Inside the Matrix of Domination

Do you ever find yourself utterly appalled at the current state of American society, what, with its militant partisanship, reality TV-style political system, widespread corruption, rampant inequality, crumbling infrastructure, chronic disease and opioid epidemics, surveillance apparatus, regime change wars, undemocratic employment structure, the encroachment of Big Tech and Corporate America into all aspects of existence, and education and healthcare outcomes that lag behind much of the developed world?
Institutions that once commanded public trust now appear completely hollowed out, political debate increasingly resembles spectacle rather than governance, the partisan divide seems wider than ever, and each passing year seems to bring new scandals, new crises, and new revelations of elite misconduct. For a nation as wealthy, technologically and medically advanced, and geopolitically powerful as the United States, these contradictions raise a serious question: how can a system produce such persistent dysfunction while continuing to reproduce itself year after year without anyone ever doing anything about it? How did things get SO bad, and why does nothing ever change? Do we not live in “times that try men’s souls”?
If you answered “yes” to any or all of those questions, I have written this book for you. From a strictly non-partisan perspective deeply critical of both parties, this book examines a system that all of us live within but rarely ever learn how to see—ultimately because those who control the levers of society do not want us to see it. Just as people want to reduce Trump’s success to one single cause like racism, we could easily reduce all of society’s ills to one cause like inequality, corruption, an unbridled profit motive, systemic racism, etc., but that would be intellectually lazy, as the ills arise from the combination of these and other factors.
Neither a conspiracy in the vulgar sense nor the product of a single ideology or ruling cabal, the proverbial “system” run by “the man” is a convergent structure, a dense network of economic, political, legal, technological, social, cultural, and psychological mechanisms that together organize behavior, shape perception and understanding, constrain imagination, and ensure uncritical obedience. This book refers to the system as the “Matrix of Domination." And remember: God is dead, corporations are people, money is speech, and greed is good. Bitch.