It is often difficult, impossible for some, to see how the ideas and prejudices that form our core beliefs, comprehensively shape our reality. Like fish swimming in water, we do not notice the limits of the world and the medium that defines them. These are aspects of our life that are formed early and constantly remolded as we age. For Americans, this tends to include a fundamental (or in recent decades, fundamentalist) faith in capitalism, deeply mixed into our religion, our patriotism, and every aspect of our identity, including race and gender. For those who break free of capitalism, it is difficult to escape a worldview that is built on, and encompassed by, economics of one sort or another. In America, to question capitalism may be considered evil or unpatriotic, but to question economics entirely is to be insane.
To understand how totally a worldview controls reality, we have to look for ones that exaggerate aspects of ours, or that are based in a different set of values. The recent past gives us several examples, but the clearest, because one of the most extreme, is that of Nazi Germany. I am not trying to liken the our present worldview to that of Hitler's followers, rather, I am using its extremism as an example and argument about the narrowness and danger that comes from failing to recognize the limitations, or even the existence, of one's worldview.
The thing that we have to understand about the Nazi worldview is that everything was made to depend on their ideas about race or Volk, which was more narrowly defined that it was even in the United States at the time. The nation essentially became a tribe, and anyone, or anything that originated outside of it was suspect, if not actually evil. The individual was nothing, the race was everything. This was how the Germans were able to justify sterilizing and euthanizing the "unfit" - whether physically, mentally, or morally. Morality itself was based in their ideas of racial purity and the needs of the Volk. Every academic subject had to conform to these ideas. Since the Nazis held that all real human progress originated with the Aryan race, which they defined as essentially or Nordic, any progress in the past had to be shown as having come from Aryan individuals. Not only did they rewrite ancient history to show that the early Greeks and Italians were Germanic in origin, gradually overcome by those of inferior blood (for the Nazis, any non-Aryan, but particularly Jewish), but they went so far as to argue that certain important characters, most notably Jesus and Confucius, were really of Aryan descent, no matter how ridiculous that appeared to non-Nazis.
Every aspect of life was conditioned on being an Aryan. Huge efforts were put into determining who was and was not sufficiently Aryan. The census was bent to its needs. It affected employment, education, healthcare, finance, and every other aspect of life. It affected whether one could even live. Contrary to America, where race has played a huge part in our public life and worldview, but economics has been central, economics was secondary. It simply had to function, and wealth was some protection, but even before the War, the German economy was kept afloat in part by cooking the books at the highest levels.
Of course this racial obsession was incapable to correctly evaluating the military and industrial potential of enemies. This was catastrophic when it came to Slavic states, such as the Soviet Union, or to "mongrel" countries such as the United States. As they were not Aryan, or not sufficiently Aryan, then they could not fight well and their industrial capacity was held to be nothing more than propaganda. (Even during the War, the Nazis refused to believe the huge numbers of ships and planes being produced in America, which, among other things, meant that they thought they were winning the Battle of the Atlantic far longer than they were.) The narrow focus on false-ideals of race was blindly self-destructive. Even had the Nazis had no war, or had won, their ideas of purity would have bred a humanity without necessary genetic diversity and an even greater fragility in the face of the climatological and ecological challenges we face now.
Today, Americans remain mired in old ways of thinking about race, but the key component of our worldview is economic, specifically capitalistic, with race, I would argue a second and highly restrictive component. We are aware of at least some of the characteristic racial thoughts as a nation in ways that we are not with capitalism, which remains. Most of us are able to look at the world and understand how race distorts our views, but, when it comes to capitalism, we have difficulty evaluating events or capabilities in any other way. As I suggested above, those who break free of capitalism's hold still remain within an economic framework. This is reflected in our reactions to things such as climate change, environmental degradation, the rise of antibiotic-resistant bugs, health issues, inequality, and many others. Even in the face of existential crises, we are, as a society, doing cost-benefit analysis and making decisions on our future, or the future of individuals, more on financial considerations than anything else.
Americans may proclaim all sorts of values, but the value that holds the most water in our country is monetary. It has been for a long time. Proto-capitalism crept into our religious discourse with the Puritans and it molded even our ideas of race from the earliest days of the Virginia planters. It has worked its way into our philosophy and every aspect of life. We are saturated with the goodness and wisdom of capitalism at every turn by our media, our ministers, and the goods our money buys. As with the Nazis and race, we are scarcely able to think in any other way, and we are prohibited from acting in any other way by the very structure of society and the values of our culture.
It acts to restrict our view, to constrain us into certain patterns of action. It is the decisive factor in our elections. We have difficulty looking at anything else. Yes, we know climate is changing, that mass extinctions are under way, that the air and the water and the land is becoming more polluted, but we explore only those pathways that will not dislocate the economy too much, that can be pursued as potentially profitable businesses, and do not disturb the markets or the wealthy too much.
Do most of us even realize that there have been different ways of looking at the world in the past, and, that if we survive, there will be very different ones in future? At the moment, we appear constrained to take any actions to save ourselves by the straight jacket of our beliefs.
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