Nowhere has soft power been more successful than in the West itself.
Over 7.7 million times on YouTube people have watched the twelve seconds in which Clinton uttered her flippant obituary and laughed – now in several languages and even set to music (4 of the 7.7 million views). Watching her minions’ videoed butchering of Gaddaffi, then her Caesarian glee, requires a stronger stomach than I have. Yet, she won the popular vote in 2016, which speaks volumes on the manipulation of the American mind.
Thirst for social acceptance – the hook of social [sic] media – shuts down critical thinking. During the years I served as a middle school administrator I saw it often: one kid would rile up two others just to watch them fight. Those who fought would get sent to the office. “Why did you hit him?” “Because my friend said he’d called me a name.” Brilliant. Now, spell “patsy”.
Algorithms regress people to a more malleable state of mind where they’ll easily follow the crowd. Of algorithms. Pixels, posing as friends. Memes far more transmissible than viruses spread rapidly with disastrous results. People feel good that they and their friends share the same "ideas". Yes, right down to the exact same words. And, people pay for the privilege of being programmed. Like the coins which a condemned prisoner paid the Executioner for a clean, swift beheading, people pay to have their phones leave the head more or less intact while taking over the brain.
These choices - when they are still choices - that people make and spend money on affect plenty of other people, as well. As of early 2019, over 26 million Americans and globally millions more in over 30 countries, had willingly sent in their own personal DNA and paid global capitalists to have it mapped. This allowed permanent storage of their DNA sequence and the derivation of that of virtually everyone else without their consent.
And it really doesn’t matter if your sample is earmarked for use in tracing Neanderthal ancestors or just looking for rare disease genes. It doesn’t matter if the sample is destroyed. The code itself is digitized and can be shared countless times and in countless ways. ~ NBC News, “What you’re giving away with those home DNA tests”, November 29, 2017
As these databases grow, they have made it possible to trace the relationships between nearly all Americans, including those who never purchased a test.” ~ CNBC, February 12, 2019 [emphasis added]
It’s called “biobanking” and it’s spelled p-a-t-s-y.
Programmers in their 20s and 30s, reared on post-modern “thought”, facilitate the obliteration of meaning, logic and ethics with algorithms deliberately programmed to be addictive, mesmerizing and manipulative – and Orwellian.
"The short-term dopamine-driven feedback loops that we have created are destroying how society works.” ~ Chamath Palihapitiya, former Facebook Vice-President for User Growth
Orwellian doublespeak‘s transmogrification of language causes otherwise sane people to hold completely contradictory beliefs and never question the divergence. Social [sic] media itself is oxymoronic, a causal factor in societal breakdown. Violence is peaceful. War is peace. Racism is anti-racist. Freedom is slavery. 2+2 is five, and unconscious is woke. Ignorance is strength.
Doublethink, convinces the used that they are “users” and that up is actually down. But, that’s at the beginning of the week. By the end of the week, people “strongly agree” that up and down do not actually exist at all but are constructs of white supremacy. Then they’re set against their peers and told to go kick some butt. Looking for guilt in all the wrong places again.
It’s called “brain hacking”. It used to be called intermittent reinforcement, a part of Skinnerian operant conditioning, which is extremely addictive.
Well every time I check my phone, I’m playing the slot machine to see, “What did I get?” This is one way to hijack people’s minds and create a habit, to form a habit. What you do is you make it so when someone pulls a lever, sometimes they get a reward, an exciting reward. And it turns out that this design technique can be embedded inside of all these products. ~ Tristan Harris, ex-Google design ethicist, founder, Center for Humane Technology
Oh, we shall persuade them [the citizens] that they will only become free when they renounce their freedom to us, and submit to us. And shall we be right, or shall we be lying? They will be convinced that we are right … Receiving bread from us, they will see clearly that we take the bread made by their hands from them – [only] to give it back to them … In truth they will be more thankful for taking it from our hands – than for the bread itself! Too well, will they know the value of complete submission! We shall show them that they are weak, that they are only pitiful children, but that childlike happiness is the sweetest of all....
We will indulge them their sins; allow them to occupy themselves with their vices. We will monitor everything, regulate everything, order and legislate for everything – and be their conscience too – so that they do not have to trouble themselves to think, overly; or, to be obliged to make decisions. They exist only to serve us, the élite who rule over them: The millions, numerous as the sands of the sea, who are weak, must exist only for the élite, who rule over them. In this mystery, says the Grand Inquisitor, “lies the great secret of the world.~ Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov, 1880 [Hat tip to Alistair Crooke]
One would think a "freedom loving" people would fight such plutocratic power over their lives, not pay for it. We’ve looked at gatekeeping (The “They” who don’t exist) but not its deeper motivation. The tradespeople, merchants, professionals and farmers who traditionally made up the large middle class were primarily independent. They could provide themselves and each other with food and necessary goods and have enough left over to sell for whatever income they might still need. As the US ruling class took on global ambitions at the end of WWII, specialization and corporatization began replacing diversification, i.e., dependence replacing independence.
Dependency – the ultimate tool of control – is the fetter capitalism imposes through privatization of life’s necessities and the means of procuring them, i.e., dependency becomes domestication. Corporate-controlled culture furthers such dependencies, effecting a self-perpetuating feedback loop that results in infantilization:
New reporters see news audiences in much the way the College Democrat leaders view students, as helpless beings incapable of exercising judgment or free will. Journalists like me once enjoyed the idea that our audiences were grownups capable of taking in difficult truths and deciding their meaning for themselves: the new trend is to see audiences as defenseless, childlike lumps, who must be led to the correct political conclusion the way horses are led by their bits. ~ Matt Taibbi, “The New Puritans”
Domestication is a pervasive way in which humans make animals vulnerable…. ~ The Moral Relevance of the Distinction Between Domesticated and Wild Animal
Dependence on a system over which they have no control means people must defend that system in order to survive.
It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it! ~ Upton Sinclair, “I, Candidate for Governor, and How I Got Licked”
And, if the system is treating them well, they will defend it vigorously.
Prosperity knits a man to the world. He feels that he is ‘finding his place in it’, while really it is finding its place in him. ~ C.S. Lewis. The Screwtape Letters, p.154-55
People – at least those with smart[sic]phones – are literally being led around by the phone, having paid dearly for their own leash. The very size of the screen in which most Americans live annihilates any vestigial urge to read and obviates research, analysis, synthesis, comparison, contrasting, source-checking, substantiation and assimilation. There’s a program or an app to tell you what you “need to know”, already pre-fact- checked [sic]. Why do people find this “convenient” rather than questionable? Why do they see “fascism” everywhere but in their own pockets?
Source
"Another Failure of Imagination?" by Caren Black, the above article is found at "Dot 7". PDF version available here.
