Corporations and political lobbyists spend trillions on editorial staff, public relations committee, university trustees, media shares, foreign intelligence, publishing offices, TV networks, radio, newspapers, gerrymandering, electoral astroturfing, gag orders, even law enforcement, just to assure public consciousness is carefully regulated to be censored, vapid and ignorant.
When Vladimir Ilyich Lenin established the provisional government of St. Petersburg, the average person couldn't read, and believed in witches and gnomes. After just a decade of producing democratically mandated cultural works and education as dictated by the hundreds of elections for the national assembly, the average person listened to the symphony and read journals about astronomy and physics.
Using democratic centralism, the Soviets turned a nation of superstitious peasants, into a nation of engineers, scientists, composers and eventually cosmonauts.
Similarly in Cuba, who today is the host to the world's most advanced medical research facilities, who have the most doctors per capita, this development began with Che Guevara and Fidel Castro running illegal schools in the countryside. It was illegal to educate peasants, but the moment they could read, they were passionate about learning.
The Cuban peasants would often have to spend days carrying sick people into town to get to a hospital, and often they wouldn't make it. The moment they were given the self-determination and the opportunity to learn, when Batista, the liberal compadore for the United States no longer had police enforce a strict policy of illiteracy and ignorance, they became a nation of doctors and scientists.
If people don't know anything, then it's because markets thrive on scarcity. By turning knowledge into a product to be bought and sold, they impoverish society both culturally and intellectually.
If people were as stupid as you propose, then you wouldn't need a CIA-funded CCF headquarters in every major city across the world. You wouldn't need to shut down public libraries with budget cuts. You wouldn't need to constantly force teachers to do their jobs on a shoestring budget.
If people were as stupid as you claim, then liberalism wouldn't require to pour trillions each year into a carefully laid out industry of stupidity.
Sources:
Inventing Reality, M. Parenti, Yale University
Manufacturing Consent, E. Herman, Berkeley University
Finks: How the C.I.A. Tricked the World's Best Writers, J. Whitney, Brooklyn Public Library
Propaganda, E. Bernays, Cornell University
