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by Dylan Charles
December 17,
2022
from
WakingTimes Website
You don't believe everything you see or hear in the media, do you?
Good, because if you did
believe it all you'd most likely end up on psychiatric meds.
You see, we live in a hyper-communicative environment, and
we're bombarded by an exceptional amount of messages and mediums
practically every moment of everyday.
There is an insane amount
of information coming at you, and most of it is intended to
influence your thoughts or beliefs in ways profitable to the
messenger.
This is the essence of
mind control:
influence someone's
thoughts, and you influence their behavior...
Every
bit of media that you allow to enter your
consciousness influences your thoughts and/or beliefs in
very real ways. If you let it, that is...
But most of us consume
media in a very passive state of consciousness.
Either in the background
while doing something else, or after a long day when the brain is
exhausted and your will power has been sapped.
In this state, ideas and suggestions are absorbed by the
subconscious mind where they go to work changing beliefs about the
world and what you need in order to survive in it.
The key to maintaining sovereignty of your own mind is
in being aware of just how real this impact is.
When you look back at the dawn of this era of mass communication,
you find that as the technology of radio, television and film
evolved, so did the scientific understanding of how these new
mediums could be used to achieve the goals of those who create and
distribute media for profit or propaganda.
The so-called father of modern propaganda, Edward Bernays
ruminates in 1928 about the need to control the habits and
behaviors of democratized citizens.
He asserts this as a
responsibility of those in power.
"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, and our ideas suggested,
largely by men we have never heard of...
It is they who pull
the wires that control the public mind."
Edward L. Bernays
Propaganda (1928)
Bernays was Sigmund
Freud's nephew, and was heavily influenced by Freud, steering
his research in the direction of manipulative psychology.
They developed what is
essentially the crux of modern advertising, which is the ability to
unlock one's desires through messaging and imagery.
These skills were
immediately harnessed to turn citizens into consumers and obedient
workers, taxpayers and soldiers.
Edward Bernays:
"Who are the men who
without our realizing it, give us our ideas, tell us whom to
admire and whom to despise, what to believe about the ownership
of public utilities, about the tariff, about the price of
rubber, about the Dawes Plan, about immigration...
Who tell us how our
houses should be designed, what furniture we should put in them,
what menus we should serve on our table, what kind of shirts we
must wear, what sports we should indulge in, what plays we
should see, what charities we should support, what pictures we
should admire, what slang we should affect, what jokes we should
laugh at?"
Edward Bernays
Propaganda
But where is all this
going if we choose not to wake up and actively participate in the
creation of our future?
Aldous Huxley had
a serious warning for us on this, calling out the subtle forces of
social engineers that were emerging at the highest levels of
industry and government.
"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
Brave New World
was published in 1931, and Huxley has been proven right.
Now the tools are far
more complex, and also far more in your face at every turn.
Two time Pulitzer Prize
winning author and influential propagandist, Walter Lippmann,
spoke about how the public is basically a dumb wild beast that needs
to be domesticated.
"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."
Vigilant Citizen
Here, Lippmann talks
about the beneficial impacts of propaganda:
"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
And now, with nearly
everyone walking around
with a smartphone, you must realize
that we are already hooked into a global neural-net, that for now,
is only slowed down by limited digital bandwidth in the space
between your phone and your brain.
Once this bridge is
gapped, there is basically nothing left to protect your mental
sovereignty unless,
you decide to
wake up and take the
wheel...!
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