see you don't want to think, you want me to give you an answer! You are starting to stir, but your next realization needs to be that your desire to read the economist instead of the CNN headlines, and the resultant feeling of superiority are themselves programming delivered the same way through the same mechanisms.
Picture Rupert Murdoch playing with puppet strings attached to education, political, and religious groups talking to an emperor palpatine figure who is the ghost of Edward Barney's, being told, "We'll control the rubes with Fox, and we'll control the slightly smarter rubes with the message 'Well the rubes watching fox are brainwashed, but the source I get my information from is more sophisticated.' which we can imprint on them the same ways. We'll just program them to think they are thinking, as a way to stop them fro actually thinking."
Go back to sleep, it's not as nice when you're always aware of it.