Book detail for Year of Consent

Cover tagline

A terrifying and realistic novel of the near future

Back cover text

Security A.D. 1990

It is only 36 years from now. The streets, the buildings, the fields look just as they do today. And the people look the same — until you get close enough to see the bland, vacant stare in their eyes, to hear the empty, guarded quality of their voices

They are victims of a gigantic con game. Free will, the right of dissent have been washed away in a sea of slogans coined by the public-relations manipulators who have taken over the government. The rare ones who momentarily forget they are no longer individuals have their symptoms recorded by an enormous mechanical brain in Washington. The real dissenters, the incorrigible rebels, have their "sickness" cured by a simple surgical operation....

This is the year of consent. And this is the story of a man who fought back.

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Interior text

Thoughts engraved upon the head of a certain pin

"To public-relations men may go the most important social-engineering role of them all: the gradual reorganization of human society...."
— G. Edward Pendray
Public Relations Counselor

"...The approach to the problems encountered can be scientific — social engineering, the engineering of consent ... or whatever term we wish to give it."
—Edward L. Bernays
Public Relations Counselor

"I think of a man in a voting booth who hesitates between two levers as if he were pausing between competing tubes of toothpaste in the drugstore. The brand that has made the highest penetration on his brain will win his choice, and the nature of the human brain is such that a one-minute or thirty-second speech, expertly crystallized, gets maximum penetration on its content."
— Rosser Reeves
Advertising Executive

"If our society comes to an end it will not be with a bang or a whimper. The sound track will be the soft tinkle of rimless glasses on a conference table."
—"Is Anybody Listening?"
William H. Whyte, Jr.