Post Class 11/3

From this reading selection, many new concepts and connections came forward and became clear. The fact of the matter is that these theorists and ideologies have shaped and influenced the world as we clearly perceive it to be. Marx has some extremely interesting commentaries on society, specifically, the notion of false consciousness is the worlds best and biggest illusion. The way in which we perceive the world and ourselves have inherent bias and by nature we all look out for our best interests and the interests of the people we spend time with. We are living in a well-oiled machine. My home nation being, The United States of America has the biggest false reality towards society. We are all actors and puppets controlled by the mass-media making everyone decision for us (unconsciously speaking). We face decisions on a day-to-day basis that goes right over our heads. The mass-media tries to regulate and control our happiness to a certain extent so there can be law and order. These are the basic fundamentals and building blocks that hold checks and balances for the remainder of society, leaving out those in power who are the puppeteers. Marx describes the mass-media as a point of deception to uphold the working class from straying away outside of the false reality. Ideologies are merely lies that help us on a day to day that reinforce our beliefs and the beliefs we are being fed by all outlets. Below, I have selected a quote that truly felt powerful and helped me make all these connections.

“Since then, with the development of mass education, forms of parliamentary democracy and, in the twentieth century and twenty-first centuries, the mass media, the social control of thought has become of major political importance, and with it, the question of ideology. Definitions of ideology have spread in widening circles, from a local concern with the ideologies of groups in a conjuncture, to those of a period, an epoch and, especially since the success of the great post-war movements against European imperialism, a sense of ideology as perhaps characterizing the whole of Western culture since Ancient Greece” (Marx, p. 33).