When you are trying to find some answers, every source can tell you something different. It’s like asking about the forecast of the stock price. The newspaper will tell you it will go up; the Twitter post will tell you it will drop; the chart will show that the price will maintain. As Jim Rohn once said, ‘Be a student, not a follower.’ You might get some valuable insight from other people, books, posts or mentors, of course, but that information should be treated as FYI or as a confirmation of our knowledge and not as absolute truth. In the end, you have to ‘go and see,’ and experience it yourself. Test it, do your own research, filter the information, and draw the conclusions yourself.
Derive answers from action and experience and not from intellectual knowledge and conceptualized ideas.— SHI HENG YI
Today’s society trusts media and the internet like it would be some Holy Grail! We believe what we hear from other sources more than our own experience. Why?? When someone approaches me and starts the conversation from — ‘They said on the news that..,’ I literally want to scream. Ok, there’s nothing wrong with engaging in conversation and talking about some interesting facts. We all do that. The problem is when we blindly believe everything we hear. How can you be sure that what you hear is true? Even simple statement like — THERE IS A RED HORSE IN THE GARDEN can tell you many incomplete truths or lies:
- The horse might not be red but orange.
- Maybe someone who told you that has never seen a horse in his/her life, so maybe that’s a donkey.
- Maybe the horse was there when someone saw it, but it’s not there anymore.
- Maybe it isn’t in the garden but on your patio.
- Or maybe someone just told a lie, and you run like a knobhead with a phone to take a picture!
Mind Your Own Mind!
We are being brainwashed constantly without even knowing it.
Have you noticed how TV volume increases in time for the adverts? Or how the advertisements meddle with our emotions? It’s no longer a picture of the product and some mere label. A good advert will have a proper story behind it to create a bond with the spectator. A pretty lady goes into the jungle and practically experiences an orgasm washing her hair — Man, that stuff must be good!
Flashy magazines work nicely with our senses and Amygdala — the seed of our emotions. The colours, divine illustrations, even paper texture are designed to grasp our attention. You open your favourite Glamour, and the first thing you see is an average pair of jeans but on some twenty years old juicy ass and you begin to drool like Pavlov’s dogs reaching for your wallet!
Take a moment and think about how you encourage these types of behaviours. Say, you’re one of those people who go to the shop first thing in the morning to get the daily newspaper. Nothing harmful, right? You sip your coffee and read the first page. And that’s all you need! Wars, accidents, news on the widespread diseases and viruses, dying statistics. You don’t even have to page through the entire paper. You’ve already seen what you came for. And this mind-twisting information is supposed to be on the first page. If you would have on the paper’s front page, ‘Today will be the beautiful day’ instead, nobody would ever buy it!
Steve Chandler, the author of 100 Ways to motivate yourself, spent chunk of his career working for a daily newspaper, and this is how he describes it:
News programs today have a one goal: to shock or sadden the listener… I have experienced this first hand when I worked for a daily newspaper. I saw how panicked the city desk got if there were no murders or rapes that day. I watched as they tore through the wire stories to see if news item from another state could be gruesome enough to save the front page. If there’s no drowning, they’ll reluctantly go with a near-drowning.
So, you see, the news is deliberately selected, twisted, or spiced up to make sure that the audience finds it interesting and provocative enough. Whether that is the news you watch, the radio you listen to or the newspaper you buy — each way they make money on you and weaken your mind to make sure you don’t think for yourself!
Anyways, you start your day like that, and then you wonder why you’re miserable or depressed. Duh! You might say — ‘But I need to be aware of what’s happening in the world?’ Why exactly?? Are you able to change anything? Do you, as one person, have control over killings, wars, diseases? Can you stop it, avoid it completely? How does this information really impact your life? It’s life! Bad stuff happens. You might go out the next day, and brick will fall on your head. For all you know — ‘tomorrow’ doesn’t exist yet and it’s unknown— anything can happen!
So how all this drama that’s happening ‘out there’ will help you to focus on the good quality of your own life? Look through your window to check if it’s safe to go or check relevant to your situation information (public transport strikes, weather forecast, flights restrictions or cancellations, etc.), but that’s all the awareness you need in terms of ‘what’s happening in the world.’
I used to get into arguments with my dad every time I came to visit, seeing him switching from channel to channel to look for brand new news. He was so absorbed in that nonsense that he didn’t hear a word that was coming from my mouth when I was talking about an actual life! Once, he told me that he needed to be aware of the gas prices increasing, so he could look for a ‘cheap’ petrol station. Yeah, right, because when you’re going to be in the middle of nowhere, and you run out of gas, you’re actually going to push your car to the nearest ‘cheap’ petrol station! Pshaw!
Fear, Propaganda and Mass Manipulation
Now, that I think about that, the life today is exactly like from the movie ‘They Live,’ from 1988, but instead of Aliens, you have Social Media, Big Pharma, and News! The guy pops on the sunglasses, and he sees the ‘sublime messages’ all around — OBEY AND CONFORM, MUST LISTEN, MUST BUY, CONSUME — on posters, magazines, television, buildings, product labels, and so on.
Mass manipulation can be very dangerous, especially if it affects a large group of people that become infected with each other’s emotions, act on impulses, and become aggressive.
Freud describes this behaviour in his Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego. Short-lived kinds of ‘masses’ aren’t very dangerous. They create the consumer. These are temporary trends — like in fashion or something popular nowadays. Other kinds are more organized and permanent, creating an image of authority like churches, military, or political parties. And this one can be vicious, especially if perceived in a bad way.
The best example — Hitler’s propaganda and the rise of Nazism in Germany. It all starts with desire and emotion, but from there, it’s not far to fear, which is the biggest enemy of rational thinking. Joe Dispenza, American author, neuroscientist, and a doctor, said once that many times ‘those who claim to protect us from fear are actually the ones that manipulate our fear for their own benefit,’ and that’s absolutely correct.
Fear is useful when it helps us to escape danger and react to the threat. But emotional manipulation through mass media often induces fearful emotion, which creates anxiety and impacts our physical and mental health. The same emotion then produces bias and prejudice that ultimately leads to hate. You must be aware of what the difference is. One is a natural body reaction to escape death; the other is an intentional manipulation of our perception in order to change our attitude towards something.
The fear factor through the influence of the media manipulates viewers constantly and creates myths that many of us trust completely. Some of them make us buy things out of impulse; others create social, racial, or religious division. During the war, it was Jews that were ‘bad guys with large noses’ who were stealing everyone’s assets; now, even after so many years, the media is doing the same awesome job of influencing behaviours by providing repetitive and selective information. After 9/11, we became fearful of Islam religion and identified all Muslims as terrorists or potential suicide bombers. People were giving them hateful glares, abusing them verbally or physically. Some of them lost their jobs or even friends; others had to move. Their kids were bullied at school.
People of colour are often portrayed as the ones involved with crime, drugs distribution, or gang-related activities, and that image often provokes attacks against them as well (‘preference of striking first instead of being struck’), no matter how innocent one would be.
All this is down to promoting fear over rationality and facts. That’s on them. Ignorance and blind trust are on us.
Fear often creates hate. It is because with just the right amount of influence, you’ll begin to view yourself as a victim, and from that, it’s not far to turn the fear into the attack. That’s one. Second — the messages of crime, disasters, accidents are the most arousing to its viewers. That’s why they always ‘hit’ the top headlines or the first pages of the newspapers (well, this and naked chicks!). We are curious and nosy individuals that seek out exciting news to share with others. Shame that in most of the cases, these are the nasty images of wars, sickness, and killings! Finally, the third — government takes charge of the media and makes sure that these frightening messages are created. Why? Because they want to be the ones that create the solution that resolves the problem, which subsequently makes us see them as an authority and someone we should trust!
Propaganda uses similar techniques to advertising — promoting something over something else. Propagandists not only use the same methods, especially repetition, some visual and catchy slogans, but they also create a positive image of themselves and a negative, often false, image for the ‘opponents,’ making them the ‘bad guys.’
Repeat a lie often enough and it becomes the truth. — Nazi JOSEPH GOEBBELS
Mass manipulation is often called a ‘mob mentality.’ In the crowd, you lose a sense of individuality and a sense of accountability. This means that you might not only act irrational, primitive, and hostile, but when everything is over, you can also say — ‘It was because of them.’ That’s one method. Another is Conformism — allowing others to make the decision for you because you neither have the ability or experience to do so, or you just simply want to fit in. Holocaust, witch trials, riots, sporting events, or even massive sales all start with the influence of the crowd, and lead to ‘solidarity,’ not necessarily representing something good. You become someone else, and if you are not crazed and deranged from nature, you often regret your actions afterwards.
Manipulation Infamous Experiments
In Stanley Milgram’s Infamous experiment in 1961, participants willingly delivered a series of electric shocks (luckily fake ones) to another participant in order to get from him a correct answer to earlier memorized words. Each time the ‘learner’ had made a mistake or didn’t give the answer, the electric shock was supposed to be increased.
The whole apparatus was obviously not real, but the volunteers didn’t know that. The learner was an actor who convincingly shouted from pain when the higher voltage was provided. Regardless of some participants’ visible disturbance and anxiety (which proved that they were still humans!), they still applied higher electric shocks, believing in the purpose and validity of the experience. The scale of electric shocks was between 0 and 450 (with the last voltage marked as XXX). 100% of volunteers applied up to 300 volts, where 35% refused to go higher after 375, and 65% applied the shock between 300 and 450 voltages.
Obedience to authority is not a feature of German culture, but a seemingly universal feature of human behaviour. — STANLEY MILGRAM
In 1971, Professor Philip Zimbardo carried out the Stanford Prison experiment. He invited 24 students and locked them in some closed facility, converted into fake prison. Students were divided into two groups: guards and prisoners. They all have been given a role to play. The role that almost led to tragedy, as some of the students took the challenge way too seriously. Prisoners allowed the ‘authorities’ to treat them like garbage or acted rebelliously, which led to their division into ‘good’ and ‘bad.’ And what do you do with the ‘bad influences’ — you punish them, to give an example.
Guards, under each other’s ‘gentle push,’ started mentally and physically torturing and humiliating badly behaved prisoners (bathroom time, sleeping arrangements, exhausting exercises, limited food rations, degrading acts etc.). The experiment was supposed to last between 7–14 days, but it was cancelled after six days due to parents’ concerns. Phillip Zimbardo has summarized his experiment with this statement — ‘Our study… reveals the power of social, institutional forces to make good men engage in evil deeds.’
Although some sources will tell you know that the above experiment was ‘overstretched’ and not completely as described, I still believe that people are capable of this kind of behaviour in the right circumstances.
See, when you step among the crows, you begin to caw like them. You don’t think for yourself. And this can be very dangerous, not only for yourself but for your surroundings as well.
Overall Lesson?
Don’t blindly trust everything you see or hear. Do your own research, check multiple sources, ‘go & see’. You’ve been given brain for a reason — Use It!
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