How American Ideology Grooms Us

Resistance In An Era of Manufactured Consent

Photo by Aaron Burden on Unsplash

I work in an education setting.

It’s difficult being in this setting because you witness firsthand the propaganda and indoctrination children go through from elementary age all the way to high school.

For example, at the time of this it writing it was Veterans Day in the US, a day that celebrates US soldiers who have retired from supporting the US imperialist project directly. In nearly every elementary school in my area, there are drawings, colorings, and or paintings dedicated to these past soldiers.

I was taught from a young age to revere the US military, I was taught to respect the police, and I was taught that the USA is the best country in the world. US exceptionalism was beaten into my mind since I could remember. School children are compelled to pledge allegiance to the US empire every morning.

The education system serves the prevailing ideology of the system. In the US, you are taught that the system is good, justified, and better than others. You are taught that those who disagree with this system are ‘bad’, ‘totalitarian’, ‘uneducated’, or ‘terrorist’.

Systems of knowledge and information dissemination groom us. Education and the media use subtle acts of psychological conditioning and manipulation to accept the prevailing ideology of the US empire.

---

Education as a Means of Control

Indeed, the interests of the oppressors lie in “changing the consciousness of the oppressed, not the situation which oppresses them”;1 for the more the oppressed can be led to adapt to that situation, the more easily they can be dominated. To achieve this end, the oppressors use the banking concept of education in conjunction with a paternalistic social action apparatus, within which the oppressed receive the euphemistic title of “welfare recipients.”

Pedagogy of the Oppressed by Paulo Freire

In Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed, the concept of education in the West is viewed through the ‘banking’ model. Knowledge is deposited in a student and withdrawn as soon as it is necessary, but what is not encouraged is deep reflection on facts.

Students are taught to achieve high test scores by reciting facts and concepts on command rather than deeply reflecting on the why behind them.

Students are taught that soldiers are good and that America is exceptional, but they are readily discouraged from asking why.

Why are American soldiers the good guys?

Why is America exceptional over other places?

Why is the economic system of capitalism superior to others?

Furthermore, even if students ask why they are given parroted responses that do not critically analyze history, geopolitical reality, and alternative perspectives.

If a student asks:

“Why are American soldiers the good guys?”

The response might be:

“Because they protect our freedom from bad people.”

But what is freedom in this case? Who decides who is “bad”? How does protecting said freedom make them “good”?

These follow-up questions will be regularly shut down in the American educational system. Students are taught facts, concepts, and skills to improve their test-taking. They’re not giving conscious awareness of systems to challenge better and perhaps change them.

The banking approach to adult education, for example, will never propose to students that they critically consider reality. It will deal instead with such vital questions as whether Roger gave green grass to the goat, and insist upon the importance of learning that, on the contrary, floger gave green grass to the rabbit. The “humanism” of the banking approach masks the effort to turn women and men into automatons—the very negation of their ontological vocation to be more fully human.

Pedagogy of the Oppressed by Paulo Freire

The US empire needs to sustain itself; it will teach its citizens to view it as necessary, justified, and preferable to any alternative. Any threat to this established order is dangerous.

This model of education is given to children and adults alike; we are taught that soldiers are good, what the US does is justified, and that the US system is the best. But we are regularly discouraged from questioning such assumptions.

---

The Media Grooms Us Too

The mass media serve as a system for communicating messages and symbols to the general populace. It is their function to amuse, entertain, and inform, and to inculcate individuals with the values, beliefs, and codes of behavior that will integrate them into the institutional structures of the larger society. In a world of concentrated wealth and major conflicts of class interest, to fulfil this role requires systematic propaganda.

Manufactured Consent by Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky

Admittedly, I am not a big fan of Chomsky for various reasons (not including his photos with Steve Bannon and Jeffrey Epstein), but I do like the propaganda model of media that both he and Herman detail.

Media in this case is constrained by factors related to power and economic incentives. In the USA about 6 media companies control pretty much all the major news networks. It would be naive to assume these corperations do not filter and control what their news networks are allowed to talk about.

We saw this during the Gaza genocide, with western media outlets repeatedly trying to deny that there was a genocide being committed and trying to sweep under the run Israeli attrocities.

The elite domination of the media and marginalization of dissidents that results from the operation of these filters occurs so naturally that media news people, frequently operating with complete integrity and goodwill, are able to convince themselves that they choose and interpret the news “objectively” and on the basis of professional news values. Within the limits of the filter constraints they often are objective; the constraints are so powerful, and are built into the system in such a fundamental way, that alternative bases of news choices are hardly imaginable.

Manufactured Consent by Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky

This skewed distribution of power along with financial control creates certain “filters” which influences what news is being covered, how that news is framed, and how it is being covered.

One of these “filters” is American Exceptionalism; corporate media does the work of sanitizing US military action and supposed “interventions” in developing nations. Coups, bombings, drone strikes, invasions, etc., are justified because America is ‘exceptional’ in its actions.

American exceptionalism survives not because it reflects reality, but because it is manufactured, meaning produced, polished, and repeated until it becomes common sense. The U.S. media system doesn’t simply report the news; it constructs a worldview in which America is always benevolent, always justified, always the reluctant savior rather than the active oppressor.

Through constant repetition, the population is trained to see American violence as “defense,” American interventions as “humanitarian,” and American dominance as the natural order of things. In this ideological universe, imperialism is invisible, genocide becomes a “conflict,” and those resisting oppression are framed as irrational or extremist.

This is how American exceptionalism functions: not as a description of the world, but as a psychological shield that protects the U.S. from accountability and insulates its citizens from the reality of their own empire.

We, as U.S. citizens, are groomed to accept this shield; we are discouraged from questioning it and can be potentially harmed for standing up against it. As we saw with those who stood up against U.S. support for the Gaza Genocide, you can easily be imprisoned and have your career ruined.

---

Psychological Grooming Under Empire

Working in education makes the process painfully visible. You watch children move through a system that molds not only what they know, but how they feel and interpret the world. Patriotic rituals, “heroes” of the nation, and narratives about the military are fed to students before they can question what they’re absorbing. By the time they reach high school, the ideological framework has already settled in: America is good, America is justified, America is right.

Paulo Freire helps us understand this process. He argues that oppressive systems must work not only on material structures but on human consciousness itself. The goal is to shape how people imagine reality. The U.S. education system is not simply teaching math and reading; it is actively manipulating children with dominant cultural narratives. These narratives invade the minds of children and, subsequently, adults, shaping their understanding of reality.

Cultural invasion is on the one hand an instrument of domination, and on the other, the result of domination. Thus, cultural action of a dominating character (like other forms of antidialogical action), in addition to being deliberate and planned, is in another sense simply a product of oppressive reality. For example, a rigid and oppressive social structure necessarily influences the institutions of child rearing and education within that structure.

Pedagogy of the Oppressed by Paulo Freire

As previously stated, under the “banking model” of education, teachers deposit facts into students, who are rewarded for reciting them, not interrogating them. Questions about why America wages war, why the military is revered, or who benefits from nationalism are not simply discouraged; they are treated as inappropriate or unpatriotic.

What Freire describes is a form of psychological grooming: conditioning the oppressed to internalize the worldview of the oppressor. Children learn that the United States is the global guardian of freedom, that soldiers protect “our way of life,” and that dissenting from these narratives makes you suspect. This is how ideology gets under the skin, long before a person can analyze geopolitics or history, they have already learned what is sacred, what is forbidden, and who is “on their side.”

Michael Parenti, in Inventing Reality, shows that this grooming does not end in the classroom or even in the newsroom. The very state apparatus and institutions we rely on shape our understanding of the world and skew this understanding towards a particular end.

Today corporate leaders and their well-paid deputies dominate the top posts of society’s educational, communicational, artistic, entertainment, legal, and scientific institutions. These institutions are ruled very much like business firms themselves, by boards of directors (or trustees or regents, as they might be called) drawn mostly from the business class or those in the pay of that class. Numbering between ten and twenty-five persons, these boards have final say over the institution’s system of rewards and punishments, its budget and personnel, its investments, and its purposes. They exercise power either by occupying the top executive positions or by hiring and firing those who do. Their power to change the institution’s management if it does not perform as they desire is what gives them control over policy.

Inventing Reality by Michael Parenti

While Parenti argues that the media does not simply relay facts, it constructs interpretations of reality that favor dominant power. The whole of American society emphasizes America’s benevolence, frames foreign conflicts through U.S. strategic interests, and downplays or erases the suffering caused by U.S. military and economic policy. In this sense, our social institutions overall become a continuation of the schooling project, policing the boundaries of acceptable thought.

The psychological grooming of empire, therefore, happens on two fronts (even though this applies to many institutions): schools shape emotional loyalty, and media shape intellectual loyalty. Together, they form what Gramsci called “cultural hegemony”: a system in which the ruling class does not need to enforce obedience through force because the population willingly consents to the dominant worldview. That worldview insists the U.S. is always the hero of history, always the protector of democracy, always the necessary actor in global affairs.

Breaking this conditioning is difficult, not because people lack intelligence, but because they have been denied the tools for critical reflection. Freire warns that without critical consciousness, the oppressed will internalize the values of their oppressors. Chomsky helped show how the media constructs those values. Parenti explains how institutions reproduce them without question. And I am sure educators witness the results firsthand, students who can recite patriotic slogans but cannot explain what the U.S. actually does in the world.

To call this grooming is not an exaggeration. It is a precise description of how an empire sustains itself, not only through bombs and bases but through beliefs.

---

Emotional Investment in Imperial Identity

One of the more overlooked dimensions of U.S. psychological grooming is not merely the information people consume, but the emotional identity they internalize. Empire is not sustained by facts alone; it is sustained by feelings: pride, fear, belonging, resentment, nostalgia. These emotions bind the individual to the imperial project in ways rational argument cannot easily undo.

I call this our imperial identity, the identity we adopt in relation to the imperial projects of a given country. Notice that this identity is inherently nationalistic. For example, US citizens are not only taught that the United States is powerful or moral, but they are also taught that it is theirs. The military is “our troops.” Foreign policy becomes “our interests.” Wars are framed as protecting “our freedom.” Through ritual (the pledge), symbolism (flags in every classroom), and holidays (Veterans Day, Memorial Day, Independence Day), national identity fuses with personal identity. Once fused, critiques of empire do not feel like critiques of a government; they feel like attacks on the self.

We see this in the media's use of first-person plural language to identify with state power. The adversaries of the United States government are “our adversaries”; when the US military intervenes, that translates to “we intervened”; allies of the US government are “our allies”, etc.

While Washington policy-makers argue that US overseas intervention is necessary to protect “our interests,” the press seldom asks what “our interests” are and who among us is actually served by them. As we have seen in regard to Nicaragua, Grenada, Panama, Iraq, and other cases, “defending US interests” usually means imposing a client-state status on nations that might strike a course independent of, and even inimical to, global corporate investment. This is rarely the reason given in the national media. Rather, it is almost always a matter of “stopping aggression,” or “protecting our national security,” or punishing leaders who are said to be dictators, drug dealers, or state terrorists.

Inventing Reality by Michael Parenti

The great psychological trick is to conflate US imperialist interests with the interests of individual citizens. This psychological connection is not organic; it is manufactured. Most Americans do not materially benefit from the Pentagon budget, the CIA’s covert operations, or the overthrow of governments abroad. But because imperial identity makes citizens feel personally invested in the survival of U.S. dominance, the state’s geopolitical projects take on the emotional stakes of personal safety, dignity, and belonging. When empire kills, sanctions, occupies, or destabilizes, the public is taught to interpret these acts as unfortunate necessities carried out in the name of “our security” rather than the enforcement of U.S. capital and military primacy. As Parenti points out, the media rarely asks “security for whom?” or “interests for whom?”, because such questions break the emotional bond between empire and subject.

This bond also produces a powerful defensive reflex. When leftists criticize U.S. imperialism, they often face not logical counterarguments but emotional backlash. Criticizing drone strikes becomes “hating America,” opposing sanctions becomes “supporting dictators,” standing with Palestinians becomes “supporting terrorism.” These reactions are not spontaneous; they are the result of a national identity built on imperial virtue. When the oppressed internalize the values of the oppressor, they come to defend those values as their own, even against their material interests. In the imperial core, this manifests as working-class people defending policies that enrich corporations, devastate foreign nations, and funnel resources away from their own communities all because empire has successfully positioned itself as the embodiment of national pride.

---

Breaking Free from Identity and Grooming

Breaking from imperial identity is rarely a matter of acquiring a few new facts. If imperial ideology were held in place by information alone, a single graph, documentary, or statistic would shatter it. But because imperial identity is emotional, educational, and psychological, the rupture tends to happen under different kinds of pressures.

To break from this imperial identity is difficult, not because Americans are uniquely irrational, but because the identity itself is structured to feel natural and inevitable. The antidote is not simply more information, but a shift in identification. This is where internationalism becomes essential. Internationalism offers a competing identity, one rooted not in national superiority, but in shared struggle against exploitation. It invites U.S. citizens to see themselves not as stakeholders in empire, but as part of a global working class whose liberation is tied to the liberation of workers and oppressed peoples everywhere.

Internationalism does not demand self-hatred or guilt, it demands disidentification with imperial power. It asks us to stop saying “we invaded Iraq” or “we support Israel,” and instead ask the questions Parenti teaches us to ask: who is “we”? who benefits? and who pays the cost? Once those questions are on the table, the emotional spell of imperial identity begins to crack. When Americans recognize that their true allies are not defense contractors or state officials but teachers in Chile, farmers in India, and students in Palestine, the possibility of real solidarity emerges. And in that emergence lies the beginning of anti-imperial struggle, not only against bombs and sanctions, but against the ideological chains that make empire feel like home.

Paulo Freire would call this moment conscientização, the development of critical consciousness. It does not come from being told what is true; it comes from realizing what one has been prevented from seeing. Seeing the fact the others struggle under the boot of imperialism abroad and the strangeling hold of capitalism at home.

It is throught awareness from agitating and education that can hopefully break through emotional identity.

How People Break From U.S. Ideological Grooming

If we look across movements rather than moral prescriptions, there are several recurring conditions under which individuals and communities break from the ideological grooming of empire:

1. Contradiction Between Narrative and Lived Experience.
When the narrative of U.S. benevolence clashes with domestic poverty, medical debt, police violence, or endless war, the myth of America-as-savior becomes harder to sustain. The Black Panther Party articulated this contradiction clearly: domestic oppression and foreign imperialism were not two separate stories, but the same story playing out at different scales. This linkage created pathways for Black Americans to identify not with the U.S. state, but with anti-colonial struggles abroad.

2. Exposure to Suppressed Histories.
Ideological grooming relies on erasure: Guatemala 1954, Indonesia 1965, Chile 1973, Iraq 2003, Gaza 2023. When those histories re-enter public consciousness often through diaspora communities, independent media, or declassified documents the official version of America collapses. There are numerous historical works that function in this register: they return agency to the colonized, interrogate the storytellers, and reveal who benefits from forgetting.

3. Relationships That Cross National or Racial Boundaries.
Internationalism is not only theoretical; it is interpersonal. Solidarity networks, student exchanges, refugee communities, migrant labor, and globalized communication create lived encounters that make U.S. narratives less airtight. Once an American befriends someone who fled a U.S.-backed dictatorship or who lost family to sanctions, empire ceases to be abstract.

4. Moments of Imperial Overreach.
Empires produce disillusionment when they demand too much too much blood, too much treasure, too much justification. The Afghanistan withdrawal produced widespread questioning not out of anti-imperialist enlightenment, but because two decades of war could no longer be reconciled with promised outcomes. Historically, all empires face such limits.

5. Cultural and Intellectual Currents.
Art, film, literature, and scholarship can become solvents for ideology. Parenti’s lectures reached people not through institutional authority but through emotional clarity and humor. Freire influenced educators who recognized domination in their own classrooms. None of these figures “told people what to think”, they widened the field of what could be thought.

These conditions do not guarantee a break from empire, but they demonstrate that ideological grooming is not totalizing. It can be interrupted, destabilized, and replaced by other frameworks, particularly internationalist ones.

And that brings us full circle: internationalism is not simply a political stance; it is an identity alternative to imperial identity. It situates the individual not in relation to “national interests,” but in relation to global structures, shared precarity, and collective dignity. When internationalism takes root, the emotional loyalty that empire once commanded is redirected, not toward another state, but toward humanity itself.

If imperial identity tells us, “Their suffering protects our freedom,” internationalism replies, “Their freedom is bound to ours.”

That shift constitutes the true break from grooming, not just seeing through empire, but ceasing to identify with it.