August 23, 2000 How to control people
By Charley ReeseThe difference between true education and vocational training has been cleverly blurred.
Here are a few tips on how smart people can control other people. If any of this rings a bell - Well, then wake up!
The first principle of people control is not to let them know you are controlling them. If people knew, this knowledge will breed resentment and possibly rebellion, which would then require brute force and terror, and old fashioned, expensive and not 100 % certain method of control.
It is easier than you think to control people indirectly, to manipulate them into thinking what you want them to think and doing what you want them to do.
One basic technique is to keep them ignorant. Educated people are not as easy to manipulate. Abolishing public education or restricting access to education would be the direct approach. That would spill the beans.
The indirect approach is to control the education they receive.
It's possible to be a Ph.D., doctor, lawyer, businessman, journalist, or an accountant, just to name a few examples, and at the same time be an uneducated person. The difference between true education and vocational training has been cleverly blurred in our time so that we have people successfully practicing their vocations while at the same time being totally ignorant of the larger issues of the world in which they live.
The most obvious symptom is their absence of original thought. Ask them a question and they will end up reciting what someone else thinks or thought the answer was. What do they think, Well, they never thought about it. Their education consisted of learning how to use the library and cite sources.
That greatly simplifies things for the controller because with lots of money, university endowments, foundations, grants, and ownership of media, it is relatively easy to control who they will think of as authorities to cite in lieu of doing their own thinking.
Another technique is to keep them entertained. Roman emperors did not stage circuses and gladiator contests because they didn't have television. We have television because we don't have circuses and gladiator events. Either way, the purpose is to keep the people's minds focused on entertainment, sports, and peripheral political issues. This way you won't have to worry that they will ever figure out the real issues that allow you to control them.
Just as a truly educated person is difficult to control, so too is an economically independent person. Therefore, you want to create conditions that will produce people who work for wages, since wage earners have little control over their economic destiny. You'll also want to control the monetary, credit, and banking systems. This will allow you to inflate the currency and make it next to impossible for wage earners to accumulate capital. You can also cause periodic deflation to collapse the family businesses, family farms, and entrepreneurs, including independent community banks.
To keep trade unions under control, you just promote a scheme that allows you to shift production jobs out of the country and bring back the products as imports (it is called free trade). This way you will end up with no unions or docile unions.
Another technique is to buy both political parties so that after a while people will feel that no matter whether they vote for Candidate A or Candidate B, they will get the same policies. This will create great apathy and a belief that the political process is useless for effecting real change.
Pretty soon you will have a population that feels completely helpless, and thinks the bad things happening to them are nobody in particular's fault, just a result of global forces or evolution or some other disembodied abstract concept. If necessary, you can offer scapegoats.
Then you can bleed them dry without having to worry overly much that one of them will sneak into your house one night and cut your throat. If you do it right, they won't even know whose throat they are cutting.
How the Elite Maintain Power by Noam Chomsky
The Propaganda System by Noam Chomsky
