Your 'Consent' to be Governed has been Engineered
Once you see it, what then? Do you abdicate your own reason, conscience, and responsibility, as the propaganda demands?
If you read my recent piece on the “consent of the governed,” you should know that American propagandists perfected something called “the engineering of consent” all the way back in the 1920s.
This video appears on my new website, Charter 24. It’s just over 15 minutes long. Here’s a partial transcript.
In 1978, Vaclav Havel, the famous anti-totalitarian poet, prisoner, and ultimately president of the former Czech Republic, described modern totalitarianism as a system “built on foundations laid by the historic encounter between dictatorship and the consumer society.” In this short video, we will examine just one aspect of American consumer society and how many modern Americans — especially the smartest among us — have been manipulated to believe that totalitarianism of the Orwellian kind has not already happened in America.
George Hill became president of the American Tobacco Company in 1925. A year later, Lucky Strike accounted for 20% of U.S. cigarette sales. In 1927, he hired two advertising men: Albert Lasker of the Lord & Thomas agency, and Edward Bernays.
Bernays hired women to march while smoking their “torches of freedom” in the New York City Easter Sunday Parade of 1929. Lucky Strike soon accounted for 38% of U.S. cigarette sales.
According to Bernays, the masses were incapable of making rational decisions. “The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society,” he wrote. He called this technique “the engineering of consent,” and in a 1927 book — titled Propaganda and dedicated to his wife — he wrote this as the last sentence: “Intelligent men must realize that propaganda is the modern instrument by which they can fight for productive ends and help to bring order out of chaos.”
On January 1, 1971, cigarette ads were banned from television.
Well, that was then, and now it’s the 2020’s. The new influencers believe everything about Jack Webb’s America was bad, and everything in their New America is good. Today’s influencers believe cigarettes were bad and using psychology to sell cigarettes was evil while simultaneously believing weed is good and using psychology to sell weed is virtuous.
Weed is the new titillating torch of freedom.
If you can’t see that the manipulation of the 2020s is the same manipulation of the 1920s – only better – then you are a member of what Vaclav Havel called “wandering humankind” with a “blind, fatalistic respect for rulers and [an] automatic acceptance of all their claims.”
That is not a judgment, though, because all of us are bombarded — virtually every day and every place we go — with the most sophisticated propaganda ever devised by those who sincerely believe in their superiority over the rest of us. Havel wrote that 1978 was “an era when metaphysical and existential certainties are in a state of crisis, when people are being uprooted and alienated and are losing their sense of what this world means.” That is more true today than it was then, and we can all be forgiven for accepting “the ideology of the system” and its “hypnotic charm.”
However, once you see it, what then? Do you abdicate your own reason, conscience, and responsibility, as the propaganda demands?
As you consider your answer, there is one more chapter to this short story.
For several decades now, we’ve been told by our modern propagandists — now called influencers — that human trafficking is good for society no matter what it brings into the country. The official words change periodically. People once called “illegals” and then “undocumented” are now called “migrants” and the propaganda demands that we see them as “an irrefutable source of our strength” — even as the official number has topped 7 million since 2021, all of them have paid human traffickers to cross the border, and significant numbers of them are literal slaves.
The central challenge of our time is not cigarettes, or weed, or human traffickers, or the cartels that have added fentanyl to their product line, or even a government that (at best) averts its eyes from a modern slave trade.
No, the challenge is for individuals to recognize that the influencers many of us adore have manufactured a functioning reality out of abject lies and organized a society where we act and react to the rules of their fictitious world [the very definition of totalitarianism]. This video has focused on one tiny aspect of the collision between consumer society and the totalitarian will to power, where cigarettes were called torches of freedom and weed is now called the oxygen of the soul. But there are other examples everywhere you look.
Government by an entrenched bureaucracy is called democracy. Police brutality is called law enforcement. The lack of free expression is the highest form of freedom. Banning independent thought becomes the scientific method. And once again, as it was in the Confederacy, human trafficking is called the source of our strength.
In order to continue its existence, the regime that defines this false reality must falsify everything: the past, the present, and the future. There is only one thing this regime cannot endure.
A person who says no.