“The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum....”
As far as I can tell, there's no need to do anything at all to keep people passive and obedient. Most people seem to be born that way. They're kinda zombie like. Don't believe me? Look at the Stanley Milgram experiments.
~ Judging by how they shamelessly manipulate their own parents, I'm sure every last one of those little jerks would have gone all the way up to the maximum pretend voltage. ~
Fair enough. I should have found a better example. But do you really think those obedient people got that way because there's some sort of conspiracy by some elite, like Noam Chomsky alludes to?
Alexis de Tocqueville noted this as a feature of American society in the mid-1800s. Chomsky would be flattering himself to think it was an original idea or that it was imposed from on high.
