One of the biggest challenges in developing a political strategy is figuring out what your priorities are. For a long time I have believed that our number one priority should be campaign finance reform. Without removing the corrupting influence of money, nothing else can be accomplished. The proof of this, as if we needed it, is demonstrated by the health care reform farce.
I was able to predict back in January 2009 (actually far sooner) that the health care reform bill that would emerge from Congress would be “another scam health care plan that will not solve a single problem but will please [the Democrats] big contributor[s] in the insurance and health care sectors.” Well, I wasn’t too far off was I? It’s just the way the game is rigged. Wall Street bankers and the insurance companies (which are really the same thing) own Washington. So it wasn’t too hard to predict that meaningful health care reform, the kind that benefits most Americans, was a pipe dream.
But over the years I have begun to realize that there is another foe even greater than money in politics. It is the Public Opinion Complex. This is the many tentacled monster that reaches into the brain of society and sets its norms, shapes its world view, and determines the boundaries of acceptable thought.
Don’t read those too fast. Each is monumental in scope and significance: Sets our norms. Shapes our world view. And determines our boundaries of acceptable thought.
There is nothing more important.
“The manufacture of consent…was supposed to have died with the appearance of democracy…but it has not died out. It has, in fact, improved enormously in technique…under the impact of propaganda, it is no longer plausible to believe in the original dogma of democracy.”
Back in the early 20th Century, the oligarchs had a problem: how could they control society while preserving the illusion of democratic self government. Obviously, the old methods of the sword would not work. They needed a more subtle form of persuasion.
The solution came in the form of new breakthroughs in the study of human psychology and the pioneering ideas of Sigmund Freud’s nephew, Edward Bernays. Freud essentially discovered that people are not solely motivated by rational thought. More often, we are motivated by irrational, subconscious desires.
Bernays pioneered ways to utilize this understanding of human nature to manipulate the masses. But that was only the beginning. Soon, a new technology would be born that would allow the oligarchs to not only manufacture consent, but manufacture society itself. By the time television came along, it was well understood the power of propaganda. Everyone had seen how Hitler had used charisma and,