Why Controlling the Masses Through Media No Longer Works | Jordan Greenhall

When television took over from print and radio as the dominant media in the second half of the 20th century, a hierarchy evolved in which the privileged few with TV camera access spoke to the masses. This top-down dissemination of news and opinion not only shaped information, but it also shaped the psychology of those people, and of anyone who has lived with one foot in the TV broadcast era, and the other in the new dynamic brought on by the Internet. That established top-down directive—and society's conditioning to widely accept what is presented to them by experts—is what Neurohacker CEO Jordan Greenhall describes as the Blue Church: "The Blue Church is a kind of narrative/ideology control structure that is a natural result of mass media. It is an evolved (rather than designed) function that has come over the past half-century to be deeply connected with the Democratic political “Establishment” and lightly connected with the “Deep State” to form an effective political and dominant cultural force in the United States," writes Greenhall on Medium. Greenhall is careful to point out that control is not necessarily always a bad thing: it is how hundreds of millions of individuals are able to make collective decisions and engage in effective collective actions to advance their society.
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I don't want to go into the history but there's actually a really neat history of exactly why and how a particular set of ideas became so important in the latter half of the 20th century. I'll give you just one example, but the idea of operational management, which was innovated during the heat of World War II and largely to do things like make strategic decisions about how we were going to go about moving ships across the Atlantic or run bombing raids on Germany using statistics, actually applying statistics to analyze the effectiveness of different approaches and then therefore making decisions based on statistics. And so operational management was very effective in the military theater and the people who had learned those techniques after the war percolated out into the broader economy and started applying those techniques in things like deciding how to run their businesses. So that's the basic framework of the order that we built up until now.
Now, the idea of the Blue Church is trying to get a sense of what it is that is the essence of the control structure. By control I don't mean necessarily anything bad I just mean the mechanism by which we're able to make collective decisions and engage in effective collective actions, the thing that holds our decision and action structure together. The control structure that still is the one that we're operating under that came out of that timeframe and the proposition is that, in addition to—and this is one piece but it's a very important piece—that there's a dominant role played by the structure of media. We're actually in the process of breaking that apart right here so this is good. We know that there's a particular dynamic associated with the kinds of media that are broadcast where one individual or group, because of the nature of the medium, so for example broadcast television in the day of three networks there was only three people who got to be the anchors who communicated out to the entire population. It was a massive asymmetry between the speaker and the listener and there's no interaction. So I am in a position of listening, you're in a position of speaking and there's 30 million of me and one of you.
Now, that's actually a very important dynamic. If you don't understand the fact of that and its importance you're going to have a very hard time understanding what actually happened during the latter half of the 20th century as, in particular, television emerged as the dominant medium displacing radio and newspapers. And by the way, you also have a hard time understanding what's happening now has the Internet is now emerging as the dominant medium replacing television. Just understanding that transition and what it implies and means at a deep level is sort of fundamental for predicting future states.