Noam Chomsky: Propaganda

So you have people arguing about do I support the troops, of course I don't? etc and then you go on. That's like Americanism and harmony, we're all together, empty slogans that somehow join in and lets make sure we don't have all these bad people around who disrupt all of our harmony with their talk about class struggle and their rights and that sort of business. Well, that's all very effective, it runs right up to today and of course it is carefully thought out. You know the people in the PR industry aren't there for the fun of it, they're doing work, they're trying to instill the right values, in fact they have a conception of what a democracy ought to be, it ought to be a system in which the specialized class are trained to do their work for the service of the masters, the people who own the society, and the rest of the population ought to be deprived of any form of organization because organization just causes trouble.

They ought to be just sitting alone in front of the television set and having drilled into their heads daily the message which says the only value in life is to have more commodities, or to live like that rich middle class family you're watching and to have nice values like harmony and americanism and that's all there is in life. You may think in your own head that there's got to be something more in life than this but since you're watching the tube alone you assume I must be crazy because that's all that's is going on over there, and since there's no organization permitted, that's absolutely crucial, you never have a way of finding out whether you're crazy and you just assume it because it's the natural thing to assume. That's the ideal and great efforts were made into trying to achieve that ideal and there is a certain conception of democracy behind it.

Noam Chomsky, 1992.