How I see mainstream media news.
Believing ≠ Hoping. Look at what you believe you believe and what you know you know. You don’t. You wish and hope and trust. There’s a big difference, Sparky.
The lies your being handed are by design. “When distant and unfamiliar and complex things are communicated to great masses of people, the truth suffers a considerable and often a radical distortion. The complex is made over into the simple, the hypothetical into the dogmatic, and the relative into an absolute.” Thus spake Walter Lippmann.
It’s about perception an awareness. It’s about what you think you know. And what those who know think. You think? We’re a country whose history is immersed in propaganda. Hedges provides this splendid piece.
In order to bring America into an unpopular war, Woodrow Wilson created the first system of modern mass-propaganda—the Creel Committee. It drew on “crowd psychology”, pioneered by Gustave Le Bon, Wilfred Trotter, Sigmund Freud and others, suggesting that people were not moved by appeals to reason but by emotional manipulation—what Walter Lippmann called “manufacturing consent”. Debs ended up in prison [for opposing the war] and after the war many of these people went off to Madison Avenue to work for corporations. They upended traditional American values of thrift and self-effacement and replaced them with the cult of the self, hedonism and consumption presented as an inner compulsion. [Christopher Hedges]