Today I was reminded of an article I wrote probably well over a decade ago, but for which my language at the time had not developed enough vocabulary to talk about the topic in a way that made sense to most people. It made sense to a few, but a few people do not make an audience,
I had not yet begun to work on the term “publicacy” [ https://socio.business.blog/2024/04/29/what-is-publicacy-why-does-it-matter ], and had to therefore work with the more-or-less adequate terms I had at my disposal, mostly “literacy”. [1]
The article explained why schools fail at adequately teaching literacy skills. The long and short of it is that market forces prevent the schools from teaching children about propaganda (and related topics). I myself had never adequately learned about propaganda until I left the so-called “learned institutions” of higher education and stepped out into the so-called “real world” of information. [2]
Neither governments nor businesses, nor even one single industrial sector is truly interested in widespread literacy, transparency or anything like that. If the 99% were able to understand what’s going on, the 1% would be heading for the hills faster than you can say “tidewater aristocracy”. All that literacy is supposed to do is to generate “obedient workers“. [3]
The way so-called “civilized society” has done that for several hundred years is to tell the people to shut up whenever they open their mouths on their own and otherwise to hold their noses closed while they pour in the propaganda … and of course people are not supposed to understand why they salivate like a Pavlov dog whenever they do. [4]
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