When he was sleeping, I logged in with his Youtube account in another device (I manage his password and 2FA, he's an old man) and let Youtube play a lot of Lenin videos for hours
For anyone interested, it's referencing the Lenin quote relevant to this thread:
People always have been the foolish victims of deception and self-deception in politics, and they always will be until they have learnt to seek out the interests of some class or other behind all moral, religious, political and social phrases, declarations and promises. Champions of reforms and improvements will always be fooled by the defenders of the old order until they realise that every old institution, how ever barbarous and rotten it may appear to be, is kept going by the forces of certain ruling classes. And there is only one way of smashing the resistance of those classes, and that is to find, in the very society which surrounds us, the forces which can—and, owing to their social position, must—constitute the power capable of sweeping away the old and creating the new, and to enlighten and organise those forces for the struggle.
I do think the behavior of the system definitely suggests central management instead of any, like, uncoordinated class interest behavior. But at the end of the day, if you fix the structural problems, it doesn't even matter.
Not quite what I mean. The way that control is orchestrated between the whole apparatus for the moves of the machine to function synchronously (media support of wars, wars happening in a way that benefits the largest companies, etc.).
For example, the way that even CNN seems to just be reading from a script re: manufacturing consent for the Palestinian genocide. It's beyond something like "they'll lose their White House press credentials if they don't play nice".