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The entities that comprise the American mass media and educational establishment constitute the most sophisticated (and successful) enterprise in thought-policing ever accomplished. These entities have cajoled hundreds of millions of Americans to conform their ambitions, thoughts, and feelings within an incredibly narrow spectrum of "acceptable" discourse. What's even worse is that they have us policing ourselves, even when we are alone in the privacy of our own homes!
This terrible reality is obfuscated by the fact that many believe that they have found their own personal island of free-thought, in an ocean of controlled discourse, by either Fox News, MSNBC, The Colbert Report, radio talk shows, universities, or even elite news opinion (the NYT); when, in reality, these are nothing more than various manifestations of the same edifice of thought-control. To wit, if you don't see how Rush Limbaugh and the New York Times agree on almost everything than you too are a member of this club of brainwashed Americans that confuse differences of style, personality, and rhetoric with that of actual substance.
Americans have not known authentic political discourse for decades, how can present & future generations appreciate the loss of something they've never known? Even if those of us who are old enough could present to the present generations a vision of free and open discourse many of them would reject it out of fear.
Reasonable facsimiles of America's thought-control leviathan can be found found in almost every advanced Western democracy. The only people that are actually aware of the dimension of thought-control that we (as a society) labor under, in many of these so-called "advanced" Western democracies, are those who are privately committing the most serious thought-crimes. Individuals whose thought-life already conforms to the accepted mainstream norms don't see this because they have never needed to engage in self-censorship as a prophylaxis for social ostracism.
Modern Westerners censor themselves and curtail their own freedoms out of fear. Many unconsciously accept the proposition that unless we restrict our thought-life we will become like the Nazis or the medieval Catholic Church and wage war with everyone else out of ignorance. I am both saddened and amused by the fact that those who curtail their own thinking the most are precisely those who openly brag of their openness and so-called independent mindedness, the paradoxical clash between themselves and the words that slip out of their mouth never occurs to them.
The American mass media and educational establishment cement their hold over our people's minds by instilling in us fear of what real intellectual freedom just might mean while nurturing within our polity ignorance of our own condition. In order to distract us from our own ignorance they call us "free", how else could they do it?
Are we not T.S. Eliot's hollow men and is this not a Wasteland?
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