Imagine living in a country and a society where the people do not know who their rulers and their sovereign are. Well, there is such a country and society in the world today, and that country and society is none other than the United States of America. I have heard on a number of occasions, including from one of my neighbors, the question of “who is running this country?” That question touches virtually every aspect, dimension, and level of American society, and the most profound effect or impact of such a question or perhaps void is a lack of credibility and trust in the system.
It is such that “individuals participate in and directly perceive modern secondary organizations, but for some reason reject them as illegitimate or corrupt.” In turn: “The only available way to organize people was through the family – a social organization which, in spite of local variations in its structure, has always played an important role in the social life of modern Greece [or traditional societies in general].” And as Francis Fukuyama wrote: “The low-trust, family-oriented society of the Greek countryside [or traditional societies in general] thus became the urban society of the early twentieth century.”
In addition to distrust and suspicion which characterizes and defines state-society relations in a modern society like the United States is the issue of class consciousness which as mentioned before dichotomizes and solidifies an “inequality regime” in modern society. And this class consciousness is most potent and stubborn amongst the upper classes as opposed to lower classes. As C. Wright Mills wrote: “Class consciousness is not equally characteristic of all levels of American society: it is most apparent in the upper class. Among the underlying population everywhere in America there is much confusion and blurring of the lines of demarcation, of the status value of clothing and houses, of the ways of money-making and of money-spending.” Mills added: “The people of the lower and middle classes are of course differentiated by the values, things, and experiences to which differing amounts of income lead, but often they are aware neither of these values nor of their class bases.”
In essence and in short, there is nothing and there is no one visible which the lower and middle classes can assess relative to their own condition, position and standing, given the general question and mystery of “who is running this country?” All that is known is that the answer to this question is unknown and hence the feeling and sense of political and social insecurity and instability which pervades the country at the moment. How long can one justify the unjustifiable and perpetuate and propagate an inorganic ideology stemming from a failed superstructure of global hegemony through mainstream avenues and channels which in turn adds to the distrust, insecurity, and insecurity from a social standpoint is also a question to which the answer can come at any moment. As one Russian author wrote: “From trivial and contrived geopolitical theories, to degenerate art and culture, to a nouveau PC ‘science,’ the whole contemporary cultural and intellectual milieu of the West is akin to a Warhol can of Campbell’s Soup, which is nothing more than a ‘school of pretense’ whose fifteen minutes of fame, measured on history’s timescale, are up.”
Is he correct? Or perhaps one should change the question and ask: how is he incorrect?
Adam A. Azim 