In spite of the actuality that no one who is not extraordinarily cultured can even begin to think for himself, and Americans are not even remotely cultured personalities; and in spite of the actuality that marriages, families, religions, languages, public funds, public schools and libraries and post offices and clinics and even corporations and mass-media are all forms of “communism,” Americans take “mind control” and “communism” as the horror of all horrors (witness the cyclical crusades of Red Scares, the ever-piquant Invasion of the Body Snatchers, etc.). But in spite of such a phobia against losing proprietary control of their “own” minds, Americans are one of the most cult-prone, mass-organized and –manipulable collectivities that has ever existed, as abject and pathos-besotted conformists down to their slavish toenails. In the early nineteenth century De Tocqueville already observed this striking phobia among Americans against standing alone and thinking for oneself. The bonds of subrational control over us are more potent than ever precisely because the critical culture, the “know thyself” that would make such controls accessible to conscious evaluation, has withered to nothing, eaten away by democratist fear of “elitist” critical intelligence and proprietarist neglect of and contempt for public education.
Source:
http://www.tcj.com/?p=548
Contributed by:
Dave 
