Mass-society today is largely about the control of various people over other people. Marxism very much is alive today. This power is used frequently without care, often ignoring the masses of people that it is used to control. This is very disconcerting. The controlling class often talks about notions of freedom, yet denies it to all but themselves. These people care about power and little more. America provides many procedural freedoms, but it rarely limits the power of the corporation. We talk about free markets, even though we know that such free markets are largely about allowing big monied interests are all about power an the anti-thesis to freedom. Money is little more then just a symbol of formalized control.

Where do we find freedom in America? Many look towards the farmer or supposedly other independent worker. We know that such accounts are largely fictional, and the family farmer is little more cog in corporate agribusiness. Don't look to government either to give us more then basic procedural freedoms. Government instead works for the corporation to enforce freedom through bona fide threats of punishment in various forms. Government supplies police after all, which act as state sanctioned terrorists. Don't like a company's policy? Go along with it or be punished is the attitude reinforced by the state. Plenty of examples of this punishment are seen on the news every night. Independent news outlets work hard to indoctrine us with a certain set of beliefs.

Our system works hard to undermine the individual's passions, beliefs, and morals. Bureaucracy is supposedly moral neutral, but often is about imposing one set of values on the individual. As they say, method does not matter in our system, as long as you get promoted. Machiavelli might be proud of the system we live in, until he realized how much it hides the true power behind how we live. Be a good little German and get promoted. Otherwise you will probably find yourself living on the street and dying there too. There might be some truth on the street. That is not a good way to live. Contemporary society provides shelter, despite some of our attitudes towards it on our world.