In Democracy in America, French smarty-pants Alexis de Tocqueville predicted a country in which the voices of the wise and thoughtful minority would be drowned out by a shrill, ignorant, materialistic majority. 150 years later, the once thoughtful minority has become the power elite by systematically brainwashing the majority through mind control and propaganda. Government, Mass Media, and Big Business all collude to keep us real ordinary American citizens misinformed, complacent, and dumb.
Politicians distract voters with controversial wedge issues like abortion, gay marriage, and illegal immigration. These are emotional arguments contrived to manufacture outrage on both sides and divert attention from hypocrisy, corruption, malfeasance, and the Truth that they actually agree more than they claim to. The left and right appear to be growing further apart, but are more alike than ever in their lust for power. While each party demonizes the other with increasingly hostile rhetoric, their arguments are over mere methods to achieve the same end. Their goals are not to improve the lives of ordinary citizens, or to reform a wasteful and corrupt government, or to return the country to a golden age of prosperity. The only goal is to seize power and to hold it for as long as possible; to do whatever they want with impunity. Electronic vote-fraud machines eliminate the paper trail that exposes rigged elections, allowing corrupt campaigns to manipulate the electoral college and steal elections like never before.
The education system is a broken mess, turned to garbage by ever-expanding government "reforms" based on narrow standardized tests that measure multiple-choice memorization (and encourage cheating by students and teachers alike) instead of cultivating actual knowledge. History books are whitewashed, written to be politically correct mythologies. Their committee of bureaucrat authors omit important lessons from the violent and bloody Truth about the revolution, slavery, and American imperialism. The citizens of tomorrow are being deliberately denied quality education so they can grow up to be vapid servile consumer drones who will unquestioningly accept the status quo, just how the power elite wants them.
Government officials frequently engage in politricks to make it appear public opinion is on their side. The War Department (don't buy that "defense" doublespeak bullshit) and the CIA "leak" official-sounding but completely fictional stories to the press that manufacture public support for doomed follies like the Iraq War. Eager for their "scoops," the Mass Media dutifully parrot whatever propaganda the government hands them, granting anonymity to the sources so there is nobody to hold accountable if the Truth is discovered.
Mass Media is obsessed with sensationalism, conflict, and inane entertainment. The best selling books are insipid ghost-written celebrity tell-all gossip memoirs or quasi-religious new age self-help dogma. Hollywood churns out unoriginal film retreads and sequels, filled with sound and fury, signifying nothing. Television offers patronizing news broadcasts full of colorful graphics, pretty faces, and feel-good fluff, yet devoid of serious critical investigation or meaningful analysis. Reality shows spin melodramatic webs wherein selfish "regular" people are rewarded for antisocial behavior. An entire cable channel nominally dedicated to "learning" is in fact a sickeningly exploitative carnival sideshow featuring every freak imaginable for its viewers' amusement. We Americans sit slack-jawed for several hours a day, absorbing all this hollow trash as though it were Truth, and make its emulation the soulless mission of our empty, frustrated lives.
A crucial organ to propagate the establishment status quo, the Mass Media portrays politics as a game, and elections as grand sporting events, awarding points for every campaign dollar raised, and subtracting them for every bungling gaffe. Voters are reduced to fans in a national popularity contest, ignorant of politicians' actual platforms and unable to make informed decisions. Devoted to maintaining its facade of objective balance, the media makes obviously harmful and wrongheaded ideas and calculated lies look like legitimate "viewpoints," thereby irresponsibly propagating them.
The Big Business-owned and advertising-dominated liberal news media is unwilling to ask big important questions or fund deep investigations for fear of losing advertiser revenue or suffering censorship from their parent company. The shallow infotainment, grotesque parade of sex and death, and celebrity mass culture we endure today is the direct result of the Mass Media's Big Business aversion to Truth and exclusive embrace of profit.
Big Business is the hand that controls America today. The most highly regarded and highly paid people in America aren't statesmen or inventors or scientists or artists or engineers, but rather CEOs and managers whose specialty is the cynical manipulation of people for their own gain, and financial vampires who derive profit from others' misfortunes. With their unlimited financial resources, the corporate plutocrats wield the power to write the laws in the government and spread lies through the media that ensure their continued legacy of dominance over the country. The corporatist has no allegiance but to profit and the unfettered acquisition thereof, even if it means devastating the entire economy. The corporation enjoys the legal and ethical rights of citizenship but holds none of the responsibilities. America is no longer a nation state of individual citizens, it is a lawless cartel of corporations which feeds on them. It is neofeudalism: they are the Lords and we are the serfs, growing their wealth in exchange for permission to survive. And if we wretched serfs have the nerve to challenge their rule, they can legally and financially brutalize us.
Our corporate masters have harnessed the government and Mass Media to keep us real citizens so stupid and complacent that we willingly, unknowingly, and repeatedly vote, act, and think against our own best interests. If Alexis de Tocqueville were to visit America today, his book would have a new title: Dumbocracy in Scamerica.
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