When Hitler took power in 1934, significant resources were expended on shaping the beliefs and values of the German population. Censorship was extreme, and the messages conveyed by the media – from films to books – were tightly controlled. Hitler, who devoted three chapters of Mein Kampf to the subject of propaganda, was acutely aware of the importance of shaping belief and opinion as a means of control. When the Nazis took power, the German education system was comprehensively revamped so that subjects were approached from within the state’s ideological framework. History lessons focused on German military achievements, biology classes taught Aryan superiority and, across the board, Jews were demonised and blamed for the economic hardships Germany had experienced. Outside school, millions of children were signed up to the Hitler Youth by parents keen to appear supportive of the regime. By 1939 the organisation had eight million members.
In spite of their ideological differences, examples of rapid political and social change from the twentieth century share some common features. Whether in Bolshevik Russia, Fascist Italy, Nazi Germany or Communist China, seizure of power was followed by a restructuring of the education system to approach academic subjects from within the confines of the newly adopted ideological framework; teachers who deviated from the prescribed curriculum often faced strict penalties. A violent clampdown on dissenting views was typical. Youth organisations worked with schools to shape the young, and songs, marches and oaths of allegiance were commonplace.
Periods of political upheaval throw into sharp relief the ways in which socialisation is used to meet the demands of a new social system, but every system shapes people to meet its needs, often in ways that tighten centralised control. Collective acceptance of social structures is reinforced through established institutions such as schools, churches, the media and the workplace. If people believe the Queen is ordained by God, they will be more inclined to bend to her will. If people believe they live in a democracy, they will more readily accept their leaders. And if people believe the wealth of the rich is deserved, they will be less likely to ask why they themselves have so little. Cultivating the appearance of legitimacy reduces the risk of protest, rebellion and revolution, and historical narratives are key to establishing legitimacy. Origin stories, whether invoking gods or founding fathers, are used to make sense of life. They serve various functions, including the concealment of uncomfortable realities and inconvenient truths – imperial wars, colonial legacies, mass enslavement and genocidal destruction. As George Orwell put it in Nineteen Eighty-Four: ‘Who controls the past, controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.’ What we are and therefore what we can be changes with our understanding of what has gone before.
Success, responsibility, ownership, work, normality, equality, freedom – the way we think about such foundational concepts frames reality and guides our choices. Moral concepts exert a particularly powerful force. When deeply internalised, the paths permitted by our moral codes need no armed guards to patrol their boundaries. We reduce our own options, police our own actions, punish our own failings: parents disown their children, patients forego treatment, couples refrain from pre-marital sex, and the young volunteer to kill.
People react strongly if they feel cheated, tricked or manipulated. When economic arrangements are viewed as illegitimate, inefficient or exploitative, they will be contested. One way around this is to obscure and confuse the reality of a coercive relationship, to draw a veil of complexity over it. Those being controlled can then be led into blaming themselves or finding a convenient scapegoat for their predicament. The use of language is important here. Think again of the concept of ownership. We use it to describe a hungry family’s relationship to the food on their table, the wealthy businessman’s relationship to his factory, the landowner’s relationship to thousands of inherited acres, and the pharmaceutical company’s relationship to life-saving medicine. The significant moral differences among these relationships are lost beneath the blanket label ‘ownership’. As we broaden the scope of our definitions, we erase crucial ethical distinctions, with far-reaching social consequences.
Debt is another example. The repayment of one’s debts has long been presented as a moral and social duty. As anthropologist David Graeber points out, ‘in Sanskrit, Hebrew, Aramaic, “debt,” “guilt,” and “sin” are actually the same word’.22 But taking on debt, for nations as well as individuals, is often an act of desperation. Although economic exchanges give the appearance of parity, they mask injustice when the more powerful party, be they employer or creditor, gets to set the terms of exchange. The fact that a loan has to be taken out to meet extortionate medical bills (the primary cause of bankruptcy in the US) becomes an irrelevant detail. Once the labels ‘debtor’ and ‘creditor’ are stamped on the relationship, the moral obligation falls on the debtor to pay back what they have borrowed and that is that. Reducing an obligation to a financial transaction robs it of history and context. Other obligations – of society to its members, of one human being to another, of those with much to those with little – are crowded out. David Graeber writes:
If history shows anything, it is that there’s no better way to justify relations founded on violence, to make such relations seem moral, than by reframing them in the language of debt – above all, because it immediately makes it seem that it’s the victim who’s doing something wrong. Mafiosi understand this. So do the commanders of conquering armies. For thousands of years, violent men have been able to tell their victims that those victims owe them something.23
In past centuries, European colonialists used debt as a control mechanism to devastating effect.24 Today it operates as a weapon of what can justly be described as economic imperialism. In the 1970s, as Western banks sought to create investment opportunities for vast sums of money arriving from the world’s leading oil-producing nations, they set about trying to convince Third World leaders to take out large loans with interest rates that quickly soared into double digits. This precipitated the Third World debt crisis, giving the Western-dominated IMF (International Monetary Fund) the leverage it needed to take control of the economies of supposedly sovereign nations, cutting vital welfare programmes and public services. Perhaps worst of all, the powerful logic of compound growth meant that the original amount borrowed had to be paid back many times over by the domestic populations who, often ruled by corrupt dictators, played no part in authorising the loans and rarely benefited from them. Since 1970, for instance, the Philippines has borrowed $110 billion, has paid back $125 billion, yet still owes $45 billion.25
The spate of foreclosures that followed the 2008 economic crash in the US left many former homeowners blaming themselves.26 A veil of complexity shrouded the collapse in confusion. In this vacuum of understanding, myths of the industrious rich and the lazy poor prospered, turning economic failure into something shameful for the individual rather than the result of a corrupt, deregulated financial sector and a rigged economic system that was rapidly increasing social inequality. Many victims of the crash channelled their anger inwards or towards their peers rather than towards those whose actions had caused the crisis. The sense of obligation that naturally arises when someone does you a favour has been hijacked by our banking system to place a veneer of legitimacy over what are plainly coercive relationships.
The supposed moral obligation to repay debt – irrespective of the wider context – has trumped far more important obligations. Employing the language of austerity and the rhetoric of ‘tough choices’, cities and states have been slashing welfare, cutting pensions and dismantling public services, ruining the lives of countless people in the process: children, the disabled, the in-work poor, the mentally ill and the elderly. The claim that we should honour our obligations to billionaires and banks before honouring our obligations to the most vulnerable in society is a thinly veiled attempt to lend moral legitimacy to rampant greed.
In all modern states, a