"Rhetoric has no need to know the truth about things"

Frontline: The Persuaders

Want to scare yourself silly. Watch this documentary PERSUADERS about how people in your world, right now, are sitting around tables and focus group rooms with one way mirrors paying millions of dollars to figure out how to sell stuff to your reptilian brain.

For the last hour I have had an insatiable urge to eat flies.

"Rhetoric," Plato says, “has no need to know the truth about things but merely to discover a technique of persuasion, so as to appear among the ignorant to have more knowledge than the expert.”

For example, if you call a tax an inheritance tax, people think you are just taxing wealthy people with estates. Call it a "death tax" and they realize that you must be taxing them and people like them because everyone dies. Of course the tax may still only people rich enough to die with estates but a death tax sounds like it is only a matter of time before every peasant will get the same treatment. Who can vote against a "No Child Left Behind Act"? Who could vote FOR a "No NEA Union Member Unemployed Act"? Its all about wording. I would suggest that this documentary or things like it was the source code for the plotline in the book, FEED.

As Hitler writes in Mein Kampf,

"Here the art of propaganda consists in putting a matter so clearly and forcibly before the minds of the people as to create a general conviction regarding the reality of a certain fact, the necessity of certain things and the just character of something that is essential. . . All propaganda must be presented in a popular form and must fix its intellectual level so as not to be above the heads of the least intellectual of those to whom it is directed. Thus its purely intellectual level will have to be that of the lowest mental common denominator among the public it is desired to reach."

I would write more but my lizard brain is going ape for flies right now. Must have flies. Must have flies. Only $99.95