Technology and the Delusional Mind

“The empires of the future are the empires of the mind.” – Winston Churchill

The Ship of Fools

I often wondered if progressives around me live in an alternate reality. How else can people so fat claim poverty and oppression when citizens of other countries live on less than $2 a day and are so thin, you can count their ribs through their skin?  What causes this obvious delusion?

There are quick answers - mental illness, mass hysteria, abundance, lack of jobs, lack of a moral compass, disintegration of families, the MSM telling them constantly that they are oppressed and enslaved to the “evil” white male, too much drug use, and indoctrination in schools to the detriment of history, causing them to lose the ability to grasp reality and to discern real from nonexistent.

Liberals have even invented the term “affluenza” in a misguided attempt to excuse bad behavior and criminality of their affluent offspring who don’t understand the difference between right and wrong.

When one loses touch with “verifiable reality” and becomes dependent on someone else to interpret reality for them, delusion sets in, a “more primitive stage of awareness” when rumor and falsehood become truth set in stone. Such deluded humans are controlled by retrograde and primitive thinking. Retrogression is caused by constant false information coming from the media, teachers, and the government.

If humans no longer think for themselves and don’t verify information against reality, their sole experience comes from dogma. It is thus not surprising that large groups of people act on command under “powerful mass emotions” and hysteria. Rational thinking is absent, replaced by submissiveness to ideologies overwhelming them with false information, in this case extreme liberalism, termed “progressivism.” There is nothing progressive about collectivism, communism, Marxism, Maoism, Stalinism, Castroism, and statism. Progressivism should actually be called regressivism, regressing to a failed ideology which resulted in the mass murder of 100 million people.

Radio, television, computers, electronic games, cell phones, and social media destroy face to face communication, discussion, affectionate relationships, attention, human interaction, and love. The creative mind is destroyed by turning a person engrossed in a blue screen into a mindless and devoid of feeling drone, an obedient soul, un-adapted and unable to cope with reality, easy to submit to authority, incapable of discerning what is real and what is contrived.

Technology saves us a lot of time, extra work, and aggravation. But in using it, conversation and direct human contact have become a lost art. People go out to dinner and everybody is on their smart devices, lone persons staring in cyberspace. Conversation, free exchange of ideas, human contact, and the creative spirit are gone.

The fascination with smart devices is an addiction with strange sexuality, with unresolved emotional turmoil, with the need to connect with total strangers while dressed in pajamas, with the narcissistic need for momentary celebrity, and with aggressive fantasies.

These addictions steal our free time, robs us of creativity and uniqueness, we become denizens of a pseudo-world in cyberspace; parents have no time for their children, children have no time for their parents, and become totally enrapt in the fantasy and the magic offered by the blue screen while hypnotized into this form of non-verbal but mesmerizing communication.

People have died texting and driving, stepping in front of a moving car, into a deep hole, over a ravine, into a pole, while totally engrossed into the hypnotizing blue screens of their smart devices.

Our cyber world and real world are interdependent now. We erased the physical sovereign boundaries and added the Internet web of highways across oceans. Dr. Meerloo’s words of sixty years ago seem quite fitting. “The machine that became a tool of human organization and made possible the conquest of nature, has acquired a dictatorial position.” (Joost A. M. Meerloo, The Rape of the Mind, p. 166)

The need for speed, for instant communication has altered the thinking process because machines can now do the thinking for us. The thinking process becomes devoid of emotion and creativity. A “moral problem gets repressed and is displaced by a technical or statistical evaluation.” Thus children and adults alike become victims of the “paralyzing and lazy-making tendencies” of our advanced technology.

Without the free exchange of ideas which allows for the expansion of the mind, it is easy to see how delusion can set in, prey to the first smooth-talking individual that comes along and mesmerizes the listeners.

Dr. Joost A. M. Meerloo explained in his 1956 book, “Rape of the Mind,” which focused on “the psychology of thought control, menticide, and brainwashing, how small and large communities are susceptible to collective delusion, often under the influence of one obsessed person.” Without what he terms, “free verification and self-correction,” dictators like Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, Castro, Ceausescu and others were made possible.

Dr. Meerloo gave examples of crews at sea or communities cut off from the world, which, because of their isolation, had experienced “contagious religious mania coupled with ritual murder.” These people became victims to their own limited viewpoint.

Delusion can be seen today among some young people who do not understand how deluded they are because they’ve been exposed their entire lives to the same misguided and false narrative, information limited and channeled by the ideology of the left.

Delusions are instilled by organizing and manipulating younger generations by Twitter, Facebook, and other MSM outlets that hide reality and only report what they want their minions and followers to know. If a delusion is carefully implanted by educators, it can be quite difficult to correct because these delusions consist of rumors fed as reality, without the opportunity to verify the manufactured information.

In totalitarian societies most people are not allowed to be free thinkers and become victims of delusion. Massive and constant brainwashing in schools and universities, fed by continuous propaganda, make it almost impossible for students to view anything objectively. Dr. Meerloo called it “mental pollution” which leads to “mental contagion” caused by totalitarian propaganda. Even “free citizens in a free country must be on their guard to protect themselves” from this mental contagion.

History had demonstrated painfully time and time again that countries and citizens, in which “governments supervised and limited the flow of ideas into the minds of men,” did not fare well. There is a reason why we have the First and the Fourteenth Amendments.

Yet free thinking and individuality are under attack by progressive ideologues who pollute the deluded masses with the failed ideas of collectivism, multiculturalism, impossible coexistence with Islam, and the superiority of primitive cultures, all represented in the globalist Common Core standards of education.