"A truth’s initial commotion is directly proportional to how deeply the lie was believed. It wasn’t the world being round that agitated people, but that the world wasn’t flat. When a well-packaged web of lies has been sold gradually to the masses over generations, the truth will seem utterly preposterous and its speaker a raving lunatic."
James Dresden
"You're going to be a homogenized consumer class of worker drones in order for them to establish Elysium, and this is also where ... the metaverse comes in. Transhumanism, this is your bread and circuses now. It's virtual bread and circuses to distract you from the suffering that goes on all around you."
Jack Posobiec
"The perfect dictatorship would have the appearance of democracy, a prison without walls in which the prisoners would not dream of escape. A system of slavery where, through consumption and entertainment, slaves would love their servitude."
Aldous Huxley
"Heavy physical work, the care of home and children, petty quarrels with neighbors, films, football, beer and above all, gambling filled up the horizon of their minds. To keep them in control was not difficult."
George Orwell, 1984
"All governments use force and all assert that they are founded on reason. In fact, whether universal suffrage prevails or not, it is always an oligarchy that governs, finding ways to give to'the will of the people'the expression which the few desire."
Vilfredo Pareto
"No group of sociologists can approximate the ad teams in the gathering and processing of exploitable social data. The ad teams have billions to spend annually on research and testing of reactions, and their products are magnificent accumulations of material about the shared experience and feelings of the entire community."
Marshall McLuhan
"We manipulate people like crazy in films and they love it. It’s a tremendous release. Every film composer mixes his experiences with a talent for musical manipulation, then projects that Machiavellian power gut to gut. The big thing about sexy music is the power of suggestion. A song with a porno lyric may cause laughter or embarrassment, but never an invitation to the bedroom. Sensual singing, an insistent beat that builds, suggestive lyrics — these are what turn people on today. One of the biggest motivations in record sales is the bedroom lure, which record companies all know about. Music is used everywhere to condition the human mind. Hitler used Wagner to win the German masses to Naziism. Our future music may be a frequency machine feeding impulses to our nervous system through electrodes or the ear, giving us highs and lows more powerful than any drugs in use today. And much more dangerous, too, because nobody takes musical manipulation very seriously."
Eddy Lawrence Manson
"The cavalier expression of such sentiments, the resurrection of a dormant specter from the crypt of America’s “cold war” with the former Soviet Union, is meant purely to foster the viral spread of collective apprehension in the fragile heart of the population which, over the centuries, has proved to be the Jesuit order’s most effective tool in the execution of psychological warfare, economic and political transformation (AKA order out of chaos), and social behavioral modification. Turns out, the looming threat of annihilation at the hands of “nuclear weapons” or viral infection due to the Covid-19 “pandemic” are both hoaxes."
Stephen C. Perkins
"In regard to propaganda, the early advocates of universal literacy and a free press envisaged only two possibilities: the propaganda might be true, or it might be false. They did not foresee what in fact has happened, above all in our Western capitalist democracies — the development of a vast mass communications industry, concerned in the main neither with the true nor the false, but with the unreal, the more or less totally irrelevant. In a word, they failed to take into account man’s almost infinite appetite for distractions."
Aldous Huxley
"My thesis, then, is as follows: In addition to our immediate consciousness, which is of a thoroughly personal nature and which we believe to be the only empirical psyche (even if we tack on the personal unconscious as an appendix), there exists a second psychic system of a collective, universal, and impersonal nature which is identical in all individuals. This collective unconscious does not develop individually but is inherited. It consists of pre-existent forms, the archetypes, which can only become conscious secondarily and which give definite form to certain psychic contents."
Carl Gustav Jung
"Impersonal forces over which we have almost no control seem to be pushing us all in the direction of the Brave New Worldian nightmare; and this impersonal pushing is being consciously accelerated by representatives of commercial and political organizations who have developed a number of new techniques for manipulating, in the interest of some minority, the thoughts and feelings of the masses."
Aldous Huxley
"The state represents violence in a concentrated and organized form. The individual has a soul, but as the state is a soulless machine, it can never be weaned from violence to which it owes its very existence."
Mahatma Gandhi
"While the State exists, there can be no freedom. When there is freedom there will be no State."
Vladimir Lenin
"Political and economic power in the United States is concentrated in the hands of a “ruling elite” that controls most of U.S.-based multinational corporations, major communication media, the most influential foundations, major private universities and most public utilities. Founded in 1921, the Council of Foreign Relations is the key link between the large corporations and the federal government. It has been called a “school for statesmen” and “comes close to being an organ of what C. Wright Mills has called the Power Elite – a group of men, similar in interest and outlook shaping events from invulnerable positions behind the scenes. The creation of the United Nations was a Council project, as well as the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank."
Steve Jacobson
"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."
Walter Lippmann
"It is with knowledge of the human being, his tendencies, his desires, his needs, his psychic mechanisms, his automatisms as well as knowledge of social psychology and analytical psychology that propaganda refines its techniques."
Jacques Ellul
"These organizations represent the collective interests of the largest corporations on earth. They not only retain armies of policy wonks and researchers to articulate their agenda and form a consensus internally, but also use their massive accumulation of unwarranted influence in media, industry, and finance to manufacture a self-serving consensus internationally. To believe that this corporate-financier oligarchy would subject their agenda and fate to the whims of the voting masses is naive at best. They have painstakingly ensured that no matter who gets into office, in whatever country, the guns, the oil, the wealth and the power keep flowing perpetually into their own hands. [....] The real revolution will commence when we identify the above equation as the true brokers of power and when we begin systematically removing our dependence on them, and their influence on us from our daily lives. The global corporate-financier oligarchy needs us, we do not need them, independence from them is the key to our freedom."
Tony Cartalucci
"It is the emergence of mass media which makes possible the use of propaganda techniques on a societal scale. The orchestration of press, radio and television to create a continuous, lasting and total environment renders the influence of propaganda virtually unnoticed precisely because it creates a constant environment. Mass media provides the essential link between the individual and the demands of the technological society."
Jacques Ellul
"But what could make democracy attractive to the powerful, whose very power it limits and threatens? The answer is quite simple: Nothing! For democracy means precisely to restrict the power needs of the powerful and the rich, in which they naturally have no interest. This now results in a tension between the needs of the rulers to stabilize their status and our need to feel socially autonomous and self-determined with regard to our social situation. In history, this fundamental tension has often been discharged in the form of revolutions. From the point of view of the rulers, how can this tension be defused if we want to avoid bloody revolutions?
The solution lies in 'satisfying' the citizens' need for freedom with a surrogate, with a substitute drug, namely the illusion of democracy. To create such an illusion of democracy, one needs above all - and this is where the herd metaphor comes into play again - an ideology of justification that justifies why the people are immature and in need of leadership. Furthermore, the idea of democracy, which is so attractive to the people, must be emptied of its meaning so that it is limited only to an electoral act. And finally, continuous democracy management is needed to ensure that the people want what they are supposed to want in the act of voting."
Prof. Rainer Mausfeld
"The fact that there is a gap between journalists and the public is shown above all by the fact that the former are much more interested in the opinion of their colleagues than in the judgment of their readers. Compare this with a healthy system, for example that of restaurants. As we [...] have seen, restaurant owners care about the opinions of their diners, not those of other restaurant owners, which keeps restaurant owners doing what their job is; it prevents the industry as a whole from moving away from diners' interests. In addition, skin in the game creates diversity, and monoculture is prevented. Economic uncertainty exacerbates the situation. Journalists currently work in the most insecure profession imaginable: the majority live hand-to-mouth, and ostracism by colleagues would be fatal. This makes them easy victims for manipulative lobbyists, as has been seen in connection with genetically modified organisms (GMOs), the wars in Syria, and more. In this profession, if you say something unpopular about Brexit, GMOs, or Putin, you're toast. It's the exact opposite of professions where being a follower is punished."
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
"As a self appointed messiah, I view music as far more than just entertainment"
John Denver
"In those days we used to say that every place we played was church and that's what it was like. A pretty far out church but that's how we felt."
Phillip Chapman Lesh
"it was not just a concert. It was a place of worship. The band was the high priest, the songs the liturgy, the dancing the prayer, the audience the congregation. Out of these simple ingredients we created a tradition and enacted a ritual that was at once entirely familiar and thoroughly mysterious."
Gary Greenberg
"Democracy has nothing to do with freedom. Democracy is a soft variant of communism, and rarely in the history of ideas has it been taken for anything else."
Prof. Hans Hermann Hoppe
"If you trust me completely…I can help you. If I tell you you are not within a prison the prison is within you can you believe that?"
Kwai Chang Caine
"We were raised by people who dutifully follow the rules of state power. We were brought up to follow the rules & not question the state. But now malicious people make the rules. It's time to teach our children something different."
The Libertarian Pilot
"It was a crusade, it was a mission. We were like sentinels, like lights. ON TOUR THE SHOWS WERE LIKE CHURCH; Bob delivering the sermon. There were mixed emotions in the audience: you see people literally crying, people in a frenzy, on A SPIRITUAL HIGH ... These concerts were powerful and highly spiritual. There was a power that pulled you there. It was a clean feeling ... For months and maybe years it stays with you"
Judy Mowatt
"In my own experience, I have been amazed to see how unrealistic are the bases for political opinion in general. Only rarely have I found a person who has chosen any particular political party - democratic or totalitarian - through study and comparison of principles."
Joost A.M. Meerloo