Hegemony: or globalism as a hegemonic ideology

Made famous by Antonio Gramsci, a leading socialist thinker who died in 1937 in a fascist italian prison, “Hegemony can be defined as a power relationship between social groups and classes in which one class exercises control by gaining the active consent of  subordinate groups.  According to Gramsci,  this process involves the internalization on the part of the subordinate classes of the moral and cultural values, the codes of practical conduct, and the worldview of the dominant classes” – Manfred B. Steger, Roots of Globalism

It is an implicit control level, and its valve is hidden in the integrated layers of our social values.  If there was a board where we must fit triangles and cubes through it to match, our triangles and cubes would our ideas and us being integrated and the board to match would be the socially believed set of acceptable “answers”, the requirements of requirementabilty.

We don’t understand why sometihng is popular at the fashion runway in an odd fancy language, then 5 months later it trickles down to Banana Republic, then a few months later to The Gap, eventually a year and a half later scraping its way onto the Old Navy where suddenly it is on sale, then it ends up at walmart 5 months after that point, then its useless.  These trends emerge from higher up, and we have groups of scientists who function like consumer think tanks, and celebrities who act like functioning scientologists who slowly induce is into finding certain things “cool” or in most cases “polite”.

The fact that its Ok to say “pussy” on TNT on gran turino but they bleep out other words is part of it.  It’s a dominance in the symbolic universe, not one through coerceion.

“Submerged in a symbolic universe created by the dominant group, the subordinant groups give their spontaneous consent to the social logic of domination that is embedded in hegemonic ideology.  This allows dominant groups to maintain a social order favoring their own interests in ‘informal’ ways– that is, largely without having to resort to open coercion” – Manfred B. Steger

A king who used to be able to take an enemy and splay them in front of an open public has less power than a king now, who can make everyone laugh at a ridiculous idea even before it’s left the mouth of his opponent.  Violence had grown too obvious as a dominant power structure, it had to be subverted into controlling the limits of conversation (discursive structures) to make certain types of investigations impossible (into the nature of the power structure itself) even as the enlightnment project heralded their objective ambitionless neutral investigation they had to hide their associations with the Power Elite!