01 September 2006

To the educated reader

I have stumbled upon a remarkable passage, while reading That Hideous Strength by C.S. Lewis.

Miss Hardcastle (one of the bad guys in the book) is initiating the virginal brain of Mark, the scholar, in the basics of propaganda:

"Why, you fool, it's the educated reader who can be gulled. All our difficulty comes with the others. When did you meet a workman who believes the papers? He takes it for granted that they're all propaganda and skips the leading articles. He buys his paper for the football results and the little paragraphs about girls falling out of windows and corpses found in Mayfair flats. He is our problem. We have to recondition him. But the educated public, the people who read the highbrow weeklies, don't need reconditioning. They are all right already. They'll believe anything."

Brilliant and now even more true than at the time this was written, in my opinion.

But what does one do when one is turned of football on one hand and does not believe the papers on the other?















This in one sure way. Or, maybe:














Nah... Back to the first one...

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