'An
awakening is most
unlikely since all
forces that could break
that trance are devoted
to maintaining it.'
By Paul Edwards: Noam Chomsky’s “Manufacturing Consent”, published in 1988, was a
ground-breaking, comprehensive analysis of the processes used by American
government to persuade citizens to approve whatever witches’ brew of deceit,
crime, and murder the ruling elite elected to perpetrate.
Today that idea has a quaint, nostalgic
charm since no serious person would now contend that our government requires
anything resembling consent from its people. It rules imperiously an
intellectually lobotomized public it has rendered torpid, quiescent,
inanimate. You are now told what it has done or is doing, if you are told
anything at all.
While the stupefied, comatose condition of
Americans that allows them to opt out of the moral universe and assuage their
guilt with petitions, donations, and memberships in faineant feel-good drum
circles is not necessarily permanent, an awakening is most unlikely since all
forces that could break that trance are devoted to maintaining it.