“In regard to propaganda the early advocates of universal literacy and a free press envisaged only two possibilities: the propaganda might be true, or the propaganda 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.
In the past most people never got a chance of fully satisfying this appetite. They might long for distractions, but the distractions were not provided. Christmas came but once a year, feasts were "solemn and rare," there were few readers and very little to read, and the nearest approach to a neighborhood movie theater was the parish church, where the performances though frequent, were somewhat monotonous. For conditions even remotely comparable to those now prevailing we must return to imperial Rome, where the populace was kept in good humor by frequent, gratuitous doses of many kinds of entertainment - from poetical dramas to gladiatorial fights, from recitations of Virgil to all-out boxing, from concerts to military reviews and public executions. But even in Rome there was nothing like the non-stop distractions now provided by newspapers and magazines, by radio, television and the cinema. In "Brave New World" non-stop distractions of the most fascinating nature are deliberately used as instruments of policy, for the purpose of preventing people from paying too much attention to the realities of the social and political situation. The other world of religion is different from the other world of entertainment; but they resemble one another in being most decidedly "not of this world." Both are distractions and, if lived in too continuously, both can become, in Marx's phrase "the opium of the people" and so a threat to freedom. Only the vigilant can maintain their liberties, and only those who are constantly and intelligently on the spot can hope to govern themselves effectively by democratic procedures. A society, most of whose members spend a great part of their time, not on the spot, not here and now and in their calculable future, but somewhere else, in the irrelevant other worlds of sport and soap opera, of mythology and metaphysical fantasy, will find it hard to resist the encroachments of those would manipulate and control it.”
― Aldous Huxley, Brave New World Revisited
Results 11 to 20 of 38
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04-25-2013, 10:58 PM #11
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04-25-2013, 10:58 PM #12
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04-25-2013, 11:07 PM #13
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<TONelson> F'real I am glad you are still a MOD here man. You give a shit. That matters
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04-25-2013, 11:23 PM #14
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<TONelson> F'real I am glad you are still a MOD here man. You give a shit. That matters
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04-25-2013, 11:34 PM #15
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<TONelson> F'real I am glad you are still a MOD here man. You give a shit. That matters
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04-26-2013, 01:07 AM #16
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Wow, at this point I am just mind blown... And of course they would blame the Russians.
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04-26-2013, 04:00 AM #17
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It is suspiciuos, one dead and the other one cant speak, a little to big a coincedence to be true
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04-26-2013, 09:47 AM #18
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04-26-2013, 09:57 AM #19
Did you guys see how the clouds formed the shape of a devil's head over the Prudential Center minutes before the first bomb went off? Me neither. Don't you guys have something better to do, like post about how Merge is rigged? Maybe Merge is a government conspiracy to take all our mobnies....
Got a fast GPU? Crunch Bitcoin calculations for PayPal $$$. See my profile for link!
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04-26-2013, 12:24 PM #20
i know this apparently hasnt anything to do with this thread but, actually, it shows us how capitalist governments all around the world see their people, and, doing so, it helps us to understand why all that "conspiracy theories" are not that crazy and impossible:
In the beginning God said : "The four dimensional divergence of an antisymmetric second rank tensor equals zero", and at once there was light.