Comment by SequoiaHope

Comment by SequoiaHope 19 hours ago

This may in some ways be technically correct, but it is also true that in a democracy, the elite make decisions with the support of the people through manufactured consent. This process involves the manipulation of the populace through mass media, to intentionally misinform and influence them.

One could take the position that this process is so flawed as to be illegitimate. In this case it would be a valid position to believe that society had not fairly decided these things, and they were instead decided by a certain class of people and pushed on to the rest of us.

See: A Propaganda Model, by Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky: https://chomsky.info/consent01/

tptacek 15 hours ago

What interventions could you not justify using this logic?

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rayiner 18 hours ago

That's the notion of "false consciousness" that Marxists trot out to justify why they're right even though people don't agree with them. It's a tool for academics to justify imposing themselves as right-thinking elites who know better than the unwashed masses.

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SequoiaHope 15 hours ago

I disagree strongly with any authoritarian rule, but it is probably correct that the masses don’t actually know the best way to run society. That doesn’t mean we need to impose rule, it means we need to understand manufacturing consent (which is a distinct concept from false consciousness and well supported by the facts), it means we need to combat manufactured consent and better educate people.

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