There are two elements of this that I think are interesting, I've been
devoting a lot of thought to the controlled media.

One is that there are always people who are at the dumb end of the
spectrum. In the standard system of democracy, these people do not get
to talk. Meritocracy is still an elitist system. But a society
functions best when it's most capable members are in control. We are
not created equal in ability, and the task of society is to harness
the ability of the most capable members for the good of all. But in no
meaningful system are the bottom 20% ever consulted about anything,
because they don't understand the question. 

The thing is, these are the people the oligarchs are really giving the
shaft to, the working class. The working class ought to be the allies
of the intellectual left in the standard model of democracy, because
the left has ethics and cares about people, but they are below the
notice of the oligarchs. In this instance the oligarchs exported all
the working class jobs to China, which was disastrous for the US
working class, because that's the kind of work they can do. 

But using their media, the oligarchs are blaming this betrayal on the
intellectual left. Moreover, they are using a kind of anti elitist
rhetoric to justify publishing the views of these incoherent folk.
Meritocracy is elitist, and there is an idea that democracy is not
elitist that can be used to justify giving the least intelligent
section of society an equal share in the national conversation. This
distorts the national conversation, because what they say is
gibberish, the tea party. 

This is what I call disinformation, which is been a military tactic
since the ancient Egyptians, but with modern communications is much
more sweeping. They are very clever tactics that screw over the
working class and the intellectual left at the same time and drives a
wedge between the oligarchs natural enemies. I call it disinformation
because that's what it would be called if we used it against our
enemies.

The second thing is more nebulous, I'm still working it out. It has to
do with how people, all of us, receive our culture. All the bones of
it we get before we are grown, and we can never really understand it
all, because it took 25k years to create it. There is so much of it,
only a professional academic can ever really think through and
comprehend the provenance and function of everything we know. 

So more information is coming in all the time, and we have to have
this information. Imagine if we had not received new acculturation
since the seventies, we would be out of step and inappropriate,
because times have changed. We receive very complex ideas all the time
and we cannot sort them all out, there just isn't time. Many of these
ideas now come from the controlled media. It's a little like eating
fast food, it's being prepared by people who don't have your best
interests at heart.

What I'm thinking lately is that this function of adsorbing culture is
one we cannot turn off, and one that makes us vulnerable unless we
really comprehend that much of what we are hearing is constructed by
experts to mess us up. All the anti government rhetoric is wrong -
government is a good thing that is the only thing between us and
anarchy, or oligarchy. And yet the constant drone of anti government
talk never lets up, and some of it is bound to be picked up by our
unconscious culture antenna. 

There is a constant slide in the direction the disinformation people
want it to go, effecting most strongly the stupid people, but right
across the spectrum. It may be that after a certain point in the
development of disinformation if the media is allowed to fall into the
hands of any single portion of society, the results will always be
disastrous. This may be something inherent in the nature of human
consciousness, in the way we have to accept new ideas in order to stay
current with our society.

-- Patrick Ridge 2011-01-21