TURN OFF YOUR
TELEVISION!
by L. Wolfe
Hey buddy, I'm talking to you. Yes, you, the guy sitting
in front of the television. Turn down the sound a bit, so that you can
hear what I am saying.
Now, try to concentrate on what I am going to say. I want
to talk to you about your favorite pastime. No, it's not baseball or
football, although it does have something to do with your interest in spectator
sports. I'm talking about what you were just doing: watching television.
Do you have any idea about how much time you spend in front of
the television set? According to the latest studies, the average American
now spends between five and six hours a day watching television. Let's
put that in perspective - that is more time than you spend doing anything else
but sleeping or working, if you are lucky enough to still have a job.
That's more time than you spend eating, more time than you spend with your wife
alone, more time than with the kids.
It's even worse with your children. According to these
same studies, young children below school age watch more than eight hours each
day. School age children watch a little under eight hours a day. In
1980, the average 20-year-old had watched the equivalent of 14 months of
television in his or her brief lifetime. That's 14 months, 24 hours a
day. More recent figures show that the numbers have climbed -- the
20-year-old has spent closer to two full years of his or her life in front of
the television set.
At the same time, the researchers have noted a disturbing
phenomena. It seems that we Americans are getting progressively more
stupid. They note a decline in reading and comprehension levels in all
age groups tested. Americans read less and understand what they read less
than they did 10 years ago, less than they have at any time since research
began to study such things. As for writing skills, Americans are, in
general, unable to write more than a few simple sentences. We are among
the least literate people on this planet, and we're getting worse.
It's the change -- the constant trendline downward -- that
interests these researchers. More than one study has correlated this
increasing stupidity of our population to the amount of television they
watch. Interestingly, the studies found that it doesn't matter what
people watch, whether it's "The Simpsons" or
"McNeil/Lehrer," or "Murphy Brown" or "Nightline"
-- the more television you watch, the less literate, the more stupid you are.
The growth in television watching had surprised some of the
researchers. a decade ago, they were predicting that television watching
would level off and might actually decline. It had reached an absolute
saturation point. They were right for so-called network television;
figures show a steady drop-off of viewers. But that drop is more than made
up for by the growth of cable television, with its
smorgasbord of channels, one for almost every perversion. Especially in
urban and suburban areas, Americans are hard-wired to more than 100 different
channels that provide them with all news, like CNN, all movies, all comedy, all
sports, all weather, all financial news and a liberal dose of straight
pornography.
The researchers had also failed to predict the market
penetration of first beta and then VHS video recorders; they made it possible
to watch one thing and record another for later viewing. They also
offered access to movies not available on networks or even cable channels as
well as home videos, recorded on your own little camcorder. The
proliferation of home video equipment has involved families in video-related
activities which are not even considered in the cumulative totals for time
Americans spend watching television.
You might not actually realize how much you are watching
television. But think for a moment. When you come home, you turn
the television on, if it isn't on already. You read the paper with it on,
half glancing at what is on the screen, catching a bit of the news, or the plot
of a show. You eat with it on, maybe in the background, listening for a
score or something that happens to a character in a show you follow. When
something you are interested in, a show or basketball game, is on, the set
becomes the center of attention. So your attention to what is on may vary
in intensity, but there is almost no point when you are home, and inside, and
have the set completely off. Isn't that right?
The studies did not break down the periods of time people
watched television, according to the intensity of their viewing. But the
point is still made: you compulsively turn the television on and spend a good
portion of your waking hours glued to the tube. And the studies also
showed that many people can't sleep without the television turned on!
Brainwashing
Now, I'm sure you have heard that watching too much television
is bad for your health. They put stories like that on the evening
news. Bad for your eyes to stare at the screen, they say.
Especially bad if you sit too close. Well, I want to make another
point. We've already shown that you are addicted to the tube, watching it
between six and eight hour a day. But it is an addiction that brainwashes
you.
There are two kinds of brainwashing. The one that's
called 'hard' brainwashing is the type you're most familiar with. You've
got a pretty good image of it from some of those old Korean war movies.
They take some guy, an American patriot, drag him into a room, torture him,
pump him full of drugs, and after a struggle, get him to renounce his country
and his beliefs. He usually undergoes a personality change, signified by
an ever-present smile and blank stare.
This brainwashing is called 'hard' because its methods are
overt. The controlled environment is obvious to the victim; so is the
terror. The victim is overwhelmed by a seemingly omnipotent external
force, and a feeling of intense isolation is induced. The victim's moral
strength is sapped, and slowly he embraces his torturers. It is Man's
moral strength that informs and orders His power of reason; without it, the
mind becomes little more than a recording machine waiting for imprints.
No one is saying that you have been a victim of 'hard'
brainwashing. But you have been brainwashed, just as effectively as those
people in the movies. The blank stare? Did you ever look at what
you look like while watching television? If the angle is right, you might
catch your own reflection in the screen. Jaw slightly open, lips relaxed
into a smile. The blank stare of a television zombie.
This is 'soft ' brainwashing, even more effective because its
victims go about their lives unaware of what is being done to them.
Television, with its reach into nearly every American home,
creates the basis for the mass brainwashing of citizens, like you. It
works on a principle of 'tension and release'. Create tension, in a
controlled environment, increasing the level of stress. Then provide a
series of choices that provide release from the tension. As long as the
victim believes that the choices presented are the 'only' choices available,
even if they are at first glance unacceptable, he will nevertheless, ultimately
seek release by choosing one of these unacceptable choices.
Under these circumstances, in a brainwashing, controlled
environment, such choice-making is not a "rational" experience.
It does not involve the use of Man's creative mental powers; instead Man is
conditioned, like an animal, to respond to the tension, by seeking release.
The key to the success of this brainwashing process is the
regulation of both the tension and the perceived choices. As long as both
are controlled, then the range of outcomes is also controlled. The victim
is induced to walk down one of several pathways acceptable for his controllers.
The brainwashers call the tension-filled environment 'social
turbulence'. The last decades have been full of such social turbulence --
economic collapse, regional wars, population disasters, and ecological and
biological catastrophes. Social turbulence creates crises in perceptions,
causing people to lose their bearings. Adrift and confused, people seek
release from the tension, following paths that appear to lead to a simpler,
less tension-filled life. There is no time in such a process for rational
consideration of complicated problems.
Television is the key vehicle for presenting both the tension
and the choices. It brings you the images of the tension, and serves up
simple answers. Television, in its world of semi-reality, of illusion, of
escape from reality, is itself the single most important release from our
tension-wracked existence. Eight hours a day, every day, through its
programming, you are being programmed.
If you doubt me, think about one important choice that you have
made recently that was not in some way influenced by something that you have
seen on television. I bet you can't think of one. That's how controlled
you are.
Who's Doing It
But don't take my word for it. Ten years ago we spoke to
a man from a think tank called the Futures Group in
"I know the secret of making the average American believe
anything I want him to. Just let me control television. Americans
are wired into their television sets. Over the last 30 years, they have
come to look at their television sets and the images on the screen as
reality. You put something on television and it becomes reality. If
the world outside the television set contradicts the images, people start
changing the world to make it more like the images and sounds of their
television. Because its influence is so great, so pervasive, it has
become part of our lives. You lose your sense of what is being done to you, but
your mind is being shaped and molded."
"Your mind is being shaped and molded." If that
doesn't sound like brainwashing, I don't know what is. Becker speaks with
the elan of a network of brainwashers who have been programming your lives,
especially since the advent of television as a "mass medium" in the
late 1940s and early 1950s. This network numbers several tens of
thousands worldwide. Occasionally, one appears on the nightly news to
tell you what 'you' are thinking, by reporting the latest "opinion
polls." But for the most part, they work behind the scenes, speaking
to themselves and writing papers for their own internal distribution.
And though they work for many diverse groups, these
brainwashers are united by a common world view and common method. It is
the world view of a small elite, whose financial and political power rests in
institutions that pass this power on from generation to generation. They
view the common folk like yourself as little better than beasts of burden to be
controlled and manipulated by a semi-feudal international oligarchy, whose
wealth, power and bloodlines entitle them to rule.
One of the oligarchy's institutions for manipulation of
populations is located in a suburb of
The Tavistock Institute is the psychological warfare arm of the
British Royal household. The oligarchs behind Tavistock, and similar
outfits in the
Like his fellow brainwashers, Becker prides himself in knowing
the minds of his victims. He calls them "saps." Man, he
told an interviewer, should be called "homo the sap."
"Soft" brainwashing by television works through the
power of suggestion. Television watching creates a state of drugged-like
oblivion to outside reality. The mind, its perceptions dulled by
habituated viewing, is ready to accept any new illusion of reality as presented
on the tube. The mind, in its drugged-like stupor of television watching,
is prepared to accept that the images that television 'suggests' as reality
'are', in fact, reality. It will then struggle to form-fit a
contradictory reality into television image, just as Becker claims.
Another Tavistock brainwasher, Fred Emery, who studied
television for 25 years, confirms this. The television signal itself, he
found, puts the viewer in this state of drugged-like oblivion. Emery
writes: "Television as a media consists of a constant visual signal of 50
half-frames per second. Our hypotheses regarding this essential nature of the
medium itself are:
"1) The constant visual stimulus fixates the viewer and
causes the habituation of response. The prefrontal and association areas
of the cortex are effectively dominated by the signal, the screen.
"2) The left cortical hemisphere -- the center of visual
and analytical calculating processes -- is effectively reduced in its
functioning to tracking changing images on the screen.
"3) Therefore, provided the viewer keeps looking, he is
unlikely to reflect on what he is doing and what he is viewing. That is,
he will be aware, but unaware of his awareness...
"In other words, television can be seen partly as the
technological analogue of the hypnotist."
The key to making the brainwashing work is the 'repetition of
suggestion' over time. With people watching the tube for 6 to 8 hours a
day, there is plenty of time for such repeated suggestion.
Some Examples
Let's look at an example to make things a bit clearer.
Think back about 20 years ago. Think about what you thought about certain
issues of the day. Think about those same issues today. notice how
you seemed to change 'your' mind about them, to become more tolerant of things
you opposed vehemently before. It's your television watching that changed
your mind, or to use Becker's terms, "shaped your perceptions."
Twenty years ago, most people thought that the lunacy that is
now called environmentalism, the idea that animals and plants should be
protected on an equal basis with human life, was screwy. It went against
the basic concept of Christian civilization that Man is a higher species than,
and distinct from, the animals, and that it is Man, by virtue of his being made
in the image of the living God, whose life is sacred. That was 20 years
ago. But now, many people, maybe even you, seem to think otherwise.
There are even laws that say so.
This contrary, anti-human view of Man being no more than equal
to animals and plants was inserted into our consciousness by the suggestion of
television. Environmental lunacy was scripted into network television
shows, into televised movies, and into the news. It started slowly, but
picked up steam. Environmental spokesmen were increasingly seen in the
favorable glow of television. Those who opposed this view were shown in
an unfavorable way. It was done over time, with repetition. If you
weren't completely won over, you were made tolerant of the views of
environmental lunatics whose statements were morally and scientifically
unsound.
Let's take a more recent example -- the war against
Finally, the American military commander-in-chief Gen. Norman
Schwartzkopf, conducting a final press briefing that was consciously
orchestrated to resemble the winning Superbowl coach describing his victory.
Those were the images that overwhelmed our population.
Only now, months later, do we find out that the images had nothing to do with
reality. The Iraqi "atrocities" in
Looking at the question more broadly, where did your children
get most of their values, if not from what they saw on television?
Parents might counteract the influence of the infernal box, but they could not
overcome it. How could they, if they themselves have been brainwashed by
the same box and if their children spend more time with it than them?
Studies show that most of television programming is geared to a less than 5th
grade comprehension level. parents, like you, are themselves being remade
in the infantile images of the television screen. All of society becomes
more infantile, more easily controllable.
As Emery explains:
"We are proposing that television as a simple constant and
repetitive and ambiguous visual stimulus, gradually closes down the central
nervous system of
Becker holds a similar view of the effect of television on
American's ability to think:
"Americans don't really think -- they have opinions and
feelings. Television creates the opinion and then validates it."
Nowhere is this clearer than with politics. Television tells
Americans what to think about politicians, restricting choices to those
acceptable to the oligarchs whose financial power controls networks and major
cable channels. It tells people what has been said and what is "important."
Everything else is filtered out. You are told who can win and who
can't. And few people have the urge to look behind the images in the
screen, to seek content and truth in ideas and look for a high quality of
leadership.
Such an important matter as choosing a president becomes the
same as choosing a box of laundry detergent -- a set of possibilities, whose
limits are determined, by the images on the screen. You are given the
appearance of freedom of choice, but you have neither freedom nor real choice.
That is how the brainwashing works.
"Are they brainwashed by the tube," said Becker to
the interviewer. "It is really more than that. I think that
people have lost the ability to relate the images of their own lives without
television intervening to tell them what it means. That is what we really
mean when we say that we have a wired society."
Turn It Off!
That was ten years ago. It has gotten far worse since
then. In this article, we will show you the brainwashers' vision of a
hell on Earth and how television is being used to get us there; we will discuss
television programming, revealing how it has helped produce what is called a
"paradigm" shift in values, creating an immoral society; we will
explain how the news is presented and how its presentation has been used to
destroy the English language; we will discuss the mass entertainment media,
showing who controls it and how; we will also deal with America's addiction to
spectator sports and show how that too has helped make you passive and stupid;
and finally, we will show where we are headed, if we can't break our addiction
to the tube.
Democratic presidential candidate Lyndon LaRouche has said that
The Making
of a
Fascist Society
So, how are you doing? I hope you still have that
television set turned off. If you don't, you'd better get up and turn it
off now, before we go any further. You'll need to be able to concentrate
on what I am telling you.
Most Americans think they have a pretty good idea of what
fascism is all about. They've seen the pictures, in the movies and on
television, of Nazi Germany in the 1930s. The marching jackbooted
troops. The huge rallies, with all the flags. The speeches by
Hitler, to the cheering approval of enormous crowds of people, who raise their
arms in salute at the beckoning of their Fuhrer. Also the pictures of the Nazi
thugs breaking windows, the Gestapo and SS troops beating someone, maybe a
Jew. Then there are the other images - the scenes after the death camps
were opened to Allied troops, the piles of bodies, the bones, the hair,
the huge mounds of eyeglasses -- and the ovens.
A generation of Americans went to war to defeat that
horror. Many gave their lives so that such inhumanity might never walk
this Earth again. We Americans would never tolerate what happened in Nazi
Germany, you say; we'd never let Hitler get that far, and we'd never look the
other way in indifference while millions of our fellow men were
slaughtered. No sir, not us.
Not us? Think back to a little more than a year
ago. Think back to those great parades of troops and equipment
celebrating the "glorious" victory of our troops in Operation Desert
Storm. There were millions of people, throughout the nation, cheering and
raising their arms and voices in salute. And there were a hundred million
more people watching the celebration on television sets throughout the
land. In fact, if you think back, these celebrations, especially the huge
ones in New York and Washington, were 'organized' by television, with local and
national newscasts providing "advance" advertising for the
"largest patriotic celebrations in history," as they were called.
And it was the television set that told you 'what ' you were
celebrating, or why Gen. Norman Schwarzkopf was as great a hero as George
Washington or Ulysses S. Grant. This had been preceded by similar
"patriotic" coverage on the war itself, before, during, and after the
hostilities. You never questioned any of it, and you chose to participate
in the celebration, either directly or indirectly.
Only now do you find that you were celebrating the 'wholesale
slaughter' of more than 100,000 innocent civilians -- women and children, in
large part, and the maiming of tens of thousands of more innocents. The
approximate one month of hostilities was one of the most savage and intense
slaughters of innocents in the history of warfare. And for whom did we
fight? Our "victory" placed a despotic ruler, a brutal and
fabulously rich ruling family, back on their feudal throne. This is what
you celebrated.
There were no Nazi thugs to terrorize you into going along with
it all. You became part of a mob, a fascist mob organized by television.
You and your fellow citizens, brainwashed by television, already live in and
tolerate a fascist society.
Let's state our point another way -- The advent and mass
dissemination of television technology has rendered the Nazi model for a
fascist society obsolete. it has provided a better, more subtle, and more
powerful means of social control than the organized terror of the Nazi state.
To understand why this is so, we must take a look at that Nazi
state, and the fascist society it organized.
The Fascist Consent of Man
The Nazi state was created by the same oligarchical financial
and political interests who today control what we call the mass media and
television. Forget about whatever stories you've seen on television about
how Hitler came to power -- his path to power was cleared by the same oligarchs
who employ the brainwashers that program you through television. Over a
period of years, following the First World War,
Once in power, the Nazis maintained their hold through the use
of terror as part of mass brainwashing. In many ways, it were proper to
view the Nazi period as an 'experiment ' in methods of mass brainwashing and
social control. At the root of this experiment was the desire to create a
New World Order based on reversing a fundamental premise of Judeo-Christian
civilization - that Man is created as a higher and distinct species from
animals, created in the image of the living God and by divine grace, and imparted
the divine spark of reason. This is what makes Man human -- His divinely
given power of reason. This view of Man, the view of the Renaissance,
holds that all men are created 'equal' in the eyes of the Creator.
Society, organized according to such principles, must enable Man to seek the
Truth as His highest goal, and thereby 'perfect ' His existence and that of
future generations, in accordance with Natural Law.
Such a worldview cannot allow for the existence of an oligarchy
who views itself, by birthright and worldly power, as more equal than other
men. Such oligarchs, and creatures like their coterie of brainwashers,
hold a contrary worldview: Man is an animal, a degraded beast, whose worst
impulses must be repressed by the state. Laws are created to 'control'
these human animals and to allow for the continued existence of the social
order. Men, in turn, make a 'social contract' to allow themselves to be
governed by such laws, which are mutable, since they are government by neither
Natural Law nor truth. This is the view of the so-called Enlightenment,
and in its extreme form, the fascist state.
The question of the concept of Man -- as a creative, reasoning
human being made in the image of the living God, or as a degraded beast, an
animal - defines all other cultural questions. It is the moral -- or
immoral - underpinning of all societies. For mass brainwashing to work,
it must attack the Renaissance view of Man, for no person with such a
self-conception can be brainwashed. Large numbers of people must be
induced to give up beliefs that are the heritage of Judeo-Christian
civilization. To do that, religious institutions, such as the
Such concepts as the sanctity and dignity of human life and the
perfectibility of Man, and the principle of the progress of human knowledge,
the ideas of the Renaissance, have been transmitted from generation to
generation. They are deeply imbedded in the human personality, and are
the invariant axioms of our culture. To remove them requires the
equivalent of psychological shock therapy. When they are removed, we
remove what makes Man human, what separates him from the beast -- 'We have made
Man bestial'.
Freudian Mass Brainwashing
The Nazi experiment was aimed at doing just that. How did
it work? Well now we'll say something that might shock some people --
Nazi Germany was an experiment in 'Freudian mass psychology'.
That is not to say that Sigmund Freud, the inventor of
psychoanalysis, was himself a Nazi; he wasn't a practicing one. But he
'shared' the belief of the Nazis and their sponsors that Man was an animal,
first and foremost. In several locations, Freud makes the case that it is
the primitive animal characteristics of Man that are at the center of His
emotional life. His life is a conflict between an animal
seeking 'pleasure' and gratification, and a reality that says that this cannot
always be so; thought emerges as the individual tries to balance between the
pleasure and reality principles.
Freud saw his work as a continuation of that of Charles Darwin,
who had "removed Man from his throne at the center of the universe,"
and placed him squarely in the animal kingdom.
This belief that Man is nothing more than a degraded beast is
at the core of the Freudian system. It is fundamental to Freud's ordering
of mental states that he must deny the perfectibility of Man, that there can be
no absolute truths; that Man can never overcome His flaws. Psychoanalysis
doesn't cure so much as it "enlightens," as it makes an individual
aware of his flaws and neuroses, to learn to live with them, and therefore cope
with their debilitating symptomatic effects.
For Freud, Man is in a constant state of war with Himself, with
an infantile "it" (the id), at war with "a little me" or
"I" (the ego); this "I" is only slightly less animalistic
than the total animal, the "it." Society exerts control over
this degraded beast, this animal, through the "over I," erroneously
referred to in English as the "superego." The "over
I," which Freud identifies as moral conscience, bids only that the
"it" and the "I" control themselves in the form of a social
contract with the rest of society.
Freud states that the "over I" often gets in the way
of the legitimate needs of the "I" and the "it." It
therefore becomes the source of neurosis, through repression of especially the
sexual needs of the "id" and the "I." What Freud
calls the moral conscience of society is a source of pain, not pleasure, for
the individual.
The sources of human creativity, what distinguishes Man from
the animal, for Freud comes from 'sublimated' sexual drives of the
"it" and the "I" -- The most creative people are either
practicing or latent homosexuals. This absurd theory Freud attempted to
"prove" in his famous essay on Leonardo da Vinci, generalizing later
to say that all people who follow what they perceive to be moral conscience,
are driven toward neurosis. There is no paradise beyond an earthly
paradise, Freud says, and all who believe otherwise suffer from a delusional
fantasy.
Freud's hatred of all religion, in particular the Roman
Catholic Church, is central to his system. Religion is the great illusion
that his psychology must strive to remove from Man, since religion tells Man
that He is more than a beast, and that He lives for a higher purpose than the
socially regulated seeking of pleasure.
Man is not made in the image of the living God, says Freud; Man
has made God in 'His' image, for the purpose of easing the pain of His
existence. Deriding the great thinkers of the past, he says their defense
of religious doctrine is infantile folly:
"We shall tell ourselves that it were very nice if there
were a God who created the world and was a benevolent
"...Yet you defend the religious illusion with all your
might. If it becomes discredited -- and indeed the threat to it is great
enough - then your world collapses. There is nothing left for you but
despair of everything, of civilization, of the future of Mankind. From that
bondage, I am, we are free. Since we are prepared to renounce a good part
of our infantile wishes, we can bear it if a few of our expectations turn out
to be illusions".
The Freudian system is thus a perfect tool for brainwashing, since it negates
the moral underpinnings of our civilization, telling us that they are an
infantile illusion. Without that moral underpinning, Man has no moorings
and is susceptible to the brainwashers' "suggestion." All
Freudian psychology is a form of brainwashing to one extent or another, because
to agree with its premises, one must agree that Man is a beast who must deny
the existence of universal law and God, the Creator.
Freudian psychology, as preached by either Freud and his followers, or by
neo-Freudians like Carl Jung, became the rage in the 1920s. It was
promoted in the popular culture through the mass media of its day, in both
newspaper and magazine articles. Its morally insane system of
"id," "ego," and "superego" became part of the
popular culture, as did its belief that creativity stems from sexual drives.
Mass
Psychology
In 1921, before the Nazis had themselves been promoted into a mass phenomenon,
Freud published one of the seminal works in his system, "Mass Psychology
and the Analysis of the I". Like the works of Fred Emery quoted
earlier, and other brainwashers, this work is at once an analysis of a social
phenomenon, and at the same time a "cookbook" on how, through mass
psychology, to create such a phenomenon -- in this case, a mass fascist
movement.
Freud uses as a
starting point the work of the French psychologist Gustav LeBon, his infamous
"The Psychology of the Crowd". It is LeBon's main thesis that
as part of a mass or crowd, Man regresses to a 'primitive' mental state.
A person who may be otherwise highly cultured and moral is capable of acting
like a barbarian, is prone to acts of unspeakable violence and inhumanity, and
loses his critical faculties in a large mass of people.
People in a crowd lose
their inhibitions and moral standards, and become highly emotional, says
LeBon. This emotionalism, this irrationality, lends itself to the power
of 'suggestion', through which the behavior of an individual can be determined
by his perceptions and the actions of others around him.
LeBon describes this as
a return to Man's primitive nature. Like Freud, at the center of his
belief is the assertion that Man is merely a higher animal, whose animal traits
are controlled by social norms and the structure of society. Place this
animal in a mass of similar animals, and his human identity is crushed -- He
ceases to think as a human and becomes caught up in instinctive animal-like
activity. Man, says LeBon, has returned to his animal roots.
But while He has
become at once more primitive, more animal-like and infantile, mass Man, the
man in the crowd, also has a heightened sense of power, while his individual
responsibility for action -- a key factor in all moral judgment -- diminishes.
Sound familiar?
LeBon is describing the behavior of all masses of people organized around
emotionalism and infantile activities, such as the crowds at large spectator
sporting events, at large rock concerts, and at mass demonstrations. It
is the psychology of the unthinking 'mob'. The masters of people like
LeBon, the people who control the brainwashers that program television, have
for centuries known that masses in mobs are easily manipulated. From the
days of ancient
LeBon says that individuals in a mass seem to behave as if they
are in a state of hypnosis. But that is where his observations
stop. Freud takes it a step further. The most effectively
controlled masses are those which are led, by a leader. It is the leader
who places the mass under an effective hypnotic spell.
Masses of people, Freud says, can be deliberately induced to
give up their moral conscience -- the values that underpin all moral
judgment. Deep within Man's unconscious, is His animal nature.
Those urges are repressed by His conscience, which is in turn molded by
society. Freud calls this the "I ideal" (the ego ideal), which
he later develops into the concept of the "over I" (the
superego). The mass itself creates the preconditions for the silencing of
the voice of individual conscience; that voice silenced, all that violates the
standards of conscience, all the evil in Man, can appear, without restraint.
Freud is wrong that Man is first and foremost an animal and
that all that society does is to repress His instinctual animal behavior.
He has laid the basis for a regressive, evil psychology, that can make Man
'more' of an animal -- and hence more easily manipulated by a small ruling
elite of oligarchs.
"In my innnermost depth, I am really convinced that my
dear fellow human beings -- with few exceptions -- are rabble," Freud
wrote to a colleague in 1929.
If you deny, as Freud does, that Man's true identity lies not
in his individual mortal self, but in the moral acts of that individual,
through his powers of creative reason, that live beyond his life on Earth, then
you take away Man's soul; then Man is 'reduced' to the animal-like, to be
controlled by the power and repressive actions of an oligarchical-controlled
state.
"It is just as impossible to do without control of the
masses by a minority as it is to dispense with coercion in the work of
civilization," Freud writes in his 1927 attack on religion, "The Future
of an Illusion". "For the masses are lazy and
unintelligent."
Freud, before Hitler and his sponsors published 'Mein Kampf',
described the concept of the "Fuauhrerprinzip", the leadership
principle around which the Nazi state was organized. In his "Mass
Psychology", Freud argues that any mass, be it a nation, or a randomly
created group, must have a leader, someone who gives it its 'I ideal' or
values. The leader 'becomes' the individual member's common 'I ideal' and
takes over all his critical faculties, just as the hypnotized individual
surrenders his self-determination to the hypnotizer. It is the leader,
says Freud, who provides the common bond for a mass of people; their common
attachment to the leader enables each member to identify with the other, giving
form and direction to the mass.
Freud says that the leader holds an attachment to his followers
through what he calls the 'aim inhibited libido' -- a sexual attraction that is
repressed or desexualized. In order for this to function, however, the
leader must remain aloof, with no emotional attachments to anybody, so as
create an almost god-like or mystical quality. The leader must appear to
be above the mass, yet part of it; "he loves no one but himself or other
people in so far as they can serve his needs," writes Freud. In that
way, the leader "loves everyone."
Man is most like an animal when He is young. The
infantile mind, while still different from the animal in its creative
capacities, thinks more instinctively, is more reactive, and is more prone to
suggestion. Freud's "Fuauhrer" becomes a vehicle to make the
masses more infantile; they are thus more easily controlled and manipulated.
"They are rendered defenseless against mass brainwashing."
Think about what we have described about the leader. Now
think about what you know about the Nazi state and its Fuauhrer. Even the
movie images have told you that Hitler organized his followers and the mass of
Germans 'almost exactly as Freud had described', with results Freud "predicted."
Was the Fuauhrer a Freudian? It is known that Hitler read
LeBon; it cannot be established that he read Freud, especially "Mass
Psychology". But it is clear that those who put Hitler in power and
those who steered his movement read Freud, as did most of the ruling elite of
the day. It was they who were promoting the Freudian craze and its
propagation throughout the world.
Some neo-Freudians did become overt supporters of the
Nazis. Of them all, the most important was the Swiss psychoanalyst Carl
Jung, who had broken with Freud over the latter's refusal to see value in
gnostic mysticism and what he called Freud's fixation on the sexual drive, the
libido, as the root of all neuroses. Ultimately, Jung came to see in
Hitler and the Hitlerian state the proof of his theories.
And, more, Jung saw in Hitler the apotheosis of Jung's own
search for a kind of pagan "communion" with the Beyond, a search that
began in 1915, with Jung's colossal nervous breakdown.
There is a strong connection between Jung's psychoanalytic theories,
which form one of the conceptual bases of "New Age" ideology today,
and his Nazism -- or, more precisely, his fascination with Hitler. For
Jung was obsessed by the notion that the deepest reality, the greatest truth,
lay buried in the unconscious, mystical, psychotic aspects of Man's mind, as
opposed to the outward, rational, scientific (Judeo-Christian) view of the
world. That was the basis for Jung's decades-long pilgrimage through
himself, beginning with his nervous collapse, to find stranger and more distant
"truths."
And that was the basis for his attitude toward Hitler.
Hitler was the prototype of Jungian Man, who surrendered His reason to His
unconscious, who welcomed divine madness as Jung himself advised.
Thus, in 1934, Jung was writing of the "formidable
phenomenon of National Socialism," which the world beheld "wide-eyed
with astonishment." Hitler, he wrote, had "literally set all
"As an autonomous archetype, Wotan produces effects in the
collective life of a people and thereby reveals his own nature," Jung
raved in trying to explain the "formidable phenomenon" of
Hitlerism. This god of wind and rain had transformed
Earlier, in an essay written in 1932 (but only printed in
1934), Jung had celebrated the "leader [Fuehrer] personality" as against
the "ever-secondary, lazy masses, who cannot take the least move in the
absence of a demagogue." When he printed the essay in 1934, he
specified in a footnote: "Since this sentence was first written,
In 1933, about three months after Hitler came to power, Jung, a
Swiss national, became a minor official of the Nazi state. Shortly after
Hitler was named chancellor of
Was Jung simply taking the post (as he later claimed) in order
to save the delicate plant of psychotherapy from utter extinction by the
Nazis? Hardly. His first editorial in "Zentralblatt", the
journal of the society, declared, "In the interest of science, we can no
longer ignore the palpable differences, long known to persons of insight,
between the Germanic and Jewish psychologies. Psychology, more than any
other science, contains a personal factor, ignorance of which falsifies the
results of theory and practice."
The next year, in 1934 in "Zentralblatt", he
published a programmatic denunciation of 'subversive' Semitism. To the
Aryan unconscious (the collective, or racial, unconscious of the German people,
as he phrased it), Jung attributed "the potential energy and creative
seeds of a future still awaiting fulfillment, ... [of] the still youthful
Germanic peoples."
All this was written in the first two years of the Nazi
regime. Perhaps Jung had not yet understood the nature of the beast, of
the regime he served?
Not true. In 1938, fully five years after Hitler's accession to
power, Jung was able to write with wild enthusiasm of Hitler as a
"visionary," an historical phenomenon belonging to the type of the
"truly inspired shaman or medicine man," the loudspeaker of the
German soul, whose power was "magical rather than political," a
"spiritual vessel."
In his interview with American newspaperman H. R. Knickerbocker
in October 1938, a month after Hitler had extorted from the West the Munich
Pact, Jung said that "Hitler belongs in the category of the truly mystic
medicine man.... The outstanding characteristic of his physiognomy is its
dreamy look. I was especially struck by that when I saw pictures taken of
him in the Czechoslovakian crisis; there was in his eyes the look of a
seer.... He is the loudspeaker which magnifies the inaudible whispers of
the German soul until they can be heard by the German's conscious ear. He
is the first man to tell every German what he has been thinking and feeling all
along in his unconscious about German fate, especially since the defeat in the
World War, and the one characteristic which colors every German soul is the
typically German inferiority complex, the complex of the younger brother, of
the one who is always a bit late to the feast. Hitler's power is not
political, it is magic."
Hitler's secret was that he allowed himself to be moved by his
own unconscious, said Jung. He was like a man who listens intently to
whispered suggestions from a mysterious voice and "then acts upon
them. In our case, even if occasionally our unconscious does reach us
through dreams, we have too much rationality, too much cerebrum, to obey it --
but Hitler listens and obeys. The true leader is always led." This,
of course, is the significance of Hitler's own, oft-quoted remark, "I go
the way
Jung predicted to Knickerbocker that
And still, after the war began, Jung remained an
enthusiast. As
Even much later in the war, when Jung had come to realize that
his future required him to dissociate himself from Hitler's particular brand of
magic, Jung was still certain that Hitler represented Germany in the
profoundest possible, mythic and mystical way. In answer to queries from
American agents as to whether Hitler could be overthrown internal to
Mass Media
The Nazis and their organized supporters represented only a
'minority' of the German population, even when in power. What about the
rest of the people, whom our television documentaries called the "good
Germans," who acquiesced to the Hitler state? How were they made to
go along?
That was accomplished through mass terrorization, through both
the actual use of jackboot terror and the 'implied threat' to use it. It
is very possible that the same powers which placed Hitler in power could have
done so, by a 'putsch', without a popular election victory. I say that
they 'chose' not to do it that way, because the psychological considerations
that were required in order for the Hitler state to take hold, demanded that
the initial choice of the Nazis appear to be a free one. This heightened
the anxiety of the "good Germans," since they appeared to have
brought the terrible state of affairs on themselves. As many Freudians
and neo-Freudians who have analyzed the Nazi experiment have remarked, this led
the majority of Germans to doubt their own judgment, making them more
susceptible to brainwashing.
The structure of the Nazi Party and the Fuehrer state provided
organized vehicles for Freudian mass brainwashing. But the principle
vehicle was 'mass media'. In fact, the Nazis more or less invented 'mass
media' -- the means for the universal or near universal dissemination of
"information" simultaneously, in this case controlled through the
state.
There were three basic institutions of mass media.
The 'print media', which featured the coordinated control of
information disseminated through the press. All information was created
and passed through the Information Ministry, under Josef Goebbels. The
coverage was orchestrated so as not to appear to be identical, with various
papers given particular aspects of a story. But the point is that all the
news was managed from the top, including even foreign coverage of German
events. Nearly every German could be reached with the message desired in
this fashion.
'Film' became a universal mass medium as well, with cinemas
established in every town, with feature films that carried brainwashing images
of Nazi culture. Such films were often carefully crafted to have the
greatest psychological effect, with the Leni Riefenstahl epics such as
"Triumph of Will" being the most notorious. Those films and
newsreels were carefully produced, and allowed audiences to become participants
in the mass experience of rallies and other events. They provided a bond,
as we have described, between the leader and masses and the individual in the
mass and his neighbor in other parts of
But the most universal of the mass media was 'radio'. As soon
as they came to power, the Nazis ordered the production and mass dissemination
of cheap radio receivers. By the end of their first year in power, nearly
every German household had one. In addition, loudspeakers, hooked to
radio receivers and amplifiers, were installed in town squares and other
locations throughout
For the first time in history, an event could be heard by
nearly every person in a single country, as it was happening. This is the
mass audience that foreshadows our television experience. The concept
behind it was the same as we have described in discussing Freud's "Mass
Psychology" -- individuals participating in the mass phenomena are susceptible
to suggestion, to losing their moral conscience -- they become overwhelmed by
the mass experience.
Coming across the radio, into millions of homes and thousands
of plazas, is the voice of one man, the Fuehrer. That fact -- that all or
nearly all Germans were hearing his voice at the same moment -- gave an
enhanced power to the message; it created an air of "all
powerfulness." Many commentators have remarked about the hypnotic
quality of Hitler's voice, how it seemed to mesmerize his audience, whether
live or on radio or seen in the film. The neo-Freudians would remark that
it was not only the quality of the voice, but the sense on the part of the
listener of being part of a mass experience, that contributed to this effect.
Careful Orchestration
Hitler's speeches were some of the first mass media events in
history. They were as carefully prepared and orchestrated as any modern
television event. They are comparable to the kind of preparation and
buildup, given a media extravaganza such as the Superbowl. In fact, one
might say that such people who prepared such mass media events learned their
lessons from the Nazis, as we shall later explain.
The speeches were preceded by widespread advertising in the
print media and radio, with a buildup of anticipation and excitement. As
the moment of the speech approached, the announcers described the frenzy and
excitement of the crowd. Hitler's entrance into the hall was carefully
described, also to build tension and excitement. When the speech began,
Hitler usually spoke in low and mellow tones, easing his audience into his
message. His sentences were simple and usually short. Words were
carefully chosen, so as not to be beyond the simplest of listeners. His
tone and excitement in voice rose as the speech progressed, eventually shouting
his message to his audience. It ended with the crowd roaring its
approval, all of which was broadcast without comment. As the Fuehrer left
the hall, the commentator would carefully describe the scene, with the emphasis
on what the crowd was doing.
But it did not come naturally for Hitler. He carefully
rehearsed everything, down to the most minute gestures and eye movements, using
photographs to modify his style for maximum effect. Like a television
star, he went over details of the staging of his entrances, the location of the
podium, the lighting, etc. with his "stage managers" such as
Goebbels.
When brainwashers spoke to Germans after the war, as part of
efforts to "psychoanalyze" the Nazi experience, they found few
remembered any specific content in Hitler's speeches. Almost all could
remember being part of the experience, if they were in attendance, and most
remembered the "excitement" in listening to them on the radio.
The words "hypnotic" and "mesmerizing" were the most used
to describe the Fuehrer's voice. Even some people who professed to have
disagreed with the Nazis grudgingly claimed that Hitler was a "a
spellbinding speaker."
The brainwashers concluded from all this that 'mass media'
events had caused people to "suspend their belief in reality", that
they had in fact been willing to accept uncritically things being said, which
they might have rejected, if they had heard them in another context.
Ironically, the Nazis were working on the next level of mass
media technology -- television -- when the war broke out. Had the war and
its production demands not intervened, it is fairly certain that by no later
than the mid-1940s every German would have had a television set!
The 'mass media' hold of Hitler on the population continued through
the end of the war; other Nazi leaders, Goebbels in particular, were said to
have had a similar effect. But no one could overwhelm reality like the
Fuehrer, or, rather, 'the Fuehrer's mass media events'. Only as the Nazi
state collapsed in military defeat and chaos, did this process break down.
A Society Driven Insane
This is a picture of a society, driven 'deliberately
insane'. It is all the more cruel for this was done to a great people,
chosen as victims because they were great and the carriers of the traditions of
the Renaissance through such giants as Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Schiller, List,
and von Humboldt. An evil science, Freudian social psychology, was
deployed against them, by a sick oligarchy.
During the war, Bruno Bettelheim, a neo-Freudian, published a
psychological analysis of the Nazi period at the behest of the network of
brainwashers associated with the Tavistock Institute. Himself a
concentration camp inmate in 1938-39, Bettelheim describes how under extreme
doubt and terror, the individual will regress to an increasingly more infantile
state. In that condition, the inmates of the camps started to mirror the
personalities and mannerisms of their oppressors, the SS guards. In a
widely circulated version of that work, "The Informed Heart", he
indicates that life outside the concentration camps mirrored the psychological
disintegration taking place inside -- All German citizens were becoming more
infantile, less able to act as reasoning adults.
"While the good child may be seen and not heard,"
writes Bettelheim, "the 'good German' had to be unseen and also
dumb... It is one thing to behave like a child because one is a child:
dependent, lacking in foresight and understanding, taken care of by bigger,
older, and wiser adults, forced by them to behave, but occasionally able to
defy them and get away with it. Most important of all, feeling certain
that in time, as one would reach adulthood oneself, all this would be
righted. It is quite another thing to be an adult and have to force oneself
to assume childish behavior, and for all time to come...
"It was not just coercion by others into helpless
dependency," continues Bettelheim. "It was also the clean splitting
of the personality. Man's anxiety, His wish to protect life, forced Him to
relinquish what was ultimately His best chance of survival -- His ability to
react and make appropriate decisions. But giving this up, He was no
longer a man, but a child. Knowing that for survival, He should decide
and act, and trying to survive by not reacting -- these in their combination
overpowered the individual to such a degree that he was eventually shorn of
all self-respect and all feelings of independence."
In this way, the multi-level experiment in Freudian mass
brainwashing worked its evil on the German population. In the end, the
Nazis, themselves a group of gnostic psychotics, went predictably out of
control and the experiment had to be destroyed. In the interim, the
Freudian mobs unleashed by the process had destroyed much of
We'll pick up this thread of a fascist state without the Nazi
superstructure in the next part of this article, and show you the kind of
society that your brainwashers plan for you. But for the moment, I want
you to think back to the two images with which we started this section -- the
Nazi state, and in particular, the Nazi rallies, with the frenzied crowds,
cheering their Fuehrer, and the millions more listening, glued to their radios.
Now reflect on what we have told you about this, how they were really carefully
stage-managed "mass media events".
Now think about the "Desert Storm" rallies, and the
similarities between the two events -- at their roots both are "organized,
mass media brainwashing events".
Do you realize that you have been manipulated? You don't,
do you? That is how well the more than 40-year brainwashing of the
American population by television has worked.
I am indebted to Molly Hammett Kronberg for the section on
Jungian psychology and Hitler, and for discussion on the Nazi movement overall.
The
Clockwork
Society
I'm back again. I won't even ask you this time whether
the television set is turned off. By now, I hope, you realize that it is
impossible to think about any important subject as long as it is on. But
in case 'someone else' has turned the set on, I'll give you a chance to either
turn it off or to go to another room before we begin.
The people who had put the Nazis in power never gave up on the
idea of mass psychological brainwashing as a means to maintain the power of the
oligarchical elite. They only grudgingly acknowledged that the Nazi model
of social control, with its requirement for total regimentation, could not have
universal application. The question confronting the brainwashers at such
places as the Tavistock Institute outside
Americans returned home from fighting a war in which they had
defeated a monstrous evil at great human sacrifice. Those involved in the
war effort were thus focused on the 'higher purpose' in life, the kind of moral
outlook that leads an individual to be willing to sacrifice his life, if necessary,
to make the world a better place to live in for someone who might come after
him, while giving renewed meaning to the achievements of past
generations. The war effort led to a burst of 'cultural optimism' in the
population, that made it seem that we could do great things for all Mankind.
Now, look around at this miserable nation of ours. It is
hard to believe that it is the same place as 40 or 50 years ago. For most
people, there is little or no purpose to life, except to survive to the next
day. Our people have a deep-seated 'cultural pessimism', and are cynical
about nearly everything.
Now, think hard -- over the last 40 years, while our moral
outlook has collapsed, what became a constant, ever-present part of your
life. That's right, 'television', that box in your living room.
That realization is necessary to understand what I am about to tell you.
The New 'Leader'
The evil Sigmund Freud, in his work "Mass Psychology and
the Analysis of the I", said that an individual's moral inhibitions and outlook
can be broken down as part of a mass or crowd. According to Freud,
people in crowds or masses behave as if they are hypnotized -- A person becomes
more infantile, and hence more like an animal under such circumstances, and
loses the power to reason critically. By using the power of mass
suggestion, a new outlook, based on different ideals, can then be substituted
for values a person had previously held.
Freud says that each mass has a leader, who serves the function
of hypnotist. It is to the leader that the individuals in the crowd
surrender their ideals, and it is from the leader that they receive their new
values. It is at the will and word of the leader, that the mass or mob
can be deployed.
Freud claimed that the leader principle worked as a
brainwashing tool because of some innate need of Man to be led; this merely
betrayed his own oligarchical outlook. He believed that Man was merely a
two-legged animal, whose basic animalism could be induced to come to the fore
in mass situations.
Freud is wrong -- Man is not an animal. However, he can,
under conditions of mass psychosis, through brainwashing techniques of the type
described, be made to 'act as if he were an animal'. The key to mass
brainwashing is to create the kinds of "organized, controlled
environments" in which "tension" and "stress" can be
applied to break down morally informed judgment, thereby making an individual
more susceptible to "suggestion". Such 'controlled environments' are
organized so as to appeal to base emotionalism, sensuality, and even eroticism
-- "feelings" that make Man "one with animals" -- and not
to Man's higher reasoning capabilities, which truly distinguished him from the
beast. It is this fact, and not merely the size of an event, that makes
the brainwashing possible.
For the brainwashers, what was required for a new system of
mass social control was a means to organize a "mass appeal to
emotionalism". The more overpowering and all encompassing that
appeal, the better. The more infantile the population could be made, the
less would be their resistance to suggestion and manipulation.
In television, they found the tool to make that constant appeal
to infantilism, organized on a mass basis. It had the potential to reach
into 'every' home, to reach 'every' citizen with a set of messages and
suggestions. It also had the ability, through the control and
dissemination of information, to create large "controlled
environments" by creating your perceptions of events. Television is the
new "leader," the technological equivalent of Hitler.
Writing in 1972 with Eric Trist, formerly of the
"We are suggesting that television evokes a basic assumption
of 'dependency'. It must evoke (this) because it is essentially an
emotional and irrational activity.... Television is the non-stop leader
who provides nourishment and protection."
Emery and Trist report that the population has never been told
this about television, and writing for a handful of fellow brainwashers, they
are now about to let this secret out: "... that the questioning and
confrontation of television has been put aside in order to maintain its role as
the 'leader' in the dependent mode."
They note that 'all' television has a dissociative effect on
mental capabilities, making people less able to think rationally.
Harkening back to the studies of the Hitler experiment, they find that this
confirms the thesis that "the leader should be 'mad' or a 'genius,' yet
all the same people feel compelled to believe that he is a dependable
leader."
Emery and Trist, after looking at over 20 years of television
brainwashing, comment; "In other words, television can be partly seen as a
technological analyst of the hypnotist."
The more you watch, the more susceptible you become to
suggestions from your 'leader', the television. "... It turns you off to
reality and time," Emery and Trist write, commenting that comprehension of
time relationships and reality are required for an individual to take reasoned
and purposeful action.
In looking at the effects of habituated television watching,
Emery and Trist cite studies proving that it does neurological damage:
"Our thesis is that television produces a quality and
quantity of habituation that approximates the destruction of critical
anatomical structures."
They report, however, that the damage is not
irreversible. The neurological problems can be cleared up within a few
days of halting the six to eight hours of daily viewing. The effects on
the ability to reason and on moral value structures are far more difficult to
"clear up":
"Man can (therefore) be seduced from purposeful
functioning in such a way that he is unable to become aware of his
deficit."
Social Turbulence
Now, we are ready to look at what the brainwashers and the
oligarchs who have deployed them have in store for you.
Many neo-Freudians have criticized Freud for presenting too
biologically oriented a system. They say that Freud failed to understand
how much of a role the 'social environment' plays in shaping the personality of
the individual. A new social psychology must place an emphasis on the
role of tension-filled environments in shaping the personality or the
"ego," producing regression to more infantile, or "id-like"
personalities.
According to the view of personality held by Tavistock's Emery
and Trist, the 'social environment' is either 'stable', at which point, people
are more or less able to "cope" with what is happening to them, or it
is 'turbulent', at which point people either take actions to relieve the
tension, or they adapt to accept the tension-filled environment. If the
'turbulence' does not cease, or if it intensifies, then, at a certain point,
people cease being able to adapt in a positive way. At that point, Emery
and Trist say, people become 'maladaptive' -- they choose a response to tension
that degrades their lives. They start to "repress reality",
denying its existence, and constructing increasingly more infantile fantasies
that enable them to cope. All the while, their lives are becoming
increasingly worse, when measured by value structures of a short time
before. To avoid this contradiction, people, under conditions of
"increasing social turbulence", change their values, yielding to new
'degraded' values, values that are less human and more animal-like.
Sound like a bunch of gobbledegook? Well, in a certain
sense it is -- Morally reasoning individuals, cultured by 2,000 years of
Christian civilization, do not think in such ways. They would reject
barbaric choices, the so-called critical choices, where none are good.
They would seek Truth, and by seeking Truth, find ways out of the brainwashers'
mind trap.
Forty years ago, our responses to problems, and our moral
outlook were different. You would have probably rejected the kinds of
critical choices you are offered today. But that was 'before
television'. Forty years of television have eroded your ability to make
moral choices, and have steered you into critical choices. You have
followed your 'leader', television, down a path to Hell.
Looking into Hell
Twenty years ago, the brainwashers, Emery and Trist, laid out
some scenarios for the future based on a "permanent condition of social
turbulence". There might be brief periods of respite, but, according
to them, the world would become increasingly more chaotic and violent.
In the hands of those with the power to make policy -- to
create the 'social turbulence' -- what they have written is a cookbook recipe
for a desired "future." It is proper to look at what they produced,
back in 1972, as the psychological warfare underpinning, the mass brainwashing
concept, behind the political doctrines of such institutions as the Council on
Foreign Relations and the Trilateral Commission. It is for such people
that they were written.
Their forecast -- a period of continuous turbulence, especially
economic turbulence leading to economic decline -- had its political corollary
in the CFR's "Project 1980s" reports drafted in the mid-1970s.
There, we find reference to plans for the "controlled disintegration"
of the American economy.
In 1972, twenty years of television-watching in the United
States and most of the West had left populations with three basic 'maladaptive'
scenarios for dealing with the tension.
one scenario is called 'superficiality'. It is a form of
psychological retreat, an attempt to simplify choices. Tension, say Emery
and Trist, makes Man desire to break free of the emotional values formerly
placed on choices. A person reduces the "value of his intentions,
lowering the emotional investment in the ends being pursued, whether they be
personally or socially shared ends... This strategy can only be pursued
by denying the deeper roots of Humanity that bind...people together on a
personal level by denying their individual psyche."
Emery and Trist, writing in the Vietnam era, point to the
drug-soaked rebellion of the "flower children" against society as an
example of how this scenario functions. Fighting an increasingly senseless
and brutal war, the older generation begins to ultimately accept the moral
decadence of the drug culture of its children, rather than seek conflict.
Society as a whole accepts a "lower moral standard", posited as a
higher value.
Citing the Frankfurt School philosopher, Herbert Marcuse,
popularized by the 1960s counterculture, Emery and Trist say that under such
conditions choice becomes meaningless. What is important is "the
moment," and "the momentary experience becomes all," they state.
Quoting from Marcuse in his "One Dimensional Man",
Emery and Trist say that modern society is thus confronted with "the
rational character of its irrationality."
The organized societal response to this process is best
identified by Aldous Huxley's "Brave New World", the drug-controlled
society, in which there are 'no' individual moral choices. They identify
the 1960s counterculture as "pioneers" for this scenario.
The second scenario involves the 'segmentation' of society into
smaller parts, of a size that one might be more easily able to cope.
"There is an enhancement of in-group and out-group prejudices as people
seek to simplify their choices," say Emery and Trist. "The
natural line of social divisions have emerged to become barricades."
In this scenario, it is every group -- ethnic, racial, sexual
-- against the other. Nations break apart into regional groups, and those
smaller areas in turn fissure into even smaller areas, along ethnic or other
lines. It is an incredibly violent scenario, but a violence associated
with a purposefulness of sorts, in individual defense of each ethnic or other
group.
The organized social response to such a psychological and
political disintegration is the orwellian fascist state, modeled on George
Orwell's book "1984". In the book, individuals turn to
"Big Brother" to regulate their lives and conflicts among various
castes within society. A continuous conflict among three superpowers,
writes Orwell, is "waged by each ruling group against its own subjects,
and the object of the war is not to make or prevent conquests of territory, but
to keep the structure of society intact..."
While noting that the Orwellian scenario is not acceptable in
its fully regimented form, any more than Nazism could now be replicated in its
exact form, Emery and Trist state that there are nonetheless obvious parallels
in the "Cold War" to the Orwellian "war of each against
all". They comment elsewhere that, should the Cold War collapse, the
ability to control a segmentation scenario on a societal scale would also
collapse.
The third scenario is the most intense, involving a withdrawal
and retreat into a "private world and a withdrawal from social bonds that
might entail being drawn into the affairs of others." Emery and
Trist caution that 'dissociation' is not the more assertive statement of
"me first," of personal selfishness that became the hallmark of the
1970s and 1980s. Fearing the terror that surrounds him, the individual
seeks to avoid all forms of danger entirely. Individuals seek
'invisibility', in order to fade into their environments; they see nothing and
no one, so that no one might see them.
The brainwashers remark that 'dissociation' has always been a
response of sorts to living in a city. People tend to "look the
other way," at some of what is going on, just as the person who rides the
subway tries to "remain invisible" although in a crowd.
Here we can see how Freud and others' predictions about the
behavior of crowds or masses of people is specific to only certain types of
specially organized experiences -- ones in which the mass is organized around
appeals to emotionalism, that lead to the regression of the individual to an
infantile state of mind, to an animal-like "freedom" of hedonistic
expression. Emery and Trist describe a level of 'dissociation' so great
that the individual is reduced to an animal. He withdraws from the terror
around him, and like an animal "playing possum," tries to hide.
With individuals withdrawn into their fantasies, their minds
numbed and brainwashed by their televisions, the brainwashers
"predict" that men will be willing to accept "the perverse
inhumanity of man to man that characterized Nazism" -- not 'the structure'
of the Nazi state, but the 'moral outlook of Nazi society'.
Ultimately, the majority of people withdraw so far that they
don't even bother to go to their sporting events or rock concerts -- "they
have such experiences mediated through television". It is the
television that "gives them solace," write the brainwashers.
To survive, such individuals require the comfort of a 'new'
religion. The old religious forms, especially Western Christianity,
demand that Man be responsible for his fellow humans. The new religious
forms will be a form a 'mystical anarchism', a religious experience much
likened to satanic practice of the Nazis and the views of Carl Jung.
Again, it is to be television that provides the "social glue" that
binds the minds of the population to their new religious forms. It is
television as the leader, in this case, the "anti-Christ".
A Clockwork
The organized social response to 'dissociation', say Emery and
Trist, is a society described in the pages of Anthony Burgess's novel "A
Clockwork Orange".
In the book, Burgess depicts a society gone controllably
mad. A majority of people are engaged in useless "schooling," a
few engaged in mind-destroying trivial labors, and somewhere, there are people
running all this as if it were an insane zoo.
Senseless violence is everywhere in the streets, committed by
gangs of youth who lust for blood. In a typical 'Clockwork Orange' street
scene, a gang of drugged, outlandishly dressed teenagers viciously beats an old
man. He had it coming, said one of the gang members; everyone knows that
if you go into certain parts of town, you will be beaten and raped.
There is no politics to any of it -- Burgess made sure that his
"hero," Alex, repeatedly makes clear that he is 'apolitical'.
Alex speaks a language invented by the linguist Burgess, appropriate to his
infantilism; It is never translated -- the reader is forced to
"learn" what it means by description or "word pictures."
Burgess provides no explanation about how society got this way;
there is no war or other social calamity referred to. "That's just
the way things are," one character says.
"A Clockwork Orange" portrays a society dominated by
infantile animal-like rage. The 'dissociated' adults cannot exert moral
authority over their children, because they are too involved with their own
infantile fantasies, brought to them through their television sets. Even
as they watch the reports of the daily mayhem, they convince themselves that it
isn't "their kids" who are doing this.
For Emery and Trist, Burgess's 'Clockwork Orange' vision
"is" the Nazi state without the superstructure. It is organized
disorder, without moral control.
It is the force of the mass communications media, the 'power of
television', however, that is driving us toward the 'Clockwork Orange
society'. As we have explained in previous sections, television, when
watched in habituated, long viewing induces 'dissociation'. It also
provides the tension and images of violence required in order to create the
form of social organization in "A Clockwork Orange". Under its
ever-present eye, the "leader", television, transforms children into
beasts like Alex and parents into impotent caretakers of beasts.
Over time, one state of mental and social disintegration can
transform itself into another. Given the power of television over
society, all states will tend to become more 'dissociative', more like "A
Clockwork Orange". As the Futures Group brainwasher Hal Becker put
it back in 1981, "Orwell made a big mistake in his "1984".
Big Brother doesn't need to watch you, as long as you watch it."
Next, I will explain how the programs you watch on television
have been crafted to brainwash you.
The
Programming of
by
Television
Reflect on the following for a moment -- Suppose someone told
you that they wanted you to take a large dose of a mind-deadening drug, and
that after you took the drug, they were then going to suggest that you do
things that without taking the drug you would probably never conceive of
doing. And, they also told you that "you would not be held
accountable for what you did, that you would have no conscious memory of what
took place". Would you take it?
Definitely not, you say, no way.
Yet, for more than 40 years, the majority of Americans, like
yourself, have been taking a daily dose of a mind-deadening drug, one of the
most powerful ever invented -- "television". With your mind in
a deadened state, things have been suggested to you that, were you alert and
reasoning, you would have rejected. And, 'over time', under the continual
dosage of this drug, you have followed the suggestions, changing the way you
think about yourself and the world around you. And, you never knew that
this was happening and you may even yet, despite ail the things we have already
shown you, have trouble believing it. That is how complete this
brainwashing process is, how strong is its power over you.
People like Sigmund Freud, his direct followers in the
psychoanalytic movement, and the neo-Freudians that split from him, as well as
all 'social pyschologists', deny the existence of the universal truth that Man
is made in the living image of God, and is therefore distinct from the
animal. They deny that Man has been endowed by his Creator with the
Divine Spark of reason, and that by the gift of reason, Man can 'consciously'
perfect his knowledge. For them, creativity is fundamentally an unknowable
mystical concept, an act linked to repression of both carnal and sexual
desires.
By denying these most fundamental of truths, they deny the
existence of any truth. They seek to impose on Mankind a "paradigm
shift that will wipe out 2,000 years of Christian civilization", thereby
returning Man to a bestial and primitive social order.
Using television as their weapon, the brainwashers have
launched a 40-year assault on the universal truths of Western Christian
civilization and on the concept of universal truth itself. In place of
morally informed reason, in the absence of universal truth, they have raised
the false god of 'popular opinion'. As we shall show, they have
consciously targeted "the higher moral values" of society, and even
the idea that there could be a set of true moral values, seeking to substitute
'amorality' as the axiomatic assumption.
Reality as Opinion
Once the concept of universal truth is obliterated, reality can
be redefined by internal "perceptions" or "images" of that
reality. Those perceptions and images are then validated by 'popular
opinion'. Reality becomes a set of conflicting opinions validated by a
mass consensus.
Freud, in discussing this transformation in his 1921 "Mass
Psychology", identifies the process in masses of people as a loosening of
the hold of what he calls moral or social conscience (the "Over I" or
"superego," as it is mistranslated in English) over a person's more
infantile and hence, more animal-like nature (the I and It, or the
"ego" and "id"). To use a term developed by the
neo-Freudians, the individual becomes more "other-directed," governed
by the perceived opinions of others, and thus, more easily manipulated.
Television brainwashing works through the manipulation of
images and perceptions to cause a 'paradigm shift' in the "public
mind." It does this through what the television people appropriately
call 'programming', the content of which is shaped and fine-tuned by
"social analysts."
Let's see how Walter Lippmann, one of the earliest practitioners
and theorists of the mass manipulation of opinion, describes the process.
Lippmann, trained by the British psychological warfare unit at Wellington House
during World War I and a follower of Freud, was to become regarded as the most
influential American social and political commentator of the first half of the
twentieth century.
In 1922, following the publication of Freud's "Mass
Psychology", Lippmann authored a handbook on the manipulation of the
public mind, titled "Public Opinion". In its introductory
chapter, titled "The World Outside and the Pictures in Our Heads," he
describes the concept of public opinion:
"Public opinion deals with indirect, unseen, and puzzling
facts and there is nothing obvious about them. The situations to which
public opinion refers are known only as opinions... The pictures inside
the heads of these human beings, the pictures of themselves, of others, of
their needs, purposes and relationship, are their opinions. Those
pictures which are acted on by groups of people, or by individuals acting in
the name of groups, are Public Opinion with capital letters... The
picture inside so often misleads men in their dealings with the world
outside."
While television might shift some opinions relatively quickly,
a 'paradigm shift' involving the 'axiomatic' assumptions that govern all
individuals thinking in a society does not occur overnight; it occurs over a
long period of time, in stages.
Think about a profile of the American population, correlating
it to the cumulative amount of television viewing.
First, you have a generation which was born before the advent
of television, the generation who fought in World War II. They had the
strongest set of moral values, since they were influenced by the war experience
and their parents' strong moral values. They were the most resistant to
brainwashing.
Their children, the "baby boomers" of the 1947-55
period, were the special targets of the brainwash programming, as we shall
show. They have been subjected to television brainwashing all their
lives. All succeeding generations have been totally immersed in the
television brainwashing experience.
Thus, you have an older generation which has been watching
television since approximately 1950, and successive generations who have been
watching for their entire lifetimes.
Now, you have parents who were themselves reared by television,
raising children, who were reared by television, who are now starting to have
children themselves -- three successive generations subjected to television
brainwashing, without any conscious memory of anything different.
With this profile in mind, focus on the following: The goal of
television programming is to make each succeeding generation more infantile,
more animal-like, more amoral, thereby 'shifting' the value structure of the
whole society. By the end of the process, the parents of the "baby
boomers" have adopted all the fundamental, infantile assumptions of their
children.
The Lost Generational War
The Tavistock brainwashers Fred Emery and Eric Trist, writing
nearly 20 years ago, identify the crucial period in this brainwashing process
-- the point at which the pre-television generation tried to raise their
"baby boom" kids, approximately 1949-69. They note the
following scenario. Throughout the period, children's television watching
increased, especially as the number of shows oriented to them increased.
At the same time, adult watching increased. Children, they say, learned
from what they saw their parents doing -- It became socially approved behavior
to watch television.
But then something interesting happened -- The television,
itself, took over as a surrogate parent. Children watched to amuse
themselves, and were encouraged by parents to do so. They became
habituated to watching.
The images presented on the screen were more real, more
powerful than the outside world. The messages presented in the shows
became more important to the children than what they were told by their live
parents.
Children watched the same shows, often with their friends, and talked
about the shows, socializing the experience. Emery and Trist, citing the
work of others, report that television became the "Pied Piper" for
the children, the 'leader' that they followed.
The whole process created an estrangement between child and parent,
although not necessarily apparent at first, creating a crisis in the
fundamental unit of social reproduction, the family. It was only as these
baby boomer children grew into adolescence in the 1960s that the conflict broke
into the open. Write Emery and Trist:
"a generation of children grow up on a TV diet, and as the
more affluent get sets, then multiple sets, the more likely they are to use it
as a substitute for a presence with their children. The children
grow into adolescence, spend less time viewing, but have a different world
view. They challenge the world view of the parents, face to face..."
In previous generational challenges, Emery and Trist write, the
disciplinary authority of the adult society ultimately won over its young-adult
values. But this time, adult society had lost its ability to discipline;
the adults had been infantilized by their own television watching. The
generational war is lost, Emery and Trist write, as all society plunges to a
new, 'lower' infantile level. The behavior of the children -- the drugs,
the sex, the anti-social behavior -- is excused or, to use a brainwasher's
word, "rationalized", with the help of the messages contained
in television programming.
Emery and Trist reach a startling conclusion -- The generational
war between the so-called counterculture and the generation that fought World
War II will be the last such sharp confrontation of values. Under the
influence of television, each succeeding generational transfer of power will be
smoother. When the adults are infantile already, it is more easy to
accept the infantilism of their youth. The children, they state, may be
violent, insane and anti-social, but no one will assert that it isn't their
right to be so!
To understand better how we got into this mess, we are going to
have to go back to the early period of television in the 1950s, and show how
what you watched as a child helped determine your values as an adult.
As we said, the "baby boom" generation was the first
to be reared by the television set. By 1952, there were already 30
million TV sets in
It is important to understand that the brainwashers think in
'long time spans'. They know that it is impossible to effect any
significant change in social values over anything but time-frames measured in
several generations. Hence, the messages presented in mass television
programming in the 1950s, which were planned to "play back" one and
two decades hence. In the same way, what you and your children are
watching today, will shape the first part of the next millennium.
While your brainwashers think in "long periods of
time", you are being induced to think in shorter and shorter
time-frames. Your attention span is shrinking almost daily. For
example, the average half-hour television show is broken into at least four
segments, with usually the longest running no more than five to six minutes,
with the remaining portions occupied by commercials, theme and credits.
Television news presents items in 30 second bites, with slightly longer feature
pieces. The very nature of the majority of your television viewing makes it
impossible to consider difficult concepts, especially developments over long
periods of time.
Cultural Warfare
Your brainwashers themselves actually fall into two major
categories. They both have the same world view -- the concept of Man as a
beast, to be controlled and manipulated like an animal -- but there is a
division of responsibility between them. There are the people like Emery
and Trist and others at places like Tavistock, who create and analyze
mechanisms for brainwashing, who study the effects of this brainwashing with
what are called 'profiles', and who make recommendations on how to do it
better. They work as social psychologists, and in similar professions.
Then, there are the people who create the "idea
content" of the brainwashing. They operate on the culture or
'paradigm', as we have explained -- the sets of axioms that govern the way we
think. These are the "cultural warfare" experts, who create the
value systems which are, in turn, imposed on the society by the brainwashing
mechanisms, such as television.
In the late 1930s and during the war, operatives of the
One of the key early pioneers in television brainwashing
techniques was Theodor Adorno, a Frankfurt School operative and a former member
of the "Radio Project." Adorno shared the bestial outlook of
the neo-Freudians, developing, along with others associated with the Frankfurt
School network, a perverse theory on the use of mass communications technology
for mass brainwashing. Given the appropriate message content, said
Adorno, media such as television and radio, could be used to make people
"forcibly retarded." An adult personality could be reduced,
through interaction with mass media, to a more primitive, childish or infantile
state.
In a 1938 report, Adorno compares the retardation capability of
existing media. Radio has one level of effect, but sound film is an even
more powerful "retardant," Adorno indicates. Television is yet
another level more powerful, said Adorno in 1944:
"Television aims at the synthesis of radio and film, and
is held up only because the interested parties have not yet reached agreement,
but its consequences will be quite enormous and promise to intensify the
overall impoverishment of aesthetic matter so drastically...."
In the minds of Adorno and his "fellow travelers,"
the power to control the new medium meant the power to determine and control
the values of society:
"Television is a medium of undreamed of psychological
control," Adorno wrote in 1956.
That same year, Adorno wrote an essay entitled "Television
and the Patterns of Mass Culture" that elaborated on the brainwashing
techniques that could be employed with television. It was intended as a
cookbook and discussion guide for people involved with the programming.
For people like ourselves, intended television brainwash victims, it provides
insight into how the messages in the programming can be "decoded."
Outlining his study, Adorno writes, "We will investigate
systematically socio-psychological stimuli typical of televised material on
both the descriptive and psychodynamic levels, in order to analyze their
presuppositions, as well as their total pattern, and to evaluate the effect
they are likely to produce. This procedure may ultimately bring forth a
number of recommendations on how to deal with these stimuli in order to
produce the most desirable effect..."
Adorno states that all television programming contains an
'overt' message as defined by plot, characters, etc. in the images presented
and a 'hidden' message that is less obvious, and is defined by the larger
intent of those presenting the images. These "hidden messages"
are the brainwashing content, while the "overt" message -- the plot,
etc. -- is the "carrier" of that brainwash content.
The "hidden message" operates on the mind so as to
cause "value conflict" over a period of time. As we have stated
before, the conflict will not surface immediately, but occurs over generational
time spans. The "hidden message" in a show may not surface for
10-20 years as a change in attitudes of the majority of the population, but
Adorno asserts that "it will ultimately surface". This is the
concept of 'playback' to which we have referred in other sections of this
report.
Those 'Wholesome' Shows
To make his point, Adorno unmasks the "hidden
message" of a number of popular shows of the early television period.
"Our Miss Brooks", a popular situation comedy
(sitcom), pitted a trained professional, a school teacher, against her boss,
the principal. Most of the humor, according to Adorno, was derived from
situations in which the underpaid teacher tried to hustle a meal from her
friends.
Adorno "decodes" the "hidden message" as
follows:
"If you are humorous, good-natured, quick-witted, and
charming as she [Miss Brooks] is, do not worry about being paid a starvation
wage. You can cope with your frustration in a humorous way and your
superior wit and cleverness put you not only above material privations, but
also above the rest of Mankind."
This 'message' will be called forth years hence, as the economy
collapses in the form of a "cynical anti-materialism." It came
forth with a vengeance among the 1960s "lost generation," and the
first wave of the "counterculture."
Generalizing from this, Adorno points out that it is
"social tension and stress" that call forth the television images of
"pyschodynamic stereotypes", the role models and images from the
early television viewing. The more confusing life becomes, the "more
people cling desperately to clichés in order to bring order to the otherwise
un-understandable," Adorno says.
Another "decoding" by Adorno emphasizes this
point. Remember the show, "My Little Margie"? The heroine
of this sitcom was a pretty girl who played "merry pranks" on her
father, who is portrayed as well-meaning but stupid.
Adorno says that the "hidden message" is the image of
an aggressive female successfully dominating and manipulating the male
father-figure. He "predicts" that years later, that young girls
will increasingly mirror this image of the "bitch-heroine."
Little Margie is the role model image for the feminist movement of the 1960s
and 1970s that took off as the "My Little Margie" viewers grew up.
The messages need not be contained within a single show; they
could be transmitted through a series of images contained as primary or
secondary features within "several shows". For example, Adorno
indicates that several shows featured characters who were artistic, sensitive,
and effeminate males. Such images cohered with Freudian notions that
artistic creativity stemmed from either a repressed or actual homosexual
passion. These effeminate, sensitive males usually come up against the
other more aggressive male "macho" images, such as cowboys, who
are uncreative.
Recognizing the psychological power in the "hidden
image", Adorno predicts that the "creative sissy" will find an
"important" place in society. Such images are "playing
back" today in the spread of homosexuality throughout society, and in all
creative arts.
Television's Killing of God
One of the fundamental relationships that defines our
civilization is that of Man to God. That relationship is mediated through
organized religion. It is religion that teaches the values and 'axioms'
of western Christian civilization, which creates in the individual the capacity
for moral judgment that must inform our reasoning processes.
As we have explained in another section of this report, the
evil Sigmund Freud, whose mass psychology became the basis for theories of mass
brainwashing, hated all religious belief, precisely because it told Man that He
was endowed with divine powers to perfect His existence. According to
Freud, this belief, the root of our moral conscience, brought Man into conflict
with his more infantile desires, thus causing neuroses.
Freud's system and its variants in social psychology must deny
the perfectibility of the soul, as described by Dante as the passage of Man
from the Inferno, through Purgatory, to Paradise. Man, the two-legged
animal, must not aspire to be any more than He is, a beast, at war with
Himself, whose base emotions must be repressed and controlled.
In the early 1950s, the majority of Americans still actively
worshiped God in churches and synagogues. The practice of religious
belief was an "axiomatic assumption" of American life, even if
Americans did not always act according to those beliefs. Television could
not "actively and openly" attack this; to do that would bring down
the wrath of an angry nation on the new medium, and lose its potential hold over
the population.
So the programmers took another tact -- "Television shows
made organized religious belief invisible; made it disappear from the
screen". Studies of the content of television shows in the 1950s
show almost no references to church-going or religious activities.
Think about such shows as "Leave It to Beaver" or
"Father Knows Best". Do you ever remember those families going
to church or discussing religious beliefs? Do you even know what faith
those families were? You don't because they never told you -- They never
discussed such matters.
Most importantly, when these families had problems, did they
ever turn to their church or their religious leaders as resources to help solve
them? Never. They were all worked out within the family -- in the
absence of organized religion or religious beliefs. The family and its
values were thus 'secularized', and what were once called moral and religious
values became known as "family values" -- a secular belief structure
that has nothing to do with fundamental values of western Christian
civilization.
This was the "hidden message" of those so-called
wholesome family shows of the 1950s, the ones that some Moral Majority-types
and people like Tipper Gore now hold up as examples of a golden era of television!
The 'playback' came in the late 1960s, with the nation
convulsed in generational battles over values, triggered by the Vietnam
conflict. Tavistock brainwasher Fred Emery noted at the time that, unlike
previous periods of social chaos, in the late 1960s no one was turning to
organized religion to help find a way out, to seek more fundamental values that
could bind together society and troubled families alike. Instead, he
describes the rise, especially among the television-weaned baby boomers, of a
"mystical anarchism" that rejected all organized religion as false
and "sought a new definition for God." This is the "New
Age," or the "Age of Aquarius," preached by Frankfurt School
gurus like Herbert Marcuse.
More recent surveys taken by Tavistock's population profilers
show that fewer people than ever before say that they hold "strong
religious beliefs" of any kind. A standard answer has a person
saying that he was brought up religiously, "but no longer practices any
organized religion."