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Feral Finster's avatar

„By means of ever more effective methods of mind-manip­ulation, the democracies will change their nature; the quaint old forms— elections, parliaments, Supreme Courts and all the rest—will remain. The underlying substance will be a new kind of non-violent totalitari­anism. All the traditional names, all the hallowed slo­gans will remain exactly what they were in the good old days. Democracy and freedom will be the theme of every broadcast and editorial—but democracy and free­dom in a strictly Pickwickian sense. Meanwhile the ruling oligarchy and its highly trained elite of sol­diers, policemen, thought-manufacturers and mind-manipulators will quietly run the show as they see fit.“ —  Aldous Huxley, book Brave New World Revisited Source: Brave New World Revisited (1958), Chapter 3, p. 25

Source: https://quotepark.com/quotes/1744774-aldous-huxley-by-means-of-ever-more-effective-methods-of-mind-ma/

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Vin LoPresti's avatar

Freedomland was a pro-patriotic theme park in NJ that my family visited when I was 5 or 6 years old. I briefly flashed on it yesterday and this post returned it to mind. What a slick propaganda vehicle for brainwashing a young mind. These vehicles are/have been ubiquitous in US society since WWII. I'm sometimes amazed that I began to reject that brainwashing by the age of 19 and moreover that by my dotage, I've experienced a complete rejection thereof. Looking back, I recognize that the voyage from "rah-rah USA" to "what a bloody over-theatricalized opera of excuses for covert and overt violence" is quite a long and tortuous one. I can only hope that as a greater number of folks travel this road, some type of hundredth-monkey effect might ensue, shifting enough consciousness to make a difference in subsequent perception of that violence-framed-as-patriotism. As to the frustration of"shouting into a hole in the ground": been there, felt that.

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