www.memes.org
TELEVISION AND THE HIVE MIND
MACK WHITE
Sixty-four years
ago this month, six million Americans became unwitting subjects in an
experiment in psychological warfare.
It was the night before Halloween, 1938. At
Later, psychologist Hadley Cantril conducted a study of the effects of the
broadcast and published his findings in a book, The Invasion from Mars: A Study in the Psychology of Panic. This study explored the power of broadcast media, particularly as it relates
to the suggestibility of human beings under the influence of fear. Cantril was affiliated with
Two years later, with Rockefeller Foundation money, Cantril
established the Office of Public Opinion Research (OPOR), also at
Thus, by the end of the 1940s, the basic research had been done and the
propaganda apparatus of the national security state had been set up--just in
time for the Dawn of Television ...
Experiments conducted by researcher Herbert
Krugman reveal that, when a person watches television, brain activity switches from the left
to the right hemisphere. The left hemisphere is the seat of logical
thought. Here, information is broken down into its component parts and
critically analyzed. The right brain, however, treats
incoming data uncritically, processing information in wholes, leading to
emotional, rather than logical, responses. The shift
from left to right brain activity also causes the release of endorphins, the
body's own natural opiates--thus, it is
possible to become physically addicted to watching television, a hypothesis
borne out by numerous studies which have shown that very few people are able to
kick the television habit.
This numbing of the brain's cognitive function is compounded by another shift
which occurs in the brain when we watch television. Activity in the higher brain regions (such as the neo-cortex) is diminished, while activity in the
lower brain regions (such as the limbic system) increases. The latter, commonly referred to as the reptile brain,
is associated with more primitive mental functions, such as the "fight or
flight" response. The reptile brain
is unable to distinguish between reality and the simulated reality of
television. To the reptile brain, if it looks real, it is real. Thus,
though we know on a conscious level it is "only a film," on an unconscious
level we do not--the heart beats faster, for instance, while we watch a
suspenseful scene. Similarly, we know the commercial is trying to manipulate
us, but on an unconscious level the commercial nonetheless succeeds in, say,
making us feel inadequate until we buy whatever thing is being advertised--and
the effect is all the more powerful because it is unconscious, operating on the
deepest level of human response. The reptile brain makes it possible for us to
survive as biological beings, but it also leaves us vulnerable to the
manipulations of television programmers.
It is not just commercials that manipulate us. On television news as well,
image and sound are as carefully selected and edited to influence human thought
and behavior as in any commercial. The news anchors
and reporters themselves are chosen for their physical attractiveness--a factor
which, as numerous psychological studies have shown, contributes to our
perception of a person's trustworthiness. Under these conditions, then, the
viewer easily forgets--if, indeed, the viewer ever knew in the first
place--that the worldview presented on the evening news is a contrivance of the
network owners--owners such as General Electric (NBC) and Westinghouse (CBS),
both major defense contractors. By molding our perception of the world, they mold our opinions. This distortion of reality is determined
as much by what is left out of the evening news as what is included--as a
glance at Project Censored's yearly list of top 25
censored news stories will reveal. If it's not on television, it never
happened. Out of sight, out of mind.
Under the guise of journalistic objectivity, news programs subtly play on our
emotions--chiefly fear. Network news divisions, for instance, frequently
congratulate themselves on the great service they provide humanity by bringing
such spectacles as the September 11 terror attacks into our living rooms. We
have heard this falsehood so often, we have come to
accept it as self-evident truth. However, the motivation for live coverage of
traumatic news events is not altruistic, but rather to be found in the central
focus of Cantril's War of the Worlds research--the
manipulation of the public through fear.
There is another way in which we are manipulated by television news. Human
beings are prone to model the behaviors they see
around them, and avoid those which might invite ridicule or censure, and in the
hypnotic state induced by television, this effect is particularly pronounced.
For instance, a lift of the eyebrow from Peter Jennings tells us precisely what
he is thinking--and by extension what we should think. In this way, opinions
not sanctioned by the corporate media can be made to seem disreputable, while
sanctioned opinions are made to seem the very essence of civilized thought. And
should your thinking stray into unsanctioned territory despite the trusted
anchor's example, a poll can be produced which shows that most persons do not
think that way--and you don't want to be different do you? Thus, the mental
wanderer is brought back into the fold.
This process is also at work in programs ostensibly produced for entertainment.
The "logic" works like this: Archie Bunker is an idiot, Archie Bunker
is against gun control, therefore idiots are against
gun control. Never mind the complexities of the issue. Never mind the fact that
the true purpose of the Second Amendment is not to protect the rights of deer
hunters, but to protect the citizenry against a tyrannical government (an
argument you will never hear voiced on any television program). Monkey see, monkey do--or, in this case, monkey not do.
Notice, too, the way in which television programs depict conspiracy researchers
or anti-New World Order activists. On situation comedies, they are buffoons. On
dramatic programs, they are dangerous fanatics. This imprints on the mind of
the viewer the attitude that questioning the official line or holding
"anti-government" opinions is crazy, therefore not to be emulated.
Another way in which entertainment programs mold
opinion can be found in the occasional television movie, which
"sensitively" deals with some "social" issue. A bad behavior is spotlighted--"hate" crimes, for
instance--in such a way that it appears to be a far more rampant problem than
it may actually be, so terrible in fact that the "only" cure for it
is more laws and government "protection." Never mind that laws may
already exist to cover these crimes--the law against murder, for instance. Once
we have seen the well-publicized murder of the young gay man Matthew Shepherd
dramatized in not one, but two, television movies in all its heartrending
horror, nothing will do but we pass a law making the very thought behind the
crime illegal.
People will also model behaviors from popular
entertainment which are not only dangerous to their health and could land them
in jail, but also contribute to social chaos. While this may seem to be simply
a matter of the producers giving the audience what it wants, or the artist
holding a mirror up to society, it is in fact intended to influence behavior.
Consider the way many films glorify drug abuse. When a popular star playing a
sympathetic character in a mainstream R-rated film uses hard drugs with no
apparent health or legal consequences (John Travolta's
use of heroin in Pulp Fiction, for instance--an R-rated film produced for
theatrical release, which now has found a permanent home on television, via
cable and video players), a certain percentage of people--particularly the
impressionable young--will perceive hard drug use as the epitome of
anti-Establishment cool and will model that behavior,
contributing to an increase in drug abuse. And who benefits?
As has been well documented by Gary Webb in his award-winning series for the
San Jose Mercury New, former
There is another socially debilitating process at work in what passes for
entertainment on television these days. Over the years, there has been a steady
increase in adult subject matter on programs presented during family viewing
hours. For instance, it is common for today's prime-time situation comedies to
make jokes about such matters as masturbation (Seinfeld once devoted an entire
episode to the topic), or for daytime talk shows such as Jerry Springer's to
showcase such topics as bestiality. Even
worse are the "reality" programs currently in vogue. Each new offering
in this genre seems to hit a new low. MTV, for instance, recently subjected a
couple to a Candid Camera-style prank in which, after winning a trip to Las
Vegas, they entered their hotel room to find an actor made up as a mutilated
corpse in the bathtub. Naturally, they were traumatized by the experience and
sued the network. Or, consider a new show on British television in which
contestants compete to see who can infect each other with the most
diseases--venereal diseases included.
It would appear, at the very least, that these programs serve as a shill
operation to strengthen the argument for censorship. There may also be an even
darker motive. These programs contribute
to the general coarsening of society we see all around us--the decline in
manners and common human decency and the acceptance of cruelty for its own sake
as a legitimate form of entertainment. Ultimately, this has the effect of
debasing human beings into savages, brutes--the better to herd them into global
slavery.
For the first decade or so after the Dawn of Television, there were only a
handful of channels in each market--one for each of the three major networks
and maybe one or two independents. Later, with the advent of cable and more
channels, the population pie began to be sliced into finer pieces--or
"niche markets." This development has often been described as
representing a growing diversity of choices, but in reality it is a fine-tuning
of the process of mass manipulation, a honing-in on particular segments of the
population, not only to sell them specifically-targeted consumer products but
to influence their thinking in ways advantageous to the globalist
agenda.
One of these "target audiences" is that portion of the population
which, after years of blatant government cover-up in areas such as UFOs and the
assassination of John F. Kennedy, maintains a cynicism toward the official
line, despite the best efforts of television programmers to depict conspiracy
research in a negative light. How to reach this vast, disenfranchised target
audience and co-opt their thinking? One way is to put documentaries before them
which mix of fact with disinformation, thereby confusing them. Another is to
take the X Files approach.
The heroes of X Files are investigators in a fictitious paranormal department
of the FBI whose adventures sometimes take them into parapolitical
territory. On the surface this sounds good. However, whatever good X Files
might accomplish by touching on such matters as MK-ULTRA or the JFK
assassination is cancelled out by associating them with bug-eyed aliens and
ghosts. Also, on X Files, the truth is always depicted as "out there"
somewhere--in the stars, or some other dimension, never in brainwashing centers such as the RAND Corporation or its
Not that there is no connection between the parapolitical
and the paranormal. There is undoubtedly a cover-up at work with regard to
UFOs, but if we accept uncritically the notion that UFOs are anything other
than terrestrial in origin, we are falling headfirst into a carefully-set trap.
To its credit, X Files has dealt with the idea that extraterrestrials might be
a clever hoax by the government, but never decisively. The labyrinthine plots
of the show somehow manage to leave the viewer wondering if perhaps the hoax
idea is itself a hoax put out there to cover up the existence of
extraterrestrials. This is hardly helpful to a true understanding of UFOs and
associated phenomena, such as alien abductions and cattle mutilations.
Extraterrestrials have been a staple of popular entertainment since The War of
the Worlds (both the novel and its radio adaptation). They have been depicted
as invaders and benefactors, but rarely have they been unequivocally depicted
as a hoax. There was an episode of Outer Limits which depicted a group of
scientists staging a mock alien invasion to frighten the world's population
into uniting as one--but, again, such examples are rare. Even in UFO
documentaries on the Discovery Channel, the possibility of a terrestrial origin
for the phenomenon is conspicuous by its lack of mention.
UFO researcher Jacques Vallee, the real-life model
for the French scientist in Stephen Spielberg's Close Encounters of the Third Kind, attempted to interest Spielberg in a
terrestrial explanation for the phenomenon. In an interview on Conspire.com, Vallee said, "I argued with him that the subject was
even more interesting if it wasn't extraterrestrials. If it
was real, physical, but not ET. So he said, 'You're probably right, but
that's not what the public is expecting--this is
How convenient that what Spielberg says the people expect is also what the
Pentagon wants them to believe.
In Messengers of Deception, Vallee tracks the
history of a wartime British Intelligence unit devoted to psychological
operations. Code-named (interestingly) the "Martians," it specialized
in manufacturing and distributing false intelligence to confuse the enemy.
Among its activities were the creation of phantom
armies with inflatable tanks, simulations of the sounds of military ships maneuvering in the fog, and forged letters to lovers from
phantom soldiers attached to phantom regiments.
Vallee suggests that deception operations of this kind may have extended beyond World War II,
and that much of the "evidence" for "flying saucers" is no
more real than the inflatable tanks of World War II. He writes: "The close
association of many UFO sightings with advanced military hardware (test sites
like the New Mexico proving grounds, missile silos of the northern plains,
naval construction sites like the major nuclear facility at Pascagoula and the
bizarre love affairs ... between contactee groups,
occult sects, and extremist political factions, are utterly clear signals that
we must exercise extreme caution."
Many people find it fantastic that the government would perpetrate such a hoax,
while at the same time having no difficulty entertaining the notion that
extraterrestrials are regularly travelling light years to this planet to kidnap
people out of their beds and subject them to anal probes.
The military routinely puts out disinformation to obscure its activities, and
this has certainly been the case with UFOs. Consider Paul Bennewitz,
the UFO enthusiast who began studying strange lights that would appear nightly
over the
What the Air Force did to Bennewitz, it also does on
a mass scale--and popular entertainment has been complicit in this process.
Whether or not the filmmakers themselves are consciously aware of this agenda
does not matter. The notion that extraterrestrials might visit this planet is
so much a part of popular culture and modern mythology that it hardly needs
assistance from the military to propagate itself.
It has the effect not only of obscuring what is really going on at research
facilities such as Area 51, but of tainting UFO research in general as
"kooky"--and does the job so thoroughly that one need only say
"UFO" in the same breath with "JFK" to discredit research
in that area as well. It also may, in the end, serve the same purpose as
depicted in that Outer Limits episode--to unite the world's population against
a perceived common threat, thus offering the pretext for one-world government.
The following quotes demonstrate that the idea has at least occurred to world
leaders:
"In our obsession with antagonisms of the moment, we often forget how much
unites all the members of humanity. Perhaps we need some outside, universal
threat to make us realize this common bond. I occasionally think how quickly
our differences would vanish if we were facing an alien threat from outside
this world." (President Ronald Reagan, speaking in 1987
to the United Nations.
"The nations of the world will have to unite, for the next war will be an
interplanetary war. The nations of the earth must someday make a common front
against attack by people from other planets." General Douglas MacArthur, 1955)
Some one remarked that the best way to unite all the nations on this globe
would be an attack from some other planet. In the face of such an alien enemy,
people would respond with a sense of their unity of interest and purpose."
(John Dewey, Professor of Philosophy at Columbia University, speaking at a
conference sponsored by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 1917)
And where was this "alien
threat" motif given birth? Again, we find the answer in popular entertainment,
and again the earliest source is The War of the Worlds--both Wells' and Welles' versions.
Perhaps it is no coincidence that H. G. Wells was a founding member of the
Round Table, the think tank that gave birth to the Royal Institute for International
Affairs (RIIA) and its American cousin, the CFR. Perhaps Wells intentionally
introduced the motif as a meme which might prove useful later in establishing
the "world social democracy" he described in his 1939 book The New
World Order. Perhaps, too, another purpose of the Orson Welles
broadcast was to test of the public's willingness to believe in
extraterrestrials.
At any rate, it proved a popular motif, and paved the way for countless movies
and television programs to come, and has often proven a handy device for
promoting the New World Order, whether the extraterrestrials are invaders
or--in films like The Day the Earth Stood Still--benefactors who have come to
Earth to warn us to mend our ways and unite as one, or be blown to bits.
We see the globalist agenda at work in Star Trek and
its spin-offs as well. Over the years, many a television viewer's mind has been
imprinted with the idea that centralized government is the solution for our
problems. Never mind the complexities of the issue--never mind the fact that,
in the real world, centralization of power leads to tyranny. The reptile brain,
hypnotized by the flickering television screen, has seen Captain Kirk and his
culturally diverse crew demonstrate time and again that the United Federation of
Planets is a good thing. Therefore, it must be so.
It remains to be seen whether the Masters of Deception will, like those
scientists in The Outer Limits, stage an invasion from space with anti-gravity
machines and holograms, but, if they do, it will surely be broadcast on
television, so that anyone out of range of that light show in the sky, will be
able to see it, and all with eyes to see will believe. It will be War of the
Worlds on a grand scale.
Jack Kerouac once noted, while walking down a residential street at night,
glancing into living rooms lit by the gray glare of
television sets, that we have become a world of people "thinking the same
thoughts at the same time."
Every day, millions upon millions of human beings sit down at the same time to
watch the same football game, the same mini-series, the same newscast. And
where might all this shared experience and uniformity of thought be taking us?
A recent report co-sponsored by the U.S. National Science Foundation and the
Commerce Department calls for a broad-based research program to find ways to
use nanotechnology, biotechnology, information technology, and cognitive
sciences, to achieve telepathy, machine-to-human communication, amplified
sensory experience, enhanced intellectual capacity, and mass participation in a
"hive mind." Quoting the report: "With
knowledge no longer encapsulated in individuals, the distinction between
individuals and the entirety of humanity would blur. Think Vulcan
mind-meld. We would perhaps become more of a hive mind--an enormous, single,
intelligent entity."
There is no doubt that we have been brought closer to the "hive mind"
by the mass media. For, what is the shared experience of television but a type
of "Vulcan mind-meld"? (Note the terminology borrowed from Star Trek,
no doubt to make the concept more familiar and palatable. If Spock does it, it
must be okay.)
This government report would have us believe that the hive mind will be for our
good--a wonderful leap in evolution. It is nothing of the kind. For one thing,
if the government is behind it, you may rest assured it is not for our good.
For another, common sense should tell us that blurring the line "between
individuals and the entirety of humanity" means mass conformity, the death
of human individuality. Make no mistake about it--if humanity is to become a
hive, there will be at the center of that hive a
Queen Bee, whom all the lesser "insects" will serve. This is not
evolution--this is devolution. Worse, it is the ultimate slavery--the slavery
of the mind.
And it is a horror first unleashed in 1938 when one million people responded as
one--as a hive--to Orson Welles' Halloween prank.
In a sense, those people who fled the
Martians that night were right to be afraid. They were indeed under attack. But
they were wrong about who was attacking them. It was something far worse than
Martians. Had they only known the true nature of the danger facing them,
perhaps they would have gone to the nearest radio station with torches in hand
like the villagers in those old Frankenstein movies and burned it to the
ground, or at least commandeered the new technology and turned it towards
another use--the liberation of humanity, instead of its enslavement.
RELEVANT LINKS
U.S. Government Report: Human Beings to be Merged with
Technology to Create a "Hive Mind"
Sydney Morning Herald
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FACTS ABOUT SEPTEMBER 11, write him at mackwhite@austin.rr.com
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