It is not necessary that religion or public opinion be engineered into believability by any one organization, in an additive process. It is a natural result of the universal human need for symbiance, that the quasi-believable but ambiguous narrative of a hidden realm "in the high places", or belief in a plain lie which suits the sensibilities of the working class, is subtractively deduced into existence by the collective imagination. In this way Noam Chomsky was wrong - consent of the public need not even be manufactured - this would be a waste of energy for the elite. All that they must do is declare an untruth with enough gusto that the weak are unable to confront it, and in their weakness, ask themselves not how to resist this untruth, but how to reconcile it with what is.
"Oh, and how, without their new social theory, would we be utterly lost in the dark ages; without your medicine, how we would have bled out on the floor! And how greatful we must be, for our leaders," Mocks the anarchist.
But he does not yet understand.
The anarchist sees this: that the elite have caused the wound which they now heal, at a great profit, and with applause; and he despises them. The facist is yet more blind; he believes, as in olden times, that wounds of public confusion are a curse from God, a result of infedility to the State, and adores the doctor all the more, for his "extending of grace to the apostate". The anarchist may even become so frustrated that he decides the pill itself is poison, and that there was no wound to begin with: this is also to the delight of the elite, as the anarchist is now as blind as the facist, simply because he is too lazy to acknowledge that what the elite have said is an untruth, an injury, which should bring about a wound. But the anarchist and the facist have this in common, that they believe in the Sugar-Pill, and though one believes in it as he believes in the Devil, and the other as he believes in Jesus, both believe all the same. So the anarchists are wise, but although they sense that they are being played, they stop short of understanding the real game, since they misunderstand the Sugar-Pill; The utility of which is to raise the wages of the doctor-elite, not by creating an artificially low supply of a necessity, but by creating an artificially high demand for an absurdity.
The elite do not inflict intellectual wounds on the public in order to sell them the salve of healing; the elite inflict wounds of confusion and untruth on the public in order to take advantage of the automatic healing process which the public is largely unaware of. This is infinitely more valuable than a simple create-the-problem-sell-the-solution scheme, since it creates a false, but durable, equilibrium. Under the simpler scheme, the elite do not have total control over the inputs, since anyone can create an alternative solution to the salve they are selling. In other words, they can control the demand for healing, by inflicting endless intellectual contusions on the minds of the weak, but they cannot control the supply of medicine.
The innovation of the modern scheme of control lies in the manipulation of the supply. This is accomplished first by the saturation of the mind in both real and manufactured discourse, by means of social media; thereby removing the possibility that an individual may come to believe that they are capable of mending the untruths on their own. The sugar-pills are in the water and the food, so how do you know they aren't healing you? They are unavoidable, and therefore plausibly the means of all symbiance. The second mechanism is a sloppy and unimpressive magic trick wherein the elite immediately cannibalise whatever is the public body's current platitude for mending, and then sell back to them their own methods. This equilibirum is false, since it is based on the premise that the sugar-pills were doing anything to begin with, but it is durable, since the elite control the demand with their untruths, and the supply with their hijackings. The result is a public mind that is entirely composed of scar tissue, of platitudes: and one unable to do anything but prepare for the next mending required of it.
It is worth noting that in the real world there are perhaps several distinct equilibriums occuring about each injury - several types of sugar pills to take, if you will. It is not necessary to believe that the proponents of these different pills are all in cahoots, though they undoubtedtly see the advantage of allowing competition, which easily convinces the simple-minded that the axis of war is drawn not along the absolute continuum of high and low economic status, but along the arbitrary farce of Left vs. Right.
Many think that they are above all of this, since they do not participate in the public discourse. The foolishness of this position cannot be overstated, since the poison is not the platitude of the people which smooths the injury, nor saturation of fake medicine which allows the elite to hijack the healing as their own, but rather the injury of falsehood itself, which the elite perpetuate indefinitely, and which permeates all corners of present thought.
The makers of all great world religions were unaware that the world around them was entirely predictable. If you went back in time, and showed Orthodox Christians in Siberia that you could predict the Northern Lights, well, first they would laugh at you, but when you were right, they would deem you a prophet. The prevailing assumption for most of history was that the universe was:
1. Operating at the immediate command of a conscious God,
2. Completely unknowable chaos, Or,
3. A causal, but incomprehensible system.
The revelation of science is that everything is predictable. The inputs equal the outputs, and if we can't see how, that is a problem of human science, not an inconsistency of nature's. This, of course, nullifies a lot of religion, which relies on Divine Providence(s) as the input-output system which dictates the actions of the natural world. Religion then in the modern context is only viable if it accepts determinism, which is mathematically provable by the following theorem: Since, when observing nature, and even biology, a biologist can predict the vast majority of outcomes, based on the current state of the thing, it then follows that this biological system was the result of another, equally predictable system, and that all systems which come from it will be predictable too.
Most of the arguments against determinism come from a complete misunderstanding of statistics. "Determinable" does not actually mean, "Determined". The religious and many others rightly point out that there are many things that happen without explanation, insofar as we see an output which has no clear input. They then claim these as the territory of God's Providence, until such a time comes as man comes to understand the inputs, at which point either the idea of "providence" is held onto in some mind-numbing fashion, or the idea of Providence is simply moved to another thing which is clearly natural.
This argument does not disprove the existence of other beings, which operate around us in a dimension we cannot see (though of course this stipulation is nearly impossible to disprove by nature), but rather requires that they too are subject to determinism, to "being caused", and are still not "free agents" in the sense that they are able to act as if uncaused. This is a right reserved only for God - to Cause, but not to be subject to Causes. However, this is a one-time privilege, since in any Causal system (which is empirically the system we are in), any action which is not ultimately a result of the First Action of Being, God, changes all other actions, for all eternity, to be not a reaction to God, but a reaction to something which he did. The theological implication of this is that God is then changeable, since the nature of his world is defined by his actions, and not his Being. The material implication is that if there were two or more separate Actions by God, working simultaneously to govern the universe, it would not make any sense. It is good for Christianity that we can prove this idea wrong by material implication, since the resultant theological position would be damning for most of Christian thought.
Imagine two men, Steven and William, roll a 50/50 die. Now, when it lands on Steven's color, he thanks God, since he knows that he needed the money much worse than William. And years later, he tells William the full story, about how he needed that money so badly, and how God came through for him, and William agrees. But the low number of instances has fooled Steven, since God is not involved at all, but rather chance: If he had rolled it 100 times, he would have gotten about 50 on his side, and 50 would have gone to William. The religious often assert that it is still possible that God works through things which are dictated by chance, but these arguments universally misunderstand mathematics. God does not turn traffic lights green, he does not make gas tanks go just far enough to get you to the gas station. All of these things, when subjected to a large enough sample size to make the results statistically significant, level out to a Gaussian distribution. But the religious make a simple mistake, which is assuming that since the sample size is small, the statistics are irrelevant. But the utility of statistics is just this, that once you have gathered enough samples, you can use that data to predict individual likelihoods, i.e., large data sets are entirely applicable to single instances, although instances are not applicable to large data sets.
These assumptions do not nullify all of religion, but they force us to immediately rethink old, and very popular theories which, beautiful as they were, simply are no longer tenable in the modern space.