I don't fully agree with the comment you're replying to in that Manufacturing Consent has nothing to do with those movements.

However, I completely disagree with your statements that:

>The mechanism is exactly the same.

>People don’t just wake up and change their minds. These opinions are filtered down to them.

People do in fact change their minds, for various reasons. These mechanisms are not the same because of power. Large institutions in the media that have lots of reach and authority act as gatekeepers to what is or isn't discussed. This idea that movements are propelled from sympathizers who are popular or have authority just misses how movements form and grow to begin with.

Yes they start out small, but they aren't cleared by the media or any figure before they grow. Movements grow with pressure through direct action to a point where the media cannot ignore it anymore. It is a challenge for every movement that exists.

It's not that what you're saying is uninteresting, but the "consent" in Manufacturing Consent is a reference to the concept of the "consent of the governed."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consent_of_the_governed

It's a very unusual view that equates a spontaneous shift towards vegetarianism in the face of corporate lobbying and advertising on behalf of the meat industries with an institutional refusal to question Israel's nuclear arsenal.

Except that shift isn’t spontaneous. Someone has to propose it, someone has to promote it, someone has to popularize it, etc.

Manufacturing consent isn’t by default bad. Manufacturing convent to built pubic transit, manufacturing consent to have people vaccinated, etc., in the face of other interests is still manufacturing consent.

>Except that shift isn’t spontaneous. Someone has to propose it, someone has to promote it, someone has to popularize it, etc.

The mechanism is different though. We didn't just wake up one day and start hearing multiple coherent media voices that vegetarianism is the way forward. We did have precisely that for the Iraq war.

It’s just slower. But there is an interest and there is a promoter, people selling books, talking on air, in movies, talked about by teachers, elevated by kids’s shows, etc. It’s more diffuse and immersive, thus, it’s even more effective because people rarely notice it. It has parallels to refined state propaganda.

Iraq war-like talk basically is the poorman’s version of ideal propaganda.

It's not just slower and there is no "promoter" that is filtering down news in the same way with talking points dictated to media. There is a wide variety of views being spread in a far more grass roots fashion.

"Propaganda" isn't just an attempt to convince somebody of something. Writing a book advancing a viewpoint isn't automatically propaganda.

I think you're talking about fads. Fads are a bit different than movements. Vegetarianism and not wearing fur are more like fads than they are social movements. Social movements fundamentally change a society.

And because they fundamentally change societies, they rarely have advocates who are "popular" or have "gravitas". If a social movement is a real social movement, then it does more than change what coats people wear to school. (Changing what clothes people wear happens every year. In fact, they made a whole industry out of it changing every year. The fashion industry.)

No, a social movement has the potential to threaten changes to everything, right down to the actual people in power at the top of a society.

If the people in the society generally accept the social movement as collectively beneficial, then the social movement becomes mainstream societal belief, and over time, will integrate into what we would call that society's "culture". If the people in the society generally reject the social movement, that's when you usually have a war.

For instance, republicanism was a social movement in France, but it's proponents could not get enough people to accept it as a good idea. The proponents refused to give up on the idea and it eventually resulted in war and the Reign of Terror. (Which, ironically, eliminated all of the ideas proponents.) France is now on its Fifth Republic at last count. (Not surprisingly, the Fifth Republic is one that had the support of the populace.) Similarly, the communist movement in Czarist Russia. Not enough accepted it. War ensued, which enabled the proponents to force communism on the people. Then the people got rid of it in the 1990s.

There are also movements that are accepted by the populace. Gandhi's radical idea of universal suffrage in India was readily accepted by legions of people on the Sub-Continent, and eventually, the British simply had to leave.

In all of these cases, those in power were staunchly opposed to the social movements in question. Obviously because those movements threatened not only their power, but to change, effectively, everything in society that even enabled their power.

Veganism, Vegetarianism, anti-fur, etc, those kinds of things just don't rise to the level of movements in my mind because they don't threaten to fundamentally change society in that fashion. There is no threat that the people making decisions if we eat veggies, would be different than the people making decisions if we eat meat. The societal structure remains in place in either case.