Our Collective Trauma is the Road to Tyranny

American society spawns trauma and this trauma expresses itself in a variety of self-destructive pathologies, including the erosion of democracy and rise of neo-fascism.

Welcome In – by Mr. Fish

By Chris Hedges

Source: ScheerPost

Corporate capitalism, defined by the cult of the self and the ruthless exploitation of the natural world and all forms of life for profit, thrives on the fostering of chronic psychological and physical disorders. The diseases and pathologies of despair — alienation, high blood pressure, diabetes, anxiety, depression, morbid obesity, mass shootings (now almost two per day on average), domestic and sexual violence, drug overdoses (over 100,000 per year) and suicide (49,000 deaths in 2022) — are the consequences of a deeply traumatized society. 

The core traits of psychopaths — superficial charm, grandiosity and self-importance, a need for constant stimulation, a penchant for lying, deception, manipulation and the inability to feel remorse or guilt — are celebrated. The virtues of empathy, compassion and self-sacrifice, are belittled, neglected and crushed. The professions that sustain community, such as teaching, manual labor, the arts, journalism and nursing, are underpaid and overworked. The professions that exploit, such as those in high finance, Big Pharma, Big Oil and information technology, are lavished with prestige, money and power.

“The fact that millions of people share the same vices does not make these vices virtues, the fact that they share so many errors does not make the errors to be truths, and the fact that millions of people share the same forms of mental pathology does not make these people sane,” Eric Fromm writes in The Sane Society.

The classic works on trauma by Dr. Bessel van der KolkDr. Gabor Maté and Dr. Judith Herman state bluntly that what is accepted as normal behavior in a corporate society is at war with basic human needs and our psychological and physical health. Huge segments of the American public, especially the tens of millions of people who have been discarded and marginalized, endure chronic trauma. Barbara Ehrenreich in “Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America” describes the life of the working poor as one long “emergency.”  This trauma is as destructive to us personally as it is socially and politically. It leaves us in a state of dysphoria where confusion, agitation, emptiness and loneliness define our lives. Whole segments of American society, especially the poor, have been rendered superfluous and invisible. As Dr. van der Kolk writes, “trauma is when we are not seen and known.”

“Our culture teaches us to focus on our personal uniqueness, but at a deeper level we barely exist as individual organisms,” Dr. van der Kolk notes.

Trauma numbs our capacity to feel. It fractures our self. It disconnects us from our bodies. It keeps us in a state of hyperarousal. It makes us confuse our desires, often artificially implanted by the consumer society, with our needs. Traumatized people view the world around them as hostile and dangerous. They lack a positive image of themselves and lose the capacity to trust. Many replace intimacy and love with sexual sadism, which is how we became a pornified culture. Trauma creates what the psychiatrist Robert Jay Lifton calls a “counterfeit” world defined by phantom enemies, lies and dark conspiracies. It negates a sense of purpose and a life of meaning. 

Trauma, Dr. Herman writes, “impels people both to withdraw from close relationships and to seek them desperately.” It induces feelings of shame, guilt, and inferiority, she writes, “as well as the need to avoid reminders of the trauma that occurs in daily life. Trauma severely compromises the capacity for intimacy. Trauma can dramatically reduce focus to extremely limited goals, often a matter of hours or days.” 

“If trauma entails a disconnection from the self, then it makes sense to say that we are being collectively flooded with influences that both exploit and reinforce trauma,” Dr. Maté writes. “Work pressures, multitasking, social media, news updates, multiplicities of entertainment sources — these all induce us to become lost in thoughts, frantic activities, gadgets, meaningless conversations. We are caught up in pursuits of all kinds that draw us on, not because they are necessary or inspiring or uplifting, or because they enrich or add meaning to our lives, but simply because they obliterate the present.”

Trauma also drives many to flee into the arms of those who are orchestrating the abuse.

Systematic and repetitive trauma, whether by a single abuser or a political system, destroys personal autonomy. The perpetrator becomes omnipotent. Resistance is accepted as futile. “The goal of the perpetrator is to instill in his victim not only fear of death but also gratitude for being allowed to live,” Dr. Herman writes. This trauma lays the foundation for the most insidious characteristic of all tyrannies, large and small. Total control. Prolonged trauma reduces its victims to a state of psychological infantilism. It conditions them to plead for their own enslavement.

“We are not content with negative obedience, not even with the most abject submission,” George Orwell wrote of the ruling “Inner Party” in his novel “1984.” “When finally you surrender to us, it must be of your own free will. We do not destroy the heretic because he resists us; so long as he resists us we never destroy him. We convert him, we capture his inner mind, we reshape him. We burn all evil and all illusion out of him; we bring him over to our side, not in appearance, but genuinely, heart and soul.”

Christian fascism, the subject of my book “American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America,” preys on this trauma. It replicates systems of control common to all tyrannies, including cults. Christian fascists skillfully break down adherents, severing them from their families and communities. They manipulate their shame, despair, feelings of worthlessness and guilt – the byproducts of their trauma – to demand total obedience to the church leadership, who are almost always white and male. These leaders, supposedly spokespeople for God, cannot be questioned or criticized. The connecting tissue among the disparate militia groups, QAnon conspiracy theorists, anti-abortion activists, right-wing patriot organizations, Second Amendment advocates, neo-Confederates and Trump supporters that stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6 is not only this Christian fascism but trauma.

“Totalitarian governments demand confession and political conversion of their victims,” Dr. Herman writes. “Slaveholders demand gratitude from their slaves. Religious cults demand ritualized sacrifices as a sign of submission to the divine will of the leader. Perpetrators of domestic battery demand that their victims prove complete obedience and loyalty by sacrificing all other relationships. Sex offenders demand that their victims find sexual fulfillment in submission. Total control over another person is the power dynamic at the heart of pornography. The erotic appeal of this fantasy to millions of terrifyingly normal men fosters an immense industry in which women and children are abused, not in fantasy but in reality.”

Donald Trump is a perpetrator and savior. He personifies the callous indifference of patriarchy, wealth, privilege and power towards the vulnerable, as well as the promise that once his cultish followers surrender to him they will be protected. He inspires in equal measure fear and solace.

“People who embrace the small tyrannies are much more susceptible to embracing the large ones,” Dr. Herman told me. “When you have a political party that embraces the subordination of women, the subordination of people of color, the subordination of gender non-conforming people, and the subordination of non-Christians, then it’s not a party that embraces democracy. It’s a party that is looking for a fascist leader and is going to find one.”

In Dr. van der Kolk’s “The Body Keeps Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma,” he opens with stark statistics compiled by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention showing that “one in five Americans was sexually molested as a child; one in four was beaten by a parent to the point of a mark being left on their body; and one in three couples engages in physical violence. A quarter of us grew up with alcoholic relatives, and one out of eight witnessed their mother being beaten or hit.”

The endemic trauma in American society, which is getting worse under the onslaught of the gig economy, pronounced social inequality, indiscriminate police violence, the climate crisis and the seizure of the political process and most institutions by corporations and the ruling oligarchs, is our most serious public health crisis. It has grave individual, social and political consequences. 

“If trauma is truly a social problem,” Dr. Herman in “Truth and Repair: How Trauma Survivors Envision Justice” writes, “then recovery cannot simply be a private individual matter. The wounds of trauma are not merely those caused by the perception of violence and exploitation. The actions or inactions of bystanders, all those who are complicit in or who prefer not to know about the abuse or who blame the victims, often cause deeper wounds.” “Full healing,” she adds, “because it originates in a fundamental injustice, requires a full hearing within the community to repair through some measure of justice the trauma survivors have endured.”

You can see my recent two-part interview with Dr. Herman here and here.You can see my interview with Dr. Maté here.

“Recovery has to take place in relationships,” Dr. Herman said in my interview. “When people feel reconnected to their communities and re-accepted in their communities, then the shame is relieved and the isolation is relieved, and that really creates the platform for healing.”

The key is community. Not virtual communities. But communities where we can reconnect and see in our wounds the wounds of others. It requires access, without onerous medical bills, to mental health professionals. It requires dismantling the corporate structures of oppression. It demands a new ethic, one that values empathy and self-sacrifice. We must reject the cynicism, indifference and cult of the self that all tyrannies inculcate in those they dominate to keep them passive. We must reach out to our neighbors, especially those in distress and those who are demonized. We must uncouple from consumer society and turn away from the allure of our cultural narcissism. 

The moral philosopher Bernard Williams argues that resentment and indignation are as important as empathy and connection to solidify social bonds. It is not only our own dignity we must protect, but the dignity of others. These “shared sentiments” he writes “bind people together in a community of feeling.” Acts of resistance around these “shared sentiments,” this “community of feeling,” establish ourselves as distinct, autonomous beings. We may not defeat these tyrannies, but by battling against them we free ourselves from the grip of the small and large tyrannies that deform American society.

The Elite’s 5,000-Year War on Your Mind is Climaxing. Can We Defeat it? Part 2

By Robert J. Burrowes

Part 1 of this study introduced the subject and discussed the psychological and political methods used to control our minds. Part 2 will consider the medical and technological methods used and explain what is necessary to win this war.

Medical Mind Control

Mind control methods extend far beyond childhood terrorization reinforced by other psychological as well as political methods in their various forms.

Most notoriously, no doubt, among his other ‘experiments’, Dr. Josef Mengele supposedly studied mind-control at Auschwitz, with these ‘medical’ experiments sometimes leading to the death of his subjects.

A Freedom of Information document in 2010 exposed the ongoing, if relabeled, work of MK-Ultra – the illegal human experimentation program initiated by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) during the 1950s which employed many former Nazi and (Italian) fascist scientists (discussed further below) – including some of its less savoury elements such as its torture of children ostensibly in its conduct of ‘mind control’ experiments. See ‘MK-ULTRA: CIA Mind Control, Sleeper Cells and Child Kidnappings’.

Other research has documented how much of MK-Ultra’s ‘medical torture’ was conducted within and beyond US borders, secretly and without the consent of those impacted, including on indigenous children and black prisoners. One Canadian victim testified in court that she had been held against her will and that her torturers ‘drugged her with LSD and other substances, subjected her to electroshock treatments, and exposed her to auditory indoctrination’ as part of their attacks on her mind. See ‘New Docs Link CIA to Medical Torture of Indigenous Children and Black Prisoners’.

But for a reasonably comprehensive and horrific overview of the US government’s longstanding and ongoing efforts to subvert the autonomy, including mental autonomy, of its citizenry – including identification and description of key programs beyond MK-Ultra, such as ‘Cointelpro’ (‘a series of secret projects conducted by the FBI between 1956 and 1971 aimed at “neutralizing political dissidents”… [by] “making them incapable of engaging in political activity by whatever means.”’) – see ‘U.S. Government Projects & Programs That Have Included Criminal and Unethical Actions Against Civilians’.

This account documents many US government programs, such as that labeled ‘Project Bluebird’ (later relabeled ‘Project Artichoke’), which was designed to deliberately create dissociative identity disorder (multiple personalities) ‘using trauma and inhumane practices for the purposes of mind control’, and ‘Northwoods’, designed ‘to trick the American public and international community into supporting a war by attacking and killing innocent U.S. citizens and blaming it on terrorism’. See ‘Trauma-Based Victimization & Mind Control – Overview’. But there are many other examples carefully described, documented and illustrated on this website.

These projects, like others, were not the work of some fringe agency but again used Nazi scientists as well as a long list of prestigious US institutions, corporations and military bases as locations for the experimentation. See ‘Project Monarch: Nazi Mind Control’.

But medical mind control is not limited to secretive work by government agencies, corporations and ‘research’ institutions. Many versions of it are imposed openly on society with devastating consequences.

Most notably, since early in his now very long career, ‘the conscience of psychiatry’ Dr Peter Breggin has ‘continued to develop the brain-disabling principle of psychiatric treatment. It states that all physical treatments in psychiatry – drugs, electroshock and psychosurgery – disable the brain and that none improve brain function.’ See ‘The Brain-Disabling Principle of Psychiatric Treatment’ in ‘Psychiatric Reform Accomplishments’.

Most horrifically, this has included the extensive use of a range of psychiatric interventions – notably including psychiatric drugs (see, for example, Medication Madness: A Psychiatrist Exposes the Dangers of Mood-Altering Medications), electroshock and lobotomy (‘psychosurgery’) (see, for example, Brain Disabling Treatments in Psychiatry: Drugs, Electroshock, and the Psychopharmaceutical Complex) – extensively documented by Breggin to have seriously incapacitated or killed substantial numbers of children and adults, including in racist contexts (see ‘Campaigns against racist federal programs by the center for the study of psychiatry and psychology’), particularly in North America and Europe.

In his extensive body of work – elaborated in The Conscience of Psychiatry: The Reform Work of Peter R. Breggin, MD – Breggin has exposed and often effectively campaigned to halt a long series of invasive psychiatric interventions against those people unfortunately targeted by ‘organized psychiatry, drug companies, and government agencies’. The book also offers ‘a probing critique of the psychopharmaceutical complex.’ If you prefer to read a summary (up to 2008) of Dr Breggin’s work to defend the human mind, you can do so at ‘Psychiatric Reform Accomplishments of Peter Breggin, M.D., 1954 to the Present’.

But Dr Breggin, with the support of his wife Ginger, is still campaigning to defend your mind, most recently against the threats posed by the Covid-19 ‘vaccine’ with its mind- and life-destroying ingredients including nanotechnology (which is discussed further in the section headed ‘Technological Mind Control’ below). See ‘Blurring Lines: Nanotechnology, Vaccines, and Control’.

Beyond these measures, however, the public has long suffered the deliberate release into communities of both ‘approved’ pharmaceutical drugs and ‘illegal’ drugs which are designed to control the mind of those impacted, even if it is just done by making people mentally and, hence, socially dysfunctional.

The most obvious examples of this are, respectively, the widespread administration of injections approved by government health authorities, which have triggered an epidemic of attention disorders such as autism, and the CIA’s distribution of illicit drugs – from LSD to crack cocaine – among targeted US communities of politically aware people and in black neighborhoods particularly to psychologically and socially disrupt those impacted. See ‘Vaccine Industry Watchdog Obtains CDC Documents That Show Statistically Significant Risks of Autism Associated with Vaccine Preservative Thimerosal: Biochemist Brian Hooker, scientific advisor to A Shot of Truth, reveals CDC knew risks for over a decade’ and ‘CIA Conspiracy to Flood Black Communities with Crack Exposed in Explosive Netflix Documentary’. https://thefreethoughtproject.com/be-the-change/cia-conspiracy-to-flood-black-communities-with-crack-exposed-in-explosive-netflix-documentary

Of course, medical mind control is also deployed as one of the weapons used to control victims of torture in which psychiatrists have also long been willingly complicit. See ‘Defeating the Violence of Psychiatry’.

Technological Mind Control

Unfortunately, however, as horrifically effective as long-standing psychological, political and medical mind control measures have been already, there are many new weapons in the arsenals of those intent on controlling our minds. These mind control weapons are technological and, with most of the research driven by the intelligence and military communities within national governments, these efforts have been well funded and made steady progress during the C20th and advanced rapidly after World War II.

Hence, a human future worth living – which presumably includes a mind capable of conceiving and manifesting individual identity, freedom and free will – now hangs by a thread.

So this means that, in addition to the four points explained in the ‘Rage Against the War Machine’ article cited above, the traditional focus by antiwar activists on the threat posed by wars generally and the threat posed by nuclear weapons particularly is failing to take into account two vital elements of the overall threat: the ancient war on the mind that is now being enhanced by a wide range of technocratic control weapons and, as an extension of this, the manner in which war-fighting is being technocratized to remove humans from the picture altogether.

The latter development which, to reiterate, is an extension of the rapidly advancing mind control, means that we are almost at the point when a transhuman individual suitably placed in the chain of command could be ‘ordered’ by an artificial intelligence (AI) program to launch full-scale nuclear war.

Or an AI program could initiate a nuclear launch directly. See ‘How Might Artificial Intelligence Affect the Risk of Nuclear War?’, ‘Autonomous Nuclear Weapons: Should We Give Control Of America’s Nukes To AI?’, ‘Assessing the Dangers: Emerging Military Technologies and Nuclear (In)Stability’, ‘Never Give Artificial Intelligence the Nuclear Codes’ and ‘AI Versus AI And Human Extinction as Collateral Damage’.

And that is assuming that AI does not induce human extinction directly. See ‘Statement on AI Risk: AI experts and public figures express their concern about AI risk’. But that is an issue to be explored another time.

Which means that the challenges for both freedom activists and anti-war activists, as well as any ‘ordinary’ human being, are far greater in this rapidly advancing technocratic age than at any previous time in human history.

Let me explain a little more about what is happening but then focus on how it is happening, the challenges it presents and how we can strategically resist these developments, which are a critical component of the Elite program to imprison and enslave those left alive after humanity has been ‘depopulated’ by the various measures being employed to achieve that end. See ‘We Are Being Smashed Politically, Economically, Medically and Technologically by the Elite’s “Great Reset”: Why? How Do We Fight Back Effectively?’

Building on long-standing techniques to manipulate previously terrorized people into feeling, thinking and doing what they are told, particularly since World War II the Elite has sought technological means of mind control as well.

At its simplest, this has included the use of television as a weapon for mass mind control, which was already happening extensively by the 1960s. In a documentary demonstrating this, the presenters illustrate how a variety of techniques are used to manipulate viewers into holding the views endorsed by those intent on controlling the narrative. How this is done varies and, for example, ranges from the messaging itself – which might be overt or be concealed in such a way that it is only perceived unconsciously – to the rate of flicker which can alter the state of consciousness to make one more receptive to some form of programming. Watch Ultimate TV Mind Control Documentary’.

Beyond this, however, enormous effort has gone into much more technologically direct forms of mind control.

Most notably, Yale University psychiatrist Dr José M.R. Delgado’s 1969 book Physical Control of the Mind: Toward a Psychocivilized Society carefully documented techniques used in the illegal human experimentation program initiated by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) during the 1950s which employed many former Nazi and (Italian) fascist scientists. Known as MK-Ultra, the project was designed to develop procedures to manipulate the mind, thus beating Elon Musk’s neuralink chip by a mere 75 years. See ‘Mind Control is Nothing New’ and watch ‘This Is How Elon Musk’s Neuralink Microchip Will Be Put In Your Brain’.

Nevertheless, and despite the physically invasive nature of his earlier work, Delgado’s later work was done wirelessly, ‘with his most advanced efforts developed without electrode implants used at all’. That is, ‘he achieved the brain manipulating effects at a distance, without any physical contact or devices attached to the living creature being manipulated’. By changing the frequency and waveform on an experimental subject, ‘he could completely change their thinking and emotional state’. See Angels Don’t Play This HAARP pp.140-141.

Consequently, since the 1950s, a long series of technologies has been or is being developed which enhance the Elite capacity to control our minds in an enormous variety of ways, compromise our health, disable us, alter us genetically or kill us, as they choose. Needless to say, in the United States such efforts have garnered significant CIA and Defense Department support. Here is a sample of more of these technologies.

Among its other weapons possibilities, researchers Dr Nick Begich and Jeane Manning have explained how the High Frequency Active Auroral Research Program – known as HAARP, a joint project of the United States Air Force and Navy based in Alaska and designed to study the ionosphere in order to develop new weapons technology – ‘could be used against humanity in a way that would change what people think, believe and feel.’ See Angels Don’t Play This HAARP p.8.

Citing Michael Hutchison’s 1990 book – see Mega Brain, New Tools and Techniques for Brain growth and Mind Expansion – which described how new technologies were being used to improve learning and memory but also for human behavior modification, Begwich and Manning noted that ‘External stimulation of the brain by electromagnetic means can cause the brain to be entrained or locked into phase with an external signal generator… overriding the normal frequencies causing changes in the brain waves; which then cause changes in brain chemistry; which then cause changes in brain outputs in the form of thoughts, emotions or physical condition…. brain manipulation can be either beneficial or detrimental to the individual being impacted.’

Writing in 2001, Begich and Manning go on to note that ‘The work in this area is advancing at a very rapid rate with new discoveries being made regularly…. Radio frequency radiation, acting as a carrier for extremely low frequencies (ELF), can be used to wirelessly entrain brain waves…. The power level needed to achieve a measure of control over brain activity is very small – from 5 to 200 microamperes – which is thousands of times less than the power needed to run a 60 watt light bulb…. The new tools include electrical cranial stimulation devices, sound systems, light pulse systems and a large variety of other brain entrainment and feedback devices.’ See Angels Don’t Play This HAARP pp.134-135.

Commenting on Hutchison’s 1994 sequel – see Mega Brain Power: Transform Your Life with Mind Machines and Brain Nutrients – which also highlighted the rapidity of developments in the field, Begich and Manning note that Hutchison was using his periodical Megabrain Report: The Psychotechnology Newsletter to discuss ‘technologies for healing nervous system disorders, correcting attention deficit and hyperactive disorders in children and curing drug and alcohol dependencies among other things.’ However, while they claimed that ‘Electromedicine of this type is emerging as one of the most exciting areas of medical research’, they lamented that ‘military research continues to look at these technologies as weapon systems rather than as human potential enhancing tools.’ The book devotes considerable attention to military research in the field that is not classified. See Angels Don’t Play This HAARP p.135.

In their detailed investigation of the mind control issue, Begich and Manning drew attention to the work of Dr. Patrick Flanagan, ‘one of America’s most gifted inventors’, who was ‘recognized for inventing what was the most advanced brain entrainment device, and possibly human-to-computer interface, on the planet – the Neurophone.’ That was in 1962. Years later, Flanagan noted that the HAARP project could be ‘the biggest brainentrainment device ever conceived’. According to HAARP records, at full power the device can send VLF and ELF waves using many wave forms at energy levels sufficient to affect entire regional populations. See Angels Don’t Play This HAARP p.136.

But why impact only ‘entire regional populations’?

Building on earlier work he had done investigating the psychophysiological impacts of ELF (extremely low frequency) field waves on living organisms – see ‘Psychophysiological Effects of Extremely Low Frequency Electromagnetic Fields: A Review’ – in a 1995 paper published in Perceptual and Motor Skills, Professor Michael A. Persinger concluded that ‘Within the last two decades… a potential has emerged which was improbable but which is now marginally feasible. This potential is the technical capability to influence directly the major portion of the approximately six billion brains of the human species through classical sensory modalities by generating neural information within a physical medium within which all members of the species are immersed.’ See ‘On the Possibility of Directly Accessing Every Human Brain by Electromagnetic Induction of Fundamental Algorithms’. And, of course, all human beings are immersed within the medium known as Earth’s atmosphere.

Begich and Manning discuss a range of mind control technologies including ‘brain biofeedback’ – which enables a person to learn how to manipulate their own brain waves, using a computer initially, in profound ways – thus offering the opportunity ‘to take greater control of ourselves through better control of our minds’. At its most benign, this technology has assisted people to reach higher meditative states, helped children suffering from attention deficit disorders and enabled adults to break drug and alcohol dependencies. Unfortunately: ‘It is disturbing to realize that governments are interested in these technologies, not for beneficial individual uses but in order to gain increased control over populations they view as dangerous. These technologies offer both great promise and a high potential for abuse.’ See Angels Don’t Play This HAARP p.138.

If you would like to watch an articulate, straightforward account of the development of some of the early technological methods of mind control, Dr Nick Begwich offers one in about eleven minutes from the 12:45 mark of this video: ‘NWO – The Battle For Your Mind & Body’. But an internet search will reveal a wide range of videos in which Begwich presents his research findings as well as his concerns.

Of course, this concern about how the technology could be deployed is shared by others.

In his own research on the subject, the founder of the ‘International Movement for the Ban of Manipulation of Human Nervous System by Technical Means’, Czech writer Mojmír Babáček concluded his 2004 study with this warning:

One clear consequence of the continuation of the apparent politics of secrecy surrounding technologies enabling remote control of the human brain is that the governments, who own such technologies, could use them without having to consult public opinion. Needless to say, any meaningful democracy in today’s world could be disrupted, through secret and covert operations. It is not inconceivable that in the future, entire population groups subjected to mind control technologies, could be living in a ‘fake democracy’ where their own government or a foreign power could broadly shape their political opinions by means of mind control technologies. See ‘Electromagnetic and Informational Weapons: The Remote Manipulation of the Human Brain’.

Despite Babáček’s well-founded concern and long-standing efforts, research on technological control of the human mind has continued to expand without regulation, with much of this research done in secret, which Babáček has long resisted as well. See ‘The Ways to Defeat the Secrecy Surrounding the Existence of Mind Control Technology’.

Among other outcomes, this ongoing research meant that, by 2011, the McGovern Institute for Brain Research was able to control the brain using light. Research in this area by several organizations is pursued vigorously and continues to make progress. See ‘Controlling nerve cells with light opened new ways to study the brain’.

And in 2018, Professor Antoine Jérusalem explained progress made in using sound waves to control the human mind. Describing ‘non-invasive neuromodulation – changing brain activity without the use of surgery’ Jérusalem explains it thus: ‘the principle of non-invasive neuromodulation is to focus ultrasound waves into a region in the brain so that they all gather in a small spot. Then hopefully, given the right set of parameters, this can change the activity of the neurons.’ The aim is to control the neuronal activity without damaging the brain tissue. While keen to acknowledge potential benefits, Jérusalem concedes inherent problems. How dystopian could it get? ‘I can see the day coming where a scientist will be able to control what a person sees in their mind’s eye, by sending the right waves to the right place in their brain.’ He advocates regulation. See ‘Mind control using sound waves? We ask a scientist how it works’.

Of course, research in the field of technological manipulation of the mind is not confined to the West with countries like China doing considerable research in the field as well. The People’s Liberation Army is considering a variety of psychological warfare technologies ‘that it envisions leveraging for future operations. These include advanced computing, especially big data and information processing; brain science, especially brain imaging; and legacy proposals that remain of interest, including sonic weapons, laser weapons, subliminal messaging, and holograms.’ See ‘Chinese Next-Generation Psychological Warfare: The Military Applications of Emerging Technologies and Implications for the United States’.

As you might have expected, the most recent efforts at technological mind control have included research into the use of nanotechnology. In their research on the subject, Prithiv K. R. Kumar & Albert Alukal explained, with a sequence of images, how nanotechnology could be delivered into a specific part of the brain and what constituents would be required to achieve particular outcomes, including in relation to brain damage repair. See ‘Control of Mind using Nanotechnology’.

And Tyler Nguyen and colleagues wrote another paper that cites shortcomings in some approaches to ‘brain stimulation’ and goes on to discuss the possibility of using ‘magnetoelectric nanoparticles’ (MENs) which was originally proposed in 2012 but later demonstrated. ‘The nanoparticles can be injected into a vein or via intranasal administration, forced to cross the blood–brain barrier (BBB) and consequently localized to a target region by applying a magnetic field gradient…. The unique properties of MENs, due to their small size (~ 30 nm)… may provide significant improvements over currently used techniques in efficacy and tissue penetration for noninvasive brain stimulation.’ See In Vivo Wireless Brain Stimulation via Non-invasive and Targeted Delivery of Magnetoelectric Nanoparticles’.

But as Ana Maria Mihalcea MD, PhD elaborates her own research in this field, she highlights ‘the capability of the Nanotechnology in the C19 injections as well as the Nanotechnology we inhale via geoengineering chemtrails and food supply to control the human mind.’ She goes on to write: ‘All aspects of human functioning can be altered in the brain without the recipient of the technology knowing it…. Quantum Dots, Carbon Nanotubes (Graphene) and Lipid Nanoparticles creating Hydrogel are all components discussed previously in my posts.’ See the following article and earlier ones accessible below it: ‘“Control of Mind Using Nanotechnology” – 2020 Scientific Paper Explains Complete Thought and Brain Control through Nanotechnology’.

And lest you think that geoengineering nanoparticles can’t be a serious problem, Dane Wigington’s recent interview of an anonymous whistleblowing scientist working in the agricultural sector in the U.S. reveals a program that sprays 40 million tons of nanoparticles onto the Earth’s surface annually. Of course, given the range of functions that nanoparticles can be designed to perform, we can only speculate on the proportion of these nanoparticles sprayed that might be devoted to mind control. Watch Nanoparticle Contamination Cover-up: Answers from a Scientist’.

But further to her research on nanotechology in human blood and its implications for mind control, Mihalcea has also drawn attention to military research – see ‘Brain-Computer Interfaces: U.S. Military Applications and Implications, An Initial Assessment’ – concerned with exploiting such technologies in conjunction with artificial intelligence: ‘rewriting neuronal function in my vocabulary means total mind control, human enslavement, and ultimately may mean human extinction’. See ‘Brain Computer Interfaces: US Military Applications and Implications’.

And in the last of her trilogy of books on geoengineering, Geoengineered Transhumanism: How the Environment Has Been Weaponized by Chemicals, Electromagnetism & Nanotechnology for Synthetic Biology Elana Freeland notes that ‘Millions of “neurograins” collecting and communicating data to remote hubs are now in all human brains…. “Absolute limits” are now about tininess, the micro, nano, pico, and femto of particles whose extraordinary power is disguised as insignificant but actually hands over the keys to the kingdom of remote control over bodies and brains to those who control technology proximate to the subatomic quantum threshold.’

In an interview on the subject, Freeland simply observes: ‘They prepped us for 20 years with what we breathed in [the nanoparticles – mainly metals such as Barium, Strontium, Aluminum (the worst for humans), Chromium, Lithium… – they dropped on us] and now one of the things that’s going in through the jab [Covid-19 injection] is software and hardware, microprocessors, so that the 5G, 6G systems – and notice I am including 6G I want to make that clear: There is 6G out as well. It’s just that they have not announced it but it’s up and running – … this nanotechnology that I am talking about can run our behaviour, our thoughts, our feelings and our emotions. And I am not talking about the future.’ Watch ‘Slobodni podcast #27 Elana Freeland’.

Given the dangers posed by the capacity of certain technologies to control the human mind, which he continues to oppose to this day – see ‘Is Mankind Able to Prevent Abuse of New Technologies Against Democracy and Human Rights?’ and ‘Control The Human Brain, Control the World. Neurotechnology and the Ban of Mind Control Weapons: If Democracy Is to Win in This World, the United Nations Must Become Democratic’ – on 18 June 2022 Mojmír Babáček and fellow signatories sent an ‘Open letter to the governments and parliaments of the world to create legislation to protect people’s brains and bodies against attacks by neurotechnologies’ and in May 2023 Babáček challenged national governments around the world to follow the example set by the Chilean government, which adopted a law in 2021 guaranteeing Chilean citizens ‘the rights to personal identity, free will and mental privacy’ and ‘prove that they are not planning to transform their states into totalitarian states where the elite turn citizens into bio-robots, controlled by supercomputers.’ See ‘People’s Brains and Bodies Are Not Protected Against Attacks by Electromagnetic Waves and Neurotechnologies: The sixth generation of cell phone telephony plans to connect human brains to the internet’.

As much as I appreciate Babáček’s long-standing efforts, there is no prospect of this happening given Elite plans to control the mind of every individual living.

Hence, we must resist it ourselves.

Strategically Resisting Efforts to Control Our Minds

Elite efforts to control our minds are long-standing, multifaceted and sophisticated although most trigger people’s (unconscious) fear as a basic component of their efforts.

Terrorized during childhood into submissive obedience to authority, bamboozled by a staggering array of mind control techniques and technologies of which there is almost zero public awareness, entranced by the latest technological gadget while reassured by the delusional promise of greater ‘privacy, security and convenience’, only a rare human is perceiving how these individual components are just parts in an overarching program that is progressively drawing us into a trap which will render those of us left alive into transhuman slaves within the technocratic walls of the Elite’s ‘smart’ cities.

Thus, for example, the vast number of people who accept payment to do Elite bidding – including those working in the public relations, propaganda, censorship and technological mind control industries – have clearly been terrorized out of their moral autonomy and, hence, are incapable of perceiving and acting in concert with the general human interest.

But most people are already so entrapped by a combination of Elite measures that there is no realistic prospect, in the timeframe available, of helping them to escape Elite influence sufficiently to survive the current range of threats to their identity, privacy, security, freedom and life by resisting these threats effectively.

Unfortunately, this includes most people who were able to perceive the delusions presented to us in relation to the ‘virus’, injectables and the various mandates.

Thus, the number of people capable of resisting effectively (that is, strategically) the foundational components of the Elite program is relatively few.

But if you regard yourself as one of these individuals, then here are the key things you need to be doing to maximize the prospects of your children having minds of their own and to defend a future worth living.

Consider making ‘My Promise to Children’. To be able to make this commitment, you might need to spend some time becoming more aware of your own emotional Self. See ‘Putting Feelings First’. To fulfill your promise to children, you will certainly need to be able to listen, deeply, to them – see ‘Nisteling: The Art of Deep Listening’ – and to understand the hazards of the existing education system. See ‘Do We Want School or Education?’

Tragically, we are at a point in human history when the obstacles to retaining autonomy over one’s mind are enormous. But how a child is parented is the most crucial variable in the ultimate outcome for the individual.

And if you have retained sufficient control over you own mind, then you will know, intuitively if not intellectually, that resisting the Elite’s complex and sophisticated program is going to require considerable effort both by you as an individual and by those we can mobilize to respond powerfully too. And this will not include lobbying or petitioning Elite agents. See ‘The Elite Coup to Kill or Enslave Us: Why Can’t Governments, Legal Actions and Protests Stop Them?’

In essence, this means that your resistance to the Elite program must be strategic. If it is not, Elite insanity will ensure that sufficient and, if necessary, overwhelming violence will be inflicted on us to compel compliance with their will. See ‘The Global Elite is Insane Revisited’.

So if you are committed to being strategic in your resistance to the ‘Great Reset’ and its related agendas, you are welcome to participate in the ‘We Are Human, We Are Free’ campaign which identifies a list of 30 strategic goals for doing so.

More simply, and as a minimum, you can download the ‘We Are Human, We Are Free’ one-page flyer that identifies a short series of crucial nonviolent actions that anyone can take. This flyer, now available in 23 languages (Chinese, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hebrew, Hungarian, Italian, Japanese, Malay, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Serbian, Spanish, Slovak and Turkish) with more languages in the pipeline, can be downloaded from here: ‘One-page Flyer’.

You are also welcome to consider sharing the article ‘Policing the Elite’s Technocracy: How Do We Resist This Effectively?’ with your local police. Resistance by police will be vital to the success of our resistance efforts.

And you might also consider organizing or participating in a local strategy to halt the deployment of 5G, given its crucial role in making the Elite’s ‘smart city’ technocratic prisons function. See ‘Halting the Deployment of 5G’.

If you like, you can also watch, share and/or organize to show, a short video about the campaign here: ‘We Are Human, We Are Free’ video.

Moreover, if this strategic resistance to the ‘Great Reset’ (and related agendas) appeals to you, consider joining the ‘We Are Human, We Are Free’ Telegram or Signal groups (with links accessible from the website).

Conclusion

Most humans laud the idea of ‘a free society’ and’ freedom of the individual’ but don’t even realise that what we most need is freedom of the mind. We pay lip service to the rights to freedom of thought, expression and conscience but lack the powerful mind necessary to meaningfully exercise these rights, often settling for superficial symbols of ‘freedom’ such as the right to choose the form of our exploitation employment, how we spend our spare time, the sporting team we support, and the style and color of our hair and clothing.

The reality is that we are terrorized throughout childhood into submissive obedience to authority leaving us highly vulnerable to the comprehensive range of psychological, political, medical and technological weapons directed against our minds. In this circumstance, identifying the truth about what is really happening in the world is a challenge far too great for most people.

Moreover, in the situation we now face, even among those who have been able to perceive the most obvious delusions being presented to them, the bulk of these individuals have proven incapable of doing little more than complaining powerlessly, begging an Elite agent to ‘go easy’ on them (by lobbying or petitioning a government or international organization such as the World Health Organization), cross-posting the latest irrelevant post from one social media platform to another, possibly advocating unspecified ‘resistance’ (or strategically irrelevant action), or attending a protest demonstration.

Seeking out and applying strategic means of resistance to the overall Elite program – the World Economic Forum’s ‘Great Reset’ with its fourth industrial revolution (technocratic), eugenicist and transhumanist components – or recognizing it when offered, has remained beyond them.

Hence, any candid assessment of the evidence presented above leads to one conclusion: The Elite war on human minds is now so advanced and effective that death or transhuman slavery for everyone on Planet Earth is virtually inevitable.

As Steve Biko noted all those years ago: ‘The most potent weapon of the oppressor is the mind of the oppressed.’

Biodata: Robert J. Burrowes has a lifetime commitment to understanding and ending human violence. He has done extensive research since 1966 in an effort to understand why human beings are violent and has been a nonviolent activist since 1981. He is the author of ‘Why Violence?’ His email address is flametree@riseup.net and his website is here.

The Elite’s 5,000-Year War on Your Mind is Climaxing. Can We Defeat it? Part 1

By Robert J. Burrowes

The most potent weapon of the oppressor is the mind of the oppressed.

-Steve Biko, South African freedom fighter, beaten to death in an Apartheid prison cell in 1977.

So you think that you make up your own mind about what you will do, how you will do it, what you will buy and so on.

Good, because that is what you are supposed to believe. Especially when you are thinking what others want you to think.

Most of us like to believe that we have ‘a mind of our own’.

But, in fact, any serious consideration of the evidence leads to the exact opposite conclusion. In the vast majority of cases, you haven’t had a mind that was yours since you were very young. At least on anything that really matters in your life.

Let me elaborate.

In recent years, I have been writing about the Elite’s 5,000-year war against humanity with the final battle in this war now being fought. See ‘The Final Battle for Humanity: It is “Now or Never” in the Long War Against Homo Sapiens’.

Hence, I have argued, it is important to understand the Elite’s ‘Great Reset’, with its fourth industrial revolution (technocratic), eugenicist and transhumanist programs, as simply the latest manifestation of this 5,000-year war on Homo Sapiens during which Elites (local, ‘national’, ultimately global) have used a range of policies to contrive ‘great events’ – orchestrated wars and famines; slavery; human sacrifice; imperialism and colonialism; economic exploitation through contrived financial crises (including depressions); ‘natural’ disasters, revolutions and ‘medical’ crises to name the most obvious – to distract attention from and facilitate profound changes in world order, to kill off substantial proportions of the human population and enslave those left alive while obscuring vast transfers of wealth from ordinary people to the Elite (whether local, ‘national’ or, ultimately, global). See Historical Analysis of the Global Elite: Ransacking the World Economy Until “You’ll Own Nothing.”

This includes, for example, the Elite-orchestrated war in Ukraine which is nothing more than another manifestation of this policy – see ‘The War in Ukraine: Understanding and Resisting the Global Elite’s Deeper Agenda’ – and, for example, it is consistent with this program that depleted uranium (DU) weapons have been deployed by Britain in Ukraine, the explosion of which threatens citizens across Europe – see ‘Britain’s Decision to Send Depleted Uranium Munitions to Ukraine Will Have Grim Consequences’ and ‘The British Gift that Keeps on Giving: Uranium-irradiated Wind and Rain for Poland, Germany, Denmark, Netherlands and London too’ – and that the United States used a nuclear weapon to destroy the Nordstream Pipelines, in this case inflicting a ‘first strike’ nuclear attack on Russia and Germany, a range of adverse environmental consequences on the populations of Scandinavia and Europe, and effectively a knock-out blow to key economies of Western Europe (by depriving them of a crucial source of energy). See ‘Nordstream – Anatomy of Dante’s Explosion’.

Both of these nuclear attacks are readily identifiable as measures consistent with the explicit Elite program to kill off a substantial proportion of the human population.

Thus, while I have previously identified four fundamental shortcomings in the efforts of anti-war activists over the past 100 years, which together account for the movement’s failure to have any impact in undermining war as an institution – see ‘Rage Against the War Machine: What Rage? “When will they ever learn?”’ – it is also clear that another very old threat, now being embellished by new and more pernicious forms, is being ignored too.

So, as I have become increasingly aware over recent years, there is another entire dimension of war-fighting that is only being discussed at the margin and must be considered and addressed not only by those committed to ending war but by anyone who values human life, identity, freedom and free will.

Because, as is manifestly obvious to those investigating more deeply and as captured in the title of this article, there is a battle now being fought in the technocratic realm and it is being waged against all of humanity simultaneously, not just a particular population.

In essence, this battle is the final battle in the war being fought to control your mind.

To put this another way, a primary battlefield of what many now call fifth-generation warfare (5GW) is your mind and who controls it. What is 5GW? It is defined by James Corbett in the following terms: ‘Fifth-generation warfare is an all-out war that is being waged against all of us by our governments and the international organizations to which they belong. It is being waged against each and every one of us right now, and it is a battle for full-spectrum dominance over every single aspect of your life: your movements and interactions, your transactions, even your innermost thoughts and feelings and desires. Governments the world over are working with corporations to leverage technology to control you down to the genomic level, and they will not stop until each and every person who resists them is subdued or eliminated.’ See ‘Your Guide to 5th-Generation Warfare’.

But, to reiterate the distinction in Corbett’s words: 5th Generation warfare is ‘being waged at all levels, not just the mental.’ and any review of the ‘Great Reset’ plans demonstrates the extraordinary breadth and depth of the control now being imposed.

Nevertheless, control of our minds is central to the war being fought and any successful defense in this war requires that we identify the threats to our mind and defend ourselves adequately against them. Otherwise we are poorly placed to identify and defend against all of the other threats.

Of course, using less invasive but still very effective weapons, the war to control your mind is ancient and it is this component on which this article is focused both because it is extremely advanced and is necessary if other components of the Elite plan are to be fully implemented.

Ancient? In fact, several authors have addressed this subject. For example, in their 2015 book on the subject, Marie D. Jones and Larry Flaxman observed that:

Mind control is probably as old as our awareness that we each had a mind of our own. Throughout the course of history, there are a number of names for mind control that describe a common goal: to take over a person’s innermost thoughts and control his or her behaviors and actions. Brainwashing, coercion, thought reform, mental manipulation, psychological warfare, programming, conversion, gas lighting, indoctrination methods, psychic driving, crowd control: They all describe a method by which a person’s individual thoughts, beliefs, and perceptions are disrupted, dismissed, and destroyed – even replaced with the thoughts, beliefs, and perceptions of someone else. Whether designed to create the perfect assassin or super soldier, indoctrinate prisoners of war, recruit members into a cult or religious belief system, or control the consuming masses and direct their behaviors in accordance to the political whims of the day, mind control has been used extensively in our past, is in use today, and no doubt will be used in the future. See Mind Wars: A History of Mind Control, Surveillance, and Social Engineering by the Government, Media, and Secret Societies.

And by 1956 Joost A. M. Meerloo, M.D. had already written a book canvassing a wide spectrum of mind control techniques and technologies in a variety of categories with, for just one example, an insightful discussion on how readily justice is subverted within legal systems by such techniques and technologies. See The Rape of the Mind.

Anyway, for the purposes of this article, I have distinguished four distinct categories of mind control, which have evolved at different times historically. I then explain each in turn. In chronological order, I label these different categories as follows:

1. psychological mind control,

2. political mind control,

3. medical mind control, and

4. technological mind control.

Psychological Mind Control

By far the oldest form of mind control is graphically illustrated by what I have previously characterized as ‘the adult war on children’. See, for example, ‘Humanity’s “Dirty Little Secret”: Starving, Enslaving, Raping, Torturing and Killing our Children’.

This war, to briefly reiterate its essential nature, has its basis in the manner in which human adults – as parents, teachers, religious figures and in other roles – use a potent combination of ‘visible’, ‘invisible’ and ‘utterly invisible’ violence to terrorize children and adolescents into submissive obedience under the pretext of ‘socializing’ them. See Why Violence?, Fearless Psychology and Fearful Psychology: Principles and Practice and ‘Do We Want School or Education?’

This works well for the Elite because it creates a human population that readily follows orders from parents, teachers, religious figures, employers, police, judges, military personnel, governments and anyone else ‘in authority’.

Hence, human societies everywhere are essentially populated with adults who are easily scared into uncritically obeying Elite directives, conveyed through a variety of its agents, as the past 3.5 years have graphically demonstrated. But because the fear is largely unconscious, most adults can easily be led to believe they are acting out of their own free will or, at worst, following ‘reasonable’ orders ‘for the good of the community’.

Moreover, this can occur for a number of reasons. Denied safe opportunities to focus on feeling their fear and terrorized out of expressing their anger and other feelings during childhood – the logical response to ‘visible’, ‘invisible’ or ‘utterly invisible’ violence inflicted by an adult – the child ‘learns’ a range of ways to suppress awareness of these feelings, almost invariably unconsciously, which is why their fear, anger and other feelings are not necessarily obvious to the person or those around them.

A variety of psychological mechanisms such as denial – denying the existence of a reality that frightens/angers in order to feel safe – and delusion – constructing a delusion in relation to a frightening/infuriating reality that cannot be denied or suppressed in order to feel safe – are everyday occurrences for most people. But these two psychological mechanisms are not the only ones. For one discussion of several key ways in which fear manifests but is unconsciously psychologically concealed by the individual, see ‘The Disintegrated Mind: The Greatest Threat to Human Survival on Earth’.

But another outcome of suppressing awareness of how one feels – including angry – also denies the child the awareness and capacity to defend themselves against violence and other injustices. As a result most children – even those who learn to ‘bully’ – end up acting very powerlessly in the face of violence and injustice as they grow up.

And this continues into adulthood. Having ‘learned’, under threat of violence from parents, teachers and other adults, not to defend themselves against their parents, teachers and other adults as a child, the child grows into an equally powerless adult.

Thus, in the current context of threats posed by the Elite program – the World Economic Forum’s ‘Great Reset’ with its fourth industrial revolution (technocratic), eugenicist, transhumanist, political and economic components – even among those who have been able to perceive the most obvious delusions being presented to them, the bulk of these individuals have proven incapable of doing little more than complaining powerlessly, begging an Elite agent to ‘go easy’ on them (by lobbying or petitioning a government or international organization such as the World Health Organization), cross-posting the latest irrelevant post from one social media platform to another, possibly advocating unspecified resistance (or strategically irrelevant action), or attending a protest demonstration.

Seeking out and applying strategic means of resistance to the ‘Great Reset’, or recognizing and acting on it when offered, has remained beyond them.

But while childhood terrorization is enough to immobilize most people into behaving powerlessly under threat, Elite agents have also invested enormous effort to work out how best to capitalize on this fear. And while fear isn’t the only psychological motivator used, it is the most powerful, with more gross or subtle versions used depending on the context. As the historical record demonstrates.

Obviously, as you may know, there is an extensive history of psychological manipulation of human populations particularly in relation to mobilizing national populations to support and participate in wars, which any investigation of Elite-driven propaganda prior to and during wars will illustrate. But war is only one context in which human populations are psychologically manipulated by Elites. Much of the Elite propaganda around the ‘Covid-19 pandemic’, for example, was grounded in manipulating people’s fear.

Of course, the knowledge of how to manipulate us did not drop out of the sky. But while earlier periods of human history clearly demonstrate the Elite’s intuitive understanding that triggering fear was a powerful form of behavioural control, since World War II particularly, Elite-sponsored institutions, including governments, have invested enormous sums of money to find out, as precisely as possible, how to manipulate our psychological responses to stimuli in order to control our behaviour. An excellent example of these institutions is The Tavistock Institute of Human Relations in the UK, founded in 1947.

But as Dr Daniel Estulin has described in great detail in his book Tavistock Institute: Social Engineering the Masses, the Institute’s sanitized name – The Tavistock Institute of Human Relations – does not describe its real work.

‘The Tavistock Institute, in Sussex, England, describes itself as a nonprofit charity that applies social science to contemporary issues and problems. [In fact] it is the world’s center for mass brainwashing and social engineering activities. It grew from a somewhat crude beginning at Wellington House into a sophisticated organization that was to shape the destiny of the entire planet and, in the process, change the paradigm of modern society.’

The book details both the Tavistock Institute network – identifying connections to research institutes, think tanks, and the drug industry, including the Stanford Research Center, Rand Corporation, Harvard Business School and Office of Naval Research in the U.S. – demonstrating its enormous reach around the world, and exposes the methods of brainwashing and psychological warfare employed.

In the words of Estulin:

‘The essential premise of the work of Tavistock is… that certain kinds of democratic “institutions represent far more efficient instrumentalities for fascist dictatorship than the traditional, straightforwardly” authoritarian models…. The psychological sciences have followed the route initially outlined in 1945 by Dr. John Rawlings Rees, grand master of psywar counterinsurgency.’

Discussing the work of psychiatrist Rees, who wrote the book The Shaping of Psychiatry by War in 1945, Estulin observes that ‘Rees called for the development of psychiatric shock troops in order to develop “methods of political control based upon driving the majority of the human population toward psychosis” through procedures of so-called programmed behavioural modification. He proposed this to render the population submissive under the post-World War II economic world order.’ See Estulin Tavistock Institute p. 6.

Of course, the budget to research ways to manipulate us psychologically to perform Elite-desired behaviours has expanded dramatically since World War II as is evident from the number and identity of organizations conducting the research. See, for example, Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness. Moreover, much of this is now focused on manipulation related to the current Elite program to impose on us their ‘Great Reset’. See ‘Government Nudge Units Find the “Best” Ways to Manipulate the Public’.

For example, a range of Elite organizations has spent millions on research to identify the most effective ways to terrorize people into submitting to injection. See the US Social Science Research Council & National Science Foundation’s ‘Mercury Project’, ‘Mercury Project to Boost Covid-19 Vaccination Rates and Counter Public Health Mis- and Disinformation in 17 Countries Worldwide’ and ‘Rockefeller Foundation, Nonprofits Spending Millions on Behavioral Psychology Research to “Nudge” More People to Get COVID Vaccines’.

And, to highlight the point that it is our fear that is the Elite’s greatest asset in this war against our minds (and trumps intelligence, no matter how great), intellectuals who, in theory, should be more capable of investigating what is happening in relation to those key issues of concern to society – such as those discussed here: ‘The Treason of the Intellectuals’ – are routinely exposed as simply frightened (again, even if unconsciously so) and support an Elite-driven narrative that is readily exposed by serious scrutiny.

Anyway, if you would like to explore this dimension of mind control more fully, Daniel Smith has compiled a straightforward summary of what he considers those methods most frequently associated with the practice: brainwashing, hypnosis, manipulation, persuasion, and deception. See Banned Mind Control Techniques Unleashed: Learn The Dark Secrets Of Hypnosis, Manipulation, Deception, Persuasion, Brainwashing And Human Psychology.

And in his own study of ‘mind games’, psychologist Roy Eidelson argues that ‘five issues consistently and profoundly shape the way we understand ourselves, our lives, and the world around us. They are vulnerability, injustice, distrust, superiority, and helplessness. Each of these is a core concern and the basis for one of the questions I mentioned earlier: Are we safe? Are we treated fairly? Who should we trust? Are we good enough? Can we control what happens to us?’ Focusing on these questions which could, in theory, usefully be at the centre of an enlightened public policy, Elites specialize in producing misleading, self-serving and widely promulgated answers that usually ‘lead us away from the more equal and more humane society most of us desire’ in order to ‘exploit these concerns for the specific purpose of advancing their own narrow interests while bringing harm and suffering to so many.’ In his book, Eidelson goes on to explain these five core concerns and examines ‘the specific mind games that the 1% use to take advantage of them’. Given their power, Eidelson concludes that ‘it’s not surprising that these five concerns figure so prominently in the propaganda campaigns of plutocrats who aim to discourage resistance to their agenda.’ See Political Mind Games: How the 1% Manipulate Our Understanding of What’s Happening, What’s Right, and What’s Possible.

Beyond any specific measures, however, the sheer complexity and far-reaching nature of the Elite ‘Great Reset’ program is frightening for most people to contemplate, let alone investigate in detail. Thus, like some other books with a futuristic or dystopian perspective, Alvin Toffler’s 1970 book Future Shock describes a phenomenon we are witnessing now: a population that is psychologically overwhelmed by the rate of change: ‘Future shock is a time phenomenon, a product of the greatly accelerated rate of change in society. It arises from the superimposition of a new culture on an old one. It is culture shock in one’s own society.’ See Toffler Future Shock p.11. So unlike the traveler who can return home to a familiar culture, the victim of future shock cannot. There is no going back and this is fearfully disorienting for most people (and another reason why people submit to the injection: the hope that things will then ‘go back to normal’). The adverse psychological impact of the ‘Great Reset’ has been discussed by several commentators but few realized it was deliberate and why it was so.

The point is simple: as those involved in this research have long known, fear is the most important factor driving human behaviour.

And once that fear has been deeply embedded in the unconscious by childhood terrorization, it is a straightforward task, for those who know what they are doing, to manipulate it later in life in accord with Elite prerogatives.

But it also makes virtually all humans particularly vulnerable to other forms of mind control too, including those that are political.

Political Mind Control

Since the dawn of human civilization, history records a long and steady (if occasionally interrupted) process of Elite efforts to capture and control the minds of those people within their domain, sometimes coupled with efforts to expand that domain.

Whether intent on extorting labor, securing military service, payment of taxes or imposing other forms of control, a submissively obedient population made the task immeasurably easier.

And even when violence was used to impose physical control, it was occasionally accompanied, but almost invariably followed, by efforts to subdue the prospect of any further resistance using less physically violent means. For a thoughtful discussion of how illiteracy and then literacy, for example, have been historically exploited by Elites, see ‘Risen Word’.

But it wasn’t until the C19th century when ‘modern’ methods of political mind control started to be seriously developed and deployed.

Not content with the existing and highly effective psychological methods – again, all founded on terrorizing individuals throughout childhood into submissive obedience to parents, religious figures, school teachers, employers and other significant adults in the child’s life and designed to train the child for a life of servitude – development of political forms of mind control (including ‘news reporting’, advertising, propaganda and censorship) advanced dramatically during the 19th and 20th centuries.

Thus, at least since the emergence of the international news agencies that started in the 1830s, the quality of what qualifies as ‘news reporting’ has been steadily in decline although it is uncertain that there has been a time in history when news reporting actually reported any sort of objective truth. In one sense, this is understandable. Inevitably, those who own and control a media channel have a perspective and the outlet invariably reports from that perspective, declared or not. And provided we are aware of this, we may choose to consume news from a declared perspective or ignore it if not to our taste. In any case, it is a rare outlet in the C21st that publishes a range of perspectives.

In the corporate news world, however, these days we are bombarded with what is called ‘news’ through a variety of media: television, radio, newspapers and social media via the internet. But because the corporate (mainstream) news world is owned by the Elite and its agents who therefore control the major international news agencies (Reuters, Agence France-Presse, Associated Press and United Press International) as well as the major news corporations (such as Alphabet, Comcast, Disney, AT&T, News Corporation, Time Warner, Fox, Facebook, the BBC, Bertelsmann and Baidu), the population that chooses to pay attention to it is fed a uniform and carefully-crafted narrative which is designed to promote Elite interests. This is graphically illustrated in this brief video compilation. Watch ‘Local News Anchors Repeating Same Script Compilation’. There are no genuinely alternative worldviews in this domain.

Of course, these days, the education of journalists starts the process, with most journalists now attending a tertiary institution to learn their craft. But how effectively these institutions turn out graduates committed to unearthing and reporting the truth, whatever the cost, is something worth considering. Given the way news reporting is now so tightly controlled, while this article by Professor Bill Willers might illustrate an unusually graphic example of how news reporting has been corrupted, it will come as no surprise to those familiar with corporate journalism. See ‘What Is Taught in Schools of Journalism?’

Because the reality is that virtually every journalist in the corporate media world becomes a hack, employed to simply write and present stories from the scripts they are given that promote the Elite narrative. And any journalist with genuine integrity keen to report the truth is not employed. Or dismissed once exposed as a truth-teller.

Moreover, journalists with genuine integrity and courage – such as Julian Assange – must create outlets of their own and the Internet now features a significant number in this category. But this does not mean that their freedom to express views that contradict the Elite narrative is respected. Of course not! Just ask Assange, now imprisoned in solitary confinement for four years in Belmarsh prison following seven years imprisonment until losing his asylum at the Ecuadorian Embassy in London, for simply reporting the truth we are all entitled to know.

‘He ripped back the veil on the dark machinations of the U.S. Empire, the wholesale slaughter of civilians in Iraq and Afghanistan, the lies, the corruption, the brutal suppression of those who attempt to speak the truth. The Empire intends to make him pay. He is to be an example to anyone who might think of doing what he did.’ See ‘The Crucifixion of Julian Assange’.

Beyond Assange, other journalists with integrity outside corporate media suffer a range of outcomes, including ‘deplatforming’: removing their capacity to communicate by reducing those outlets willing to publish them. For a range of examples, see ‘The Disappearance of Integrity: Organized Suppression of the Facts, Only Writers Who Support “Official Narratives” Are Tolerated. Americans are blue pill people’.

Needless to say, every journalist in a corporate or government media setting is well aware of Assange’s fate and, while some might make use of the tolerance occasionally afforded a slight variation on the Elite-driven narrative, cowed into submissively reporting what they know to be the permissible perspective. It is safer than risking jail. Or even unemployment.

The outcome of these combined factors is that, in essence, much of what is called ‘news reporting’ by the legacy (corporate) media is nothing more than propaganda. And this has been the case for a very long time.

This has particularly included the use of propaganda, often designed to play on unconscious fears, sophisticated enough to manipulate vast proportions of large national populations to do the bidding of those responsible for controlling the methods deployed. See the 1928 book Propaganda.

Most notably perhaps, in this case, was Adolf Hitler’s understanding of the ‘big lie’ in manipulating the German population during World War II and its use by his propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels who is (perhaps incorrectly) attributed with these words: ‘If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it.’ See ‘Joseph Goebbels: On the “Big Lie”’.

And, more recently, in a video interview, Professor Michel Chossudovsky thoughtfully discusses the importance of lies in various contexts, including in relation to 911, wars and the Covid-19 crisis. Watch ‘When The Lie Becomes The Truth’.

In fact, to reiterate, it has been the case for very many decades already that even the most basic communication in government and corporate media is effectively devoid of educational material or truthful information designed to inform you so that you can make your own thoughtfully-considered evaluation in response to it. For another account of this, written in 1988, see Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media. Of course, this is precisely how the Global Elite wants it and why it has unfolded this way.

For example, this article by Lara-Nour Walton at Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting (FAIR) thoughtfully identifies six different ways that prominent corporate media outlets lie in relation to Israeli violence against the Palestinians, now including the use of artificial intelligence. See ‘Six Tropes to Look Out for That Distort Israel/Palestine Coverage’.

Of course, it is well known and has been thoroughly documented that Elite agents, including the US government, have long subverted what is euphemistically referred to as ‘the free press’. One example of this is ‘Project Mockingbird’. This project uses CIA spies as journalists in order to control the public debate. See ‘The CIA and the Media: How America’s Most Powerful News Media Worked Hand in Glove with the Central Intelligence Agency and Why the Church Committee Covered It Up’ and ‘U.S. Government Projects & Programs That Have Included Criminal and Unethical Actions Against Civilians’.

For other work that thoughtfully teases out more of the nuances employed to manipulate our minds, you can read what the following authors have identified in their respective articles: Lynn Hasher, David Goldstein and Thomas Toppino highlight that frequency of repetition makes something seem true; Jordan Hall points out the increasing difficulty of making sense of anything given the variety of plausible explanations deliberately promulgated; John Pilger reminds us of the value of ‘omission’ of relevant history, truths and facts; and Caitlyn Johnstone, among other points, mentions Elite efforts to ‘exploit glitches in human cognition like the illusory truth effect, which causes our minds to mistake the experience of having heard something before with the experience of having heard something that is true.’ See, respectively, ‘Frequency and the Conference of Referential Validity’, The War on Sensemaking’, ‘Silencing the Lambs: How Propaganda Works’ and ‘Why Propaganda Works’.

And, in an update to the ‘bread and circuses’ trick used in ancient Rome, another simple but extremely effective method is to make sure that most people are comfortable enough economically (if not made vulnerable by their marginal economic existence) while deluging us with a huge range of issues to consider as well as many forms of entertainment (sport, cinema, theatre, art galleries, museums…) and use these to distract us from any central issues. So, in the current context, while most people are debating the latest controversies in the recent game of football, tennis or basketball, and some others are arguing about whether or not the SARS-CoV-2 ‘virus’ exists, whether or not the various WHO-approved, government-imposed lockdowns and other measures were necessary, and whether or not the ‘vaccines’ are ‘safe and effective’, a multitude of other issues are presented (the war in Ukraine, a range of gender and sexual identity issues, environmental threats, economic and financial challenges… each with a range of subsidiary issues) to further overwhelm and confuse us. This works very well with people who are already busy with work, families, financial obligations and other responsibilities, and draws our attention away from the fundamental threat: the Elite’s ‘Great Reset’ and its component eugenicist, technocratic, transhumanist, political and economic programs.

[Obviously, I am not suggesting that other issues – the risk of nuclear war, many environmental and human rights threats… – are not vitally important too. It’s just that the current Elite program threatens to destroy our capacity to consider and engage in all other issues, such as those just nominated, if it is not defeated.]

Anyway, with so many tools at its disposal, the Elite’s political war against our minds is invisible to virtually everyone.

As you will not be surprised to read, these days, the political mind control industry is huge, embracing substantial sections of national economies.

So, with virtually all human adults effectively terrorized out of the capacity for independent thinking and investigation at a young age, once an Elite narrative has been decided, the relevant propaganda is then prepared by its agents in the massive ‘public relations’ industry, worth $US107billion globally in 2023 – see ‘Public relations market size worldwide from 2022 to 2027’ – before being promulgated through its agents in international organizations, governments, the corporate media (and a relatively new and powerful weapon: corporate social media such as Facebook, Twitter [now X], Instagram, TikTok, YouTube…), education systems and the entertainment industry, while its vast censorship network – see ‘Report on the Censorship-Industrial Complex: The Top 50 Organizations to Know. The citizen’s starter kit to understanding the new global information cartel’ and ‘Docs Offer Glimpse Inside Censorship Industrial Complex’ – is deployed to ensure that the truth, labeled variously by Elite agents as ‘misinformation’ (false information unintentionally created or shared), ‘malinformation’ (information based on fact but used out of context to mislead, harm or manipulate) and ‘disinformation’ (false information deliberately created to mislead, harm or manipulate) – see ‘We’re in This Together. Mis-, Dis-, and Malinformation Stops with You’ – is prevented from being widely exposed.

As you might have immediately realized, such definitions vastly expand the capacity of Elite agents to censor narratives that compete with the one that is endorsed by the Elite – that is, to suppress free speech – which, of course, is how they have been used. For more on this, see ‘A Century of Censorship’.

For example, the latest UN report on this subject uses a classically Orwellian newspeak to justify censorship in order to maintain ‘information integrity’. For the unwary, the superficially benign wording used in the report might conceal its true intent but you can judge for yourself from its opening paragraph which calls for an

‘empirically backed consensus around facts, science and knowledge. To that end, the present brief outlines potential principles for a code of conduct that will help to guide Member States, the digital platforms and other stakeholders in their efforts to make the digital space more inclusive and safe for all,

while vigorously defending the right to freedom of opinion and expression, and the right to access information. The Code of Conduct for Information Integrity on Digital Platforms is being developed

in the context of preparations for the Summit of the Future. My hope is that it will provide a gold

standard for guiding action to strengthen information integrity.’ See ‘Our Common Agenda Policy Brief 8: Information Integrity on Digital Platforms’.

Given the Elite’s extensive history of using propaganda and censorship to control what people believe in order to manipulate their behaviour – while suppressing any forum that endeavours to share alternative perspectives, arguments and critiques – the problem with an ‘empirically backed consensus around facts, science and knowledge’ is that it simply means that Elite deceit, lies and manipulation would be shielded from scrutiny. Which is why this report is just another attempt to conceal Elite propaganda and censorship, in this case by labeling the Elite-endorsed narrative as the one with ‘information integrity’.

And this is why major international organizations such as the EU, WHO and UN are putting enormous effort into clamping down on those seeking to expose the truth behind Elite manipulation and manoeuvring.

As Taylor Hudak explains in a recent article about censorship proposals in the European Union, concern has been expressed about ‘loopholes that would allow the surveillance of journalists while paving the way for unprecedented interventions in the internal media market by the European Commission.’ See ‘Centralizing Information Control! Inside the EU’s Latest Proposal to Censor the Media’.

But any straightforward interpretation of the draconian censorship measures being introduced by the European Union leads to the obvious and inevitable conclusion that free speech is being terminated in Europe.

As Ben Bartee points out in an article summarizing three previous ones he has written: ‘Nation-states under EU jurisdiction can no longer be rationally said to be “free,” to the extent that they ever truly were to begin with. They are now part of a wholly integrated slave colony of the multinational technocracy, headed by the World Economic Forum and similar organizations outside of the reach of any democratic control.’ See ‘Brutal EU Censorship Regime Takes Hold, “Free Speech” Advocate Elon Musk Folds, YouTube Adopts WHO “Misinformation” Policy’.

Not content with measures being taken by the UN and EU, the WHO has developed its own programs to censor us, carefully outlined in their document ‘Preparedness and Resilience for Emerging Threats’.

As explained by Dr Michael Nevradakis the WHO ‘claims “misinformation” has resulted in an “infodemic” that poses a threat – even in instances where the information is “accurate.”’ See ‘WHO Initiative Would “Promote Desired Behaviors” by Surveilling Social Media’.

Of course, not to be left out, the US military is vitally concerned with what we are led to believe as well and US Special Operations Command (USSOCOM) ‘has contracted New York-based Accrete AI to deploy software that detects “real time” disinformation threats on social media. The company’s Argus anomaly detection AI software analyzes social media data, accurately capturing “emerging narratives” and generating intelligence reports for military forces to speedily neutralize disinformation threats. Synthetic media, including AI-generated viral narratives, deep fakes [a digitally manipulated image to replace one person’s likeness with that of another], and other harmful social media-based applications of AI, pose a serious threat to US national security and civil society,” Accrete founder and CEO Prashant Bhuyan claimed. ‘Social media is widely recognized as an unregulated environment where adversaries routinely exploit reasoning vulnerabilities and manipulate behavior through the intentional spread of disinformation.’

But Accrete will also launch a business version of its Argus software for disinformation detection later this year. ‘The AI software will provide protection for “urgent customer pain points” against AI-generated synthetic media, such as viral disinformation and deep fakes. Providing this protection requires AI that can automatically “learn” what is most important to an enterprise and predict the likely social media narratives that will emerge before they influence behavior.’ See ‘USSOCOM to Use AI to Detect Disinformation Threats on Social Media’.

As ‘Sundance’ astutely observes however, the ‘Argus detection protocol’ is incredibly expensive so by using military funding to pay for the research under the auspices of ‘national defense’ but then allowing major corporations privileged access to the technology, the US government gains effective control of a technology to manipulate its own citizens while bypassing constitutional limits on such activity (in this case, the Posse Comitatus Act which limits the power of the US government to use federal military personnel to enforce domestic policies within the United States). See ‘US Special Operations Command Will Deploy Argus AI Program to Scour Social Media for Disinformation, Misinformation and Malinformation, National Security Authority to Protect U.S. Internet from “Pain Points”’.

To reiterate: the purpose of this AI technology is for ‘military forces to speedily neutralize disinformation threats’; that is, anything that contradicts the Elite-driven narrative. Free speech is vanishing before our eyes.

But the threats keep accumulating.

In a recent publication on its iVerify initiative, the United Nations Development Program noted that ‘Understanding online information pollution is an urgent global challenge. Misinformation, disinformation, and hate speech threaten peace and security, disproportionately affecting those who are already vulnerable.’ Thus:

‘iVerify is UNDP’s automated fact-checking tool that can be used to identify false information and prevent and mitigate its spread.’ See ‘iVerify: Supporting actors around the world for the prevention and mitigation of disinformation, misinformation and hate speech’.

But as noted by one critic, the program’s ‘automated fact-checking service’ will be funded and conducted by Elite agents in Big Tech. See ‘U.N. Unveils “Automated Fact-Checking Tool” to Counter Disinformation with Big-Tech, Soros-Funded Orgs’.

So how reliable is fact-checking in defense of the truth?

As it turns out, one recent study concludes that censorship now sometimes masquerades under the guise of ‘fact checking’. Originally an honorable attempt to confirm something as fact, it is now just a corrupt way of concealing censorship and eliminating truthful analysis from the discourse.

In her detailed report of her research into the fact checking industry, Dr Judith Brown identified about ‘500 active fact check platforms’ – noting that it is ‘likely that the number of fact check platforms is far greater than those located’ – with about half linked to media outlets. After explaining many aspects of the fact check industry, it is clear that it is big business. In her report she notes a long list of fact checking ‘grants and donations’ from such entities as the US National Endowment for Democracy, Ford Foundation, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Open Society, Rockefeller Fund, the EU, American and European Embassies, large media corporations, Google, Meta, and various UN agencies. She concludes her report simply:

‘Fact checkers are the mechanism of censorship. They can only do this with immense sums of money that come from the rich and powerful to support their industry…. The fact check industry’s access to wealth and power undermines democracy throughout the world.’ See ‘Fact Checking the “Fact Checkers”’.

As Ilana Rachel Daniel notes in a recent video presentation: ‘The very definition of living in a free world means access to a full spectrum of information and choices where discussion and debate of those facts lead us to a life of self-determination.’ But in her two-part presentation, which acknowledges the work of Antonio Pasquali – see ‘Society can be controlled through its means of communication’ – she provides a fine overview of how mind manipulation is a polished art among those keen to control our behaviour and how their technologies (such as the television and smart phone) and tools (such as Google, Facebook, Twitter, Youtube and the Metaverse) play a vital role in this. See ‘Mind Manipulation – Who is in Control? Part 1’ and ‘Mind Manipulation – Who is in Control? Part 2’.

In their analysis of censorship, John and Nisha Whitehead highlight the role of technology now too. ‘By “censor,” we’re referring to concerted efforts by the government to muzzle, silence and altogether eradicate any speech that runs afoul of the government’s own approved narrative.’

In fact, the Whiteheads label this phenomenon ‘technocensorship’: ‘we are technically free to speak. In reality, however, we are now only as free to speak as a government official – or corporate entities such as Facebook, Google or YouTube – may allow.’ See ‘Technocensorship: The Government’s War on So-Called Dangerous Ideas’.

And this depends, in part, on direction from government intelligence agencies.

As Larry Sanger, a cofounder of Wikipedia, noted in a recent interview with journalist Glenn Greenwald, the online ‘encyclopedia’ has ‘become an instrument of “control” in the hands of the… establishment, among which he counts the CIA, FBI, and other US intelligence agencies’. Noting that this was being observed as early as 2008, Sanger reports that ‘A great part of intelligence and information warfare is conducted online, on websites like Wikipedia.’

Of course, earlier this year, Elon Musk, owner of X (formerly Twitter), released a trove of documents showing how the platform’s former executives colluded with the FBI to remove content the agency wanted hidden’ and ‘assisted the US military’s online influence campaigns’ on behalf of multiple US intelligence agencies. And ‘Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has also admitted that Facebook, the biggest social media platform on Earth, censored accurate information that was damaging to President Joe Biden’s 2020 election campaign at the direct request of the FBI.’ See ‘Former Editor: CIA Moderating Wikipedia’.

But the number of hurdles to a mind free of control by outsiders just keeps expanding.

Elite agents routinely employ ‘trolls’: People employed as part of ‘online armies’ to secretly promote particular perspectives on social media. This distorts people’s sense of what is happening, and why, towards the Elite perspective promoted by the ‘trolls’. See, for example, ‘Inside Israel’s million dollar troll army’.

And to reiterate a point illustrated earlier, the political component of the Elite war on our minds is not solely the preserve of international organizations, intelligence agencies, military forces and Big Tech. It is being waged by other Elite agents as well, including national governments. For just two of the latest examples you can check out recent efforts by the Australian and Canadian governments but they are typical. See Online misinformation’, ‘BREAKING: The Australian Government colluded with big tech to suppress speech on Covid: The Censorship Industrial Complex Down Under’ and Canada’s censorship bill explained: A chilling law that lets the government censor user-generated content’ as well as ‘Is this the End of Natural Health Information? Google, Meta Ban News in Canada’.

Moreover, governments, including that in the United States, are resisting efforts to halt their censorship of perspectives at variance with the Elite-driven narrative. See, for example, ‘Biden Administration Pushes Back Against Request For an Injunction Against Government-Directed Censorship’.

And even the courts, when they actually defend free speech, are resisted by governments with a range of tools. See ‘Deny, Deflect, Defend: The Censors’ Strategy on Display’.

A more blunt tool of censorship is the use of cyber attacks to close down independent news outlets, as happened to the highly reputable but unforgivably independent outlet ‘SouthFront’ on 18 August 2023, thus destroying the public record of a large body of thought on vital issues. See ‘Cyber Attacks against Independent Media, Censorship and Double Standards’. Fortunately, after much effort, the site was restored at a new Internet address: SouthFront’.

A perfect illustration of how effectively promotion of an Elite-driven narrative, combined with massive hidden censorship (including ‘fact checking’), works occurred during the past three years when most people readily accepted that a nonexistent virus was killing off a substantial proportion of their fellows and they needed to take many experimental, toxic injections to remain healthy. See ‘We Are Being Smashed Politically, Economically, Medically and Technologically by the Elite’s “Great Reset”: Why? How Do We Fight Back Effectively?’

Already victims of psychological mind control from childhood, and now under the barrage of Elite propaganda and the cover provided by massive censorship, relatively few people were capable of investigating the evidence for themselves: Had a unique pathogenic ‘virus’ been isolated (when none had been previously)? Were the measures taken – lockdowns, mask-wearing, PCR testing, mandatory injections – scientifically justified? What else was going on behind the scenes? Which should have led to discovery of the obscured but profound threat posed by the Elite’s ‘Great Reset’ – with its related fourth industrial revolution, eugenicist and transhumanist programs – and consideration of what it all meant for themselves and those they love.

The point is simple: Elite control of most human minds is already so extensive that most people are disinclined to even countenance an alternative to the Elite-driven narrative. For an illustration of this, see ‘The Corona War. They’re Coming After Our Thoughts’.

But if someone does decide to challenge or expose Elite dogma in a particular context, there is yet another hurdle they might be required to navigate. Elite agents (and those in their thrall) might seek to discredit the offending individual. One way of attempting this is by applying the label ‘conspiracy theorist’ to the person concerned. This tactic has been used extensively, and effectively, since the 1950s, scaring many people into renouncing the evidence and conscientious beliefs that shaped their original perspective while scaring many others into believing that the truth-teller was lying.

As explained by academic philosopher David Coady, use of the term ‘conspiracy theorist’ serves ‘a function similar to that served by the term “heresy” in medieval Europe. In both cases these are terms of propaganda, used to stigmatise and marginalise people who have beliefs that conflict with officially sanctioned or orthodox beliefs of the time and place in question.’ See ‘In defence of conspiracy theories (and why the term is a misnomer)’.

In essence, navigating the psychological and political hurdles that stand in our way to knowing and acting on the truth is an enormous challenge. Unfortunately, these are not all.

Part 2 of this study will consider the medical and technological methods used to control our minds and explain what is necessary to win this war.

Biodata: Robert J. Burrowes has a lifetime commitment to understanding and ending human violence. He has done extensive research since 1966 in an effort to understand why human beings are violent and has been a nonviolent activist since 1981. He is the author of ‘Why Violence?’ His email address is flametree@riseup.net and his website is here.

Did David Foster Wallace predict the future?

Our world is more dystopian than Infinite Jest

By Sarah Ditum

Source: UnHerd

Infinite Jest is frequently attention-repellent. David Foster Wallace’s brick-sized novel is physically challenging, an 800g book that forces you to flick back and forth to the errata. This is not optional. Major plot points hinge on throwaway glosses. 

I was a bratty, bookish 15-year-old when it was published in 1996. A 1,000-page-plus novel bloated with endnotes that have their own footnotes was an irresistible challenge. David Foster Wallace was not an obscurantist in his own literary taste — he taught Stephen King and Thomas Harris at Illinois state university — but Infinite Jest is a book at bloody-minded war with its own bookness. With its maddening excess of information that you must hold in your hand as best you can, it feels more like the internet.

As well as being attention-repellent, it is also sometimes just repellent. There are scenes of comedically extreme horror: a woman dying after the handbag that holds her artificial heart is snatched from her, a man dying in his own filth while obsessively watching reruns of M*A*S*H, a dog dragged behind a car until all that’s left is a leash, a collar and a “nubbin”. Before livestreamed mass shootings and animal cruelty for clicks, Wallace knew that the grisly and grotesque was what the public wanted.

He did not see the future. But he saw the forces shaping the future, and understood the ways they would deform people in turn. 

In an aside, Wallace writes about how, with the introduction of the “Teleputer” (what we would call a laptop), video calls enjoyed huge popularity, followed by dramatic decline. Users quickly discover that being seen is enormously anxiety-inducing, partly because it means you must visibly be paying attention to the other party at all times, partly because you must also pay attention to how you look when making a call.

The answer to this anxiety is, first, “high definition masking” — a flattering composite of the user’s face digitally overlaid on the screen. Then comes actual masking — hyperreal rubber versions of the user’s face that can be quickly strapped on for calls. Eventually, in response to this “stressfully vain repulsion at their own videophonic appearance”, consumers revert to audio-only, which is now “culturally approved as a kind of chic integrity”. 

This divide between the real and the represented has been borne out by our experience of Zoom, Instagram and TikTok: filters are now so advanced that they can be applied to moving images, and you can digitally beautify yourself while livestreaming. Only instead of resorting to rubber masks, we remodel the flesh itself: “filter face” tweakments, intended to bring the human closer to the digital ideal, are on the rise. Wallace was right about the way pervasive exposure to our own image would break us. It’s just that the way we’ve responded is, somehow, even more dystopian than he imagined.

Infinite Jest’s near future is now our near past, and in 2008, Wallace killed himself after suffering decades of profound depression. By the middle of the next decade, his greatest novel had been recast as a byword for tedious white masculinity, the author himself cancelled. This was, at least in the biographical sense, deserved. In 1990, Wallace had met the poet Mary Karr. He was a resident in a halfway house, she was a volunteer, and he became obsessed with her. They dated, they broke up, then he assaulted and stalked her. In 2018, Karr tweeted that he had “tried to buy a gun. kicked me. climbed up the side of my house at night. followed my son age 5 home from school. had to change my number twice, and he still got it. months and months it went on.”

The novel includes multiple men in recovery steeping in the shame of their past violence, and it would be nice to imagine that this was Wallace examining his own conscience. On the other hand, it also includes a reciprocated love story between the large, lunkish, David-Foster-Wallace-ish character Don Gately, and the beautiful, idealised, Mary-Karr-ish Joelle van Dyne. Infinite Jest was, arguably, an implement of his ongoing harassment and should not be dishonestly mined for signs of redemption.

Still, it is a very contemporary thing to demand moral purity in artists: the kind of impulse that, perhaps, comes from seeking simplicity when far too much knowing is possible. “What do we do with the art of monstrous men?” asked Claire Dederer, as though to be an audience is inevitably to be an accomplice. Good art can be made by people who’ve done bad things, and perhaps only a monstrous man can faithfully portray the outlines of his own monstrosity. Reading is not an act of worship, although one of the problems for Infinite Jest is that certain male readers have treated it as such. 

And so, Infinite Jest has plummeted from literary touchstone to confirmed red flag. In a viral tweet from 2020 listing “Top 7 Warning Signs In a Man’s Bookshelf”, the first item was “A dog-eared copy of Infinite Jest”. The “dog-eared” was important: it was the act of having read it, rather than posing as someone who might read it, that sounded the klaxon.

But unread copies could be equally alarming: when the actor Jason Segal bought Infinite Jest in preparation for playing Wallace in a film, he recalled that the female bookseller rolled her eyes and said: “Every guy I’ve ever dated has an unread copy on his bookshelf.” Nicole Cliffe made it number four on her catalogue of “Books that Literally All White Men Own”. 

I have never run into a “DFW guy” — they’re probably more of an American campus thing. But I ran into the “Philip Roth guy” at university and recognise the type: clammy, proprietorial, forcing his literary taste on girls in lieu of forcing himself. That I had read Infinite Jest felt vaguely embarrassing. All that effort, and it turned out the most high-status option would have been to not read it and then be glibly dismissive. 

It’s perversely appropriate that Infinite Jest ended up holding such a key place in the vocabulary of this irony-bound strand of performative feminism, because irony was one of the things that Wallace was both appalled and fascinated by. In a 1993 essay, he writes that “irony and ridicule are entertaining and effective, and that at the same time they are agents of a great despair and stasis in US culture.”

Infinite Jest isn’t above irony, but it often pits itself against irony. “It’s like there’s some rule that real stuff can only get mentioned if everybody rolls their eyes or laughs in a way that isn’t happy,” thinks one character. Another feels an “aftertaste of shame after revealing passion of any belief and type when with Americans, as if he had made flatulence instead of had revealed belief” (the weird syntax is because this character is Quebecois). When sincerity is untenable, it becomes easier to engage with symbols than things. 

Over and again in the novel, the “real” gets displaced by the representation, like the rubber faces that can replace flesh ones on video calls. One of the centrepiece scenes of Infinite Jest features a geopolitical strategy game called Eschaton — a kind of Risk, but played by teenagers with balls and rackets to stand for missiles. The game comes violently undone when the players start hitting each other and the referee can’t work out how to distinguish between the territory and the map. As for the M*A*S*H-obsessive, “crucial distinctions had collapsed” between the fiction and the real.

And maybe this is connected to the novel’s weirdly well-informed interest in transsexuality. The gender ideology that makes front-page news now was a niche interest in the Nineties, confined mostly to academic papers and message boards for transitioners. Wallace’s inclusion of a young, effeminate, gay, “gender-dysphoric” character and a middle-aged, masculine, straight crossdresser suggests a hefty familiarity with the sexology literature long before any of this had crossed into the mainstream — it’s effectively a thumbnail sketch of the influential theory, developed by Ray Blanchard in the Eighties and Nineties, that male transsexuality divides into “two types”, the autogynephiliac and the homosexual.

But it also fits with the vision of an America where the signifiers that stand for “woman” hold more weight than the physical fact of femaleness. Gender as we experience it now — the idea of an “essence” or “true self” that renders the material body irrelevant — couldn’t have come to exist without the internet. Only when technology allowed people to present themselves as pure language, signifier unmoored from signified, did it become possible to believe that sex was malleable or unreal. Maybe transsexuality fascinated Wallace because he saw it as another way that humans confuse the symbol with the thing itself, the feminine with the female.

This summer, I started rereading Infinite Jest, mostly out of curiosity. It is, still, a very annoying book. But there’s something I didn’t understand about it in 1996 that I do now I’m older than Wallace was when he wrote it. He saw American culture as an exhausted force, trapped smirking in a hall of mirrors. And he saw that getting worse as screens extended their influence.

One of Wallace’s influences, Thomas Pynchon, wrote stories about the technology that made America possible: geographical surveys (Mason Dixon), the postal service (The Crying of Lot 49). Infinite Jest is about the technology that could undo a state: a kind of entertainment so compelling that it turns consumers utterly away from reality. It asks whether the real, or something like it, might be worth recovering. 

It is, still, a difficult book — and difficult in new ways. The wheedling presence of my phone is competition that Infinite Jest never had to contend with the first time around. The disturbing fact of Wallace’s own bad acts, too, was not available to me in the Nineties, and even if it had been it probably wouldn’t have struck me as a problem for the novel. But the difficulty is, and always has been, the point. Of course Infinite Jest could be shorter, lighter, less infuriating. But if it’s heavy, it’s because it’s weighing you back down in the physical world.

Restoring A World Out of Balance

Is our expansive evolution in technological advancement a wrong turn for humanity? Or has it evolved without our consciousness keeping up to steward it effectively?

By Tom Bunzel

Source: The Pulse

One of my first really disquieting insights about the planet and the pace of change came when I saw the film “World Out of Balance” or “Koyaanisqatsi” in the 1980’s.

The concept behind the film was that Nature has an exquisite balance between various forces, and that’s when I first thought about the likelihood of the existence of a higher intelligence.

The film was jarring because it showed dramatically, now 40 plus years ago, the havoc that was wreaked by technology not just on the environment, but how human technology was literally putting the world out of balance – a harmony that was naturally sustained prior to human intervention.

Computers Introduced Me to Rapid Change

At that time, I just getting interested in computer graphics and I encountered “Moore’s Law”, which refers to the observation made by Intel co-founder Gordon Moore in 1965 that the number of transistors on integrated circuits doubles approximately every two years.

That meant that processing power doubled in the same span of time, allowing graphics, for example, to go from color, to 3D, to 3D with texture mapping and other effects, and on and on.

One example of this was the original movie Jurassic Park, which was made with 3D models of dinosaurs having their wire frames “texture mapped” – covered with skin and then animated on a Silicon Graphics work station.  The processing power required to render these images quickly enough for a 30 frames per second film was staggering.

I just Googled the company.  As I suspected they are extinct like the dinosaurs; and the process I described above now happens on a phone, or on a website, and films are using artificial intelligence to fool audiences.

As I began writing about digital video and animation, and attended conferences, I found myself on a carousel of a continual need to adapt to change, and “upgrade” my system to keep up with the latest advancements.

It worked for me for a while and I enjoyed integrating solutions based on a creative understanding of what was coming out, but eventually, I realized that I could no longer keep up.

I had to take a break from the relentless pressure, which I did, and ended my tech writing career.

It was around that time I was reading Eckhart Tolle, and learning how the Ego, the voice in my head, always wants MORE.

The Continued Acceleration of Change

Moore’s law for integrated circuits was only the beginning, of course.  We now have the promise of quantum computing and the reality of artificial intelligence, which both have the potential to put the world as we knew it even more out of balance.

When we consider our human conditioning, the wider the gap between one’s childhood where one “learns the ropes” and perhaps conforms for one’s safety and one’s adulthood — when everything has changed creates intense discomfort relative to the gap in years.

For a dinosaur like me the continual need to “download the app” is stressful.  For my friends’ grandchildren it’s just part of being alive.

Peter Russell, in his new book “Forgiving Humanity” uses a sobering term – Exponential Change – as he describes how rapid changes in technology first affected agrarian culture, increased dramatically with the industrial revolution and accelerated again with the advent of computer technology and integrated circuits.

It’s Not You, It’s Exponential Change

He reaches a conclusion that is both profound and daunting:

“This doesn’t mean humankind has taken a wrong turn. Spiraling rates of development, with all their consequences, positive and negative, are the inevitable destiny of any intelligent, technologically-empowered species.”

So the fact that we have knocked the world out of its natural harmony is something that is part of evolution?  In essence, we are a part of nature that keeps pushing the envelope, but it can have dire consequences for a species that goes too far?

That is certainly what we are up against with respect to artificial intelligence, where the notion of exponential change in terms of brute intellectual capacity, is making many experts wary of consequences of an “intelligence” that vastly dwarfs human capabilities.

Consider the difference between exponential change versus simple, let us say, incremental change.  Exponential means that is multiplied by its current value, or the power of 2.  Anyone who has played with relationships like that in math knows how rapidly it can spin out of control.

Calculations of this order of magnitude quickly go beyond what the human brain can process.

And how does this expansion of potential knowledge affect consciousness today?

Peter Russell takes one of the driving forces of exponential change – AI – and discusses his new book by interviewing “his clone” in a fascinating video.

There is the possibility that with enough shocks or consequences that humanity may begin to glean that a purely intellectual approach to reality is the reason for our imbalance, and that knowledge itself, without wisdom or “being”, is fraught with peril.  Blind intellect alone creates conflict with a higher, natural intelligence which it ignores.

Russell uses the analogy of how a wheel that spins faster and faster will eventually come apart.

Taking a Cosmic Perspective – Collectively and Individually

In the video Russell’s “clone” suggests that a way for humanity to adapt, and actually align with the natural forces that have brought it to this point, is to begin to take a truly “cosmic perspective” and see our species in true proportion to the vast universe in which we now find ourselves.

Advances like the Webb Telescope have opened humanity’s eyes to a more accurate understanding of the vast scale of the universe we inhabit.  We now know that galaxies move in clusters of unimaginable proportions.

Russell points out that there are trillions of stars and life might have evolved to an intelligent level on some of these, and that perhaps such life has found itself at the point where we are many times in eternity.

We have to confront the stark reality that from such a perspective within the vastness of Nature, we are here for only a brief interval both as individuals – and indeed perhaps as a species.  

Russell suggests that such a perspective can make us more aware and grateful for our higher capabilities in areas beyond the intellect, such as art, culture, and probably philosophy.  Humanity needs to become more deeply human once again rather than purely mental, as the computers we use are just brute intellect.

A Shift Beyond Copernican Proportions

Such a “renaissance” would be like a new Copernican revolution.  Most of us have a perspective (in consciousness) that WE are the center of all existence. 

But from a “cosmic” perspective we must recognize that cannot be true; it must be an illusion.  We can begin by sensing the truth through our bodies that we are organic beings within dimensions of a vast organism (maybe like the microscopic organisms that exist in our gut and make our “lives” possible are organic beings within us) – and this recognition could serve to dampen both our hubris as a species as to how important we are (dominant on this planet), but also make this a cornerstone of a viable personal philosophy.

I don’t know if I will be here to witness it, but I sense that this shift is very much in line with current trends toward a more dramatic “Disclosure” of our place in the universe – revealing that several other interplanetary or interdimensional species have been here, communicated with humans and are still monitoring human affairs.

Harvard astronomer Avi Loeb, who gained prominence when he speculated that “Oumamoua” – the interstellar object spotted entering and leaving our solar system recently, showed that it was intelligently controlled.  He has since begun Galileo project to search for evidence of extraterrestrial intelligence.

All of this is finally putting to rest the misgivings of the famous Brookings memo that greatly contributed to the secrecy around UFOs – the memo speculated that if extraterrestrial life were a proven reality many social structures, religions and institutions would collapse.  Better to hush it up.

But of course, we are now witnessing the dissolution of many conditioned beliefs and the institutions that these flawed beliefs supported; among them our belief in our dominance as a species and our self-importance as individuals.

It would give me hope to see the shift completed with a deep comprehension of our connection to the universe both epigenetically and spiritually.

What Do You (Think You) Really Know?

On the need for maintaining a curious spirit.

By Tom Bunzel

Source: The Pulse

“When in doubt observe and ask questions.  When certain, observe at length and ask many more questions.”  — George Patton

Once again, I thought I would follow up on Joe Martino’s recent discussion of huge gaps and worse in many peoples’ understanding.  This is such an important point first made by Socrates: You don’t know what you don’t know.

Joe mentioned the Dunning-Kruger effect in which people with relatively little knowledge will overestimate what they in fact know.  Joe’s piece used the example of brand influencers who tend to become very sure of their pronouncements because, of course, they had a vested interest in it.  

This speaks to the conditioning that takes place in corporate environments, similar to how an individual accumulates a self or Ego.

One thing that happens with people who are sure of themselves is that they frequently break off mentally and become separate from any sense of Wholeness (to defend their position).  This crystallizes the ego which then, with many insecure people, and hardens with each challenge – something we can see in our current politics.

It’s also obvious that whatever we think we know is generally another thought.  The exception is if it is a bodily sensation or emotion which is purely felt, without interpretation.

Unfortunately, most people are also heavily invested in feeling good – or avoiding any discomfort – and the discipline of sensing emotions in the body and allowing them to be experienced without judgement is quite foreign.  I say it’s unfortunate because in my recent experience, it is the one way to begin to heal trauma stored in the body.

And speaking of the body, this is where we can surely go even a step further.

We Don’t Know What We Don’t Know that We Don’t Know

Things get even more complicated when you focus on the real mystery.  The vastness of the gaps is staggering.

An example of this is qualia – defined as “the internal and subjective component of sense perceptions, arising from stimulation of the senses by phenomena.”

What this really comes down to is our Experience, which is somehow created out of our Awareness of whatever is happening.  But qualia for humans is more subtle and indefinable – scientists have been unable to explain, for example, why some wine tastes dry and another fruity.

How does the subjective part – the judgment – come into (our?) awareness.

Neuroscience now can identify and label the various components of the experience in terms of physics and biochemistry, but they cannot explain how “we” experience things like awe, gratitude and so on.

And for the sense of “someone” experiencing any phenomena they can only give it another label:  Consciousness.  

When trying to define “ourselves” or the experience of being, our language has proven so inadequate (partly due to the subject/object grammatical bias of English and most modern languages) that to the extent any speculations or theories are wrong – we probably don’t even have the capability to comprehend what makes them so incomplete.

Attempts to pin the experience of the self down scientifically have fallen short, as I described in “AI and the Hard Problem of Consciousness”.

Where is the Ground of Our Experience?

This conundrum exists because science deals with facts and certainty and our experience actually seems to arise in a space other than that which science can adequately define.

But still, we are deeply conditioned to believe that our experiences and thoughts about what has, may or is happening comprise a separate self or identity, that is often surmised to exist in the brain.

But recent neurological advances have failed to locate any physical or even biochemical basis for a separate self.

If we return once again to the body, we can also see that all of our senses, and even thoughts, can be reduced to a biochemical reaction.  We can now view it as information passing from the receptor to the brain, gut or heart.

Since this information is based on very specific individual parameters, the results are almost by definition finite and fallible.  What we experience is by no means a universally known phenomenon. We generally experience what we’ve been conditioned to experience, which separates us from other humans, and for that matter from all other life forms.

Birds can see better than we can, whales, dolphins and bats live on sound and most animals can hear things humans can’t.  If you have a cat you know that its world is nothing like yours.

And now, even when humans have invented incredible instruments to augment our senses and allow a glimpse even into vast apparent distances away from our planet out into the cosmos, we are confronted more and more with phenomena that we cannot explain.

(I wrote “apparent distances” because our view of “outer” space is always, inevitably a subjective experience that seems to create an image within “us” – presumably within our brains from a signal through the optic nerve.  I often suspect that even the way we perceive “outer space” is a function of our limited sensory and intellectual capacities).

The irony is that it is Science that now points most effectively to what we don’t even know that we don’t know, and yet it is the same science that is the cause of so much human hubris and delusion.

Before Quantum Mechanics was discovered and Einstein’s theories verified we didn’t know that we had no clue about matter and energy.  Because a lot in the quantum world doesn’t make “sense” there are presumably more vast areas where we can’t even comprehend our own ignorance.

I dealt with some of these issues when I wrote about Robert Lanza’s theory of Biocentrism.  Science seems to be dragged kicking and screaming into a new paradigm where the self we believe in doesn’t really exist – and what WE ARE (not what we have or do) is aligned intimately with Nature, or our environment, or whatever label one might want to use in what is really an infinitely sacred Mystery.

The Limitations of Current Scientific Labels

Another example would be biology where for centuries all life was thought of as either animal or plant.  Then they found microbes, and eventually viral agents and the line between life and the “objective” world blurred.

Returning our attention to qualia, and consciousness, again these personal “events” are defined as subjective experiences.

Science can’t really explain subjectivity.  As previously noted, that may well be because explanations involve a subject and an object (as conditioned by our language and grammar) but what if everything is just an arising in Consciousness (subjectivity)?

If we take the concept of “Wholeness” literally – there cannot in fact be anyone outside of the whole to have a subjective experience.

This is the essence of “Nonduality” – a modern popular philosophical movement.

Our interpreted experience is comprised of thoughts, words and feelings.  But where do these occur?

The body and the brain are the short answers, the ones the DKE people would grab hold on, but upon deeper examination “your” experience of your hands, for example, takes place visually and tactilely; you can both see your hands and feel them.  But how is that happening and by whom?

But what makes them “yours”?  What is it that differentiates “you” from everything else you see or feel?

If you think about it, a separate “identity” was not originally within awareness when your body was first born.  It started when someone told you ‘your’ name.

And ever since the narrative of a separate person, made up mainly of thoughts and memories has accumulated more knowledge based on that one erroneous assumption of separation, culminating in an illusory experience of “you.”

How do we make the bulk of humanity aware of this delusion?   I wonder if it is not central to the issue of what we now may become “Disclosure” where our psychological world seems poised to explode in ways we cannot know that we do not know.  And as the 70’s comedy team called Firesign Theater once said:  “Everything you know is wrong.”

I would think that under the circumstances the most appropriate position to take in many instances is what Eckhart Tolle recommends – deep acceptance of not knowing.

Moreover, in the face of such overwhelming evidence of our ignorance, we might be better advised to ask very deep questions – and as Joe Martino has also mentioned, allowing silent sensing to bring us a response (perhaps not even answer) that could even bring up physical emotions or sensations, but no actual conclusion.

I tried to use that technique in the book I wrote recently “Conversations with Nobody” written with AI, about AI and giving a taste of AI.

Because the format of the book was an apparent “conversation” with a nonhuman intelligence the questions I posed (or prompts) were actually the only creative element in the book – and were designed to either take the AI’s response and follow up with more depth, or pose a question that had some nuance and would make the reader think about an issue like the one in this article.

Of course the potential promise of AI is to provide impersonal and presumably more factual information than a mere human; but so far that promise is unfulfilled.

The AI generally gave answers perfectly in line with the most obvious human biases – not surprising in that its “answers” were simply guesses as to next appropriate word in the response, based on its programming as a “language” model.  No actual human thought was involved in the response.

But the openness of the question may evoke an appropriate feeling in one who considers it silently.  It may even take one beyond one’s mind.  Questions to ponder and go beyond the conditioned limitations of Dunning-Kruger:

What do we really know? 

Who (or what) are we?

What is our relationship to reality – what was here before we got here and thought about it?

Do People Change?

By Edward Curtin

Source: Behind the Curtain

Because there is so much personal anguish, unhappiness, and human mental and physical suffering in the world, many people often wonder how they might personally change to find happiness, contentment, or some elusive something. Or even how to change other people, as if that arrogant illusion could ever work.

This question of significant personal change is usually couched within the context of narrow psychological analyses.  This is very common and is a habit of mind that grows stronger over the years.  People are reduced to their family upbringings and their personal relationships, while the social history they have lived through is dismissed as irrelevant.

The United States is very much a psychological society.  Sociological and historical analyses are considered insignificant to people’s identities.  It’s as if economics, politics, culture, and propaganda are beside the point.

Yes, it is often admitted that circumstances, such as illness, death, divorce, unemployment, etc. affect people, but such circumstances are not considered central to who people are and whom they become.  These matters are rarely seen contextually, nor are connections made.  They are considered inessentials despite the fact that they are always connected to larger social issues – that biography and history are intertwined.

In writing about what he termed the sociological imagination, C. Wright Mills put it clearly when he described it as “the idea that the individual can understand his own experience and gauge his own fate only by locating himself within his period, that he can know his own chances in life only by becoming aware of those of all individuals in his circumstances.  In many ways it is a terrible lesson; in many ways a magnificent one.”

Without learning it, one cannot know who one is or whom one might become if one chose to change and were not just blown by the winds of fate.

We now live in a digital world where the uncanny nature of information pick up sticks is the big game. Uncanny because most people cannot grasp its mysterious power over their minds.

What was true in 1953 when Ray Bradbury penned the following words in Fahrenheit 451, is exponentially truer today:

Cram them full of non-combustible data, chock them so damn full of ‘facts’ that they feel stuffed, but absolutely ‘brilliant’ with information. Then they’ll feel they’re thinking, they’ll get a sense of motion without moving. . . . Don’t give them any slippery stuff like philosophy or sociology to tie things up with. That way lies melancholy.

That it is all noise, all signal – no silence.  That it prevents deep reflection but creates the habit of mental befuddlement that is consonant with the mental derangement of the mainstream media’s 24/7 news reports.

When almost everything you hear is a lie of one sort or another, it becomes barely possible to keep your wits about you.

These bits of bait are scattered all over the mind’s floor, tossed by an unknown player, the unnameable one who comes in the night to play with us.  Their colors flood the mind, dazzle and razzle the eye.  It is screen time in fantasy-land.

This summer’s two hit movies – “Oppenheimer” and “Barbie” – while seemingly opposites, are two sides of this same counterfeit coin.  Spectacles in The Society of the Spectacle as Guy Debord put it:

The spectacle is a social relation between people that is mediated by an accumulation of images that serve to alienate us from a genuinely lived life. The image is thus an historical mutation of the form of commodity fetishism.

“Oppenheimer,” while concentrating on the man J. Robert Oppenheimer who is called “the father of the atomic bomb,” omits the diabolic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki as if there were no innocent victims, while “Barbie” plays the coy game of satirizing the doll that celebrates women as sex objects while advertising its same sex doll status.  It’s just great “fun.”  Colorful salt water taffy for a summer hoot.  “Little Boy” meets sexy sister in the land of dreams where existential crises lead to expanded consciousness.  Yes, Hollywood is the Dream Factory.

There is so much to attend to, multi-colored tidbits begging to be touched carefully, to grab our full consideration as we delicately lift them into the air of our minds.  So many flavors.  Call it mass attention disorder order or paranoia (beside the mind) or digital dementia.  The names don’t matter, for it is a real condition and it is widespread and spreading madly.  Everyone knows it but represses the truth that the country has become a comic book travesty sliding into quicksand while bringing the world down with it.

“Oppenheimer” plays while a mumbling and bumbling U.S. President Biden pushes the world toward nuclear annihilation with Russia over Ukraine.

“Barbie” struts on her stilettos while men receive guidance from the CDC on “chest feeding” and millions of young people are not sure what sex they are.

What’s up?

It’s all noise, all signal – no silence.

The instinct of self-defense has disappeared.  “Not to see many things, not to hear many things, not to permit many things to come close,” this, Nietzsche told us, is the instinct of self-defense.  But we have let all our defenses down because of the Internet, cell phones, and the digital revolution.  We have turned on, tuned in, and dropped into computerized cells whose flickering bars note signal strength but not mental bondage.  Not the long loneliness of distant signals barely heard, but “Cause” what Rodriquez sings for us:

Cause my heart’s become a crooked hotel full of rumours
But it’s I who pays the rent for these fingered-face out-of-tuners
and I make 16 solid half hour friendships every evening

It’s all noise, all signal – no silence.

I recently had the arduous task of reviewing nearly fifty years of a writer’s personal journals.  The thing that stood out to me was the repetitive nature of his comments and analyses of people he knew and the relationships he had.  His political, literary, and historical comments were insightful, and his keen observations into the decades long diminution of the belief in existential freedom captured well the growing domination of today’s deterministic ethos with its biological emphasis and its underlying hopeless nihilism. But it was also very clear that the people he wrote about were little different after forty to fifty years.  Their situations changed but they did not – fundamentally.  They were encased in long-standing carapaces that protected them from change and choices that would force them to metamorphosize or undergo profound metanoias. Most of them saw no connection between their personal lives and world events, nor did they seem to grasp what William James, in writing about habits, said, “if we suffer the wandering of our attention, presently it will wander all the time. Attention and effort are … but two names for the same psychic fact.”

The notebooks, of course, were one man’s observations.  But they seemed to me to capture something about people generally.  In the notes I took, I summarized this by the words “social addiction,” a habit of living and thinking that has resulted in vast numbers of people locked in their cells, confused, totally bamboozled, and in despair.  This condition is now widely recognized, even by the most unreflective people, for it is felt in the gut as a dazed death-in-life, a treading of water waiting for the next disaster, the next bad joke passing for serious attention.  It is impossible to fail to recognize, if not admit, that the United States has become a crazy country, mad and deluded in the worst ways and leading the world to perdition on a fool’s dream of dominance and delusions.

The psychoanalyst Allen Wheelis, an intriguing writer who questioned his own profession, put it well in his 1973 book How People Change:

Often we do not choose, but drift into those modes which eventually define us. Circumstances push and we yield. We did not choose to be what we have become, but gradually, imperceptibly, became what we are by drifting into the doing of those things we now characteristically do. Freedom is not an objective attribute of life; alternatives without awareness yield no leeway… Nothing guarantees freedom. It may never be achieved, or having been achieved, may be lost. Alternatives go unnoticed; foreseeable consequences are not foreseen; we may not know what we have been, what we are, or what we are becoming. We are the bearers of consciousness but of not very much, may proceed through a whole life without awareness of that which would have meant the most, the freedom which has to be noticed to be real. Freedom is the awareness of alternatives and of the ability to choose. It is contingent upon consciousness, and so may be gained or lost, extended or diminished.

He correctly warned that insight does not necessarily lead to change.  It may help initiate it, but in the end the belief in freedom and the power of the will is necessary.  This has become harder in a society that has embraced biological determinism as a result of decades of propaganda.  Freedom has become a slogan only.  We have generally become determined to be determined.

To realize that one has choices is necessary and that not to decide is to decide.  Decisions (from Latin de = off and caedere = to cut) are hard, for they involve deaths, the elimination of alternatives, the facing of one own’s death(s) with courage and hope.  The loss of illusions.  This too has become more difficult in a country that has jettisoned so much of the deep human spirituality that still animates many people around the world whom the U.S. government considers enemies.

Such decisions also involve the intellectual honesty to seek out alternative voices to one’s fixed opinions on a host of public issues that affect everyone’s lives.

To recognize that who we are and who we become intersect with world events, war, politics, the foreign policies of one’s country, economics, culture, etc.; that they cannot be divorced from the people we say we are.  That none of us are islands but part of the main, but when that main becomes corporate dominated mainstream news pumped into our eyes and ears day and night from little machines, we are in big trouble.

To not turn away from what the former CIA analyst Ray McGovern calls this propaganda machine – the Military-Industrial-Congressional-Intelligence-Media-Academic-Think Tank Complex (MICIMATT) – is a choice by default and one of bad faith in which one hides the truth from oneself while knowing one is doing so.

To not seek truth outside this complex is to deny one’s freedom and to determine not to change even when it is apodictic that things are falling apart and all innocence is being drowned in a sea of lies.

It’s all noise, all signal – no silence.

Change begins with desire, at the personal and public level.  It takes courage to face the ways we have all been wrong, missed opportunities, shrunk back, lied, refused to consider alternatives.  Everyone senses that the U.S. is proceeding down a perilous road now.  Everything is out of joint, the country heading for hell.

I recently read an article by Timothy Denevi about the late writer Joan Didion who, together with her husband John Gregory Dunne, was at the Royal Hawaiian Hotel in Honolulu in June 1968 when Senator Robert F. Kennedy, who was assassinated in Los Angeles a few days previously, had died.  The thing that struck me in the article was what Didion described as the sickening indifference of so many vacationers to the news about RFK’s death and funeral.  Because television reception was sketchy in Hawaii, Didion and Dunne, not Kennedy supporters, were only able to watch a three-hour ABC taped special on June 8 that covered the assassination, funeral, and train ride of the body to Arlington Cemetery as millions of regular people kept vigil along the tracks.  A television had been set up on a large veranda where guests could watch this taped show.  But few vacationers were interested; the opposite, actually.  It angered them that this terrible national tragedy was intruding into their vacations.  They walked away.  It seemed to Didion and Dunne that something deep and dark was symbolized by their selfish indifference.  As a result, Didion suffered an attack of vertigo and nausea and was prescribed antidepressants after psychiatric evaluation.  She felt the 1960s “snapping” as she too snapped.

I think those feelings of vertigo and nausea are felt by many people today.  Rightly so.  The U.S.A. is snapping.  It is no longer possible to remain a normal person in dark times like these, no matter how powerfully that urge tempts us.  Things have gone too far on so many fronts from the Covid scam with all its attendant deaths and injuries to the U.S. war against Russia with its increasing nuclear risks, to name only two of scores of disasters.  One could say Didion was a bit late, that the snapping began in Dallas, Texas on November 22, 1963 when President Kennedy was assassinated by the CIA.  As Billie Joel sings, “J.F.K. blown away, what more do I have to say?”  And why was he assassinated?  Because he changed dramatically in the last year of his life to embrace the role of peacemaker despite knowing that by doing so he was accepting the real risk that he would be killed.  He was courage and will personified, an exceptional example of radical change for the sake of the world.

So I come back to my ostensible subject: Do people change?

The short answer is: Rarely.  Many play at it while playing dumb.

Yet is does happen, but only by some mixture of miracle and freedom, in an instant or with the passing of time where meaning and mystery can only exist.  Where we exist.  “If there is a plurality of times, or if time is cyclic,” the English writer John Berger muses, “then prophecy and destiny can coexist with freedom of choice.”  Time always tells.

The last entry in the writer’s notebooks that I reviewed was this:

I read that Kris Kristofferson, whose music I love, has said that he would like the first three lines of Leonard Cohen’s “Bird on a Wire” on his tombstone:

Like a bird on the wire
Like a drunk in a midnight choir
I have tried in my way to be free

It seemed apposite.

Julian Rose: ‘Humanity in Hypnotic Thrall to a Techno-Industrial God’

By Julian Rose

Source: 21st Century Wire

So here we are. For yes, this is where we are – if by ‘we’ one understands the current materialistically imprisoned post industrial world – driven on by the relentless force of globalisation.

Brussels, still a remarkably human city by today’s standards, has the misfortune of housing the European Union HQ, which is not a very human conglomerate. And what goes on in it is equally devoid of humanity. For it is about being ‘big, central and dominating’.

Big, central and dominating is the future of the planet if you subscribe to the techno-industrial mind’s two dimensional determinism. In the soothing words of Klaus Schwab and Yuval Noah Harari, it is to be an Information Technology/Artificial Intelligence future, in which Schwab tells us “we will have nothing and will be happy”.

The mobile phone tower and mast which tops the temple of techno-industrial prowess, is an ugly, spindly piece of steel which is an expression of dominance in its own right. The vast global infrastructure formed by these Saturnian steel structures carry with them a penetrating EMF amplified soup of toxicity.

It is this ‘network’ which acts as the gateway to the virtual reality world of those who depend on it for their ‘signals’. Signals that have an abstracted kind of dominance and pronounced tendency to thin the blood and blur the brain.

The majority of messages that come through this gateway concern how to get on in ‘the system’.

How to get from A to B faster; news faster; financial reports faster; connections with family and friends faster; everything faster.

Being permanently plugged-in to this hyper electromagnetic crossroads of life is said to be the only way to ‘stay in touch’, to be a participant in the mental matrix; to be part of ‘the programme’.

But already twenty years ago I decided to cut my ties with this programme. Dispensing with the mobile phone turned out to be an act of liberation, soon to be followed by the ousting of the TV.

Big Brother was consigned to the back seat and I saw that a life that belonged to myself still existed, all be it with the proviso that one prioritised one’s values with a solid dose of determination to be true to that which is ‘real’ in life.

Perhaps this is why I can see so clearly how those who continue to participate in the ‘programme’ are running blindly towards an uncompromisingly sheer cliff-face, and how their voracious demands on the natural environment are increasingly undermining her natural resilience.

I can see something particularly shocking – that this frenetic rush to the cliff face and the great consumption of finite resources it involves – has no other purpose than playing-out a quasi demonic fascination with ever more refined toys of distraction. Distraction from the real pulse of life.

Yet this techno-industrial suicide machine is staffed by humans who appear not to recognise that their joint mission is programmed to end in collapse.

On the contrary, they seem to think that by increasing the efficiency and speed of the means of travel, it will somehow consummate its own need to arrive at where it is headed for. Where or what that is – simply never gets asked.

However, the psychotic gods of insentient ‘progress’ who designed the programme have built into it a series of ‘events’ which reach a certain conclusion in something they call the Transhuman. A robotic state of computer connected and controlled brain power for those able to pay for it.

To pay for the right to be dehumanised and rendered devoid of the need – and indeed ability – to think. Freed from emotion and freed from a soul based link to one’s Creator.

Stations on the way to this dark point of human annulment are laid-out under the WEF creed known as ‘The Great Reset’. A ‘Reset’ from human to non human.

Here are some of stations along the Great Reset route to the Transhuman:

The cessation of food grown in soil and the manufacturing of synthetic food produced in laboratories (at least six of which are already in production).

The end of farming the land as we know it and the removal of redundant farmers and country dwellers into 5 and 6G controlled total surveillance ‘smart cities’.

Countryside and farm landscapes redesigned to accommodate ‘rewilding’ projects and gated access to designated ‘leisure sites’ for those who can afford access.

The end of bank notes and coinage, replaced by a centrally controlled digital currency whose availability will depend upon one’s ‘social credit’ a la China.

The confiscation of one’s assets and private property with the option to ‘rent’ aspects of them back from the corporate state that is to become the new owner.

‘Self-autonomous’ 5G guided transportation systems operating between major cities.

100% surveillance via satellite and ‘the internet of everything’ and the profligate use of algorithms to pick-up any signs of resistance in communications.

The repression of true spirituality in favour of a ‘one world religion’.

Deliberate blurring of sexual delineation ‘man/woman’ and the decline of normal sexual reproduction.

Sperm-counts further reduced due to de-vitaminised synthetic GMO foods, vaccinations and polluted air and water – population control.

Enforced ‘15 minute cities’ as centres of local authority control.

Designer gene-altered babies via laboratory cloning of DNA sequences and cell tissues.

The removal of certain words from the common language, particularly poetic and spiritual ones.

Real art reduced to pseudo art as an expression of the will of the state, including dark-side ritual.

‘Medical health’ seen as the sole domain of Big Pharma with natural medicine outlawed.

Further media/government control over the passing of public information.

There is more, much more. But this is enough to show the basic composition of the stations on the way to ‘Transhumanism’. The arrival point of which is said to be circa 2035.

Behind this in-your-face destruction of hard won human liberties is a vast global propaganda/indoctrination exercise already in existence for more than two decades and built around the now infamous ‘Zero carbon by 2045’ or ‘Net Zero’ in news-speak (Orwell).

When challenged by those still able to question the need for these deadly impositions, the answer is always the same “To save the world from Global Warming.”

This piece of acute brainwashing, initially devised at the Club of Rome in 1972, is key to the whole ‘programme’. As long as enough people buy into it for long enough, the slavery exercise will be irreversible. Based on the current rate of awakening, the discovery that anthropogenic Global Warming is a mega lie will likely be neutralised by the impositions already in place to prevent an uprising.

The techno-industrial god will then have served its purpose. Like the rocket booster that gets the capsule into orbit, it will have taken the majority of mankind over the brink into abject slavery to its hypnotic convenience culture, before imploding in on itself and taking much of humanity and nature’s life sustaining diversity with it.

BUT, all this can be avoided. It doesn’t have to happen. It won’t happen. Our lives do not depend upon adopting the smart technology of tomorrow, today. We won’t any longer be seduced by ‘convenience’ once we recognise it is leading to our self destruction, will we?

We will retain sufficient will-power to get shot of this addiction to the IT/AI life inhibiting distractions that make up the mind controlled road to Armageddon.

The only way to recognise just how diabolical is the trap that has been set for us – and that we have set for ourselves – is to get a grip on our sense of deeper purpose in this life. To make an unbreakable commitment to listen and respond to the call of our souls. The true self. And then pull this true self out of any association with the metaverse mincing machine.

Let no one in possession of a soul ever allow himself/herself to become processed into a sub human product of the techno-industrial behemoth. Stick with what’s solid, what’s real – and ditch the counterfeit virtual world that snares the unweary and turns once healthy minds into casualties of a blind rush to a dystopian digital nowhere land.