Losing Track of Reality: Imperialism and Push vs Pull

Compare:

"The aide [Karl Rove] said that guys like me were 'in what we call the reality-based community,' which he defined as people who 'believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.' I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. 'That's not the way the world really works anymore,' he continued. 'We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality -- judiciously, as you will -- we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.' " (from http://goo.gl/OIQT3) (This interview took place in 2002.)

and

    "... From these changes comes the need and the opportunity for the large organization. It alone can deploy the requisite capital; it alone can mobilize the requisite skills .... The large commitment of capital and organization well in advance of result requires that there be foresight and also that all feasible steps be taken to insure that what is foreseen will transpire.
    Planning exists because the [market] process has ceased to be reliable. Technology, with its companion commitment of time and capital, means that the needs of the consumer must be anticipated--by months or years.... [I]n addition to deciding what the consumer will want and will pay, the firm must make every feasible step to see that what the consumer will want and will pay, the firm must make every feasible step to see that what it decides to produce is wanted by the consumer at a remunerative price.... It must exercise control over what is sold.... It must replace the market with planning.
    ... The need to control consumer behavior is a requirement of planning. Planning in turn, is made necessary by extensive use of advanced technology and capital and by the relative scale and complexity of organization. As a further consequence, goods that are related only to elementary physical sensation--that merely prevent hunger, protect against cold, provide shelter, suppress pain--have come to comprise a small and diminishing part of all production. Most goods serve needs are discovered to the individual not by the palpable discomfort that accompanies deprivation, but by some psychic response to their possession...."
 - John Kenneth Galbraith, "The New Industrial State" (This was written in 1967. See also: push vs pull economies, explained well here: http://goo.gl/ddMMK)