The critical consciousness of western societies

The establishment or dominant system of Western society would use the invisible dictatorship of compulsive consumerism of material goods to annul the ideals of the primitive individual and transform him into an uncritical, fearful, and conformist being that will form a homogeneous, uniform, and easily manipulated society, having as a collateral effect the disappearance of critical consciousness.

Hermann Hesse in his book “The Steppenwolf” (Der Steppenwolf, 1927), defines the bourgeois as:

“a person who always tries to place himself in the center, between the extremes, in a temperate and pleasant zone, without violent storms or tempests.

Consequently, it is by nature a creature of weak vital impulse, fearful, afraid of surrendering itself, and easy to rule. That is why it has substituted power for majority rule, force for law, and responsibility for the voting system.

It is evident that this weak and frightened being, even existing in such considerable numbers cannot stand alone and on the basis of its qualities could play in the world no other role than that of a flock of lambs among wandering wolves…”

For his part, the American Harold Lasswell (one of the pioneers of “mass communication research”), studied propaganda techniques after the First World War and identified a way of manipulating the masses (theory of “the hypodermic needle or magic bullet”), a theory embodied in his book “Propaganda Techniques in the World War (1927).

This theory consists of:

“injecting a specific idea into the population with the help of the mass media in order to direct public opinion to one’s own advantage and to achieve the adhesion of individuals to one’s political ideology without having to resort to violence”.

Consequently, the awakening of critical consciousness will have to wait for a certain number of people (Critical Mass) to reach a higher level of consciousness, at which point the individual is capable of making an evolutionary leap and achieving a change of mentality, a thesis known as the “Theory of the Hundredth Monkey” and formulated by the biologist Lyan Watson in his work “Lifetide” published in 1979.

From the above, it can be deduced that in order to achieve this, a process of catharsis and subsequent collective metanoia of today’s society will be inevitable, which will imply the double connotation of physical movement (retracing the path we have walked) and psychological movement (change of mentality after discarding the old stereotypes in force) to dilute the opiate that inhibits critical consciousness (compulsive consumerism).

By Germán Gorraiz, political analyst