Reknowned political scientist and billionaire George Lucas has delivered an inspired plea that lesser Americans help keep the rest of the world in its place.
"As long as there has been a talking Hollywood, Hollywood has had a huge impact on the rest of the world," Lucas said as he discussed his films and enhancing education with computer technology."It shows all the morality we espouse in this country, good and bad. The French were the first to start yelling cultural imperialism." ...
People see shows such as "Dallas," about a wealthy Texas oil family, and decide they want the grand lifestyles portrayed, according to Lucas.
"They say that is what I want to be," Lucas said. "That destabilizes a lot of the world."
"There has been a conflict going on for thousands of years between the haves and the have-nots, and now we are in a position for the first time to show the have-nots what they do not have."
And it's clear that America should be focused on keeping the have-nots in ignorance rather than helping lift them up out of tyranny and poverty, which always go hand-in-hand.
Lucas endorsed US students studying abroad to help imbue them with more global perspectives."Study abroad is extremely important; just for kids to get outside this country and experience the fact there is a big world out there," Lucas said.
"We are a provincial country. Our president has barely been out of the country."
It's too bad we aren't all billionaires who can jet around the world on a whim. Alas, some of us peasants have to work for a living. Even though Lucas apparently considers he and I to both be "haves", I suspect there's a lot more space between us than between myself an one of his "have-nots".
The real difference between cultures in the world isn't between those who do and don't have material wealth, but between those who have freedom and those who live in tyranny. Free poor people can always become more wealthy and gain all the benefits thereof, but oppressed poor people often need outside encouragement and aid to throw off their shackles. Perhaps that would be a worthy goal for Hollywood.
I disagree with your last paragraph. Political freedom does not guarantee the ability to become rich. It takes far more than democracy for a society to become a meritocracy.
In plenty of non-dictatorial non-politically-oppressive countries out there, the poor simply do not encounter the opportunities to become rich - the rich keep these to themselves, effectively. Bad public education causes the children of poor people to be unable to get high-paying jobs. Low wages cause parents to have to work so much, they don't have time to be good parents, to convey to their kids the importance of education, of discipline, of staying out of crime. And even in countries where public education is pretty dang good, kids in poor families have a much harder time being motivated to do well in school. This all happens in non-oppressive, democratic countries.
For the poor to become "free" to "always become more wealthy and gain all the benefits thereof", a society needs more than political freedom, democracy, and freedom of expression and of opinion. For that, a society needs its people to realize that this kind of situation - where the poor do not get the same opportunities as the rich, where poor parents can't parent and poor kids can't learn - is fundamentally unfair, that the wealth of the rich needs to be used to fix this system. Social injustice is its own animal, it's not a consequence of political tyranny.
I'm not saying I know how to fix social injustice, but I do think that a good start would be understanding 1) that poverty is self-perpetuating and 2) that rich people should donate money to causes that stop this cycle by making it easier for at-risk kids to have access to health, to education, and to the message that education is the way out.
Michael is right. While freedom does not assure folks of wealth, opression universally DOES assure the masses of poverty.
I would think the goal is to give everyone a chance to gain wealth. What they do with that chance is a different discussion.
One, neither of poverty and oppression causes the other. Rather, they often have a common cause - and sometimes it works out as people in poverty seeking deliverance from it and mistakenly handing themselves over to oppression. Quite often, in fact.
If anything, a Maharajah taxing his subjects to accumulate gold and jewels just takes their spare labour - with too many people they couldn't have improved their living conditions which were limited by available land.
That's just to illustrate that in true third world conditions, you can only move food from mouth to mouth anyway, and oppression is bad for quite separate reasons without causing poverty at all.
Two, because of the "fallacy of composition" it is not possible for everyone who is free to make the effort to succeed in climbing out from where they started, just like that, all by doing what looks right at any point in time.
To prevent them just crowding each other aside the total number of opportunities has to grow too, which takes rather longer. A true free market tends to produce this increase in opportunities (though not the sort of thing calling itself "free market" these days).
But there's still a catch: poor people can still increase faster than opportunities, unless conditions are favourable.