Sunday afternoon. You are at the park along
the Little Miami and it appears nature is ready for Spring. Carol is finishing
up Sandra Brown’s Friction. – Amorella
1556 hours. There are no green buds yet but it feels
like Spring as it is in the sixties, we are in a valley and don’t feel the wind
but it is gusting into the forties. We both feel to be catching colds or it is
allergies – otherwise a very pleasant blue sky day.
Carol sent you an online article titled, “The
New Mind Control” by Robert Epstein. Here is a sample:
** **
The New Mind
Control
By Robert Epstein
(Originally published on Aeon.com)
The internet has spawned subtle forms of influence that can flip
elections and manipulate everything we say, think and do.
Over the past century, more than a few great writers have
expressed concern about humanity’s future. In The Iron Heel (1908), the
American writer Jack London pictured a world in which a handful of wealthy
corporate titans – the ‘oligarchs’ – kept the masses at bay with a brutal
combination of rewards and punishments. Much of humanity lived in virtual
slavery, while the fortunate ones were bought off with decent wages that
allowed them to live comfortably – but without any real control over their lives.
In We (1924), the brilliant Russian writer Yevgeny
Zamyatin, anticipating the excesses of the emerging Soviet Union, envisioned a
world in which people were kept in check through pervasive monitoring. The
walls of their homes were made of clear glass, so everything they did could be
observed. They were allowed to lower their shades an hour a day to have sex,
but both the rendezvous time and the lover had to be registered first with the
state.
In Brave New World (1932), the British author Aldous
Huxley pictured a near-perfect society in which unhappiness and aggression had
been engineered out of humanity through a combination of genetic engineering
and psychological conditioning. And in the much darker novel 1984
(1949), Huxley’s compatriot George Orwell described a society in which thought
itself was controlled; in Orwell’s world, children were taught to use a
simplified form of English called Newspeak in order to assure that they could
never express ideas that were dangerous to society.
These are all fictional tales, to be sure, and in each the
leaders who held the power used conspicuous forms of control that at least a
few people actively resisted and occasionally overcame. But in the non-fiction
bestseller The Hidden Persuaders (1957) – recently released in a
50th-anniversary edition – the American journalist Vance Packard described a ‘strange
and rather exotic’ type of influence that was rapidly emerging in the United
States and that was, in a way, more threatening than the fictional types of
control pictured in the novels. According to Packard, US corporate executives
and politicians were beginning to use subtle and, in many cases, completely
undetectable methods to change people’s thinking, emotions and behaviour
based on insights from psychiatry and the social sciences.
Most of us have heard of at least one of these methods: subliminal
stimulation, or what Packard called ‘subthreshold effects’ – the
presentation of short messages that tell us what to do but that are flashed so
briefly we aren’t aware we have seen them. In 1958, propelled by public concern
about a theatre in New Jersey that had supposedly hidden messages in a movie to
increase ice cream sales, the National Association of Broadcasters – the
association that set standards for US television – amended its code to prohibit
the use of subliminal messages in broadcasting. In 1974, the Federal
Communications Commission opined that the use of such messages was ‘contrary to
the public interest’. Legislation to prohibit subliminal messaging was also
introduced in the US Congress but never enacted. Both the UK and Australia have
strict laws prohibiting it.
Subliminal stimulation is probably still in wide use in the US –
it’s hard to detect, after all, and no one is keeping track of it – but it’s
probably not worth worrying about. Research suggests that it has only a small
impact, and that it mainly influences people who are already motivated to
follow its dictates; subliminal directives to drink affect people only if they’re
already thirsty.
Packard had uncovered a much bigger problem, however – namely
that powerful corporations were constantly looking for, and in many cases
already applying, a wide variety of techniques for controlling people without
their knowledge. He described a kind of cabal in which marketers worked closely
with social scientists to determine, among other things, how to get people to
buy things they didn’t need and how to condition young children to be good
consumers – inclinations that were explicitly nurtured and trained in Huxley’s Brave
New World. Guided by social science, marketers were quickly learning how to
play upon people’s insecurities, frailties, unconscious fears, aggressive
feelings and sexual desires to alter their thinking, emotions and behaviour
without any awareness that they were being manipulated.
By the early 1950s, Packard said, politicians had got the
message and were beginning to merchandise themselves using the same subtle
forces being used to sell soap. Packard prefaced his chapter on politics with
an unsettling quote from the British economist Kenneth Boulding: ‘A world of
unseen dictatorship is conceivable, still using the forms of democratic
government.’ Could this really happen, and, if so, how would it work?
The forces that Packard described have become more pervasive
over the decades. The soothing music we all hear overhead in supermarkets
causes us to walk more slowly and buy more food, whether we need it or not.
Most of the vacuous thoughts and intense feelings our teenagers experience from
morning till night are carefully orchestrated by highly skilled marketing
professionals working in our fashion and entertainment industries. Politicians
work with a wide range of consultants who test every aspect of what the
politicians do in order to sway voters: clothing, intonations, facial
expressions, makeup, hairstyles and speeches are all optimised, just like the
packaging of a breakfast cereal.
Fortunately, all of these sources of influence operate
competitively. Some of the persuaders want us to buy or believe one thing,
others to buy or believe something else. It is the competitive nature of our
society that keeps us, on balance, relatively free.
But what would happen if new sources of control began to emerge
that had little or no competition? And what if new means of control were
developed that were far more powerful – and far more invisible – than
any that have existed in the past? And what if new types of control allowed a
handful of people to exert enormous influence not just over the citizens of the
US but over most of the people on Earth?
It might surprise you to hear this, but these things have
already happened.
To understand how the new forms of mind control work, we need to
start by looking at the search engine – one in particular: the biggest and best
of them all, namely Google. The Google search engine is so good and so popular
that the company’s name is now a commonly used verb in languages around the
world. To ‘Google’ something is to look it up on the Google search engine, and
that, in fact, is how most computer users worldwide get most of their
information about just about everything these days. They Google it.
Google has become the main gateway to virtually all knowledge, mainly because
the search engine is so good at giving us exactly the information we are
looking for, almost instantly and almost always in the first position of the
list it shows us after we launch our search – the list of ‘search results’.
That ordered list is so good, in fact, that about 50 per cent of
our clicks go to the top two items, and more than 90 per cent of our clicks go
to the 10 items listed on the first page of results; few people look at other
results pages, even though they often number in the thousands, which means they
probably contain lots of good information. Google decides which of the billions
of web pages it is going to include in our search results, and it also decides
how to rank them. How it decides these things is a deep, dark secret – one of
the best-kept secrets in the world, like the formula for Coca-Cola.
Because people are far more likely to read and click on
higher-ranked items, companies now spend billions of dollars every year trying
to trick Google’s search algorithm – the computer program that does the
selecting and ranking – into boosting them another notch or two. Moving up a
notch can mean the difference between success and failure for a business, and
moving into the top slots can be the key to fat profits. . . .
Ironically, I
suppose, one can Google the author and title and find the complete version
online. – “The New Mind Control” by Robert Epstein (I assume it will come to the top of the Goggle list.)
** **
This strikes to your heart because long ago,
after reading Packard’s The Hidden Persuaders and other works fiction and
nonfiction, you set out to develop a three week class course on propaganda and
subliminal advertising during the decades of the sixties right through to your
retirement in 2003. The last decade or so became short chapter, an extension or
a prelude to your logical lectures. You are very much bothered by how people
are so easily subconsciously manipulated. This is one of the reasons why you
find the status quo such a social, religious, political and economic wall
around the world. Is this not so, boy? – Amorella
1614 hours. The concept raises a deep anger within – a
wall filled with a smorgasbord of deliciously appetizing blocks of many varied
colors, some so close one can hardly discern the difference, each the same size
for easily constructed perceptive human intake. No one is born free from it and
the manipulation is not entirely conscious – the separation of truth to fiction
becomes as blurred as the magical line between Saturday night and Sunday
morning. In a way this manipulation (presently seemingly rightly or wrongly)
can separate our human spirit from our living-in-the-physical world. Language
loses its luster and openly clear thinking becomes enhanced with night and fog;
oh, yes, and where are the stars, the hopes in such a mental place. Economic
manipulation is no different from any of the other colored bricks in the wall. In
fact it is in the water that initially wets concrete before the construction of
each brick itself. Family, the noun, is manipulated by parents of the parents
or the parent back into the dawn of human history. It is as though our goose is
cooked before we know there is a goose to be had. Only recently the
manipulation has been seen on a global scale. This is not a good thing because
what can we do about our nature except to find a way to come to peace with our
instincts and find a tunnel to a new light. Once we are aware of reality we can
individually wall off that part that is insincere and downright dishonest with befriending
the human psyche. (1636) Well, I’m not sure where this comes from in such a
straightforward manner (from my perspective) but here it is. – rho
You haven’t even re-read your thoughts here
but are willing to put your signature to it, boy. Where’s your reason, boy? –
Amorella
1638 hours. You brought this up out of my deep,
Amorella. You toss a pebble in the pond and you are bound to get a ripple.
Post when plausible. Carol is on page 405;
she’ll be ready to head for home soon. Enjoy the rest of the day. – Amorella
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