Listen to a reading of this article (reading by Tim Foley): It's not really deniable that western civilization is saturated with domestic propaganda geared toward manipulating the way the public thinks, acts, works, shops and votes. Mass media employees
Fundamental to neuroscience is the realization that sensory perception is constructive; we create a world by combining the registrations of our retinas and inner ears (etc.) with our stored experiences. Percepts are by nature biased, hence whatever the clever admen have managed to wangle into our synapses will corrupt further percepts from the get-go, before they've even been interpreted. It's therefore a good idea to skeptically question just about everything we perceive as "reality." An example that currently seems vulnerable to such skepticism is the idea that the US government is truthful with its citizens. When documents are ultimately declassified, they almost universally reveal how agencies like the CIA lie for decades until those lies are ultimately revealed. Yet the outrage, the calls for abolition of these rogue unelected organizations are often heavily criticized as excessive -- a testament to just how effective that brainwashing is, that it passively accepts granting great destructive powers to an org with a consistent track record of mendacity.
I'd love to have heard more on your opinions of the 24/7 pushed Covid narrative. I hope this piece means you applied critical thinking to the blatant nonsense rammed into us.
This article certainly explains why those who didn't question it, continue not to despite the almost daily revelations of the lies told.
Western propaganda is so effective because it comes from authority figures. A newborn baby instinctively trusts its parents, especially the mother, so that trusting authority figures is ingrained in us from birth. It's a survival instinct that all animals are born with. Contributing to this natural tendency is that prior to the age of large, concentrated populations, dishonesty and incompetence in chosen leaders was readily detected and expeditiously dealt with, such that leaders were actually held to standards that today's 'leaders' can't even pretend to. Thus, leaders effectively held to standards that benefitted the entire tribe -- a win/win -- was the norm for most of the human experience, so that we've culturally evolved to instinctively trust authority figures, be they elected or imposed. Now we find ourselves in a radically changed world where the old reflexive trust in authority is counter to the wellbeing of the masses. Like they say, old habits die hard, which is why we have to try harder.
For many people their beliefs are a safe harbor anchored in calm waters behind break waters. To go beyond the breakwater into the open sea of inconvenient truths is life in full sail and they are not prepared for the passage.
Are you familiar with the concept popularized in Asian cultures of Double Discipline?
External Discipline, i.e. force, coercion, punishment and reward.
Internal Discipline, i.e. a responsibility for self and one's impact on others, an internal code of values.
This is taught in many martial Arts. China's leaders embrace the concept today. They are very aware of their history rising to power and the cultural revolution, Great Leap Forward where external discipline was primarily applied to force the idea of collectivism onto a population of individuals. Violence, depravation, death visited on the disobedient in a frenzy to force obedience to a declared collective will. The death toll of their external discipline exceeds all other democides to date.
When the fervor of forced discipline ebbed, due to the effect that extreme fear and intimidation had, as well as the elimination of the most disobedient China embraced the development of internal discipline studies. Getting citizens to voluntarily obey government and societal policy as "the right thing to do." Reserving their right to apply external discipline as conditions warrant, but leaning into internal discipline as their primary means of population control.
This is an important concept to understand as we contemplate authoritarian/totalitarian governing models and changes being forced onto nations that historically value individualism, freedom as sovereigns.
Authoritarian and totalitarian regimes compel obedience. And apply external discipline to achieve it. They consider themselves the parents and the people their children. And unruly children get punished, while obedient children get rewards. This is their thinking and justification. And their thinking assumes they possess the wisdom, the truth, the proper goals and values that others must obey. An unassailable elite, above question, possessing the only truth and values that merit unflinching obedience to. They and they alone are entitled to rule, impose their agendas on the people who dare not question, for the collective good as they ordain.
China considers itself more enlightened these days because it has a largely internally disciplined population. And so they rarely roll out external discipline. But how did they transform a population of sovereign individuals needing lots of external discipline to a voluntary collectively obedient population?
They applied human psychology through a behavioral science model of propaganda campaigns. Reeducation camps for the unruly and insolent. Framing choices with psychological appeals to virtue, popularity, authority, experts, fear. Managing minds through manipulation, coercion and more subtle framing of choices, issues, linguistics, symbols, appeals, nudges. So people would become obedient through self-discipline that elevates the collective's wishes above self.
I know collectivists find this description dreamy. Utopian to them. But it is built on a false and unstable construct. Because it relies heavily on propaganda, deceit and turning over one's own free will to others. A population in an artificially constructed state of internal discipline has been effectively brainwashed. But it is fragile. And the more removed it becomes from the natural world, as propaganda and reality become sufficiently disconnected the population will break from their propaganda indoctrination.
Authoritarian/totalitarian governments must then apply external discipline to compel obedience in that situation. This cycle may go on repeatedly. But it is unstable. It is not the natural order of mankind no matter what collectivist dream. They are not parents of adult children. They have no right to infantilize citizens disciplining them with punishments and rewards or repeated psychological attacks, propaganda, on their minds to gain "voluntary" compliance.
The double discipline model is fine and appropriate for actual parents to raise their children. But it is tyranny, hard and soft, when used to govern citizens.
God created man in his image, to be free. To live in peace and harmony with the earth he created. We were not created by man in the image of other men. We are not compelled by God to obey the whims and demands of a self-proclaimed elite declaring a collective good overrides our own individual values. God did not create man to be slaves to other men. Even if the masters believe they are benevolent stewards of their slaves, their property. Authoritarian/totalitarian regimes believe they own the people they rule over as they own land, a machine or cattle. The parent-child model only works because childhood demands it. Applied to adults it's slavery.
The strongest prison isn't made of concrete and steel. It is the mind. Propaganda wielded by behavioral scientists, psychologists on sovereign adults is an attack the mind to control them, to enslave them.
The double discipline model for governance is an attack on God's design for man. Internal discipline as practiced by government is a false construct because it doesn't authentically come from within the individual. True internal discipline cannot be taught, it must come from within. False internal discipline designed by behaviorists using propaganda is inauthentic.
And so it will remain in conflict with government campaigns to impose it. Those tensions are unsustainable. We are God's children, not the children of government. And God created us to be free, not slaves to mind prisons created by arrogant men.
"So the simple answer to why people cling to beliefs instilled by imperial propaganda is because that's just how minds work." CJ
I disagree. People cling to beliefs from on high because they are mentally lazy. Hell, my first day of school when I was 5 some dumb Polish Catholic kid knocked over my wood block fort. I stood up and slugged the kid in the nose. He bled. He cried like a baby. And I had to kneel in front of the class for two hours until lunch.
My first day of school!
So I knew at the age of 5 that authoritarian figures were full of shit.
In first grade at the age of 6 I was the only kid in my class who didn't march up to the front of the church and get the cross of ashes on my forehead on Ash Wednesday. I hid out in the bathroom.
To hell with the crowd, the mob, the herd. What a bunch of lazy gullible shites!
This is brilliant and adds to my understanding of why propaganda works. I'll definitely be citing it in a future episode. I also think that shared superiority is the bribe in every belief system. 'You and me, we're smarter than them' is the subtext. But the backfire effect is really interesting. I've termed it cognitive dissonance but I think it's the same thing. When something conflicts with our core belief that we're a good person, we do the work of justifying it.
In 2007, many true believers in the financial markets were handed pink slips because they trusted familiar institutions and what seemed like authoritative administrative procedures and leaders. Thousands lost everything.
I think the faith and certainty of the victims of the 2008 crash is identical to the faith and certainty of the true believers in Western Liberalism. People are whistling as they saunter through the cemetery.
The evidence of misplaced confidence in a declining empire is not the abrupt shock that devastated investors experienced in a fraudulent market. It is the gradual, steady realization that the media lies, the police are bought, the teachers are underpaid by design, the church is complicit, civility is hiding under a bed, guns and drugs are more available than clean water, and every last drop of the cost of living is wrung out of more and more people, and still the advertisers sell their wares as if there is nothing wrong, and the military budget grows and grows and grows.
It is the difference between the frog dropped into boiling water that immediately jumps out, and the frog that is placed in warm, soothing water, that is gradually brought to a boil, and the frog expires.
Propaganda works because most humans are too lazy to think for themselves or at least question things. After the last decade or two, it is impossible to trust most institutions, agencies or government. We blindly trusted these fools and prison is our reward.
Interesting. Given we are all so immersively submerged in propagnda from a young age, what do you think is\are the major factors in provoking awakening? Is it purely genetic disposition, is it environmental, and if , as probable, it is a mix of both, what do you think are the genetic and environmental factors that helps un-propagandize more?
Psychologists/psychiatrists/neuroscientists go wild with theories dating back to walking on all fours, but propaganda's success has a much simpler explanation: it makes us feel good. We don't have to think, as an aded bonus, and that works so well that even oblivion around the corner is no reality check. As a corollary, we believe in authority for the same reasons, and protests are usually on the level of child-like tantrums, not followed up by effective action. The system doesn't work, it is killing us, period. We shouldn't support it. For a start we should regularly ask authorities just what percent of our taxes go to war efforts, to repair of infrastructure, people programs: ask for justification of politicos' salary increases, in fact the whole balance sheet. This info is all available, but bug them anyway. And especially, question the money sucking worm-hole that supports the losing, people devouring nemesis we call "War in Ukraine".
The "Free World" is a concept that has been propagandized to no end. There never was a free world, only a Neoliberal controlled world with a brainwashed public to boot. Our press is owned by the oligarchs as is public opinion. The residents of this "free world" don't know the difference.
I am honestly not digging your takes on propaganda or on free will. The real answer is far more simple.
Propaganda in a capitalist country like ours works because people are selfish, assholes and propaganda caters directly to their narcissism and underlying nihilism.
Deep down everyone knows that by accepting the lies of corrupted institutions at face value and not bothering to question or examine blatant contradictions, they are really making the world a worse, shittier place but what it always comes down to is that there's some pay off for them personally and so they are simply justifying choosing not to think about it.
Just look at the current hollywood celebrity culture for the most glaring example. To the extent that nearly everyone in our society of clicks and "likes" wants to be his/or her own mini-celebrity and to feel like they have an "identity" of sorts within this vacuous hellscape of a so called "culture", everyone in their own tiny little way is like the fuckers in hollywood who promote every single disgusting empire psyop at the top of their lungs with zero consideration of the negative impact or any deeper sense of moral commitment to something greater than themselves because that's of far less importance than their own perceived personal benefit.
Our culture is absolutely drowning in this kind of grotesque narcissism and the only hope I can see is for it to basically be swept away.
Fundamental to neuroscience is the realization that sensory perception is constructive; we create a world by combining the registrations of our retinas and inner ears (etc.) with our stored experiences. Percepts are by nature biased, hence whatever the clever admen have managed to wangle into our synapses will corrupt further percepts from the get-go, before they've even been interpreted. It's therefore a good idea to skeptically question just about everything we perceive as "reality." An example that currently seems vulnerable to such skepticism is the idea that the US government is truthful with its citizens. When documents are ultimately declassified, they almost universally reveal how agencies like the CIA lie for decades until those lies are ultimately revealed. Yet the outrage, the calls for abolition of these rogue unelected organizations are often heavily criticized as excessive -- a testament to just how effective that brainwashing is, that it passively accepts granting great destructive powers to an org with a consistent track record of mendacity.
I'd love to have heard more on your opinions of the 24/7 pushed Covid narrative. I hope this piece means you applied critical thinking to the blatant nonsense rammed into us.
This article certainly explains why those who didn't question it, continue not to despite the almost daily revelations of the lies told.
Western propaganda is so effective because it comes from authority figures. A newborn baby instinctively trusts its parents, especially the mother, so that trusting authority figures is ingrained in us from birth. It's a survival instinct that all animals are born with. Contributing to this natural tendency is that prior to the age of large, concentrated populations, dishonesty and incompetence in chosen leaders was readily detected and expeditiously dealt with, such that leaders were actually held to standards that today's 'leaders' can't even pretend to. Thus, leaders effectively held to standards that benefitted the entire tribe -- a win/win -- was the norm for most of the human experience, so that we've culturally evolved to instinctively trust authority figures, be they elected or imposed. Now we find ourselves in a radically changed world where the old reflexive trust in authority is counter to the wellbeing of the masses. Like they say, old habits die hard, which is why we have to try harder.
Fabulous piece!
For many people their beliefs are a safe harbor anchored in calm waters behind break waters. To go beyond the breakwater into the open sea of inconvenient truths is life in full sail and they are not prepared for the passage.
Are you familiar with the concept popularized in Asian cultures of Double Discipline?
External Discipline, i.e. force, coercion, punishment and reward.
Internal Discipline, i.e. a responsibility for self and one's impact on others, an internal code of values.
This is taught in many martial Arts. China's leaders embrace the concept today. They are very aware of their history rising to power and the cultural revolution, Great Leap Forward where external discipline was primarily applied to force the idea of collectivism onto a population of individuals. Violence, depravation, death visited on the disobedient in a frenzy to force obedience to a declared collective will. The death toll of their external discipline exceeds all other democides to date.
When the fervor of forced discipline ebbed, due to the effect that extreme fear and intimidation had, as well as the elimination of the most disobedient China embraced the development of internal discipline studies. Getting citizens to voluntarily obey government and societal policy as "the right thing to do." Reserving their right to apply external discipline as conditions warrant, but leaning into internal discipline as their primary means of population control.
This is an important concept to understand as we contemplate authoritarian/totalitarian governing models and changes being forced onto nations that historically value individualism, freedom as sovereigns.
Authoritarian and totalitarian regimes compel obedience. And apply external discipline to achieve it. They consider themselves the parents and the people their children. And unruly children get punished, while obedient children get rewards. This is their thinking and justification. And their thinking assumes they possess the wisdom, the truth, the proper goals and values that others must obey. An unassailable elite, above question, possessing the only truth and values that merit unflinching obedience to. They and they alone are entitled to rule, impose their agendas on the people who dare not question, for the collective good as they ordain.
China considers itself more enlightened these days because it has a largely internally disciplined population. And so they rarely roll out external discipline. But how did they transform a population of sovereign individuals needing lots of external discipline to a voluntary collectively obedient population?
They applied human psychology through a behavioral science model of propaganda campaigns. Reeducation camps for the unruly and insolent. Framing choices with psychological appeals to virtue, popularity, authority, experts, fear. Managing minds through manipulation, coercion and more subtle framing of choices, issues, linguistics, symbols, appeals, nudges. So people would become obedient through self-discipline that elevates the collective's wishes above self.
I know collectivists find this description dreamy. Utopian to them. But it is built on a false and unstable construct. Because it relies heavily on propaganda, deceit and turning over one's own free will to others. A population in an artificially constructed state of internal discipline has been effectively brainwashed. But it is fragile. And the more removed it becomes from the natural world, as propaganda and reality become sufficiently disconnected the population will break from their propaganda indoctrination.
Authoritarian/totalitarian governments must then apply external discipline to compel obedience in that situation. This cycle may go on repeatedly. But it is unstable. It is not the natural order of mankind no matter what collectivist dream. They are not parents of adult children. They have no right to infantilize citizens disciplining them with punishments and rewards or repeated psychological attacks, propaganda, on their minds to gain "voluntary" compliance.
The double discipline model is fine and appropriate for actual parents to raise their children. But it is tyranny, hard and soft, when used to govern citizens.
God created man in his image, to be free. To live in peace and harmony with the earth he created. We were not created by man in the image of other men. We are not compelled by God to obey the whims and demands of a self-proclaimed elite declaring a collective good overrides our own individual values. God did not create man to be slaves to other men. Even if the masters believe they are benevolent stewards of their slaves, their property. Authoritarian/totalitarian regimes believe they own the people they rule over as they own land, a machine or cattle. The parent-child model only works because childhood demands it. Applied to adults it's slavery.
The strongest prison isn't made of concrete and steel. It is the mind. Propaganda wielded by behavioral scientists, psychologists on sovereign adults is an attack the mind to control them, to enslave them.
The double discipline model for governance is an attack on God's design for man. Internal discipline as practiced by government is a false construct because it doesn't authentically come from within the individual. True internal discipline cannot be taught, it must come from within. False internal discipline designed by behaviorists using propaganda is inauthentic.
And so it will remain in conflict with government campaigns to impose it. Those tensions are unsustainable. We are God's children, not the children of government. And God created us to be free, not slaves to mind prisons created by arrogant men.
"So the simple answer to why people cling to beliefs instilled by imperial propaganda is because that's just how minds work." CJ
I disagree. People cling to beliefs from on high because they are mentally lazy. Hell, my first day of school when I was 5 some dumb Polish Catholic kid knocked over my wood block fort. I stood up and slugged the kid in the nose. He bled. He cried like a baby. And I had to kneel in front of the class for two hours until lunch.
My first day of school!
So I knew at the age of 5 that authoritarian figures were full of shit.
In first grade at the age of 6 I was the only kid in my class who didn't march up to the front of the church and get the cross of ashes on my forehead on Ash Wednesday. I hid out in the bathroom.
To hell with the crowd, the mob, the herd. What a bunch of lazy gullible shites!
14-YEAR-OLD IRISH GIRL BEHIND VIRAL ‘I AM NOT A DRESS’ POEM
https://www.megynkelly.com/2023/04/28/14-year-old-irish-girl-behind-viral-i-am-not-a-dress-poem-speaks-out-about-trans-indoctrination/
“I Am Not A Dress” by @brandubh4
We are women, we are warriors of steel.
Woman is something no man will ever feel.
Woman is not a skill that any man can hone.
Woman is our word and it is ours alone.
I am not a dress to be worn on a whim,
A man in a dress is nonetheless a him.
Women are not simply what we wear.
If this offends you, I do not care.
I am not an idea in any man’s mind
And my purpose in life is not to be kind.
So while my rights are trampled every day of the week,
I will not stand by being docile and meek.
I am not defined by sexist lies.
There is more to a woman than that shallow guise,
That guise of dresses, bikinis, and skirts.
Those clothes are not what womanhood is worth.
I am not a bitch, a TERF, a whore, a slag,
Hysterical, witch, a slut, a hag.
No, I am a woman. I am a female,
Who will not let her rights be put up for sale.
I am not defined by what men are not,
So to hell with cis misogynistic rot.
I am a woman, I’m not as subset of my sex.
If this makes me a dinosaur, so be it, I’m a T-Rex.
I am not a bleeder nor a menstruator,
A womb carrier or a uterus haver.
These words and phrases are such a sham.
Just call me woman, it’s who I am.
We are women, we are warriors of steel.
Woman is something no man will ever feel.
Woman is not a skill that any man can hone.
Woman is our word and it is ours alone.
This is brilliant and adds to my understanding of why propaganda works. I'll definitely be citing it in a future episode. I also think that shared superiority is the bribe in every belief system. 'You and me, we're smarter than them' is the subtext. But the backfire effect is really interesting. I've termed it cognitive dissonance but I think it's the same thing. When something conflicts with our core belief that we're a good person, we do the work of justifying it.
In 2007, many true believers in the financial markets were handed pink slips because they trusted familiar institutions and what seemed like authoritative administrative procedures and leaders. Thousands lost everything.
I think the faith and certainty of the victims of the 2008 crash is identical to the faith and certainty of the true believers in Western Liberalism. People are whistling as they saunter through the cemetery.
The evidence of misplaced confidence in a declining empire is not the abrupt shock that devastated investors experienced in a fraudulent market. It is the gradual, steady realization that the media lies, the police are bought, the teachers are underpaid by design, the church is complicit, civility is hiding under a bed, guns and drugs are more available than clean water, and every last drop of the cost of living is wrung out of more and more people, and still the advertisers sell their wares as if there is nothing wrong, and the military budget grows and grows and grows.
It is the difference between the frog dropped into boiling water that immediately jumps out, and the frog that is placed in warm, soothing water, that is gradually brought to a boil, and the frog expires.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=dlbG6G_iHLU
Propaganda works because most humans are too lazy to think for themselves or at least question things. After the last decade or two, it is impossible to trust most institutions, agencies or government. We blindly trusted these fools and prison is our reward.
Interesting. Given we are all so immersively submerged in propagnda from a young age, what do you think is\are the major factors in provoking awakening? Is it purely genetic disposition, is it environmental, and if , as probable, it is a mix of both, what do you think are the genetic and environmental factors that helps un-propagandize more?
Psychologists/psychiatrists/neuroscientists go wild with theories dating back to walking on all fours, but propaganda's success has a much simpler explanation: it makes us feel good. We don't have to think, as an aded bonus, and that works so well that even oblivion around the corner is no reality check. As a corollary, we believe in authority for the same reasons, and protests are usually on the level of child-like tantrums, not followed up by effective action. The system doesn't work, it is killing us, period. We shouldn't support it. For a start we should regularly ask authorities just what percent of our taxes go to war efforts, to repair of infrastructure, people programs: ask for justification of politicos' salary increases, in fact the whole balance sheet. This info is all available, but bug them anyway. And especially, question the money sucking worm-hole that supports the losing, people devouring nemesis we call "War in Ukraine".
The "Free World" is a concept that has been propagandized to no end. There never was a free world, only a Neoliberal controlled world with a brainwashed public to boot. Our press is owned by the oligarchs as is public opinion. The residents of this "free world" don't know the difference.
What was stated at the end resonated with me which was about finding ways to cleverly tell the truth.
I am honestly not digging your takes on propaganda or on free will. The real answer is far more simple.
Propaganda in a capitalist country like ours works because people are selfish, assholes and propaganda caters directly to their narcissism and underlying nihilism.
Deep down everyone knows that by accepting the lies of corrupted institutions at face value and not bothering to question or examine blatant contradictions, they are really making the world a worse, shittier place but what it always comes down to is that there's some pay off for them personally and so they are simply justifying choosing not to think about it.
Just look at the current hollywood celebrity culture for the most glaring example. To the extent that nearly everyone in our society of clicks and "likes" wants to be his/or her own mini-celebrity and to feel like they have an "identity" of sorts within this vacuous hellscape of a so called "culture", everyone in their own tiny little way is like the fuckers in hollywood who promote every single disgusting empire psyop at the top of their lungs with zero consideration of the negative impact or any deeper sense of moral commitment to something greater than themselves because that's of far less importance than their own perceived personal benefit.
Our culture is absolutely drowning in this kind of grotesque narcissism and the only hope I can see is for it to basically be swept away.