Resisting Manipulation
“Just as the technological advances of the modern world have refined and perfected the weapons of physical warfare, so the advance in man’s understanding of the manipulation of public opinion have enabled him to refine and perfect the weapons of psychological warfare...and the totalitarian psychological warfare is an effort to propagandize and hypnotize the world into submission.”
There was once a time when mankind was controlled by whips and chains; where the mechanism of power was overtly evident and the explanation for subservience to that power was made obvious. The strong ruled over the weak. Those conquered became the enslaved. Everyone understood this social order and the simple logic of it created no room for confusion. Today, however, the machination of dominion is far more elusive for the conscious mind to firmly grasp. The oligarchy remains as a crystal reality, but the tools used to herd the masses have become nearly invisible to us; hence the term, “blind obedience.” Though the methods by which the rulers manipulate the human race vary and are vast beyond measure, there are but two that appear most potent; compulsory state education and the mass media.
For those reading this, it is too late to avoid the influence the former has had on you, but not too late to undo it and prevent its continued effect on your future generations. Often hailed as a societal benchmark for achievement, the public school system is revered as a sacred institution. Its critics are quickly condemned and smeared with labels implying an attitude of neglect toward child wellbeing. But the argument against this system of mass-education is more well-founded than its proponents are willing to admit, or even consider as a possibility.
H.L. Mencken:
“The most erroneous assumption is to the effect that the aim of public education is to fill the young of the species with knowledge and awaken their intelligence…Nothing could be further from the truth. The aim of public education is not to spread enlightenment at all; it is simply to reduce as many individuals as possible to the same safe level, to breed and train a standardized citizenry, to put down dissent and originality. That is its aim in the United States, whatever the pretensions of politicians…and that is its aim everywhere else.”
The origin of our contemporary schooling system is found in Prussia, at a time and place where the individual was considered to be the property of the state. In the late 18th century, leaders in Prussia began the first attempts at mass manipulation by instituting the world’s first system of compulsory state-education. Why do I label this new institution an attempt at mass manipulation? – because its founders presented it as such. Johann Fichte, a philosopher who took a leading role in this revolutionary form of indoctrination, said this in his Addresses to the German Nation about the new educational system:
“The new education must consist essentially in this, that it completely destroys freedom of will in the soil which it undertakes to cultivate and produces on the contrary strict necessity in the decisions of the will, the opposite being impossible. Such a will can henceforth be relied on with confidence and certainty.”
Compulsory education proved successful in its stated purpose and soon after, many governments around the world began to take an interest, including the United States. Horace Mann, a politician from Massachusetts and considered the “Father of American Education,” lobbied heavily, and successfully, for this new education system, for reasons he confesses in a letter published by his wife:
“I have abandoned jurisprudence and have betaken myself to a larger sphere of mind and morals. Having found the present generation composed of materials almost unmalleable, I am about transferring my efforts to the next. Men are cast-iron, but children are wax. Strength expended upon the latter may be effectual, which would make no impression upon the former.”
As with most government services and institutions, it is sold to the people under the guise of the “common good” and the term “free” is lavishly painted on it. Advertised as a saving grace for those too poor to properly educate their children, the masses were quick to accept the new policy. Of course, the real underlying purpose of state education was far more insidious. Frederick Gates, business advisor to John D. Rockefeller, provides a more accurate and elitist perspective of the role of compulsory schooling.
Frederick Gates:
“In our dream, the people yield themselves with perfect docility to our molding hand. We shall not try to make these people or any of their children into philosophers or men of learning or science. We are not to raise up from among them authors, orators, poets, or men of letters. We shall not search for embryo great artists, painters, musicians. Nor will we cherish even the humbler ambition to raise up from among them lawyers, doctors, preachers, politicians, statesmen, of whom we now have ample supply. …For the task that we set before ourselves is a very simple as well as a very beautiful one: to train these people as we find them for a perfectly ideal life just where they are…an idyllic life under the skies and within the horizon, however narrow, where they first open their eyes.”
When we put aside the political rhetoric and utopian social theories, it becomes clear that the state did not intend for these institutions to create a populace of well-educated and formidable thinkers, rather they sought to destroy the will to independence and individuality. The ambition was to remove any thoughts and passions contrary to the status quo; to mold the child into an obedient working-class serf of the state. Monday through Friday, 8AM to 4PM, our children march off to perform their assigned tasks of memorization and repetition. The object is not to think, but to absorb the approved information. The goal is not to discover personal values and motivations, but to adopt and conform to those practices and traditions that best serve the authority and collective. The ultimate end is not to train a child to find their way in this world, but to be placed on a path from which deviance is to be viewed as perverse and irrational. William Harris, the US Commissioner of Education from 1889 to 1906, described with great pride the mission of his establishment:
“Ninety-nine [students] out of a hundred are automata, careful to walk in prescribed paths, careful to follow the prescribed custom. This is not an accident but the result of substantial education which, scientifically defined, is the subsumption of the individual.”
It is a rare moment in our modern times for any advocate of public education to speak toward it in such plain terms. At the time of these honest presentations, speech could be directed toward a particular and aristocratic demographic that was more likely to share in their vision of social engineering without the risk of the common man becoming privy to it. Fortunately, in our current age of information, we are all able to excavate these long-lost sentiments from the founders of our present institutions and with it, pierce through the veil of propaganda to discover the true purpose of this system; a factory of indoctrination.
Joost Meerloo, Rape of the Mind:
“No longer does man think in personal values, following his own conscience and ethical evaluations; he thinks more and more in the values brought to him by mass media…television keeps him in continual awe and passive fixation. Consciously he may protest against these anonymous voices, but nevertheless their suggestions ooze into his system.”
Mass media: the second most prevalent form of collective psychological manipulation. Mass media presents itself in a number of different mediums; newspaper, radio, television, social media, etc. The most powerful of these appear to be those emitted through screens, and the message isn’t the key ingredient, rather the screen itself. The secrets of hypnosis and mind control have been known and explored for some time now. Though these practices appear mystical or something only to be found in science-fiction, there are scientific explanations behind their influence and many studies have been published within its field. Dr. Adam Lipson, a neurosurgeon and graduate of Harvard Medical School, describes what happens when you watch TV:
“There have been EEG studies that demonstrate that television watching converts the brain from beta wave activity to alpha waves, which are associated with a daydreaming state, and a reduced use of critical thinking skills.”
The act of simply watching these screens places the individual into a state of mind that more readily accepts the information being received. And even if the information isn’t consciously accepted, it’s much more likely to bypass your skeptical defenses and sink into your unconscious, where it festers and generates an effect unknown to its host. In a more deliberate form, we see the hypnotist operating under the same principle. The first task for these mind control tacticians is to place the subject into a “trance-like” state, meaning they need to induce a mindset of complete relaxation and passivity. While in this state of mind, the subject becomes highly-susceptible to influence.
This understanding of the human psyche combined with limitless technological advances creates an opportunity for the powers-that-be too enticing to resist. To believe that theories of mass mind control through television and smartphones are nothing but tinfoil-hat conspiracies, you must also believe that the ruling classes and institutions have such strong morals as to not attempt it. For the psychology and physiology is proven and the instruments are already established – all that stands in the way of their weaponizing is the virtue of those who control them. Aldous Huxley, author of Brave New World, forecasts:
“As the art and science of manipulation come to be better understood, the dictators of the future will doubtless learn to combine techniques of propaganda with the non-stop distractions which, in the West, are now threatening to drown in a sea of irrelevance the rational information essential to the maintenance of individual liberty.”
It may be the case that governments and oligarchy everywhere have perfected the art of control to such a great degree that resistance has become futile. It may be true that the masses have been so infected by this propaganda that anyone who believes otherwise will be smothered out of existence or simply cast aside into nothingness. It may be possible that any attempt to live a free and truthful life, founded on the values discovered within your own heart, can only result in a violent clash with the social order. But however real these likelihoods, the opposite outcomes may yet endure. Perhaps the stranglehold of the state around the minds of men is not as strong as it would seem. Maybe the rigid structure of totalitarianism is too unstable to support the suppression of the exercise of human conscience. Whatever the case may be, we must not surrender our humanity to these forces without a battle cry. A quiet submission to slavery is a voluntary one. If we are truly facing the death of free thought and moral agency, let it die with such a fury worthy of its glory.