Plutocrats like Thiel are constantly thinking about the fact that ordinary people vastly outnumber them and can kill them at any time. They think about it way more often than ordinary people do. It’s a point that they are acutely aware of at all times. It consumes their attention. They are always working on manipulating public consciousness to ensure that we don’t think as much as they do about how many more of us there are of them, and how we don’t have to put up with their domination of our society if we don’t want to.

As Michael Parenti once put it:

“I tell students when they say, ‘Oh they don’t care what we think. They ignore us’, and all that, and I say, ‘Oh no, no. That’s the only thing they care about you. The only thing they care about you is what you’re thinking. They don’t care if you eat correctly, they don’t care how your living conditions are, they don’t care that they’ve built up an inhuman and irrational traffic system that’s strangulating us and polluting our air, they don’t care about anything. The only thing about you they care about is what you’re thinking. In the morning, they start, ‘What’s going to be the story today? How do we manipulate, how do we control, how do we contain, how do we influence, how do we act upon what it is that they have in their minds?’”

Manipulating public consciousness is of existential importance to the ruling class, because no matter how many billions of dollars you amass, at the end of the day you’re still a soft skin sack of blood and bones like anybody else, and you share a society with huge numbers of people who can very easily hurt you if they want to. That’s why our minds are constantly being hammered with propaganda into accepting the status quo politics upon which our rulers have built their kingdoms.

  • Jumpingspiderman@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    Good. These monsters SHOULD be terrified. Note well that fear doesn’t get them to change their evil behaviors, it just makes them spend more on security. Every one of these bastards should never again get a good night’s sleep.

    • davel@lemmy.mlOP
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      1 year ago

      Spending more on private security out of their own pockets is the least of what they’re going to do. The capitalist class owns the media, funds the non-profits, and largely runs the government[1][2]. They’re going to crank up the security state/police state apparatus, which incidentally is Theil’s speciality.

      • TipRing@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        Recent events have certainly displayed how fearful the owners of media are of the masses getting ideas all on their own.

  • surph_ninja@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    He knows they’ve crossed a line into the most indefensible of behavior. He knows that they’re killing us for profit, and he’s begging us to stop defending ourselves.

    The mask is off. They’re now openly asking us to die for their wealth.

  • d00phy@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    It’s really telling that their fear is causing them to spend so much on security and separating themselves from the masses rather than, I don’t know, acknowledging the grievances of the masses and spending a paltry percentage of their wealth to solve some widely recognized societal issues that government can’t or won’t address.

    Seriously, the cognitive dissonance on display is mind boggling when so much of the population sees you and your kind as greedy leeches, and your response is, “They’re simply wrong!” as you pump obscene amounts of money towards your security, bunkers, and electing politicians who will protect your widely despised position in the world.

    • daddy32@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      Even the actual honest to god mobsters were smarter than this, with their soup kitchens and whatnot.

  • JoYo@lemmy.ml
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    1 year ago

    bunkers gotta have exhaust vents. those are super visible with IR.