I don’t mean to sound like a conspiracy nut, but we’re being manipulated. By “we,” I mean all of us—you, me, anybody who is exposed to any media at all, but especially social media. We’re not being lied to, exactly, but we’re being force-fed a version of the truth that is intended to control our emotions, influence our reactions, and direct our behavior. The powers that be—and this is very much a part of the rupture between the ruling class and the country class—want to encourage specific social and political responses from us and are doing everything they can to make them happen.
A little more than a century ago, the French engineer and leftist radical Georges Sorel wrote extensively about the most effective ways to motivate large groups of people and commit them to a particular cause. Like many other leftists of the time, Sorel advocated for a workers’ movement that could convincingly wield the threat of a violent “general strike” and, as a result, shut down all industrial production, thereby enabling a revolutionary takeover of the means of production. Unlike his contemporaries, however, Sorel didn’t think that the reality of a general strike was necessary, nor even the reality of a movement that could accomplish such a strike if necessary. Rather, Sorel believed that all that mattered was the idea of the strike, the perception that such a thing might be possible. Sorel referred to this as the glorious “myth” of the general strike, a manipulation of observation and assessment that would be both powerful enough to frighten the capitalists and create heroic workers willing to fight and die for the cause.
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