[jakeva]

"But the problem is a real one, not a mere intellectual game. Because today we live in a society in which spurious realities are manufactured by the media, by governments, by big corporations, by religious groups, political groups — and the electronic hardware exists by which to deliver these pseudo-worlds right into the heads of the reader, the viewer, the listener"

I wonder what he would think of today's world

[colechristensen]

Has there ever been a society that was not full of manufactured realities? People just get distributed when the new ones are different than the ones they grew up with, but shit doesn’t change.

[taneq]

"J. Edgar Hoover is the man of the hour, all that he needs is just a little more power / How do I know? I read it in the daily news." - Daily News, Tom Paxon

[boomlinde]

There are probably more means now than ever to construct and promote a few dominating common themes in people's subjective experiences. Perhaps before mass media realities were more diverse or more limited by that which people themselves had a chance to experience.

[Revery42]

I think you're spot-on here. Authoritarian-made realities seem to be the historical norm. Just look at the Roman Catholic Church at the height of its power. If anything, we were under a Dunning-Kruger effect before. We have more opportunity to realize now that truth is actually very difficult to pin down.

[Archelaos]

What is interesting about the Roman Catholic Church in this context is that its internal power was never as large as when its political power was at its lowest, and vice versa: the doctrin of papal infallibility was made official by the First Vatican Council that had to flee Rome when in 1870 the troops of Vittorio Emanuele II. concered the church state that had subsequently been dissolved (until the Vatican as a political entity was reinstituted by Mussolini in 1929). In contrast, during the Middle Ages, when the pope's political power was at its peak, papal power had always been challenged externally by secular powers and internally by antipopes, heretics, numerous reform movements and the majority belief that a general council is superior to the pope.

[wruza]

That people finally can choose in which pseudo-world they will live, but they still do not because it’s much easier not to?