Compulsive Developmentism: What is Cultural Imperialism?
The opinion industry; the ideology of the control of knowledge. Scientific and technical progress has also maximalized knowledge. On the other hand it has made communications, the mass media, manipulation, information shocks, industrial opinion-moulding, propaganda and advertising its most important instruments of power and influence. Western society permits any form of manipulation, even if it is systematically one-sided, as long as its aims are economically useful, commercially successful or otherwise progressive. Western man has long accepted the necessity of organizational lies.
Matti Sarmela & John Zerzan | 21 March 2013
In What is Cultural Imperialism?, Matti Sarmela, Former Professor of Social and Cultural Anthropology at the University of Helsinki from 1973 to 2000, and a founder and the first president of the Finnish Anthropological Society, describes the inner psychological and corporate workings of cultural imperialism.
He draws an ideological profile of the cognitive and ideological factors that “go some way towards explaining the hegemony of western culture and the process that is leading to the establishment of a common world culture” of compulsive development, which has destroyed the ecological equilibrium of ethnic communities; as all cultures are blindly encouraged to blindly adopt their the dogma of compulsive development, as an alleged ‘superior cultural system’. He concludes that it is time for sociologists and cultural anthropologists to examine their roles in this dogma of ‘compulsive development’: “Should they merely record the changes that take place, perhaps even establish new disciplines such as urban anthropology or mass anthropology? Should they concentrate on collecting into museums what can still be salvaged, setting up memorials to dead cultures? Are there no longer any cultures that are not western or westernizing?”
Similarly Primitivist John Zerzan argues that the primary motive of the ‘left’ is to co-opt indigenous cultures into becoming industrialized cultures, where their members become workers and consumers in the industrialized retrace. The problem with the left, is their addiction to industrial progress, industrialization and domestication, and their cooptation of indigenous and non-industrialized cultures, on behalf of international corporations. Primitivists do not endorse industrialization or industrialization’s cooptation of indigenous cultures; whereas the left are fully engaged in the cooptation of indigenous people’s into becoming workers and consumers, and not to be indigenous agrarian and outside of industrialization. Primitivists perceive indigenous cultures as cultures which still have community face to face, and an authentic community and cultural life, in touch with the land. Primitivists believe we cannot all of a sudden become primitives and return to a relocalized and non-industrialized way of life, but overtime we can do so; and if we do not do so, the collapse of industrial civilization shall either exterminate us, or force us to do so.
