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Volume 3-2013

NEWS FEEDS

The RCJ provides RSS feeds from well-respected news organizations, giving our readers a convenient portal through which to stay abreast of world events and issues. Use the links provided. The following are on the RCJ Front Page Report homepage (scroll both columns to the right).

The New York Times

The Huffington Post

The Economist

The Daily Beast

These are provided on other pages within this site:

Politico

Politics Daily

Wall Street Journal

Ezra Klein's WonkBlog - Washington Post

Nuclear Threat Initiative

cnet

Wired

Variety

Rolling Stone

 

Other sites worth visiting:

Cracked.com
Political Punch (ABC News Blog)
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LIBRARY OF ARTICLES

9-11 Liberals and Salman Rushdie

Police Force "Bombing" in Iraq

Anatomy of a Screwing

Fix America Now

Iceberg Economy: How the Supply Siders are Sinking the Ship of State

Bloomberg Illustrates Dodd-Frank Regulations for Investors

DAVOS WEF Points Out Single Points of Failure in the New Global Economy

Soulless Possession of Santo Niño

What Keeps NBC's Chuck Todd Up at Night?

"King of Bain" - Documentary on Mitt Romney's Private Equity Firm Bain Capital

Robert Smigel's Lost Ode to the Evil of General Electric

Riddle This: Do Our Governmental Systems Hinder Mitigation of Harmful Influences to Our System of Government?

The Achievement Metric - Time for a New Way of Determining Public Policy and Positioning Revenue Spending

Hide Your Brains! Matthews from the Left! Gingrich from the Right! Blowhard Attack! Or, more to the point...book reviews of "JFK Elusive Hero" and "Valley Forge"

Art Sampler - An RCJ Review of Art in the Modern Period

Benicia, California Case Study in Traffic Engineering and Growth Management

Everyday Heroism - The Penn State Debacle

How to Keep Things Lousy in the USA

How Being a Socialist Became a Negative

Are You A Slave? A Brief History of the Subject Suggests "Probably"

Moses, Wall Street, Human Nature and Grover Norquist

Concepts of Resistance - The RCJ Provides a Road Map for the OWS Movement

Lance Henriksen - World's Greatest Actor in Reflective Mode

Conspiracy - A Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the New World Order

Elections 2012

What Does it Take to be President?

Rating the U.S. News Readers

The Antidote to Michelle Bachman

Ship of Fools - Why Won't We Save Ourselves?

White House Solar Bomb

What Is Happening to Us?

The Cloud - What It Is

Background on Afghanistan

Economics 101

Global Economic Risks

Islamic Definition

Middle East

Second Amendment Remedies

Sam Broussard - Republicans

Treason

Why All the Zombies?

Gun Rights

Leadership Chronicles

Mind Games


Compelling large swaths of the public to believe in and react to certain things and to respond to certain triggers has developed under various names. Madison Avenue calls it advertising, public relations, and marketing. Militaries worldwide call it psyche warfare. It is the only thing that keeps the status quo in place.


By RAR

Did you really think that, or is that just something that you heard?

There has been a great deal of thought put into how exactly the human mind processes information, and into the way the neurological wiring of a human being will respond to specific stimuli. This is at the heart of marketing and communications, which many historians believe dates back to ancient Babylonia. I'm guessing it dates to the first time a primitive animal noticed others in his living group responding to the gaseous odors of one of their own. Perhaps the first joke developed from this discovery or observation, for what is more exemplifying of behavioral communications than a joke? The joker must know that there is a response that can be aroused by providing some specific impulse that will make his targeted audience laugh. That is sophisticated data gathering and interpretation, and sophisticated tactical communications planning. It is a perfect example of mental and emotional manipulation by an outside actor.

Sigmund Freud, the Father of Psychoanalysis, is often considered to also be the father of behavioral engineering, which as the graphic below intends to indicate has led to all kinds of machinations by all kinds of interested parties. (continued below graphic)



The result of all of the research and development that has been done in the field of behavior modification through various means is that the world of the 21st Century plays out like images broadcast on a scrim or a green screen, upon which reality presents itself in shadows and computer-generated imagery (CGI). Knowing this, people suspect that everything one sees should be perceived as the product of some particular thought factory; not necessarily an artifact of physical, empirical reality, but rather a meme - a thought construct launched into the vastness of potential interpretation.

This, of course, makes exercising the responsibilities of democratic institutions exceedingly difficult, if not altogether impossible. Does anyone know what is really going on? Or more horrifyingly, is anyone in charge, and if so, who are they and what do they want?

Freud came up with the notion of "Seduction Theory", which traced dysfunctions in adult patients to molestation events in their youth. While he eventually dumped that, upon the insistence of patients whom he forced to replay these hidden memories, to no apparent psychological benefit, he probably rightly recognized the potential of certain artifacts of youthful development to be useful in triggering related responses.

Freud was also a big believer in "the unconscious", i.e., "a cycle in which ideas are repressed, but remain in the mind, removed from consciousness yet operative, then reappear in consciousness under certain circumstances." He documented all of this in his book The Unconscious.

All of this clever inside knowledge of what people were really thinking, deep within themselves, found expression not just in psychology and psychoanalysis, but more profoundly in the development of advertising, marketing and public relations. While the world had always known hard-selling merchants, snake oil peddlers, and door-to-door salesmen, the first public relations agency wasn't founded in the U.S. until 1900: Boston's somewhat creepy sounding firm "The Publicity Bureau".

The Industrial Age fell in love with the notion that one could put a certain body English on information about their products that could not only produce reactive "buy signals" in their customers, but even suggest "needs" the unwitting may not have known they even had.

Concurrent with all of those lights going on was research into how these psychological triggers might be used to more efficiently manage workforces, even populations. And further concurrent with all of that was a 30-year long campaign of anti-trust legislation that gave rise the wizards of Waywardly Place, the modern business consultants. (continued below)


A Brief Aside on Business Consulting

In "The Making of McKinsey: A Brief History of Management Consulting in America" (The Firm, Simon & Schuster), author Duff McDonald argues that watch-dogging the large corporations made it illegal for them to collude openly, so there developed powerful consulting groups like the McKinsey Company. "The unintended effect, according to historian Christopher McKenna, was to accelerate the creation of an informal—but legal—way of sharing information among oligopolists. Who could do that? Consultants."

McDonald further argues that federal regulation forced new levels of competition upon large corporations not used to having competition at all, which further empowered the rise of consulting firms. The Big Four today are Ernst & Young, KPMG, Deloitte, and PricewaterhouseCoopers. Arthur Andersen made up the Big Five, until in 2002 they were laid low by involvement in the Enron scandal. Today Arthur Andersen is known as Accenture. Those are auditing firms in their basic form, but in reality are multidiscipline powerhouses of refined intellectual resources, which is to say that they have really smart people working there in all kinds of capacities other than accounting.

The McKinsey Company, founded in 1926, was until fairly recently the most mysterious of this consultancy realm. They were renowned for hiring from only the top one percent of the seven finest business schools in the world. (Chelsea Clinton got a gig there.) Their invoices were without detail or explanation as to services, and theirs were the industry's largest, or such was the legend. There is a feeling, voiced by McDonald, that while McKinsey makes huge mistakes in their business analysis prognostications and judgments from time to time, no executives are willing to question a company that charges so much for its services. While that may be insane, the world works that way. I once followed Accenture into a consulting gig with a major corporation to find that they had left them with a fetish for Microsoft Smart Art, PowerPoint Decks (printed slideshows), and for the SmartNOTES application. Said one executive, "I know, its stupid."

McKinsey and others of its ilk offer one other thing that modern mega-corporations find worthy of large rewards: they are heartless. General Motors can bring in McKinsey to downsize divisions and improve their efficiency, all of which means getting rid of workers, and using the lizards at McKinsey to do that kind of thing protects the General Motors management team clear down to the middle manager level. People get axed by strangers they have never seen before.




(continued from above)

By 1920 the world, and United States in particular, had become a complicated place in which information managers could encourage people to buy and want things, and to convince them to pay for it all through robotic compliance with the machine language of industry. The world was just emerging from its first full-scale war and people were already more or less in their phalanxes, good to go.

Along came the writer and public intellectual Walter Lippmann, whose 1920 book Liberty and the News and 1922's Public Opinion created a language for discussing the relationships between opinion, news and democratic principles. Professor Noam Chomsky, in his 1988 book Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media, explored Lippmann's role in the creation of the world we know today in which the "mass media of the United States are effective and powerful ideological institutions that carry out a system-supportive propaganda function by reliance on market forces, internalized assumptions, and self-censorship, and without overt coercion".

Lippmann had an apparently low regard for the common news consumer, certain that the common man was too ill-informed and ignorant to be trusted with an opinion in any case. So, there further developed a media culture in which agenda-driven purveyors of news told people just what they needed for them to hear to motivate them in the directions they wished them to go. Again, nothing new here beyond leverage of recent, ground-breaking studies in human behavior. Cryers, poets, writers and troubadours had long sought to influence the policy directions of authority, but the advancements in wired and radio communications technologies, coupled with psychology's new insights into human behavior, by this time had the thought manipulators in their veritable catbird seats.

Plenty would support the notion that this string of developments in mass communications drove Nazi Germany's propaganda machine. Under the brilliant direction of Joseph Goebbels, and with the help of image-producing artists such as Leni Riefenstahl, behavioral communications were used to move a down-trodden German nation to mount a war machine powerful enough to control much of Europe and a big part of Soviet Russia. It was a frightening tribute to the power of manufactured consent. 

The Tavistock Institute, with roots dating back to a 1921 study of shell-shock patients emerging from World War I, formed England in 1947 as a special sort of independent not-for-profit organization. Tavistock's mission is to combine research in the social sciences with the development of specific business practices. Their interest is in how groups of people and individuals process specific types of stimuli, such as one finds in the business world. They look at institution-building programs, organizational design, change management, and other arcane fields of study as they apply to the complete range of national and international sectors (i.e., government, industry and commerce, health and welfare, education, etc.). Tavistock prints the monthly journal Human Relations (published by Plenum Press), "now in its 48th year", and the new journal Evaluation (in conjunction with Sage Publications) a new journal Evaluation.



What makes Tavistock so different, besides by an independent operation with huge fundraising capabilities, is the active nature of the application of its research. Through a network of groups, Tavistock sponsors research in England at the University of Sussex, and in the U.S. through the Stanford Research Institute, Esalen, MIT, Hudson Institute, Heritage Foundation, Center of Strategic and International Studies at Georgetown (where State Department personnel are said to be trained), US Air Force Intelligence, and the Rand and Mitre corporations.

All of those groups are committed to putting disciplines as diverse as anthropology, economics, organizational behavior, political science, psychoanalysis, psychology, and sociology directly into real-time program trials. How would that work? Writer Dr. Byron Weeks, who sees an evil pattern in it all, describes some of their deeds:

"Tavistock Institute developed the mass brain-washing techniques which were first used experimentally on American prisoners of war in Korea. Its experiments in crowd control methods have been widely used on the American public, a surreptitious but nevertheless outrageous assault on human freedom by modifying individual behavior through topical psychology. A German refugee, Kurt Lewin, became director of Tavistock in 1932. He came to the U.S. in 1933 as a 'refugee, the first of many infiltrators, and set up the Harvard Psychology Clinic, which originated the propaganda campaign to turn the American public against Germany and involve us in World War II."

Putting aside Dr. Weeks claims of "topical psychology" used against U.S. citizens, there were key elements of the Nazi intelligence community absorbed into the Office of Security Services and eventually the CIA after World WAR II. The U.S. government recognized talent when they saw it, and the CIA in particular benefited from this special brand of psychological warfare warrior.

Whether or not one buys this notion of broad-scale experimentation on the citizens of America and elsewhere, David Icke knows there is something behind the fads that typify today's popular culture, including body tatooing and head shaving. It is because we are all said to be "sheeple": a race of humanoids castrated of our abilities to do anything but blindly follow the actions of those around. This is the farmyard analog to the mindless "robots" with which humans were compared earlier. Icke's observations of modern human behavior are most certainly correct. His mission to save us all from subterranean lizard masters called the Babylonian Brotherhood may lack the clarion call to really wake we sheeple up to the mass hypnotic suggestions under which we must surely be acting. Or are we all "Manchurian Candidates", under the unconscious control of masters whose motivations we can never perceive, let alone comprehend.

It is into that void of comprehension and understanding that now pours the manufactured consent, the political spin, the selected news, and the unedited opinion.

All we can do, in 2013, is understand that much of what you think you see, read, and hear is not real, but is instead just a piano roll with fingers reaching out and stroking our hot buttons, tickling our fancies to respond this way and that.

(112513)


Psychological Warfare Video Worth Watching

Psychological Warfare - 1955

 

Psychological Warfare

Psywar

 

 

©Rick Alan Rice (RAR), December, 2013