What is keeping so many people from making social change due to what they are taught to believe in these films? The very thing that has caused us to keep from social change? I am sorry to say but the social change has already been made. �whole classes of people; which create a lasting action resulting in a great transformation.� (Engles) With the inventions of radio and television a new class has been made. The class of the listeners ad viewers. Entire evenings where reserved for sitting around the radio and television. TV dinners are a great example of how this new technology has changed lives. We as a class of viewers has become accustomed to the uses and manipulation of our viewing and listening time to advertising time. We as a class are told by the people who make the shows that it is only a show. We are told not to take what we view to be taken laterally. �It�s only a show.� It is not difficult to make the transition from it�s only a show to it�s only a movie. When we as a class are presented with situations in a film we don�t act because we don�t think we should. Then if we think we should we can�t because everyone else says it is only a movie. The long lasting transformation has been made. Now the writers of the films that are designed to create social change instead make film that is translated to entertainment.
�The characters�have already acquired the stability of natural self-understood forms of social life, before man seeks to decipher not their historical character (for in his eyes they are immutable) but their meaning.� (Engels)
Members of lower social classes know precisely what and where there place in the social latter they are. What they don�t know is that they have the ability to change there social status, so they make little or no efforts to understand how they fell into that position or the meaning of the history of how they came to that position. Instead individuals decide to find meaning in there position and gratification in the work that they do. Many times the feeling of doing a good days work, and the hopes of working until there boss takes notice and promotes them is enough to keep one happy. Unfortunately in the terms of the job an individual will work his way up to a position where they will no longer be able to perform the tasks they are required to perform. There they shall stay until either they will loose there job, or retire.
�history is transformed into the irrational rule of blind forces which is embodied at best in the �spirit of the people� or in �great men�.� (Lukacs)
As a social culture we have a tendency to believe that history is in essence law, and cannot be argued with. An unfortunate result of this form of thinking can keep social evolution from preceding or at lease lessen it�s haste. Often we will find that the idea of �The American People� is the most common ideal of a people that we will want to work to save or improve on. This ideal is in many ways nothing more than what the people in power believe it to be and tell the everyday man, woman and child to believe it to be. In this country the ideal of �The American People� are masses of statistics who care about abortion issues, gun control, and social security. In reality the �American People� are individuals who care about there every day lives. This includes Native Americans dealing with issues of sovereignty, Latino Americans who care about Equal work rights, African Americans dealing with issues of equality, Asian Americans, Caucasian Americans, Immigrants, numerous other people of different cultures, and mixes of all the cultures that deal with every issue that any people could ever suffer from. The idea of the American people is simply an illusion that most people are told to believe.
�Capital and with it every form in which the national economy objectives itself is, according to Marx, �not a thing but a social relation between persons mediated through things.�� (Lukacs)
In the society that we live in, a persons status is held by the belongings that they have, but relations are also judged the same way. If a person wants to make them selves known to a person in power they must work there way through the ranks and live the life as a person in power. There is no direct path one way or another between the social stratification. If there is no direct contact between individuals in different levels of social stratification, no matter how impersonal, there is and will be a certain barrier between the two individuals. The person in the lower social status will view all objective items, clothing, or even the individual in power themselves as a being above them, and will cause an imbalance in nerves, thus giving the person in the higher social status more power over the situation.
�These relations are not those between one individual and another but between worker and capitalist� Eliminate these relations and you abolish the whole of society; your Prometheus will then be nothing more than a specter without arms or legs�� (Marx) Given what we know about the power that those in charge wield, we can also assume that the power they hold with in the very objects around them that these objects can also loose there power. Whenever any country fell to a new order of there society all of the old relics that held power lost there power. If a person in power lost there power and maningfulobjects and was met in the middle of a street they would be recognized as another person and passed by like everyone else. They become another individual, who has to be ruled by some kind of authority figure.
�The criminal interrupts the monotony and security of bourgeois life. Thus he protects it form stagnation and brings forth that restless tension, that mobility of spirit without which the stimulus of competition would itself become blunted. He therefore gives new impulse to the productive forces...The criminal therefore appears as one of those natural �equilibrating forces� which establish a just balance and open up a whole perspective of �useful� occupations� (Marx)
Crime can be presented in many forms. Financial crime, environmental crime, crimes against humanity and even political crime. Each forms of crime breaks the everyday life of the average man and causes fear. These fears are not necessarily a bad thing. These fears cause many to want to take action to protect themselves, and thus bringing into motion many other and new forces. If we take a look at the drug problem in this country we can notice pattern arising. A drug dealer is a part of an underworld economic system, and in this world of economics many other crimes are caused. Drug smuggling, turf wars, cliental wars, police scouts, exe. There are many underworld jobs working at once to make sure the economic system runs with little to no problems. On the other hand, the FDA, FBI, CIA, as well as the local police departments who spends millions, and holds thousands of jobs to keep the drug problem under some kind of control. The CIA, and FBI track and record amounts of drugs being brought in to the country, who and how they smuggle it in. They also keep tabs on who is in charge of the individual drug empires, and how they are at war with each other. The local police and FDA tracks local drug rings, and tries to keep the drug wars on the streets under control as well as trying to stop dealers from dealing and users from using. Each of these programs has funding admitted to them, and each of these programs in themselves have numerous more jobs for research, treatments, needed equipment and weaponry.
On another point of crime, it is also important to take notice to the importance of deviance on a social level. While deviance may be breaking the rules of the social norms, deviance is needed to remind us why we have the rules we have. What happens if deviance is becoming the norm is simply that the whole of society changes to accept that new ideal of that society in social reconstruction.