"The effect of the permission structure machine is to instill and maintain obedience to voices coming from outside yourself, regardless of the obvious gaps in logic and functioning that they create."
"Where this analysis went wrong is the same place that the Obama team’s analysis of Trump went wrong: The wizards of the permission structure machine had become captives of the machinery that they built. Bullying large numbers of people into faddish hyperconformity by controlling the machinery of social approval may require both money and technique, but it is not art or thought. In fact, it is something like the opposite of thought. Lost in the hypercharged mirror world that they had created, they decided that having made themselves cool also made them right, and that evidence to the contrary could be safely dismissed as a “right-wing talking point.” Obama’s operatives shared the same character flaw as their master, a kind of brittle, Ivy League know-it-all-ness that demanded that they always be the smartest person in the room."
Quotes above are from David Samuel's thought provoking article on Tablet entitled, "Rapid Onset Political Enlightenment: How Barack Obama Built an Omnipotent Thought Machine and How it Was Destroyed
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