Military Industrial (Academia Entertainment) Complex

on
Let us, for the sake of argument, pretend for a moment that you are the owner of Hilbert Hotel¹, a highly successful hotel in a densely populated American city. If you are a good business owner, the single most important thing to you quickly becomes how many rooms are filled each night, because more people in need of your services equates to more profits. 

In the case of owning hotels, needing more people to be in need of your services simply means you want more individuals to travel, go on business trips, and host conferences. But what if, instead of a hotel, you ran a weapons manufacturing plant? Now, your only customer is the United States Department of Defense, and thus "more people in need of your services" has become a euphemism for...more wars. You want more wars. You want more people dying.

This is the military industrial complex. While the surface-level aim of our nearly $900 billion annual military spending is to "protect our citizens" and "deflect or avoid total war," the truth is that those in power stand to gain immense material wealth from any armed conflict that arises. 

Come with me for a little history lesson:

In 1939, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Congress worked together to enact a Cash and Carry Policy as pertaining to World War II. Although the United States was still following the Washington Farewell Address policy of isolating themselves from international affairs, Roosevelt's (and the general public's) personal sympathies to the Allied forces led to this policy, which essentially made the United States the Official Sponsor™ of World War II. Like any good wartime sponsor, the United States made themselves popular amongst those who mattered -- Roosevelt sold maritime weapons to England for one dollar, later ditching the monetary payment part of the deal altogether with 1941's Lend-Lease Act.

All this to say: the United States quickly realized that they could pull themselves out of the decade-long Great Depression, fight ideological battles, and increase their standing on the world stage without any boots on the ground. They didn't have to fight any wars -- just finance them. This gave rise to America's participation in proxy wars, from Korea to Vietnam. 

In 1961, Dwight Eisenhower coined the term "military industrial complex" to refer to this little pattern of ours to prioritize weapons manufacturing and arms dealing over internal infrastructure improvements (like, for example, investment in education or healthcare) for the sake of profits -- both tangible and otherwise. And it has only gotten worse since: the Department of Defense encouraged the fifty-one largest weaponry contractors to consolidate into five major companies in the early 2000s, thus monopolizing the industry and creating a reality where the government pays $10,000 for equipment that cost $328 to make. 

Frankly, I'm a good faith capitalist. I have no problem with Boeing profiting from their production of military weapons. My problem with the MI complex is two-fold:
  1. The government is completely aware of, and perfectly fine with the existence of a monopoly in the weapons industry, because the Department of Defense is unaffected by hyper-inflated prices. After all, it's not their money, but ours, the taxpayers. Because nobody in charge of the Defense Department views this money as their own, they have no incentive to work harder to find cheaper, more efficient means of production, and thus it's not just that we spend such an obscene amount of money on arms. It's that we, most likely, don't need to.  
  2. To paraphrase President Eisenhower, every cent paid to Boeing to produce a gun comes directly from the budget for education, healthcare, and protection of our weakest groups. The common counter-argument to this idea is "if America didn't spend this much on the military, we wouldn't be as safe as we are". Which is true, and the reason I'm not altogether anti-military. But the $900 billion spent on weaponry each year isn't even being used to produce the nuts and bolts of guns -- it is becoming direct profit for these five behemoth companies, each of which has grown exponentially faster than the S&P 500 in the last 30 years. 
But my mother and I were speaking about the Military Industrial Complex² the other day, and we decided two more groups need to be added: Academia and Entertainment. 

On Academia:

Let's revisit our hotel analogy. What if, instead of a hotel, you owned Hilbert Hospital? Your business intuition carries through -- you need as many beds as possible to be occupied each night, because more people in need of your services equates to more profits. In short: you need more sick people, despite the purpose of your establishment, which is to eliminate disease. 

What if you invested in Hilbert University? Now your goals are two-fold: 1. to protect your financial interests by collecting tuition and filling dorm rooms, and 2. to rise to the top of US News & Rankings, a list largely predicated on acceptance rate and yield. The result? Slimy business practices, from yield-protection to artificially low acceptance rates, combined with skyrocketing expenses and poor infrastructure. After all, giving each student ample living space and a clean environment at an affordable price hurts the bottom line and accepting stupid kids hurts your reputation, even if the goal of educational institutions is to "democratize knowledge" and "improve access to information for all". 

There are countless more examples of the cognitive dissonance between the stated, altruistic goal of an industry and the true, vested priorities of its leaders:
  • Ever wondered why the stock market is so overly byzantine? Because Americans participating on an individual basis, exchanging stocks without the use of middlemen, investment bankers, and hedge/mutual-fund managers, would eliminate millions of jobs. More bluntly: the rich men in suits have a financial incentive to make investing as hard/time-consuming as possible for the average citizen, and thus take deliberate steps to protect trade secrets that demystify sales and trading. (Not to mention the steps the government takes to protect its corporate interests at the expense of the lower and middle classes.)
  • Why are so many organizations that subsidize scientific research, from Pfeizer to universities, so obstructionist? Why is quality information secured behind paywalls, while the PhDs (and teachers) responsible for the existence (and dispersal) of this information are paid nothing? 
  • Why is big tech so powerful, and left so unregulated by the government despite being, by definition of Anti-Trust laws, a monopoly? Why do they have such expansive access to our personal information?
Systems that are "too complicated" for the general public to understand -- namely the systems that gatekeep access to information -- are that way by design. There is nothing accidental about how impossibly difficult it feels to break the sound barrier and understand what "educated professionals" are ever talking about. These are giants bigger than us -- a 250-year old legislature and military, academia even older than that -- all colluding against us for profit. 

And finally, on entertainment, and its relationship with the military: 

Every movie that uses military equipment, films on a military base, references military commanders, or even features a military uniform must first be approved by the United States armed forces. While part of this is for good reason -- to ensure no high security secrets are revealed to the general public, for example -- the vast majority of the motivation behind this rule is to protect the reputation of the United States. If you plan on using anything the United States military owns, your movie script will be vetted and edited by a board of government workers with the sole intent of propagandizing it. Perhaps this is why finding films that criticize the military is so difficult, whereas a new Top Gun-esque, self-congratulatory film comes out every six months. It's the Military Industrial Academia Entertainment Complex!

I hope I don't sound too much like a fear-mongerer or a crazed conspiratorial radical. I, honestly, just got to thinking about this world that exists on an entirely separate liminal space than the average American does, and began wondering about what rules it abides by. The "rules" I came up with are listed below. I encourage you all to investigate the industries you participate in, exist around, and see how many groups we can add to this (already admittedly wordy) phenomenon. 

Rules for Membership in the MIAE+ Complex:
  1. The system's purpose and its means of self-sufficiency must directly contradict each other. The way the system functions and the reason it was created must be antithetical.
  2. The system must interact with one or more of the following groups in a way that benefits the special interests/leaders of the system, while hurting both lower-level participants and non-participants:
    1. The military
    2. The legislature/congressional body
    3. The world of publicly traded corporations (business)
    4. The world of education and academia
  3. The system must be run by individuals who have vested (financial) interest in the success of one or more of the groups listed above. 
  4. The system must give the leading individuals a disproportionate amount of influence over the mind, money, and/or lives of the general public. 
  5. BONUS: monopolies must be common within the system, thus consolidating power in the hands of fewer and fewer individuals.
¹ I highly recommend this video that inspired my usage of Hilbert throughout this blogpost. It's completely unrelated to the subject matter, but fascinating nonetheless.

² Sometimes also referred to as the Military Industrial Congressional complex, but for all intents and purposes, the military and Congress function as a singular entity. The only added piece of information the "congressional" component adds is that there exist powerful lobbies within our legislative bodies which function to keep the MI complex active, thriving, and unquestioned. But I'm sure you guessed that much...

Author's Note:
I don't usually cite sources, usually because these are all my own thoughts/opinions and because there are often countless videos/media being mushed together in my subconscious brain to produce a blogpost idea, but because this topic is important to me, I wanted to include some ILLUMINATING videos and articles I've found for further reading. Enjoy!

Comments

Post a Comment