We always associate thought control with totalitarian societies, but there is a more subtle kind, the Adbusters believe. But here in the First World countries it is Huxleyan, much more subtle. We have been slowly, systematically indoctrinated since the day we were born. We develop a sense of belonging. It is a marketing triumph.
Young people are much more media-savvy than in the past, but they have been blinded somehow.
In part, Lasn blames this on the fact that young people no longer grow up in a natural environment, as he himself did. Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky's propaganda model proposes that advertisers, corporate owners and state influences working on a profit-seeking media dramatically limit media freedom, Lasn informs. I mean that he is too much stuck to the old slogans, to the old era when the Soviet Union still had something idealistic about it. My feeling is that for us to mount an effective social activist movement of the '90s and beyond we have to get beyond the left. There is a better way.