Wasn't that Huxley's dystopian future? A world tranquilized by pleasure & drugs & completely sex obsessed.
In my opinion we have a melding of both Orwell & Huxley. Pleasure & distraction for the middle classes. The boot heel & prison for the lower classes. It seems to be working quite well for the upper classes.
As much as people say th…
Wasn't that Huxley's dystopian future? A world tranquilized by pleasure & drugs & completely sex obsessed.
In my opinion we have a melding of both Orwell & Huxley. Pleasure & distraction for the middle classes. The boot heel & prison for the lower classes. It seems to be working quite well for the upper classes.
As much as people say they ache for change, it doesn't appear to be very hard to get them to vote for everything but change.
And then bullshit themselves about what they really voted for.
I heard a local liberal talk show host actually say that the country needs someone like Joe Biden, who can think outside the box.
Joe Biden is a lot of things, but an original thinker isn't one of them. He's had 47 years sucking at the public tit. I don't think he's had a good idea in those 47 years.
&, in my opinion, anyone who uses phrases like "think outside the box," don't really even know where "the box" is at let alone how to think outside of it.
If anything, the real prophet of dystopia was Edward Bernays who said,
“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. ...We are governed, our minds are molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of. This is a logical result of the way in which our democratic society is organized. Vast numbers of human beings must cooperate in this manner if they are to live together as a smoothly functioning society. ...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. It is they who pull the wires which control the public mind.”
That was written almost a hundred years ago.
Not much has changed since then & I doubt that much will change anytime soon.
E Bernays as you write was and is an essential part of the story of our modern times. But the tone of what he writes is vastly exaggerated: after all he was a propagandists, and so obviously would blow his own trumpet as loudly as possible. Those described later as the "Hidden persuaders" (V Packard, 1957) are not as powerful as he describes, and neither are the media; they have influence, but very prone to failure too.
JM Keynes wrote something similar but different from E Bernays:
“Practical men who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influence, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist. Madmen in authority, who hear voices in the air, are distilling their frenzy from some academic scribbler of a few years back”
My personal impression is that both underestimate the ultimate source of hold over people's thoughts: theologians and in particular their theories of eschatology. My cod-philosophical reasoning why this happens is that most people are dominated by fear of death which creates anxiety about purpose, and that is rationalized into eschatological theology, one perhaps non-obvious example of which is for example social darwinism, "God/evolution/... wills it" is a powerful way to cope with justifying ourselves. Note: this is an expanded version of M Weber's "The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism" :-).
It is ancient theologians who inspire the theories of those "defunct economist" and "academic scribbler of a few years back", and who provide the mental buttons that propagandists push.
I'd be more prone to agree if I didn't know so many folk who are consumed by irrational Trump hate. I've started asking them to name Trump's crime. No one can seem to do that simple task. It just appears that they've been manipulated towards this irrational Trump hate by the media they consume.
If any religious idea is holding sway here I think it's the idea of the ritual scapegoat.
Trump has become that ritual scapegoat.
There's this entirely irrational idea floating through the Democrat controlled media that alludes to the idea that there will be some huge national epiphany of cooperation now that Trump is gone.
Michael Moore goes on the Stephen Colbert Show and rambles on about how Joe will save our national soul because he went to Catholic school.
Huh?
Priests went to Catholic school. Didn't stop them from diddling altar boys.
Meanwhile Joe's stocking his cabinet with corporate lobbyists & corporate yes men.
One would think Moore would be outraged since the story broke last week that Democrats like Pelosi & Schumer were meeting with Wall Street folk during the primary, strategizing about how to derail Sander's primary momentum.
Meanwhile, in reality, a Texas food bank handed out 600,000 lbs. of food to 25,000 cars a few days ago.
Yet no checks are forthcoming.
We're just at the outer edges of a horror show.
And Joe Biden isn't going to stop it.
I should point out that I don't particularly like Trump.
I mostly agree with what you say (which is the same as Matt Taibbi usually says) as to the substance of the Trump Derangement Syndrome, but I disagree with your thinking that it is media propaganda that created it.
Instead (and Matt Taibbi's writings like "Hate Inc." and academic studies support this) most media don't *change* opinions, but they pander to them. The TDS pandemic has not been created by media propaganda: those infected by TDS were already anti-Trump, they just loved their prejudices to be amplified and stroked by the media propaganda. Same as on the right. It is not so much that the media leads/creates public opinion, but they follow/pander to it.
Sometimes I think that some of the media propaganda in the recent years has been a "deep state" experiment to see just how gullible so many can be when fed deliberately ridiculous and ever-changing conspiracy theories like "russian collusion" and "Salisbury's novichok attack". If so, the wild success of that experiment must have amused them a lot.
Agreed-- I would add to the theories -- that there is a virus that is MUCH worse than anything we have ever seen 🙄-- so we have to lockdown and wait until it goes away (never?). Gullibility and constantly living in a fear state from constant propaganda is being tested -- a giant experiment to see where we can be controlled easily. Or as a medical colleague of mine said " A perfect experiment in natural selection".
I always thought it was gonna be more Huxley than Orwell, but I'm increasingly convinced that it's gonna be more Bradbury/F451, right down to the Boston Dynamics robot dogs hunting you.
"You'll stink like a bobcat for a couple days, but that's all right."
Wasn't that Huxley's dystopian future? A world tranquilized by pleasure & drugs & completely sex obsessed.
In my opinion we have a melding of both Orwell & Huxley. Pleasure & distraction for the middle classes. The boot heel & prison for the lower classes. It seems to be working quite well for the upper classes.
As much as people say they ache for change, it doesn't appear to be very hard to get them to vote for everything but change.
And then bullshit themselves about what they really voted for.
I heard a local liberal talk show host actually say that the country needs someone like Joe Biden, who can think outside the box.
Joe Biden is a lot of things, but an original thinker isn't one of them. He's had 47 years sucking at the public tit. I don't think he's had a good idea in those 47 years.
&, in my opinion, anyone who uses phrases like "think outside the box," don't really even know where "the box" is at let alone how to think outside of it.
If anything, the real prophet of dystopia was Edward Bernays who said,
“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. ...We are governed, our minds are molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of. This is a logical result of the way in which our democratic society is organized. Vast numbers of human beings must cooperate in this manner if they are to live together as a smoothly functioning society. ...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. It is they who pull the wires which control the public mind.”
That was written almost a hundred years ago.
Not much has changed since then & I doubt that much will change anytime soon.
Outside the box-🤣🤣🤣-a box of Depends....
E Bernays as you write was and is an essential part of the story of our modern times. But the tone of what he writes is vastly exaggerated: after all he was a propagandists, and so obviously would blow his own trumpet as loudly as possible. Those described later as the "Hidden persuaders" (V Packard, 1957) are not as powerful as he describes, and neither are the media; they have influence, but very prone to failure too.
JM Keynes wrote something similar but different from E Bernays:
“Practical men who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influence, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist. Madmen in authority, who hear voices in the air, are distilling their frenzy from some academic scribbler of a few years back”
My personal impression is that both underestimate the ultimate source of hold over people's thoughts: theologians and in particular their theories of eschatology. My cod-philosophical reasoning why this happens is that most people are dominated by fear of death which creates anxiety about purpose, and that is rationalized into eschatological theology, one perhaps non-obvious example of which is for example social darwinism, "God/evolution/... wills it" is a powerful way to cope with justifying ourselves. Note: this is an expanded version of M Weber's "The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism" :-).
It is ancient theologians who inspire the theories of those "defunct economist" and "academic scribbler of a few years back", and who provide the mental buttons that propagandists push.
I'd be more prone to agree if I didn't know so many folk who are consumed by irrational Trump hate. I've started asking them to name Trump's crime. No one can seem to do that simple task. It just appears that they've been manipulated towards this irrational Trump hate by the media they consume.
If any religious idea is holding sway here I think it's the idea of the ritual scapegoat.
Trump has become that ritual scapegoat.
There's this entirely irrational idea floating through the Democrat controlled media that alludes to the idea that there will be some huge national epiphany of cooperation now that Trump is gone.
Michael Moore goes on the Stephen Colbert Show and rambles on about how Joe will save our national soul because he went to Catholic school.
Huh?
Priests went to Catholic school. Didn't stop them from diddling altar boys.
Meanwhile Joe's stocking his cabinet with corporate lobbyists & corporate yes men.
One would think Moore would be outraged since the story broke last week that Democrats like Pelosi & Schumer were meeting with Wall Street folk during the primary, strategizing about how to derail Sander's primary momentum.
Meanwhile, in reality, a Texas food bank handed out 600,000 lbs. of food to 25,000 cars a few days ago.
Yet no checks are forthcoming.
We're just at the outer edges of a horror show.
And Joe Biden isn't going to stop it.
I should point out that I don't particularly like Trump.
Didn't vote for Trump.
Or Biden for that matter.
Just trying to be as non-partisan as I can be.
As a product of a Jesuit HS, I say dioscesan Catholic schools are the biggest peddlers of idiocy out there.......
I mostly agree with what you say (which is the same as Matt Taibbi usually says) as to the substance of the Trump Derangement Syndrome, but I disagree with your thinking that it is media propaganda that created it.
Instead (and Matt Taibbi's writings like "Hate Inc." and academic studies support this) most media don't *change* opinions, but they pander to them. The TDS pandemic has not been created by media propaganda: those infected by TDS were already anti-Trump, they just loved their prejudices to be amplified and stroked by the media propaganda. Same as on the right. It is not so much that the media leads/creates public opinion, but they follow/pander to it.
Sometimes I think that some of the media propaganda in the recent years has been a "deep state" experiment to see just how gullible so many can be when fed deliberately ridiculous and ever-changing conspiracy theories like "russian collusion" and "Salisbury's novichok attack". If so, the wild success of that experiment must have amused them a lot.
We can agree to disagree.
Although I'm behind your last paragraph 100%.
Maybe I'm personalizing this too much.
I didn't like Trump but, as a general rule, I don't watch television.
Or troll through social media.
So my dislike never reached hysterical proportions.
I even started defending him towards the end of his run even though I don't like him or agree with him.
Having said that I'm beginning to think I agree with you more than I think.
Agreed-- I would add to the theories -- that there is a virus that is MUCH worse than anything we have ever seen 🙄-- so we have to lockdown and wait until it goes away (never?). Gullibility and constantly living in a fear state from constant propaganda is being tested -- a giant experiment to see where we can be controlled easily. Or as a medical colleague of mine said " A perfect experiment in natural selection".
I always thought it was gonna be more Huxley than Orwell, but I'm increasingly convinced that it's gonna be more Bradbury/F451, right down to the Boston Dynamics robot dogs hunting you.
"You'll stink like a bobcat for a couple days, but that's all right."