[Opinion] - Propaganda Restricts Speech More Than Censorship Does: Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix - Caitlin Johnstone

The biggest impediment to free speech is people’s belief that they have it. Not censorship. Not refusal to platform critical voices. Not the war on journalism. It’s the fact that most people are propagandized into saying what the powerful want them to say, and don’t know it.

What makes our dilemma so historically unique is that we live under an empire which makes extensive use of the post-Bernays science of mass-scale psychological manipulation to trick its subjects into believing that they are thinking, speaking, and gathering information freely. In this way our rulers suppress any revolution long before it starts, not by making people’s lives better, nor by violent repression, but by manipulating people into thinking there’s nothing to revolt against, because they have no rulers and they are already free.

In our civilization most people are thinking, speaking, gathering information, working, shopping, moving and voting exactly as our rulers want them to, because these mass-scale psychological conditioning systems have been imposed to keep human behavior aligned with the empire. We are trained to believe we are free while behaving exactly how our rulers want us to behave, and to look down on other nations and shake our heads at how unfree their people are.

What the average mainstream partisan really means when they say they want “free speech” is they want to be able to regurgitate the power-serving narratives that were put in their mind by the powerful. That’s not free speech, it’s deeply enslaved speech. But they can’t see it. By design.

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