by
Vigilant Citizen
April 28, 2010
from
VigilantCitizen Website
Mass media is the
most powerful tool used by the ruling class to
manipulate the masses.
It shapes and molds opinions
and attitudes and defines what is normal and acceptable.
This article looks at the
workings of mass media through the theories of its major
thinkers, its power structure and the techniques it
uses, in order to understand its true role in society.
Most of the articles on this site discuss occult symbolism found in objects
of popular culture.
From these articles arise many legitimate
questions relating to the purpose of those symbols and the motivations of
those who place them there, but it is impossible for me to provide
satisfactory answers to these questions without mentioning many other
concepts and facts.
I’ve therefore decided to write this article to
supply the theoretical and methodological background of the analyzes
presented on this site as well as introducing the main scholars of the field
of mass communications.
Some people read my articles and think I’m
saying “Lady Gaga wants to control our minds”. That is not the case.
She is
simply a small part of the huge system that is the mass media.
Programming Through
Mass Media
Mass media are media forms designed to reach the largest audience possible.
They include television, movies, radio,
newspapers, magazines, books, records, video games and the internet. Many
studies have been conducted in the past century to measure the effects of
mass media on the population in order to discover the best techniques to
influence it. From those studies emerged the science of Communications,
which is used in marketing, public relations and politics.
Mass communication is a necessary tool to insure
the functionality of a large democracy; it is also a necessary tool for a
dictatorship. It all depends on its usage.
In the 1958 preface for A Brave New World, Aldous Huxley paints a
rather grim portrait of society.
He believes it is controlled by an “impersonal
force”, a ruling elite, which manipulates the population using various
methods.
“Impersonal forces over which we have almost
no control seem to be pushing us all in the direction of the Brave New
Worldian nightmare; and this impersonal pushing is being consciously
accelerated by representatives of commercial and political organizations
who have developed a number of new techniques for manipulating, in the
interest of some minority, the thoughts and feelings of the masses.”
- Aldous Huxley, Preface to A
Brave New World
His bleak outlook is not a simple hypothesis or
a paranoid delusion. It is a documented fact, present in the world’s most
important studies on mass media. Here are some of them:
Elite Thinkers
Walter Lippmann
Walter Lippmann, an American intellectual, writer and two-time Pulitzer
Prize winner brought forth one of the first works concerning the usage
of mass media in America.
In Public Opinion (1922), Lippmann compared
the masses to a “great beast” and a “bewildered herd” that needed to be
guided by a governing class. He described the ruling elite as “a
specialized class whose interests reach beyond the locality.” This class
is composed of experts, specialists and bureaucrats.
According to
Lippmann, the experts, who often are referred to as “elites,” are to be
a machinery of knowledge that circumvents the primary defect of
democracy, the impossible ideal of the “omnicompetent citizen.” The
trampling and roaring “bewildered herd” has its function: to be “the
interested spectators of action,” i.e. not participants.
Participation
is the duty of “the responsible man”, which is not the regular citizen.
Mass media and propaganda are therefore tools that must be used by the
elite to rule the public without physical coercion. One important
concept presented by Lippmann is the “manufacture of consent”, which is,
in short, the manipulation of public opinion to accept the elite’s
agenda. It is Lippmann’s opinion that the general public is not
qualified to reason and to decide on important issues.
It is therefore
important for the elite to decide ”for its own good” and then sell those
decisions to the masses.
“That the manufacture of consent is capable of great refinements no one,
I think, denies. The process by which public opinions arise is certainly
no less intricate than it has appeared in these pages, and the
opportunities for manipulation open to anyone who understands the
process are plain enough... as a result of psychological research,
coupled with the modern means of communication, the practice of
democracy has turned a corner.
A revolution is taking place, infinitely
more significant than any shifting of economic power...
Under the
impact of propaganda, not necessarily in the sinister meaning of the
word alone, the old constants of our thinking have become variables. It
is no longer possible, for example, to believe in the original dogma of
democracy; that the knowledge needed for the management of human affairs
comes up spontaneously from the human heart.
Where we act on that theory
we expose ourselves to self-deception, and to forms of persuasion that
we cannot verify. It has been demonstrated that we cannot rely upon
intuition, conscience, or the accidents of casual opinion if we are to
deal with the world beyond our reach.”
-Walter Lippmann, Public Opinion
It might be interesting to note that Lippmann is one of the founding
fathers of the
Council on Foreign Relations
(CFR), the most influential
foreign policy think tank in the world.
This fact should give you a
small hint of the mind state of the elite concerning the usage of media.
“Political and economic power in the United States is concentrated in
the hands of a “ruling elite” that controls most of U.S.-based
multinational corporations, major communication media, the most
influential foundations, major private universities and most public
utilities.
Founded in 1921, the Council on Foreign Relations is the key
link between the large corporations and the federal government. It has
been called a “school for statesmen” and “comes close to being an organ
of what C. Wright Mills has called the Power Elite - a group of men,
similar in interest and outlook shaping events from invulnerable
positions behind the scenes.
The creation of the United Nations was a
Council project, as well as the International Monetary Fund and the
World Bank.”
- Steve Jacobson, Mind Control in the United States
Some current members of the CFR include,
-
David Rockefeller
-
Dick Cheney
-
Barack Obama
-
Hilary Clinton
-
mega-church pastor Rick Warren
-
the
CEOs of major corporations such as CBS, Nike, Coca-Cola and Visa
Carl Jung
Carl Jung is the founder of
analytical psychology (also known an Jungian psychology), which
emphasizes understanding the psyche by exploring dreams, art, mythology,
religion, symbols and philosophy.
The Swiss therapist is at the origin
of many psychological concepts used today such as the Archetype, the
Complex, the Persona, the Introvert/Extrovert and Synchronicity. He was
highly influenced by the occult background of his family.
Carl Gustav,
his grandfather, was an avid Freemason (he was Grand Master) and Jung
himself discovered that some of his ancestors were Rosicrucians. This
might explain his great interest in Eastern and Western philosophy,
alchemy, astrology and symbolism.
One of his most important (and
misunderstood) concept was the Collective Unconscious.
“My thesis, then, is as follows: In addition to our immediate
consciousness, which is of a thoroughly personal nature and which we
believe to be the only empirical psyche (even if we tack on the personal
unconscious as an appendix), there exists a second psychic system of a
collective, universal, and impersonal nature which is identical in all
individuals.
This collective unconscious does not develop individually
but is inherited. It consists of pre-existent forms, the archetypes,
which can only become conscious secondarily and which give definite form
to certain psychic contents.”
- Carl Jung, The Concept of the Collective Unconscious
The collective unconscious transpires through the existence of similar
symbols and mythological figures in different civilizations.
Archetypal
symbols seem to be embedded in our collective subconscious, and, when
exposed to them, we demonstrate natural attraction and fascination.
Occult symbols can therefore exert a great impact on people, even if
many individuals were never personally introduced to the symbol’s
esoteric meaning.
Mass media thinkers, such as Edward D. Bernays, found
in this concept a great way to manipulate the public’s personal and
collective unconscious.
1955 Time Magazine cover featuring Carl Jung.
Looks a little like
'Avatar,' doesn’t it?
Edward Bernays
Edward Bernays is considered to
be the “father of public relations” and used concepts discovered by his
uncle Sigmund Freud to manipulate the public using the subconscious.
He
shared Walter Lippmann’s view of the general population by considering
it irrational and subject to the “herd instinct”.
In his opinion, the
masses need to be manipulated by an invisible government to insure the
survival of democracy.
“The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and
opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society.
Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an
invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country.
We are governed, our minds are molded, our tastes formed, our ideas
suggested, largely by men we have never heard of. This is a logical
result of the way in which our democratic society is organized. Vast
numbers of human beings must cooperate in this manner if they are to
live together as a smoothly functioning society.
Our invisible governors are, in many cases, unaware of the identity of
their fellow members in the inner cabinet.”
- Edward Bernays, Propaganda
Bernay’s trailblazing marketing campaigns profoundly changed the
functioning of American society.
He basically created “consumerism” by
creating a culture wherein Americans bought for pleasure instead of
buying for survival. For this reason, he was considered by Life Magazine
to be in the Top 100 most influential Americans of the 20th century.
Harold Lasswell
In 1939-1940, the University of
Chicago was the host of a series of secret seminars on communications.
These think tanks were funded by the Rockefeller foundation and involved
the most prominent researchers in the fields of communications and
sociological studies. One of these scholars was Harold Lasswell, a
leading American political scientist and communications theorist,
specializing in the analysis of propaganda.
He was also of the opinion
that a democracy, a government ruled by the people, could not sustain
itself without a specialized elite shaping and molding public opinion
through propaganda.
In his Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences, Lasswell explained that
when elites lack the requisite force to compel obedience, social
managers must turn to,
“a whole new technique of control, largely through
propaganda.”
He added the conventional justification:
we must recognize
the “ignorance and stupidity [of] … the masses and not succumb to
democratic dogmatisms about men being the best judges of their own
interests.”
Lasswell extensively studied the field of content analysis in order to
understand the effectiveness of different types of propaganda.
In his
essay Contents of Communication, Lasswell explained that, in order to
understand the meaning of a message (i.e. a movie, a speech, a book,
etc.), one should take into account the frequency with which certain
symbols appear in the message, the direction in which the symbols try to
persuade the audience’s opinion, and the intensity of the symbols used.
Lasswell was famous for his media analysis model based on:
Who (says) What (to) Whom (in) What Channel (with) What Effect
By this model, Lasswell indicates that in order to properly analyze a
media product, one must look at who produced the product (the people who
ordered its creation), who was it aimed at (the target audience) and
what were the desired effects of this product (to inform, to convince,
to sell, etc.) on the audience.
Using a Rihanna video as an example, the analysis would be as follows:
-
WHO PRODUCED: Vivendi Universal
-
WHAT: pop artist Rihanna
-
TO WHOM:
consumers between the ages of 9 and 25
-
WHAT CHANNEL: music video
-
WHAT EFFECT: selling the artist, her
song, her image and her message
The analyzes of videos and movies on The Vigilant Citizen place a great
importance on the “who is behind” the messages communicated to the
public.
The term “Illuminati” is often used to describe this small elite
group covertly ruling the masses. Although the term sounds quite
caricatured and conspiratorial, it aptly describes the elite’s
affinities with secret societies and occult knowledge.
However, I
personally detest using the term “conspiracy theory” to describe what is
happening in the mass media. If all the facts concerning the elitist
nature of the industry are readily available to the public, can it still
be considered a “conspiracy theory”?
There used to be a variety of viewpoints, ideas and opinions in popular
culture. The consolidation of media corporations has, however, produced
a standardization of the cultural industry.
Ever wondered why all recent
music sounds the same and all recent movies look the same? The following
is part of the answer.
Media Ownership
As depicted in the graph above, the number of corporations owning the
majority of U.S. media outlets went from 50 to 5 in less than 20 years.
Here are the top corporations evolving around
the world and the assets they own.
“A list of the properties controlled by AOL
Time Warner takes ten typed pages listing 292 separate companies and
subsidiaries. Of these, twenty-two are joint ventures with other major
corporations involved in varying degrees with media operations.
These partners include,
-
3Com
-
eBay
-
Hewlett-Packard
-
Citigroup
-
Ticketmaster
-
American Express
-
Homestore
-
Sony
-
Viva
-
Bertelsmann
-
Polygram
-
Amazon.com
Some of the more familiar fully owned
properties of Time Warner include,
-
Book-of-the-Month Club
-
Little, Brown
publishers
-
HBO, with its seven channels
-
CNN, seven specialized and
foreign-language channels
-
Road Runner
-
Warner Brothers Studios
-
Weight
Watchers
-
Popular Science
-
fifty-two different record labels.”
- Ben Bagdikan, The New Media
Monopoly
AOL Time Warner owns:
-
64 magazines, including Time, Life,
People, MAD Magazine and DC Comics
-
Warner Bros, New Line and Fine Line Features in cinema
-
More than 40 music labels including Warner Bros, Atlantic and Elektra
-
Many television networks such as WB Networks, HBO, Cinemax, TNT, Cartoon
Network and CNN
-
Madonna, Sean Paul, The White Stripes
Viacom owns:
-
CBS, MTV, MTV2, UPN, VH1, Showtime, Nickelodeon, Comedy Central, TNN, CMT
and BET
-
Paramount Pictures, Nickelodeon Movies, MTV Films
-
Blockbuster Videos
-
1800 screens in theaters through Famous Players
“Disney ownership of a hockey team called The Mighty Ducks of Anaheim does
not begin to describe the vastness of the kingdom. Hollywood is still its
symbolic heart, with eight movie production studios and distributors:
The Walt Disney Company controls,
-
eight book house imprints under Walt Disney
Company Book Publishing and ABC Publishing Group; seventeen magazines
-
the
ABC Television Network, with ten owned and operated stations of its own
including in the five top markets
-
thirty radio stations, including all the
major markets
-
eleven cable channels, including,
-
Disney
-
ESPN (jointly)
-
A&E
-
the History Channel
-
thirteen international broadcast channels
stretching from Australia to Brazil
-
seven production and sports units
around the world
-
seventeen Internet sites, including,
-
the ABC group
-
ESPN.sportszone
-
NFL.com
-
NBAZ.com
-
NASCAR.com
Its five music groups
include the Buena Vista, Lyric Street, and Walt Disney labels, and live
theater productions growing out of the movies The Lion King, Beauty and the
Beast, and King David.”
- Ibid
The Walt Disney Company owns:
-
ABC, Disney Channel, ESPN, A&E, History
Channel
-
Walt Disney Pictures, Touchstone Pictures, Hollywood Pictures, Miramax Film
Corp., Dimension and Buena Vista International
-
Miley Cyrus/ Hannah Montana, Selena Gomez, Jonas Brothers
Vivendi Universal owns:
-
27% of US music sales, labels include:
-
Interscope
-
Geffen
-
A&M
-
Island
-
Def Jam
-
MCA
-
Mercury
-
Motown
-
Universal
-
Universal Studios
-
Studio Canal
-
Polygram Films
-
Canal +
-
Numerous internet and cell phone companies
-
Lady Gaga, The Black Eyed Peas, Lil Wayne, Rihanna, Mariah Carey, Jay-Z
Sony owns:
-
Columbia Pictures, Screen Gems, Sony
Pictures Classics
-
15% of US Music sales, labels include Columbia, Epic, Sony, Arista, Jive and
RCA Records
-
Beyonce, Shakira, Michael Jackson, Alicia Keys, Christina Aguilera
A limited number of actors in the cultural industry means a limited amount
of viewpoints and ideas making their way to the general public.
It also
means that a single message can easily saturate all forms of media to
generate consent (i.e. “there are weapons of mass destruction in Iraq”).
The Standardization of
Human Thought
The merger of media companies in the last
decades generated a small oligarchy of media conglomerates.
The TV shows we follow, the music we listen to,
the movies we watch and the newspapers we read are all produced by FIVE
corporations. The owners of those conglomerates have close ties with the
world’s elite and, in many ways, they ARE the elite.
By owning all of the
possible outlets having the potential to reach the masses, these
conglomerates have the power to create in the minds of the people a single
and cohesive world view, engendering a “standardization of human thought”.
Even movements or styles that are considered marginal are, in fact,
extensions of mainstream thinking. Mass medias produce their own rebels who
definitely look the part but are still part of the establishment and do not
question any of it.
Artists, creations and ideas that do not fit the
mainstream way of thinking are mercilessly rejected and forgotten by the
conglomerates, which in turn makes them virtually disappear from society
itself. However, ideas that are deemed to be valid and desirable to be
accepted by society are skillfully marketed to the masses in order to make
them become self-evident norm.
In 1928, Edward Bernays already saw the immense potential of motion pictures
to standardize thought:
“The American motion picture is the greatest
unconscious carrier of propaganda in the world today. It is a great
distributor for ideas and opinions. The motion picture can standardize
the ideas and habits of a nation.
Because pictures are made to meet
market demands, they reflect, emphasize and even exaggerate broad
popular tendencies, rather than stimulate new ideas and opinions.
The
motion picture avails itself only of ideas and facts which are in vogue.
As the newspaper seeks to purvey news, it seeks to purvey
entertainment.”
- Edward Bernays, Propaganda
These facts were flagged as dangers to human
freedom in the 1930′s by thinkers of the school of Frankfurt such as
Theodor Adorno and Herbert Marcuse. They identified three main problems with the
cultural industry.
The industry can:
-
reduce human beings to the state of mass
by hindering the development of emancipated individuals, who are
capable of making rational decisions
-
replace the legitimate drive for
autonomy and self-awareness by the safe laziness of conformism and
passivity
-
validate the idea that men actually seek
to escape the absurd and cruel world in which they live by losing
themselves in a hypnotic state self-satisfaction
The notion of escapism is even more relevant
today with advent of online video games, 3D movies and home theaters.
The masses, constantly seeking state-of-the-art
entertainment, will resort to high-budget products that can only be produced
by the biggest media corporations of the world. These products contain
carefully calculated messages and symbols which are nothing more and nothing
less than entertaining propaganda. The public have been trained to LOVE its
propaganda to the extent that it spends its hard-earned money to be exposed
to it.
Propaganda (used in both political, cultural and
commercial sense) is no longer the coercive or authoritative communication
form found in dictatorships: it has become the synonym of entertainment and
pleasure.
“In regard to propaganda the early advocates
of universal literacy and a free press envisaged only two possibilities:
the propaganda might be true, or it might be false.
They did not foresee
what in fact has happened, above all in our Western capitalist
democracies - the development of a vast mass communications industry,
concerned in the main neither with the true nor the false, but with the
unreal, the more or less totally irrelevant. In a word, they failed to
take into account man’s almost infinite appetite for distractions.”
- Aldous Huxley, Preface to A
Brave New World
A single piece of media often does not have a
lasting effect on the human psyche.
Mass media, however, by its omnipresent
nature, creates a living environment we evolve in on a daily basis. It
defines the norm and excludes the undesirable.
The same way carriage horses
wear blinders so they can only see what is right in front of them, the
masses can only see where they are supposed to go.
“It is the emergence of mass media which
makes possible the use of propaganda techniques on a societal scale. The
orchestration of press, radio and television to create a continuous,
lasting and total environment renders the influence of propaganda
virtually unnoticed precisely because it creates a constant environment.
Mass media provides the essential link between the individual and the
demands of the technological society.”
- Jacques Ellul
One of the reasons mass media successfully
influences society is due to the extensive amount of research on cognitive
sciences and human nature that has been applied to it.
Manipulation
Techniques
“Publicity is the deliberate attempt to
manage the public’s perception of a subject. The subjects of publicity
include people (for example, politicians and performing artists), goods
and services, organizations of all kinds, and works of art or
entertainment.”
The drive to sell products and ideas to the
masses has lead to an unprecedented amount of research on human behavior and
on the human psyche.
Cognitive sciences, psychology, sociology, semiotics,
linguistics and other related fields were and still are extensively
researched through well-funded studies.
“No group of sociologists can approximate
the ad teams in the gathering and processing of exploitable social data.
The ad teams have billions to spend annually on research and testing of
reactions, and their products are magnificent accumulations of material
about the shared experience and feelings of the entire community.”
- Marshal McLuhan, The Extensions
of Man
The results of those studies are applied to
advertisements, movies, music videos and other media in order to make them
as influential as possible. The art of marketing is highly calculated and
scientific because it must reach both the individual and the collective
consciousness.
In high-budget cultural products, a video is never “just a
video,” images, symbols and meanings are strategically placed in order to
generate a desired effect.
“It is with knowledge of the human being,
his tendencies, his desires, his needs, his psychic mechanisms, his
automatisms as well as knowledge of social psychology and analytical
psychology that propaganda refines its techniques.”
- Propagandes, Jacques Ellul (free
translation)
Today’s propaganda almost never uses rational or
logical arguments.
It directly taps into a human’s most primal needs and
instincts in order to generate an emotional and irrational response. If we
always thought rationally, we probably wouldn’t buy 50% of what we own.
Babies and children are constantly found in advertisements targeting women
for a specific reason:
studies have shown that images of children trigger in
women an instinctual need to nurture, to care and to protect, ultimately
leading to a sympathetic bias towards the advertisement.
Strange old 7up ad
using the
cuteness of babies
Sex is ubiquitous in mass media, as it draws and keeps the viewer’s
attention.
It directly connects to our animal need to breed and to
reproduce, and, when triggered, this instinct can instantly overshadow any
other rational thoughts in our brain.
Subliminal Perception
What if the messages described above were able to reach directly the
viewers’ subconscious mind, without the viewers even realizing what is
happening?
That is the goal of subliminal perception.
The phrase subliminal
advertising was coined in 1957 by the US market researcher James Vicary, who
said he could get moviegoers to “drink Coca-Cola” and “eat popcorn” by
flashing those messages onscreen for such a short time that viewers were
unaware.
“Subliminal perception is a deliberate
process created by communications technicians, by which you receive and
respond to information and instructions without being consciously aware
of the instructions”
- Steve Jacobson, Mind Control in
the United States
This technique is often used in marketing and we
all know that sex sells.
Although some sources claim that subliminal advertising is ineffective or
even an urban myth, the documented usage of this technique in mass media
proves that creators believe in its powers.
Recent studies have also proven
its effectiveness, especially when the message is negative.
” A team from University College London,
funded by the Wellcome Trust, found that it [subliminal perception] was
particularly good at instilling negative thoughts.
There has been much speculation about
whether people can process emotional information unconsciously, for
example pictures, faces and words,” said Professor Nilli Lavie, who led
the research.
We have shown that people can perceive the
emotional value of subliminal messages and have demonstrated
conclusively that people are much more attuned to negative words.”
- Source
A famous example of subliminal messaging in
political communications is in
George Bush’s advertisement against
Al Gore
in 2000.
Right after the name of Gore is mentioned, the ending of the word
“bureaucrats” - “rats” - flashes on the screen for a split second.
The discovery of this trickery caused quite a stir and, even if there are no
laws against subliminal messaging in the U.S., the advertisement was taken
off the air.
As seen
in many articles, subliminal and
semi-subliminal messages are often used in movies and music videos to
communicate messages and ideas to the viewers.
Desensitization
In the past, when changes were imposed on populations, they would take to
the streets, protest and even riot.
The main reason for this clash was due
to the fact that the change was clearly announced by the rulers and
understood by the population. It was sudden and its effects could clearly be
analyzed and evaluated.
Today, when the elite needs a part of its agenda to
be accepted by the public, it is done through desensitization.
The agenda,
which might go against the public best interests, is slowly, gradually and
repetitively introduced to the world through movies (by involving it within
the plot), music videos (who make it cool and sexy) or the news (who present
it as a solution to today’s problems).
After several years of exposing the
masses to a particular agenda, the elite openly presents the concept the
world and, due to mental programming, it is greeted with general
indifference and is passively accepted.
This technique originates from
psychotherapy.
“The techniques of psychotherapy, widely practiced and accepted as a means
of curing psychological disorders, are also methods of controlling people.
They can be used systematically to influence attitudes and behavior.
Systematic desensitization is a method used to dissolve anxiety so the the
patient (public) is no longer troubled by a specific fear, a fear of
violence for example. [...]
People adapt to frightening situations if they
are exposed to them enough”.
- Steven Jacobson, Mind Control in the United States
Predictive programming is often found in the science fiction genre.
It
presents a specific image of the future - the one that is desired by the
elite - and ultimately becomes in the minds of men an inevitability. A
decade ago, the public was being desensitized to war against the Arab world.
Today, the population is gradually being exposed to the existence of mind
control, of transhumanism and of an Illuminati elite. Emerging from the
shadows, those concepts are now everywhere in popular culture.
This is what
Alice Bailey describes as the “externalization of the hierarchy”: the hidden
rulers slowly revealing themselves.
Occult Symbolism in Pop Culture
Metropolis
...a movie by the elite, for the elite?
click image for video
Contrarily to the information presented above, documentation on occult
symbolism is rather hard to find.
This should not come as a surprise as the
term “occult”, literally means “hidden”. It also means “reserved to those in
the know” as it is only communicated to those who are deemed worthy of the
knowledge.
It is not taught in schools nor is it discussed in the media. It
is thus considered marginal or even ridiculous by the general population.
Occult knowledge is NOT, however, considered ridiculous in occult circles.
It is considered timeless and sacred. There is a long tradition of hermetic
and occult knowledge being taught
through secret societies originating from
ancient Egyptians, to Eastern Mystics, to
the Knights Templar to modern day
Freemasons.
Even if the nature and the depth of this knowledge was most
probably modified and altered throughout the centuries, mystery schools kept
their main features, which are highly symbolic, ritualistic and
metaphysical.
Those characteristics, which were an intricate part of ancient
civilizations, have totally been evacuated from modern society to be
replaced by pragmatic materialism.
For this reason, there lies an important
gap of understanding between the pragmatic average person and the
ritualistic establishment.
“If this inner doctrine were always concealed from the masses, for whom a
simpler code had been devised, is it not highly probable that the exponents
of every aspect of modern civilization - philosophic, ethical, religious,
and scientific-are ignorant of the true meaning of the very theories and
tenets on which their beliefs are founded?
Do the arts and sciences that the
race has inherited from older nations conceal beneath their fair exterior a
mystery so great that only the most illumined intellect can grasp its
import?
Such is undoubtedly the case.”
- Manly P. Hall,
Secret Teachings of All Ages
The “simpler code” devised for the masses used to be
organized religions.
It
is now becoming the Temple of the Mass Media and it preaches on a daily
basis extreme materialism, spiritual vacuosity and a self-centered,
individualistic existence. This is exactly the opposite of the attributes
required to become a truly free individual, as taught by all great
philosophical schools of thought.
Is a dumbed-down population easier to
deceive and to manipulate?
“These blind slaves are told they are “free” and “highly educated” even as
they march behind signs that would cause any medieval peasant to run
screaming away from them in panic-stricken terror.
The symbols that modern
man embraces with the naive trust of an infant would be tantamount to
billboards reading, ‘This way to your death and enslavement,’ to the
understanding of the traditional peasant of antiquity”
- Michael A. Hoffman II, Secret Societies and Psychological Warfare
In Conclusion
This article examined the major thinkers in the field of mass media, the
media power structure and the techniques used to manipulate the masses.
I
believe this information is vital to the understanding of the “why” in the
topics discussed here. The “mass population” versus
“ruling class” dichotomy described in many articles is not a “conspiracy
theory” (again, I dislike that term), but a reality that has been clearly
stated in the works of some of the 20th century’s most influential men.
Lippmann, Bernays and Lasswell have all declared that the public are not fit
to decide their own fate, which is the inherent goal of democracy.
Instead,
they
called for a cryptocracy, a hidden government, a ruling class in charge
of the “bewildered herd.”
As their ideas continue to be applied to society,
it is increasingly apparent that an ignorant population is not an obstacle
that the rulers must deal with: It is something that is DESIRABLE and,
indeed, necessary, to insure total leadership.
An ignorant population,
It simply follows trends...
Popular culture
caters to and nurtures ignorance by continually serving up brain-numbing
entertainment and spotlighting degenerate celebrities to be idolized.
Many
people ask me:
“Is there a way to stop this?”
Yes, there is. STOP BUYING
THEIR CRAP AND READ A BOOK.
“If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, it expects what never was and
never will be.”
- Thomas Jefferson
