Nearly 100 years ago, Walter
Lippmann wrote about “the manufacture of consent” in his classic work, “Public
Opinion.” On the heels of that book, Edward Bernays penned a little volume
called “Propaganda,” in which he stated that an elite would always be
responsible for making the public aware of “new ideas” which the public would
then act upon as the elite nudged them into it. Related, but more in-depth is
Jacques Ellul’s 1962 book, “Propaganda: The Formation of Men’s Attitudes.”
Political propaganda aims to
mobilize the masses to move an agenda forward. That’s most effectively done
when the masses are unaware of the process. It’s what “community organizers”
work towards, whether they know it or not. Once the masses are mobilized to
push for a cause, the propagandists’ goals can be put into law.
In fact, many newly propagandized
ideas seem to have taken America by storm just in the past decade or so.
Same-sex marriage is only one of those ideas. Transgenderism is now eclipsing
that notion, and its propaganda techniques—wrapped in the language of civil
rights—are getting Americans on board with the idea of erasing all sex
distinctions in law, including their own. It’s as though Americans are
buying into a fast-talking sales pitch without being allowed to read the print,
whether it’s large print or small.
There’s more on the horizon: a singles’ rights movement that promises to end legal recognition of all marriage.
Then there is transhumanism, which includes a push to end “fleshism” by enacting laws
that protect non-biological entities from discrimination.
Propaganda Is Directing Us Leftward
American conservatives are by and
large clueless about propaganda methods and tactics. And it shows. There are
virtually no conservative social psychologists around. You’d think once a liberal social psychologist hits the
public over the head with this fact some
on the Right would take notice and at least try to get clued in.
Meanwhile, the Left has been
employing social psychology and depth psychology on the masses for decades.
President Obama’s campaign staff was filled with social
psychologists. In this context, those who believe
conservatives can subsist on reason and logic alone are kidding themselves.
It’s no wonder GOP leaders are caving on so many principles, and being absorbed
so easily into the Left’s machine.
A lot of people are scratching their
heads today, wondering how life got to be so surreal, so fast in the United
States of America. Based on the silencing tactics revealed by the LGBT lobby, many observers are likely now thinking:
“Gee, I thought marriage equality was merely a gay rights movement. I didn’t
realize that fascism was part of that package.” The Great Unraveling continues
at a rapid clip when slipping on a pronoun in these days of transgender rule
could cost you your career or earn you massive social media rallies chanting
“hater” at you.
Even benign reminders of the First
Amendment—embodied in Religious Freedom Restoration Acts—are quickly dispatched
by mob hysteria. One day a supposedly principled leader like Indiana Gov. Mike
Pence promotes the RFRA, and the next day he folds
and essentially signs on with the mob.
There seem to be few independent
thinkers left. But even they don’t seem to know what hit them. A woman gets banned by her gym and labelled a bigot because she told management that a
man—who she only later learned “identified as female”—entered the locker room while
she was getting undressed. Comedians who dare tread into trans territory are
shut down. Never before have the media and pop culture dictated in such a
draconian manner how each and every one of us is supposed to think about
identity. Our own identity.
The list goes on. The unrest and
rioting from Ferguson to Baltimore seem to be happening on cue also, with media
propaganda that urges it on. There is no real debate on the merits of policies
that depend on a blind faith in man-made global warming: those who disagree are
labelled “deniers.”
Our Age of Mass Delusion and
Logicide
But it was all so predictable. One of the best books that cracks
the code on what we are living through was written by Dutch psychiatrist Joost
A. M. Meerloo about 60 years ago. Mull over the first line of his book’s
forward, and you will think he is writing about today: “This book attempts to
depict the strange transformation of the free human mind into an automatically
responding machine – a transformation which can be brought about by some of the
cultural undercurrents in our present-day society as well as by deliberate
experiments in the service of a political ideology.”
When it comes to understanding the
inner workings of social psychology and political correctness, we seem to be at
a loss. That’s from “The Rape of the Mind: The Psychology of Thought Control, Menticide, and Brainwashing” (1956). There is indeed a war on the private mind, as Kevin
Williamson explained in a recent National Review column.
Unfortunately, too many Americans have been sleeping through most of its
propaganda battles, and for a very long time. When it comes to understanding
the inner workings of social psychology and political correctness, we
seem to be at a loss.
Meanwhile, the power elites who now
control the media, academia, and Hollywood seem to understand social psychology
well enough to exploit it on a massive scale. They have engaged in
psychological warfare against the private mind by inducing “collective belief formation.” There’s really nothing new here. Conditioning and nudging
the masses into groupthink is a very old trick of all wannabe dictators. The
bloody twentieth century is filled to the gills with examples.
Yet it feels like we’ve awakened to
an ambush. A lot of Americans watched in shock while cultish mobs suddenly
attacked the RFRA that Pence initially defended. But the groundwork for mass hysteria like this was
stealthily laid for decades, and the minefields sown.
The groundwork for mass hysteria
like this was stealthily laid for decades, and the minefields sown.
Family breakdown led to community
breakdown, which we can see in the decline of trust in society. Ignorance was cultivated in the schools through
political correctness and squashing free debate. The academy’s disparaging of
western civilization virtually wiped out respect for any serious study of
history and civics, as well as for the Socratic method and the rules of civil
discourse. Political correctness sewed confusion into the language,
particularly regarding identity politics. Youth are now set to be programmed
for conformity through the K-12 “Common Core” curriculum mandates.
All of that and more promotes the
semantic fog that allows for mind rape. It amounts to an act of “logicide,” to
borrow a term from Meerloo, whom I will continue to quote below. To kill logic
and reason that might stand in their way, wannabe dictators “fabricate a hate
language in order to stir up mass emotions.” Leaders in Indiana, Arkansas, and
Louisiana have been unable to understand this tactic and are grossly unprepared
to deal with it. So they simply surrendered. In effect, they joined the mob, further endangering everybody’s freedom.
The Link Between Crowds and Power
The whole image of such mass
delusion in America is surrealistic, especially to comfortably insulated
Americans who believe our first freedoms could never really be thrown away in
the face of such a full-frontal, PC-induced attack. Most cannot grasp that such
mobs are mentally detached from reality. And participants in the mob action
cannot comprehend that they are actually cutting off their own freedom
of expression, as well as everybody else’s.
Why would anyone want to build such
a culture of coercion? In a word, power. “Equality” is not the reason
for what is happening with such mobs. It is the pretext for what they
are doing. Like all such deceptions, its sole purpose is as a vehicle to
transfer power from individuals to an increasingly centralized state. The fuel,
as usual, is the emotional blackmail of people of goodwill, the uses of mass
mobilization to exploit that goodwill, then, finally, to render all such
goodwill meaningless.
Most who protest the RFRA laws are
more likely pawns than true believers. Like the “Occupy Wall Street” crowd,
they tend to be atomized individuals who are drawn to the psychic thrill of
being part of a mobilized mass that feeds on emotions and can feel a sense of
righteousness in the stated pretext. (In the RFRA case, it’s the semantic
device of “marriage equality,” but it’ll just as easily be something else
tomorrow.) “The ecstatic participation in mass elation is the oldest psycho
drama in the world,” wrote Meerloo.
“Crowds and Power,” by Elias Canetti, is a classic work that explores in
detail the draw of the crowd for human beings. With the continued chipping away
of the organic family of mother-child-father, human relationships inevitably
become diluted and more subservient to a mass state. This detachment cultivates
human alienation, which draws more people to answer to the call of the mass
state’s mob.
Such protesters and their scores of
clueless apologists in the media are also utterly detached from the reality of
the meaning of laws such as an RFRA. The RFRA only clarifies that the
government doesn’t get to coerce us in private thought or to dictate what we
are allowed to feel, believe, think, and express. In other words, the First
Amendment is not negotiable if we are to have any semblance of freedom in this
country. But the emotional stew in which we
are now boiling doesn’t allow logic or reason to prevail. We can never fight
back as long as we are in the dark about how our minds can be manipulated. So
we absolutely must try to fully understand the methods and tactics of
mental coercion and share that knowledge with others as much as possible.
Brainwashing—Mind Rape—Is for Real
Meerloo published “The Rape of the Mind: The Psychology of
Thought Control, Menticide and Brainwashing”
in 1956 after years immersed in the study of social psychology and countless
interviews with victims of mental coercion, including Nazi officers and
American prisoners of war in Korea. This treasure of insights was written for
the layman. It is an absolute must-read for anyone who hopes to uphold the
dignity of the individual. The book offers the psychic defenses so lacking
among those who submit to logicide.
“The transformation of the free
human mind to an automatically responding machine” is essentially the story of
the transformation of the United States of America we are watching in real time
today. Delusion is an important element, because tyrannies do not stand up to
logic. It seems very sudden, but it’s not. We’re only at this tipping point
because we let our defenses down. In fact, if the First Amendment collapses, it
would simply indicate a return to humanity’s tribal default position, in which
a sort of Nietzschean “Will to Power” rules the day.
Mass delusion is an important tool
of oppressors because they can’t survive where free exercise of expression and
association is practiced. Unfortunately, delusion can be induced anywhere. “It is simply a question of
organizing and manipulating collective feelings in the proper way. If one can
isolate the mass, allow no free thinking, no free exchange, no outside
correction and can hypnotize the group daily with noises, with press and radio
and television, with fear and pseudo-enthusiasms, any delusion can be
instilled.”
Free Speech Is the Only Antidote to
Mass Delusion
“The Rape of the Mind” could have
served as a terrific manual to inoculate many against political correctness and
groupthink, had it not collected so much dust since it was published in 1956.
More of us could have learned how free speech is essential to preventing mass
delusion.
Free expression is always the prime
target of tyrants because it promotes logic, the search for truth, and
friendship. America is exceptional precisely because it rejects the tyrants’
rule.
Yet as our speech becomes more
restricted, we end up more separated from one another and more susceptible to
mass delusions. As Meerloo wrote: “Where thinking is isolated without free
exchange with other minds, delusion may follow.” He added, chillingly, “Is this
not what happened in Hitler Germany where free verification and self-correction
were forbidden?”
In his book, Meerloo also shows
immense compassion for our human frailties. He understood just how difficult it
is to push back against the social pressures to conform. When it comes to
brainwashing, every one of us has our breaking point. But we absolutely must
push back once we understand those tactics: “The totalitarian potentate, in order
to break down the minds of men, first needs widespread mental chaos and verbal
confusion, because both paralyze his opposition and cause the morale of the
enemy to deteriorate – unless his adversaries are aware of the dictator’s real
aim.”
Of course, it’s really hard for
control freaks to do their work on us if we are speaking freely with one
another in friendship, and especially if we all understand what they are up to
and can call them on it in one voice. So their first order of business is to
separate us. A sense of enforced isolation is a cruel and effective tool for
instilling loneliness and then delusion in people.
According to Meerloo, manipulators
accomplish this through the knowledge that “far below the surface, human life
is built up of inner contradictions.” Our hopes and fears and longing to avoid
social rejection are exploited through the dictates of political correctness,
which is the tool that separates people today, especially in that one place
where ideas and ideals are supposed to be tested most vigorously in adulthood:
the university. A sense of enforced isolation is a
cruel and effective tool for instilling loneliness and then delusion in people.
By squashing free thought in the one
place where it is supposed to be especially respected, political correctness
circumvents Meerloo’s warning that “the only way to strengthen one’s defenses
against an organized attack on the mind and will is to understand better what
the enemy is trying to do to outwit him.” Of course, the fear of isolation
isn’t always enough to silence some people. So manipulators repeat lies and
sloganeer endlessly to condition their subjects to repress unauthorized speech
and thought: “The techniques of propaganda and salesmanship have been refined
and systematized; there is scarcely any hiding place from the constant visual
and verbal assault on the mind. The pressures of daily life impel more and more
people to seek an easy escape from responsibility and maturity.” It’s sobering to realize that the
above words predate the Internet by nearly half a century. They describe
perfectly how transgenderism has become such a “thing” and why so few are
willing to admit that the emperor has no clothes.
Love and Laughter Dissipate Delusion
As more people succumb to PC
conditioning and cede their freedom of thought, it becomes more difficult for
the rest of us to maintain integrity of mind. Our audience shrinks. As we
encounter more and more drone-like personalities in daily life, the world seems
to sink into surrealism, like so many in Rod Serling’s old “Twilight Zone”
episodes. ‘The totalitarian mind does not
observe and verify its impressions of reality; it dictates to reality how it
shall behave, it compels reality to conform to its fantasies.’
Meerloo testified to this feeling of
disorientation: “Many victims of totalitarianism have told me in interviews
that the most upsetting experience they faced in the concentration camps was
the feeling of loss of logic, the state of confusion in which they had been
brought – the state in which nothing had any validity.”
That’s because in the mass
centralized state, “peaceful exchange of thoughts in free conversation will
disturb the conditioned reflexes and is therefore taboo.” On a hopeful note,
Meerloo writes that “love and laughter break through all rigid conditioning.”
I think the reason there is so
little “comedy” that’s funny today is the genre itself has been hijacked by the
humorless PC crowd. Why is their humor so unamusing and so dependent upon
mean-spiritedness? Consider this possibility: “The totalitarian mind is like
the schizophrenic individual; it has a contempt for reality. Think for a moment
of Lysenko’s theory and its denial of the influence of heredity. The totalitarian
mind does not observe and verify its impressions of reality; it dictates to
reality how it shall behave, it compels reality to conform to its fantasies.”
Along these lines, Meerloo offers a
prescription: “We must learn to treat the demagogue and aspirant dictator in
our midst just as we should treat our external enemies in a cold war – with the
weapon of ridicule. The demagogue himself is almost incapable of humor of any
sort, and if we treat him with humor, he will begin to collapse. Humor is, after
all, related to a sense of perspective. If we can see how things should be, we
can see how askew they can get, and we can recognize distortion when we are
confronted with it.”
Freedom Requires Self-Awareness
Before human beings can preserve
true freedom, they must first be aware of their
individual inner contradictions: “Democracy, by its very nature will always
have to fight against dictatorship from without and destructiveness from
within. Democratic freedom has to battle against both the individual’s inner
will to power and his urge to submit to other people . . . Essentially,
democracy means the right to develop yourself and not to be developed by
others. Yet to develop yourself is impossible without the duty of giving your
energy and attention to the development of others.”
Freedom means cultivating the art of
friendship, boldly exercising our rights to free association and to communicate
our thoughts to others. So, in the end, freedom truly
depends upon breaking down the walls of separation that tyranny builds. It
means cultivating the art of friendship, boldly exercising our rights to free association and to
communicate our thoughts to others. It means cultivating knowledge instead of
cultivating ignorance. After all, political correctness is
primarily a tool for crushing people’s ability to have open conversations in
friendship and mutual respect. In this context, it seems very much like a tool
to bring all personal relationships under state control. And it shouldn’t
surprise us that this is being done today in the name of equality for certain
kinds of personal relationships. Tyrannies always pretend to promote the very
thing they seek to destroy.
Resistance Is Not Futile
So, where do we go from here? We
need to take philosopher George Santayana’s warning to heart, that those who
don’t learn from the past are condemned to repeat it. We need to remind leaders
who are tempted to cave in to mob hysteria that resistance to tyranny is not as futile as submission to tyranny. Resistance to tyranny is not as
futile as submission to tyranny.
Nearly 60 years ago, Meerloo warned
his readers that we absolutely must equip ourselves for this war on the private
mind: “In the future, as our psychological understanding grows, leading
politicians will have to be better educated in the principles of modern
psychology. Just as a soldier must know how to handle his physical weapons, so
the politicians must know how to face and handle the mental strategy of human
relationships and diplomacy. He will have to become aware of the pitfalls in
all human communication and the frailties of his own mind.”
In retrospect, it’s tragic that
virtually all well-positioned people of goodwill seem to have been unaware of
that warning, or able to effectively act on it. Worse, many end up caving to
tyrants because they are unaware of the tactics on the propaganda battlefield. Our hope, as Meerloo concluded, is
in the reality that human rebellion and dissent cannot be forever suppressed:
“They await only one breath of freedom in order to awake once more.”
http://thefederalist.com/2015/06/08/how-to-escape-the-age-of-mass-delusion/
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