by John Tyler

Created on: December 10, 2009

It would be hard to find a person when asked if they attribute their development as a political, personal, moral, and religious individual to the society they live in. It seems all too common that people seek to rebel and repress mainstream culture as a sort of oppressing evil that is to be removed from their life; however, it is equally hard to deny these aspects of life as influential and shaping in a person’s construct.

In the German Ideology Marx and Engels argue, “The phantoms formed in the human brain, too, are necessary sublimations of man’s material premises. Morality, religion, metaphysics, and all the rest of ideology… no longer seem to be independent… Consciousness does not determine life, but life determines consciousness”. This argument might inspire a revolting reaction to disprove this notion; however, it is easy and clear to see the connections the argument makes to real world situations in every day life. Is it not true that Americans are more apt to eat a certain food? Worship a certain religion? Subscribe to a democratic ideology in politics, whether conservative or liberal? Although the existence of the mainstream and subcultures remain in every society, the mainstream of America is much more closely tied to the subculture of America than it is any culture of traditional China; although admittedly, recent trends in the 20th century could provide argument otherwise in the case of China.

We all spend time in a private sphere separated from people, we turn off the television to separate from the news, we turn off our phone so we can’t be reached; but, unless we remove from our life our home, our belongings and as The German Ideology would argue material possessions we are no more removed than what we were before. If we retreat to a room with a lazy boy and books written by contemporaries of our time, we are still in a place of societal construct. Even if we retreat to wilderness, do we not seek to remove confusion in order to gain clarity of our current lives? If so, we are still spending our time pondering the societal constructs of religion, the economy, justice, freedom; all things that are left without meaning if not assigned meaning by society. What is justice if we do not consent to a legal system? It is hard to believe that a ban on a substance such as marijuana could logistically exist if every person protested the ban. The reason the economy in

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