Dear George,
I want to share a few thoughts with you about manipulation. Manipulation is clumsy and inefficient, but since we are still a putative democracy, it remains your primary instrument of social control.
Manipulation has but one primary goal, and that is to transform a despot into a mortician because a despot operates at peak effectiveness when dealing with a public that is a dead, inert mass. The despot achieves this through a process of massification that reduces a group of free individuals to an unthinking organism that dances to the despot’s tune, smiling even as they are doing so.
Methodologies for this process vary from culture to culture. For American’s the preferred method is a process of mass individuation in which the masses come to believe that their herd behavior is an expression of individual freedom. Freedom ceases to be a community affair and shrinks until it is seen as little more than “being one’s self.”
This yields a group-grope selfishness that blinds the masses to their moral and economic impoverishment. Loss becomes gain as they accumulate more toys and artifacts at the cost of their liberty. The clueless drone drowning in debt has replaced the indentured servant as the country’s driving labor force. Harnessed by debt, a man or woman will work under the most primitive of conditions for meager wages just to keep their heads above water.
But unlike the indentured servant of yore, they remain unaware of their servitude because they have no concept of freedom beyond being able to drive their over-sized vehicles wherever they want to, even though they have no place to go. Nor does their term of indenture ever end. We have replace retirement with “the late life career change.”
But, it is crucial that you never, never, never, allow them to ask, “To what end?” It might set them to thinking.
Your admirer,
Belacqua Jones
5:02:09 AM 
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