A Free-Lance
Intelligence Report by J. Paul
Serengeti for GaSCo
SPECIAL REPORT: INFOTOXIN AND PSYCHOLOGICAL WARFARE (part 1)
Greetings.
In 1983 I came up with the word
"infotoxin" while reading at a coffee shop in
We have always lived in and been a
part of the world of nature, our true home, our real living environment. Our
second-order artificial environment was actually born with the
development of symbolic language, but took major evolutionary strides with the
invention of the written word, the printing press, and in this century with the
advent of television and computers. We now as a whole essentially live in a
virtual-reality matrix fabricated from inter-connected systems and artifacts of what I call (mc)2,
or amplified mass-communication.
The most salient quality of (mc)2 is that it is a second-order "reality", meaning
that it is gathered, constructed, fabricated and disseminated by people other
than you. A first-order "reality" would be what you experience directly
yourself. Most of what we call "education" is a second-order reality. The good
side of it is that we can learn what others have learned and from what they have
done, even though they may have lived on a distant continent several hundred
years ago; the down side is that the transmission of knowledge is at best
subject to the whims and limitations of the human mind, and at worst subject to deliberate distortion or the imposition of
spin or censorship.
The relationship between first- and
second-order "realities" in each of our lives is critical to understanding the
current scenario. In today’s world most of us rely heavily on inputs from
assorted mass-media to give us a sense of what is happening in the world.
Obviously, if you weren’t there to see something happen, you only know about it
from other people’s sources. But we tend to give little thought to who actually
controls these media. For example, a few decades ago the US had thousands of
independently-operated newspapers; today only a fraction of that number exist,
and most of them are directly or indirectly controlled by a handful of global
media magnates, like Rupert Murdoch. The same applies to television stations and
networks. Concentration and centralization of media
ownership and control has been a major trend over the past 30
years.
A major result of this trend is that
all the various media are saying the same things…there is no real cognitive
dissonance or voices of opposition to the status quo…and these same things are
messages of persuasive consumption: buy this
and buy that and you will be cool and with it and have high
self-esteem.
What we call the "news" has
undergone similar mutation, from the reporting of happening events in the spirit
of true journalism to the spoon-feeding of corporate
pap which is fabricated by public relations firms. We somehow give the
"news" undue authority, as if they were the official spokespersons for the
government. During the Gulf War media analysts recognized that as much as 70% of
all news had questionable origins. That was over 10 years ago. Since then we
have travelled far down the path toward "manufactured
reality."
Our culture today has both Orwellian
and Huxleyan components. In Orwell’s 1984 Big Brother was the secret
government who forced you to obey through coercion and fear; in Huxley’s
Brave New World no force was necessary because the powers that be simply
provided you with your supply of soma, an undefined drug that simply made
everything ok. Today we have "Big Brother" as an electronic narcotic self-administered through voluntary
televison viewing. Timothy Leary said that in today’s world the
_expression "to have someone by the balls" means "by the eyeballs." Brave new electronic
techno-soma. (end part one)