“We advertise our commitment to immaturity, mendacity and profound gullibility”

Mute the commercials.

“Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway’s vital book The Big Myth: How American Business Taught Us to Loathe Government and Love the Free Market shows you need not be paranoid to uncover conspiracies. Their book offers detailed explanations of how the myth went mainstream, capturing American and British governments in the 1980s and enacting a welter of laws and (de) regulations that played havoc with the world’s economies. Even more importantly, they show how the myth was carefully prepared by business interests whose influence ranged from university professors to newspaper cartoons, from Hollywood studios to church pulpits. In the English drawing rooms and Italian gardens that Henry James inhabited, he could not have imagined how thoroughly we’d be changed by “the new science of advertising” he foresaw. Half a century later Galbraith wrote: 

We, quite literally, advertise our commitment to immaturity, mendacity and profound gullibility. It is the hallmark of the culture. And it is justified as being economically indispensable. 14 He continued:

 Nor should scholars and scientists be detained for a moment by the protest that this is a highbrow view and that people must be allowed to have what they want. This is the standard defense of economic priority. It is not the argument of those who want to defend the public choice. It is the argument of those who want no interference in their management of the public choice. 15 Propaganda is sometimes a matter of simple deception. The claim that one group of people is eating another group’s puppies is just a lie, though as Goebbels discovered, repeating lies regularly can lead many to believe them. Repetition is always important, but most propaganda is subtler…”

— Call It Evil: Understanding the Trump Era by Susan Neiman
https://a.co/06cdRcSo