Brave New World, Revisited.

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Re: Brave New World, Revisited.

Postby stickdog99 » Sun Jul 24, 2022 11:54 am

Bandura pretty much experimentally proved that you can't simply write individual cognitive assessments and attitudes out of the human behavior equation.

Our masters haven't yet mastered cognitive behavior control, but they are certainly trying their hands at it. And otherwise intelligent people seem to me to be remarkably easy to manipulate with social comparison principles.

Very few are willing to risk being selected last (or even later) when teams are chosen on the playground.
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Re: Brave New World, Revisited.

Postby drstrangelove » Sun Jul 24, 2022 7:03 pm

isn't the problem being able to find a thing that is universally considered pleasure/reward so people are collectively compelled to engage with it like jung's extrovert. nationalism and its reward of victory is the most successful thing i can think of to this end. but they haven't been able to use this since globalisation became the goal. they haven't been able to use religion because scientific rationalism refutes it - at least so far as legitimising power.

what control mechanism was left? strip away the human personality and tap into instinct. but A did not always equal B, nor even at times C. or D or E or F etc. too complex. so they called it all noise and fell under the illusion of their own controls. personality types a, b, c, d. the quizzes, they start to appear in the magazines. people start identifying as A,B,C,D. but it's all just mimesis. they aren't really these things, even if they'd like to be. and they know it. uh oh - there's that psychology getting in the way again. if only they had the confidence to really be what they ought to. arnold toynbee warned them of this in his 'study of history', but they dispensed with the mythologists and brought in the machinists. cybernetics. new personality disorder - aspergers. aspergers is the perfect personality condition for the totalitarian state. yes, we'll order everything into 1s and 0s - but uh oh again, maxwell's demon.

from chaos, order - yes. but also true - from order, chaos.
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Re: Brave New World, Revisited.

Postby Joe Hillshoist » Sun Jul 24, 2022 8:48 pm

drstrangelove » 24 Jul 2022 21:58 wrote:whats the difference between a reward and pleasure?


Among other things context. Positive feedback can be a reward.

Its not as simple as "pleasure good, pain bad" (which is why cognitive psychology developed. Social animals view social status oe even just acceptance as a reward.)
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Re: Brave New World, Revisited.

Postby Harvey » Sat Aug 06, 2022 9:54 am

Tacitus, The Life of Gnaeus Julius Agricola, c. AD 98

The following winter was spent on schemes of the most salutary kind. To induce a people, hitherto scattered, uncivilized and therefore prone to fight, to grow pleasurably inured to peace and ease, Agricola gave private encouragement-and official assistance to the building of temples, public squares and private mansions. He praised the keen and scolded the slack, and competition to gain honour from him was as effective as compulsion. Furthermore, he trained the sons of the chiefs in the liberal arts and expressed a preference for British natural ability over the trained skill of the Gauls. The result was that in place of distaste for the Latin language came a passion to command it. In the same way, our national dress came into favour and the toga was everywhere to be seen. And so the Britons were gradually led on to the amenities that make vice agreeable, arcades, baths and sumptuous banquets. They spoke of such novelties as 'civilization', when really they were only a feature of enslavement.


https://archive.org/stream/in.ernet.dli ... y_djvu.txt
And while we spoke of many things, fools and kings
This he said to me
"The greatest thing
You'll ever learn
Is just to love
And be loved
In return"


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Re: Brave New World, Revisited.

Postby drstrangelove » Sun Aug 14, 2022 5:28 pm

Harvey » Sat Aug 06, 2022 9:54 am wrote:Tacitus, The Life of Gnaeus Julius Agricola, c. AD 98

The following winter was spent on schemes of the most salutary kind. To induce a people, hitherto scattered, uncivilized and therefore prone to fight, to grow pleasurably inured to peace and ease, Agricola gave private encouragement-and official assistance to the building of temples, public squares and private mansions. He praised the keen and scolded the slack, and competition to gain honour from him was as effective as compulsion. Furthermore, he trained the sons of the chiefs in the liberal arts and expressed a preference for British natural ability over the trained skill of the Gauls. The result was that in place of distaste for the Latin language came a passion to command it. In the same way, our national dress came into favour and the toga was everywhere to be seen. And so the Britons were gradually led on to the amenities that make vice agreeable, arcades, baths and sumptuous banquets. They spoke of such novelties as 'civilization', when really they were only a feature of enslavement.


https://archive.org/stream/in.ernet.dli ... y_djvu.txt


I remember reading about the Mongol empire and the key to its success resting in its ability to remain nomadic inspite of Chinese attempts to make it languid through introduction of luxury goods.
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Re: Brave New World, Revisited.

Postby Belligerent Savant » Mon Aug 15, 2022 7:52 pm

.
In line with the last 2 posts, quoting again from BNW, Revisited:

IV. Propaganda in a Democratic Society

...

In regard to propaganda the early advocates of uni­versal literacy and a free press envisaged only two possibilities: the propaganda might be true, or it might be false. They did not foresee what in fact has happened, above all in our Western capitalist democra­cies -- the development of a vast mass communications industry, concerned in the main neither with the true nor the false, but with the unreal, the more or less totally irrelevant. In a word, they failed to take into account man's almost infinite appetite for distractions.

In the past most people never got a chance of fully satisfying this appetite. They might long for distrac­tions, but the distractions were not provided. Christmas came but once a year, feasts were "solemn and rare," there were few readers and very little to read, and the nearest approach to a neighborhood movie theater was the parish church, where the per­formances, though frequent, were somewhat monoto­nous. For conditions even remotely comparable to those now prevailing we must return to imperial Rome, where the populace was kept in good humor by frequent, gratuitous doses of many kinds of entertain­ment -- from poetical dramas to gladiatorial fights, from recitations of Virgil to all-out boxing, from con­certs to military reviews and public executions. But even in Rome there was nothing like the non-stop dis­traction now provided by newspapers and magazines, by radio, television and the cinema. In Brave New World non-stop distractions of the most fascinating nature (the feelies, orgy-porgy, centrifugal bumble-puppy) are deliberately used as instruments of policy, for the purpose of preventing people from paying too much attention to the realities of the social and polit­ical situation. The other world of religion is different from the other world of entertainment; but they resem­ble one another in being most decidedly "not of this world." Both are distractions and, if lived in too con­tinuously, both can become, in Marx's phrase, "the opium of the people" and so a threat to freedom. Only the vigilant can maintain their liberties, and only those who are constantly and intelligently on the spot can hope to govern themselves effectively by demo­cratic procedures. A society, most of whose members spend a great part of their time, not on the spot, not here and now and in the calculable future, but some­where else, in the irrelevant other worlds of sport and soap opera, of mythology and metaphysical fantasy, will find it hard to resist the encroachments of those who would manipulate and control it.

In their propaganda today's dictators rely for the most part on repetition, suppression and rationaliza­tion -- the repetition of catchwords which they wish to be accepted as true, the suppression of facts which they wish to be ignored, the arousal and rationaliza­tion of passions which may be used in the interests of the Party or the State. As the art and science of manip­ulation come to be better understood, the dictators of the future will doubtless learn to combine these tech­niques with the non-stop distractions which, in the West, are now threatening to drown in a sea of irrele­vance the rational propaganda essential to the mainten­ance of individual liberty and the survival of demo­cratic institutions.


https://www.huxley.net/bnw-revisited/
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Re: Brave New World, Revisited.

Postby Grizzly » Sun Aug 28, 2022 12:03 am

“The more we do to you, the less you seem to believe we are doing it.”

― Joseph mengele
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Re: Brave New World, Revisited.

Postby Belligerent Savant » Mon Sep 19, 2022 1:05 pm

.
A compliment to the last ~few comments in the "moon hoax" thread:

Excerpts:
V.
Propaganda Under a Dictatorship


...

In the Brave New World of my prophetic fable, tech­nology had advanced far beyond the point it had reached in Hitler's day; consequently the recipients of orders were far less critical than their Nazi counter­parts, far more obedient to the order-giving elite. Moreover, they had been genetically standardized and postnatally conditioned to perform their subordinate functions, and could therefore be depended upon to behave almost as predictably as machines. As we shall see in a later chapter, this conditioning of "the lower leadership" is already going on under the Communist dictatorships. The Chinese and the Russians are not relying merely on the indirect effects of advancing technology; they are working directly on the psycho-physical organisms of their lower leaders, subjecting minds and bodies to a system of ruthless and, from all accounts, highly effective conditioning. "Many a man," said Speer, "has been haunted by the nightmare that one day nations might be dominated by technical means. That nightmare was almost realized in Hitler's totalitarian system." Almost, but not quite. The Nazis did not have time -- and perhaps did not have the intel­ligence and the necessary knowledge -- to brainwash and condition their lower leadership. This, it may be, is one of the reasons why they failed.

...

Since Hitler's day a great deal of work has been car­ried out in those fields of applied psychology and neu­rology which are the special province of the propagandist, the indoctrinator and the brainwasher. In the past these specialists in the art of changing people's minds were empiricists. By a method of trial and error they had worked out a number of techniques and proce­dures, which they used very effectively without, how­ever, knowing precisely why they were effective. Today the art of mind-control is in the process of becoming a science. The practitioners of this science know what they are doing and why. They are guided in their work by theories and hypotheses solidly established on a massive foundation of experimental evidence. Thanks to the new insights and the new techniques made possi­ble by these insights, the nightmare that was "all but realized in Hitler's totalitarian system" may soon be completely realizable.

...

A man or woman makes direct contact with society in two ways: as a member of some familial, professional or religious group, or as a member of a crowd. Groups are capable of being as moral and intelligent as the individuals who form them; a crowd is chaotic, has no purpose of its own and is capable of anything except intelligent action and realistic thinking. Assembled in a crowd, people lose their powers of reasoning and their capacity for moral choice. Their suggestibility is increased to the point where they cease to have any judgment or will of their own. They become very ex­citable, they lose all sense of individual or collective responsibility, they are subject to sudden accesses of rage, enthusiasm and panic. In a word, a man in a crowd behaves as though he had swallowed a large dose of some powerful intoxicant. He is a victim of what I have called "herd-poisoning." Like alcohol, herd-poison is an active, extraverted drug. The crowd-intoxicated individual escapes from responsibility, in­telligence and morality into a kind of frantic, animal mindlessness.

During his long career as an agitator, Hitler had studied the effects of herd-poison and had learned how to exploit them for his own purposes. He had discovered that the orator can appeal to those "hidden forces" which motivate men's actions, much more effec­tively than can the writer. Reading is a private, not a collective activity. The writer speaks only to indi­viduals, sitting by themselves in a state of normal sobriety. The orator speaks to masses of individuals, already well primed with herd-poison. They are at his mercy and, if he knows his business, he can do what he likes with them. As an orator, Hitler knew his busi­ness supremely well. He was able, in his own words, "to follow the lead of the great mass in such a way that from the living emotion of his hearers the apt word which he needed would be suggested to him and in its turn this would go straight to the heart of his hearers." Otto Strasser called him "a loud-speaker, pro­claiming the most secret desires, the least admissible instincts, the sufferings and personal revolts of a whole nation." Twenty years before Madison Avenue embarked upon "Motivational Research," Hitler was systematically exploring and exploiting the secret fears and hopes, the cravings, anxieties and frustra­tions of the German masses. It is by manipulating "hidden forces" that the advertising experts induce us to buy their wares -- a toothpaste, a brand of ciga­rettes, a political candidate. And it is by appealing to the same hidden forces -- and to others too dangerous for Madison Avenue to meddle with -- that Hitler in­duced the German masses to buy themselves a Fuehrer, an insane philosophy and the Second World War.

...

Virtue and intelli­gence belong to human beings as individuals freely associating with other individuals in small groups. So do sin and stupidity. But the subhuman mindlessness to which the demagogue makes his appeal, the moral imbecility on which he relies when he goads his vic­tims into action, are characteristic not of men and women as individuals, but of men and women in masses. Mindlessness and moral idiocy are not charac­teristically human attributes; they are symptoms of herd-poisoning. In all the world's higher religions, salvation and enlightenment are for individuals. The kingdom of heaven is within the mind of a person, not within the collective mindlessness of a crowd. Christ promised to be present where two or three are gath­ered together. He did not say anything about being present where thousands are intoxicating one another with herd-poison. Under the Nazis enormous numbers of people were compelled to spend an enormous amount of time marching in serried ranks from point A to point B and back again to point A. "This keeping of the whole population on the march seemed to be a senseless waste of time and energy. Only much later," adds Hermann Rauschning, "was there revealed in it a subtle intention based on a well-judged adjustment of ends and means. Marching diverts men's thoughts. Marching kills thought. Marching makes an end of individuality. Marching is the indispensable magic stroke performed in order to accustom the people to a mechanical, quasi-ritualistic activity until it becomes second nature."

...

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Re: Brave New World, Revisited.

Postby Grizzly » Tue Sep 20, 2022 10:13 pm

“The more we do to you, the less you seem to believe we are doing it.”

― Joseph mengele
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Re: Brave New World, Revisited.

Postby guruilla » Wed Sep 21, 2022 5:10 am

Grizzly wrote:
What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism. Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance. Orwell feared we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture. In 1984, Huxley added, "people are controlled by inflicting pain. In Brave New World, they are controlled by inflicting pleasure. In short, Orwell feared that what we hate will ruin us. Huxley feared that what we love will ruin us". ~Neil Postman

(Book: Amusing Ourselves to Death)


Postman is naive in thinking Huxley feared this outcome, but he made a damn good show of it for the plebs. And it is a rich irony that:

Brave New World—ironically, set in a world in which books are banned—made it into the top 10 of books to be banned in third place. Huxley’s novel is no stranger to complaints: in 1980 it was removed from classrooms for making promiscuous sex ‘look like fun,’ and it has been the subject of frequent challenges in the US over the years. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2011/ ... nged-books In 2010 it was successfully banned from the curriculum at Nathan Hale High School. Seattle, when a Native girl complained about the treatment of Native people in the book. http://archive.seattleweekly.com/home/9 ... oksauthors More incidents of the book’s banning in schools can be found here: https://thecensorshipfiles.wordpress.co ... new-world/
(from Big Mother, Horsley, due 2023)


Regarding the means of controlling human beings, hmm, well now, can Pavlov's dogs really make a good estimation of how well Pavlov's methods are working? "No dude, I am salivating because I want to; that bell has nothing to do with anything!"

Thesis question: what is the difference between technological programming, ideological conviction, psychological derangement, and demonic possession? Answer, not much.

Couple of examples of Mass Derangement Syndrome and how none of us are immune:

Do you doubt anymore that the USA, indeed most of Western Civ, is in the grip of demonic possession? You can’t quite medicalize the problem by calling it a group psychosis because the people demolishing social boundaries know exactly what they’re doing and are shoving it in your face maliciously for the purpose of goading you into humiliation and punishment — which is predictably what will happen if you object to being mind-fucked.

Case in point: a shop teacher styling himself as “Kayla” Lemieux, comes to work wearing a grotesquely outsized fake boob costume. You are meant to say that this is okay because, hey, it is just a form of “gender expression” — so said the Halton District school board in Ontario, Canada. Of course, you know it’s not okay. The School Board only pretends that it’s okay, because this nonsense is supported by the Canadian federal government under the Woke-Marxist Justin Trudeau, which holds the levers of law and can crush you, subject you to its courts, bankrupt you, ruin you, if you don’t play along. ...
Who knew that the glorious George Jetson future would tip into a neo-medieval religious frenzy and, more to the point, one deriving its dark energy from the demonic and Satanic?

You are asked to swallow ever-greater absurdities, destroying your self-respect because you know that you are a coward for not standing up to this host of degenerates.

James Kunstler, "A Walk on the Wild Side": https://kunstler.com/clusterfuck-nation ... wild-side/


the aim of ideology is to turn bodies into hosts for non-sentient programs. This methodology (which is ancient) depends on manipulating charge, deeply buried emotional content; like buried plutonium, the charge is highly reactive and only needs the correct “trigger” to be attached in order for it to blow up in our faces.

Critical race theory (recently in the MSM for being targeted by the Trump administration as “unAmerican”—oh the irony!*) is just one of a number of ideological “disciplines” (memeplexes) which the education system (at least since the Fabian Society—see The Vice of Kings) acts as a Trojan Horse to install in the collective psyche. The ideology of identity politics, intersectionality, CRT, etc, acts as a language-and-concept-matrix to hijack the cognitive and perceptual faculties of the host body (human beings) and redirect its energy down specific channels. The plutonium of ancient ancestral and childhood trauma is wired and weaponized, then made to either explode or irradiate, on command, in carefully directed ways. It is a controlled demolition of the human bio-system.

At the deepest level, a collective harvesting of humanity’s life force energies is being geared and levered towards the feeding of the-Great-Satan-by-any-other-name. This technocratic AI memeplex of ancestral insentience is designed to provide organic landing points (host bodies) for hordes of hairy, hungry ghosts to zero in on. Like a swarm of intergalactic tics, they graft themselves onto the body of the Earth to suck it dry of every last drop of its vital essence, using humanity as the plug-in points.

And all this under the auspices of peace, love, and social justice? Fate, it seems, is not without a sense of irony.

"The Social Revenge Fantasist: Scapegoating Patriarchy, Generational Trauma, & the Identity Police State": https://auticulture.com/the-social-reve ... ice-state/
It is a lot easier to fool people than show them how they have been fooled.
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Re: Brave New World, Revisited.

Postby Grizzly » Thu Sep 22, 2022 9:08 am

Rite on! I've been saying for Decades that this has all been systemic,clinical and goddamned methodical, yet everyone blows it/me off.Oh well... no prizes for being rite in this game.
“The more we do to you, the less you seem to believe we are doing it.”

― Joseph mengele
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