27 December 2023
The key issue in mind control is that you don't have it; someone else does.
Two primary methods: brainwashing and manipulation. Brainwashing requires a lot of effort, planning and system building and still produces only limited results. But political or social manipulation is far less expensive because the goal is far less than total control. Brainwashing seeks total control. Manipulation seeks certain targeted issues for control and the rest is left alone. Even when we are aware of all this, we tend to play along with the limited manipulation because it may not seem worth the effort.
Think about the situations wherein we encounter various types of limited brainwashing. Do you realize that initial military training uses brainwashing techniques? You are thrown into a small group, a foreign setting that isolates you from your norm, whatever that may be. It's wholly artificial, and you are kept in shock, conditioned to react without thinking.
It's the same if you experience any form of incarceration or detainment. Even college is built around the brainwashing model. Church? How about religious retreats? I'd say I've seen some that did.
You can look it up for yourself, but brainwashing is a set of steps you are pushed through in order to arrive at some desired end. First is shattering your sense of who you are and what is normal. Then, you are compelled to adopt dependency on one or a few authorized leadership figures, all of whom work hard to keep you off balance. There is no escape. You are never allowed time to process, but kept moving. You never know what to expect, and they keep such information from you quite intentionally, sometimes even lying about it. Meanwhile, you are fed more than you can reasonably remember, held accountable with very real punishment for the inevitable failures, ensuring that you understand you are to blame. Most importantly, you are given a whole new set of moral values.
Once you start to comply with all of this, you are handed a new identity, usually in bits and pieces, until a very substantial change is put in place. You have to earn the relief from the constant pressure by conforming to the new model. In the end, you have a whole new life, new friends, everything. Most of the various systems that use this model have been tested over time, with periodic adjustments for the cultural drift.
Brainwashing is one thing; manipulation is another. There are plenty of forms of manipulation that don't assume a full course of brainwashing. Even if you avoid brainwashing situations, manipulation is still overwhelming. Often, the only goal of manipulation is simply to keep you from getting in the way of whatever agenda the powerful are pushing.
In the Derren Brown videos we learn that a key element in manipulation is keeping you from being in control of yourself. And a primary tactic is still giving you a sense of isolation. The whole point of human politics is herding large numbers of people in one direction or another. For a political or social agenda, it's done in incremental steps. At each step, dissenters are isolated so that they cannot organize their resistance. This is the key to manipulative training like the Delphi Technique.
The idea behind the Delphi Technique is to create a false consensus for a community decision, a decision that the powerful have chosen beforehand. The whole exercise is run by trained facilitators or change agents. It was originally used on panels of experts, pressuring them to conform by dividing them into committees in multiple rounds. It has since been expanded for use to hijack the democratic process on the local level, when any given community is known to include those who will surely dissent. The dissenters are identified and then isolated. Each is swamped by being put in with a group that is more compliant. The issues are discussed and the dissenters are all individually neutralized -- unless they know how to counter it.
In situations when the bad guys are outnumbered, the change agents infiltrate and call into question the expertise of the leaders. Highly trained agents will attempt to derail everything. The whole idea is to raise opposition that cannot be answered quickly by whatever rules of order are in use. If you exclude the activists, you run the risk of lawsuits, riots, etc. The answer, of course, is having leadership that is fully aware of how this crap works and can shoot it down. (I've had to once or twice.)
It's all part of mind control.
Comments
Jay DiNitto
Delphi! That's what I was trying to think of in a post a while ago. I knew it was a Greek word, but I couldn't remember exactly.
Like seen in the Delphi technique, keeping certain information in a black hole, known only to the controllers or even known only to some of the divided group they do control (misinformation, etc.), is a critical part of making it work.
This document is public domain; spread the message.