Do you find yourself checking your thoughts, attitudes, beliefs, or actions because you're afraid of what other people in Dane County will think of you? If so, you're likely experiencing the impacts of a social cartel. What is a social cartel? How does it operate? And what makes us susceptible to the pressures they impose? Host Aletheia offers some possible definitions and answers. Recognizing the existence of social cartels and how we become subject to them is the first step in breaking free of them.

Show Notes: 

A working definition of the term social cartel:

cooperation between people or groups to mediate and direct public expression of thoughts, attitudes, beliefs, and actions, in order to advance a moral code that masks not only an agenda of control but also one or more aspects of objective truth.

Mechanisms for reinforcing the agendas of social cartels include virtue signaling, public shaming, public labeling or classification, tribalism, isolation, and cancelation.

A helpful discussion of social cartels in relationship to the history of racism in the U.S.:

http://lorenzo-thinkingoutaloud.blogspot.com/2015/06/cause-and-context.html

Full text of John Taylor Gatto's 1991 speech, "The Seven-Lesson Schoolteacher":

https://www.wanderings.net/notebook/Main/SevenLessonsTaughtInSchool

Bumper music from #Uppbeat (free for Creators!): https://uppbeat.io/t/monument-music/travel-in-the-ocean License code: ZNKR4QOHSNHSUSAQ