we. I, however, when entering and exiting this paradise, couldn\u2019t help thinking that this park was caged in by the massive apartment complexes of the super-rich elite class, as if to say to the park\u2019s visitors: you can visit but not stay.\u00a0 We oversee your pleasures.<\/p>\n

Max Weber said it well<\/a> a century ago:<\/p>\n

No one knows who will live in this cage in the future, or at the end of this tremendous development entirely new prophets will arise, or there will be a great rebirth of old ideas and ideals, or, if neither, mechanized petrification, embellished with a sort of convulsive self-importance. For of the last stage of this cultural development, it might be said: \u201cSpecialists without spirit, sensualists without heart; this nullity imagines that it has attained a level of civilization never before achieved.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

__________________________________________<\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a> Edward J. Curtin, Jr.<\/span>, Ph.D. <\/em>is a widely published author and a member of the <\/em>TRANSCEND Network for Peace Development Environment<\/a>.<\/em> His new book is <\/em>Seeking Truth in a Country of Lies<\/a> \u2013 His website: <\/em>Behind the Curtain<\/em><\/a> – email: <\/em>edcurtinjr@gmail.com<\/em><\/a><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Go to Original \u2013 edwardcurtin.com<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

2 May 2024 – To be crucified is to suffer and die slowly and agonizingly.\u00a0 It is generally associated with Rome\u2019s killing of Jesus and carries profound symbolic spiritual meaning for Christians.\u00a0 It also refers to many types of suffering and death inflicted on the weak by the strong, such as the ongoing genocidal slaughter of Palestinians by the Israel government.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":261706,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[40],"tags":[555,87,865,88,427,481],"class_list":["post-261705","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-transcend-members","tag-elites","tag-gaza","tag-genocide","tag-israel","tag-palestine","tag-warfare"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/261705","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=261705"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/261705\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":261709,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/261705\/revisions\/261709"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/261706"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=261705"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=261705"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=261705"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}