“with the political press is bound up the need of universal school education, which in the classical world was completely lacking…in this demand there is an element of desiring to shepherd the masses, as the objects of party politics, into the newspaper’s power area…no tamer has his animals more under his power…unleash the people as a reader-mass and it will storm through the streets and hurl itself upon the target indicated, terrifying and breaking windows; a hint of press-staff and it will become quiet and go home…the press today is an army with carefully organized arms and branches, with journalists as officers, and readers as soldiers…the reader neither knows or is allowed to know, the purposes for which he is used, nor even the role that he is to play…a more appalling caricature of freedom of thought cannot be imagined…formerly a man did not dare think freely, now he dares and cannot…the competitors strive by means of money to detach readers…nay, peoples, en masse from the hostile allegiance and bring them under their own mind-training…a higher will put together a picture of their world for them…there is no need now, as there was for baroque princes, to impose military service liability on the subject…one whips their souls with articles, telegrams, and pictures until they clamor for weapons and force their leaders into a conflict to which they were willed to be forced.”
Oswald Spengler. “decline of the west”_________________________________________
sometimes ozzie's writing is so impenetrable i have to wonder if i am just dense or if he is shamming...then again sometimes he knocks me out of my chair...the idea of universal public education as a method of indoctrinating citizens into the world-view of the hegemonic culture and teaching children to stay in one place for eight or more hours ( we are evolved as nomads after all...walking is life ) is a familiar theme...that it is a mechanism to educate the masses to the reception of the tools of manipulation is, for me, strikingly new...( and spengler was writing at a time when newspapers were still the main mass medium...commercial radio wasn't around yet, much less television...films were, however, and i am wondering if the rise of the "visual learner" coincided with the rise of the first visual mass medium )...certainly humans are social animals who have an innate desire to belong...vangardists seize on this and "detach" the masses from previously held identities and being them "under their own mind training"....and the sense of "belonging" to a group can be manipulated into an intense hatred and fear which can translate into mob action against "the other"...anyone not "of the body" which is conveniently defined by mass media...the current zoo parade of a presidential campaign certainly falls into the category of manipulation of fear...and frightened people do extreme and ugly things...this is the fourteenth presidential campaign in my life and the eleventh of which i was ( and am) politically aware enough to draw conclusions...and those conclusions are that 1) there is a concerted effort to manipulate us through fear by virtually every candidate out there...even bernie, who may simply be using it to contrast himself with the others, and, 2) that effort is being aided and abetted by mass media who, as for profit corporate concerns as interested in their bottom lines as disseminating anything like factual information, are giving free reign to this bullshit because it is lurid, cheap, easy news and serves the purposes of a "higher will" rather than anything like even representative democracy...hamilton's governmental ponzi scheme grinds on...i'm not sure even he would be comfortable with this
