..............They are dedicated to what the great American political economist Thorstein Veblen called "fabricating wants".

In the words of business leaders themselves, the task is to direct people to "the superficial things" of life, like "fashionable consumption". That way people can be atomized, separated from one another, seeking personal gain alone, diverted from dangerous efforts to think for themselves and challenge authority.

The process of shaping opinion, attitudes and perceptions was termed the "engineering of consent" by one of the founders of the modern public relations industry, Edward Bernays. He was a respected Wilson-Roosevelt-Kennedy progressive, much like his contemporary, journalist Walter Lippmann, the most prominent public intellectual of 20th-century America, who praised "the manufacture of consent" as a "new art" in the practice of democracy.

Both recognized that the public must be "put in its place", marginalized and controlled - for their own interests, of course. They were too "stupid and ignorant" to be allowed to run their own affairs. That task was to be left to the "intelligent minority", who must be protected from "the trampling and the roar of [the] bewildered herd", the "ignorant and meddlesome outsiders" - the "rascal multitude" as they were termed by their 17th-century predecessors. The role of the general population was to be "spectators", not "participants in action", in a properly functioning democratic society.

And the spectators must not be allowed to see too much .................