now that's just sad

They very explicitly drew on their First World War experience for their work. In their writings from the 1920s, they said that they had learned you can control "the public mind", you can control attitudes and opinions, and, in Lippman's phrase, "manufacture consent". Bernays said that the more intelligent members of the community can direct the population through "the engineering of consent", which he considered "the very essence of the democratic process". [...]

But the thought-control experts soon realized that you could have not only what was called "on-job control" but also "off-job control". It's a fine phrase. Off-job control means turning people into robots in every part of their lives by inducing a "philosophy of futility", focusing people on "the superficial things of life, like the fashionable consumption."

Noam Chomsky on the history of propaganda