The more educated you are, the more you realize people don't know that much. If everyone could see the consequences of their beliefs and actions, governments wouldn't need to exist. Public education/shaping interests can be a good thing.
Shaping someone's opinion of sugary food or smoking cigarettes, or the negative effects of various drugs or any other number of things can be good. Informing the public of foreign adversaries fomenting and supporting fascism via bot networks promoting hatred and division is a national security issue. Good faith information from places of intellectual authority is positive for society.
The problem is not the government shaping interests, the problem is who is the government shaping interests for.
In a democracy supposedly the government acts on behalf of the people, but we do not live in a democracy, the west is largely plutocratic. Governments represent billionaires (not literally billionaires, but the wealthy). That's why our government promotes socialism for the rich and capitalism for the poor. Because the government works on behalf of those with money.
This is not a casual statement. This is the product of our voting system. Before anyone gets to vote on any candidates, candidates must fund raise to win a primary. Before any person votes on candidates, money votes on candidates. So our government is responsive to money, because money votes first.
So it is not the government shaping interests, but the government using force on behalf of the wealthy that is problematic.
All political roads lead to a central problem: The rich are too rich and therefore cannot be bound by law and are able to coerce the government to act on their behalf.
The more educated you think you are, the more you look down on people and deny their ability to think for themselves.
Informing people of facts is different from shaping opinions - the former tries to give people what they need to make their own decisions while the latter starts out with a conclusion and seeks to make the general public arrive at it too. Manufacturing consent is as much about omitting information or outright preventing it from spreading as it is about providing information that would support your conclusion.
Sugary food, smoking cigarettes, and legal drugs are interesting examples here because there is a third party that benefits from them and is actually engaging in similar tactics to shape the public's consent. Perhaps the most obvious part of this is advertisement. Ideally the government would recognize this and severly limit how corporations can manipulate people.
I do agree with your point that the root cause of all of this is that the government is representing the people as you would expect from an ideal democracy.
The more educated you are, the more you realize people don't know that much. If everyone could see the consequences of their beliefs and actions, governments wouldn't need to exist. Public education/shaping interests can be a good thing.
Shaping someone's opinion of sugary food or smoking cigarettes, or the negative effects of various drugs or any other number of things can be good. Informing the public of foreign adversaries fomenting and supporting fascism via bot networks promoting hatred and division is a national security issue. Good faith information from places of intellectual authority is positive for society.
The problem is not the government shaping interests, the problem is who is the government shaping interests for.
In a democracy supposedly the government acts on behalf of the people, but we do not live in a democracy, the west is largely plutocratic. Governments represent billionaires (not literally billionaires, but the wealthy). That's why our government promotes socialism for the rich and capitalism for the poor. Because the government works on behalf of those with money.
This is not a casual statement. This is the product of our voting system. Before anyone gets to vote on any candidates, candidates must fund raise to win a primary. Before any person votes on candidates, money votes on candidates. So our government is responsive to money, because money votes first.
So it is not the government shaping interests, but the government using force on behalf of the wealthy that is problematic.
All political roads lead to a central problem: The rich are too rich and therefore cannot be bound by law and are able to coerce the government to act on their behalf.