PROPAGANDA!

"... [T]his became a part of contemporary political science, the founder of the modern field of communications, one of the leading american political scientists, Harold Laswell he explained a couple of years after this in the early 1930's that should no succumb to what he called democratic dogmatisms about men being the best judges of their own interests, because they're not, they're not the best judges of their own interests, WE'RE the best judges of their interests and we have to therefore just out of ordinary morality make sure that they don't have an opportunity to opt to act on the basis of their misjudgements and the way we nowadays in whats nowadays called a totalitarian state/military state or something, it's easy you just hold a bludgeon over their heads and if they get out of line you just smash them over the head, but as societies become more free and democratic you lose that capacity and therefore you have to turn to the techniques of propaganda.

The logic is clear -- propaganda is to a democracy what the bludgeon is to a totalitarian state and that's wise and good because again the common interests elude the bewildered herd, they cant figure them out. The public relations industry not only took this ideology on very explicitly but also acted on it, that's a huge industry, spending hundreds of..by now probably on the order of a billion dollars a year on it or something and its committment all along was to controlling the public mind."

Noam Chomsky interviewed by unidentified interviewer, January, 1992

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