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saras

(6,670 posts)
10. You don't need pomo to know this. Every psychological theory acknowledges it. In private.
Sat Feb 25, 2012, 03:08 PM
Feb 2012

Certainly the progressive psychology of the forties to seventies supported it, as did relatively mainstream sociology, such as Jacques Ellul's Propaganda. He also made the point that there's two distinctly different kinds of propaganda - some of it is designed to get you to go do something, and some of it is designed to keep you passive and keep you from doing anything. And all of it is done on levels of the mind that are not amenable to being altered significantly by conscious thought. In fact, he makes the point that propaganda works BETTER if you think about it critically, because you are saturating yourself in its emotional environment for hours and hours when you aren't even being EXPOSED to it.

Ellul, a Christian anarchist, also coined "think globally, act locally."

But since Reagan reconstructed the entire funding system of mental health, the vast majority of psychology research that is done is explicitly for private consumption and corporate profit, and not for the public interest. So the PUBLIC voice of modern psychology says "just take your pill, dearie, and those anti-authoritarian symptoms will go right away like the bad dream they are" and the private says "Hey, advertisers. Start with younger kids. The emotions are already there to manipulate, and there's less mind to get in the way. And you can wire products and thinking of the world in terms of products into their very thinking processes. Give them brand names as the raw material to think about the world with, instead of leftist abstractions like community and responsibility."

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