Erosion of freedom

In recent days, due to circumstances beyond my control I have suffered a painfully excessive exposure to television.  As I watch the inordinate amount of advertising and the unrelenting torrent of banal, contrived, superficial, manipulative programming, I feel I have landed in a dystopian society described in some science fiction novel of my youth. 

The situation today is infinitely more dire than in 1955, but even then wise people were noting the insidious undermining of freedom of the human mind and spirit, a prescient awareness revealed in the following quotes, and ending with a clarion call of hope:

Quotes from “Living Issues in Philosophy”, 4^th Edition, Harold H. Titus

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Adlai Stevenson, 1955, at the Columbia bicentennial celebration:

"I wonder if today mass manipulation is not a greater danger than economic exploitation;  if we are not in greater danger of becoming robots than slaves."

At the same Columbia bicentennial celebration:

Whitney Griswold, President of Yale:

“Though we celebrate freedom here tonight, over a large part of the earth the concrete definition of it has utterly ceased and in our part it has slowed almost to a standstill  Why so?  On the other side of the iron curtain the reason is obvious.  But at home?  Why should the life process of freedom falter among its creators?”

Again Griswold, speaking to the graduating class at Yale in 1957:

“…the society into which you now graduate is not as free as the one which produced the principles by which you have been educated.  Bit by bit we have exchanged our freedom – voluntarily, for the most part, involuntarily to some extent – for security, for productive efficiency, for creature comforts.  But far from discounting the value of those educational principles, this puts them at a premium. ….”

“To do good you must first know good; to serve beauty you must first know beauty; to speak the truth you must first know the truth.”