Monday 28 November 2011

Control of the people (2)

I first posted on this subject here, back in August, following the riots. Courtesy of one of my commenters on my blog, Tom Tom, I am directed to a guest-post on ZeroHedge by Tyler Durden in which various matters are discussed - and one which is well worth reading in full. However, I wish to concentrate on one section of Durden's post in which he discusses the subject of people control. Whilst this post is written from an American 'angle' the points he makes are just as true for this country:
"The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country. …We are governed, our minds are molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of. This is a logical result of the way in which our democratic society is organized. Vast numbers of human beings must cooperate in this manner if they are to live together as a smoothly functioning society. In almost every act of our daily lives, whether in the sphere of politics or business, in our social conduct or our ethical thinking, we are dominated by the relatively small number of persons…who understand the mental processes and social patterns of the masses. It is they who pull the wires which control the public mind.” – Edward Bernays, Propaganda, 1928 

Edward Bernays, the father of propaganda to control the masses, would be so proud of his disciples running our country today. He clearly believed only an elite few were intellectually capable of running the show. Essentially, he hit upon the concept of the 1% telling the 99% what they should think and believe over eighty years ago. The mechanisms for controlling the thoughts, beliefs, and actions of the population are so much more efficient today. The conditioning begins when we are children, as every child will be bombarded with at least 30,000 hours of propaganda broadcast by media corporations by the time they reach adulthood. Their minds are molded and they are instructed what to believe and what to value. Those in control of society want to keep the masses entertained at an infantile level, with instant gratification and satisfying desires as their only considerations. The elite have achieved their Alpha status through intellectual superiority, control of the money system, and control of the political process. Their power emanates from eliminating choices, while giving the illusion of choice to the masses. People think they are free, when in reality they are slaves to a two party political system, a few Wall Street banks, and whatever our TVs tell us to buy.
Our entire system is designed to control the thoughts and actions of the masses. In many ways it is done subtly, while recently it has become more bold and blatant. It is essential for the ruling elite to keep control of our minds through media messages and the educational system. It is not a surprise that our public education system has methodically deteriorated over the last four decades. The government gained control over education and purposely teaches our children selected historical myths, social engineering gibberish and only the bare essentials of math and science. The government creates the standardized tests and approves the textbooks. We are left with millions of functionally illiterate children that grow into non-critical thinking adults. This is the exact result desired by the 1%. If too many of the 99% were able to ignore the media propaganda and think for themselves, revolution would result. This is why the moneyed interests have circled the wagons, invoked police state thug tactics, and used all the powers of their media machine to squash the OWS movement. It threatens their power and control.
“Experience has shown that even under the best forms of government those entrusted with power have, in time, and by slow operations, perverted it into tyranny.” – Thomas Jefferson
A highly educated engaged citizenry would be a danger to the existing social order. The 1%, educated at our finest universities, does not want average Americans to obtain a great education for a reasonable price. They want them to get a worthless diploma at an excessively high price tag and become debt slaves to the Wall Street 1%. They want uneducated, indebted consumers, not educated productive citizens. Our republic has been slowly perverted since the time of its inception. The insidious process had been slow and methodical until 1913. The establishment of the Federal Reserve by an elite group of bankers and their politician friends and the establishment of a personal income tax created the conditions that have allowed a small cabal of powerful men to dictate the course of our economic, political, social, and military policies for the last 98 years. Anyone that chooses to open their eyes and awake from the propaganda induced stupor can see the result of allowing a small group of corrupt authoritarian men using their power to pervert our government into tyranny. The majority remains oppressed, buried under trillions of debt, while the shysters reap obscene profits, poison the worldwide economic system, and walk away unscathed in the aftermath of their crimes."
It is unlikely that any one of the problems about which Bernays or Dreyden write would have happened under a system of democracy called direct democracy, because the 'political elite' would have been constrained by 'people power'.

'1984' has indeed arrived, albeit late - but then you can never rely on politicians to get anything to run on time!

6 comments:

Stuart said...

I found this many years ago and still admire the truth of most of it:

http://www.sovereignty.org.uk/features/articles/sovstrat1.html

giant bee said...

Nothing we didn't already know, but as a post to show someone you're trying to wake, this is one of the best summaries I've seen.

Budgie said...

There is always Philip K Dick's idea of a president fitted with a collar bomb wired to the daily voting intentions of the population.

TomTom said...

a president fitted with a collar bomb

President is NOT the problem, it's Congress which is corrupt and exempt from insider trading laws and where Congressmen and Senators own Delaware corporations to receive bribes from Goldman Sachs etc

Anonymous said...

Good article by Alistair McConnachie, highlighted by Stuart, but I am not so sure about some of his remedies, in particular the one regarding state funding of political parties. It is a racing certainty that given the opportunity to install this, it will very soon become even more corrupt than the present private funding system. Raedwald has been doing a series of blogs on the current enquiry into state party funding, and is generally gloomy about the likely outcome.

It is better to try to get more people interested in their own fate and understand what is to be done with money given to parties. The idea is not to allow one person to influence direction, by controlling the purse strings.

A recent example would be UKIP's recent exercise called a "Facebook bomb" (I think), where a campaign to get many people to donate a fiver or something small if you agree with what the party is aiming to do. I do not do Facebook, so I am not sure what happened, but I believe it raised awareness and cash and was overall quite successful.

On the extract above highlighted by WfW and written by Tyler Durden...

Before our system was highjacked by the party system, there was a tendency, rather than a party, our ruling classes were liberal or conservative.

Go back even further and there was less difference between the rulers and the ruled, it would not be uncommon for a baron to be be found sitting in the pub of an evening with a yeoman and a serf, quaffing a few tankards and mulling the state of play.

There is quite a lot of well researched stuff on this by Tom Hodgkinson (The Idler), in his book "How to Be Free"...

http://idler.co.uk/books/how-to-be-free/

It seems a bit "hair shirt" in places, but he makes the point that working a bit harder for ourselves and our families (even if we don't own our own land) is better for our community than slaving over a hot computer for eight hours and then flaking out in front of mind sapping Corrie (or the like).

He makes the point that the mediaeval system was not the way it is portrayed by the lefties at all, even though he himself is a bit of a lefty. Work was not as gruelling and defeating as is often made out, and the debt to the landlord (yeoman or baron) tended to be a relatively small part of the equation, far less than the amount of work we donate to our modern (enlightened) government to waste on its fripperies. Tax Freedom day was 30th May this year I believe... Effectively half the year is spent working exclusively for the non-productive sector, and I believe that estimate is somewhat conservative.

Finally another example of the old, which should not be completely thrown out, can be seen in microcosm on a little island called Sark. Here, the land is owned by the crown and managed by the Queen's representative "The Seigneur", the land is parcelled out into manors and tenanted by forty families. Life has carried on here in good cheer for centuries, and only the earlier German attempt at the unification of Europe aka WW2 interrupted their peaceful co-existence.

Recently, the Barclay brothers have effectively taken over part of Sark and attempted to corrupt the system with "representative democracy", and much damage has been done.

WitteringsfromWitney said...

S: Thanks for that link. Some good points, but like r_w below I do not agree with his views on party funding. Parties want money, then raise it from those who believe in its ideals - don't expect non-believers to pay!

gb: Thanks!

B: I believe TT has responded - and I would agree with TT.

r_w: see response to S, above.