> Brian:
>> Oh, my God, we're living under the NAZIS? Why didn't anyone TELL me?
> How
>> could I have been so easily DELUDED by the lack of storm troopers,
>> Waffen-SS, and Gestapo officers running our lives? How could I have
>> MISSED the CONCENTRATION CAMPS just outside of Philadelphia? Why did I
>> not NOTICE the sudden disappearance of all my Jewish friends? Oh, my
>> GOD, how could I have IGNORED this for so long?
>
> The answer which I found is that every government, especially a fascist
> one, depends on ***learned ignorance*** -a selective inattention of the
> general public to certain facts that may shatter their complacency. If
> the burghers of Bergen Belsen realized that their government was
> committing genocide in their backyard, they would have to either a)
> endorse it, and thus take the responsibility for it or b) oppose it, and
> thus take the risk being labeled subversive. In either case, however,
> they would have to do something that would challenge, or even shatter,
> their system of values and lifestyle. They would either have to reject
> the normative system of the occidental civilization or run a personal
> risk of being socially ostracized or even punished by their government.
> However, a selective blindness coming from learned ignorance of
> inconvenient fact relieved them from that disturbing dilemma. They
> could go about their everyday business, working, shopping, playing
> without noticing what their government was doing in their name.
Fine, fine. fine. Wojtek's right. We don't live in a country that's more affluent and considerably freer than most regions of the world. We actually live in a Nazi hellhole, a nightmare of mass murder and blight and pervasive terror, where whole populations are spirited away to death camps, and the state's propaganda apparatus has reduced the already-compliant population to little more than reflexive, barely-sentient sheep. This system of terror is so all-encompassing and all-powerful that everyone who expresses even the slightest deviation from state-approved norms is spirited away to an extermination camp, their families barely capable of wondering why Mummy or Daddy aren't coming home because of the degree of "learned ignorance" cultivated by the geniuses of the system. Existence is a continual recycling of despair's flavors, pain and suffering is the norm, and the few joys we _do_ have are merely illusions perpetrated by the state to distract us from the utter futility of continued existence. All we can do is huddle in our basements and hope that they won't start gassing whole cities to get at us.
On the other hand....
If _I_ were in charge of propaganda for a modern, malevolent corporate state, I'd cultivate people to act as theoreticians for whatever Resistance might turn up. Every society has its dissidents, and one would have to make sure they can't do _squat_ and get in the way. So I'd cultivate theoreticians who could tell these people what they ought to know: that yes, the system is evil, and yes, the state exerts power to keep everyone in line. I'd encourage them to believe that that all the things that people enjoy are the products of an evil system, so they couldn't derive joy from them anymore. I'd encourage them to squabble between themselves over the meager efforts they manage to raise. I'd suggest that any of their fellow citizens who doubt this gloomy outlook are, in fact, hopelessly indoctrinated, treacherous, reactionary, passive sheep-- just like that young Nazi who rats out the von Trapps in _The Sound of Music_.
In other words, I'd be paying people like Wojtek to write the stuff Wojtek writes.