Noam Chomsky, American professor and public intellectual, who according to some sources refers to himself as an ‘anarcho-syndicalist and libertarian socialist’, has been described as having a status that places him in the left wing of American politics. While I am today but a mere vestige of the leftist liberal I was back in my undergrad days, there is much in the works of Chomsky that still seems rather brilliant to me as well as eminently applicable to our times.

Most people are familiar with the name ‘Noam Chomsky’ but often have little real acquaintance with his views and opinions, other than to vaguely identify him as “a socialist.” Unless one has a strong interest in the socio-political turmoil that characterizes youthful veering to the left, he remains to most young people a little understood ideological mentor and mostly unread by contemporary adolescent and post-adolescent rebels.

Chomsky, a prolific American writer and intellectual who has authored a substantial number of intriguing books on political philosophy and social economy, never hedges his bets in stating his carefully thought-through arguments and hypotheses with a minimum of obfuscative semantic jargon (unlike me, LoL) and many of his conclusions about social and political reality in the United States are so carefully backed up by meticulous academic research and documentation that those who try to pick his assertions apart often have a daunting task before them.

From my own standpoint, as an admittedly half-baked and sophomoric commentator on American life, I have usually found Chomsky’s astringent conclusions to be quite bracing and convincing. Every now and then, whilst considering the perpetually chaotic state of social and political discourse in the present day United States, various arguments Chomsky has advanced strike me as resoundingly as a solid oak clapper would a Buddhist temple bell…that is to say, with a resonance that leaves little uncertainty about the verity of his interpretations that he has submitted to us for our own rumination.

One such bit of Chomsky-speak I encountered in a book of his was the phrase, “…treat people like mushrooms: keep them in the dark and feed them sh*t.”

This phrase, now fairly well known to most of us, is not an original Chomsky utterance but has rather been generally attributed to a British politician, a former Member of Parliament (in 1942-1974) named Thomas Driberg. Whether that erstwhile quote is an actual ‘Dribergism’ or not is subject to frequent debate, but it certainly stands to reason that Driberg might well have made such a scathing dismissal of the masses, given his own notorious personal life and social involvements.

Driberg was, among many other things, a closeted homosexual whose life has sometimes been disapprobatively described by those who loathed him as having a “drink-sodden and sex-driven” lifestyle. Despite pretensions of being a self-described poet of note, others regarded him as a mediocre scribbler of rather inane drivel. But then, it’s fairly easy to be critical of someone well after they’ve departed this weary coil of misfortune called life, isn’t it? I admit being guilty of that failing quite often, myself.

Clearly, it is both difficult and hugely unfair to attempt to explain Driberg in the span of couple of brief summations like the foregoing, and it is certainly well beyond the scope of my commentary in this present context to go into any intense scrutiny of Driberg the man and the politician, or to dwell even briefly on him, for that matter…interesting life, or not.

Suffice it to say that the description of people as mushrooms (et al) certainly finds an apt application in my discussion of the following subjects dealt with here.

Among the Chomsky gems of insight that have recently struck me as profoundly relevant and worth bringing to light in these paragraphs is his argument that American corporations have become a largely unperceived, if nonetheless deadly adversary (or ought to be considered as such) of the best interests of the common American masses.

Another such insight of his was expressed in a book-length expostulation on the expropriation of American mass media by vested socio-political interests in this country. The book in reference (Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media) was published originally back in 1988 and has been subsequently reprinted in paperback form more recently. It remains as valid and convincing conclusion today as it was back then. In it, Chomsky describes how mass media journalism has, over the past 5 decades, been transformed into a politically partisan propaganda vehicle by narrow but extremely powerful vested economic interests in this country whose undeclared purpose is to exploit the gullibility of the masses. And herein lies the tie-in to Driberg’s (although perhaps apocryphal) quote about mushroom cultivation.

To me, these revelations constitute a significant epiphany, serving to confirm what I have long felt to be true myself. But therein lie some interesting implications that warrant analysis, as I shall hopefully be able to explain.

In today’s supercharged progressively liberal (left-of-center) society (in which sentiments tend to be polarized directly with age, perhaps unsurprisingly), until only very recently, older individuals (notably so-called ‘Boomers’, for the most part tended to maintain moderate-to-right wing sentiments, in contrast to those under the age of 30-40 or so who tend to conform to left-of-center outlooks.

Into this admixture of age/political sentiment correlations, it is interesting to take a deeply critical look at current commercial advertising and the mass-media establishment behind it, I think.

Someone recently observed on another website that if you use American television advertising (commercials) as a reckoning bellwether, one could easily think that America was an even 50/50 mix of black and white peoples, since TV commercials all seem to be overly full of black actors hawking various and sundry commercial products. Of course, that isn’t a singular observation, since a great many people have remarked similarly on the fact that over the past several years (from roughly the 2019 COVID-19 onset through today), we’re suddenly seeing ‘black culture and black people’ all over commercial television, in both program content and advertising. And certainly in gross disproportion to the actual demographic reality which reveals that only about 13% of the American population are actually black.

Additionally, what started out originally as ‘Black History Month’ (February) has now seemingly become almost a year-round phenomenon; one heavily promoted and promulgated by (among others) PBS (Public Broadcasting Network) and a great many corporate media channels, who heavily promote and subscribe to DEI/Woke/critical theory ideologies.

Any reasonably sane and reflective individual would have to be somewhat puzzled by this very heavy injection of black culture into public news and entertainment programs and commercials, and a possible, logical conclusion would suggest that corporate media organisations and businesses are trying to exploit blacks the same way that they have been excusively trying to exploit whites up until the COVID crisis affected America. To me and many, many others, this seems the most perverse of efforts to establish ‘equality’ in our culture.

Let us assume for the sake of my argument that the foregoing is true . That powerful commercial organisations are ‘cultivating’ black people deliberately to exploit them. After all, when almost 80% of America is white, surely such a corporate ambition doesn’t even begin to reflect demographic reality, does it? And it certainly doesn’t begin to ‘honestly’ make up for more than a hundred years of white racism in American marketing and advertising, does it?

On that assumption, it’s useful to observe that over the past 10-15 years, American culture has been progressively (a poor choice of words, perhaps) ‘dumbing down.’ This initially began some decades ago when it was noted that black academic achievement levels paled in comparison to those for white and Asians.

After various ineffectual interventions in our schools to establish parity were tried and failed, one way of ‘bringing up’ black academic scores to some sort of parity with whites and Asians was to reduce academic standards, qualifications and requirements. In other words, ‘make it easier’ for disprivileged blacks to achieve educational equality. This by necessity handicapped non-blacks, but the reality has been that it has also adversely affected blacks by making it seem as if they were just as qualified and no worse off than whites, despite copious documentation that clearly demonstrated that they were not functioning at the same levels of academic achievement.

Again, assuming this to be an accurate assessment for the sake of my argument, it doesn’t take much cerebral cogitation to deduce the fact that ‘dumbed down’ awareness and marginal competence is a LOT easier to exploit than its smarter, more truly educated equivalent. Hence a corporate awareness that ‘dumbed down’ (less critical and analytical) individuals would comprise a far more vulnerable market to exploit for commercial profit. However, when this effort is combined with a not-so-subtle subtle attempt to ‘condition’ the American public into thinking that what advertisements present as social reality are truly reflective of the actual extant reality that has existed for decades. Social scientists call this process ‘socialisation.’ Various tyrannical regimes are a bit less frusty; they call it ‘brain-washing.’

I found it interesting to note that whereas the American ‘status-quo reality’ formerly reflected in television commercial advertisements conveyed resonance with predominantly white cultural patterns of thought and behavior, today we see such things as white ‘straw-men’ actors (who were formerly portrayed as staid and restrained individuals in television commercials) suddenly being depicted bizarrely leaping onto a table-top and ‘boogieing’ for apparent sheer joy over a new pharma product (such as one for improved digestion or relief of back-pain, thanks to wonder-drug XXX…ask your doctor!) or pleasurable undertaking.

I assure you that the average white married couple does NOT suddenly start dancing the soft-shoe footy-foot for sheer joy, anywhere, any time, for ANY reason. But now we are seeing this everywhere in the ‘new’ television reality that is being forced-fed to uncritical, clueless American television viewers everywhere. Further, the repetitive theme of mixed white/black marriages being ‘normal’ couples in these advertisements sticks out as plain and simple phoniness. The medium, if you will, becomes the message (and the massage, as well) at such moments.

A particularly amusing example of this bizarre ‘boogie for joy’ behaviorial affect is seen on the execrable Oak Street Physicians advertisements aired on commercial (free) broadcasting, wherein a dapper, but ‘cool’ older black man waltzes into an OSP treatment center with a goofy grin on his face and proceeds to dance his way through the clinic’s treatment rooms, boogieing soft-shoe the whole while, as he proclaims the benefits of the OSP healthcare he is receiving. As he dances along, all the patients and staff gradually join him in his weird happy-dance and we end up watching a hip racial counterpart to 80s style C&W line-dancing. As a reflection of actual daily realities?! I hardly think so!

From my stance as a conservative, adult (and hopefully mature) offspring of Catholic and Presbyterian parentage (and lapsed Christian), I find myself asking “Where did all this Fantasyland quality propaganda suddenly come from?! Surely not from any culture I was brought up in!”

The answer is: From the commercial business corporate sector trying to control our perceptions of reality through ‘feeding’ us a reality that they wish to actually exist. It certainly didn’t come from black people themselves! An analogous explanation was recently used in an EPOCH TIMES article about the means and methods that China (PRC) uses to ‘condition’ the world into the belief that China is the new international hegemon of power and influence on the globe. After all, when powerful partisan ‘economic ‘players’ control your means of viewing the world, they literally control you, whether or not you have even the barest glimmer that this is NOT a true reflection of society!

After all, it’s no great secret that billions upon billions of dollars are expended every year by these corporations to employ expensive teams of psychologist consultants and specialist advertising agencies to design and formulate consumer advertising campaigns. I am sure that if the costs are judged too immense for even a huge corporation such as the ABC Broadcasting Network to pull off, some wealthy and misguided leftist misanthrope (like George Soros, et al) will surely come to their rescue, financially. etc., etc., etc.

In a recent spate of commercial television viewing I undertook as a sort of experiment, it became strikingly clear to me that this perception-altering effort is all part of the “...treat ‘em like mushrooms, keep ‘em in the dark and feed ‘em shit” philosophy I remarked upon at the start of this piece, that seems to predominate in the minds of corporate executives (who are unabashedly trying to drain you figuratively lobotomised ‘consumers of mass quantities’ of as much of your discretionary income as possible). Or at least that increasingly small proportion of it that is left after you attempt to stay abreast of the wallet-wrenching impact of today’s runaway commercial product inflation in America.

Keeping all this in mind, consider these following fine points. 1) That corporations quickly realized that what started as a progressive academic ‘necessity’ (that is, dumbing-down American society to the lowest academic and social common denominator) could be effectively used to subjugate and enslave, not a mere 13% national minority, but the entirety of America’s mass social economy! 2) That the most effective way to do this would be by coopting America’s mainstream media AND commercial (corporate) advertising and subjecting ‘average’ (read: uncritical, unreflective) Americans of all races, religions and social origins to an unrelenting diet of phenomenally odious ‘sh*t’, deliberately contrived and formularized to exploit the sort of widespread, fadish popularity of ignorant, knee-jerk reactivism that contemporary mass pop-culture encourages and promotes, and 3) The folks behind all this flim-flam and ‘conditioning’ that sets black people up for exploitation (under the guise of promoting DEI/Wokeism/diversity) are not black. They are white liberals and not necessarily eager to ‘share’ the potential profits from their sociological manipulations with those blacks they feature so prominently in their commercial advertisements!

As the Chinese well know, he who controls ‘reality’ (which implies ‘captured mindset’, regardless of how factual or deluded the ‘substitute reality’ may actually be), controls America’s mindless masses (estimated to be about 75% or more of our population, by my biased reckoning), including roughly that 13% of our population determined to be black! In China’s case, such damaging social media venues as Tik-Toc and its ilk exist to exploit gullible Western youths, just as corporate DEI/wokeism exists not for altruistic reasons but to facilitate economic exploitation of blacks! Not a happy realization, that, but one that likely will not be focused upon or identified by blacks themselves (who likely feed happily on the fanciful commercial realities being forced upon us all and regard them as ‘racial progress’)!

For all the foregoing reasons, corporations are most definitely NOT our best buddy and we all need stop hewing to these bogus conventions and undergo a serious reality check! Finally, we need to admit that the (corporate) Emperor is indeed not clothed in the finest raiment money can buy as he strolls down the street, but is actually absolutely stark, bare-assed naked.

It bears pointing out that this sort of fake reality conditioning is not something that is limited to mass media and advertising alone, but to all the power-elite (read: 'wealthy whites') who increasingly hold the reins of power governing public affairs at the highest level, whether local or national. All of them regard you (and the rest of us “dulled masses”) as simple sh*ts who they can easily manipulate just about any way they wish, if and when it is to their economic advantage to do so.

One of the many main enabling factors that permits this “…treat ‘em like mushrooms”, etc. philosophy (in my opinion), is the lack of adequate academic curricula containing courses on critical reasoning and experiential analysis in our institutions of higher learning (i.e. high school through graduate school), not to mention the foundation need for foundational emphasis on elementary basics like reading skills, comprehension and literacy.

I hope that my arguments here have made it more obvious that “stupid" is not just something to make jokes about, but a serious national concern that is in the long-term perhaps even more deadly than the worst biological disease vector imaginable. And that television, along with widely availed electronic social media, are all inconceivably harmful weapons whose distortions are being remorselessly wielded by a small but immensely powerful and wealthy group of individuals (who are white, of course) in America’s social economy, whose objective is to subjugate and enslave all the rest of us proles in their materialistic consumer snares.'Stupid' is bad enough when it describes an individual, but when 'stupid' is formularised, corporatised and institutionalised, watch out!

Famed author and social philosopher George Orwell would definitely agree with that conclusion, I am certain, as would Thomas Driberg, when he was not caught up in his incessant moments of debauchery and hedonism!

In closing, I am reminded of that famous acronym those of us who served in the military so well remember: “BOHICA!” (“Bend Over…Here It Comes Again!”).