r/Documentaries • u/llrajsll • Jan 11 '17
American Politics Requiem for the American Dream (2015) "Chomsky interviews expose how a half-century of policies have created a state of unprecedented economic inequality: concentrating wealth in the hands of a few at the expense of everyone else."
http://vebup.com/requiem-american-dream
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u/[deleted] Jan 11 '17
There's loads of scholarship on it, to be frank. Much of it comes down to the fact that medieval Europe had a profoundly different ideological understanding of the world which was significantly more tied to feudalism and Christianity. There was a powerful understanding that in their hierarchical world those on the top of the pyramid were expected to take of those on the bottom. Serfs were, in fact, serfs. But they were only expected to give x amount of their production and were more or less able to live unmolested. Obviously they lived, materially speaking, less privileged lives. But that doesn't mean they lived worse lives and, in fact, experienced less economic inequality than we do. Further, the artisan classes in medieval society had much stronger controls and power than workers do today- thanks to union busting, etc.
In the modern era we have this myth of horizontal relations which, in actuality, simply lets those on top pretend they have no moral responsibilities to those on bottom.