[383] If they say they are adjusted to the general standards of the way in which one should think and act, then I would say this "adjustment" is adjustment to mass society^a and is a fundamental way of preventing people to remain non-conformists and to say No! And a teacher who tells me, if I ask him, "How often do your pupils say NO to what you say, either in papers or in questions?"-- and he says either "Usually they don't" or "They don't dare!" [laughter], or something like that, then I would say this is a very bad teacher. And one of the main criteria of the good teacher is that he creates so much independent thinking that they reject the teacher, not malignantly or

with hostility, but in terms of their own thought; then they have really learned something from him, namely the ability of dialectical discussion about problems which can anyhow be solved ONLY through the process of Yes and No, and never through a monolithic statement of the teacher to the pupils. The other ways of hidden psychological^b influence are the means of mass communication^c, to which I already referred and which are so much discussed today. These means of mass communica- tion (the older one, the newspaper, the radio; and the newer one, the movie and television) are extremely strong, even to those who listen or look at them very little. They are strong because they fill the atmosphere and produce a language, produce connotations, indirectly even in those who are not addicted to one of these influences, but who keep fairly away from them... But they cannot really keep away from them because the whole civilization is filled with them.

And they are most powerful means for producing mass society--people who know the same things, they have learned from these means of mass communication: people who think the same thing,