C Wright Mills Quotes

Let every man be his own methodologist, let every man be his own theorist

Neither the life of an individual nor the history of a society can be understood without understanding both.

Freedom is measured by the amount of control you have over the things upon which you are dependant.

People with advantages are loathe to believe that they just happen to be people with advantages. They come readily to define themselves as inherently worthy of what they possess; they come to believe themselves 'naturally' elite; and, in fact, to imagine their possessions and their privileges as natural extensions of their own elite selves.

P3- neither the life of an individual nor the history off a society can be understood without understanding both

p5-what they need..is a quality of mind that will help them to use information and to develop reason in order to achieve lucid summations of what is going on in the world and of what may be happening within themselves. It this this quality..what may be called the sociological imagination.

Those in authority within institutions and social structures attempt to justify their rule by linking it, as if it were a necessary consequence, with moral symbols, sacred emblems, or legal formulae which are widely believed and deeply internalized. These central conceptions may refer to a god or gods, the 'votes of the majority,' the 'will of the people,' the 'aristocracy of talents or wealth,' to the 'divine right of kings' or to the alleged extraordinary endowment of the person of the ruler himself.

P6-the sociological imagination enables us to grasp history and biography and the relations between the two within sociey.

The idea that the millionaire finds nothing but a sad, empty place at the top of this society; the idea that the rich do not know what to do with their money; the idea that the successful become filled up with futility, and that those born successful are poor and little as well as rich - the idea, in short, of the disconsolateness of the rich - is, in the main, merely a way by which those who are not rich reconcile themselves to the fact. Wealth in America is directly gratifying and directly leads to many further gratifications. To be truly rich is to possess the means of realizing in big ways one's little whims and fantasies and sicknesses....

The more we understand what is happening in the world, the more frustrated we often become, for our knowledge leads to feelings of powerlessness. We feel that we are living in a world in which the citizen has become a mere spectator or a forced actor, and that our personal experience is politically useless and our political will a minor illusion. Very often, the fear of total permanent war paralyzes the kind of morally oriented politics, which might engage our interests and our passions. We sense the cultural mediocrity around us-and in us-and we know that ours is a time when, within and between all the nations of the world, the levels of public sensibilities have sunk below sight; atrocity on a mass scale has become impersonal and official; moral indignation as a public fact has become extinct or made trivial.

The very shaping of history now outpaces the ability of men to orient themselves in accordance with cherished values. Even when they do not panic men often sense that older ways off feeling and thinking have collapsed and that newer beginnings are ambiguous to the point of stasis.

Whether one deems our present society wondrous or awful or both, history reveals how we arrived at this point. Understanding our past is central to our ability to understand ourselves and the world around us. We need to know our history, and according to sociologist C. Wright Mills, we know we do.8

the more aware they become,however vaugely,of ambitions & of threats which transcend their immediate locales, the more trapped they seem to feel.

p4- the history that now effects everyman is world history

Nie można zrozumieć ani życia jednostki, ani życia społeczeństwa, nie odnosząc jednego do drugiego.

If we accept the Greek’s definition of the idiot as an altogether private man, then we must conclude that many citizens of many societies are indeed idiots.

Once war was considered the business of soldiers, international relations the concern of diplomats. But now that war has become seemingly total and seemingly permanent, the free sport of kings has become the forced and internecine business of people, and diplomatic codes of honor between nations have collapsed. Peace in no longer serious; only war is serious. Every man and every nation is either friend or foe, and the idea of enmity becomes mechanical, massive, and without genuine passion. When virtually all negotiation aimed at peaceful agreement is likely to be seen as 'appeasement,' if not treason, the active role of the diplomat becomes meaningless; for diplomacy becomes merely a prelude to war an interlude between wars, and in such a context the diplomat is replaced by the warlord.

The truth about the nature and the power of the elite is not some secret which men of affairs know but will not tell. ... No matter how great their actual power, they tend to be less acutely aware of it than of the resistance of others to its use.

p11- when people cherish some set of values and do not feel any threat to them they experience well being 12- we are frequently told that the problems of our decade.. have shifted from the external realm of economics and now have to do with the quality of individual life.

Xiii- men must...find their way from false to true consciousness, from their immediate to their real interest. They can do so only if they live in need of changing their way of life, of denying the positive, of refusing, it is precisely this need which the established society manages to repress using the scientific conquest of nature for the scientific conquest of man. Xvi-the technological society is a system of domination.

Among the writers he was reading when he wrote these stories in the 1950s—and he was reading all the time, all kinds of books, dozens and dozens of them—were David Riesman, Saul Bellow, Bernard Malamud, John Cheever, James Baldwin, Randall Jarrell, Sigmund Freud, Paul Goodman, William Styron, C. Wright Mills, Martin Buber, George Orwell, Suzanne Langer, F. R. Leavis, David Daiches, Edmund Wilson, Alfred Kazin, Ralph Ellison, Erich Fromm, Joseph Conrad, Dylan Thomas, Sean O’Casey, e. e. cummings—who collectively represented a republic of discourse in which he aspired to

Those in the grip of the methodological inhibition often refuse to say anything about modern society unless it has been through the fine little mill of The Statistical Ritual. It is usual to say that what they produce is true even if unimportant. I do not agree with this; more and more I wonder how true it is. I wonder how much exactitude, or even pseudo-precision, is here confused with 'truth'; and how much abstracted empiricism is taken as the only 'empirical' manner of work.

To have mastered "method" and "theory" is to have become a self-conscious thinker, a man at work and aware of assumptions and the implications of whatever he is about. To be mastered by "method" or "theory" is simply to be kept from working, from trying, that is, to find out about something that is going on in the world.

In so far as he [sic] is concerned with liberal, that is to say liberating, education, his public role has two goals: What he ought to do for the individual is to turn personal troubles and concerns into social issues and problems open to reason – his aim is to help the individual become a self-educating man, who only then would be reasonable and free. What he ought to do for the society is to combat all those forces which are destroying genuine publics ... his aim is to help build and to strengthen self-cultivating publics.

What ordinary men are directly aware of & what they try to do is bounded by the private orbits which they live -pg 3

One great lesson that we can learn from its systematic absence in the work of the grand theorists is that every self-conscious thinker must at all times be aware of — and hence be able to control — the levels of abstraction on which he is working. The capacity to shuttle between levels of abstraction, with ease and with clarity, is a signal mark of the imaginative and systematic thinker.

Wiele ważnych problemów publicznych, podobnie jak wiele prywatnych kłopotów, opisuje się w kategoriach „psychiatrycznych” – często, jak się wydaje, w żałosnej próbie ucieczki przed wielkimi problemami i pytaniami nowoczesnego społeczeństwa.

We do not meet one another as persons in the several aspects of our total life, but know one another only fractionally, as the man who fixes the car, or as that girl who serves our lunch. The humanistic reality of others does not, cannot, come through.

When a society is industrialized, a peasant becomes a worker, a feudal lord is liquidated or becomes a businessman. When classes rise or fall a man is employed or unemployed; when the rate of investment goes up or down, a man takes new heart of goes broke. When wars happen, an insurance salesman becomes a rocket launcher; a store clerk, a radar ma; a wife lives alone; a child grows up without a father. Neither the life of an individual nor the history of a society can be understood without understanding other. - pg 3

What I have been trying to say to intellectuals, preachers, scientists- as well as more generally to publics- can be put into one sentence: drop the liberal rhetoric and the conservative default; they are now parts of one and the same official line; transcend that line.

Among the means of power that now prevail is the power to manage and to manipulate the consent of men. That we do not know the limits of such power—and that we hope it does have limits—does not remove the fact that much power today is successfully employed without the sanction of the reason or the conscience of the obedient.

Sometimes, by the way, you may find that a book does not really have any themes. It is just a string of topics, surrounded, of course, by methodological introductions to methodology, and theoretical introductions to theory. These are quite indispensable to the writing of books by men without ideas. And so is lack of intelligibility.

The idea of the normative order that is set forth, and the way it is handled by grand theorists, leads us to assume that virtually all power is legitimated. In fact: that in the social system, ‘the maintenance of the complementarity of role-expectations, once established, is not problematical.… No special mechanisms are required for the explanation of the maintenance of complementary interaction-orientation.

(“Becoming cultured” and “being adjusted to the social group” are taken almost as synonymous.) Either way, it follows that you can teach people anything; you can adapt them to anything if you use the right techniques of “socializing” or “communicating.” The essence of “human nature” is to be pretty indefinitely malleable. “Man,” as C. Wright Mills suggests, is what suits a particular type of society in a particular historical stage. This

Much that has passed for ‘science’ is now felt to be dubious philosophy; much that is held to be ‘real science’ is often felt to provide only confused fragments of the realities among which men live. Men of science, it is widely felt, no longer try to picture reality as a whole or to present a true outline of human destiny. Moreover, ‘science’ seems to many less a creative ethos and a manner of orientation than a set of Science Machines, operated by technicians and controlled by economic and military men who neither embody nor understand science as ethos and orientation. In the meantime, philosophers who speak in the name of science often transform it into ‘scientism,’ making out its experience to be identical with human experience, and claiming that only by its method can the problems of life be solved. With all this, many cultural workmen have come to feel that ‘science’ is a false and pretentious Messiah, or at the very least a highly ambiguous element in modern civilization.

Yet men do not usually define the roubles they endure in terms of historical change and institutional contradiction. The well-being they enjoy, they do not usually impute to the big ups and downs of the societies in which they live. Seldom aware of the intricate connection between the patterns of their own lives and the course of world history, ordinary men do not usually know what this connection means for the kinds of men they are becoming and for the kinds of history-making in which they take part. - pg 4

To reflect upon the present as history is to understand that history may now be made by default. Understanding that, we no longer need accept as “necessary” the lesser evil. We no longer need to accept historical fate, for fate is a feature of specific kinds of social structure, of irresponsible systems of power. These systems can be changed. Fate can be transcended We must come to understand that while the domain of fate is diminishing, the exercise of responsibility is also diminishing and in fact becoming organized as irresponsibility. We must hold men of power variously responsible for pivotal events, we mush unmask their pretentions- and often their own mistaken convictions- that they are not responsible. Our politics, in short, must be the politics of responsibility.

Even male children of affluent white families think that history as taught in high school is “too neat and rosy.” 6 African American, Native American, and Latino students view history with a special dislike. They also learn history especially poorly. Students of color do only slightly worse than white students in mathematics. If you’ll pardon my grammar, nonwhite students do more worse in English and most worse in history.7 Something intriguing is going on here: surely history is not more difficult for minorities than trigonometry or Faulkner. Students don’t even know they are alienated, only that they “don’t like social studies” or “aren’t any good at history.” In college, most students of color give history departments a wide berth. Many history teachers perceive the low morale in their classrooms. If they have a lot of time, light domestic responsibilities, sufficient resources, and a flexible principal, some teachers respond by abandoning the overstuffed textbooks and reinventing their American history courses. All too many teachers grow disheartened and settle for less. At least dimly aware that their students are not requiting their own love of history, these teachers withdraw some of their energy from their courses. Gradually they end up going through the motions, staying ahead of their students in the textbooks, covering only material that will appear on the next test. College teachers in most disciplines are happy when their students have had significant exposure to the subject before college. Not teachers in history. History professors in college routinely put down high school history courses. A colleague of mine calls his survey of American history “Iconoclasm I and II,” because he sees his job as disabusing his charges of what they learned in high school to make room for more accurate information. In no other field does this happen. Mathematics professors, for instance, know that non-Euclidean geometry is rarely taught in high school, but they don’t assume that Euclidean geometry was mistaught. Professors of English literature don’t presume that Romeo and Juliet was misunderstood in high school. Indeed, history is the only field in which the more courses students take, the stupider they become. Perhaps I do not need to convince you that American history is important. More than any other topic, it is about us. Whether one deems our present society wondrous or awful or both, history reveals how we arrived at this point. Understanding our past is central to our ability to understand ourselves and the world around us. We need to know our history, and according to sociologist C. Wright Mills, we know we do.8

But his opinion that Sonia should enter politics was also based on his conviction that without a Nehru-Gandhi family member at the top, the Congress party would splinter and wither away. This view was also encouraged by members of the Delhi durbar—a ‘power elite’, to use sociologist C.Wright Mill’s term, comprising civil servants, diplomats, editors, intellectuals and business leaders who had worked with or been close to the regimes of Nehru, Indira and Rajiv. Some of them inhabited the many trusts and institutions that the Nehru-Gandhi family controlled. They had all profited in one way or another, over the years, from their loyalty to the Congress’s ‘first family’.

Kekuasaan adalah dominasi. Dominasi berarti kemampuan untuk memaksakan kehendak walaupun orang lain menentangnya (C. Wright Mills, 1956)

Kekuasaan itu mengandung paksaan dan dominasi, sehingga siapapun yang akan berkuasa akan berusaha memaksakan kehendaknya untuk mencapai kekuasaan termasuk dalam perebutan kekuasaan (C. Wright Mills, 1956)

By 1955 thirteen states had passed laws regulating the publication, distribution, and sale of comic books. Leading intellectuals, including C. Wright Mills, praised Wertham's efforts.70

Exilic Intellectuals 1 "It is part of morality not to be at home in one's home." —Theodore W. Adorno "[I am] the outlander, not only regionally, but down bone deep for good...my Texas grandfather has something to do with that." —C. Wright Mills Edward Said's Representations of the Intellectual must be considered a landmark in radically reawakening the crucial consciousness of that critical community of counter-interpreters we have habitually called "The Intellectuals." It appears that the problem of intellectuals in the United States is reformulated periodically as a crucial barometer of issues and concerns centered around, but much beyond, the immediate conception of this social category. It was in Democracy in America that Tocqueville opened his second, theoretically more significant, volume with the startling pronouncement that: I think that in no country in the civilized world is less attention paid to philosophy than in the United States. The Americans have no philosophical school of their own, and they care but little for all the schools into which Europe is divided, the very names of which are scarcely known to them. 2

Sincerity” is detrimental to one’s job, until the rules of salesmanship and business become a “genuine” aspect of oneself. —C. Wright Mills

In 1951, the Columbia University sociologist C. Wright Mills published a study titled White Collar: The American Middle Classes.26 Like Ronald Coase, Mills was fascinated by the rise of large managerial corporations. He argued that these firms, in their pursuit of scale and efficiency, had created a vast tier of workers who carried out repetitive, mechanistic tasks that stifled their imagination and, ultimately, their ability to fully participate in society. In short, Mills argued, the typical corporate worker was alienated. For many, that alienation was captured in the warning printed on the Hollerith punch cards that, thanks to IBM and other data processing firms, became ubiquitous symbols and agents of bureaucratized life during the 1950s and 1960s: “Do Not Fold, Spindle, or Mutilate.

El humanista, por ejemplo, puede concebir la élite no como un plano o categoría social, sino como el conjunto de los individuos dispersos que intentan superarse a sí mismos y que, en consecuencia, son más nobles, más eficientes, como hechos de mejor clase. No importa que sean pobres o ricos, que ocupen altas o bajas posiciones, que sean aclamados o despreciados: son élite por la clase de individuos que son. El resto de la población es masa, la cual, según esta concepción, yace indolente en una incómoda mediocridad.

When we consider what a word stands for, we are dealing with its semantic aspects; when we consider it in relation to other words, we are dealing with its syntactic features.5 I introduce these shorthand terms because they provide an economical and precise way to make this point: Grand theory is drunk on syntax, blind to semantics. Its practitioners do not truly understand that when we define a word we are merely inviting others to use it as we would like it to be used; that the purpose of definition is to focus argument upon fact, and that the proper result of good definition is to transform argument over terms into disagreements about fact, and thus open arguments to further inquiry.

Four days a week, Miss Baez and her fifteen students meet at the school for lunch: potato salad, Kool-Aid, and hot dogs broiled on a portable barbecue. After lunch they do ballet exercises to Beatles records, and after that they sit around on the bare floor beneath a photomural of Cypress Point and discuss their reading: Gandhi on Nonviolence, Louis Fischer’s Life of Mahatma Gandhi, Jerome Frank’s Breaking the Thought Barrier, Thoreau’s On Civil Disobedience, Krishnamurti’s The First and Last Freedom and Think on These Things, C. Wright Mills’s The Power Elite, Huxley’s Ends and Means, and Marshall McLuhan’s Understanding Media.

My conception stands opposed to social science as a set of bureaucratic techniques which inhibit social inquiry by ‘methodolocigal’ pretentions, which congest such work by obscurantist conceptions, or which trivialize it by concern with minor problems unconnected with publicly relevant issues.

The fact, just noted, that sociology has often won its academic right to existence in opposition to other departments may have increased the necessity for textbooks. Now, textbooks organize facts in order to make them available to youngsters, not around the growing points of research and discovery. Accordingly textbooks readily become a rather mechanical gathering of facts to illustrate more or less settled conceptions. The research possibilities of new ideas, the interplay of ideas and facts, are not usually considered very important in putting accumulated detail into some sort of textbook order.

their reading: Gandhi on Nonviolence, Louis Fischer’s Life of Mahatma Gandhi, Jerome Frank’s Breaking the Thought Barrier, Thoreau’s On Civil Disobedience, Krishnamurti’s The First and Last Freedom and Think on These Things, C. Wright Mills’s The Power Elite, Huxley’s Ends and Means, and Marshall McLuhan’s Understanding Media. On the fifth day,

Today, of course, many people who are disengaged from prevailing allegiances have not acquired new ones, and so are inattentive to political concerns of any kind. They are neither radical nor reactionary. They are inactionary. If we accept the Greek’s definition of the idiot as an altogether private man, then we must conclude that many citizens of many societies are indeed idiots.

Polykarp Kusch, Nobel Prize-winning physicist, has declared that there is no ‘scientific method,’ and that what is called by that name can be outlined for only quite simple problems. Percy Bridgman, another Nobel Prize-winning physicist, goes even further: ‘There is no scientific method as such, but the vital feature of the scientist’s procedure has been merely to do his utmost with his mind, no holds barred.’ ‘The mechanics of discovery,’ William S. Beck remarks, ‘are not known… I think that the creative process is so closely tied in with the emotional structure of an individual… that… it is a poor subject for generalization….

Maybe it does require an inferential leap to arrive at the assumption that wealthy and powerful elites seek to dominate their societies politically and economically in order to further aggrandize their wealth and power. The “leap” entails assuming that elites enjoy their status—a social circumstance at which they or their ancestors arrived intentionally and which they seek to maintain or improve. As C. Wright Mills pointed out, elites of power are constrained or empowered by their respective historical circumstances.

To live and strive in modern America is to participate in a series of morally fraught systems. If a family’s entire financial livelihood depends on the value of its home, it’s not hard to understand why that family would oppose anything that could potentially lower its property values, like a proposal to develop an affordable housing complex in the neighborhood. If an aging couple’s nest egg depends on how the stock market performs, it’s not hard to see why that couple would support legislation designed to yield higher returns, even if that means shortchanging workers. Social ills—segregation, exploitation—can be motivated by bigotry and selfishness as well as by the best of intentions, such as protecting our children. Especially protecting our children. These arrangements create what the postwar sociologist C. Wright Mills called “structural immorality” and what the political scientist Jamila Michener more recently labeled exploitation “on a societal level.”[27] We are connected, members of a shared nation and a shared economy, where the advantages of the rich often come at the expense of the poor. But that arrangement is not inevitable or permanent. It was made by human hands and can be unmade by them.

Por lo que ya hemos hecho, independientemente de lo que pueda suceder después, estamos seguros de que "la historia nos absolverá". Pero ni la historia ni nuestras biografías individuales están todavía consumadas y sus relaciones mutuas están aún en difícil equilibrio. Estamos cobrando conciencia de esto a medida que nuestra revolución marcha adelante. Ni tú yanqui ni nosotros ni nadie puede saber todavía si vamos a estar a la altura de las terribles y gloriosas responsabilidades que nos han tocado.

Ours is a time of uneasiness and indifference—not yet formulated in such ways as to permit the work of reason and the play of sensibility. Instead of troubles—defined in terms of values and threats—there is often the misery of vague uneasiness; instead of explicit issues there is often merely the beat feeling that all is somehow not right. Neither the values threatened nor whatever threatens them has been stated; in short, they have not been carried to the point of decision. Much less have they been formulated as problems of social science.

Gandhi on Nonviolence, Louis Fischer’s Life of Mahatma Gandhi, Jerome Frank’s Breaking the Thought Barrier, Thoreau’s On Civil Disobedience, Krishnamurti’s The First and Last Freedom and Think on These Things, C. Wright Mills’s The Power Elite, Huxley’s Ends and Means, and Marshall McLuhan’s Understanding Media.

earlier generations the main chance,

we also encounter the issue of accumulation through dispossession. As all of this is going on, producers, workers, peasants, and so forth, are displaced from their own means of production, which is why we see the growth, enormous growth, of slum populations around the world. These are people being thrown off the land. These are people being deprived of their means of subsistence and production. As capital takes over resources, whether those are land resources or other resources, people are displaced. This becomes part of the refugee stream that we see, in addition to conflict and war and so forth. But these processes of accumulation through dispossession are entailing the planet’s population in the capitalist sphere, whether they are directly, as I say, exploited by capitalism or not. C. Wright Mills in his book The Power Elite describes a phenomenon that he calls “the higher immorality,” in which, he says, “in a civilization so thoroughly business-penetrated as America,” money becomes “the one unambiguous marker of success, the sovereign American value” (Mills 1956) You can begin to see how this operates. We become a society, as Mills argues, of organized irresponsibility, where the legal often supplants the moral. We see this in US society and in other places, where litigiousness is a marker of how the society works. Whether something is right or wrong is not nearly as relevant as whether it’s legal or illegal, and sometimes illegality doesn’t even really matter that much. But the idea that we bump up against—this whole notion of morality versus legality—is derived from, as at least Wright Mills argues, this notion of higher immorality.

In the slum countries of the world today, what are they saying? The rich Americans, they pay attention only to violence- and to money. You don’t care what they say, American? Good for you. Still, they may insist; things are no longer under the old control; you’re not getting it straight, American: your country- it would seem- may well become the target of a world hatred the like of which the easy-going Americans have never dreamed. Neutralists and Pacifists and Unilateralists and that confusing variety of Leftists around the world- all those tens of millions of people, of course they are misguided, absolutely controlled by small conspiratorial groups of trouble-makers, under direct orders from Moscow and Peking. Diabolically omnipotent, it is /they/ who create all this messy unrest. It is /they/ who what given the tens of millions the absurd idea that they shouldn’t want to remain, or to become, the seat of American nuclear bases- those gay little outposts of American civilization. So now they don’t want U-2’s on their territory; so now they want to contract out of the American military machine; they want to be neutral among the crazy big antagonists. And they don’t want their own societies to be militarized. But take heart, American: you won’t have time to get really bored with your friends abroad: they won’t be your friends much longer. You don’t need /them/; it will all go away; don’t let them confuse you.

The ‘revolving door’ of people and money perpetuates what C. Wright Mills described as the ‘military metaphysic’, a militaristic definition of reality justifying ‘a permanent war economy’.8 This, despite the warning of the former General, Dwight D. Eisenhower, in his farewell address as President of the United States: [with] the conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry … in the councils of government we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist. We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes.

Have not these chief executives carried through a silent revolution, a managerial revolution from the top, and has not their revolution transformed the very meaning of property? Are not, in short, the old expropriators now expropriated by their salaried managers? Maybe the chief executives are trustees for a variety of economic interests, but what are the checks upon how fair and well they perform their trusts? And was it not the state, subject to the control of a free electorate, that was to be the responsible trustee, the impartial umpire, the expert broker of conflicting interests and contending powers?

Moreover, as the propertied family has entered the corporate economy, it has been joined in the corporate world by the managers of these properties, who, as we shall presently see, are not themselves exactly unpropertied, and who, in fact, are not an entirely distinct economic species from the very rich.

Not ‘Wall Street financiers’ or bankers, but large owners and executives in their self-financing corporations hold the keys of economic power. Not the politicians of the visible government, but the chief executives who sit in the political directorate, by fact and by proxy, hold the power and the means of defending the privileges of their corporate world.

the enormous size of the modern corporation cannot be explained as due to increased efficiency; many specialists regard the size now typical of the giants as already in excess of the requirements of efficiency. In truth, the relationship of corporate size to efficiency is quite unknown; moreover, the scale of the modern corporation is usually due more to financial and managerial amalgamations than to technical efficiency.

What the old guard represents is the outlook, if not always the intelligent interests, of the more narrow economic concerns. What the business liberals represent is the outlook and the interests of the newer propertied class as a whole.

The top executives of the big companies are not, and never have been, a miscellaneous collection of Americans; they are a quite uniform social type which has had exceptional advantages of origin and training, and they do not fit many of the stereotypes that prevail about them.

C. Wright Mills was among the first to take note of how “national security” could be invoked by the power elite to more deeply disguise its operations.