I got the comment below from a smart, grown-up (over 30) American. I didn’t approve it. I decided instead to give it its own post.
I hate politics. It is honestly one of the few times in my life that I feel stupid, I do not understand anything and when someone tries to explain policies to me, I swear my brain shuts off.
This is such stuff as the government’s wet dreams are made on.
Did you know that ever since the 20s, the American government has perpetrated a special kind of manipulation on the American public to distract and control them? It’s true. It’s because there were (and still are) a lot of people who, deep down, think that handing power (in the form of Democracy) to the seething masses is a bad idea.
When Woodrow Wilson saw how well pro-American propaganda worked overseas in WWI, he decided to start a propaganda campaign at home to keep people in line. He gave Sigmund Freud’s American nephew, Edward Bernays, the job. Bernays called what he was doing public relations (because propaganda left a bad taste in the mouth).
Bernays decided that what they needed to do to keep the mob fat and happy was to artificially create need by appealing to all those baser instincts Uncle Siggy talked about, and then give them the means to satisfy their potentially disruptive urges. He took marketing in a completely new direction. Before the war, ordinary people only bought things they needed, when they needed them. Bernays’ PR was about getting people to want things they didn’t need and to buy them.
It worked. In 1928, a newly elected President Hoover congratulated a group of advertisers and public relations men, saying “You have taken over the job of creating desire and have transformed people into constantly moving happiness machines. Machines which have become the key to economic progress.”
What does this have to do with my reader’s comment? Almost 90 years and two generations into that government/corporate PR campaign, Joe America is an automaton. His primary preoccupation is satisfying his artificially created needs. He’s so busy doing that that he doesn’t have the time or motivation to get informed or pay attention to what his government’s doing. Joe doesn’t think for himself. The only dynamic he understands is one in which someone tells him what to think or what he needs, whether it’s the latest flavor of designer coffee, a tax cut, or a war.
That’s exactly how They want it.
There’s a fascinating BBC documentary series called The Century of the Self that chronicles the history of this phenomenon. The points I bring up in this post (and a lot more) are covered in the first episode. You can read the complete transcript of that episode or watch all four of them here.
Watch it. It’ll blow your mind. (That’s a good thing.)
Thanks to sknob for the link to the BBC series.
I am glad I am someone’s wet dream. * winks *
But you are right you know…we should all be more informed about our government and our leaders and their motives and agendas….but dear Gods, do all Politicians have to be so damn boring….*le sigh*
Claudia, I admire your courage (but you knew that).
Politicians are mostly boring, and you can’t believe what they say anyway.
But it’s easy to get excited about issues, even though they can be complicated. That’s a good place to start.
Americans are victims of the propaganda machine, but we all have free will and some of us have it in us to unplug from the Matrix.
Thought of you…….
There was a Chemistry professor in a large college that had some exchange students in the class. One day while the class was in the lab the Prof noticed one younger man (exchange student) who kept rubbing his back, and stretching as if his back hurt.
The professor asked the younger man what was the matter. The student told him he had a bullet lodged in his back. He had been shot while fighting communists in his native country who were trying to overthrow his country’s government and install a new communist government.
In the midst of his story he looked at the professor and asked a strange question. He asked, ‘Do you know how to catch wild pigs?’
The professor thought it was a joke and asked for the punch line. The young man said this was no joke. ‘You catch wild pigs by finding a suitable place in the woods and putting corn on the ground. The pigs find it and begin to come everyday to eat the free corn. When they are used to coming every day, you put a fence down one side of the place where they are used to coming. When they get used to the fence, they begin to eat the corn again and you put up another side of the fence. They get used to that and start to eat again. You continue until you have all four sides of the fence up with a gate in The last side. The pigs, who are used to the free corn, start to come through the gate to eat, you slam the gate on them and catch the whole herd.
Suddenly the wild pigs have lost their freedom. They run around and around inside the fence, but they are caught. Soon they go back to eating the free corn. They are so used to it that they have forgotten how to forage in the woods for themselves, so they accept their captivity.
The young man then told the professor that is exactly what he sees happening to America . The government keeps pushing us toward socialism and keeps spreading the free corn out in the form of programs such as supplemental income, tax credit for unearned income, tobacco subsidies, dairy subsidies, payments not to plant crops (CRP), welfare, medicine, drugs, etc. while we continually lose our freedoms – just a little at a time.
One should always remember: There is no such thing as a free Lunch! A politician will never provide a service for you cheaper than you can do yourself.
If you see all of this wonderful government ‘help’ is a problem confronting the future of democracy in America, you might want to send this on to your friends. If you think the free ride is essential to your way of life then you will probably delete this email, but God help you when the gate slams shut!
In this ‘very important’ election year, listen closely to what the candidates are promising you – just maybe you will be able to tell who is about to slam the gate on America.
‘A government big enough to give you everything you want, is big enough to take away everything you have.’ – Thomas Jefferson
Hi Claudia. I’m glad you posted this.
This is a facile and very weak argument against things like taxes and universal health care from a Republican, I’m guessing. He’s using a tactic common with the right: “politics of fear.” Nothing works better to keep the herd calm and malleable. E-mails like this show that people in the US have integrated the tactic so thoroughly that they use it to police themselves…
The Bush administration used this tactic after 9/11 to strip civil liberties right and left (illegal wiretapping of citizens, habeas corpus). I don’t know where this guy gets off suggesting that anything the Democrats could do would be worse in terms of removing freedoms… He just sounds terribly ignorant, I’m afraid, like most of them do.
The Democrats (and socialists in France) want to level the playing field. Their goal is to make it possible for everyone to have a reasonable standard of living by meeting esssential needs like health coverage.
America is nowhere near becoming socialist (unfortunately). In France, the socialism is ALL ABOUT protecting rights/civil liberties/quality of life of citizens and workers. That goal informs absolutely every program and policy of the socialists in France.
Socialism is only a bad word in America, where people don’t really know what it means. Americans’ attitudes towards it are a vestige of the Cold War and McCarthyism, during which time the politics of fear were used to brainwash the nation into thinking that socialism was the same as communism and that those political ideologies were evil, evil, evil. (And atheist! Sinners! Heathens!) And that is still the “idée reçue.” Many, even most, Americans just accept that as a fact, don’t question, and don’t take the initiative to delve deeper into it to learn more. Certainly communism is a failed experiment, but the basic idea of everybody being equal isn’t a bad thing.
Although I don’t mention the politics of fear in this post, it is another example of the kind of psychological manipulation government uses to control the masses.
I could easily see the pig and corn metaphor used to represent the consumerist brainwashing I talk about in the post.
Thanks again for this!
[...] and the marketing community want a piece of it. Just what we need is to give them more tools to manipulate us [...]
[...] is such a strong tendency in Americans to swallow the sound bite and look no further, thanks to nearly 90 years of conditioning, and an equally strong tendency to align themselves along ideological lines that they barely [...]