Overflight, 25

“What people are interested in is not always what is to their interest; the troubles they are aware of are not always the ones that beset them… It is not only that [people] can be unconscious of their situations; they are often falsely conscious of them.”
C. Wright Mills, quoted in Michael Parenti, Dirty Truths, as quoted in zhibit.org/diemythographer

“In the midst of increasing mechanization and technological organization, propaganda is simply the means used to prevent these things from being felt as too oppressive and to persuade man to submit with good grace. When man will be fully adapted to this technological society, when he will end by obeying with enthusiasm, convinced of the excellence of what he is forced to do, the constraint will no longer be felt by him.”
Jacques Ellul, Propaganda: The Formation of Men’s Attitudes, as quoted in zhibit.org/diemythographer

“The average citizen is the world’s most efficient censor. His own mind is the greatest barrier between him and the facts. His own ‘logic−proof compartments’, his own absolutism are the obstacles which prevent him from seeing in terms of experience and thought rather than in terms of group reaction.”
Edward L. Bernays, Crystallizing Public Opinion, as quoted in zhibit.org/diemythographer

“The frightening thing is that it has become clear now that simply recognizing the artificiality of something does not ensure immunity to that thing. Simply knowing that you’re an object of propaganda is not enough, in itself, to armor one against the appeals of propaganda. That’s really the message of 1984… everybody’s aware that the propaganda is ongoing – that’s what doublethink is, that’s what the concept of doublethink means: with one part of your mind you can see that it’s just a crock, and you don’t fall for it, but with the other part of that same mind, you adhere blindly to it.”
Mark Crispin Miller, quoted in Consuming Images, part one of Bill Moyers, The Public Mind: Image and Reality in America, as quoted in zhibit.org/diemythographer

Overflight