"What’s Going In Your Head?"
by John Wilder
"What goes in your head? Really, what goes in your head? The CIA did some significant experiments in the past under the collective name of “MK-Ultra”. If you haven’t looked them up, this won’t be the place to get good information about it. Heck there are very few places to get good info about MK-Ultra because the CIA just shredded it all. Or burned it. The biggest reason we have information about it is through accounting records. No one in the 1970s remembered to burn the receipts.
The goal of MK-Ultra was mind control. Why? I’m not sure, perhaps to create a group of super-secret assassins? The CIA already had zillions of ways to kill people and topple foreign governments. So, not that. What minds would they want to control? Dunno. Maybe ours?
There are lots of different types of mind control. The MK-Ultra type is really cool for movies, because it involves creating what I think of as the ultimate horror – a human being whose mind has been hollowed out, and whose actions no longer belong to them. The goal of MK-Ultra was to create zombies. And not the Rob kind.
Again, we don’t have the data from MK-Ultra, but we do know that the one thing government craves more than any other is the power that it has. Jerry Pournelle called it Pournelle’s Iron Law of Bureaucracy. To allow Jerry to describe it himself: "Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy states that in any bureaucratic organization there will be two kinds of people": First, there will be those who are devoted to the goals of the organization. Examples are dedicated classroom teachers in an educational bureaucracy, many of the engineers and launch technicians and scientists at NASA, even some agricultural scientists and advisors in the former Soviet Union collective farming administration.
Secondly, there will be those dedicated to the organization itself. Examples are many of the administrators in the education system, many professors of education, many teachers’ union officials, much of the NASA headquarters staff, etc.
The Iron Law states that in every case the second group will gain and keep control of the organization. It will write the rules, and control promotions within the organization."
This is the story of government since, well, forever. Thankfully, Federalism and the Constitutions slowed it. A bit. The real power, though, got into place around the turn of the century – the turn of the 20th Century. The CIA wasn’t the cause of it, it was more the result. If the CIA was willing to drug unknowing citizens with LSD and also to conduct experiments on hundreds (if not thousands) of other people, it’s not very hard for me to believe that they also spent a lot more effort studying how to influence the average American.
When it comes to persuasion, the most potent medium is visual. It creates it’s own reality – it creates an emotional investment. I remember as a kid, when the Death Star® blew up, I felt the emotion, just as if I had flown the X-Wing® down that trench myself. When the alien was about to munch a scantily clad Sigourney Weaver, pre-puberty me felt a zillion emotions. Seeing the video made it seem like I was there.
There’s a reason for that. The medium of video is “hot” (in the theory of Marshall McLuhan) and is especially wonderful for propaganda. Hot media fully engages one sense, and spoon feeds the content directly into the viewer’s mind. Cool media, like this blog, demands interaction, and demands thought.
And you thought those memes were just for fun. In reality, they serve a purpose – they exist to counter propaganda. It’s why the Right is so good at memes and the Left is awful. A great meme from the Right tells the Truth in just a few words. The Left, on the other hand, has to build an entire reality for their meme to even make sense – if you’re not already on board with the worldview of the Left, they have to build it for you.
But media today is everywhere. Especially, it’s on phones. And it’s addictive. I was at dinner with Pugsley today and he was on his phone. I said, “Please, put that down.” He didn’t. “Pugsley,” I said, “You don’t want to have people watching you databating in public.” He turned sixteen shades of red, and the phone went down onto the table like it had been sucked down with a magnet and his hand moved away like the phone was hotter than the Sun. So, Internet, if you ever want your kid to put the phone down, let them know you don’t approve of public databation.
And that explains the memes. They break the programming, and break the addiction loop. But back to the programming itself. What values does the world want you to have? What values are those who program the algorithms at YouTube® attempting to create in our minds? What values and beliefs does Hollywood™ want to create? And how are those values being rolled out?
When you look back at a television show like "Sex and the City", showing how strong independent women don’t really need men, what impact did that have? I wonder, because the writer whose stories the whole series was based on is now in her sixties, and was lamenting that she never created a strong marriage and family.
Ooops. But what about all those girls that bought the message? And what about all those divorced moms, living in houses that (in reality) they’d never be able to afford? How many women were influenced that divorce was the key to freedom, prizes, and a home version of the game? Even if you ignore the awful emotional consequences of divorce on the family and on children, divorce is generally economically devastating on all the participants as well.
Divorce was featured and glamorized on film and television starting in the 1960s. Why? Who benefits? Well, families don’t. Churches don’t. Communities don’t. So that leaves lawyers, the court system, and the alimony/child support complex, which employs thousands in most states. But that’s not enough. A strong family is like an atom – self-sufficient. It provides strength, and a way to transmit values from generation to generation. But families don’t consume welfare, mostly. They aren’t dependent and that’s why Nu-Government® has little use for them, and would like them to disappear.
Who benefits from this? The Left. They want the families destroyed, so that individuals have to turn to government for their money and values.
Movies are also used to try to influence public opinion on policy. How many movies do you see in 2022 where immigrants are here dealing drugs or committing crimes? Contrast that with how many films that show immigrants in a ludicrously positive light. Why? Studies show that immigrants coming into this country are overwhelmingly in favor of strong states that provide massive welfare and restrict (for instance) the individual right to keep and bear arms.
Hmmm. Who would that make happy? Oh, yeah. The Left. You can think of plenty of other examples of how film and television and news has been used to create a version of reality that leads to Leftist values, which always, always leads to the horror and carnage of Leftism in action.
There is that alternative, though. When done well, film can really be uplifting, and fun. It has the ability to provide examples of the very best values that man can strive for, and share them back with us. Always, always, guard what goes into your head."
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Freely download "The Search for the 'Manchurian Candidate':
The CIA and Mind Control: The Secret History of the Behavioral Sciences"
by John D. Marks, here:
