Ferrus
5 Dec 2006, 11:51 AM
I have been studying theories of the state recently and came across the figure known as Lindblom... and found an interesting ariticle.
http://www.prospect.org/print/V12/15/scialabba-g.html
A lot of it struck me as common sence but one of the quotes there seemed most piquant:
A reasonable suspicion--to understate it--is that the messages of market elites constitute a twofold assault on the mind, the effects of which are all the more grave because government elites join in the assault. The first assault might be called distraction....Market elite persuasion of mass is so persistent and relentless, so widespread, and so inventive in its appeals that one must ask how much room it leaves in the mind for thinking about other things--or thinking at all rather than simply reacting....
The second assault is obfuscation. Politics, it is now often said, is huckstering. As for communication from the market elite on products, its mixture of emptiness, confusion, and deceit may have descended to a level below which there is not much room to drop further....
If we simply look about us at both sales promotion and the political appeals of market elite to mass, especially those now in the hands of specialists in public relations, we cannot escape some fears that they are systematically undermining that respect for truth or honesty long argued to be a requirement of civilized society.
I often hear here the cry against the supposed 'SJ' society - but is it really a personality type that is to blame? Education, our milieu and so on seems increasingly to want us to back down and cease thinking - surely those among us who do think critically are not so much a special personality type but rather those of us who somehow through some form of capacity to think deeply have resisted this impluse - to a degree?
And it strikes a chime too because when observing much of Western society as it is, isn't so much of it glib, tawdry and hollowly hedonistic in a way more wholesome socities outside the west and the societies of the past weren't.
http://www.prospect.org/print/V12/15/scialabba-g.html
A lot of it struck me as common sence but one of the quotes there seemed most piquant:
A reasonable suspicion--to understate it--is that the messages of market elites constitute a twofold assault on the mind, the effects of which are all the more grave because government elites join in the assault. The first assault might be called distraction....Market elite persuasion of mass is so persistent and relentless, so widespread, and so inventive in its appeals that one must ask how much room it leaves in the mind for thinking about other things--or thinking at all rather than simply reacting....
The second assault is obfuscation. Politics, it is now often said, is huckstering. As for communication from the market elite on products, its mixture of emptiness, confusion, and deceit may have descended to a level below which there is not much room to drop further....
If we simply look about us at both sales promotion and the political appeals of market elite to mass, especially those now in the hands of specialists in public relations, we cannot escape some fears that they are systematically undermining that respect for truth or honesty long argued to be a requirement of civilized society.
I often hear here the cry against the supposed 'SJ' society - but is it really a personality type that is to blame? Education, our milieu and so on seems increasingly to want us to back down and cease thinking - surely those among us who do think critically are not so much a special personality type but rather those of us who somehow through some form of capacity to think deeply have resisted this impluse - to a degree?
And it strikes a chime too because when observing much of Western society as it is, isn't so much of it glib, tawdry and hollowly hedonistic in a way more wholesome socities outside the west and the societies of the past weren't.