Stan - You really undercut your message when you use terms like this. My first thought was to stop reading as soon as I encountered 'sheeple'.
If you discredit that there are and always have been "sheeple" in human history, you haven't read enough history books.
It's nothing to be emotionally bothered by. Bell curves are mathematical proof that there's 50% of us below average on the intelligence scale.
The politically powerful and intelligent human-monkeys know this, and use it to their advantage, daily. The "sheeple" don't even know they're being manipulated or aren't smart enough to do anything about it.
600,000 people had to die to bring you the nice Hollywood movie, Lincoln.
Most of them had to march with no food and about half with no shoes, for five years or so -- all the while being thrown by clueless Generals against fortified works, and dying for the other smarter human's power to remain intact -- or be destroyed -- depending on which side they were on.
We aren't going to the theaters watching "Davis" this month.
Sherman's march across Georgia to the Atlantic served zero military purpose. It was DESIGNED to manipulate emotions. As just one example.
Virtually all historians agree, slavery would have gone away on its own without the Civil War, as it did on much of the rest of the planet.
We make movies and claim it was all the work of one man.
For a more modern variant, people toss around the phrase, "Drink the Kool-Aid" with abandon today, completely forgetting that it took a small group of "sheeple" who died following a nut-bag, to bring that little slang phrase into our vocabulary. It's a parable about not blindly following any other human told to save the weaker-minded amongst us.
Modern slavery comes in the form of a loan. The smart people even broke the whole monetary fiat system worldwide a few years ago, and managed to figure out how to convince the dumber people to pay for their mistakes. They still get a few million bucks in bonuses each year, when they should be mowing my lawn and asking for my pocket change after screwing up that badly, if not sitting in a prison cell for breaking society's rules.
Easier for them to just convince the left side of the bell curve that they could fix all of it and vote for their own bailouts.
DHS costs more than it fixes, which means it's really just another form of slavery under the guise of being our Brother's Keeper.
No one is immune. There's suicide nets hung to catch people jumping from the building in China where the iPad I'm typing this message on, was built. Did I create the situation by being willing to buy it, or were there more powerful people than I convincing me I "needed" an iPad here, and powerful people there making sure the factory workers never can escape?
Hard to say... But denying that there are sheeple in the world isn't going to change it.
(Last Friday the MD80 I was on had an inop heater in the baggage area.... even though it was noted in all the paperwork, someone on the ground crew loaded live animals in there, resulting in our returning to the gate and taking an additional 45 minute delay in order for the animals to be removed and the plane to take on more fuel).
