The Institutionalized Minds of Many Americans
Posted by freedomforall 1 year ago to Government
Excerpt:
"I must have seen “The Shawshank Redemption” at least a hundred times. It was an ubiquitous staple of college life in the late 1990s, like “Friends” or The Dave Matthews Band. It’s the story of a young banker, Andy Dufresene (Tim Robbins), who tries to preserve his humanity and his hope while serving a life sentence after being wrongly convicted of the murder of his wife and her lover.
In the middle of the movie an elderly prisoner, Brooks Hatlen (James Whitmore), holds another inmate hostage at knifepoint. After Andy defuses the situation it is revealed that, after 50 years in prison, Brooks will be paroled. Brooks had spent his entire adult life in prison, and he didn’t want to leave, so he reasoned that by committing another crime he could remain in prison. While Brooks’ would-be victim surmises that Brooks is simply crazy, Andy’s best friend, “Red” Redding (Morgan Freeman), has a different explanation: “He’s just . . . just institutionalized.”
The entire modern state in America is one vast engine for institutionalizing its subjects. That state is so huge and so pervasive that essentially everyone is somehow dependent on it, whether they know it or not, whether they’d like to be or not. We depend on the state for everything from government jobs and student loans to occupational licenses and the use of public resources. All of these foster the dependence, and therefore the subservience, of the recipient on the state. A rancher must remain in the good graces of the Bureau of Land Management. Raytheon, and all its employees, are ruined if they don’t get a steady stream of Defense Department contracts. Radio and TV broadcasters need government permission in the form of an FCC license in order to work. To retain my access to federal student aid, my parents had to hand over sensitive tax information to the Department of Education. Failure to comply could result in loss of access to government largesse, with all the attending consequences.
The significance of the pervasiveness of government involvement in the scientific and medical fields goes far beyond the threat of loss of benefits and the promise of more benefits. For those who are enmeshed in it, the government-scientific complex is natural, beneficent, and indispensable. It predisposes them to believe that anyone who is outside the complex is not credible, and anyone who challenges it is a crank, a charlatan, or a conspiracy theorist. It fosters the mentality that any other arrangement is inconceivable. Defending that complex is thus a sine qua non of their very being, even when that complex is exposed as incompetent, corrupt, and even unscientific. The system is science.
Medical and scientific experts have, in the last couple of years, been accused of being stupid, crazy, or downright evil. Whatever is true in individual circumstances (Dr. Fauci, call your office), at the macro level these allegations miss the mark. They’re just . . . just institutionalized."
"I must have seen “The Shawshank Redemption” at least a hundred times. It was an ubiquitous staple of college life in the late 1990s, like “Friends” or The Dave Matthews Band. It’s the story of a young banker, Andy Dufresene (Tim Robbins), who tries to preserve his humanity and his hope while serving a life sentence after being wrongly convicted of the murder of his wife and her lover.
In the middle of the movie an elderly prisoner, Brooks Hatlen (James Whitmore), holds another inmate hostage at knifepoint. After Andy defuses the situation it is revealed that, after 50 years in prison, Brooks will be paroled. Brooks had spent his entire adult life in prison, and he didn’t want to leave, so he reasoned that by committing another crime he could remain in prison. While Brooks’ would-be victim surmises that Brooks is simply crazy, Andy’s best friend, “Red” Redding (Morgan Freeman), has a different explanation: “He’s just . . . just institutionalized.”
The entire modern state in America is one vast engine for institutionalizing its subjects. That state is so huge and so pervasive that essentially everyone is somehow dependent on it, whether they know it or not, whether they’d like to be or not. We depend on the state for everything from government jobs and student loans to occupational licenses and the use of public resources. All of these foster the dependence, and therefore the subservience, of the recipient on the state. A rancher must remain in the good graces of the Bureau of Land Management. Raytheon, and all its employees, are ruined if they don’t get a steady stream of Defense Department contracts. Radio and TV broadcasters need government permission in the form of an FCC license in order to work. To retain my access to federal student aid, my parents had to hand over sensitive tax information to the Department of Education. Failure to comply could result in loss of access to government largesse, with all the attending consequences.
The significance of the pervasiveness of government involvement in the scientific and medical fields goes far beyond the threat of loss of benefits and the promise of more benefits. For those who are enmeshed in it, the government-scientific complex is natural, beneficent, and indispensable. It predisposes them to believe that anyone who is outside the complex is not credible, and anyone who challenges it is a crank, a charlatan, or a conspiracy theorist. It fosters the mentality that any other arrangement is inconceivable. Defending that complex is thus a sine qua non of their very being, even when that complex is exposed as incompetent, corrupt, and even unscientific. The system is science.
Medical and scientific experts have, in the last couple of years, been accused of being stupid, crazy, or downright evil. Whatever is true in individual circumstances (Dr. Fauci, call your office), at the macro level these allegations miss the mark. They’re just . . . just institutionalized."
"Institutionalized" is a great one-word description of the problem. It's just a story of people who've grown so comfortable with the order on the inside that freedom scares them.