engineering consent.

immunology quiz was a terror. it felt as though it was the actual exams already. and the count-down timer edward wrote on the resource room white board is starting to freak me out. 21 days to my first paper and i barely touched the lectures other than immunology.

welcome to year 4.

just this afternoon i peeked at this girl using the resource room computer and surfing a very familiar website. and i realized it was the university of washington school of medicine website.

she was finding subjects to do subject-matching!

well that certainly brought back a huge flood of memories of a year ago. where i was fretting over my insane 6-module-workload and exams, visa applications, MOE things, air tickets, accomm stuff. and i thought about everything i went through for the sake of my exchange, and everything i gave up for. somehow on hindsight now, it seemed like things could have been very different if i had stayed. or they may have been exactly the way they turned out to be.

it's common knowledge that things we do have repercussions. things we say too (today's incident involving my gd girlfriend and another friend of ours is a good example of that). my exchange has taught me so many things, and given me memories which i'd treasure for life, and opened my narrow-minded mind to so many cultures and places and perspectives. but there's always the sacrifices we make. the times i lost with my loved ones. the things i could have done as WSC's vice-president. the worrying that my family went through would be greatly reduced.

shoulda, woulda, coulda. why does "on hindsight" make it so much more difficult to move on?

anyway, i keep lamenting about how much fun i had in US studying. and for old time's sake i like to read through the things i've learnt or the work that i did over at UW. (: here is an example.

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Qn: Discuss the origins of and the key figures behind the philosophy of "engineering consent". What is the underlying view of the public in this philosophy, and what are the best arguments for and against engineering consent in a democracy?

The key figures behind the philosophy of "engineering consent" are Sigmund Freud, Walter Lippmann and Edward L. Bernays. The origins of this philosophy came mainly from Freud's psychoanalysis of the human mind and the human condition. Lippmann and Bernays then concluded that the public opinion is not rational (as though in previous decades) and cannot be swayed using facts or reasoned arguments. hence the public can only be reached through its emotions, where images, symbols, stories that are relatable to the public and are able to stir up emotions. With these techniques, public opinion can then be engineered according to those who are able to come up with images that reach out to the public most effectively.

Engineering consent of the public restores order in a chaotic society. This is one advantage. It also puts the power in a selected group of people that have the knowledge and ability to engineer consent in a way that is "best" for the society, rather than let the power run in the hands of the middle class, who are irrational and uninformed, and hence incapable of making wise decisions. This is the argument put forth by democratic realists.

However, from a democracy standpoint, the philosophy of engineering consent is no longer democracy, because the power and rights are no longer in the hands of the masses, but the elite few who hold the power to sway public opinion.

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you know i wouldn't rule out going to grad school after my bond ends and study communications or political science or something. i did get the best grade for this class on media, society and political identity, better than all of my other subjects i took. even in singapore. haha.

now it's back to the science. which i love learning it, but certainly not the memorizing part.