> This Chomsky quote comes to mind “The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum....”. The sad part is that a lot of people seem to be addicted to the right vs left thinking.

What this is more broadly is the Overton Window. There is "acceptable" topics that can be broached.

As for Right versus Left, well that is 1 dimension politically. There is for example authoritarian / libertarian scale. So many political tests have the "Quad" or "Compass". Most people normally score around the middle.

However there are 4 dimensional tests such as this.

https://8values.github.io/

I have no idea how accurate these are, or whether they are biased. But there is certainly much more than left vs right.

> A while ago I listened to a radio interview with an author whose thesis was that modern philanthropists allow change only in a way that doesn’t threaten their own wealth and power. This definitely rings true.

Well what you are talking about is the idea of hyper-normalisation. The idea is that you finance both sides e.g. pro fascist, anti-fascist etc. This creates a state of confusion where people don't really know what is going on and become apathetic to it.

Adam Curtis made a documentary about it, however here is a snippet from it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=31&v=wcy8uLjRHPM