Necessary Illusions
   HOME
*





Necessary Illusions
''Necessary Illusions: Thought Control in Democratic Societies'' is a 1989 book by United States academic Noam Chomsky concerning political power using propaganda to distort and distract from major issues to maintain confusion and complicity, preventing real democracy from becoming effective. The title of this book borrows a phrase from the writings of Reinhold Niebuhr. Nearly the entire first half of the book is based on Chomsky's five 1988 Massey Lectures on Canadian Broadcasting Corporation Radio from November 1988 and extends his and Edward S. Herman's propaganda model to a variety of new situations. The remaining appendices address criticisms of the work and provide additional detail. As a genre of political thought, parallels exist between Niebuhr's "necessary illusions" and the "noble lies" of Plato and Leo Strauss, "public relations" of Edward Bernays and "myth making" of Niccolò Machiavelli. Likewise, Chomsky's analyses in ''Necessary Illusions'' represent a refoc ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  


picture info

Noam Chomsky
Avram Noam Chomsky (born December 7, 1928) is an American public intellectual: a linguist, philosopher, cognitive scientist, historian, social critic, and political activist. Sometimes called "the father of modern linguistics", Chomsky is also a major figure in analytic philosophy and one of the founders of the field of cognitive science. He is a Laureate Professor of Linguistics at the University of Arizona and an Institute Professor Emeritus at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), and is the author of more than 150 books on topics such as linguistics, war, politics, and mass media. Ideologically, he aligns with anarcho-syndicalism and libertarian socialism. Born to Ashkenazi Jewish immigrants in Philadelphia, Chomsky developed an early interest in anarchism from alternative bookstores in New York City. He studied at the University of Pennsylvania. During his postgraduate work in the Harvard Society of Fellows, Chomsky developed the theory of transformati ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  


picture info

Niccolò Machiavelli
Niccolò di Bernardo dei Machiavelli ( , , ; 3 May 1469 – 21 June 1527), occasionally rendered in English as Nicholas Machiavel ( , ; see below), was an Italian diplomat, author, philosopher and historian who lived during the Renaissance. He is best known for his political treatise ''The Prince'' (''Il Principe''), written in about 1513 but not published until 1532. He has often been called the father of modern political philosophy and political science. For many years he served as a senior official in the Florentine Republic with responsibilities in diplomatic and military affairs. He wrote comedies, carnival songs, and poetry. His personal correspondence is also important to historians and scholars of Italian correspondence. He worked as secretary to the Second Chancery of the Republic of Florence from 1498 to 1512, when the Medici were out of power. After his death Machiavelli's name came to evoke unscrupulous acts of the sort he advised most famously in his work, ''T ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  


picture info

Books About Foreign Relations Of The United States
A book is a medium for recording information in the form of writing or images, typically composed of many pages (made of papyrus, parchment, vellum, or paper) bound together and protected by a cover. The technical term for this physical arrangement is ''codex'' (plural, ''codices''). In the history of hand-held physical supports for extended written compositions or records, the codex replaces its predecessor, the scroll. A single sheet in a codex is a leaf and each side of a leaf is a page. As an intellectual object, a book is prototypically a composition of such great length that it takes a considerable investment of time to compose and still considered as an investment of time to read. In a restricted sense, a book is a self-sufficient section or part of a longer composition, a usage reflecting that, in antiquity, long works had to be written on several scrolls and each scroll had to be identified by the book it contained. Each part of Aristotle's ''Physics'' is called a b ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  


picture info

Books About Public Opinion
A book is a medium for recording information in the form of writing or images, typically composed of many pages (made of papyrus, parchment, vellum, or paper) bound together and protected by a cover. The technical term for this physical arrangement is '' codex'' (plural, ''codices''). In the history of hand-held physical supports for extended written compositions or records, the codex replaces its predecessor, the scroll. A single sheet in a codex is a leaf and each side of a leaf is a page. As an intellectual object, a book is prototypically a composition of such great length that it takes a considerable investment of time to compose and still considered as an investment of time to read. In a restricted sense, a book is a self-sufficient section or part of a longer composition, a usage reflecting that, in antiquity, long works had to be written on several scrolls and each scroll had to be identified by the book it contained. Each part of Aristotle's ''Physics'' is called a ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  


picture info

Books About Media Bias
A book is a medium for recording information in the form of writing or images, typically composed of many pages (made of papyrus, parchment, vellum, or paper) bound together and protected by a cover. The technical term for this physical arrangement is '' codex'' (plural, ''codices''). In the history of hand-held physical supports for extended written compositions or records, the codex replaces its predecessor, the scroll. A single sheet in a codex is a leaf and each side of a leaf is a page. As an intellectual object, a book is prototypically a composition of such great length that it takes a considerable investment of time to compose and still considered as an investment of time to read. In a restricted sense, a book is a self-sufficient section or part of a longer composition, a usage reflecting that, in antiquity, long works had to be written on several scrolls and each scroll had to be identified by the book it contained. Each part of Aristotle's ''Physics'' is called a ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  


picture info

Books About Propaganda
A book is a medium for recording information in the form of writing or images, typically composed of many pages (made of papyrus, parchment, vellum, or paper) bound together and protected by a cover. The technical term for this physical arrangement is ''codex'' (plural, ''codices''). In the history of hand-held physical supports for extended written compositions or records, the codex replaces its predecessor, the scroll. A single sheet in a codex is a leaf and each side of a leaf is a page. As an intellectual object, a book is prototypically a composition of such great length that it takes a considerable investment of time to compose and still considered as an investment of time to read. In a restricted sense, a book is a self-sufficient section or part of a longer composition, a usage reflecting that, in antiquity, long works had to be written on several scrolls and each scroll had to be identified by the book it contained. Each part of Aristotle's ''Physics'' is called a bo ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  


Books By Noam Chomsky
This is a list of writings published by the American author Noam Chomsky. Books and articles by Chomsky General * (2006). '' The Chomsky-Foucault Debate: On Human Nature'' (with Michel Foucault). New York: The New Press, distributed by W.W. Norton. * (2015). ''What Kind of Creatures Are We?''. Columbia University Press. . Linguistics A full bibliography is available on Chomsky'MIT homepage * * * * (1955). '' Logical Structure of Linguistic Theory''. (A typescript Chomsky wrote in preparation for his PhD thesis, including hand-written notes made in preparation for the 1975 book, is available as a 149  MiB919 page PDF) * * * * * * * * * &mdashProceedings as E-Book* * * * * * * (Reprint: ) * (1966). ''Topics in the Theory of Generative Grammar''. * (1968) with Morris Halle. ''The Sound Pattern of English''. New York: Harper & Row. * (1968). '' Language and Mind''. * (1971). ''The Case Against B.F. Skinner''. New York Review of Books, December 30, 1971. * (197 ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  


picture info

1989 Non-fiction Books
File:1989 Events Collage.png, From left, clockwise: The Cypress Street Viaduct, Cypress structure collapses as a result of the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake, killing motorists below; The proposal document for the World Wide Web is submitted; The Exxon Valdez oil tanker runs aground in Prince William Sound, Alaska, causing a large Exxon Valdez oil spill, oil spill; The Fall of the Berlin Wall begins the downfall of Communism in Eastern Europe, and heralds German reunification; The United States United States invasion of Panama, invades Panama to depose Manuel Noriega; The Singing Revolution led to the independence of the Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania from the Soviet Union; The stands of Hillsborough Stadium in Sheffield, Yorkshire, where the Hillsborough disaster occurred; 1989 Tiananmen Square protests and massacre, Students demonstrate in Tiananmen Square, Beijing; many are killed by forces of the Chinese Communist Party., 300x300px, thumb rect 0 0 200 200 1989 Loma ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  


picture info

Adam Curtis
Adam Curtis (born 26 May 1955) is an English documentary filmmaker. Curtis began his career as a conventional documentary producer for the BBC throughout the 1980s and into the early 1990s. The release of ''Pandora's Box (British TV series), Pandora's Box'' (1992) marked the introduction of Curtis's distinctive presentation that uses collage film, collage to explore aspects of sociology, psychology, philosophy and political history.Darke, Chris (17 July 2012)"Interview: Adam Curtis."''Film Comment''. Archived frothe original./ref> His style has been described as involving, "whiplash digressions, menacing atmospherics and arpeggiated scores, and the near-psychedelic compilation of archival footage", narrated by Curtis himself with "patrician economy and assertion". His films have been awarded with four British Academy Television Awards, BAFTAs. Early life Adam Curtis was born in Dartford in Kent, and raised in nearby Platt, Kent, Platt. His father was Martin Curtis (1917– ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  


The Underground History Of American Education
''The Underground History of American Education: A Schoolteacher’s Intimate Investigation Into the Problem of Modern Schooling'' (, pbk. ) is a critique of the United States education system by John Taylor Gatto. A former teacher, Gatto left the classroom the same year he was named New York State Teacher of the Year. He announced his decision in a letter titled "I Quit, I Think". Using anecdotes gathered from thirty years of teaching, alongside documentation, Gatto presents his view of ''modern compulsion schooling'' as opposed to genuine education, describing a "conflict between systems which offer physical safety and certainty at the cost of suppressing free will, and those which offer liberty at the price of constant risk". Gatto argues that educational strategies promoted by government and industry leaders for over a century included the creation of a system that keeps real power in the hands of very few people. From the book's Introduction: :"... Underground History isnâ ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  


John Taylor Gatto
John Taylor Gatto (December 15, 1935 – October 25, 2018) was an American author and school teacher. After teaching for nearly 30 years he authored several books on modern education, criticizing its ideology, history, and consequences. He is best known for his books ''Dumbing Us Down, Dumbing Us Down: the Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling'', and ''The Underground History of American Education, The Underground History of American Education: A Schoolteacher’s Intimate Investigation Into the Problem of Modern Schooling''. Biography Gatto was born to Andrew Michael Mario and Frances Virginia ( Zimmer) Gatto in Monongahela, Pennsylvania, a steel town near Pittsburgh. In his youth he attended public schools throughout the Pittsburgh Metro Area including Swissvale, Pennsylvania, Swissvale, Monongahela, and Uniontown, Pennsylvania, Uniontown as well as a Catholic boarding school in Latrobe, Pennsylvania, Latrobe. He did undergraduate work at Cornell University, Cornell, the U ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  


picture info

Edward Bernays
Edward Louis Bernays ( , ; November 22, 1891 − March 9, 1995) was an American theorist, considered a pioneer in the field of public relations and propaganda, and referred to in his obituary as "the father of public relations". His best-known campaigns include a 1929 effort to promote female smoking by branding cigarettes as feminist "Torches of Freedom", and his work for the United Fruit Company in the 1950s, connected with the CIA-orchestrated overthrow of the democratically elected Guatemalan government in 1954. He worked for dozens of major American corporations including Procter & Gamble and General Electric, and for government agencies, politicians, and nonprofit organizations. Of his many books, '' Crystallizing Public Opinion'' (1923) and ''Propaganda'' (1928) gained special attention as early efforts to define and theorize the field of public relations. Citing works of writers such as Gustave Le Bon, Wilfred Trotter, Walter Lippmann, and Sigmund Freud (his own double u ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]