- The subconcscious is powerful. It is aware of every particle
and detail around you. But it doesn't know the difference between fact
or fiction and acts on all information passing through the conscious mind
as fact, and responds to it. So what do you think happens when you watch
silly, moron, goofy commercials and television programs? They are training
your thought processes.
-
- Hey buddy, I'm talking to you. Yes, you, the guy sitting
in front of the television. Turn down the sound a bit, so that you can
hear what I am saying. Now, try to concentrate on what I am going to say.
I want to talk to you about your favorite pastime. No, it's not baseball
or football, although it does have something to do with your interest in
spectator sports. I'm talking about what you were just doing: watching
television.
-
- Do you have any idea about how much time you spend in
front of the television set? According to the latest studies, the average
American now spends between five and six hours a day watching television.
Let's put that in perspective: that is more time than you spend doing anything
else but sleeping or working, if you are lucky enough to still have a job.
-
- That's more time than you spend eating, more time than
you spend with your wife alone, more time than with the kids. It's even
worse with your children. According to these same studies, young children
below school age watch more than eight hours each day. School age children
watch a little under eight hours a day. In 1980, the average 20-year-old
had watched the equivalent of 14 months of television in his or her brief
lifetime. {That's 14 months, 24 hours a day.}
-
- More recent figures show that the numbers have climbed:
the 20-year-old has spent closer to two full years of his or her life in
front of the television set. At the same time, the researchers have noted
a disturbing phenomena. It seems that we Americans are getting progressively
more {stupid}. They note a decline in reading and comprehension levels
in all age groups tested. Americans read less and understand what they
read less than they did 10 years ago, less than they have at any time since
research began to study such things.
-
- As for writing skills, Americans are, in general, unable
to write more than a few simple sentences. We are among the least literate
people on this planet, and we're getting worse. It's the change--the constant
trendline downward--that interests these researchers. More than one study
has correlated this increasing stupidity of our population to the amount
of television they watch.
-
- Interestingly, the studies found that it doesn't matter
what people watch, whether it's ``The Simpsons'' or ``McNeil/Lehrer,''
or ``Murphy Brown'' or ``Nightline':' the more television you watch, the
{less literate, the more stupid} you are. The growth in television watching
had surprised some of the researchers. Back a decade ago, they were predicting
that television watching would level off and might actually decline. It
had reached an absolute saturation point.
-
- They were right for so-called network television; figures
show a steady dropoff of viewership. But that drop is more than made up
for by the growth of cable television, with its smorgasbord of channels,
one for almost every perversion. Especially in urban and suburban areas,
Americans are hard-wired to more than 100 different channels that provide
them with all news, like CNN, all movies, all comedy, all sports, all weather,
all financial news and a liberal dose of straight pornography.
-
- The researchers had also failed to predict the market
penetration of first beta and then VHS video recorders; they made it possible
to watch one thing and record another for later viewing. They also offered
access to movies not available on networks or even cable channels as well
as home videos, recorded on your own little camcorder. The proliferation
of home video equipment has involved families in video-related activities
which are not even considered in the cumulative totals for time Americans
spend watching television.
-
- You might not actually realize how much you are watching
television. But think for a moment. When you come home, you turn the television
on, if it isn't on already. You read the paper with it on, half glancing
at what is on the screen, catching a bit of the news, or the plot of a
show. You eat with it on, maybe in the background, listening for a score
or something that happens to a character in a show you follow.
-
- When something you are interested in, a show or basketball
game, is on, the set becomes the center of attention. So your attention
to what is on may vary in intensity, but there is almost no point when
you are home, and inside, and have the set completely off. Isn't that right?
The studies did not break down the periods of time people watched television,
according to the intensity of their viewing.
-
- But the point is still made: you compulsively turn the
television on and spend a good portion of your waking hours glued to the
tube. And the studies also showed that many people can't sleep without
the television turned on! Brainwashing Now, I'm sure you have heard that
watching too much television is bad for your health. They put stories like
that on the evening news. Bad for your eyes to stare at the screen, they
say. Especially bad if you sit too close. Well, I want to make another
point.
-
- We've already shown that you are addicted to the tube,
watching it between six and eight hour a day. But it is an addiction that
{brainwashes} you. There are two kinds of brainwashing. The one that's
called {hard} brainwashing is the type you're most familiar with. You've
got a pretty good image of it from some of those old Korean war movies.
They take some guy, an American patriot, drag him into a room, torture
him, pump him full of drugs, and after a struggle, get him to renounce
his country and his beliefs. He usually undergoes a personality change,
signified by an ever-present smile and blank stare.
-
- This brainwashing is called {hard} because its methods
are overt. The controlled environment is obvious to the victim; so is the
terror. The victim is overwhelmed by a seemingly omnipotent external force,
and a feeling of intense isolation is induced. The victim's moral strength
is sapped, and slowly he embraces his torturers. It is man's moral strength
that informs and orders his power of reason; without it, the mind becomes
little more than a recording machine waiting for imprints. No one is saying
that you have been a victim of {hard} brainwashing. But you have been brainwashed,
just as effectively as those people in the movies. The blank stare? Did
you ever look at what you look like while watching television?
-
- If the angle is right, you might catch your own reflection
in the screen. Jaw slightly open, lips relaxed into a smile. The blank
stare of a television zombie. This is {soft} brainwashing, even more effective
because its victims go about their lives unaware of what is being done
to them. Television, with its reach into nearly every American home, creates
the basis for the mass brainwashing of citizens, like you.
-
- It works on a principle of {tension and release}. Create
tension, in a controlled environment, increasing the level of stress. Then
provide a series of choices that provide release from the tension. As long
as the victim believes that the choices presented are the {only} choices
available, even if they are at first glance unacceptable, he will nevertheless,
ultimately seek release by choosing one of these unacceptable choices.
Under these circumstances, in a brainwashing, controlled environment, such
choice-making is not a ``rational'' experience. It does not involve the
use of man's creative mental powers; instead man is conditioned, like an
animal, to respond to the tension, by seeking release.
-
- The key to the success of this brainwashing process is
the regulation of both the tension and the perceived choices. As long as
both are controlled, then the range of outcomes is also controlled. The
victim is induced to walk down one of several pathways acceptable for his
controllers. The brainwashers call the tension-filled environment {social
turbulence}. The last decades have been full of such {social turbulence}--economic
collapse, regional wars, population disasters, ecological and biological
catastrophes. {Social turbulence} creates crises in perceptions, causing
people to lose their bearings.
-
- Adrift and confused, people seek release from the tension,
following paths that appear to lead to a simpler, less tension-filled life.
There is no time in such a process for rational consideration of complicated
problems. Television is the key vehicle for presenting both the tension
and the choices. It brings you the images of the tension, and serves up
simple answers. Television, in its world of semi-reality, of illusion,
of escape from reality, {is itself the single most important release from
our tension-wracked existence.} Eight hours a day, every day, through its
programming, you are being programmed.
-
- If you doubt me, think about one important choice that
you have made recently that was not in some way influenced by something
that you have seen on television. I bet you can't think of one. That's
how controlled you are. Who's Doing It But don't take my word for it. Ten
years ago we spoke to a man from a think tank called the Futures Group
in Connecticut. Hal Becker had spent more than 20 years of his life manipulating
the minds of the leaders of our society. Listen to what he said: {``I know
the secret of making the average American believe anything I want him to.
Just let me control television.
-
- Americans are wired into their television sets. Over
the last 30 years, they have come to look at their television sets and
the images on the screen as reality. You put something on television and
it becomes reality. If the world outside the television set contradicts
the images, people start changing the world to make it more like the images
and sounds of their television.
-
- Because its influence is so great, so pervasive, it has
become part of our lives. You lose your sense of what is being done to
you, but your mind is being shaped and moulded.''} ``Your mind is being
shaped and moulded.'' If that doesn't sound like brainwashing, I don't
know what is. Becker speaks with the elan of a network of brainwashers
who have been programming your lives, especially since the advent of television
as a ``mass medium'' in the late 1940s and early 1950s.
-
- This network numbers several tens of thousands worldwide.
Occasionally one appears on the nightly news to tell you what {you} are
thinking, by reporting the latest ``opinion polls.'' But for the most part,
they work behind the scenes, speaking to themselves and writing papers
for their own internal distribution. And though they work for many diverse
groups, these brainwashers are united by a common world view and common
method. It is the world view of a small elite, whose financial and political
power rests in institutions that pass this power on from generation to
generation.
-
- They view the common folk like yourself as little better
than beasts of burden to be controlled and manipulated by a semi-feudal
international oligarchy, whose wealth, power and bloodlines entitle them
to rule. One of the oligarchy's institutions for manipulation of populations
is located in a suburb of London called Tavistock. The Tavistock Institute
for Human Relations, which also has a branch in Sussex, England, is the
``mother'' for much of this extended network, of which Becker is a member.
They are the specialists in {both} hard and soft brainwashing.
-
- The Tavistock Institute is the psychological warfare
arm of the British Royal household. The oligarchs behind Tavistock, and
similar outfits in the United States and elsewhere, are determined that
you should be a television addict, sucking up a daily dose of brainwashing
from the ``tube;'' that is how they control you. Like his fellow brainwashers,
Becker prides himself in knowing the minds of his victims.
-
- He calls them ``saps.'' Man, he told an interviewer,
should be called ``homo the sap.'' ``Soft'' brainwashing by television
works through power of suggestion. Television watching creates a state
of drugged-like oblivion to outside reality. The mind, its perceptions
dulled by habituated viewing, is ready to accept any new illusion of reality
as presented on the tube. The mind, in its drugged-like stupor of television
watching, is prepared to accept that the images that television {suggests}
as reality {are} reality. It will then struggle to form fit a contradictory
reality into television image, just as Becker claims. Another Tavistock
brainwasher, Fred Emery, who studied television for 25 years, confirms
this.
-
- The television signal itself, he found, puts the viewer
in this state of drugged-like oblivion. Emery writes: ``Television as a
media consists of a constant visual signal of 50 half-frames per second.
Our hypotheses regarding this essential nature of the medium itself are:
-
- ``1) The constant visual stimulus fixates the viewer
and causes the habituation of response. The prefrontal and association
areas of the cortex are effectively dominated by the signal, the screen.
-
- ``2) The left cortical hemisphere--the center of visual
and analytical calculating processes--is effectively reduced in its functioning
to tracking changing images on the screen.
-
- ``3) Therefore, provided, the viewer keeps looking, he
is unlikely to reflect on what he is doing and what he is viewing. That
is, he will be aware, but unaware of his awareness....
-
- ``In other words, television can be seen partly as the
technological analogue of the hypnotist.''
-
- The key to making the brainwashing work is the {repetition
of suggestion} over time. With people watching the tube for 6 to 8 hours
a day, there is plenty of time for such repeated suggestion. Some Examples
Let's look at an example to make things a bit clearer. Think back about
20 years ago. Think about what you thought about certain issues of the
day. Think about those same issues today; notice how you seemed to change
{your} mind about them, to become more tolerant of things you opposed vehemently
before.
-
- It's your television watching that changed your mind,
or to use Becker's terms, ``shaped your perceptions.''
-
- Twenty years ago, most people thought that the lunacy
that is now called environmentalism, the idea that animals and plants should
be protected on an equal basis with human life, was screwy. It went against
the basic concept of Christian civilization that man is a higher species
than and distinct from the animals, and that it is man, by virtue of his
being made in the image of the living God, whose life is sacred.
-
- That was 20 years ago. But now, many people, maybe even
you, seem to think otherwise; there are even laws that say so. This contrary,
anti-human view of man being no more than equal to animals and plants was
inserted into our consciousness by the suggestion of television. Environmental
lunacy was scripted into network television shows, into televised movies,
and into the news. It started slowly, but picked up steam. Environmental
spokesmen were increasingly seen in the favorable glow of television.
-
- Those who opposed this view were shown in an unfavorable
way. It was done over time, with repetition. If you weren't completely
won over, you were made tolerant of the views of environmental lunatics
whose statements were morally and scientifically unsound. Let's take a
more recent example: the war against Iraq. That was a war made for television.
In fact, it was a war {organized} through television. Think back a year:
How were Americans prepared for the eventual slaughter of Iraqi women and
children? Images on the screen: Saddam Hussein, on one side, Hitler on
the other.
-
- The images repeated in newscasts, backed up by scenes
of alleged atrocities in Kuwait. Then the war itself: the video-game like
images of ``smart'' weapons killing Iraqi targets. Finally, the American
military commander-in-chief Gen. Norman Schwartzkopf, conducting a final
press briefing that was consciously orchestrated to resemble the winning
Superbowl coach describing his victory.
-
- Those were the images that overwhelmed our population.
Only now, months later, do we find out that the images had nothing to do
with reality. The Iraqi ``atrocities'' in Kuwait and elsewhere were exaggerated.
Our ``smart'' weapons like the famous Patriot anti-missile system didn't
really work.
-
- Oh, and the casualty figures: it seems that we murdered
far more women and children than we did soldiers. Hardly a ``glorious victory.''
But while it might have made a difference if people knew this while the
war was being planned or in progress, polls show that Americans no longer
find the war or any stories about it ``interesting.''
-
- Looking at the question more broadly, where did your
children get most of their values, if not from what they saw on television?
Parents might counteract the influence of the infernal box, but they could
not overcome it. How could they, if they themselves have been brainwashed
by the same box and if their children spend more time with it than them?
Studies show that most of television programming is geared to a less than
5th grade comprehension level; parents, like you, are themselves being
remade in the infantile images of the television screen. All of society
becomes more infantile, more easily controllable.
-
- As Emery explains: {``We are proposing that television
as a simple constant and repetitive and ambiguous visual stimulus, gradually
closes down the central nervous system of man.''} Becker holds a similar
view of the effect of television on American's ability to think:
-
- {``Americans don't really think--they have opinions and
feelings. Television creates the opinion and then validates it.''}
-
- Nowhere is this clearer than with politics. Television
tells Americans what to think about politicians, restricting choices to
those acceptable to the oligarchs whose financial power controls networks
and major cable channels. It tells people what has been said and what is
``important.'' Everything else is filtered out. You are told who can win
and who can't. And few people have the urge to look behind the images in
the screen, to seek content and truth in ideas and look for a high quality
of leadership.
-
- Such an important matter as choosing a president becomes
the same as choosing a box of laundry detergent: a set of possibilities,
whose limits are determined, by the images on the screen. You are given
the appearance of freedom of choice, but that you have neither freedom
nor real choice. That is how the brainwashing works. ``Are they brainwashed
by the tube,'' said Becker to the interviewer. ``
-
- It is really more than that. I think that people have
lost the ability to relate the images of their own lives without television
intervening to tell them what it means. That is what we really mean when
we say that we have a wired society.'' Turn It Off! That was ten years
ago. It has gotten far worse since then.
-
- In coming issues, we will show you the brainwashers'
vision of a hell on earth and how television is being used to get us there;
we will discuss television programming, revealing how it has helped produce
what is called a ``paradigm'' shift in values, creating an immoral society;
we will explain how the news is presented and how its presentation has
been used to destroy the English language; we will discuss the mass entertainment
media, showing who controls it and how; we will deal with America's addiction
to spectator sports and show how that too has helped make you passive and
stupid; and finally, we will show where we are headed, if we can't break
our addiction to the tube.
-
- So, after what I just told you, what do say, buddy? Do
you want to stay stupid and let your country go to hell in a basket? Why
don't you just walk over to the set and turn it off. That's right, completely
off. Go on, you can do it. Now isn't that better? Don't you feel a little
better already? You've just taken the first step in deprogramming yourself.
It wasn't that hard, was it? Until we speak again, try to keep it off.
Now that will be a bit harder.
-
- From New Federalist V6, #29.
-
-
-
- Comment
- From Ted Twietmeyer
- 3-14-5
-
- Regarding
- http://www.rense.com/general63/traid.htm
-
-
- On May 2 2004, I wrote a very similar article to this
one, about brainwashing and the Tavistock Institute. It was the first in
my Couch Patriot series (http://www.rense.com/general52/couch.htm).
-
- Their subversion of thought not just in America but around
the world is well known. Is it any wonder that satellite dish television
is being brought to the most remote corners of the earth, even if a solar
panel is required ?
-
- Although it's easy to focus just on brainwashing of Americans,
in reality the entire world is at stake.
-
- Ted Twietmeyer
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