Noam says:
Propaganda By Noam Chomsky
[L]et me begin by counter-posing two different conceptions of democracy. One conception of democracy has it that a democratic society is one in which the public has the means to participate in some meaningful way in the management of their own affairs and the means of information are open and free. If you look up democracy in the dictionary you'll get a definition something like that.
An alternative conception of democracy is that the public must be barred from managing their own affairs and the means of information must be kept narrowly and rigidly controlled. That may sound like an odd conception of democracy, but it's important to understand that it is the prevailing conception.
EARLY HISTORY OF PROPAGANDA
Let's begin with the first modern government propaganda operation. Woodrow Wilson was elected President in 1916 on the platform "Peace Without Victory." That was right in the middle of the First World War. The Wilson Administration was actually commietted to war and had to do something about it. They established a government propaganda commission, called the Creel Commission, which succeeded, within six months, in turning a pacifist population into a hysterical, war-mongering population which wanted to destroy everything German, tear the Germans limb from limb, go to war and save the world.
That was a major achievement, and it led to a further achievement. Right at that time and after the war the same techniques were used to whip up a hysterical Red Scare, as it was called, which succeeded pretty much in destroying unions and eliminating such dangerous problems as freedom of the press and freedom of political thought. There was very strong support from the media, from the business establishment, which in fact organized--pushed much of this work-- and it was in general a great success.
SPECTATOR DEMOCRACY
Another group that was impressed by these successes were liberal Democratic theorists and leading media figures, like, for example, Walter Lippmann, who was the dean of American journalists, a major foreign and domestic policy critic and also a major theorist of liberal democracy. If you take a look at his collected essays, you'll see that they're subtitled something like "A Progressive Theory of Liberal Democratic Thought." Lippmann was involved in these propaganda commissions and recognized their achivements. He argued that what he called a "revolution in the art of democracy," could be used to manufacture consent, that is, to bring about agreement on the part of the public for things that they didn't want by the new techniques of propaganda.
This is a view that goes back hundreds of years. In fact, it has very close resemblance to the Leninist conception that a vanguard of revolutionary intellectuals take state power, using popular revolutions as the force that brings them to state power, and then drive the stupid masses towards a future that they're too dumb and incompetent to envision themselves.
The liberal democratic theory and Marxism-Leninism are very close in their common ideological assumptions. I think that's one reason why people have found it so easy over the years to drift from one position to another without any particular sense of change. It's just a matter of assessing where power is.
Lippmann backed this up by a pretty elaborated theory of progressive democracy. He argued that in a properly-functioning democracy there are classes of citizens. There is first of all the class of citizens who have to take some active role in running general affairs. That's the specialized class.
Those others, who are out of the small group, the big majority of the population, they are what Lippmann called "the bewildered herd." We have to protect ourselves from the trampling and rage of the bewildered herd. Their function in a democracy, he said, is to be spectators, not participants in action. Occasionally they are allowed to lend their weight to one or another member of the specialized class. That's because it's a democracy and not a totalitarian state. That's called an election.
But once they've lent their weight to one or another member of the specialized class they're supposed to sink back and become spectators of action, but not participants.
The compelling moral principle is that the mass of the public is just too stupid to be able to understand things. If they try to participate in managing their own affairs, they're just going to cause trouble. Therefore it would be immoral and improper to permit them to do this.
Just remember, there is an unstated premise here. The unstate premise --and even the responsible men have to disguise this from themselves-- has to do with the question of how they get into the position where they have the authority to make decisions.
The way they do that, of course, is by serving people with real power. The people with real power are the ones who own the society, which is a pretty narrow group. If the specialized class can come along and say, I can serve your interests, then they'll be part of the executive group. Unless they can master that skill, they're not part of the specialized class.
The rest of the bewildered herd just has to be basically distracted. Turn their attention to something else. Keep them out of trouble.
This point of view has been developed by lots of other people. In fact, it's pretty conventional. For example, a leading contemporary theologian and foreign policy critic Reinhold Niebuhr, sometimes called "the theologian of the establishment," the guru of George Kennan and the Kennedy intellectuals and others, put it that "rationality is a very narrowly restricted skill." Most people are guided by just emotion and impulse.
Those of us who have rationality have to create necessary illusions and emotionally potent over-simplifications to keep the naive simpletons more or less on course. In the 1920's and early 1930's, Harold Lasswell, the founder of the modern field of communications and one of the leading American political scientists, explained that we should not succumb to "democratic dogmatisms" about men being the best judges of their own interests.
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 so we were given a Town Center Task Force, and a Calthorp Study, and the public copy table at the side of the meeting room is ignored while last minute papers are handed around the council table. If one of the herd bellows, an additional copy is grudgingly made - with a lot of show.
And this new Ramsey3 is packaged and presented this way. We have a task force in the works there too, or that is my understanding.
It may be a great idea - much greater than Town Center failures - something that might preserve old Ramsey and the rural "feel," rather than threaten it as the Town Center malignancy and high density gun club housing deals etc. promise to do.
The point is, if Ramsey3 surprisingly turns out good it would be in spite of and not because of the condescending way it has so far been managed. If you package it the same as Town Center it will be more skeptically received than if it is honestly presented without smokescreening and bureauspeak but with simple fair and honest explanations - containing facts and getting to the point.
People who think otherwise would be those who subscribe to the "herd" theory Chomsky described. They should be weeded out to wend away with James Norman.
Try, for instance, to look at recent council agendas and minutes - not the multipage tomes James Norman constructs full of pages as numerous as snowflakes, for meetings, but the shorter items alleged to keep you informed - and tell me where you find, regarding the "Transition Team," who the people on that team are and what they will be doing.
You should feel like a herd animal, coming out of that exercise - and wondering where the "Port of Ramsey" is, for heavan's sake.
Read the entire Chomsky item if you like. The above is an extended excerpt. It is the nub.
Finally, on December 20, when your city's government holds that new Taj Majal open house, don't leave Ben alone across the street and out in the cold without stopping by to say hello.
Go over, visit with Ben, and think of your taxes while there. Moon the new building if that's your heartfelt taxpayer urge, while with Ben.