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.
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