Freedom is the most important asset we can achieve. The question is: Do we really have it? David Edwards, a British writer and teacher on matters of human rights and the environment, has published a brilliant book about freedom, Burning All Illusions: A Guide to Personal and Political Freedom (South End Press, $15 paperback).
In trenchant, fascinating detail, Edwards steadily builds a case that freedom is an illusion, a fact that makes actual attainment of it difficult to achieve because we believe we already have it.
The problem, Edwards says, is that "most of us tend to find ridiculous, or funny, that which dramatically contradicts our usual conception of the world." In praising the work of Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman in their book, Manufacturing Consent, Edwards points out that their argument is a good one, the notion that "the powerful state and business elites seek to determine the basic framework of modern social goals: maximum economic growth generated by maximized corporate profit, fueled by mass production, fueled by mass consumerism. By 'pouring' news, information and ideas into this basic economic framework, a version of reality progressively suited to the requirements of the framework is inevitably produced."
Edwards agrees with the Chomsky-Herman conclusion: As long as the basic framework is maintained, the pyramid will simply build itself.
Today we watch as the media in the U.S. increasingly comes under the domination of just a few players. A few months ago, The Nation published a brilliant and shocking assessment of how Time-Warner, Westinghouse, Disney, News Corporation of America (owned by Rupert Murdoch) and a few other media giants now control the major TV networks and many influential newspapers and magazines. This disturbing trend bodes ill for chances of this country to hold its role as a bastion of freedom.
Money is the end-all, the sole reason for being. The past few years, for instance, have seen the book publishing giants fall into the hands of business moguls who have demanded profits above all. Many newspapers now are concerned only with the bottom line, not informing their readers. The march to oblivion seems ever faster, ever more disturbing.
Advertising is one way control occurs. Advertisers support the media, which portrays those same advertisers in the best light, shunting aside the concerns of the average working person. Edwards notes that the "huge volume of state and business communications not only swamps dissenting voices, but provides the media with cheap and readily available news."
"Flak" is defined as negative responses to a media statement or program. Edwards sees the threat of advertisers fleeing the media as "often sufficient enough to persuade editors to review the contents of their product."
Modern neuroses are not the product of family problems, but rather could be attributed to "a violent individual/social conflict between the desire of human beings to live and think in reasonably sane and rational ways and the requirement of our society that we live and think in ways that are absurd."
We all are victims of a kind of mind control that is invisible, in a sense, a mind control that has convinced us that we are happy and in charge of our lives. Edwards, in one of the most challenging and cogent books of the year, provides us with a "chest of tools" for intellectual self-defense.
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