Epigovernment: The New Model - 9

In this series we have been pointing out what some would call "the obvious."

They will say that it is obvious to even a casual observer that more and more as time goes on government policy does not serve the common good, rather, it tends to more and more serve the elite few.

Which is what this series has repeatedly pointed out--that what some call the obvious knowledge cannot be hidden anymore in plain sight because it is so obvious that it is generating a public book storm, a noisy storm pointing out what really is happening:

The really scary characters are our soberest politicians, scholars, journalists, professionals, and managers, men and women (though mostly men) who imagine themselves as morally serious, and then enable the wars, devastate the planet, and rationalize the atrocities. 

(Greg Grandin @ Tom Dispatch, emphasis added). This is the same sort of thing that Noam Chomsky said in 1967 as he watched young students being beaten for demonstrating against war:

I speak of Senator Mansfield precisely because he is not a breast-beating superpatriot who wants America to rule the world, but is rather an American intellectual in the best sense, a scholarly and reasonable man -- the kind of man who is the terror of our age. Perhaps this is merely a personal reaction, but when I look at what is happening to our country, what I find most terrifying is not Curtis LeMay, with his cheerful suggestion that we bomb everybody back into the stone age, but rather the calm disquisitions of the political scientists on just how much force will be necessary to achieve our ends, or just what form of government will be acceptable to us in Vietnam. What I find terrifying is the detachment and equanimity with which we view and discuss an unbearable tragedy. We all know that if Russia or China were guilty of what we have done in Vietnam, we would be exploding with moral indignation at these monstrous crimes.

(On Resistance, Noam Chomsky, emphasis added). The folks with the good reputations, who go to church, and who do everything respectable are the ones responsible for orchestrating mass murder and atrocities against other human beings, and against the Earth which we must have in order to live.

Regular readers know that Dredd Blog calls those at the elite core of empire policy making The Epigovernment.

Regular readers know that Dredd Blog thinks that the person called "The Father of Spin / Public Relations" summed it up quite spectacularly:

THE conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses [by] an invisible government [which is] the true ruling power of our country [by whom] our minds are molded ... largely by men we have never heard of ... Our invisible governors ... govern us by their qualities of natural leadership, their ability to supply needed ideas and ... it remains a fact that in almost every act of our daily lives, whether in the sphere of politics or business, in our social conduct or our ethical thinking, we are dominated by the relatively small number of persons ... who understand the mental processes and social patterns of the masses ... they who pull the wires which control the public mind ... It is the purpose of this book to explain the structure of the mechanism which controls the public mind ...

(Epigovernment: The New Model). The quote just above is from Edward L. Bernays' book Propaganda (emphasis added).

Bernays, our premiere American propagandist, was bragging about how well American Propaganda, Spin, and Public Relations work to herd us along in our very misguided national direction.

There is only one word for a person who would guide people in a direction toward their deaths via war, ecocide, and the demise of civilization.

That word is psychopath.

The next post in this series is here, the previous post in this series is here.