Listen to a reading of this article: The science of modern propaganda arguably got its start over a century ago during World War I when a young Edward Bernays was recruited to help sell the conflict to a reluctant American populace, after which he took what he'd learned on that front and folded it into a lifetime of work on the study of mass-scale psychological manipulation.
"What a blessing it is for rulers that people are sheep." - A. Hitler.
The subject was cats: when Boswell said he didn’t care for them, Rousseau pounced. Men who disliked cats were tyrannical: “They do not like cats because the cat is free and will never consent to become a slave. He will do nothing to your order, as the other animals do.”
“Nor a hen, either,” Boswell objected. “A hen would obey your orders if you could make her understand them,” the philosopher rejoined, “but a cat will understand you perfectly and not obey them.”
Just after reading this post, I read another by Patrick Lawrence in Consortium News, which featured a quote by Bertrand Russell, one that struck me as so appropriate to my recollections of some of the authoritarian droning of my "colleagues" in "higher education", so-called professors who flung standard unmitigated rubbish at students as fact. This ensured that their lecture halls full of indoctrinated-since-the-cradle charges would fail to ever grasp the extent of their own mental prisons. And that grading them would be simple: Just regurgitate my truth for your grade.
Russell's simple statement reveals the embarrassing truth about the US higher educational system that most of us struggle to ignore, but which is complicit in sustaining this Dawn-of-civilization narrative control among our so-called best-educated:
“But the utility of intelligence is admitted only theoretically, not practically; it is not desired that ordinary people should think for themselves, because it is felt that people who think for themselves are awkward to manage and cause administrative problems.”
A topic after my own heart, thank you Caitlin! It's an interesting term, 'the dawn of civilization,' by which we usually mean Western oligarchies modeled after Greece and using a form of coinage that co-opted the populace into the conquest and enslavement of their neighbors. Those were the first two psy-ops, I think. Agriculture gets a bad rap but The Dawn of Everything by the late David Graeber and David Wengrow shows that it's not the villain--the monetization of land and labor was, in service to the lord, king, pharaoh, emperor. And the next psy-ops was the empire-generated story of Jesus, which I write about in this post, followed by two on The Dawn of Everything:
You lost me in the past two paragraphs where you said maybe one day we can transcend our humanity essentially and become something better. I don't think so. As you outlined yourself, societies based on domination and subjugation and exploitation have always been the order and that will never change. There are improvements possible of course, but the overarching narrative determining human organization (the powerful reigning over the masses, greed, war, endless quest for control and dominance) will never change. I know you want to have hope and I don't blame you, but I am always amazed how despite being so amazingly astute, you still are holding out hope that maybe one day we can overcome our programming and thus what is in our nature and which has defined our civilizations and with it species since day one, with seemingly sheer willpower. Or by "working at it". Like work at it how? Do you think if people could will into existence a better world they wouldnt have done do already? Or maybe it is because they just don't want to. They cannot.
Humanity is going to end one way and one way only: by burning itself and this planet to the ground. There is nothing to indicate in our species' history or biology that we can just become good people not dominated by desires for power and control and conquest. Again that is not to say betterments are not possible. That we cannot do good and achieve good. They are. But the trajectory is still the same.
Actually information from recent discoveries suggests a different history. It is a nonlinear trajectory of civilizations, many far earlier than thought with different lifestyles and technologies.
Rockefeller is largely responsible for allopathic medicine's focus on petroleum based drug therapy and the elimination of alternative holistic therapies. Western medicine does NOT promote health and wellness. It promotes obesity, illness, drug dependence and unhappiness. It takes your power away.
When people realize that the Pfizer and other Covid injections have killed more people than they ever saved, they'll really understand the power of narrative control.
I can't think about this too much because it makes me too outrageously sad and depressed. We really are captives to elites that want us fat, sick, isolated, depressed, and distracted. They want your money, and then they want to kill you.
This society doesn't actually value freedom and democracy, except as something of which to starve others. There are other ideologies of emancipation that are not merely ideals to cajole most of humanity into sacrificing for the Few.
Ahh... to return to an innocent time when no one felt compelled to manipulate others for their own gain. People need to feel secure. They need to feel like no one will hurt them or let them starve. Without it, they just keep manipulating.
I think when our civilization was Neolithic and female led things were pretty chill. With farming the men began to control culture and once we got to Medieval times and the rise of early corporations, well, the royalty, merchants and priests made sure to maintain control. That's when the propaganda really kicked in. Corporations and healthy cultures are diametrically opposed. You cannot have both.
It could happen but I think it's unlikely until the current 6th mass extinction event has run its' course without a significant number of the hundreds of nuclear reactors on the planet melting down and ionizing the atmosphere.
Absolutism in a complex world is spin maintenance; sophisticated consideration/specificity negates theLine. What sort of mask? What flavor of Oreos? Which style of bagua? What size of tires? Which kind of cheese?
Excelllent article. You mention “People who are just a little bit more clever than the rest, and just unprincipled enough to use that to their advantage” as those who dominate the rest. Then you mention towards the end of the article that perhaps we can overcome this by way of a conscious shift towards what the book Total Reset (www.totalreset.com.au) by author Greg Campbell describes as a holistic approach toward this change - a new lens derived from traditional perspectives - to support this change. Those who are clever see beyond the veil of greed. Those who are clever are inclusive. Those who are clever embrace diversity and all the prosperity which it can manifest for the benefit of people and Earth. Thank you for a great read.
News today from family, cancer is rearing its ugly head in weird formats. Compliance means death. People of Canada are dying. Who fucking cares? Cancer, the vicious cunts. A big cancer pandemic to cover their lies. It is close.
Another good one. Before 1492 Native Americans had a concept of the way of thinking that creates civilization - wetiko. And reading Iain McGilchrist in "The Matter with Things" you'll find that this civilized man uses the left hemisphere of the brain without paying much attention to the right. We like talking and thinking combined with "I can do it better than it is. I can control."
Agree with your exhaustive explanation of the effects of propaganda and how it has been scientifically studied and adapted to become even more effective over time. Yet a small percentage of the population, like the readers here and myself, don't get suckered into the nonsense and can still see the objective truth of our world. Much of it is due to access to honest, unimpeachable sources such as you Caitlin, and others such as the Duran, Brian Beltetic, Patrick Lawrence, Chris Hedges, Eva Bartlett, Scott Ritter, Col Douglas MacGregor, Patrick Lancaster and several others I know I am forgetting. Thank you for continuing to tell the truth to power.
"What a blessing it is for rulers that people are sheep." - A. Hitler.
The subject was cats: when Boswell said he didn’t care for them, Rousseau pounced. Men who disliked cats were tyrannical: “They do not like cats because the cat is free and will never consent to become a slave. He will do nothing to your order, as the other animals do.”
“Nor a hen, either,” Boswell objected. “A hen would obey your orders if you could make her understand them,” the philosopher rejoined, “but a cat will understand you perfectly and not obey them.”
Just after reading this post, I read another by Patrick Lawrence in Consortium News, which featured a quote by Bertrand Russell, one that struck me as so appropriate to my recollections of some of the authoritarian droning of my "colleagues" in "higher education", so-called professors who flung standard unmitigated rubbish at students as fact. This ensured that their lecture halls full of indoctrinated-since-the-cradle charges would fail to ever grasp the extent of their own mental prisons. And that grading them would be simple: Just regurgitate my truth for your grade.
Russell's simple statement reveals the embarrassing truth about the US higher educational system that most of us struggle to ignore, but which is complicit in sustaining this Dawn-of-civilization narrative control among our so-called best-educated:
“But the utility of intelligence is admitted only theoretically, not practically; it is not desired that ordinary people should think for themselves, because it is felt that people who think for themselves are awkward to manage and cause administrative problems.”
https://consortiumnews.com/2023/01/09/patrick-lawrence-dimming-the-lights/
A topic after my own heart, thank you Caitlin! It's an interesting term, 'the dawn of civilization,' by which we usually mean Western oligarchies modeled after Greece and using a form of coinage that co-opted the populace into the conquest and enslavement of their neighbors. Those were the first two psy-ops, I think. Agriculture gets a bad rap but The Dawn of Everything by the late David Graeber and David Wengrow shows that it's not the villain--the monetization of land and labor was, in service to the lord, king, pharaoh, emperor. And the next psy-ops was the empire-generated story of Jesus, which I write about in this post, followed by two on The Dawn of Everything:
https://thirdparadigm.substack.com/p/jesus-is-the-og-psy-ops
https://thirdparadigm.substack.com/p/when-mothers-ran-the-world
https://thirdparadigm.substack.com/p/muskrat-love-and-anarchy
You lost me in the past two paragraphs where you said maybe one day we can transcend our humanity essentially and become something better. I don't think so. As you outlined yourself, societies based on domination and subjugation and exploitation have always been the order and that will never change. There are improvements possible of course, but the overarching narrative determining human organization (the powerful reigning over the masses, greed, war, endless quest for control and dominance) will never change. I know you want to have hope and I don't blame you, but I am always amazed how despite being so amazingly astute, you still are holding out hope that maybe one day we can overcome our programming and thus what is in our nature and which has defined our civilizations and with it species since day one, with seemingly sheer willpower. Or by "working at it". Like work at it how? Do you think if people could will into existence a better world they wouldnt have done do already? Or maybe it is because they just don't want to. They cannot.
Humanity is going to end one way and one way only: by burning itself and this planet to the ground. There is nothing to indicate in our species' history or biology that we can just become good people not dominated by desires for power and control and conquest. Again that is not to say betterments are not possible. That we cannot do good and achieve good. They are. But the trajectory is still the same.
Actually information from recent discoveries suggests a different history. It is a nonlinear trajectory of civilizations, many far earlier than thought with different lifestyles and technologies.
Rockefeller is largely responsible for allopathic medicine's focus on petroleum based drug therapy and the elimination of alternative holistic therapies. Western medicine does NOT promote health and wellness. It promotes obesity, illness, drug dependence and unhappiness. It takes your power away.
When people realize that the Pfizer and other Covid injections have killed more people than they ever saved, they'll really understand the power of narrative control.
I can't think about this too much because it makes me too outrageously sad and depressed. We really are captives to elites that want us fat, sick, isolated, depressed, and distracted. They want your money, and then they want to kill you.
This society doesn't actually value freedom and democracy, except as something of which to starve others. There are other ideologies of emancipation that are not merely ideals to cajole most of humanity into sacrificing for the Few.
Everything old is new again!
Ahh... to return to an innocent time when no one felt compelled to manipulate others for their own gain. People need to feel secure. They need to feel like no one will hurt them or let them starve. Without it, they just keep manipulating.
I think when our civilization was Neolithic and female led things were pretty chill. With farming the men began to control culture and once we got to Medieval times and the rise of early corporations, well, the royalty, merchants and priests made sure to maintain control. That's when the propaganda really kicked in. Corporations and healthy cultures are diametrically opposed. You cannot have both.
It could happen but I think it's unlikely until the current 6th mass extinction event has run its' course without a significant number of the hundreds of nuclear reactors on the planet melting down and ionizing the atmosphere.
Good point. As long as we have governments and control freaks, we will have lies and propaganda.
Absolutism in a complex world is spin maintenance; sophisticated consideration/specificity negates theLine. What sort of mask? What flavor of Oreos? Which style of bagua? What size of tires? Which kind of cheese?
Excelllent article. You mention “People who are just a little bit more clever than the rest, and just unprincipled enough to use that to their advantage” as those who dominate the rest. Then you mention towards the end of the article that perhaps we can overcome this by way of a conscious shift towards what the book Total Reset (www.totalreset.com.au) by author Greg Campbell describes as a holistic approach toward this change - a new lens derived from traditional perspectives - to support this change. Those who are clever see beyond the veil of greed. Those who are clever are inclusive. Those who are clever embrace diversity and all the prosperity which it can manifest for the benefit of people and Earth. Thank you for a great read.
News today from family, cancer is rearing its ugly head in weird formats. Compliance means death. People of Canada are dying. Who fucking cares? Cancer, the vicious cunts. A big cancer pandemic to cover their lies. It is close.
Do Not Comply.
Another good one. Before 1492 Native Americans had a concept of the way of thinking that creates civilization - wetiko. And reading Iain McGilchrist in "The Matter with Things" you'll find that this civilized man uses the left hemisphere of the brain without paying much attention to the right. We like talking and thinking combined with "I can do it better than it is. I can control."
Agree with your exhaustive explanation of the effects of propaganda and how it has been scientifically studied and adapted to become even more effective over time. Yet a small percentage of the population, like the readers here and myself, don't get suckered into the nonsense and can still see the objective truth of our world. Much of it is due to access to honest, unimpeachable sources such as you Caitlin, and others such as the Duran, Brian Beltetic, Patrick Lawrence, Chris Hedges, Eva Bartlett, Scott Ritter, Col Douglas MacGregor, Patrick Lancaster and several others I know I am forgetting. Thank you for continuing to tell the truth to power.