In the 40s, yes, it was simpler, but so were people. They had less sources of information. The churches has much more power over minds. Of course today people are manipulated in all sorts of ways, but the opportunity to get information that will make you skeptical of the dominant meme and culture allow individuals a better chance of disengaging. The roles of both men and women were much stiffer then. People dove at specific boxes and the propaganda suggesting they do that DID NOT NEED TO BE advanced, or as advanced.
To me it doesn’t matter how I or we are being manipulated and boxed, but that we are being boxed. The social pressures for conformism were simpler and much more effective in the sense that anyone doing something different really stood out. Yes, most individual diversity today is shallow, on the other hand it is easier to find others and streams and subcultures within the dominant culture if you are awake enough or skeptical enough or have enough intuition to do so.
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And we still get right wing BS from HOllywood about how experts, government and industry and police and the CIA and so on, must be trusted, espcially in crisis. Hollywood does tend tot he left, but when it comes to foreign policy and power and class dynamics it sends out very mixed messages, never manages to stop militarycorporate choices and ultimately marginalizes independent thinking. Hollywood would overwhelmingly push for Democrats. Whoopy, a slightly left party, wholly beholden to Wall street and the Military industrial complex. The right is upset at Hollywood’s spreading of certain social values and there is a lot to criticize there. but the rights fucking social values were deadening, controlling, shaming, garbage. I’m old enough to have lived through when they had the political correctness and it was completely fucked up. Such hatred of anything out of the box. Like that asshole, childhating 7th grade teacher glaring at students was in charge of all minds. Such fearfilled and yet at the same time fear denying (not being honest, that is) ideas about women, men, normality, other races, sexuality, sex in general, how to fucking sit for gods sake. A fucking nation of gray minded peopel clucking their tongues at anything that wasn’t what they thought was normal. And then making sure the police, teachers, psychiatrists, employers punished anyone for being slightly different. I am not even thinking of sexuality. Anything, stuff you take for granted today as being within the range of normal, even right wing people. Let alone the infantilization of women. No housewife should feel shame for being that, sure. But the incredibly idiotic limitations put on the minds of women are completely contradicted by what women are clearly capable of. And men, the right’s political correctness made stiff, bizzarre, cardboard men who were socially retarded.