Originally Posted by AMPP
The old establishment cloaks itself in cultural camouflage, employing tactics for which it almost seamlessly maintains plausible deniability. Subtle, ubiquitous, often implicit propaganda fosters a broad public acceptance and embrace of the authority of the old establishment, and of the old establishment's definitions of good and evil, preventing the public from seriously contemplating the reality that the old establishment is itself quite often evil by its own definition. The old establishment, and even the new neoconservative establishment, reiterate the mantra that the President of the United States is “the leader of the free world”, but a free world has no leader, since a person can be a leader only if he has followers, and followers are not free. The President of the United States is simply the most obvious spearhead of the authority of the establishment. Except when he acts to reign in parts of the government below him and the establishment to whom he owes his office (something he does at his peril), he gathers strength at the expense of the world's freedom.
"Generally, an errant public attributes the results of the old establishment's meddlesome actions to happenstance, or to motives viewed as essentially innocuous or virtuous. The design is irrefutably evident only in the pattern of results, or by actually showing proof of meddling. The public has been systematically conditioned to ignore such patterns, and to condemn those who draw attention to them (e.g., by dismissing them as “conspiracy theorists”). Thus, controlling access to and dissemination of information that constitutes proof of meddling suffices in large part to protect the old establishment program from exposure. The compartmentalization of the old establishment's covert apparatus assures that those exposures which do transpire cause only limited damage.
Society is arranged so that the behaviors desired by the establishment are, in the short to medium term, more convenient, more profitable, or simply more likely to meet with success, than the alternatives.
The media and education apparatuses are used to manipulate popular perception in a manner that discourages undesired behavior and encourages desired behavior, and laws and corporate policies are subtly - or sometimes, blatantly - formed to alter the relative profitabilities of behaviors. Media campaigns leverage particularly off the tendency of people to be concerned with others' unreasoned opinions; this tendency is, of course, encouraged. Over time, a majority of the population comes to abandon the undesired behaviors and exhibit the desired behaviors, without having been forced to.
Once the cooperation of a majority of the population has been secured, a campaign is often waged to enact a prohibition of the undesired behavior, often incrementally through increasingly onerous impediments. These measures will have no effect on a majority of the population, since most have already abandoned the behavior. They are thus not inclined to actively oppose a campaign for prohibition. Once the prohibition campaign is underway, the media and education campaign is subtly changed, from one primarily intended to manipulate people into abandoning the undesired behavior, to one primarily intended to manipulate people to view those who engage in the undesired behavior as a threat. This secures the support for prohibition among a majority of the population. The minority that resists the campaign for prohibition is ostracized and vilified, and in some cases actively harassed and persecuted by the state, allied private corporations, and the community, annihilating its last vestiges of political capital. If and when an actual prohibition is in place, the people who continue to practice the prohibited behavior tend to be unsavory types, with little to lose, who resort to risk taking to find a niche and advantage. These people act as scarecrows, enhancing deterrence of the prohibited behavior.
These campaigns may be staged to pursue a separate, pre-existing goal, or they may be staged for their own sake, since they inherently marginalize the non-compliant. The citizen disarmament campaign is an example of the former, whereas the anti-tobacco campaign is largely an example of the latter. In the citizen disarmament campaign, an additional tactic is evident. During the twentieth century, large politically influential portions of the population were barred by law from keeping or bearing arms, and these disfranchised subpopulations now aggressively support the disfranchisement of the rest of the population, because they perceive the intact franchise of the rest as an unfair advantage.
Frequently, no explicit prohibition is necessary. Through the concatenation of ostensibly non-prohibitive impediments, the undesired behavior can be made practically impossible. This technique is particularly effective in suppressing complex economic and political activities. Compared to explicit prohibition, it has the advantage that supporters of the effective prohibition can technically - though disingenuously - claim that the undesired behavior is “perfectly legal.”
Many of the old establishment's strategies are so complex and subtle that few are capable of understanding them even as a purely intellectual exercise. Moreover, some of their strategies strike the layman as plainly outlandish, with their actual effectiveness evident only to serious economists and sociologists."
