False Consciousness pt.1, 2006.
 False Consciousness pt.1, 2006.
“The conscious and intelligent manipulation
of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in
democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute
an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country… Whatever
attitude one chooses toward this condition, 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 the relatively
small number of persons…who understand the mental processes and social patterns
of the masses…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.” -Walter
Lippmann, Public Opinion, 1922, page 158. "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, cover blurb for Born to Buy: The Commercialized Child and the New Consumer Culture, Juliet B. Schor, 2004. "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, interview with Arnie Cooper, The Sun Magazine, August 2002, page 8. "What people are interested in is not always what is to their interest; the troubles they are aware of are not always the ones that beset them...It is not only that [people] can be unconscious of their situations; they are often falsely conscious of them." -C. Wright Mills, quoted in Dirty Truths, Michael Parenti, 1996, page 209. “In the midst of increasing mechanization and technological organization, propaganda is simply the means used to prevent these things from being felt as too oppressive and to persuade man to submit with good grace. When man will be fully adapted to this technological society, when he will end by obeying with enthusiasm, convinced of the excellence of what he is forced to do, the constraint will no longer be felt by him.” -Jacques
Ellul, Propaganda: The Formation of Men’s Attitudes, 1962, page xviii. "The average citizen is the world's most efficient censor. His own mind is the greatest barrier between him and the facts. His own 'logic-proof compartments', his own absolutism are the obstacles which prevent him from seeing in terms of experience and thought rather than in terms of group reaction." -Edward L. Bernays, Crystallizing Public Opinion, 1923, page 122. "The people want to be deceived, let them be deceived." -Cardinal Carlo Caraffe "The frightening thing is that it has become clear now that simply recognizing the artificiality of something does not ensure immunity to that thing. Simply knowing that you're an object of propaganda is not enough, in itself, to armor one against the appeals of propaganda. That's really the message of 1984...everybody's aware that the propaganda is ongoing --that's what doublethink is, that's what the concept of doublethink means: with one part of your mind you can see that it's just a crock, and you don't fall for it, but with the other part of that same mind, you adhere blindly to it." -Mark Crispin Miller, quoted in Consuming Images, part one of The Public Mind: Image and Reality in America, Bill Moyers, 1989. "High-tech mass persuasion has achieved levels of sophistication far beyond what most individuals imagine. Most still desperately cling to the delusion that they think for themselves, determine their own destinies, exercise both individual and collective free will (the great myth that underlies democratic ideology); that advertising works in the interest of the consumer; and perhaps the greatest self-deception of all- that they can easily discriminate between fantasy and reality." -Wilson
Bryan Key, The Age of Manipulation, 1989, page "Certainement qui est en droit de vous rendre absurde est en droit de vous rendre injuste." -Voltaire, Questions sur les miracles, 1765. 1 comment | Post comment
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