The Engineering of Consent

The majority of our knowledge comes from the authority of others.  In science,  we can reproduce experiments that allow us to see first hand physical realities otherwise only read about in books, but even in the natural world where we can see and verify many things for ourselves, we still accept a great deal of things on authority, not having investigated them ourselves.  It is one advantage of society that we can know something without having to see it first hand.  There is in us a powerful and necessary inclination to believe what we are told.   We also have an inclination to generally tell the truth for without a large measure of truth in what we tell each other the social order would collapse.  Even the best investigative journalist will have to rely on information that has passed through a social filter, that is never complete and in the telling and retelling is never completely objective.  One way to evaluate information contained in news stories of which we have no first hand knowledge is to look for corroboration among different sources and more importantly to give every story or factual claim a common sense test.  If even the most authoritative news story has elements of the outlandish,  evaluate it,  not on the authority of the source,  but on what is reasonable. 

       I had the opportunity to sit in on a guest lecture given by Edward Bernays who is often called the father of modern public relations.   He was ninety nine years old at the time and talked for over an hour and then autographed posters of himself and gave them out to everyone in the class.  Many students, especially the foreign students, flocked into that classroom to hear him speak.  I had never heard of him before, but in the international business environment of that school, many recognized his name and his accomplishments.  Edward Bernays perfected the art of manipulating public opinion through the placement of news stories and promotions not overtly associated with the interests involved.  He worked behind the scenes to get fashionable and popular woman to smoke cigarettes in public in the 1920s with the deliberate intention to encourage women to smoke.  Most organizations of any size employ professionals to manipulate public perceptions in a manner favorable to their interests.  This includes the military and other government bureaucracies as well as corporations, whole industries and all organized political and financial entities.

   We live under a three tiered system of control.  The first tier is the control and framing of information through the media,  the second tier is the possession of our personal information which can be used to intimidate political opposition or to attack it,  and the final tier is brute force,  the ultimate power of the state being violence.