Sitting on a bayonet

'The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country. We are governed, our minds are molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of.' --- Edward Bernays, 1928

We're all victims of propaganda, regardless of the level of education, and the higher the education the more susceptible to brainwashing we become:

"This ignorance and gullibility among the college-educated modern public is despite the fact that Western academe is at the forefront of the vast majority of behavior control and social engineering research studies, often funded by, or in collaboration with, Western intelligence, military services, and private tax-exempt foundations such as the Rockefeller Foundation, Carnegie Endowment, Ford Foundation, etc. The highly compartmentalized nature of such research ensures that few students and professors in on the ground breaking studies into human behavior can ever glean the bigger picture towards which they work so diligently to respectively earn their Ph.D. and research funding! Those few who do comprehend are invariably already engaged with empire in the largely unhidden orchestration of social engineering, or, recruited into it as agents and assets of the Mighty Wurlitzer.

The indoctrination of belief in authority figures and “experts” has reached pandemic proportions in the West. It is today perhaps the greatest public plague afflicting the mightiest superpower on earth, a direct consequence of “dumbing down” the public in the name of higher education to craft self-obsessed economic widgets, narrow specialists, and superficial generalists, for the Technetronic Era."

Source and more: scoop.co.nz June 2, 2011