Equality by lot

Already weakened by the vast impersonal forces at work in the modern world, democratic institutions are now being undermined from within by politicians and their propagandists. The methods now being used to merchandise the political candidate as if he were a deodorant positively guarantee the electorate against ever learning the truth about anything. —Aldous Huxley, Brave New World Revisited, 1958, VI.

We vote, indeed we perceive political reality, through the people with whom we are in contact. Most of us are reached by the mass media only in a two-step process, by way of other people’s perceptions and reactions to them. —Hanna F. Pitkin, The Concept of Representation, 1967, p. 223.

… it has also become evident that if one acts ruthlessly …, cleverly organized propaganda can accomplish swift and drastic changes in opinions and attitudes, especially in difficult and critical situations; it can … also instill patently false ideas about actual conditions. — Daniel Boorstin, The Image, 1961.

Regarding one of those Pernicious P’s, Wikipedia says the following [2024-07-01] about the influential author Edward Bernays and his book, Propaganda (1928):

[Bernays] outlined how skilled practitioners could use crowd psychology and psychoanalysis to control them [the masses] in desired ways. Bernays later synthesized many of these ideas in his postwar book, Public Relations (1945), which outlines the science of managing information released to the public by an organization, in a manner most advantageous to the organization.

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Filed under: Books, Elections, Press, Sortition | Tagged: citizen deliberation, citizen juries, Citizen Legislature, citizens' assemblies, random selection, sortition | Leave a comment »