Propaganda 101

Published: Sun, 04/25/21

Are you feeling that your mind has been ‘got at’ over the past year? Well you should be because it well and truly has been manipulated, and not just in the past year, but for the whole of your life. The science of ‘getting at your mind’ is called behavourism and arguably it goes back to Pavlov and his dogs in the 1890s. The purpose of behavourism is to control and modify human behaviour using various techniques. One of those techniques is propaganda which is the management of information, and seeking to control how people might react to that information, and thus influence the decisions which they make. Massive resources are funneled into creating and managing propaganda because it works, but only up to a point as we shall see.

Propaganda is a vast subject, so just three very brief points this morning. However, principles are very simple and once you understand how a principle works you can come to understand a very great deal.

Take Facebook, which is a very powerful vehicle for propaganda. Here are three principles at work on Facebook and they are quite amusing when you can see these activities for what they are.

1. Shaming and subtext. I have noticed a great many memes (pictures with captions, often humorous) popping up on my feed with a recurring theme of: ‘Fancy an ordinary person thinking that they can know more about science than a scientist by reading about stuff on the internet. How silly is that?’ Now, why would this be happening over the past year? Obviously someone who studies a subject all their lives knows more about that particular field of knowledge than someone who has just read a brief introduction. This is stating the obvious, a bit like saying. ‘Fancy that, blue whales are bigger than dolphins.’ So what? Why even bother to state the obvious? You need to recognise subtext to get the real meaning of a statement. It would seem to me that these memes have become prevalent over the past year because people who are not ‘experts’ have been asking awkward questions about a certain disease and the response to it. That
should be pretty obvious but I find it alarming how willing people are to repost these memes without thinking about why they were created in the first place.

2. The Overton window. This gets a bit more sophisticated. Joseph Paul Overton recognised the idea of a window of acceptable discourse which the media then does its best to control and manage. Those who wish to participate in public discourse must then limit their statements and shared opinions to views which are permitted within the window as it is at that moment in time. Managing the Overton window can never be an exact science. Every now and then someone will get a chance to state something ‘unacceptable’ on a platform such as the BBC programme ‘Question Time’ but they won’t be asked back twice. Or, their views are established as being ‘right wing’ so the audience knows not to take them seriously. As far as social media is concerned the Overton window is managed by constantly calibrating the algorithms to block, or at least minimise the extent of sharing of certain words and links. You may post something ‘controversial’ on
Facebook and a couple of your regular followers may like or comment on it to give the impression of engagement, but your personal Overton window will have been kept very small, even if you don’t realise it.

3. Direct censorship. Sometimes people are just not shamed into keeping silent by ridiculing subtext, sometimes so many people just want to share the truth that the Overton window is smashed to pieces. At that point the masters of our discourse have to step in and shut down the flow of information as best they can. At the end of March a Facebook group was set up for victims and families of people who had been injured or killed after receiving injections to deliver the so called Covid 19 ‘vaccines’. As of a few days ago the group had grown to 120,000 members sharing heartbreaking stories. Then Facebook deleted the group.

Youtube has deleted hundreds, if not thousands of videos over the past year for ‘violating community standards’, or some similar euphemism.

So, what can you do to resist manipulation of your mind? In Stav terms the Trel is the one who believes that he has no agency over his life. The Trel will not realise that he has a choice of what to believe and what to reject. The Konge knows that he is responsible for his own mind. A free mind can recognise the subtext in propaganda, see the boarders of the Overton Window, and notice when censorship is happening. Once you are aware you can start getting creative. You can ridicule attempts to manipulate using obvious propaganda, just smash the Overton Window by refusing to be silent, and find ways to get past the censors (not usually that difficult because the kind of person who will do that job will have little intelligence, and even less imagination.)

Best of all, work with others who can recognise mind manipulation whenever, and wherever, it is attempted. Last Saturday I joined with perhaps as many as 500,000 people to march in London. In a world which seems to be dominated by sleepwalkers it was great to join with so many who were genuinely awake. The most powerful form of mind control is to make you believe that you are alone in seeing the truth. If it really is the truth you are by no means alone, just reach out and connect, it really isn’t so hard.

regards

Graham

PS When awakened minds work together this is the kind of thing they can do https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8dBeRAzqEYI&feature=emb_logo