"Is it not surprising, Master, the agility with which the churches switched over to the uses and pratices of the popsyndicate, their Ways of mental mutilation?"
"Not surprising at all. Selling is selling, and a young customer/convert, is a long life of buying. Says it not in Wyndham's 'Secret People': 'In the same way, suggestion will work on an adult, but if you want to make a good job of it, you've got to start on the infant. The church has the right idea. It got in as soon as it decently could with a babtism service. When they followed that up with a proper course of training, they got the poor blighter just where they wanted him. He couldn't think for himself. He thought he could, mind you;...'
Before the penetration of the pop-syndicate into the minds of most children on the planet, these kids had different idols. Sportsmen, inventors, artists, scientists, were then 'in', but from these, one cannot copy fruitful techniques of control. Too much hard work. The pop-bastards came as a godsend to send the gods into the immature minds. Not idolatry of hard work and talent, quality, but destruction of the most important element for intelligent development, nay, the only one, i.e. the aesthetic feeling first. After that destruction, then, anything goes. It reminds one of Wells' remark: 'To this day I will confess I dislike the restriction and distortion of knowledge as I dislike nothing else on Earth. In this modern world it is, I hold, second only to murder to starve and cripple the mind of a child.'
This is the overall strategy, destroy first, then anything goes."