I think "good education" is an increasingly rare commodity. Almost all of us are indoctrinated from a very early age to become dutiful consumers. I've spent years studying psychodynamics and the way we are manipulated by the corporate media. So I'm probably more clued-up about the theory and techniques than most people... and yet I still go out of my way to avoid advertising because I know it works. On me. On everyone.

Yet the world is full of people who, despite never thinking much about the issue, insist that they are unaffected by it.

As far back as the 1940s, Albert Einstein was warning us about all this...

Private capital tends to become concentrated in few hands, partly because of competition among the capitalists, and partly because technological development and the increasing division of labor encourage the formation of larger units of production at the expense of smaller ones. The result of these developments is an oligarchy of private capital the enormous power of which cannot be effectively checked even by a democratically organized political society. This is true since the members of legislative bodies are selected by political parties, largely financed or otherwise influenced by private capitalists who, for all practical purposes, separate the electorate from the legislature. The consequence is that the representatives of the people do not in fact sufficiently protect the interests of the underprivileged sections of the population. Moreover, under existing conditions, private capitalists inevitably control, directly or indirectly, the main sources of information (press, radio, education). It is thus extremely difficult, and indeed in most cases quite impossible, for the individual citizen to come to objective conclusions and to make intelligent use of his political rights.

-- Why Socialism?