How to break from the system of indoctrination and propaganda?
You’ve said that it’s nearly impossible for individuals to do anything,
that it’s much easier and better to act collectively. W hat prevents
people from getting associated?
T here’s a big investment involved. Everybody lives within a
cultural and social framework which has certain values and certain
opportunities. It assigns cost to various kinds of action and benefits
to others. You just live in that—you can’t help it.
We live in a society that assigns benefits to efforts to achieve
individual gain. Let’s say I’m the father or mother of a family. W hat
do I do with my time? I’ve got 24 hours a day. If I’ve got children to
take care of, a future to worry about, what do I do?
One thing I can do is try to play up to the boss and see if I can get
a dollar more an hour. Or maybe I can kick somebody in the face
when I walk past them (if not directly then indirectly, by the
mechanisms that are set up within a capitalist society). T hat’s one
way.
T he other way is to spend my evenings trying to organize other
people, who will then spend their evenings at meetings, go out on a
picket line and carry out a long struggle in which they’ll be beaten
up by the police and lose their jobs. Maybe they’ll finally get enough
people together so they’ll ultimately achieve a gain, which may or
may not be greater than the gain that they tried to achieve by
following the individualist course.
In game theory, this kind of situation is called “prisoner’s
dilemma.” You can set up things called “games”—interactions—in
which each participant will gain more if they work together, but you
only gain if the other person works with you. If the other person is
trying to maximize his or her own gain, you lose.
Let me take a simple case—driving to work. It would take me
longer to take the subway than to drive to work. If we all took the
subway and put the money into that instead of into roads, we’d all get
there faster by the subway. But we all have to do it. If other people
are going to be driving and I’m taking the subway, then private
transportation is going to be better for the people who are doing it.
It’s only if we all do something a different way that we’ll all
benefit a lot more. T he costs to you—an individual—to work to