How Consensus is Shaped by Pivotal Events and How Consensus Defines What is Possible

The consensus view of reality generated in earlier times by the much maligned mainstream media, or MMMSM (esp. in the days of the big three television networks) had massive flaws and deficiencies, but at least they never stampeded Americans into the sort of madness that German culture and institutions underwent during the 1930s, which lead to World War II.

I'm afraid this faint praise may represent an achievement far more difficult and fragile than we would imagine or wish.  My impression is that most of us had a "good enough to get by" sense of who or what institutions to trust, more or less, and our institutions were structured such that trusting them would not lead to civilization's collapse.

Very recently, I learned something new about the structure of the institution which would become the Nazi Goebbels' propaganda ministry, which shaped the worldviews of true believers prior to 1933, and soon after that, shaped the worldviews of the German people as a whole.  According to Prof. Thomas Childers, in his course of lectures on tape, Europe and Western Civilization in the Modern Age, at Goebbels' direction, the Nazis went to taverns and beer halls and got people to talk about what issues they were angry about, in order to fine tune the Nazi message.  Goebbels said "That propaganda is good which leads to success, and that is bad which fails to achieve the desired result .. It is not propaganda’s task to be intelligent, its task is to lead to success."  The ideas the Nazis put in their speeches and newspapers were mostly about Germany's humiliation, the idea that the whole world was out to get Germany, the sense of humiliation and outrage of ordinary Germans, including their being looked down on by elites, and unemployment and the like.  Even when in power, some early attempts to go after the Jews had to be rolled back until the German people were better conditioned.  It was not until 1938, 5 years after Hitler became Chancellor that the Nazi government launched Kristallnacht, which was the real beginning of  a relentless centralized policy of persecution (after years of centrally encouraged thuggish persecution).

[To be continued]