The Manipulators 1

We’ve heard a thousand times or more, the term, “brainwashing,” or “brainwashed.” But does one in a thousand know what it means? How does it happen?

Most people think along the lines of The Manchurian Candidate, when they think of “brainwashing.” A process performed in glittering stainless steel labs packed with menacing technical gizmos, dazzling spot lamps and zany scientists gleefully eyeing sweating needles oozing nefarious serums.

Well, there’s that, but, generally, people are brainwashed by everyday and routine strategies, not in labs.

Of course they want to push that “mad scientist” take on it, to make it seem rare and difficult to do.

Also, “brainwashing” can be a misused, facile term that can conceal or obfuscate a sort of psychosis that very many people have: the cry for attention, which is the key to exploitation.

So, brainwashing is the human condition, not the exception, perhaps why there are gurus saying you must detach yourself from things like wants and desires.

So, yes, we’re brainwashed about brainwashing!

Brainwashed?

How do you determine if you’re brainwashed, and how do you counter it? Tough questions.

Being “offended” by something you read or observe, is usually due to brainwashing.

Doing most anything that is ultimately against your interests is due to brainwashing. Like wanting things in excess. For example, take vehicles. Why anyone would need more than a top-trim Toyota Camry or Honda Accord or Mazda 6 for a luxury car is perplexing, perhaps a Chrysler 300 if you need more room, but, it’s brainwashing that pushes us into higher-priced cars than those. (Accords and Camrys are far more “luxurious” in a real sense than anything called “luxury” back in the ’60s or ’70s. The Fleetwood was nice, but still more a mobile boudoir than sensible transportation.) Many of the rich use only common, not ostentatious, autos.

Buying the higher-priced cars for routine traveling is ultimately a bad move, being that you lose even more due to depreciation, and it’s due to brainwashing.

Misunderstood?

It is said that no one who is brainwashed has ever known that he or she is brainwashed.

If you were to tell someone’s quite innocuously, that he was brainwashed, most likely you’ll immediately be accused of being brainwashed yourself, in a knee-jerk reaction. Yet it’s not an insult to be told you’re brainwashed, it’s a warning.

“You’re brainwashed…”
“No you’re brainwashed!”

“You’ve got a poisonous deadly scorpion about to sting your neck!”
“No! You’ve got a poisonous deadly scorpion about to sting your neck!”

Well, as the world turns, we see the folly of man, and we all are guilty of that ego-driven nonsense. Instead of a simple, “What brings you to that conclusion?” with real concern for whether it’s true, the mentality is to “strike back” in “self-defense.” Certainly, if someone is just saying that to be insulting, you’ll want to defend, but there’s no way of knowing without some civilized inquiry as to the legitimacy of the claim.

Another good response could be, “Thank you for pointing that out to me, and please tell me how and where I am brainwashed so I can correct it.”

We’ll see how far that flies. Because ego looks to defend itself even against rationality.

So how would you advise someone in a civilized way that he’s brainwashed, without offending? Perhaps the proper way is from another angle, indirectly, hoping to teach, rather than rile.

Secret

A “secret of life” is knowing we are all brainwashed, and a task of life is finding out how, then overcoming the brainwashing.

The First Step

So the first step in recovery is to realize, and really know, that we are all flawed and brainwashed, not just some.

The term, “brainwashing,” then, is an example of “the labeling fallacy,” described in our discussion of logical fallacies. Brainwashing is everyday life, and “brainwashing,” and similar terms, like hypnosis, subliminals, mind control, indocrination and gaslighting, are widely used, but they’re all interrelated. All of those are types of “brainwashing,” a term it appears we’ll have to continue to use for lack of a suitable alternative, while keeping in mind, it’s really a descriptor for a whole range of manipulative tactics and techniques.

Brainwashing and mass psychosis are the same as well.

Brainwashing is pursued because a dysfunctional society is a profitable society. Lots of use of shrinks, doctors, lawyers. Despairing people are easily manipulated.

Brainwashing is pursued because a dysfunctional society is easily kept under control, with its subjects subservient and malleable to authority.

Now, it doesn’t help that most of us can’t distinguish lies from truth, because we’re indirectly, and directly, trained to the point where lying is fundamental to our behavior. And we’re trained to believe the lies we’re fed. That is the ultimate (successful) goal of the educational and societal brainwashing we endure, designed to keep us in a child-like state of belief and existence.

Clinging to False Knowledge

False knowledge is a big part of brainwashing. Ego works against us here, our innate sense that conceding a particular point or accepting another point of view might cause us to have to change our beliefs and behavior, which would mean that we were wrong before. This causes us discomfort, so we “change the subject,” argue pointlessly, or make a run for it.

Our familiar old blowhard, Dr. J., was interviewing a woman on his podcast. This woman was informing him – trying to educate him – that women hate men due to the media war on men. And the old fart doubts it! He was simply shocked to be told the truth. What the…? She had to work to explain something that is readily verifiable via simple observation, and this mange-ridden buzzard argues the point?

Well, the stooge has explained before he fancies himself a “ladies’ man,” not realizing he gets approval of that nature as a result of suckery, pandering, and saying what others want to hear.

That women have been groomed to hate men is important for men to understand. A media war is ultimately damaging both sexes. So brainwashing is a serious business, and goes a long way to help explain this dysfunctional “society.”

Ideological Subversion

This is the nasty result of exploitation of brainwashing, a process by which a country can be taken over by a foreign power, “without firing a shot,” as they say.

Yuri Bezmenov exposed this back in the ’80s. “What it basically means is: to change the perception of reality of every American to such an extent that despite of the abundance of information no one is able to come to sensible conclusions in the interest of defending themselves, their families, their community, and their country.”

He specifies the US, but of course it may be applicable to any nation. This Communist infiltration has four main stages:

• demoralization, a long process that is now complete in the Western nations;
• destabilization, which we’re now going through, where the nations’ structures are destroyed;
• crisis, brings a “a violent change,” of power, the political structure, and the economy;
• normalization, or acceptance, where the new regime takes over, and a new reality takes hold.

Demoralization

Thus Bezmenov, a Soviet defector, laid out the entire scheme of this ongoing world-wide brainwashing that has broken Western society.

Destabilization

Once demoralization is completed, the second stage of ideological brainwashing is “destabilization,” about a two- to five-year period. Bezmenov explained that this is the targeting of essential structural elements of a nation: the economy, foreign relations, and defense systems. Basically, the subverter would look to destabilize every one of those areas in the United States, considerably weakening it.

Crisis

This third stage involves inducing a crisis situation. For example, this could be a replay of the 1920s-30s strategy of market collapse, depression, war. It would take only up to six weeks to send a country into crisis, explained Bezmenov.

Normalization

The last stage, “normalization,” is the ultimate phase and the goal of the conspirators, when the country is basically taken over, living under a new ideology and reality.

But how is this demoralization achieved? The following are some of techniques, but these are also used by controlling, sociopathic personalities to achieve their own ends.

Brainwashing Methods & Tactics

Education

“Education,” as we’re saddled with today, is an active process intended to “mold” or “shape” children’s minds using known psychological conditioning processes.

Once the student is molded to their satisfaction in the public schools, in colleges, the brainwashing continues, and in certain programs, like medicine, excessive workloads cause fatigue and even sleep-deprivation. Those are only good for brainwashing and indoctrination, not education.

Psychological Tricks

This one pretty much goes without saying. Pavlovian Conditioning is one example (someone wisely observed that school bells signaling start and end of classes are a good example of this). Positive reinforcement when we comply, negative when we resist or rebel. Being taught to assign “authority” to “official” figures (but rather than the deserving, this authority goes to approved designates who follow an agenda).

And it’s not really conditioning, is it, when it’s inherent to associate things? One example lays bare the lame understanding of the popular press: “Golden arches of McDonald’s associate with making you hungry.” That must be a page out of the “Notes for Dummies.” First off, no one at Mickey Ds is “conditioning” anything by putting up a sign. You already know arches are outside McDonald’s. And they induce vague feelings of nausea in discerning people. It’s no more conditioning than a banana is conditioning.

Conditioning is an association of a stimulus with a reaction not normally related (like a dog salivating when a bell is rung). Better is a Coke example, back when Coke used ads to promote feelings of happiness and love with Coca-Cola. They’d show people having fun and wanting to buy the world a Coke, and say that Coke was “The Real Thing,” which meant, indirectly, love. So you’d have loving feelings about Coke. That’s conditioning.

These ads had to be withdrawn, of course, you may remember, when too many people were marrying their Coke bottles.

It’s tragic, but a bulletin just came in. I have to place notice that, no, they weren’t really marrying their Coke bottles, that was a joke. And a pretty darned good one, I might add!

Entertainment

Entertainment is one of the avenues by which you are most susceptible to fraud. They say it’s because you’re vulnerable because you’re “off guard,” but, really, people want to be fooled. In fact, we watch entertainment, hoping to be brainwashed. Oh, we only want the good parts of the brainwashing, of course. But as you know, we take the good with the bad, happy with the sad…

Bond playing baccarat, or poker (and smoking like a chimney)? Brainwashing. They don’t just make expensive movies purely for your amusement, to surprise and delight and coddle you. So James Bond is a gambler, and a smoker, and a heavy drinker. So that will rub off on certain people, who will imitate him, hoping to get some of that whiff of “Bondness.” Bond also is supposedly a government agent out there, saving the world. That in itself is farcical.

“Poker Stars?” Brainwashing. Organized poker needs a steady supply of suckers. (That’s you and me.) So they focus on publicizing how “average Joes” “make a killing at the tables” against “The Pros.” They can’t resist sticking it to the rubes, though. “Chris Moneymaker” was a champion. Really? Reminds of how Homer Simpson went to change his name to one of, “Rembrandt Q. Einstein,” “Handsome B. Wonderful,” “Hercules Rockefeller,” or “Max Power.”

Subliminal Suggestion

It’s not just some brief unconscious clip spliced into a movie reel that makes you feel like having popcorn or something, oh, no.

There are many other subliminal tactics than that.

There’s a flip side, where they include the word, “cancer,” airbrushed into cigarette ads. Then there are the skulls disguised in whiskey ads…

The reasoning? Research has shown that there is a positive, not negative correlation between these death symbols, and sales.

Well, horror movies are popular, this shouldn’t come as a complete surprise.

So now we can understand the motive behind all these government-mandated warnings with those horrid pictures on cigarette packs. Sneaky, back-handed reverse psychology instead of sincerely motivated disincentive, like the “Just Say No!” con we discussed earlier.

“Subliminal suggestion” goes much deeper than the superficial implanting of silly desires.

It’s a similar case as with Pavlovian Conditioning, which is much more potent than the mumbo-jumbo about “dogs salivating when you ring a bell” would have you believe. No, Pavlov and later experimenters explored in depth, and there are many still at it, seeking insights to allow greater exploitation of humanity. Conditioning is another process, with many nuances. For example, there is a paradoxical response, where more of a conditioned stimulus creates less, instead of more, response. All of the details need an entire essay to expound on.

Deception

“Desires” are largely artificial, like this insane desire to get in line for new iPhones, or buy gigantic SUVs, or one of those absurd “McMansions.” We could have as easily been coached into lives lived in the most prudent and unassuming way possible. Where, to “beat the other guy,” you’d buy an ever smaller car with even better gas mileage, or grow more turnips per square foot in your home backyard garden. Where the status symbol was the smallest, most efficient house.

All this advertising and propaganda appeals to deep-seated desires to excel by “coming out on top,” in endless competition with that other guy. It feeds a silly competitive emotion whose origins might be mysterious if we couldn’t see that humans are childish in many ways beyond just this quirk. Competitiveness is not all bad, of course. It is a motivator.

Insularity

The problem: inability to communicate with others, and when we do, we must speak in platitudes and lies, so as not to offend, or “trigger,” or hurt someone’s feelings.

Groupthink

Going along with the crowd is an obvious sort of inherent, exploitable, brainwashing.

Trusted Source

If you have a compromised “trusted source,” your brainwashing is ready-made and prepackaged. Newsreader Cronkite was “the most trusted man in America,” in the old days, and we still listen to other news anchors, doctors, teachers, ministers, politicians, even lawyers and actors, of all people, despite them either proving unreliable, or not having knowledge in the area where they speak.

“Grassroots Marketing”

This is any situation where you think you’re getting a private person’s recommendation, but it’s actually just a false-fronted form of advertising/publicity.

A current trick is saturation on sites that accept comments. One recent example: people talking up Rolex watches on website comments sections, particularly on a financial blog I read. Soon after, Rolex crashed — did they know ahead of time and were front-running or executing a pump and dump? And now, right after, we aren’t seeing anything in comments about Rolex. This is related to “trusted source,” since you’re susceptible to trusting some commenter that seems rational and knowledgeable.

Brainwashing by Attrition

Argumentum ad nauseam is a part of brainwashing by attrition and by the psychological fact that if you keep hearing something long enough, you start to incorporate it, leading to “belief.”

Exploitation of Cravings & Desires

We saw the leveraging of James Bond to promote smoking. Sexual desires, or desires to feel excitement, or to eat a lot of sugary food can be exploited, too. The brainwashing here is already sort of prepared, the schemer just has to walk in and take advantage.

You’re Not Healthy

An accelerating trend: they’ve really started to feed us slop. A lot of what we eat is unfit for consumption, and a lot used to be considered waste product. Pink slime, HFCS, rancid and hydrogenated seed oils and margarine, bleached flour and sugar… And of course all the chemicals in our food, air and water are ruinous.

It’s not natural to crave so much sugar. There might be a cup of it or more in your sugary morning breakfast, all tolled. And all those cakes, candies and ice cream. Sugar is a poison in the quantities we guzzle it down. It should be considered a condiment, not a staple. But you crave sugars and starches and bad fats because you aren’t getting sufficient proper nutrition. Certainly this has been known for a long time. Sort of an open secret.

And the drugs… Good lord, the drugs. Most of the proletariat are unacknowledged druggies, the water supply itself being contaminated due to their addictions. And no one calls to put a stop to this? Of course sugar itself is a drug in the body.

Because of that, toxicity and nutrition deficiencies, a person’s will is sapped by hormonal imbalances and weakness, and yet more susceptible to brainwashing.

Trauma

They are talking about trauma-based mind control recently. This is in reference to a concerted effort where people, particularly children, are subjected to cruel tortures and psychological tactics with the objective of creating split-personality slaves. But this “Stockholm Syndrome” style brainwashing is all over the place. And you see it especially in the medical arena. Look at the people, damaged and killed by the medical profession, and they still get the highest praise! “Heroes!” the simps bleat, fawn and praise. Yet the deaths by their medical interventions and disease skyrocket. The only explanation must be trauma-based mind control.

It brings to mind a horror novel where the villain kicks a dog to death. As it’s dying, with its last effort, it licks the man’s shoe. Man exhibits exactly the same mindset. It appears the mind is susceptible to being permanently manipulated and warped due to extreme pain and injury, trauma or psychological warfare. The conclusion from this is that we’ll never progress any further as a society as long as this isn’t known, publicized and embraced by most every citizen. It should be taught and drilled and reminded constantly, starting early, in childhood. Along with this, methods should be considered to counter it, though widespread awareness would be the fundamental tool to resist.

Wanting to “Fit In”

We want to be accepted — at church, school, work, in the family, with friends, in society in general. What isn’t properly realized for its significance is that there are beings akin to sociopaths that recognize and exploit that. In fact, virtually every successful organization has succeeded in brainwashing you, or in exploiting the labors of others’ brainwashing. Once you absorb that, your life should improve. Churches, your job, school, government, and now, even our supposed servants, corporations like Walmart, etc. The leaders of these organizations are these exploiters, or they don’t last long in their positions.

Some Contemporary Examples

Weather Maps

This recent scam is showing weather temperature pattern maps all in scalding reds and oranges, but those colors only represent moderate temperatures. In the past, greens and yellows were used for the same temperatures. They already conditioned you to consider oranges and reds as “hot” and “very hot,” so that priming is now exploited.

Similarly, strange as it seems, Conservatives/Republicans in the US, in the 1970s, were represented as blue, Liberals/Democrats as red, on demographic maps, now it’s reversed, to take away the stigma of the association of Democrats with… Communism!

ChatGPT

Most should relate to this. These headlines over the past few years, such as: “A.I. Going to Eliminate 50% of Jobs by 2025.” They’ve been touting that more and more aggressively. To repeat, there’s no such thing as A.I. in the sense that most think of.

We used to go to the encyclopedia to write an essay for school, then just change it enough to avoid plagiarizing. What else could you do? It’s not like you had your own research facility, and if you did try something original, you’d be buggered over anyway, for not following the script.

They’re just pulling this BS out to hype A.I. as the new phenomenon, as explained in Stop Killer Robots Now!

How it works: People have been doing all the leg-work for this search engine, on sites like Reddit, where people pose questions, others answer, and the answers are graded on a scale. This and other “answer” sites already have compiled databases of answers to programming questions and such, which ChatGPT can skim and regurgitate.

So-called A.I., in its currently-hyped incarnation, is a search engine/scraper, harvesting all these answers and re-issuing them as its “intelligent responses.”

How we know for certain that this crock is a crock? Easy giveaways: Things like misspellings in its responses, like an instance found where, “too,” was spelled “to” of all things. That’s all you need to know. An A.I. obviously couldn’t make that mistake, it simply regurgitated a misspelled human response to the question from somewhere else.

In another fiasco, it “played chess,” against top bot, Stockfish, and didn’t know how to move its pieces correctly! Sure, you want this “super-intelligence” to write your computer programs when it can’t even learn or conform to the rules of chess.

Now for the vitally important piece of the puzzle. What about all these goons saying it wrote a computer program for them, or a sonnet, or cured their ailments? In cases of very specific things like that, they’re doing what all hyping shills do: they lie. Some human manually programs some software code, or tweaks a sonnet, claims it’s “A.I.” then the legions of these shills — the “grassroots marketers,” particularly certain YouTubers that suddenly appear — publicize it. (Or there are of course those who simply post lies about how ChatGPT wrote a program for them.) No magic.

This trick is a replay of something we’ve seen before, years ago, a little ruse pulled by a consulting company. It couldn’t complete its networked accounting software in time, but it was contracted to a fixed delivery date, with big penalties if they buggered up. So they just hired a legion of data-input clerks to post and process data behind the scenes. The client would enter data, see a calculated result spit back up on the screen, and it looked like everything was dandy. One person entered an obvious error, that the hidden worker caught and corrected on the spot, and the client marveled. “Look at that, it even corrects typos!” “Oh, yes,” said the consultant. “The system can be quite intelligent. But we don’t guarantee it will catch all user errors!”

Then there are the hucksters. One stooge writes Coding Won’t Exist In 5 Years. This Is Why in the JavaScript in Plain English site, but provides no evidence to back it up. Well into the article, we see the actual intent in writing this screed: a puff-piece to promote ChatGPT!

These oblique, sly references to things are along the lines of product placement in media, where there will be a prominent box of Cheerios on the kitchen table in a movie, for example. Another contributor to “brainwashing.”

But It Gets More Weird

Glow-op huckster Elon Musk is bleating that they “must stop all A.I. development now,” before it’s too late. What a dipstick. He’s in talks with Bill Gates or something to avert the catastrophe.

Then there’s this knee-slapper.

This incompetent jabroni and self-styled expert is in the same league as all of the other promoted A.I. “experts,” like Max Tegmark, Musk, Kissinger, Gates… Know-nothing, hysterical and nonsensical.

We wish we could laugh at all of this, but it has really become too wearisome.

Why even come out with this sort of mad crap, though? Well, other than its value as a simple distraction for the mutts and simpletons, it’s part of a — wait for it… a sort of pump-and-dump. It’s to make you think they’ve really got something there, so maybe you’ll buy something they’ve got prepared for market, and buy into their line of BS. Remember, if they can scare you, you don’t reason well, and you’ll jump into any old thing for “safety and salvation.” It’s an age-old tactic, and those of you who don’t know it better get schooled post-haste.

Also, we’ve previously looked at how they’re trying to sell this A.I. as all-seeing and knowing, so they have another avenue to feed you BS.

As always, it also gives them an excuse to trot out their mouthpieces to spout off their worthless blather.

Benefits of a Brainwashed Population to Controllers

We’re brainwashed — and this is one of the most foul examples — not to inquire into the simplest yet most urgent questions, like how to deal with when political units become corrupt, and how to constantly check for that, and guard against it.

What about the tacit acceptance of cancer and heart disease increasing year by year, consistently, with no apparent curiosity or desire to investigate or stop it?

Pathetic, too, that we’ve somehow accepted bottled water when we’re brainwashed to not insist that one role of government should be to ensure all water is 100% pure coming out of taps.

As brainwashed mechanisms in search of validation, we merely roll, on autopilot, until something comes along that validates the quest to be brainwashed. Then cue the fanaticism, group-think and other insanity that engenders.

Now they’re saying 300 million jobs to be displaced by A.I., a predictive programming ruse to condition people to the unemployment they’re trying to foist on us. A note about “employment,” that is limitless, another thing that we expect few to understand. As long as there’s one project, one thing that someone wants that they could make use of, and don’t have, there’s potential employment.

There’s plenty of idle, willing manpower, it’s just stifled by the absurd, unworkable monetary and economic system. You must grok this point: there’s no limit to what needs to be done, and there’s plenty of opportunity and ability to do it. And each positive job or creation elevates society that bit more. Instead, we have goons creating only opportunities for squalor and destruction, and goofs go along with it every step of the way.

Is there any limit to the work that needs to be done? There’s nowhere that roads don’t need improvement, potholes filled. Nowhere that couldn’t use a subway or extension. Nowhere that couldn’t use more sidewalks or more power generation or improved tech. That’s just the public works. And when all the tidying up and repairs and infrastructure are in order, we turn to enhancements of each individual.

If everyone wants to live in a castle, that could be done. If everyone wants to drive a Lambo, so be it. If free enterprise and efficient use of labor were applied, Lamborghinis would be financially possible for every worker, if we structured society correctly.

Summary

The Sad Truth: A Brainwashed State Is the Human Condition

You’ve heard the expression, “You can’t con an honest man.” It refers to most cons involving a victim who gets suckered in because he thinks he’s going to profit off some shady deal — a “confidence scheme.” Well, there’s a similar rule for brainwashing. Those tricks we’ve discussed don’t work on a person with his feces in a tidy pile. If you understand the way the world works, and know truth, how can you be convinced of falsehoods that contradict it? You can’t. So why isn’t everyone resistant against brainwashing? Because truth is often hard, and, generally, people prefer the soft cushion provided by lies.

So Important

That point: there is no limit to the “economy,” or to the wealth we can produce, except our capacity to perform tasks, and our determination, and our commitment to eliminate useless make-work and counterproductive “jobs.”

This other salient point: You know you’re brainwashed if something spoken or written “offends” you. Most times, it merely reflects on how you are brainwashed, and is exploitation of that brainwashing. A good example is politics. You’re tricked into “picking a side” and being offended by “the other side,” in an endless carnival of absurdity that is neutering. If something is wrong or bad, take action to stop it if possible, don’t run around “offended” all the time. We’re talking about non-personal things, not, for example, direct threats of violence affecting you personally, of course, that should be obvious.

Also:

• Brainwashing is required to gloss over that basically everything is a lie to manipulate you or drive your emotions.
• People can’t understand that the world was here long before they were, and had a chance to cement all the nefariousness of the “bad guys,” with their mastery of these controlling techniques, like brainwashing.
• If you’re brainwashed into obedience to authority, like that relayed on the TV, any other brainwashing is of course unnecessary.
• If you’re brainwashed into materialism, you can’t ever be happy, you’ll always be “coming up short” by comparison to someone else, and there will always be someone that will step in to exploit your desires.
• Most people, sadly, are looking for the chance to be brainwashed to allow indulgence of needs, and cravings, which can be mostly negative, not positive.
• There is a problem for anyone who has half an inkling of what’s going on, being swept along in the backwash of the teeming brainwashed hicks and their crazy behavior.
• Awareness of the problem may not even be possible, at a certain stage. It behooves people to, if they can, simply assume they’re brainwashed and work from there.

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