We have identified the pattern: a state of never-ending war, from the global stage to the living room. But a war cannot continue without soldiers, without taxpayers, without a populace that accepts it as inevitable. The most profound revelation is this: these wars can only continue as long as we, the people, consent.
Our consent, however, is not given freely. It is manufactured, engineered through a sophisticated system of deprivation, distraction, and fear. To see this system is to take the first step toward reclaiming your own mind, and your own power.
The Pillars of Manufactured Consent
The political linguist Noam Chomsky, along with Edward Herman, identified the concept of “manufacturing consent” – the means by which a population is manipulated into agreeing to agendas that serve a powerful minority. In our modern age, this manufacturing process has been refined into a brutal science, resting on several key pillars:
- The Assault on Thought: Clear thinking is the enemy of the control system. It is actively discouraged through a dual strategy of fear and ridicule. To question the official narrative is to be labelled a “conspiracy theorist,” to express empathy for a designated enemy is to be branded “unpatriotic,” and to propose alternatives is to be mocked as “naive.” This social pressure enforces intellectual conformity more effectively than any law.
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The Tribal Factory: A united populace is a powerful populace. Therefore, the system works tirelessly to divide us into small, easily managed, and perpetually squabbling groups. The media does not inform; it curates outrage. It amplifies the most extreme voices on every issue, creating a world of binary choices: you are either for us or against us, you belong to this tribe or that one. This fragmentation ensures we see each other as the enemy, rather than the system that pits us against one another.
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The Complicit Political Class: Our leaders are no longer statesmen; they are careerists. Their primary goal is not to lead with vision, but to secure their position, their funding, and their post-political lobbying career. They are not solving crises; they are managing perceptions. They are enablers, actors in a theatre of the absurd, reading scripts written by their corporate and ideological donors, while the real needs of the people go unaddressed.
The Strategy of Calculated Deprivation
Beyond the psychological warfare lies a more tangible, more brutal strategy: keeping the population in a state of chronic, debilitating precarity.
The Denial of Basics: An individual who is fighting every day for healthcare, housing, and food is an individual who has no time, energy, or mental bandwidth to question the geopolitical order or the economic structures that enslave them. The system creates a state of perpetual crisis at the personal level to prevent a crisis for the system itself.
The Sabotage of Education: A true education teaches children to think critically, to question authority, and to understand history. The system requires a populace trained for compliance, not curiosity. Hence, education is defunded, turned into vocational training, and drowned in standardised testing that rewards memorisation over understanding.
The Entrenching Economic System: All of this is locked in place by an economic model that funnels wealth relentlessly upward. It is a system designed to create and maintain a permanent underclass, ensuring a ready supply of cheap labour and desperate soldiers, all while telling them their poverty is a personal failure.
The Grand Distraction: Global Terrors and the Absurd Stage
To complete the illusion, the system offers us grand, terrifying spectacles to consume our remaining attention.
The reality of climate change is twisted from a unifying existential threat into another political football, ensuring no collective action is taken. The fear of an impending world war is constantly stoked, with new enemies always waiting in the wings. We are kept in a state of low-grade panic, our eyes fixed on the horizon for the next big disaster, blind to the silent, slow-motion collapse happening in our own communities.
This is the Theatre of the Absurd, orchestrated by political leaders and their enablers. The stage is set, the lights are dazzling, and the plot is designed to be just coherent enough to hold our attention, but too chaotic to ever actually understand.
Withdrawing Your Consent: The First Revolutionary Act
The solution begins not with a ballot, but with a decision.
It begins the moment you turn off the news and talk to your neighbour.
It begins when you refuse to be ridiculed into silence and speak your truth with courage.
It begins when you see the political circus for what it is and withdraw your emotional investment from its actors.
It begins when you recognise that the person from the “other” tribe is not your enemy, but a fellow victim of the same machinery.
They can only stage the play as long as we are willing to sit in the audience and watch. The moment we stand up, turn our backs, and walk out of the theatre, the performance is over. The war – on every level – ends when we simply, collectively, and resolutely withdraw our consent.
Our power was never truly gone. It was only ever on loan, and we have the right to demand it back. The curtain is falling. It is time to leave the theatre and rebuild the world outside.
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“… “manufacturing consent” – the means by which a population is manipulated into agreeing to agendas that serve a powerful minority….”
It is very simple: Politicians and compliant media can prevent public dissent from occurring. By suppressing dissent politicians can say that consent was neither offered nor sought. Politicians can then assume that if there is no significant dissent then, by default, consent is neither confirmed nor denied and it is therefore safe to proceed. And that is what they do!
Excellent work from Chomsky & Herman and in parallel several years ago New Yorker’s Jane Mayer (‘Dark Money’) on Atlas Koch ‘FreedomWorks’ media audit said ‘it’s not just about what you think, but how you think (or not)?
We see evidenced in Australia hollowed media and news sources using US think tank talking points, no interrogation (of issues or ppl the right) eg. no how and why for analysis?
Other free kick for the powers that be is lack of basic literacies in maths/data, science/research process and finanace/economics, making it easier to astroturf with junk science and BS.
Chomsky, could have been essential in this time of Putin and Trump on media and puvlic discourse, but chose the dark side?
In Europe he lost it in ’90s with the left due to denying Srbenica genocide, his reflexive American centric views, silence on media, seeming support for Russia vs Ukraine, then recently emerged he was with Epstein on a plane……
No worse than many of the local faux anti-imperialist left* tankies, grifters and apologists for authoritarians; *again manybof the same US types are viewed as right wing, but not locally eg. Koch-Putin Mearsheimer? Anglsophere has lost the plot……..
Absolutely on points 1,2 & 3, and here’s how that is continually reinforced, so the body politic really needs to become engaged with politics and the usual vested interests….
https://www.thenewdaily.com.au/finance/2026/01/23/imf-australian-economy?
We need a Royal Commission into Real Estate and all its intersecting markets which is the entire shooting match, its toxic
https://www.theage.com.au/national/victoria/auction-rules-battle-looms-after-agents-withdraw-support-for-landmark-change-20260121-p5nvw9.html
Utilities and its regulators way beyond time….
https://michaelwest.com.au/inpex-and-australias-gas-rip-off-billions-in-revenue-crumbs-in-tax/
As for Chalmers pontificating….
https://michaelwest.com.au/nobel-laureates-advice-for-treasurer-to-fix-housing/
Andrew Smith has criticised Chomsky for “denying Srbenica genocide…”
Andrew, as noted previously, thrives in a “low-information” environment. (His term, not mine.)
His criticism, in supporting an article exposing the global misinformation extravaganza, is ironic in the extreme.
There was no Srebrenica genocide.
From John Pilger, August 2016 —
The International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia in The Hague has quietly cleared the late Serbian president, Slobodan Milosevic, of war crimes committed during the 1992-95 Bosnian war, including the massacre at Srebrenica.
Milosevic died of a heart attack in 2006, alone in his cell in The Hague, during what amounted to a bogus trial by an American-invented “international tribunal.” Denied heart surgery that might have saved his life, his condition worsened and was monitored and kept secret by U.S. officials, as WikiLeaks has since revealed.
Milosevic was the victim of war propaganda that today runs like a torrent across our screens and newspapers and beckons great danger for us all. He was the prototype demon, vilified by the Western media as the “butcher of the Balkans” who was responsible for “genocide,” especially in the secessionist Yugoslav province of Kosovo. Prime Minister Tony Blair said so, invoked the Holocaust and demanded action against “this new Hitler.”
David Scheffer, the U.S. ambassador-at-large for war crimes, declared that as many as “225,000 ethnic Albanian men aged between 14 and 59” may have been murdered by Milocevic’s forces.
This was the justification for NATO’s bombing, led by Bill Clinton and Blair, that killed hundreds of civilians in hospitals, schools, churches, parks and television studios and destroyed Serbia’s economic infrastructure.
Once NATO began bombing, there was a stampede of Kosovar refugees “fleeing a holocaust.” When it was over, international police teams descended on Kosovo to exhume the victims.
The FBI failed to find a single mass grave and went home. The Spanish forensic team did the same, its leader angrily denouncing “a semantic pirouette by the war propaganda machines.”
The final count of the dead in Kosovo was 2,788. This included combatants on both sides and Serbs and Roma murdered by the pro-NATO Kosovo Liberation Front. There was no genocide. The NATO attack was both a fraud and a war crime.
In 2008, the prosecutor of the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, Carla Del Ponte, revealed that she had been pressured not to investigate NATO’s crimes.
This was the model for Washington’s subsequent invasions of Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and, by stealth, Syria. All qualify as “paramount crimes” under the Nuremberg standard; all depended on media propaganda.
An excellent article that is too close to them reality of today.
Uhm ….. re Chomsky ….. I read somewhere on the Internet about six (6) months ago (before I cancelled Facebook) that Chomsky has been seriously physically debilitated and is unable to maintain his excellent political analyses of US policies.
@ heather: The present residential real estate policies are NOT designed to provide social housing, rather they are designed to pass ownership of residential real estate into the hands of the Billionaires Club and foreign investment banks having unlimited funds.
Fixing the residential real estate market is straight forward;
Negative Gearing (NG) ONLY for new builds;
CGT concessions only for new builds for say five (5) years;
No NG on ”used” residences regardless of age or purchase price. This is expected to create a secondary market that younger persons may be able to afford.
The real threat is the cashed up foreign banks benefiting from the Foreign Exchange system that gifts foreign investors a bonus payment for bringing funds into Australia, as well as limiting taxation in Australian profits.
Cocky, Chomsky’s 97 years old. Way past time to hand the keys to someone else.
New England Cocky…..disagree with your solution regarding NG for new builds only, you’re just reinforcing the existing status quo and its legislation which many drive a truck thru especially in relation to NG and CGT deductions, and there was legislation that allowed for social housing, Governments just choose to remove it for private profit.
A quick reminder in that regard, see below and we are a signatory to that, which politicians in their own inglorious right, ignore wholesale
https://www.un.org/en/about-us/universal-declaration-of-human-rights
Another long running sore in this country that has yet to be delivered
https://www.thenewdaily.com.au/news/politics/australian-politics/2026/02/01/gambling-reform-7am-albanese?
@ heather: Think about the economics of rental residential real estate; government wants more houses but the present NG & CGT provisions favour the ”few” high income individuals off-setting potential income tax payments by investment. It just protects to few to the detriment of the many.
Buying a ”used house” for rental income does not increase the available pool of available rental properties.
New England Cocky buying a”used house” for rental income does not increase the available pool of available rental properties.
Depends on how you look at it! Does not stop the wealthy from buying derelict property, knocking them down and re-building, which is what’s happening now; a lot of property on the market in Victoria is ex NG property and being sold due to land tax!
As for derelict NG property, I’m living in one now, the house is 60 yrs. old, landlord has ‘owned’ it for 8 years and does not maintain it, have taken him to VCAT now and the games being played are disgusting; sleight of hand with maintenance, takes 100% of pension in rent and fiddles with rent paid to dates from inception!
Please do not justify this kind of person to me New England Cocky, I have no time for it or their self-delusion that they are a self-funded retiree when it’s the taxpayers who pay for that.