Abused By Illusions

"It is not the case as the naive might think that indoctrination is inconsistent with democracy, rather . . . it's the essence of democracy. The point is that in a military state or a feudal state or what we would now call a totalitarian state, it doesn't much matter because you've got a bludgeon over their heads and you can control what they do. But when the state loses the bludgeon, when you can't control people by force, and when the voice of the people can be heard you have this problem—it may make people so curious and so arrogant that they don't have the humility to submit to a civil rule, and therefore you have to control what people think. And the standard way to do this is to resort to what in more honest days used to be called propaganda, manufacture of consent, creation of necessary illusion. Various ways of either marginalizing the public or reducing them to apathy in some fashion."

—Dr. Noam Chomsky, from Manufacturing Consent , censored ex parte from WUTK radio's Alternative Nation, Summer 2001.

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