Overflight, 24
“There will be, in the next generation or so, a pharmacological method of making people love their servitude, and producing dictatorship without tears, so to speak, producing a kind of painless concentration camp for entire societies, so that people will in fact have their liberties taken away from them, but will rather enjoy it, because they will be distracted from any desire to rebel by propaganda or brainwashing, or brainwashing enhanced by pharmacological methods. And this seems to be the final revolution.”
Aldous Huxley, lecture to The California Medical School, San Francisco, 1961, as quoted in zhibit.org/diemythographer
“The book (The Proper Study of Mankind by Stuart Chase, 1948.) discusses in some detail the theory that by manipulating society you can change not only society itself but also the people in it. Theoretically, says the book, a society could be completely made over in something like fifteen years, the time it takes to inculcate a new culture into a rising crop of youngsters.”
Hearings of Special Committee to Investigate Tax−Exempt Foundations and comparable organizations, House Resolution 217, 83rd Congress, 1st Session, as quoted in zhibit.org/diemythographer
“We worry about so many dangers to our children – drugs, perverts, bullies – but seldom notice the biggest menace of all: the multibillion−dollar marketing effort aimed at turning the kids into oversexed, status−obsessed, attention−deficient little consumers.”
Barbara Ehrenreich, author of Nickel and Dimed, cover blurb for Juliet B. Schor, Born to Buy: The Commercialized Child and the New Consumer Culture, as quoted in zhibit.org/diemythographer
“The average person in the US watches about four hours of television each day. Over the course of a year, we see roughly twenty five thousand commercials, many of them produced by the world’s highest−paid cognitive psychologists. And these heavily produced advertisements are not merely for products, but for a lifestyle based on a consumer mindset. What they’re doing, day in and day out, thirty thousand times a year, is hypnotizing us into seeing ourselves as consumers who want to be entertained rather than as citizens who want to be informed and engaged…”
Duane Elgin, interview with Arnie Cooper, The Sun Magazine, August 2002, as quoted in zhibit.org/diemythographer