The Western system marginalises its opponents

[samiaseo222]

Poverty in the West is the fate of those too honest or too stupid to evade the dues imposed officially upon them which those equipped with money and wits are able to evade. The new source of power and the will to exercise it does not lie in courage and is not a test of strength or ingenuity in the face of nature. Success is offered to those who single-mindedly pursue their career at the expense of their general intelligence, their sense of civic duty, political responsibility and integrity.

Tries to ensure that they do not reach any position of social or economic influence. Power so far as the individual is concerned is therefore apparently more a matter of personal initiative than it was in days phone number list gone by, yet the increasing narcissism of society is an indication of the decline of civil power for the individual. The individual has retreated from civic responsibility and his vacated place of power is replaced by the promoter, the advertiser. Ours is a society of pushers, the power of persuasion. The modern persuader offers the soft option, the reduction of the power of the individual to the power of the consumer, a passive power, a responsive power.

The power supposedly offered by the electronic revolution is of a similarly passive and indeed unreal nature, as left-winger Mark Slouka points out in his timely warning against the isolating, anti-social nature of the internet and virtual reality, War of the Worlds. The social vacuum is filled by the big persuaders. Many persons spend more time listening to voices telling them what to buy and looking at images telling them what to buy, than they do to any arguments of social or political principle. For better and for worse, political parties no longer rally belligerent interest groups, since the masses of the West only grumble, they are not belligerent.