Friday 23 January 2009

Necessary Illusions: Thought Control in Democratic Societies

Theologian Reinhold Niebuhr concluded that ordinary people were hardly capable of understanding the world or drawing reasonable conclusions without being subjected to a set of what he called "necessary illusions" - what we'd call "propaganda". Constructed by the intellectual elites. The system for managing this has turned out to be the mass-media.

(intro to the 1988 Massey Lectures)

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