“Those who manipulate the organized habits and opinions of the masses constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of the country… It remains a fact in almost every act of our daily lives, whether in the sphere of politics or business, in our social conduct or our ethical thinking, we are dominated by this relatively small number of persons…As civilization has become more complex, and as the need for invisible government has been increasingly demonstrated, the technical means have been invented and developed by which opinion may be regimented.”
-Edward Bernays, Propaganda, 1928."There will be, in the next generation or so, a pharmacological method of making people love their servitude, and producing dictatorship without tears, so to speak, producing a kind of painless concentration camp for entire societies, so that people will in fact have their liberties taken away from them, but will rather enjoy it, because they will be distracted from any desire to rebel by propaganda or brainwashing, or brainwashing enhanced by pharmacological methods. And this seems to be the final revolution.”
-Aldous Huxley, lecture to The California Medical School, San Francisco 1961.
“The book (The Proper Study of Mankind by Stuart Chase, 1948.) discusses in some detail the theory that by manipulating society you can change not only society itself but also the people in it. Theoretically, says the book, a society could be completely made over in something like fifteen years, the time it takes to inculcate a new culture into a rising crop of youngsters.” (Hearings; page 141, page 86)
- Special Committee to Investigate Tax-Exempt Foundations and comparable organizations-House Resolution 217, 83rd Congress, 1st Session. Filed with the House of Representatives 83rd Congress, 2nd Session, as Union Calendar N. 926 Report N. 2681.
"We worry about so many dangers to our children--drugs, perverts, bullies--but seldom notice the biggest menace of all: the multibillion-dollar marketing effort aimed at turning the kids into oversexed, status-obsessed, attention-deficient little consumers."
-Barbara Ehrenreich, author of Nickel and Dimed
"The average person in the US watches about four hours of television each day. Over the course of a year, we see roughly twenty five thousand commercials, many of them produced by the world's highest-paid cognitive psychologists. And these heavily produced advertisements are not merely for products, but for a lifestyle based on a consumer mind-set. What they're doing, day in and day out, thirty thousand times a year, is hypnotizing us into seeing ourselves as consumers who want to be entertained rather than as citizens who want to be informed and engaged..."
-Duane Elgin, author of Voluntary Simplicity |
