This subject has received significant attention because as hard as it is to accept, it is all true. There has been a deliberate "Brave New World" effort to control the masses of democracies, under the assumption that leaving people to their own devices will ultimately result in chaos and destruction by someone else manipulating them (case in point: the Republican Party fiasco regarding Donald Trump)
If you are willing to see how your life and role as a passive consumer has been designed, watch the BBC documentary "Century of the Self," read Edward Bernays' "Crystallizing Public Opinion," and "Propaganda," and for an extra dose of depression, Noam Chomsky's "Profit Over People."
I haven't seen any of those yet, but I get the sneaking suspicion that they would all be preaching to the choir.
But I reached my current world view by extensive wearing of foil hats and painstaking calibration of handcrafted bullshit detectors, so it would be nice to see the analyses of those more reputable than my usual sources (by many orders of magnitude), just in case they would ever be useful in an appeal to authority.
For instance, I could tell my spouse something for years, such as "chia seeds are a better source of omega-3s than flaxseed, because the chia seed coat is digestible, whereas the flax seed coat has to be cracked mechanically, which allows the oils inside to become rancid due to oxidation between milling and ingestion." And this is dismissed and forgotten, until Dr. Mehmet Oz features chia seeds on his television show. Afterward, I'm still the only one actually eating the chia seeds, but at least I get less flak for it when I do.
The Cassandra Phenomenon: it's horribly demoralizing.
It's even worse with my homespun political analysis.
If you are willing to see how your life and role as a passive consumer has been designed, watch the BBC documentary "Century of the Self," read Edward Bernays' "Crystallizing Public Opinion," and "Propaganda," and for an extra dose of depression, Noam Chomsky's "Profit Over People."
Sorry.