Required Consent: Mass Mind Control

Caitlyn:

Propaganda works. If it didn't, they wouldn't pour so much energy into doing it. The empire churns out propaganda for the same reason advertising is on track to become a trillion-dollar industry in the next couple of years: because it is possible to manipulate people's minds at mass scale using media.

They generate propaganda because it's an effective way to manufacture consent for the agendas of the powerful, and they manufacture consent because they have to. If our rulers just started acting directly against the will of the people without first psychologically pulling the wool over our eyes using propaganda, they'd have a revolution on their hands in short order. Doing something huge like waging a war with China — with all the death, suffering, impoverishment, and risk of nuclear annihilation that goes with it — without the consent of the people would quickly lose public trust in all the ruling institutions which keep us marching to the beat of the imperial drum.

They don't work so hard to manufacture our consent because it's fun for them, they work so hard to manufacture our consent because they require our consent. So it's important that we don't give it to them. It's important that we forcefully oppose the global conflict the US-centralized empire is pushing us all toward, and that we vocally decry the propaganda that's being used to grease the wheels of that depraved agenda. 

Ultimately the powerful have no answer to the problem that there are a whole lot more of us than there are of them and that there's really nothing they can do if we decide not to be ruled by them anymore. All they have is little work-arounds for that problem that they have to continually use day in and day out, in the same way we've designed work-arounds for the problem of gravity so that we can temporarily fly through the air.

[Terrified=terrorist=terrific=terrible (spells)]

But gravity always wins, and sooner or later the giant that these monsters have been keeping in a propaganda-induced coma is going to start stirring. We're going to have to wake up sooner or later, and because of the stakes involved it is very important that we do everything we can to try and make sure that it is sooner.