Propaganda, Totalitarians, and Somnambulism

Propaganda indoctrination springing from totalitarian regimes can have two human reactions: apathy and indifference to everything happening around you, admitting to yourself that there is nothing you can do about it, or the intense desire to study and understand it as if that process alone begins to redress what is wrong with such a system.

Take for example, the much maligned and hated Christopher Columbus. It is not possible that one single human being had caused all the havoc the leftist academia and their worshippers are heaping upon his memory.

Columbus managed to sail his way to the new world, and on October 12, 1492 sighted land, probably Watling Island in the Bahamas, even though he was looking for a western passage to China and India. There is such rabid leftist and misplaced hatred for this man as if he was the biggest genocidal maniac in the history of the world. The cause of such virulent reactions is likely the decades of propaganda indoctrination in schools masquerading as history.

“Totalitarians are very ingenious in arousing latent guilt in us by repeating over and over again how criminally the Western world has acted toward innocent and peaceful people.” (Dr. Joost Meerloo, The Rape of the Mind, p. 71)

Can we coexist with a totalitarian system?  It is highly unlikely because the definition of coexistence of the totalitarian is quite different from the definition of the free citizen, living in peace with one another. To a totalitarian, coexistence means total subordination to their whims, plans, and ideology. “The psychological roots of totalitarianism are usually irrational, destructive, and primitive, though disguised behind some ideology.” (p. 74)

The citizens of totalitarianism become robots, speak in whispers, and look over their shoulders, officially bombarded by speeches and slogans that are empty and devoid of meaning and logic. Human beings must conform to survive and thus become robots. Man becomes mentally coerced and intimidated. Humans then become herds of sheeple—indoctrinated by enthusiasm and happy expectations for promised change and then followed and replaced by feelings of terror and panic. Dr. Meerloo calls it “personal and political somnambulism” or sleepwalking. (p. 82)

In the March 7, 1968 episode of Dragnet, titled “The Big Departure,” teenagers are determined to start their own country on an island off the coast of California. To finance this new country, they are caught shoplifting, and the infamous Jack Webb gives them a lecture that seems fitting even today. http://www.itsworthashare.com/jack-webbs-the-big-departure-speech-still-holds-true-today/#isGACLTqKEAVq3Af.99

Every generation feels dissatisfied with what they possess even though they have opportunities and wealth that other nations can only dream of, but they expect the world to understand their misplaced dissatisfaction. Without a real poverty baseline or point of reference, they have no idea how well off they truly are when compared to other nations or other points in history. Nothing is ever perfect but usually each generation lives better than the previous one.

“You are taller, stronger, better educated, and you live longer than the last generation. And we don’t think that’s all together bad. You probably have never seen a quarantine sign on your neighbor’s door, diphtheria, scarlet fever, whooping cough. Probably none of your classmates have been crippled with polio,” said the Dragnet character Jack Webb.

Leftist academia is quick to point out that Americans are war mongers and thus immoral. But a lot of people around the world are “free today to make their own mistakes because of it” and to spew the venom of progressivism.

“You are in a hurry, you grew up on instant orange juice, flip a dial--instant entertainment, dial seven digits--instant communication, turn a key, push a pedal--instant transportation, flash a card--instant money, push a few buttons--solve a problem, but some problems you cannot get quick answers to no matter how much you want them.”

You want equality, social justice, instant gratification and reward without effort. How can you justify stealing from the rich and the middle class and giving to the welfare class as “entitlements” when they never made an effort to earn it, paid taxes into such a fund, nor were they entitled to? How can you hurt somebody or steal from someone who was never responsible for the wrongs of the past? Where is the social justice in that?

Jack Webb’s advice resonates for people with experience and common sense. “Don’t break things up in the name of progress. Don’t break a stick over someone’s head to get them to see the light. Be careful of his rights! Your property, your rights, and your person are not any better than his. And next time, you may be the one to get it. You knew a man who killed six million people and called it social improvement.”  A new country will never solve your problems-- just make the old one work. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FZo2hhvvlpw (Dragnet, Jack Webb’s the Big Departure speech)

A 1981 movie, My Dinner with Andre, explained reality through the lens of boredom, an “unconscious, self-perpetuating form of brainwashing created by a world totalitarian government based on money.” In this theory, the process of boredom makes a person fall asleep and a sleeping individual cannot say no.

“I met this Swedish physicist who told me that he no longer watches television, reads newspapers, completely cuts them out of his life, because he really does feel the wind leading into some kind of Orwellian nightmare and everything that you hear now contributes to turning you into a robot,” explained one of the characters.

New Yorkers, he said, are a classic example of people who want to leave their town but they can’t because “New York is the model for the new concentration camp that has been built by the inmates themselves, and the inmates are the guards and they have this pride, they built their own prison and they live in this state of schizophrenia where they are both guards and prisoners and, as a result may have lost the capacity and the ability, having been lobotomized, to leave or even see it as a prison.”  

He lamented that he and his friends should get out but “the problem is where to go because it seems quite obvious that the whole world is going in the same direction.”

He continued, “It’s quite possible that the 1960s represented the last burst of the human being before it was extinguished, and this is the beginning of the rest of the future. From now on, all there is going to be around are these robots, feeling nothing, thinking nothing. And there will be nobody left around to remind them that there was once a species called a human being with feelings and thoughts, and history and memory are now being erased, and soon nobody will really remember that life existed on the planet.”  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=68JLWyPxt7g

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.