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But we must be on good terms with all the living things of this world. This is the reason why we must talk to plants we are about to kill and apologize for hurting them; the same thing must be done with the animals we are going to hunt. We should take only enough for our needs, otherwise the plants and the animals and the worms we have killed would turn against us and cause us disease and misfortune.

EVERYWHERE IS MY TEMPLE
ALL THE WATERS OF THE EARTH ARE MY ALTAR
AND ALL THAT LIVE AND DIE ARE SUBJECT TO
MY EVERLASTING CONTEMPT AND ADORATION
IN EQUAL MEASURE.

So in the twentieth century, there’s a major current of American thought-in fact, it’s probably the dominant current among people who think about these things (political scientists, journalists, public relations experts and so on)-which says that precisely because the state has lost the power to coerce, elites need to have more effective propaganda to control the public mind. That was Walter Lippmann’s point of view, for example, to mention probably the dean of American journalists-he referred to the population as a “bewildered herd”: we have to protect ourselves from “the rage and trampling of the
bewildered herd.” And the way you do it, Lippmann said, is by what he called the “manufacture of consent”-if you don’t do it by force, you have to do it by calculated “manufacture of consent.”