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...although Americans still give ritual lip-service to democracy,

the concept has lost much of its meaning. In fact, it has become boring
and irrelevant in most people's lives. (..)

..someone ends up taking an oath of office --
but the ugly truth, as we all know,
is that the campaign promises are empty rhetoric,

based not on what the candidates believe
but on what their expert pollsters have told them we want to hear.

If you ask the managers of these ever-more-expensive propaganda campaigns
why they have vulgarized the democratic process,

they will frequently tell you that the problem is not with them
but with the voters, who are too "irrational," "ignorant," or "apathetic"

to respond to any other kind of appeal.

....Apparently people today are less hungry for serious talk
and less capable of comprehending it
than the half-literate voters a century and a half ago who turned out
in multitudes and sat for hours listening to the debates
between Abraham Lincoln and William Douglas.

"The minute you begin to view the public as
something that doesn't operate rationally,
your job as a publicist or journalist changes," Ewen observes.

"The pivotal moment was when those who provided the public with
its intelligence no longer believed the public had any intelligence."

/ /

..it can be disturbingly easy for false experts
to manipulate the thinking and behavior of others.

One of the classic experiments in this regard was conducted in 1974
by Stanley Milgram,
who tried to see how far people would go in following orders
given by a seemingly authoritative scientist.

/

In another famous experiment, known as the "Doctor Fox Lecture"'
a distinguished-looking actor was hired to give a meaningless lecture,

titled "Mathematical Game Theory as Applied to Physical Education".

The talk, deliberately filled with
"double talk, neologisms, non sequiturs, and contradictory statements"

was delivered before three audiences composed of psychiatrists,
social workers, psychologists, educators, and educational administrators,

many of whom held advanced degrees.
After each session, audiences received a questionnaire asking them to evaluate
the speaker.
None of the audience members saw through the lecture as a hoax,
and most reported that they were favorably impressed with the speaker's
expertise.

//

..a variety of scientific pretenders-disciplines such as phrenology or eugenics
that merely claim to be scientific.
The renowned philosopher of science Karl Popper gave a great deal of consideration
to this problem
and coined the term "pseudoscience" to help separate the wheat from the chaff.
The difference between science and pseudoscience, he concluded,
is that genuinely scientific theories are "falsifiable" --
that is, they are formulated in such a way that if they are wrong,
they can be proven false through experiments.
By contrast, pseudosciences are formulated so vaguely that they can never be
proven or disproven.

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Psykolog Milgrams skumle avsløring

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