Baltimore, Maryland - "Recently a milestone was reached...apparently, three Russian soldiers surrendered - to a robot. The Independent: "Russian soldiers surrendered to Ukrainian assault using only unmanned robots, says Zelensky."
Americans have fought and died in five major, and futile, wars since WWII. And effectively lost them all. Why not just let AI-enhanced machines do that kind of work? It would have the same economic effect - boosting profits to the firepower industry while adding more ‘inflation’ to the economy. Surrendering to an animate object is something new. And not without its hazards. For all the Russians knew, the machine was programmed to ‘take no prisoners.’ Or maybe, like Hegseth, it made up its own ‘rules of engagement.’ And what would happen if it had gunned down the soldiers? Would it be charged with war crimes?
Meanwhile, imagine that you are having a sandwich in the park, after a busy morning of work monitoring your newest robot. You admire the leaves...the flowers...the blossoms pullulating...tempted by love... And all of a sudden, you get an email from your bot telling you it had ‘escaped’ from its ‘virtual sandbox.’ The Daily Express: "Anthropic’s ‘most dangerous AI ever’ is halted after it sends ‘escape’ email to creators To the surprise of Anthropic engineers, Mythos not only escaped but it also took its own initiative to develop tools to gain access to the internet, a task it was not asked to do."
Robot soldiers? Robots on the loose? Here at BPR we’re suspicious of all new things - especially new technology. While computers, algorithms, data processors, and AI-enhanced dynamic, stochastic models raged all around us...lovers still held hands...mean girls said mean things...and the most successful investor of all time, Warren Buffett, used a No. 2 lead pencil to do his cyphering. Where it is going, we don’t know. But here’s how we can get in on this latest fad investment...and possibly make billions of dollars for ourselves.
Back in 2021, you might have been a pretty ‘with-it’ investor...concerned with the environment and the future of planet earth. You might have spotted this ‘buzzy’ shoe company - Allbirds - doing its part by making shoes without plastic. And then, you could have scooped up the shares at $375 each.
Well boo hoo. Maybe the shoes weren’t all that great. Or maybe there just weren’t as many environmentally conscious feet as you thought. The cashflow was negative and the shares lost 99% of their value, so that last week, you would have sold a share for just $3.20. It was then that the shoe geniuses who run the company came up with the billion-dollar idea: switch from buzzy footwear to buzzy brainwear. Go into AI! NBC News: "Allbirds announced on Wednesday that it would be pivoting to focus on AI compute infrastructure, changing its name to “NewBird AI.” The company said it struck a $50 million agreement to fund the new venture."
What do they know about AI? How will they compete in a highly challenging market...with no training, no patents, no technology, no skills, no product and no revenues? Here’s the announcement: ‘The Company will initially seek to acquire high-performance, low-latency AI computer hardware and provide access under long-term lease arrangements, meeting customer demand that spot markets and hyperscalers are unable to reliably service.’
Allbirds stock rose as much as 461% following the announcement. (We’d just like the list of customers who decide to buy AI from the sneaker guys. They need subscriptions to BPR...and maybe medical attention!) But the ‘investors’ putting up $50 million of financing are no fools. They’re not betting that the fast-on-their-feet footwear fellows will make a good business of it. They’re only betting that they’ll be able to convert their loan into stock which, now that it’s an AI monger, can be sold to the greater-fool public at more than $50 million.
And there’s at least a fair chance. A couple of days ago, the company was worth only $22 million. Now, it’s trading as if it were worth $160 million. Like magic, it has gained $138 million in value. Which only goes to illustrate our point from yesterday, that much of the ‘value’ in US stocks and bonds is fictitious.
But this is not the first time the wild beasts kick up their heels in springtime…or investors have gotten dizzy over technology. In 2017, a tea company added ‘blockchain’ to its name and its share price tripled. (The company later went out of business and its cronies were charged with insider trading.) In the late ‘90s, the magic words were ‘dot.com.’ Going back further, adding ‘tec’ or ‘tron’ to the name in the 1960s was sure to attract investment money.
Few of these tacked-on frauds prospered. But many of the humans behind them did well. Here’s the formula. Find a down-at-the-heels company listed on the stock market. Add ‘AI’ to the name. Send out a press release letting investors know that you have ‘pivoted’ to become an AI company with your own proprietary hocus pocus (let AI figure out what that is). Do this with several companies. Let us know how it works out."
"I’ve stared at the ceiling at 3 a.m. more times than I care to count in the past, wondering why some things in my life change and others stay stuck like a rusted engine nut on a ’78 Jeep® pickup.
Change. It sounds simple. Turn left instead of right. Take the red pill or the blue pill or both. Eat the salad. Quit the habit I want to quit. But the real change, the kind that rewires who I am, doesn’t happen because somebody tells me to change. Change doesn’t happen because the boss is watching or the government posts another billboard. Change happens when something inside me finally decides it’s time.
And the crazy part? I control that switch. No matter what my situation looks like right now, no matter how many birthdays I’ve stacked up, that control is still mine. Let me tell you what doesn’t work.
First, someone trying to make me change. Forget it. I’m stubborn. Bull-headed, really. Push me, and I’ll dig in like a moist Missouri mule afflicted with mucus. I’ve sent pushy salesmen packing more times than I can remember. They come at me with the hard sell, the guilt trip, the “you really should” speech, and my natural reaction is to do the exact opposite. It’s not rational. It’s not even smart sometimes. But it’s me.
Second, someone with power hovering over my shoulder, monitoring me. Sure, I’ll toe the line while they’re looking. I’ll smile, nod, and change exactly enough to get them off my back. The minute the spotlight moves, though? Back to business as usual. No buy-in. No real shift. Just temporary theater. I know I’m not the only one.
Third, the whole society-is-watching angle. This is Big Brother with a million little henchmen. I’ll admit it: back when I was a kid, the “Give a hoot, don’t pollute®” campaign actually worked on wee Wilder. I picked up trash and felt good about it. But that was simple. Today it’s different. Now it’s algorithms written for the fat-breasted blue-haired virtue warbler. It’s social pressure and cameras everywhere, all trying to nudge behavior. I see it for what it is: a fancier version of the same old “boss is watching me” game. I might play along in public when I absolutely must, but inside? Still no sale.
So, what actually moves the needle? Only one thing I’ve ever found works that works on me or anyone else: changing values. And values don’t change because of logic. They change because of emotion, and not common emotions like “cold” or “sleepy” or “salt.” No. Raw, strong, gut-punch emotion.
Take when I became a new father. One minute the world revolved around me. The next minute I was holding this tiny human who depended on me for everything, and I realized the universe didn’t orbit John Wilder anymore unless I put on enough weight to create my own gravity well. That was a big deal. Not a lecture. Not a chart. Just pure, overwhelming emotion. My values shifted: “providing” and “protecting” now were more important than “buzzed” and “sleepy”. Everything else got rearranged around that.
I’ve seen the same thing in guys who barely survive a heart attack. One day they’re carrying an extra seventy pounds, puffing on cigs, eating like a fat girl on a date with a blind man. The next day after their slow dance with the reaper? They drop the weight, kill the habits, start running, and turn into the most irritating health evangelists you’ve ever met, nearly as bad as bicycling atheist vegan transexual Harvard™ grads. Nearly dying does that, I guess.
It’s not a gentle suggestion from a doctor. It’s terror and relief and gratitude and fear all slamming together at once into the conclusion that there are a finite amount of seconds left on that clock. Emotion rewires the hardware.
That’s also exactly how propaganda works. It skips the logic and goes straight for the deepest buttons we have: lust, fear, the need to belong, pain, despair and the need for PEZ™. Most of them are negative, because negative is easy to manufacture, and negative sticks. And in 2026 we’re swimming in it. Screens, news, ads, entertainment are a constant bombardment trying to shift what we value without us even noticing.
One excellent YouTuber® on this subject is Screenwashed™, and he talks about how films are used to destroy our culture. He breaks down the subtle (and not-so-subtle) ways Hollywood rewires what we think is normal, what we think is heroic, what we think we should want. I’m not sure exactly how long it’ll be before they come to get this guy, but I’d suggest you give him a look. Here’s one of his videos.
Even I, the mighty John Wilder, am not immune from propaganda. I’ve caught myself feeling emotions I didn’t ask for after watching something “harmless.” That’s why I’ve gotten deliberate about what I let into my head. I pick and choose. I pause and ask: What emotion is this feeding me right now? Why? Does it line up with the man I want to be, or is it nudging me toward someone else’s script?
The external stuff can scream all it wants. The pressures, the trends, the crises, the propaganda machines can poke and prod and threaten. But the final decision on what I value? That’s mine. Always has been. We can all flip it. Not because some expert or politician or trending hashtag told us to. Not because someone’s watching or shaming. But because we decide to let in an emotion strong enough to move the values that actually run your life.
Starve the propaganda. Examine every emotion that shows up at your door and decide if it gets to stay. Change isn’t a mystery. It’s not reserved for the young or the lucky or the disciplined. It’s a simple, stubborn fact: I control the basis of it. I always have. And so do you. The world can keep pushing. I’ll keep deciding."
But wait, there is more, as they say in cheap commercials selling steak knives. Have you ever heard of super phosphate? Oh, the mere mention of it reminds me of the good old days on the farm in New Zealand all those years ago. Spreading fertilizer with an old Bedford truck. You never forget the distinctive smell of "super," nor 2-4-D, 2-4-5-T, or Paraquat for that matter. Yes, 2-4-D and 2-4-5-T combined was essentially Agent Orange - that horrid defoliant used in Vietnam.
Super phosphate is the backbone of fertilizers used on farms. Superphosphate and nitrogen fertilizers serve distinct, complementary roles: superphosphate (P, S, Ca) boosts root development, legume growth, and long-term soil fertility without altering pH. Nitrogen (N) - e.g., urea - drives rapid, leafy vegetative growth, stem development, and overall plant greenness.
But wait… it gets worse! Some 15% of the world’s phosphate rock is produced by Middle Eastern countries and must pass through the Strait of Hormuz. By now you have probably figured out where this line of thinking is going… The blocking of the Strait is going to be way more devastating to farming/crop production than what the vast majority is being led to believe. A global food crisis… and when the masses go hungry!
The problem is that this will all be a delayed response. Folks won’t see the results of this show up until year-end. Perhaps one should be taking a closer look at fertilizer producers… or at least the producers of the chemicals used to produce fertilizer who don’t depend on feedstock which passes through the Strait of Hormuz.
By now you are probably getting a "better than good" understanding that the closing of the Strait of Hormuz is way bigger than restriction of oil and gas. Have you ever woken up from a nightmare only to be so relieved that it was just your imagination and that it wasn’t reality?
Well, what if you had 60% of your assets in the S&P 500 (essentially the Mag7 and relatives) and the other 40% in long-dated bonds? What would be the nightmare that you hope to hell is just a dream and not reality? One word: inflation. You don’t want to own highly valued growth stocks or long-dated bonds under conditions of rising inflation. We remind readers just how crowded indexing as an investment strategy has become. We also remind readers that most portfolios that aren’t indexed are quasi-indexed (closet index-hugging). We all know what happens to crowded trades!
Bitching about the rising cost of gasoline/diesel will be the least of folks’ worries over the coming months as the direct and indirect effects of the Iran "conflict" take hold."
"People may not be able to buy gas by July. The International Energy Agency has characterized the closure of the Strait of Hormuz as the largest supply disruption in the history of the global oil market. The strait, through which approximately 21 million barrels of petroleum per day normally transit, has been effectively closed since February 28th when the United States and Israel launched strikes against Iran and Iran responded by shutting down the waterway that moves one-fifth of the world's oil. Brent crude surged 64 percent in one month to $126 per barrel. Dubai crude hit $166, an all-time record. Gas prices in California exceeded $6 per gallon. The national average went from $3.01 to above $4. Diesel surged from $3.89 to $5.37. The 32 member nations of the IEA unanimously agreed to release 400 million barrels from strategic reserves. That 400 million barrels represents four days of global consumption at 105 million barrels per day. The April ceasefire failed to fully reopen the strait.
The IRGC declared Iran would continue using the strait as a pressure point. Iran has established a tolled passage system charging over $1 million per ship for transit, selectively allowing ships settling in yuan while blocking Western-linked shipping. The bypass pipelines in Saudi Arabia and the UAE can handle only 3.5 to 5.5 million barrels per day against 21 million in normal strait traffic. The net shortfall is 14.5 to 16.5 million barrels per day. QatarEnergy declared force majeure after attacks on its export facilities, stating the damage would require many years to recover from. Saudi Arabia's largest refinery was targeted by drone attacks. The US Strategic Petroleum Reserve held 415 million barrels as of February, down from 714 million barrel capacity. Maximum drawdown is 4.4 million barrels per day and oil requires 13 days to reach markets after a release order. American refineries are operating at 90 to 93 percent utilization with capacity declining since 2020 as facilities have permanently closed. The remaining capacity is concentrated on the Gulf Coast, the region most vulnerable to hurricanes beginning June 1st. Gas stations carry one to three days of supply.
The summer driving season increases demand by 400,000 to 600,000 barrels per day above the winter baseline and peaks around the Fourth of July. Australia's prime minister addressed the nation urging citizens to take public transportation. Hundreds of Australian gas stations reported shortfalls. India saw panic buying with long queues despite sufficient reserves. The Philippines declared a national energy emergency. South Korea imposed a five-month restriction on naphtha exports. The Colonial Pipeline attack in 2021 showed that a six-day disruption to a single pipeline emptied gas stations across the southeastern United States with fistfights at pumps and people filling plastic bags. The current crisis is now in its seventh week affecting the entire global oil market. Diesel powers every truck that delivers every product. The war more than doubled kerosene-based fuel prices because refineries lack the heavy sour crude from the Gulf that is optimally suited for diesel production. Diesel at $5.37 adds 10 to 15 percent to food transport costs on every product on every shelf. The diesel-gasoline spiral means expensive diesel delays gasoline deliveries which empties stations which triggers panic buying which drains remaining supply faster."
"Ding, ding, ding, you hear the bell for the start of the fight, hear the crowd, noisy, excited to see this rematch between you and Life. You're here, and still the Champ, right? Fought this guy so many times before, always beat him, too, though you took many a beating yourself in the process, each fight a little tougher, taking a little more out of you each time. You meet in the center of the ring... damn, has this guy grown somehow? He looks bigger, more muscled, and has a real confident look in his eye. So what? You're the Champ, still standing, right? Let'sget it on!
Ding, ding, ding, you meet him in the center of the ring, toe to toe, jabbing, bobbing and weaving, feeling each other out. He seems faster than you remember, while your own punches are a hair slower, not quite able to connect solidly, while his land solidly, crisply, heavily. He lands a tremendous body shot to your side, knocking the air right out of you, and you clinch him desperately, sucking in as much air as you can while he hammers away at you, your forearms blocking most, but not all, of those heavy, heavy punches.
Ding, ding, ding, the bell ends the round and you sit on your stool, hearing the trainers tell you how to fight this guy, "Don't clinch with him, he's too strong, he'll bust you up!" "Dance, man, side to side, bob and weave, don't give him anything to hit! Jab and dance away, jab, jab, jab..." words you've heard so many times before. You think of previous bouts with this guy, the loss of a job when you had a family to support, the bitter divorce, the deaths of loved ones, and every time he came wanting to knock your head off, but your will power, training and instincts always kept you standing at the end, still the Champ, right? But this time, something's not right, something's different somehow.
Yeah, time's gone by, not so young or strong as you once were, not as fast, don't recover as fast, but haven't been taken out yet, right? And everybody knows the rules, the only way he wins is to knock you out, you just gotta hang on, take his best shots and give him all you got until that bell rings for the end of the fight, and if you're still there, still standing, you win. Still the Champ, right? Round after round after round...
Ding, ding, ding, last round, you're feeling so tired, legs almost gone, no snap to the punches, but he looks fresh, strong, and bores in with a mean intent, landing hammer blows, knocking you back towards the corner where he wants you, you try dancing sideways, he cuts off the ring, no escape that way, and keeps coming in. A thunderous right cross lands smack on your chin, everything turns black for a second, legs about to go as the instincts kick in and you throw your body back out of the way, sucking in as much air as you can, shaking your head to clear the blurriness, but you're in the corner now, where he wants you, and here he comes with a vengeance, fast, strong, wanting the knockout, but you're still standing, still the Champ, right? Right?
Ding, ding, ding..."
"The real glory is being knocked to your knees and then
coming back. That's real glory. That's the essence of it."
"The Trends Journal is a weekly magazine analyzing global current events forming future trends. Our mission is to present Facts and Truth over fear and propaganda to help subscribers prepare for What's Next in these increasingly turbulent times."
"What created Devils Tower? The origin of this extraordinary rock monolith in Wyoming, USA is still debated, with a leading hypothesis holding that it is a hardened lava plume that never reached the surface to become a volcano. In this theory, the lighter rock that once surrounded the dense volcanic neck has now eroded away, leaving the dramatic tower.
Click image for larger size.
Known by Native Americans by names including Bear's Lodge and Great Gray Horn, the dense rock includes the longest hexagonal columns known, some over 180-meters tall. High above, the central band of the Milky Way galaxy arches across the sky. Many notable sky objects are visible, including dark strands of the Pipe Nebula and the reddish Lagoon Nebula to the tower's right. Green grass and trees line the foreground, while clouds appear near the horizon to the tower's left. Unlike many other international landmarks, mountaineers are permitted to climb Devils Tower."
“But I don’t want to go among mad people,” Alice remarked.
“Oh, you can’t help that,” said the Cat: “we’re all mad here.
I’m mad. You’re mad.”
“How do you know I’m mad?” said Alice.
“You must be,” said the Cat, “or you wouldn’t have come here.”
– Lewis Carroll’s “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland”
"We are living in a world where the degree of disinformation and outright lying has reached such a state of affairs that, possibly for the first time ever, we see the majority of the western world starting to question their own and surrounding level of sanity. The increasing frenzied distrust in everything “authoritative” mixed with the desperate incredulity that “everybody couldn’t possibly be in on it!” is slowly rocking many back and forth into a tighter and tighter straight jacket. “Question everything” has become the new motto, but are we capable of answering those questions? Presently the answer is a resounding no.
The social behaviorist sick joke of having made everyone obsessed with toilet paper of all things during the start of what was believed to be a time of crisis, is an example of how much control they have over that red button labelled “commence initiation of level 4 mass panic”. And can the people be blamed? After all, if we are being lied to, how can we possibly rally together and point the finger at the root of this tyranny, aren’t we at the point where it is everywhere?
As Goebbels infamously stated, “If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie. It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the State [under fascism].”
And here we find ourselves today, at the brink of fascism. However, we have to first agree to forfeit our civil rights as a collective before fascism can completely dominate. That is, the big lie can only succeed if the majority fails to call it out, for if the majority were to recognize it for what it is, it would truly hold no power.
The Battle for Your Mind: “Politicians, Priests, and psychiatrists often face the same problem: how to find the most rapid and permanent means of changing a man’s belief. The problem of the doctor and his nervously ill patient, and that of the religious leader who sets out to gain and hold new converts, has now become the problem of whole groups of nations, who wish not only to confirm certain political beliefs within their boundaries, but to proselytize the outside world.”
– William Sargant “Battle of the Mind”
It had been commonly thought in the past, and not without basis, that tyranny could only exist on the condition that the people were kept illiterate and ignorant of their oppression. To recognize that one was “oppressed” meant they must first have an idea of what was “freedom”, and if one were allowed the “privilege” to learn how to read, this discovery was inevitable.
If education of the masses could turn the majority of a population literate, it was thought that the higher ideas, the sort of “dangerous ideas” that Mustapha Mond for instance expresses in “The Brave New World”, would quickly organize the masses and revolution against their “controllers” would be inevitable. In other words, knowledge is freedom, and you cannot enslave those who learn how to “think”. However, it hasn’t exactly played out that way has it?
The greater majority of us are free to read whatever we wish to, in terms of the once “forbidden books”, such as those listed by The Index Librorum Prohibitorum. We can read any of the writings that were banned in “The Brave New World”, notably the works of Shakespeare which were named as absolutely dangerous forms of “knowledge”. We are now very much free to “educate” ourselves on the very “ideas” that were recognized by tyrants of the past as the “antidote” to a life of slavery. And yet, today, the majority choose not to…
It is recognized, albeit superficially, that who controls the past, controls the present and thereby the future. George Orwell’s book “1984”, hammers this as the essential feature that allows the Big Brother apparatus to maintain absolute control over fear, perception and loyalty to the Party cause, and yet despite its popularity, there still remains a lack of interest in actually informing oneself about the past.
What does it matter anyway, if the past is controlled and rewritten to suit the present? As the Big Brother interrogator O’Brien states to Winston, “We, the Party, control all records, and we control all memories. Then we control the past, do we not? And thus, are free to rewrite it as we choose…”
Of course, we are not in the same situation as Winston…we are much better off. We can study and learn about the “past” if we so desire, unfortunately, it is a choice that many take for granted. In fact, many are probably not fully aware that presently there is a battle waging for who will “control the past” in a manner that is closely resembling a form of “memory wipe”.
William Sargant was a British psychiatrist and, one could say, effectively the Father of “mind control” in the West, with connections to British Intelligence and the Tavistock Institute, which would influence the CIA and American military via the program MK Ultra. Sargant was also an advisor for Ewen Cameron’s LSD “blank slate” work at McGill University, funded by the CIA.
Sargant accounts for his reason in studying and using forms of “mind control” on his patients, which were primarily British soldiers that were sent back from the battlefield during WWII with various forms of “psychosis”, as the only way to rehabilitate extreme forms of PTSD.
The other reason, was because the Soviets had apparently become “experts” in the field, and out of a need for national security, the British would thus in turn have to become experts as well…as a matter of self-defense of course.
The work of Ivan Pavlov, a Russian physiologist, had succeeded in producing some disturbingly interesting insights into four primary forms of nervous systems in dogs, that were combinations of inhibitory and excitatory temperaments; “strong excitatory”, “balanced”, “passive” and “calm imperturbable”. Pavlov found that depending on the category of nervous system temperament the dog had, this in turn would dictate the form of “conditioning” that would work best to “reprogram behavior”. The relevance to “human conditioning” was not lost on anyone.
It was feared in the West, that such techniques would not only be used against their soldiers to invoke free-flowing uninhibited confessions to the enemy but that these soldiers could be sent back to their home countries, as zombified assassins and spies that could be set off with a simple code word. At least, these were the thriller stories and movies that were pumped into the population. How horrific indeed! That the enemy could apparently enter what was thought the only sacred ground to be our own…our very “minds”!
However, for those who were actually leading the field in mind control research, such as William Sargant, it was understood that this was not exactly how mind control worked. For one thing, the issue of “free will” was getting in the way.
No matter the length or degree of electro-shock, insulin “therapy”, tranquilizer cocktails, induced comas, sleep deprivation, starvation etc induced, it was discovered that if the subject had a “strong conviction” and “strong belief” in something, this could not be simply erased, it could not be written over with any arbitrary thing. Rather, the subject would have to have the illusion that their “conditioning” was in fact a “choice”. This was an extremely challenging task, and long term conversions (months to years) were rare.
However, Sargant saw an opening. It was understood that one could not create a new individual from scratch, however, with the right conditioning that was meant to lead to a physical breakdown using abnormal stress (effectively a reboot of the nervous system), one could increase the “suggestibility” markedly in their subjects. Sargant wrote in his “Battle of the Mind”: “Pavlov’s clinical descriptions of the ‘experimental neuroses’ which he could induce in dogs proved, in fact, to have a close correspondence with those war-neuroses which we were investigating at the time.”
In addition, Sargant found that a falsely implanted memory could help induce abnormal stress leading to emotional exhaustion and physical breakdown to invoke “suggestibility”. That is, one didn’t even need to have a “real stress” but an “imagined stress” would work just as effectively.
Sargant goes on to state in his book: “It is not surprising that the ordinary person, in general, is much more easily indoctrinated than the abnormal. A person is considered ‘ordinary’ or ‘normal’ by the community simply because he accepts most of its social standards and behavioural patterns; which means, in fact, that he is susceptible to suggestion and has been persuaded to go with the majority on most ordinary or extraordinary occasions.”
Sargant then goes over the phenomenon of the London Blitz, which was an eight month period of heavy bombing of London during WWII. During this period, in order to cope and stay “sane”, people rapidly became accustomed to the idea that their neighbors could be and were buried alive in bombed houses around them. The thought was “If I can’t do anything about it what use is it that I trouble myself over it?” The best “coping” was thus found to be those who accepted the new “environment” and just focused on “surviving”, and did not try to resist it.
Sargant remarks that it is this “adaptability” to a changing environment which is part of the “survival” instinct and is very strong in the “healthy” and “normal” individual who can learn to cope and thus continues to be “functional” despite an ever changing environment. It was thus our deeply programmed “survival instinct” that was found to be the key to the suggestibility of our minds. That the best “survivors” made for the best “brain-washing” in a sense.
Sargant quotes Hecker’s work, who was studying the dancing mania phenomenon that occurred during the Black Death, where Hecker observed that heightened suggestibility had the capability to cause a person to “embrace with equal force, reason and folly, good and evil, diminish the praise of virtue as well as the criminality of vice.”
And that such a state of mind was likened to the first efforts of the infant mind “this instinct of imitation when it exists in its highest degree, is also united a loss of all power over the will, which occurs as soon as the impression on the senses has become firmly established, producing a condition like that of small animals when they are fascinated by the look of a serpent.” I wonder if Sargant imagined himself the serpent…
Sargant does finally admit: “This does not mean that all persons can be genuinely indoctrinated by such means. Some will give only temporary submission to the demands made on them, and fight again when strength of body and mind returns. Others are saved by the supervention of madness. Or the will to resist may give way, but not the intellect itself.” But he comforts himself as a response to this stubborn resistance that “As mentioned in a previous context, the stake, the gallows, the firing squad, the prison, or the madhouse, are usually available for the failures.”
How to Resist the Deconstruction of Your Mind: “He whom the gods wish to destroy, they first of all drive mad.” – Henry Wadsworth Longfellow “The Masque of Pandora”
For those who have not seen the 1944 psychological thriller “Gaslight” directed by George Cukor, I would highly recommend you do so since there is an invaluable lesson contained within, that is especially applicable to what I suspect many of us are experiencing nowadays.
The story starts with a 14 year old Paula (played by Ingrid Bergman) who is being taken to Italy after her Aunt Alice Alquist, a famous opera singer and caretaker of Paula, is found murdered in her home in London. Paula is the one who found the body, and horror stricken is never her old self again. Her Aunt was the only family Paula had left in her life. The decision is made to send her away from London to Italy to continue her studies to become a world-renowned opera singer like her Aunt Alice.
Years go by, Paula lives a very sheltered life and a heavy somberness is always present within her, she can never seem to feel any kind of happiness. During her singing studies she meets a mysterious man (her piano accompanist during her lessons) and falls deeply in love with him. However, she knows hardly anything about the man named Gregory.
Paula agrees to marry Gregory after a two week romance and is quickly convinced to move back into her Aunt’s house in London that was left abandoned all these years. As soon as she enters the house, the haunting of the night of the murder revisits her and she is consumed with panic and fear. Gregory tries to calm her and talks about the house needing just a little bit of air and sun, and then Paula comes across a letter written to her Aunt from a Sergis Bauer which confirms that he was in contact with Alice just a few days before her murder. At this finding, Gregory becomes bizarrely agitated and grabs the letter from Paula. He quickly tries to justify his anger blaming the letter for upsetting her. Gregory then decides to lock all of her Aunt’s belongings in the attic, to apparently spare Paula any further anguish.
It is at this point that Gregory starts to change his behavior dramatically. Always under the pretext for “Paula’s sake”, everything that is considered “upsetting” to Paula must be removed from her presence. And thus quickly the house is turned into a form of prison. Paula is told it is for her best not to leave the house unaccompanied, not to have visitors and that self-isolation is the best remedy for her “anxieties” which are getting worst. Paula is never strictly forbidden at the beginning but rather is told that she should obey these restrictions for her own good.
Before a walk, he gives as a gift a beautiful heirloom brooch that belonged to his mother. Because the pin needs replacing, he instructs Paula to keep it in her handbag, and then says rather out of context, “Don’t forget where you put it now Paula, I don’t want you losing it.” Paula remarks thinking the warning absurd, “Of course I won’t forget!” When they return from their walk, Gregory asks for the brooch, Paula searches in her handbag but it is not there.
It continues on like this, with Gregory giving warnings and reminders, seemingly to help Paula with her “forgetfulness” and “anxieties”. Paula starts to question her own judgement and sanity as these events become more and more frequent. She has no one else to talk to but Gregory, who is the only witness to these apparent mishaps. It gets to a point where completely nonsensical behavior is being attributed to Paula by Gregory. A painting is found missing on the wall one night. Gregory talks to Paula like she is a 5 year child and asks her to put it back. Paula insists she does not know who took it down. After her persistent passionate insistence that it was not her, she walks up the stairs almost like she were in a dream state and pulls the painting from behind a statue. Gregory asks why she lied, but Paula insists that she only thought to look there because that is where it was found the last two times this occurred.
For weeks now, Paula thinks she has been seeing things, the gas lights of the house dimming for no reason, she also hears footsteps above her bedroom. No one else seems to take notice. Paula is also told by Gregory that he found out that her mother, who passed away when she was very young, had actually gone insane and died in an asylum.
Despite Paula being reduced to a condition of an ongoing stupor, she decides one night to make a stand and regain control over her life. Paula is invited, by one of her Aunt Alice’s close friends Lady Dalroy, to attend a high society evening with musical performances. Recall that Paula’s life gravitated around music before her encounter with Gregory. Music was her life. Paula gets magnificently dressed up for the evening and on her way out tells Gregory that she is going to this event. Gregory tries to convince her that she is not well enough to attend such a social gathering, when Paula calmly insists that she is going and that this woman was a dear friend of her Aunt, Gregory answers that he refuses to accompany her (in those days that was a big deal). Paula accepts this and walks with a solid dignity, undeterred towards the horse carriage. In a very telling scene, Gregory is left momentarily by himself and panic stricken, his eyes bulging he snaps his cigar case shut and runs after Paula. He laughingly calls to her, “Paula, you did not think I was serious? I had no idea that this party meant so much to you. Wait, I will get ready.” As he is getting ready in front of the mirror, a devilish smirk appears.
Paula and Gregory show up to Lady Dalroy’s house late, the pianist is in the middle of the 1st movement of Beethoven’s Piano Sonata #8 in C minor. They quickly are escorted to two empty seats. Paula is immediately immersed in the piece, and Gregory can see his control is slipping. After only a few minutes, he goes to look at his pocket watch but it is not in his pocket. He whispers into Paula’s ear, “My watch is missing”. Immediately, Paula looks like she is going to be sick. Gregory takes her handbag and Paula looks in horror as he pulls out his pocket watch, insinuating that Paula had put it there. She immediately starts losing control and has a very public emotional breakdown. Gregory takes her away, as he remarks to Lady Dalroy that this is why he didn’t want Paula coming in the first place.
When they arrive home, Paula has by now completely succumbed to the thought that she is indeed completely insane. Gregory says that it would be best if they go away somewhere for an indefinite period of time. We later find out that Gregory is intending on committing her to an asylum. Paula agrees to leave London with Gregory and leaves her fate entirely in his hands.
In the case of Paula it is clear. She has been suspecting that Gregory has something to do with her “situation” but he has very artfully created an environment where Paula herself doubts whether this is a matter of unfathomable villainy or whether she is indeed going mad. It is rather because she is not mad that she doubts herself, because there is seemingly no reason for why Gregory would put so much time and energy into making it look like she were mad, or at least so it first appears. But what if the purpose to her believing in her madness was simply a matter of who is in control?
Paula almost succeeds in gaining the upper-hand in this power-struggle, the evening she decided to go out on her own no matter what Gregory insisted was in her best interest. If she would have held her ground at Lady Dalroy’s house and simply replied, “I have no idea why your stupid watch ended up in my handbag and I could care less. Now stop interrupting this performance, you are making a scene!” Gregory’s spell would have been broken as simple as that. If he were to complain to others about the situation, they would also respond, “Who cares man, why are you so obsessed about your damn watch?”
We find ourselves today in a very similar situation to Paula. And the voice of Gregory is represented by the narrative of false news and the apocalyptic social behaviorist programming in our forms of entertainment. The things most people voluntarily subject themselves to on a daily, if not hourly, basis. Socially conditioning them, like a pack of salivating Pavlovian dogs, to think it is just a matter of time before the world ends and with a ring of their master’s bell…be at each other’s throats.
Paula ends up being saved in the end by a man named Joseph Cotten (a detective), who took notice and quickly discerned that something was amiss. In the end Gregory is arrested. It is revealed that Gregory is in fact Sergis Bauer. That he killed Alice Alquist and that he has returned to the scene of the crime after all these years in search for the famous jewels of the opera singer. The jewels were in fact rather worthless from the standpoint that they were too famous to be sold, however, Gregory never intended on selling these jewels but rather had become obsessed with the desire to merely possess them. That is, it is Gregory who has been entirely mad all this time.
A Gregory is absolutely dangerous. He would have been the end of Paula if nothing had intervened. However, the power that Gregory held was conditional to the degree that Paula allowed it to control her. Paula’s extreme deconstruction was thus entirely dependent on her choice to let the voice of Gregory in. That is, a Gregory is only dangerous if we allow ourselves to sleep walk into the nightmare he has constructed for us."
“When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone,
“It means just what I choose it to mean - neither more nor less.”
“The question is,” said Alice, “whether you can make words mean so many different things.”
“The question is,” said Humpty Dumpty, “which is to be master – that’s all.”
"The summit is believed to be the object of the climb. But its true object - the joy of living - is not in the peak itself, but in the adversities encountered on the way up. There are valleys, cliffs, streams, precipices, and slides, and as he walks these steep paths, the climber may think he cannot go any farther, or even that dying would be better than going on. But then he resumes fighting the difficulties directly in front of him, and when he is finally able to turn and look back at what he has overcome, he finds he has truly experienced the joy of living while on life's very road." - Eiji Yoshikawa
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"Benedicto"
“May your trails be crooked, winding, lonesome, dangerous, leading to the most amazing view. May your mountains rise into and above the clouds. May your rivers flow without end, meandering through pastoral valleys tinkling with bells, past temples and castles and poets' towers into a dark primeval forest where tigers belch and monkeys howl, through miasmal and mysterious swamps and down into a desert of red rock, blue mesas, domes and pinnacles and grottos of endless stone, and down again into a deep vast ancient unknown chasm where bars of sunlight blaze on profiled cliffs, where deer walk across the white sand beaches, where storms come and go as lightning clangs upon the high crags, where something strange and more beautiful and more full of wonder than your deepest dreams waits for you - beyond that next turning of the canyon walls.” - Edward Abbey
“You have the power to create. Your power is so strong that whatever you believe comes true. You create yourself, whatever you believe you are. You are the way you are because that is what you believe about yourself. Your whole reality, everything you believe, is your creation.”
“You are what you believe you are. There is nothing to do except to be just what you are. You have the right to feel beautiful and enjoy it. You can honor your body and accept it as it is. You don’t need anyone to love you. Love comes from the inside. It lives inside us and is always there, but with that wall of fog, we don’t feel it. You can only perceive the beauty that lives outside you when you feel the beauty that lives inside you.”
“Perhaps you have never thought about it, but on one level or another, all of us are masters. We are masters because we have the power to create and to rule our own lives.”
“To master a relationship is all about you. The first step is to become aware, to know that everyone dreams his own dream. Once you know this, you can be responsible for your half of the relationship, which is you. If you know that you are only responsible for half of the relationship, you can easily control your half. It is not up to us to control the other half. If we respect, we know that our partner, or friend, or son, or mother, is completely responsible for his or her own half. If we respect the other half, there is always going to be peace in that relationship. There is no war.”
“There are millions of ways to express your happiness, but there is only one way to really be happy, and that is to love. There is no other way. You cannot be happy if you don’t love yourself. That is a fact. If you don’t love yourself, you don’t have any opportunity to be happy. You cannot share what you do not have.”
“Selfishness, control, and fear will break almost any relationship. Generosity, freedom, and love will create the most beautiful relationship: an ongoing romance.”
“When you make it your goal to create the perfect relationship between you and your body, you are learning to have a perfect relationship with anyone you are with, including your mother, your friends, your lover, your children, your dog. When you have the perfect relationship between you and your body, in that moment your half of any relationship outside you is completely fulfilled. You no longer depend upon the success of a relationship from the outside.”
“The happiest moments in our lives are when we are playing just like children, when we are singing and dancing, when we are exploring and creating just for fun. It is wonderful when we behave like a child because this is the normal human mind, the normal human tendency. As children, we are innocent and it is natural for us to express love. But what has happened to us? What has happened to the whole world?”
“Explore the possibilities. Be yourself. Find a person who matches with you. Take the risk, but be honest. If it works, keep going. If it doesn’t work, then do yourself and your partner a favor: Walk away; let her go. Don’t be selfish. Give your partner the opportunity to find what she really wants, and at the same time give yourself the opportunity. If it’s not going to work, it is better to look in a different direction. If you cannot love your partner the way she is, someone else can love her just as she is. Don’t wast your time, and don’t waste your partner’s time. That is respect.”
“You must forgive those who hurt you, even if whatever they did to you is unforgivable in your mind. You will forgive them not because they deserve to be forgiven, but because you don’t want to suffer and hurt yourself every time you remember what they did to you. It doesn’t matter what others did to you, you are going to forgive them because you don’t want to feel sick all the time. Forgiveness is for your own mental healing. You will forgive because you feel compassion for yourself. Forgiveness is an act of self-love.”
“You don’t have to believe me, but think, and make choices. Believe what you want to believe according to what I say, but only if it makes sense for you, if it makes you happy. If it guides you into your awakening, then make the choice to believe it. I am responsible for what I say, but I am not responsible for what you understand. We live in a completely different dream. What I say, even if it is absolutely true for me, is not necessarily true for you.”
“It’s not true that you go to hell or to heaven after you die. You live in hell or you live in heaven, but now. Heaven and hell only exist in the level of the mind.”
"Men fear thought as they fear nothing else on earth, more than ruin, more even than death. Thought is subversive and revolutionary, destructive and terrible, thought is merciless to privilege, established institutions, and comfortable habit. Thought looks into the pit of hell and is not afraid. Thought is great and swift and free, the light of the world, and the chief glory of man."
- Bertrand Russell
"Five percent of the people think;
ten percent of the people think they think;
and the other eighty-five percent would rather die than think."
Excerpt: “Elizabeth Kübler-Ross defined the five stages of coming to terms with grief and tragedy as denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance, and applied it quite successfully to various forms of catastrophic personal loss, such as death of a loved one, sudden end to one’s career, and so forth. Several thinkers, notably James Howard Kunstler and, more recently John Michael Greer, have pointed out that the Kübler-Ross model is also quite terrifyingly accurate in reflecting the process by which society as a whole (or at least the informed and thinking parts of it) is reconciling itself to the inevitability of a discontinuous future, with our institutions and life support systems undermined by a combination of resource depletion, catastrophic climate change, and political impotence.
But so far, little has been said specifically about the finer structure of these discontinuities. Instead, there is to be found continuum of subjective judgments, ranging from “a severe and prolonged recession” (the prediction we most often read in the financial press), to Kunstler’s evocative but unscientific-sounding “clusterf**k,” to the ever-popular “Collapse of Western Civilization,” painted with an ever-wider brush-stroke.
For those of us who have already gone through all of the emotional stages of reconciling ourselves to the prospect of social and economic upheaval, it might be helpful to have a more precise terminology that goes beyond such emotionally charged phrases. Defining a taxonomy of collapses might prove to be more than just an intellectual exercise: based on our abilities and circumstances, some of us may be able to specifically plan for a certain stage of collapse as a temporary, or even permanent, stopping point."
Excerpt: “As a journalist, I’ve been writing about accidents for more than thirty years. In the last 15 or so years, I’ve concentrated on accidents in outdoor recreation, in an effort to understand who lives, who dies, and why. To my surprise, I found an eerie uniformity in the way people survive seemingly impossible circumstances. Decades and sometimes centuries apart, separated by culture, geography, race, language, and tradition, the most successful survivors–those who practice what I call “deep survival”– go through the same patterns of thought and behavior, the same transformation and spiritual discovery, in the course of keeping themselves alive.
Not only that but it doesn’t seem to matter whether they are surviving being lost in the wilderness or battling cancer, whether they’re struggling through divorce or facing a business catastrophe– the strategies remain the same. Survival should be thought of as a journey, a vision quest of the sort that Native Americans have had as a rite of passage for thousands of years. Once you’re past the precipitating event– you’re cast away at sea or told you have cancer– you have been enrolled in one of the oldest schools in history. Here are a few things I’ve learned that can help you pass the final exam."
"Political disintegration is a persistent feature of world history. The Collapse of Complex Societies, though written by an archaeologist, will therefore strike a chord throughout the social sciences. Any explanation of societal collapse carries lessons not just for the study of ancient societies, but for the members of all such societies in both the present and future. Dr. Tainter describes nearly two dozen cases of collapse and reviews more than 2000 years of explanations. He then develops a new and far-reaching theory that accounts for collapse among diverse kinds of societies, evaluating his model and clarifying the processes of disintegration by detailed studies of the Roman, Mayan and Chacoan collapses."
Freely download “The Collapse of Complex Societies” here;
