Manufacture Consent Quotes

Education is a system of imposed ignorance.

The mass media serve as a system for communicating messages and symbols to the general populace. It is their function to amuse, entertain, and inform, and to inculcate individuals with the values, beliefs, and codes of behavior that will integrate them into the institutional structures of the larger society. In a world of concentrated wealth and major conflicts of class interest, to fulfil this role requires systematic propaganda.

The beauty of the system, however, is that such dissent and inconvenient information are kept within bounds and at the margins, so that while their presence shows that the system is not monolithic, they are not large enough to interfere unduly with the domination of the official agenda.

Most info-Web-media-newspaper types have a hard time swallowing the idea that knowledge is reached (mostly) by removing junk from peoples heads

The words consent of the governed have become an empty phrase. Our textbooks on political science and economics are obsolete. Our nation has been hijacked by oligarchs, corporations, and a narrow, selfish, political, and economic elite, a small and privileged group that governs, and often steals, on behalf of moneyed interests. This elite, in the name of patriotism and democracy, in the name of all the values that were once part of the American system and defined the Protestant work ethic, has systematically destroyed our manufacturing sector, looted the treasury, corrupted our democracy, and trashed the financial system. During this plundering we remained passive, mesmerized by the enticing shadows on the wall, assured our tickets to success, prosperity, and happiness were waiting around the corner.

...I take as a point of departure the possibility and desirability of a fundamentally different form of society--call it communism, if you will--in which men and women, freed from the pressures of scarcity and from the insecurity of everyday existence under capitalism, shape their own lives. Collectively they decide who, how, when, and what shall be produced.

Genocide" is an invidious word that officials apply readily to cases of victimization in enemy states, but rarely if ever to similar or worse cases of victimization by the United States itself or allied regimes.

In times of war or crisis, power is easily stolen from the many by the few on a promise of security. The more elusive the or imaginary the foe, the better for manufacturing consent.

Convenient mythologies require neither evidence nor logic.

Large corporate advertisers on television will rarely sponsor programs that engage in serious criticisms of corporate activities, such as the problem of environmental degradation, the workings of the military-industrial complex, or corporate support of and benefits from Third World tyrannies.

Concentrate on the victims of enemy powers and forget about the victims of friends.

But entertainment has the merit not only of being better suited to helping sell goods; it is an effective vehicle for hidden ideological messages.24 Furthermore, in a system of high and growing inequality, entertainment is the contemporary equivalent of the Roman “games of the circus” that diverts the public from politics and generates a political apathy that is helpful to preservation of the status quo.

Unpopular ideas can be silenced, and inconvenient facts kept dark, without the need for any official ban. Anyone who has lived long in a foreign country will know of instances of sensational items of news — things which on their own merits would get the big headlines-being kept right out of the British press, not because the Government intervened but because of a general tacit agreement that ‘it wouldn’t do’ to mention that particular fact. So far as the daily newspapers go, this is easy to understand. The British press is extremely centralised, and most of it is owned by wealthy men who have every motive to be dishonest on certain important topics. But the same kind of veiled censorship also operates in books and periodicals, as well as in plays, films and radio. At any given moment there is an orthodoxy, a body of ideas which it is assumed that all right-thinking people will accept without question. It is not exactly forbidden to say this, that or the other, but it is ‘not done’ to say it, just as in mid-Victorian times it was ‘not done’ to mention trousers in the presence of a lady. Anyone who challenges the prevailing orthodoxy finds himself silenced with surprising effectiveness. A genuinely unfashionable opinion is almost never given a fair hearing, either in the popular press or in the highbrow periodicals.

Like its wartime prototype, the post-war propaganda drive was an immense success, as it persuaded not just businessmen but journalists and politicians that “the manufacture of consent,” in Walter Lippmann’s famous phrase, was a necessity throughout the public sphere.

Manufacturing consent begins by weaponizing the meme and utilizing the censorship algorithms of Google, Facebook, Twitter and YouTube.

One night, Tim stumbled across a documentary called Manufacturing Consent. After viewing it, he found some writing online by its subject, Noam Chomsky, and as a result began to feel that there wasn't really a point to anything, that free will was an illusion, and that the things most people invested time and energy in were systems of control designed by those who sought to manipulate the general populace

A propaganda model has a certain initial plausibility on guided free-market assumptions that are not particularly controversial. In essence, the private media are major corporations selling a product (readers and audiences) to other businesses (advertisers). The national media typically target and serve elite opinion, groups that, on the one hand, provide an optimal “profile” for advertising purposes, and, on the other, play a role in decision-making in the private and public spheres. The national media would be failing to meet their elite audience’s needs if they did not present a tolerably realistic portrayal of the world. But their “societal purpose” also requires that the media’s interpretation of the world reflect the interests and concerns of the sellers, the buyers, and the governmental and private institutions dominated by these groups.

The picture of the world that's presented to the public has only the remotest relation to reality. The truth of the matter is buried under edifice after edifice of lies upon lies. It's all been a marvellous success from the point of view in deterring the threat of democracy, achieved under conditions of freedom, which is extremely interesting.

The culture and ideology fostered in this globalization process relate largely to “lifestyle” themes and goods and their acquisition; and they tend to weaken any sense of community helpful to civic life.

Advertisers will want, more generally, to avoid programs with serious complexities and disturbing controversies that interfere with the "buying mood." They seek programs that will lightly entertain and thus fit in with the spirit of the primary purpose of program purchases—the dissemination of a selling message.

[...] the institutional bias of the private mass media "does not merely protect the corporate system. It robs the public of a chance to understand the real world.

The era of manufacturing consent has given way to the era of manufacturing news. Soon media newsrooms will drop the pretence, and start hiring theatre directors instead of journalists.

Structural factors are those such as ownership and control, dependence on other major funding sources (notably, advertisers), and mutual interests and relationships between the media and those who make the news and have the power to define it and explain what it means. The propaganda model also incorporates other closely related factors such as the ability to complain about the media’s treatment of news (that is, produce “flak”), to provide “experts” to confirm the official slant on the news, and to fix the basic principles and ideologies that are taken for granted by media personnel and the elite, but are often resisted by the general population.1 In our view, the same underlying power sources that own the media and fund them as advertisers, that serve as primary definers of the news, and that produce flak and proper-thinking experts, also play a key role in fixing basic principles and the dominant ideologies. We believe that what journalists do, what they see as newsworthy, and what they take for granted as premises of their work are frequently well explained by the incentives, pressures, and constraints incorporated into such a structural analysis. These structural factors that dominate media operations are not allcontrolling and do not always produce simple and homogeneous results.

the mass media are interested in attracting audiences with buying power, not audiences per se; it is affluent audiences that spark advertiser interest today, as in the nineteenth century. The idea that the drive for large audiences makes the mass media “democratic” thus suffers from the initial weakness that its political analogue is a voting system weighted by income!

In effect, the large bureaucracies of the powerful subsidize the mass media, and gain special access by their contribution to reducing the media's costs of acquiring the raw materials of, and producing, news. The large entities that provide this subsidy become "routine" news sources have privileged access to the gates. Non-routine sources must struggle for access, and may be ignored by the arbitrary decision of the gatekeepers. It should also be noted that in the case of the largesse of the Pentagon and the State Department's Office of Public Diplomacy, the subsidy is at the taxpayers' expense, so that, in effect, the citizenry pays to be propagandized in the interest of powerful groups such as military contractors and other sponsors of state terrorism.

That the manufacture of consent is capable of great refinements no one, I think, denies. The process by which public opinions arise is certainly no less intricate than it has appeared in these pages, and the opportunities for manipulation open to anyone who understands the process are plain enough. . . . as a result of psychological research, coupled with the modern means of communication, the practice of democracy has turned a corner. A revolution is taking place, infinitely more significant than any shifting of economic power. . . . Under the impact of propaganda, not necessarily in the sinister meaning of the word alone, the old constants of our thinking have become variables. It is no longer possible, for example, to believe in the original dogma of democracy; that the knowledge needed for the management of human affairs comes up spontaneously from the human heart. Where we act on that theory we expose ourselves to self-deception, and to forms of persuasion that we cannot verify. It has been demonstrated that we cannot rely upon intuition, conscience, or the accidents of casual opinion if we are to deal with the world beyond our reach.

an advertising-based system will tend to drive out of existence or into marginality the media companies and types that depend on revenue from sales alone. With advertising, the free market does not yield a neutral system in which final buyer choice decides. The advertisers’ choices influence media prosperity and survival.

This bias is politically advantageous to U.S. policy-makers, for focusing on victims of enemy states shows those states to be wicked and deserving of U.S. hostility; while ignoring U.S. and client-state victims allows ongoing U.S. policies to proceed more easily, unburdened by the interference of concern over the politically inconvenient victims.

In times of war or crisis, power is easily stolen from the many by the few on a promise of security. The more elusive or imaginary the foe, the better for manufacturing consent.

Don't think of it as manufactured consent... Think of it as the candy everybody wants.

Propaganda campaigns in general have been closely attuned to elite interests. The Red scare of 1919-20 have served well to abort the union-organizing drive that followed World War I in the sell and other industries. The Truman-McCarthy Red scare helped inaugurate the Cold War and the permanent war economy, and it also served to weaken the progressive coalition of the New Deal years. The chronic focus on the plight of Soviet dissidents, on enemy killings in Cambodia, and on the Bulgarian Connection helped weaken the Vietnam syndrome, justify a huge arms buildup and a more aggressive foreign policy, and divert attention from upward redistribution of income that was the heart of Reagan's domestic economic program. The recent propaganda-disinformation attacks on Nicaragua have been needed to avert eyes from the savagery of the war in El Salvador and to justify the escalating U.S. investment in counterrevolution in Central America.

So in the twentieth century, there’s a major current of American thought―in fact, it’s probably the dominant current among people who think about these things [political scientists, journalists, public relations experts and so on]―which says that precisely because the state has lost the power to coerce, elites need to have more effective propaganda to control the public mind. That was Walter Lippmann’s point of view, for example, to mention probably the dean of American journalists―he referred to the population as a “bewildered herd”: we have to protect ourselves from “the rage and trampling of the bewildered herd.” And the way you do it, Lippmann said, is by what he called the “manufacture of consent”―if you don’t do it by force, you have to do it by the calculated “manufacture of consent.

Veterans being sent into unjust wars for corporate profit is a perversion of trust, at best. I found the emotional manipulation of both sides, the propaganda at play so incredibly revolting that I couldn't stand to idly wave a flag or flaunt yellow ribbons without asking serious questions regarding motive.

The hypothesis advanced by the propaganda model, excluded from debate as unthinkable, is that in dealing with the American wars in Indochina, the media were "unmindful", but highly "patriotic" in the special and misleading sense that they kept -- and keep -- closely to the perspective of official Washington and the closely related corporate elite, in conformity to the general "journalistic-literary-political culture" from which "the left" (meaning dissident opinion that questions jingoist assumptions) is virtually excluded. The propaganda model predicts that this should be generally true not only of the choice of topics covered and the way they are covered, but also, and far more crucially, of the general background of the presuppositions within which the issues are framed and the news presented. Insofar as there is debate among dominant elites, it will be reflected within the media, which in this narrow sense, may adopt an "adversarial stance" with regard to those holding office, reflecting elite dissatisfaction with current policy. Otherwise the media will depart from elite consensus only rarely and in limited ways. Even when large parts of the general public break free of the premises of the doctrinal system, as finally happened during the Indochina wars, real understanding based upon an alternative conception of the evolving history can be developed only with considerable effort by the most diligent and skeptical. And such understanding as can be reached through serious and often individual effort will be difficult to sustain or apply elsewhere, an extremely important matter for those who are truly concerned with democracy at home and "the influence of democracy abroad," in the real sense of these words.

What Lippmann took from the war—as he explained in his 1922 classic Public Opinion—was the gap between the true complexity of the world and the narratives the public uses to understand it—the rough “stereotypes” (a word he coined in his book). When it came to the war, he believed that the “consent” of the governed had been, in his phrase, “manufactured.

There is little reason to believe that they would not like to understand why they are working harder with stagnant or declining incomes, have inadequate medical care at high costs, and what is being done in their name all over the world. If they are not getting much information on these topics, the propaganda model can explain why: the sovereigns who control the media choose not to offer such material.

How long can news function as a palliative for despair and counter space for products? It is so frustrating and sad to open a newspaper and find the news literally at the edges, like the embroidered hem of the real subject – advertisement. The media spectacle must not continue to direct its attention to the manufacture of consent, rather than debate with more than two sides, to the reinforcement of untruths, and a review of what else there is to buy.

Hegemony, as I’m using the term here, is governance with the consent of the governed. The alternative form of governance is coercion. Now think about it, if you’re an elite and you want to govern people, which of these forms is preferable? Well, of the two, hegemony is much more desirable for the governors since governance with consent does not produce opposition and resistance by definition. If people are consenting to be governed, why would they object? Why would they resist?

The essential ingredients of our propaganda model, or set of news "filters,", fall under the following headings: (1) the size, concentrated ownership, owner wealth, and profit orientation of the dominant mass-media firms; (2) advertising as the primary income source of the mass media; (3) the reliance of the media on information provided by government, business, and "experts" funded and approved by these primary sources and agents of power; (4) "flak" as a means of disciplining the media; and (5) "anticommunism" as a national religion and control mechanism.

Governments and business-news promoters go to great pains to make things easy for news organizations. They provide the media organizations with facilities in which to gather; they give journalists advance copies of speeches and forthcoming reports; they schedule press conferences at hours well-geared to news deadlines; they write press releases in usable language; and they carefully organize their press conferences and "photo opportunity" sessions. It is the job of news officers "to meet the journalist's scheduled needs with material that their beat agency has generated at its own pace.

The most insidious of our country, the greediest and highest rung of our socioeconomic ladder, line their pockets with misappropriated funds as military personnel and hordes of civilians are maimed or killed. It’s not their children out there, blinded by manufactured patriotism or lured into the service with the promise of economic stability, all with the sanctimonious blessings of misguided public consent by way of corporate, state-sponsored media. It won’t be their children who are terrorized by Wahabbist insurgents tearing through city blocks and rural areas as only an ever-devouring plague could. It won’t be any of their loved ones watching thousands of years of civilization unraveling like an old sweater as each thread of wool is lit on fire or stolen to sell on the black market for greedy consumers with a fetish for hijacked Mesopotamian artifacts.

What was happily proved by this early revolution is something that we perhaps need to be reminded of again today: that neither exact science nor engineering is proof against the irrationality of those that operate the system. Above all, that the strongest and most efficient of megamachines can be overthrown, that human errors are not immortal. The collapse of the Pyramid Age proved that the megamachine exists on a basis of human beliefs, which may crumble, of human decisions, which may prove fallible, and human consent, which, when the magic becomes discredited, may be withheld. The human parts that composed the megamachine were by nature mechanically imperfect: never wholly reliable. Until real machines of wood and metal could be manufactured in sufficient quantity to take the place of most of the human components, the megamachine would remain vulnerable.

Democracy has degenerated to the manufacturing of consent where paternalistic thugs vote less freedom for us and more money for themselves.

The manufacturing of consent*2 is now endemic to modern technological societies.

The steady advance, and cultural power, of marketing and advertising has caused “the displacement of a political public sphere by a depoliticized consumer culture.”21

If we once manufactured the consent of the population for everything from the Vietnam War to the bombing of Kosovo to the occupation of Iraq, we’re now manufacturing discontent. It’s the only way to prevent a popular uprising. It can’t hold. As we saw with the election of Trump and with the Bernie Sanders campaign (and with countless protest movements around the world, from Catalonia to the Gilets Jaunes), voters are not completely stupid. They know enough to be angry. Commercial news media has tried frantically to come up with enough red capes to keep us charging forward, but they’re running out of gimmicks.

As an illustration of how the funded experts preempt space in the media, table 1-4 describes the “experts” on terrorism and defense issues who appeared on the “McNeil-Lehrer News Hour” in the course of a year in the mid-1980s. We can see that, excluding journalists, a majority of the participants (54 percent) were present or former government officials, and that the next highest category (15.7 percent) was drawn from conservative think tanks. The largest number of appearances in the latter category was supplied by the Georgetown Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), an organization funded by conservative foundations and corporations, and providing a revolving door between the State Department and CIA and a nominally private organization.93 On such issues as terrorism and the Bulgarian Connection, the CSIS has occupied space in the media that otherwise might have been filled by independent voices.94

The anti-Communist control mechanism reaches through the system to exercise a profound influence on the mass media. In normal times as well as in periods of Red scares, issues tend to be framed in terms of a dichotomized world of Communist and anti-Communist powers, with gains and losses allocated to contesting sides, and rooting for “our side” considered an entirely legitimate news practice.

When a Vietnamese official suggested that the U.S. send food aid to regions where starving villagers are being asked to spend their time and energy searching for the remains of American pilots killed while destroying their country, State Department spokeswoman Phyllis Oakley reacted with great anger: “We are outraged at any suggestion of linking food assistance with the return of remains,” she declaimed. So profound is the U.S. commitment to humanitarian imperatives and moral values that it cannot permit these lofty ideals to be tainted by associating them with such trivial concerns and indecent requests.166

deflect any political challenge to established privilege and authority. The general public must be reduced to its traditional apathy and obedience” through a degraded mass culture, manipulative political elections (or “manufactured consent”), and a mind-numbing, conformist system of thought control via the mass media.4

...If we once manufactured the consent of the population for everything from the Vietnam War to the bombing of Kosovo to the occupation of Iraq, we're now manufacturing discontent. It's the only way to prevent a popular uprising.

Some argue that the Internet and the new communications technologies are breaking the corporate stranglehold on journalism and opening an unprecedented era of interactive democratic media.

Noam Chomsky’s Manufacturing Consent,

The Israeli intellectual elite of the Zionist Left are part and parcel of this social class. As in many other places, they fulfill the crucial function of the intelligentsia—namely, sustaining the ideology that gives a major role to state power and “manufacturing the consent” around its policies, ideology, and political culture. In Israel, Zionist Left intellectuals have enlisted in the service of the interests of the Ashkenazi political-social elite (who usually support the Labor Party) and have sustained the hegemonic ideology.70 At the center of this ideology is the “Jewish state”—the key premise of Zionism, as imagined and implemented by the Zionist Labor movement.

Capitalism sells you “happiness”. It wants to convert you into “happiness machines”. It also sells you anxiety. If you don’t buy what they are selling, you will ipso facto be unhappy, they claim. Capitalism is all about the Engineering of Consent. You are seduced into submitting to capitalist hegemony, to accepting cultural capitalism. You have an entirely false consciousness manufactured for you by capitalism, to serve capitalist interests, which are always those of the elite 1% that run the capitalist world. Wake up!

That the manufacture of consent is capable of great refinements no one, I think, denies. The process by which public opinions arise is certainly no less intricate than it has appeared in these pages, and the opportunities for manipulation open to anyone who understands the process are plain enough. The creation of consent is not a new art. It is a very old one which was supposed to have died out with the appearance of democracy. But it has not died out.

When it came to the war, he believed that the “consent” of the governed had been, in his phrase, “manufactured.” Hence, as he wrote, “It is no longer possible…to believe in the original dogma of democracy; that the knowledge needed for the management of human affairs comes up spontaneously from the human heart. Where we act on that theory we expose ourselves to self-deception, and to forms of persuasion that we cannot verify.

So, if people don't want a war - are opposed to a war - how do you get away with it? You change public opinion and manufacture consent, that's how. You construct a carefully organised deception. A well-crafted and perfectly executed lie. Stage a false flag attacks, created by our own security services, blame it on terrorists, blow up British or US soldiers, bomb our buildings, fly planes into them, lie about weapons of mass destruction that can annihilate us in forty-five minutes flat. And bombard people with it in the media. Terrorists! Terrorism! Cells! Al-Qaeda! Isis! So every single time you turn on the new or read a paper, it's there. Despite the fact that statistically, you're more likely to be killed in a car accident or by your own bathtub than killed by a terrorist! And all the while, they're hiding the real reasons. Oil and gas. Gold. Regime change. Land. Power. Money. So they carry on until the public gets scared and angry, and yes, let's bomb these bastards! And how dare these people threaten and attack us! Then they want the war. The public are practically begging for it by then! Like George Orwell said, "The people believe what the media tells them". And if you control the media, the money, the politics, and the military, you control the whole systems.

People afraid of outsiders are easily manipulated. The warrior caste, supposedly society's protectors, often become protection racketeers. In times of war or crisis, power is easily stolen from the many by the few on a promise of security. The more elusive or imaginary the foe, the better for manufacturing consent. The Inquisition did a roaring trade against the Devil.

media are independent and committed to discovering and reporting the truth, and that they do not merely reflect the world as powerful groups wish it to be perceived.

In the succeeding thirty-two years of U.S. guidance, not only has Guatemala gradually become a terrorist state rarely matched in the scale of systematic murder of civilians, but its terrorist proclivities have increased markedly at strategic moments of escalated U.S. intervention. The first point was the invasion and counterrevolution of 1954, which reintroduced political murder and large-scale repression to Guatemala following the decade of democracy. The second followed the emergence of a small guerrilla movement in the early 1960s, when the United States began serious counterinsurgency (CI) training of the Guatemalan army. In 1966, a further small guerrilla movement brought the Green Berets and a major CI war in which 10,000 people were killed in pursuit of three or four hundred guerrillas. It was at this point that the "death squads" and "disappearances" made their appearance in Guatemala. The United States brought in police training in the 1970s, which was followed by the further institutionalization of violence. The "solution" to social problems in Guatemala, specifically attributable to the 1954 intervention and the form of U.S. assistance since that time, has been permanent state terror. With Guatemala, the United States invented the "counterinsurgency state.

How bodies harvest, produce, organize, and distribute energy determines how power flows, shaping the political arrangements of a given collective organism behind whatever ideologies the ruling classes may use to manufacture consent, obscure the mechanisms of control, or convince themselves of their infallible omniscience.

We make the point that for societies that purport to be democratic, consent, based upon a constantly reinforced common sensical understanding of the legitimacy of the rulers, is not only the most desirable form of governance, but is necessary to maintain the veneer (whether thick or thin) of democracy itself.

Another notable achievement of Bernays’s liberal record was in the early 1950s when he was employed by the United Fruit Company, which virtually owned Guatemala, in fact much of Central America. In the early ’50s they were threatened by a new reformist democracy in Guatemala, which overthrew the dictatorship and intended to take unused lands owned by the fruit company and distribute them to poor peasants, along with other reforms. Bernays was hired to do something about that. He developed a very successful propaganda campaign to engineer consent among the American public for a military coup, the 1953 military coup, which ended these heresies and protected the power of the Fruit Company under the new military dictatorship

Bernays explained his principles in 1947, in the Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science. He informed the world of science that leaders, with the aid of technicians in the field who have specialized in utilizing the channels of communication, have been able to accomplish purposefully and scientifically what we have termed ‘the engineering of consent.’ This phrase quite simply means the use of an engineering approach—that is, action based on thorough knowledge of the situation and on the application of scientific principles and tried practices to the task of getting people to support ideas and programs…. The engineering of consent is the very essence of the democratic process, the freedom to persuade and suggest…. A leader frequently cannot wait for the people to arrive at even general understanding … democratic leaders must play their part in … engineering consent to socially constructive goals and values…. The responsible leader, to accomplish social objectives, must therefore be constantly aware of the possibilities of subversion. He must apply his energies to mastering the operational know-how of consent engineering, and to out-maneuvering his opponents in the public interest (Bernays, 1947).

Propaganda is to Democracy what violence is to Totalitarianism

Walter Lippmann, a progressive journalist, co-founder of The New Republic, and a power within the Wilson administration, had been among those who pressured Wilson to take the nation to war. During the war he worked at the Creel Committee, and witnessed firsthand its power to whip the country into a fanatical assent. Despite his own initial support for the war, the ease with which the Creel Committee had succeeded turned him into something of a lifelong cynic. What Lippmann took from the war—as he explained in his 1922 classic Public Opinion—was the gap between the true complexity of the world and the narratives the public uses to understand it—the rough “stereotypes” (a word he coined in his book). When it came to the war, he believed that the “consent” of the governed had been, in his phrase, “manufactured.” Hence, as he wrote, “It is no longer possible…to believe in the original dogma of democracy; that the knowledge needed for the management of human affairs comes up spontaneously from the human heart. Where we act on that theory we expose ourselves to self-deception, and to forms of persuasion that we cannot verify.

All dynamic societies founded their success on two production processes that unfolded in parallel: the manufacturing of a surplus and the manufacturing of consent (regarding its distribution). However, the feedback between the two processes grew to new heights in the Age of Capital. The rise of commodification, which also led to the flourishing of finance, coincided with a subtler, more powerful, form of consent. And here lies a delicious paradox: consent grew more powerful the more economic life was financialized. And as finance grew in importance, the more prone our societies became to economic crises. Hence the interesting observation that modern societies tend to produce both more consent and more violent crises.

that nobody has a right of self-defense against this country, even if it intervenes across the ocean to impose by force a government that the people of that country reject.

In fact, it was Lippmann who coined the term “the manufacture of consent,

Unsurprisingly for such an inside-out, back-to-front society, consent to this newly liberated/indebted way of life is manufactured through consumption. We are now addressed as consumers first and foremost, rather than producers, even if we are penniless: the illusion of choice must be maintained at all costs. Even the Jobcentre calls its claimants 'customers'.

Let us now remind ourselves that the artist is also a man, and as a man responsible for all that his will consents to; "in order that a man may make right use of his art, he needs to have a virtue which will rectify his appetite." The man is responsible directly, as a murderer for example by intent if he intends to manufacture adulterated food, or drugs in excess of medical requirement; responsible as a promoter of loose living if he exhibits a pornographic picture, (by which we mean of course something essentially salacious, preserving the distinction of “obscene” from “erotic”); responsible spiritually if he is a sentimentalist or pseudo-mystic. It is a mistake to suppose that in former ages the artist’s “freedom” could have been arbitrarily denied by an external agency; it is much rather a plain and unalterable fact that the artist as such is not a free man. As artist he is morally irresponsible, indeed; but who can assert that he is an artist and not also a man? The artist can be separated from the man in logic and for purposes of understanding; but actually, the artist can only be divorced from his humanity by what is called a disintegration of personality. The doctrine of art for art's sake implies precisely such a sacrifice of humanity to art, of the whole to the part. It is significant that at the same time that individualistic tendencies are recognizable in the sphere of culture, in the other sphere of business and in the interest of profit most men are denied the opportunity of artistic operation altogether, or can function as responsible artists only in hours of leisure when they can pursue a “hobby” or play games. What shall it profit a man to be politically free if he must be either the slave of “art,” or slave of “business”?

You had manufactured my consent every step of the way, a mere formality. This had always been your design for the both of us; we were always going to end up here, in this bed.

Robert McChesney notes that “the hallmark of the global media system is its relentless, ubiquitous commercialism.

[reporting components for "worthy" victims]: Fullness and reiteration of the details of the murder and the damage inflicted on the victim. Stress on indignation, shock, and demands for justice. The search for responsibility at the top.

[on sponsored elections] Thus the dramatic denouement of the election is voter turnout, which measures the ability of the forces of democracy and peace (the army) to overcome rebel threats. [...] "Off the agenda" for the government in its own sponsored elections are all of the basic parameters that make an election meaningful or meaningless prior to the election-day proceedings. These include: (1) freedom of speech and assembly; (2) freedom of the press; (3) freedom to organize and maintain intermediate economic, social, and political groups (unions, peasant organizations, political clubs, student and teacher associations, etc.); (4) freedom to form political parties, organize members, put forward candidates, and campaign without fear of extreme violence; and (5) the absence of state terror and a climate of fear among the public. Also off the agenda is the election-day "coercion package" that may explain turnout in terms other than devotion to the army and its plans, including any legal requirement to vote, and explicit or implicit threats for not voting.

In contrast to the standard conception of the media as cantankerous, obstinate, and ubiquitous in their search for truth and their independence of authority, we have spelled out and applied a propaganda model that indeed sees the media as serving a "societal purpose," but not that of enabling the public to assert meaningful control over the political process by providing them with the information needed for the intelligent discharge of political responsibilities. On the contrary, a propaganda model suggests that the "societal purpose" of the media is to inculcate and defend the economic, social, and political agenda of privileged groups that dominate the domestic society and the state. The media serve this purpose in many ways: through selection of topical distribution of concerns, framing of issues, filtering of information, emphasis and tone, and by keeping debate within the bounds of acceptable premises.

Hill tried to sell smoking to women as a way to shed pounds, strike a pose, stay alert, but nothing worked. Bernays told Hill that he should instead link his private interest—get women to smoke more—to a public cause. With this in mind, he planted newspaper articles that challenged the taboo against female public smoking, arguing that cigarettes were neither a dirty habit nor a weight-loss tool, but a symbol of empowerment. He took out an ad, calling women to “smoke out”: the female citizens of New York were asked to leave their offices one afternoon and stroll along Fifth Avenue, puffing all the way. This was followed by “smokeouts” across the country. Bernays claimed he had not invented the issue—women really did want to smoke in public—but had merely exploited an existing sentiment, “crystallizing public opinion” and “manufacturing consent,

Since democratic leaders can’t wait for the people to arrive at even general understanding and have to engineer consent to socially constructive goals and values, some obvious questions arise. Who makes the decisions about these goals and values? What factors enter into the decisions of “democratic leaders”? How is their “responsibility” and dedication to the public interest established?

I’ve been discussing elite attitudes toward democracy. I sketched a line from the first democratic revolution, with its fear and contempt for the rascal multitude who were asking for ridiculous things like universal education, health care, and democratization of law, wanting to be ruled by countrymen like themselves who know the people’s sores, not by knights and gentlemen who just oppress them. From there to the second major democratic revolution establishing the US Constitution, which was, as discussed last time, a Framers’ Coup, the title of the main scholarly work, a coup by elites that the author describes as a conservative counterrevolution against excessive democracy. On to the twentieth century and such leading progressive theorists of democracy as Walter Lippmann, Edward Bernays, Harold Lasswell, and Reinhold Niebuhr, and their conception that the public has to be put in its place. They’re spectators, not participants. The responsible men, the elite, have to be protected from the trampling and the roar of the bewildered herd, who have to be kept in line with necessary illusions, emotionally potent oversimplifications, and, in general, engineering of consent, which has become a gigantic industry devoted to some aspects of the task, while responsible intellectuals take care of others. The men of best quality through the ages have to be self-indoctrinated, as Orwell discussed. They must internalize the understanding that there are certain things it just wouldn’t do to say. It must be so fully internalized that it becomes as routine as taking a breath. What else could anyone possibly believe? As long as all of this is in place, the system functions properly, with no crises. This picture, I think, captures crucial features of thought control in the more free societies, but it is misleading in essential ways. Most importantly, it largely omitted the constant popular struggles to extend the range of democracy, with many successes. Even in the last generation, there have been quite substantial successes. Such successes typically lead to a reaction. Those with power and privilege don’t relinquish it easily. The neoliberal period that we’re now enduring, long in planning, is such a reaction.

During the Constitutional Convention, the most respected of the delegates was Benjamin Franklin, who objected to what was going on. He expressed his “dislike of everything that tended to debase the spirit of the common people” and reminded his colleagues that “some of the greatest rogues he was ever acquainted with were the richest rogues” (Klarman, op. cit.)—rather like some of Adam Smith’s reflections. Franklin was a lone voice at the convention. Thomas Jefferson expressed somewhat similar sentiments, but he wasn’t there. He was then ambassador in Paris. In any event, the coup did proceed on course with consequences to the present, though there was plenty of conflict in the country at the time—hence “a coup”—and in the years that followed, to the present. The twentieth century also had important exceptions in elite opinion. The most prominent was John Dewey, the most respected American social philosopher of the twentieth century. Most of his work—and also activism—was devoted to democracy and education, along lines very much opposed to the doctrines of “manufacture of consent” and marginalization of the “bewildered herd.” By democracy, Dewey meant full-blooded democracy, with active participation of an informed public. His democratic theory was linked closely to his educational philosophy, which was designed to nurture creativity and independence of thought, for one reason as preparation for participation in a democratic society. It worked. I was lucky enough to go to a Deweyite school from about age two to twelve, and it was very impressive. Dewey was at first a typical responsible intellectual, joining the self-adulation of intellectuals during World War I for their stellar role in directing the stupid masses to wartime enthusiasm. That was, however, not unusual. The capitulation to power of the intellectual classes during those years, on all sides, is astonishing to behold, and of the few who didn’t swim with the tide, the best known ended up in jail: Bertrand Russell in England, Eugene Debs in the US, Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg in Germany.

All dynamic societies founded their success on two production processes that unfolded in parallel: the manufacturing of a surplus and the manufacturing of consent (regarding its distribution).

Our political institutions have absorbed the tactics of the tabloids like a giant sanitary product. The domination of spin, with political image managers intricately connected with media personnel, sees our political discussion operate as a subset of the corporate media, and our politicians strategising in much the same way as the media does: asking how do we push and prod and suck up the desires and frustrations of the electorate, transforming them into something that articulates the will of the powerful. It manufactures not just consent, but dissent and outrage and doubt, in a ceaseless production line of images. When the machinery jams, these interests become starkly visible. Jones’s

The exploitative sexual caste system could not be perpetuated without the consent of the victims as well as of the dominant sex, and such consent if obtained through sex role socialization - a conditioning process which beings to operate the moment we are born, and which is enforced by most institutions. Parents, friends, teachers, textbook authors and illustrators, advertisers, those who control the mass media, toy and clothes manufacturers, professionals such a doctors and psychologists - all contribute to the socialization process. This happens through dynamics that are largely uncalculated and unconscious, yet which reinforce the assumptions, attitudes, stereotypes, customs, and arrangements of sexually hierarchical society. The fact of womne's low caste status has been - and is - disguised. It is masked, first of all, by sex role segregation, as in a ghetto, for it makes possible the delusion that women should be "equal but different". Sexual caste is hidden also by the fact that women have various forms of *derivative status* as a consequence of relationships with men. That is, women have duality of status, and the derivative aspect of this status - for example, as daughters and wives - divides us against each other and encourages identification with patriarchal institutions which serve the interests of men at the expense of women. Finally sexual caste is hidden by ideologies that bestow false identities upon women and men. Patriarchal religion has served to perpetuate all of these dynamics of delusion, naming them "natural" and bestowing its supernatural blessings upon them. The system has been advertised as "according to the divine plan".

The steady advance, and cultural power, of marketing and advertising has caused "the displacement of a political public sphere by a depoliticized consumer culture." And it has had the effect of creating a world of virtual communities built by advertisers and based on demographics and taste differences of consumers. These consumption- and style-based clusters are at odds with physical communities that share a social life and common concerns and which participate in a democratic order. These virtual communities are organized to buy and sell goods, not to create or service a public sphere. Advertisers don't like the public sphere, where audiences are relatively small, upsetting controversy takes place, and the settings are not ideal for selling goods. Their preference for entertainment underlies the gradual erosion of the public sphere under systems of commercial media, well exemplified in the history of broadcasting in the United States over the past seventy-five years. But entertainment has the merit not only of being better suited to helping sell goods; it is an effective vehicle for hidden ideological messages. Furthermore, in a system of high and growing inequality, entertainment is the contemporary equivalent of the Roman "games of the circus" that diverts the public from politics and generates a political apathy that is helpful to preservation of the status quo.

what’s argued by people like Walter Lippmann and the whole rest of this main tradition of “democratic” thinkers in the West—that democracy requires a class of elites to manage decision-making and “manufacture” the general population’s consent for policies that are supposedly beyond their capacity to develop and decide on themselves.