Cultural Hegemony

(WARNING: THIS POST WILL PROBABLY BORE YOU IF YOU'RE NOT A HUGE NERD LIKE ME)

Ok, for those that don't know (or can't tell by these blogs) I'm a huge nerd... LOL... one class I'm taking this semester is a seminar class for Ethnic Studies... today we were discussing a French theorist by the name of Michel Foucault and he made lots of theories about power and how it's used in the world... his main works focused on hegemony which is when power is maintained by a small group of people over a larger group of people without the direct use of threat or force... and he was refering to Western Civilization and how Europeans set out to dominate other places through sheer intimidation and would soon after use mind control by making people think their cultures were not only barbaric and prehistoric but also irrelevant and unnecessary... this is how Europeans would control other parts of the world without much violence...

And that got me to thinking about how America has really infiltrated every part of the world simply through popular icons... look at McDonalds, Pepsi, hip-hop music, how we dress, how we talk, movies... they're all over the place... this is when I saw the parallels between old European ideals and new American pop culture... in a way, we do rule the world similarly to Europe back in the 1600-1800s... and we don't do it by threatening other countries, we do it simply by being who we are as Americans... the world looks at us as the "cool" country... the country to be, if you will...

And to also correlate with that, we as Americans all have a systematic allegiance to hegemony because we follow all the rules of the norm here... for example, we all go to work or to school because that's what the norm is... all the things we do as a society, at least to a large extent follow the norms of American life... so it's not only other countries that fall into the "trap" of hegemony, but we ourselves, do it as well... think about it... something becomes popular when people see one person do something and then EVERYBODY does it... that's hegemony in a nutshell... it's mind control... now I'm not saying it's anything wrong with that but I'm just pointing out some of the things I thought about while in class...

Another point, my professor bought up is that the government seduces us into thinking we have more control over our lives than we really do... to parallel that, have you ever heard the saying "the greatest trick the Devil ever did was convincing people he didn't exist..."? I mean, I'm not saying the government is the devil, I'm just pointing out the parallel there... anyway, that's enough of my random class rant... I think I'm going to like this class... plus it's going online at the end of February so I guess I do still get my online class for this semester... LOL...

Anyway, signing off... ya'll be easy...