Somethings to think about

Unpleasant Facts final

I’m going to wrap up my Unpleasant Facts series here on what Huxley wrote about in his Brave New World Revisited (1958). Huxley goes on to describe in his overview of BNWR by describing further uses of Propaganda, good and bad, The Art of Selling, Brainwashing, Chemical Persuasion, Subconscious Persuasion, Hyponpaedia or implanting suggestions during a persons sleep, Education for Freedom.

What I find fascinating is the manipulation that we humans do to each other in the quest for control and power over each other. History has shown us many times that we continue to forget those past manipulations only to learn to late after a freedom is gone.  Some psyops are subtle while other forms are overt. I can throw some examples out such as the current gun control being used to take our collective minds away from the economy and the unemployment rate still sitting at 8.7 percent. This is only one small example and I don’t need to bore you with more, there are are plenty of other blogs to fill your minds with more of that type of information.

As humans everyday we are psyop’d by what we see in the media, and what we are exposed to in marketing. And I believe we psyops each other,without even recognizing we are doing it. How many times have you used a white lie to a family member or friend to get what you want? A simple form of manipulation none the less.  Realizing what is being done to you makes you much smarter than the average joe. It is also a good skill to learn and helps hone your situational awareness if you stop and think about it.

If you still don’t believe that any of what I prescribed in all the previous articles, using Huxley, go to Surviving In Argentina. The author of the blog FerFAL is living in a fairly modern society, a democracy none the less, and yet his government is controlling the media to it own ends and means.

Or you can just say, “AD, your full of crap we live in a free society and that can’t happen here” I say to each his or her own.

Here are links to the previous three articles I wrote about and Huxley’s thoughts.

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

“Idealism is the noble toga that political gentlemen drape over their will to power.”
Aldous Huxley

Unpleasant Facts Part 3

In my first two parts of this article I have talked about how Huxley (mostly Huxley) and Orwell spoke of their thoughts on the ills of government (if not controlled) and how through the governments manipulation of the press, either directly or indirectly a government can control it’s population. Orwell had, as he described a boot to face description of control that he laid out in his book 1984. For most of us older generation it meant a Stalinist type of world on steroids. Ruling through complete fear.

Huxley took a different approach in his book Brave New World. He wrote about how a population can be controlled through a more passive avenue by removing religion, groups or organizations, along with the liberal use of early indoctrination of children, free sex and drugs. The removal of the individual and the embracement of the crowd or herd.

Both writers talked about the Ultimate Revolution. The total subversion of the individual’s psychology and physiology. In my previous articles I drew some parallels to our society today. More pointedly the current Progressive Movement, or what was known as Liberals.  And I understand that many people will have a different view than myself after digesting the previous posts. But when you apply the below commentary of Huxley in regards to today’s Progressives, he again describes the general attitude that prevails in Washington DC today. I have underlined probably one of the purest descriptions of a Progressive mindset I have ever read.

The second underline portion below is a perfect example of what the current administration in the White House uses today against any opponents that disagree with their policies, healthcare, budgets, or I’ll belabor the point again the Second Amendment.

Unlike the masses, intellectuals have a taste for ra­tionality and an interest in facts. Their critical habit of mind makes them resistant to the kind of propa­ganda that works so well on the majority. Among the masses “instinct is supreme, and from instinct comes faith. . . . While the healthy common folk instinc­tively close their ranks to form a community of the people” (under a Leader, it goes without saying) “in­tellectuals run this way and that, like hens in a poul­try yard. With them one cannot make history; they cannot be used as elements composing a community.” Intellectuals are the kind of people who demand evi­dence and are shocked by logical inconsistencies and fallacies. They regard over-simplification as the origi­nal sin of the mind and have no use for the slogans, the unqualified assertions and sweeping generaliza­tions which are the propagandist’s stock in trade. “All effective propaganda,” Hitler wrote, “must be confined to a few bare necessities and then must be expressed in a few stereotyped formulas.” These stereotyped for­mulas must be constantly repeated, for “only constant repetition will finally succeed in imprinting an idea upon the memory of a crowd.” Philosophy teaches us to feel uncertain about the things that seem to us self-evident. Propaganda, on the other hand, teaches us to accept as self-evident matters about which it would be reasonable to suspend our judgment or to feel doubt. The aim of the demagogue is to create social coherence under his own leadership. But, as Bertrand Russell has pointed out, “systems of dogma without empirical foundations, such as scholasticism, Marxism and fas­cism, have the advantage of producing a great deal of social coherence among their disciples.” The dema­gogic propagandist must therefore be consistently dogmatic. All his statements are made without qualification. There are no grays in his picture of the world; everything is either diabolically black or celestially white. In Hitler’s words, the propagandist should adopt “a systematically one-sided attitude to­wards every problem that has to be dealt with.” He must never admit that he might be wrong or that people with a different point of view might be even partially right. Opponents should not be argued with; they should be attacked, shouted down, or, if they be­come too much of a nuisance, liquidated. The morally squeamish intellectual may be shocked by this kind of thing. But the masses are always convinced that “right is on the side of the active aggressor.”

Huxley on speaking of Hitler and his ability to control the herd:

Mindlessness and moral idiocy are not charac­teristically human attributes; they are symptoms of herd-poisoning. In all the world’s higher religions, salvation and enlightenment are for individuals. The kingdom of heaven is within the mind of a person, not within the collective mindlessness of a crowd. Christ promised to be present where two or three are gath­ered together. He did not say anything about being present where thousands are intoxicating one another with herd-poison. Under the Nazis enormous numbers of people were compelled to spend an enormous amount of time marching in serried ranks from point A to point B and back again to point A. “This keeping of the whole population on the march seemed to be a senseless waste of time and energy. Only much later,” adds Hermann Rauschning, “was there revealed in it a subtle intention based on a well-judged adjustment of ends and means. Marching diverts men’s thoughts. Marching kills thought. Marching makes an end of individuality. Marching is the indispensable magic stroke performed in order to accustom the people to a mechanical, quasi-ritualistic activity until it becomes second nature.”

        From his point of view and at the level where he had chosen to do his dreadful work, Hitler was perfectly correct in his estimate of human nature. To those of us who look at men and women as individuals rather than as members of crowds, or of regimented collec­tives, he seems hideously wrong. In an age of accelerat­ing over-population, of accelerating over-organization and ever more efficient means of mass communication, how can we preserve the integrity and reassert the value of the human individual? This is a question that can still be asked and perhaps effectively answered. A generation from now it may be too late to find an answer and perhaps impossible, in the stifling collec­tive climate of that future time, even to ask the ques­tion.

We could conclude that the attack on religion in this country is but a part of what Huxley is speaking about.

Huxley on The Arts of Selling:

The survival of democracy depends on the ability of large numbers of people to make realistic choices in the light of adequate information. A dictatorship, on the other hand, maintains itself by censoring or dis­torting the facts, and by appealing, not to reason, not to enlightened self-interest, but to passion and prej­udice, to the powerful “hidden forces,” as Hitler called them, present in the unconscious depths of every hu­man mind.

In the West, democratic principles are proclaimed and many able and conscientious publicists do their best to supply electors with adequate information and to persuade them, by rational argument, to make realis­tic choices in the light of that information. All this is greatly to the good. But unfortunately propaganda in the Western democracies, above all in America, has two faces and a divided personality. In charge of the editorial department there is often a democratic Dr. Jekyll — a propagandist who would be very happy to prove that John Dewey had been right about the abil­ity of human nature to respond to truth and reason. But this worthy man controls only a part of the machin­ery of mass communication. In charge of advertising we find an anti-democratic, because anti-rational, Mr. Hyde — or rather a Dr. Hyde, for Hyde is now a Ph.D. in psychology and has a master’s degree as well in the social sciences. This Dr. Hyde would be very unhappy indeed if everybody always lived up to John Dewey’s faith in human nature. Truth and reason are Jekyll’s affair, not his. Hyde is a motivation analyst, and his business is to study human weaknesses and failings, to investigate those unconscious desires and fears by which so much of men’s conscious thinking and overt doing is determined. And he does this, not in the spirit of the moralist who would like to make people better, or of the physician who would like to improve their health, but simply in order to find out the best way to take advantage of their ignorance and to expolit their irrationality for the pecuniary benefit of his em­ployers. But after all, it may be argued, “capitalism is dead, consumerism is king” — and consumerism re­quires the services of expert salesmen versed in all the arts (including the more insidious arts) of persuasion. Under a free enterprise system commercial propa­ganda by any and every means is absolutely indis­pensable. But the indispensable is not necessarily the desirable. What is demonstrably good in the sphere of economics may be far from good for men and women as voters or even as human beings.

Take the below quote and frame it in the context when describing Social Security, National Healthcare, Gun Control, Medicare or a discussion that speaks of cutting any social program. When you watch the news next time watch for the emotional words that the reporter is using to describe the story. I have talked about commercials in the past on this blog, Huxley gives some perfect examples below.

 Effective rational propaganda becomes possible only when there is a clear understanding, on the part of all concerned, of the nature of symbols and of their rela­tions to the things and events symbolized. Irrational propaganda depends for its effectiveness on a general failure to understand the nature of symbols. Simple-minded people tend to equate the symbol with what it stands for, to attribute to things and events some of the qualities expressed by the words in terms of which the propagandist has chosen, for his own purposes, to talk about them. Consider a simple example. Most cos­metics are made of lanolin, which is a mixture of purified wool fat and water beaten up into an emulsion. This emulsion has many valuable properties: it penetrates the skin, it does not become rancid, it is mildly antiseptic and so forth. But the commercial prop­agandists do not speak about the genuine virtues of the emulsion. They give it some picturesquely volup­tuous name, talk ecstatically and misleadingly about feminine beauty and show pictures of gorgeous blondes nourishing their tissues with skin food. “The cosmetic manufacturers,” one of their number has written, “are not selling lanolin, they are selling hope.” For this hope, this fraudulent implication of a promise that they will be transfigured, women will pay ten or twenty times the value of the emulsion which the propagandists have so skilfully related, by means of misleading symbols, to a deep-seated and almost universal feminine wish — the wish to be more attrac­tive to members of the opposite sex. The principles underlying this kind of propaganda are extremely sim­ple. Find some common desire, some widespread uncon­scious fear or anxiety; think out some way to relate this wish or fear to the product you have to sell; then build a bridge of verbal or pictorial symbols over which your customer can pass from fact to compensa­tory dream, and from the dream to the illusion that your product, when purchased, will make the dream come true. “We no longer buy oranges, we buy vitality. We do not buy just an auto, we buy prestige.” And so with all the rest. In toothpaste, for example, we buy, not a mere cleanser and antiseptic, but release from the fear of being sexually repulsive. In vodka and whisky we are not buying a protoplasmic poison which in small doses, may depress the nervous system in a psychologically valuable way; we are buying friendli­ness and good fellowship, the warmth of Dingley Dell and the brilliance of the Mermaid Tavern. With our laxatives we buy the health of a Greek god, the radi­ance of one of Diana’s nymphs. With the monthly best seller we acquire culture, the envy of our less literate neighbors and the respect of the sophisticated. In every case the motivation analyst has found some deep-seated wish or fear, whose energy can be used to move the consumer to part with cash and so, indirectly, to turn the wheels of industry. Stored in the minds and bodies of countless individuals, this po­tential energy is released by, and transmitted along, a line of symbols carefully laid out so as to bypass ra­tionality and obscure the real issue.

Children and education:

Thanks to compulsory education and the rotary press, the propagandist has been able, for many years past, to convey his messages to virtually every adult in every civilized country. Today, thanks to radio and television, he is in the happy position of being able to communicate even with unschooled adults and not yet literate children.

        Children, as might be expected, are highly suscepti­ble to propaganda. They are ignorant of the world and its ways, and therefore completely unsuspecting. Their critical faculties are undeveloped. The youngest of them have not yet reached the age of reason and the older ones lack the experience on which their new-found rationality can effectively work. In Europe, con­scripts used to be playfully referred to as “cannon fodder.” Their little brothers and sisters have now be­come radio fodder and television fodder. In my child­hood we were taught to sing nursery rhymes and, in pious households, hymns. Today the little ones warble the Singing Commercials. Which is better — “Rheingold is my beer, the dry beer,” or “Hey diddle-diddle, the cat and the fiddle”? “Abide with me” or “You’ll wonder where the yellow went, when you brush your teeth with Pepsodent”? Who knows?

        “I don’t say that children should be forced to harass their parents into buying products they’ve seen adver­tised on television, but at the same time I cannot close my eyes to the fact that it’s being done every day.” So writes the star of one of the many programs beamed to a juvenile audience. “Children,” he adds, “are living, talking records of what we tell them every day.” And in due course these living, talking records of television commercials will grow up, earn money and buy the products of industry. “Think,” writes Mr. Clyde Miller ecstatically, “think of what it can mean to your firm in profits if you can condition a million or ten million children, who will grow up into adults trained to buy your product, as soldiers are trained in advance when they hear the trigger words, Forward March!” Yes, just think of it! And at the same time remember that the dictators and the would-be dicta­tors have been thinking about this sort of thing for years, and that millions, tens of millions, hundreds of millions of children are in process of growing up to buy the local despot’s ideological product and, like well-trained soldiers, to respond with appropriate be­havior to the trigger words implanted in those young minds by the despot’s propagandists.

To be continued………

Unpleasant Facts

I just couldn’t pass this article up after I read it over at Combat Studies Group. From a ten thousand foot view, a letter from Aldous Huxley to George Orwell. Huxley wrote Brave New World and Orwell penned 1984. The authors discuss the Ultimate Revolution and their views of  as Huxley puts it “the revolution that relies beyond politics and economics and which aims at the total subversion of the individual’s psychology and physiology” the other chilling quotation is as Huxley describes “My own belief is is that the ruling oligarchy will find less arduous and wasteful ways of governing and of satisfying its lust for power, and these ways will resemble those which I describe in Brave New World.”

These two men back in 1949 were hitting the proverbial nail on the head about our current government and the events that are in motion today. Huxley is  also quoted and writes ” Thanks to the voluntary ignorance of our fathers, the advent of the ultimate revolution was delayed for five or six generations.” Are we not five or six generations from the founding of our nation? Ok maybe a few years more.

Huxley continues with: “Within the next generation I believe the world’s rulers will discover that infant conditioning and narco-hypnosis are more efficient instruments of government, than clubs and prisons, and that the lust for power can be completely satisfied by suggesting people into loving their servitude as by flogging and kicking them into obedience.”

Pretty powerful stuff! One could draw a parallel just by looking at our current education system (infant conditioning) children are taught that there are no indvidual winners and losers, we all must feel good, socialization and an entitlement is the norm. Also think about the relaxation of drug laws in some states (narco-hypnosis) along with the current attitude that if there is a sickness or a pain, just take a pill. For those that are old enough to remember the term,Tune in, turn on, and drop out comes to mind.

Our current reliance on the government, state, local, and federal for all kinds of social programs or the impression that the government likes to portray, makes Huxley’s last statement about suggesting to people into loving their servitude. All one has to do is turn on the “news” and listen to how great things are, how great your government is making your life easier, how much better off you are now than say “X” number of years ago?

I remember when Brave New World was required reading in (my) 6th grade, and thinking at the time wow what a utopia! All the drugs and sex bypassed my young brain at the time but I do recall how everyone in the book walked around in a halcyon haze, loving life. Later when I was a teenager and very aware of the Soviet Union I read 1984 and drew the mental conclusion that Stalin was meant to be the main character not Big Brother. And according to Huxley, if you believe he is right, The Stalin’s, Pol Pot’s, Mao’s are pretty much gone after their social revolutions died after years of boot to head tactics. That is not to say those types of tyrants don’t still exists.

Did these two authors have some sort of Nostradamus view back in 1932 and 1946? possibly? I beleive they had a wide eyed view of current events and were able to articulate  just one of the possible outcomes of the world. But the parallels are eerily  relevant then as they are today.

Granted I am not a big fan of our current administration, and I find the lack of information on a lot of topics alarming, the large purchases of ammunition by three letter agencies, and recently the opening of the skies to a future drone operations, the total buy in of the media that the government knows best are just a few. I also know that anyone can construe what they want from what they read and come a 180 degrees from my thoughts. But what I am trying convey is use your melon and think for yourself.

 

Combat Studies Group.