They Would Be Gods - 80 - Social Control and the Manipulation of Public Opinion

THEY WOULD BE GODS: OUR PAST RECONSIDERED, OUR FUTURE FOREWARNED

PART VIII: CONTROL

by Anthony Forwood (2011)

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80: Social Control and the Manipulation of Public Opinion

A person can only know with any certainty what he or she personally experiences as being true, and everything else has to be accepted or rejected based strictly on what they are told. Some of the things we are told to believe are commonly considered more reliable to believe than any proposed alternatives, and this reliance depends primarily on where the information is coming from. We tend to believe those sources that we have learned to trust the most: our parents, teachers, close friends, experts, authority figures, etc. Other sources are deemed less believable to one degree or another. This depends largely on previous experiences of reliability or unreliability from a particular source. Most of the things that we’re told, we’re willing to accept unless it conflicts with our current beliefs, or unless we’ve previously found the source to be unreliable, or otherwise suspect that it might be. Sometimes we put our faith in what we would expect to be a reliable source, but later we might find that that source had misinterpreted the facts, or had even purposely distorted them. When this happens, and particularly when it’s supposed to be a very reliable and authoritative source, we should naturally be suspicious of anything that source claims from that point on. Understanding the true intentions of those in control puts a whole new perspective on what they might claim, and anything they claim should raise our suspicions.

Each generation receives a slightly different interpretation of the world than that of the generation before it, based primarily on its experiences and what it has been conditioned to believe. In the process, they acquire a modified mindset from that of the previous generation. The only knowledge about the previous generational worldview comes from what the new generation might glean from the older generation and through historical documentation. Other than that, the new generation remains quite ignorant of previous conditions and certain social changes that have taken place since their parents were young. The older generation, in turn, is often quite unaware of these changes taking place because they are too focused on simply earning a living and raising a family, or they are mildly aware of them but think of them as small sacrifices necessary to what they believe is progress, but in many ways they don’t realize any significant differences between the past and the present until much later in life.

In the last fifty years, there has been a drastic increase in the loss of personal freedoms, heavier policing, a large increase in depictions of crime and violence in the media (both as news and entertainment), greater degrees of fear being pushed upon the population, and generally tighter and broader control of people’s lives. Before all this, we were able to enjoy a time of relative peace and security in our daily lives. People were happier, friendlier, more relaxed, and more respectful to each other. Nor did we have all the modern accoutrements that we have today, and yet things were much better in our personal lives. There was still the hope of a better future with greater freedom, and people appreciated and respected their freedoms and the freedoms of others more than they seem to now. But that hope of a better future and those freedoms seem to continually slip further beyond the horizon as we get older and those in power focus on molding the beliefs, and therefore the lives, of the newer generations.

Incremental changes to society have taken place in this generational, step-wise manner – slow enough that the changes don’t upset the status quo too much, but always advancing towards greater control and domination over our lives and our beliefs. It is through the manipulation of our beliefs, of course, that we are most predominantly controlled. This is the oldest method of mind-control there is.

We’re bombarded with information and ideas by the media through all of its organs: radio and television, movies, books and magazines, the Internet, music, even billboards, and of course, word of mouth. We get so much information forced upon us each day that we become overwhelmed and have no way to verify every purported fact or suggestion we encounter. These messages have a habit of being picked up by the subconscious when we aren’t really paying them much attention, and we’re influenced in this way into accepting much of what we’re told (especially by those in authority) without investigating any further. The content of both the news and entertainment media is purposely used in this manner to influence public opinion.

If we look around us at the world with as little bias as possible, without the preconditioned mindset of the authoritative opinions that we’ve been conditioned to accept, and if we study the reasoning of this authority that determines these opinions for us, we can begin to grasp the falsehoods that have been promoted by these sources. We will see that these opinions, these false or unproven facts, are always geared to direct our thinking towards a distorted perspective that omits a bigger and truer reality. When you begin to see the irrationality behind the depictions presented to you, you become more and more aware of the methods that are commonly used to convince you of the falsehoods. You begin to see how these methods rely on one another in order to take a person’s otherwise rational thinking processes through leaps of logic that purposely omit relevant factors from the equation and simplifies the perception of reality to the point that makes authoritative opinion seem reasonable. When you can do this, you begin to see that a great deal of the true reality and what we are led to believe isn’t very reasonable at all.

Those in authority make use of statistics quite frequently, and use them to manipulate public opinion in order to persuade the public body to accept the actions and decisions of that authority. But statistics, particularly in the form of opinion polls and public surveys, can be very misleading in both their questions and their results for a number of reasons. First, questions can be posed to the public that are prone to being misunderstood because they’re not worded clearly enough to express the full or exact meaning of the question. Second, the polled question might only offer a limited selection of answers to choose from that do not allow certain responses to be expressed. Third, we rarely ever see precisely how the final data is gathered and assessed, and we’re usually only ever given the results based on the interpretation of those doing the polling. For these reasons, polls and surveys are highly suspect, since there is so much leeway for manipulating the questions and results to fit a particular conclusion.

Other means of manipulating public belief is accomplished through the suppression of facts. If we take the US government’s assessment of the UFO situation as an example, we’ll find that the truth of the situation has been largely distorted, and the number of relevant sightings of UFOs has been considerably downplayed. The significant number of sightings made by qualified professionals such as airline pilots, military personnel, police, astronomers and other scientists, has been kept quiet through secrecy laws, or, if necessary, by means of intimidation. Witness testimonies of this caliber immediately become designated as classified information and are hidden away from public scrutiny, or they are reinterpreted as mistakes that are explained away in the official records as misjudgments of perceptions, with any details that would illuminate the irrationality of such a conclusion being eliminated from any possible public disclosure. As for sightings made by less qualified members of the public, discrediting these people has been so much easier by using either ridicule or one of a series of false explanations that again are meant to suggest misinterpretation by the witnesses regarding what was seen. If this will not work, as was the case with the ‘Phoenix lights’ in the 1990’s, which were witnessed by thousands and caught on video by many people, the authorities will give the inquisitive investigator one explanation after another until the matter becomes so confusing or so far out of the public’s mind that it no longer matters to the authorities that a few people still see the faulty logic.

Another form of public persuasion that is often used to mold public perception is through continual and excessive bombardment of certain events or issues, such as crime and violence. We’re inundated with stories in the news that are geared to increase our fears and convince us to accept supposed solutions that only limit our own freedoms further. Currently, the biggest perceived threat to the public that is regularly promoted is terrorism, which we’re constantly reminded is always looming and capable of striking anywhere at any time for any reason. Aside from this highly promoted threat, there are also the daily news stories that continually highlight the latest robberies, child abuses, rapes, murders, child molestations, home invasions, identity thefts, car-jackings, etc. These are broadcast to the public through the most prevalent forms of media in order to either sensitize us to them, thereby increasing our fears by continually reminding us that these sorts of crimes are a constant threat, or to desensitize us to them, and thereby increasing our acceptance of them and our susceptibility to committing them ourselves. We’re led to believe that these things are entirely the result of a problem with the mindset of those who perform these acts, rather than it being any sort of problem with society itself and an effect of the beliefs that have been promoted by our most authoritative sources. Not only does the promotion of these issues and events increase the fears of innocent people and disturb their otherwise peaceful lives, effectively being for these people a form of social terrorism, but they also promote ideas for certain others who are guided by self-interest and don’t care much for their fellow human beings, and who are easily influenced to go out and commit these sorts of crimes, thinking that others are succeeding at them and so they can too. And yet, this self-interest and the general attitude of uncaring are fast becoming the only possible means to survive in a world that is over-regulated and brutally competitive, so that the very social sickness that is becoming so prevalent is a natural result of the social situations that are being promoted and even surreptitiously encouraged. It’s just a matter of perspective, and perspective is what the media controls. If we took away all the media promotion of crime and violence, we wouldn’t feel that these things are normal and they would begin to lessen, and we’d become less likely to allow our freedoms to be taken away as a false solution to eradicating any such problems. We’ve been giving up our freedoms as the solution to our problems for years, and even according to the voice of authority (when it suits them to say so), things have not gotten any better at all. But nobody is ever given the time to reflect on this fact for very long. Authority cannot deny that things are getting worse, so they will quickly divert our attention from the faults within the system that cause these problems and issues with a new volley of problems and issues for us to contend with. And these new problems and issues inevitably lead to more changes that take away more freedoms that eventually cause new problems, ad infinitum. Any other solution than to take away further freedoms from the masses and to tighten control over them are rejected on the pretext that it would upset the current social system too drastically, which is just a round-about way of saying that certain people with a great deal of power would lose some of that power, and this is not acceptable to them. This has become the extent of any purported progress in today’s world: advancement of a few at the cost of many.

Authority uses all forms of media as a platform to pose the apparent problems and issues in the world that they want to bring into our lives and have us focus on while ignoring certain relevancies that would show that the real problems and issues are often of a completely different or deeper nature. We can take the 9/11 disaster as an example. This event has been portrayed by our governments as a terrorist act that was supposedly perpetrated by a group of religious extremists who are hell-bent on destroying American imperialism, although the deeper reasons for such hatred are very rarely ever mentioned because they actually have a great deal of justification that we should be concerned about. True, these extremists exist, and true, they have a strong revulsion to American ideals, but this was taken advantage of and used as a scapegoat by those who wished to silence the growing numbers of people in the world who have similar feelings. 9/11 was enacted by those in power to send a strong message to the citizens of their own country and to the world at large, that dissension against American imperialism will not be tolerated. This, of course, was but one purpose of this multi-purpose event. 9/11 also served to give American interests an excuse to take what wasn’t theirs and to profit from it. A third, little realized reason for the 9/11 scam was to create an excuse to go into Iraq in order to destroy or steal rare and valuable artifacts that might otherwise shed some light on our true history and origins. Iraq is the center of ancient Mesopotamia and the sites of our earliest civilizations, and therefore holds a great number of treasures from that ancient past. It has no doubt been of special interest to the alien group for this very reason. As far as the public has been led to believe by our trusted authorities, we are under attack from the outside, when in reality the attack is coming from not just within our borders, but from within the institutions that have been erected to serve and protect us. The fear deserves to be as real as it is, but it has been purposely displaced so that it’s focused in the wrong direction. This was intended to divert the public eye from the real threat that faces them.

We might ask why those in power keep advancing their short-sighted solutions to the problems in the world – those of crime, violence, poverty, starvation, disease, pollution, drug abuse, over-crowding, homelessness – and once we are goaded into accepting those solutions (if we are given any choice in the matter at all), they implement an inadequate solution, and then quickly focus on new problems to divert our attention, using this method as a means to never getting anything done that would make the world a truly better place. They simplify the problem and it’s solution, while in the process excusing themselves from actually making the effort that they promise to make (if they make any promises at all), and instead further their own self-interests with an attitude of uncaring – the very same characteristics that are the cause of these problems in the first place.

Real solutions are avoided at all costs. Real solutions would involve approaching the matter with the understanding that what has been tried in the past that did not work then will probably not work now. Real solutions require any other method than through force and intimidation, which is a barbaric attitude that would be beneath anyone who really wanted to improve society and the human situation in general. They lead us to believe that ‘democracy’ and American idealism will end all wars once we eradicate all other forms of government. They lead us to think that a pharmaceutical solution or genetic manipulation of the species will cure the masses of everything from aging to criminal behavior. They lead us to accept that all undesirable motivations in the human species is due to one form of mental disease or another, rather than looking at how that disease originates as a natural response to the dysfunctional society we are forced to live in.

This reflects how those in power operate. They will accuse another group – a nation, a political party, a terrorist group, an activist group, a troublesome segment of society such as the poor, or even an undesirable individual – of standing in the way of our peace and freedom, slowing our progress towards attaining a better world for ourselves, and in this way keep the public focus on the wrong targets while those in power go about their business creating the situations that they accuse these others of causing. In this way, we see the police promoting violence by regularly using excessive force in ‘fighting crime’ and inciting riots at otherwise peaceful demonstrations; we see the US government selling arms to other nations while preaching peace; we see our leaders starting wars with these other nations who have different ideals but are no real threat at all until they are purposely provoked; we see our governments enacting more laws or making changes that don’t improve anything that they are intended to, but instead only end up make things worse; we see corporations being given the right to infect us with a sense of need for their existence when in reality their existence is only useful to the plans of those in power and necessary for their continued control.

Corporations and institutions have actually been given more importance in our society than the individual person. They are able to exist indefinitely and with no limits to their growth. They are given rights and privileges that are denied to the general population. They are allowed to creep further and further into our private lives where they were never invited. All of this, coincidentally or not, gives them the characteristics that were once reserved for gods: immortality, omnipotence, and omnipresence. Corporations are the new gods of the modern age, and have taken their positions of power alongside the older gods that are known to us as governments. The public is coerced through promotional advertising, media approval, and government support to praise these new gods for the apparent benefits that they provide, the trinkets and trivial rewards for having them around – an endless supply of new and improved consumer products and services to waste our money on, which was hard-earned for being a cog in the wheels that keep the system functioning, and allowing further power to accrue through these otherwise unnecessary corporations and institutions.

Many people have been led to believe that all of this is necessary, that society would fall apart and result in chaos and anarchy if we didn’t allow those in power to do as they are doing. These people are usually the ones who are happy with their lot. They feel safe and secure and are complacent to submit to the controlling powers and blindly believe in them and allow them to continue to do most of their thinking for them. The real world and what goes on in it bears little on their lives except when it affects their taxes or threatens the comforts that they have gotten so used to. For these people, life itself is seen as a privilege rather than a right, and they feel they should give support to these corporations and institutions for having been given the opportunity to work all week for wages that can then be spent to entertain themselves while they rest up just enough to be able to continue working for them some more. But the greater part of their effort is always for their employer’s benefit rather than their own.

Although much of the population is happy and complacent with their current situation, a growing number of people are not, and it is these people who are becoming most aware of the causes of society’s underlying dysfunction. This is because they are subjected to these dysfunctions and their causes on a regular basis, but because they are still a small enough minority and aren’t given an equal voice or allowed the proper capacity to make any significant change, they simply stagnate. The alien group knows that it’s very important at this point in time to keep the majority happy and complacent, so that they won’t notice what’s really going on until it’s too late. Therefore the alien group makes certain that the majority have well-paying jobs and plenty of trivialities to spend their earnings on, in order to make them think that society is improving and there’s little to really complain about. These people are led to believe that those who go without are for the most part just lazy and unwilling to work, and they are easily influenced to turn against these less fortunate, particularly within their own communities. This sets up friction within a population that can be used to create a division between the masses that will encourage the loss of further freedoms. This is the Hegelian philosophy of playing two sides against each other and then stepping in to initiate a solution – one which serves themselves more than either side. At some point, however, the agenda of the alien group will necessitate taking away the excesses that the majority currently enjoys, and throw these people into the same level of disparity that the minority currently suffer. When this happens, as it soon will, those who will have lost their extravagant pleasures will be coerced to focus the blame on the minority, while those in power go blameless. We are seeing this division already, and it’s not hard to discern where the negative attitude of the majority starts.

For those who dedicate themselves to this system by making a professional career out of serving those in power in one capacity or another, they are often given the promise of a pension when they retire, and this pension serves in some ways to cement their dedication even when they no longer serve those powers with their time and energy. Many people often spend a lifetime under the influence of corporate thinking, and become conditioned to believe certain ideals that uphold the system as it currently exists, believing that this system is just and good. Many people go into retirement already well conditioned to support the system in whatever it does, and they make up a large body of the voters that those in power use to support their own causes. These retirees, naturally tired from a life of hard work serving others, wish only to finally live in comfort with the free time to do as they wish, while separating themselves as much as possible from the troubles that afflict society. They become more and more isolated from the real world, except through the organs of the media, which to them becomes their only source of perspective on things. Through it, they are made to feel that because they are weakening in their old age, they are potential victims of crime and violence, and their fears are built up by the media so that they will be goaded into supporting whatever actions are taken by those in power.

Then there are those people who, having worked hard all their lives to gain more than they require for a decent level of comfort, complain that those who have less don’t deserve any sort of compassion at all because they seem to do nothing to help themselves. These people who worked so hard and feel that all their money and comfort is justly deserved for themselves ignore or forget or don’t realize the fact that they participated in taking more for themselves at a cost to those they benefited off, and who had to go with less as a result. For instance, the assets and resources that naturally belong to third-world nations are forced from them in order that corporations can make a huge profit off of them, and in the process pass on only a small fraction of those profits to those who have slaved for these corporations. Almost nothing goes back to those who were cheated out of not just their assets and resources, but also their opportunities. They instead become poorer and more limited in their abilities, and are then portrayed as useless undesirables and come to symbolize a problem that stands in the way of the proper functioning of the system.

Those seeking power in government keep telling us that they intend to make the world a better place by reducing the major problems that we have already listed, but after we vote them in, they never bother to uphold their promises or make any changes that have any positive effect on those problems. They hem and haw and make excuses and bore us with meaningless rhetoric until we give in, perhaps leaving us with the hope that the next elected leader will be a better choice. But they never are, and we’ve gotten used to this and have come to accept it. Every candidate that makes it into the election ‘finals’ is already bought and paid for by those in control or they would have had no chance of ever making it that far. Running for public office requires financial backing to compete with the other parties, and in the higher political offices such financing comes primarily from powerful corporations who end up controlling the candidate and turning him or her towards working to implement their own agenda. In this way, no one, short of a Ross Perot with a lot of personal funding, can ever hope to make it into office. But even if such a person does make it into office, there are still many other roadblocks already in place, both inside and outside of government, that can be used to subvert any attempts to make any real positive change that would upset the system as it currently stands. These roadblocks are often in the form of other politicians – congressmen and senators, for example, or corporate heads – who are paid by those in control to stand in the way of any agenda that is not about more power for the few that already have it.

It should be pointed out that corporations have no reason to feel they must affect positive changes in the world. They were not voted into office and are not publicly owned, so they have no need to make promises to the public, as empty as those promises might be anyway. All they will promise is that if we buy their products, we can expect a new line of slightly better ones soon after to replace the current ones that we have just bought.

In government, no long term plans to fix our social problems are ever considered that go beyond a term or two in office. This is because those in office only care about what they can achieve during their term to benefit themselves. This is the reason why a US president who is a major shareholder in a US oil cartel declared war on Iraq. It’s an excuse to take control of the Iraqi oil reserves, and to subvert the profits that would be made from this oil and place it into their own hands so that they might become wealthier and more powerful at the expense of the taxpayer. The excuse that Iraq was stockpiling biological weapons and had nuclear capabilities was never as true as the public was led to believe in order to gain their support for this move, and the fact that the US and its allies all have similar weapons which they are willing to sell to any who can afford them does not seem to matter in the least.

I could go on and on here about how governments, corporations, and other institutions lie and cheat and steal while pretending to offer a better life for all by believing in them and supporting them, but there’s already a large amount of material in print that covers this subject much more in-depth than could ever be done here. It is important, however, that the reader recognizes the pattern of all this, the way that we are led to believe what we are told and given predetermined and carefully crafted choices to select from as to what to accept – black or white, and nothing in between. In this way, our freedoms are taken away from us and instead we are given an unnaturally artificial world with no room for natural evolution or advancement of the individual or the species. Our means for such evolution and growth is being circumvented through a form of mass hypnosis and mental conditioning. Real growth is being supplanted by purposeful stagnation. The human potential is festering because we’re not being given the opportunity to think for ourselves and use our own judgment in deciding how we will conduct our lives and what we can do or achieve as individuals. We are being kept from using our minds and imaginations in any way that would contribute real solutions to the problems that refuse to go away as long as this system of control and domination is maintained.

We are being choked with our own ignorance. We are being ‘dumbed down’ with trivial pursuits that do nothing more than waste our time and money and keep us preoccupied so that we don’t think about more important issues too much, lest we begin to perceive the illusion that has been erected around us through the manipulation of our thoughts and beliefs. Our greatest goal, as individuals, has been reduced to simply achieving a level of comfort and security among the chaos that the controlling powers continually create while convincing us that things would only get worse if they weren’t there to direct our lives for us. We’ve been hypnotized and our subconscious minds have been conditioned to automatically think and act as certain others direct us to.

The world has not gotten any better in the last hundred or even thousand years. It has just changed in its appearance, and is slowly getting worse.