I can appreciate what you are saying Anon. It's important we return to the status of being sovereign thinkers.
I just finished reading The Fountainhead. Outstanding and chilling reveal about a society slowly being taken over by socialist thinkers. Being set in the 1930's, the mechanism of thought control centered around Newspaper journalism. But the same warnings apply today. In the book, a mere handful of people were able to completely change the way the public thought and functioned, simply by a long slow drip of media that contained a certain 'slant'.
A few hero / protagonists were able to withstand the onslaught. But they were like lone voices in a world of NPC's.
The Author's later work, Atlas Shrugged, is also a good but difficult read. In it, we see the 'makers' of society hopelessly struggling against the 'takers'.