Tinfoil Hat – Mind Control and Coercive Psychological Systems

chapter

Introduction

September 28, 2011 – 5:38 pm

Part 1 of 4 in the series Sheeple

Reading through email spam or the classified advertisements in a progressive newspaper, one may find offers for everything from assertiveness training¹ to sexual domination hypnosis² to computer software designed to flash brief messages on the screen with the goal of quitting smoking or losing weight.³ These are just a few of the many household Mind Control products marketed today promising that their simple tricks will allow anyone to be the master of their domain. While the efficacy of these programs is debatable, the science behind them is quite sound.

The basics of Mind Control are as ancient as mankind itself. Convincing someone to adopt an idea or perform a task is commonplace in every family. Children thus begin learning how to rationalize, peer pressure, beg, bribe, bully, guilt, or resort to any number of other tactics including blackmail and all out violent assault in order to get their way. As author Eric Schlosser notes in Fast Food Nation, James U. McNeal, a leading authority in marketing to children, “classifies juvenile nagging tactics into seven major categories” in his 1992 book Kids As Consumers:

A pleading nag is one accompanied by repetitions of words like “please” or “mom, mom, mom.” A persistent nag involves constant requests for the coveted product and may include the phrase “I’m gonna ask just one more time.” Forceful nags are extremely pushy and may include subtle threats, like “Well, then, I’ll go and ask Dad.” Demonstrative nags are the most high-risk, often characterized by full-blown tantrums in public places, breath-holding, tears, a refusal to leave the store. Sugar-coated nags promise affection in return for a purchase and my rely on seemingly heartfelt declarations like “You’re the best dad in the world.” Threatening nags are youth forms of blackmail, vows of eternal hatred and of running away if something isn’t bought. Pity nags claim the child will be heartbroken, teased, or socially stunted if the parent refuses to buy a certain item.⁴

An increasing number of teens and young adults are beginning to hone these skills in order to control family, friends and coworkers. Bullying has become epidemic, for example.

“Flicking through some of the saner sections of neuro-linguistic programming texts (minus the new age content) brings up the subtle use of language and body-language to influence other people,” states United Kingdom Defense Contractor “Mom” in personal correspondence. One method of this technique is through “mirroring” ⁵ the actions and words of the other person, which Mom explains:

Mirroring fosters a sense of ease or trust. Courting couples tend to do this intuitively (watch dating couples and see how they mirror things like sipping coffee, taking a bite of food, etc.) but it can be used as a way of making the mirrored party susceptible to persuasion. By doing the opposite to mirroring, the other party can be made ill-at-ease and be less amenable to persuasion (basically it rubs them up the wrong way).

Annie Finnigan reports on body language for Women’s Day magazine:

“Up to 80% of what we communicate is nonverbal,” says Joe Navarro, a former FBI agent turned nonverbal communication expert and author of What Every Body Is Saying. That means every gesture, look, mouth twitch, eyebrow raise, even the way we stand sends a message.… We relate to people in three ways: verbally (with words), vocally (tone of voice), and visually (body language), says Albert Mehrabian, PhD, emeritus professor of psychology at UCLA and author of Silent Messages. But the three V’s don’t always line up.… “If there’s an inconsistency between the verbal, vocal and visual, our words give off the least information,” he says. “Our facial expressions play the greatest role.”…

“Poker players are good at hiding nonverbal cues,” [says poker champion Annie Duke]. “But I always watch them very closely, and if I see them blinking fast, licking their lips or flashing a quick grimace before they smile, chances are they’re bluffing.” ⁶

Mom points out entertainer Derren Brown⁷ whose website reveals that he “can seemingly predict and control human behavior. He doesn’t claim to be a mind-reader, instead he describes his craft as a mixture of magic, suggestion, psychology, misdirection and showmanship.” Brown “primes” his audience members using subtle clues to respond in predetermined ways. The effect is dramatic.

Mom also notes a Mind Control game that primes players based upon their personality: conformists will end up visualizing one image (e.g., an elephant in Denmark) while nonconformists will see another (e.g., an emu in Dubai). This phenomenon may be found in simpler form per a circulating email that has the reader calculate the number six several times then asks for a vegetable. It claims 98% of readers will choose carrot.

A documentary at the YouTube.com website, “The CFR Controlled Media Cabal (Part 3),” reports:

The human mind is like a computer no matter how efficient it may be. It’s reliability is only as great as the information fed into it. If it is possible to control the input of the human mind, then no matter how intelligent a person may be, it’s entirely possible to program what he will think; and yes, it’s even possible to program people to laugh at the mere mention of the word “conspiracy.” ^{8, i}

From its application in the classroom to its use in the workplace, psychology has become a hot topic. The discipline is even finding its way into homes. Today’s television programs like “Nanny 911″ and “Supernanny” demonstrate what the power of a little Mind Control can do. The children on these shows would surely be required by schools to take a “chemical straightjacket” ⁹ such as Ritalin, but in a week’s time the behavior modification programs transform these tiny terrors into little angels.

Notes

ⁱ A conspiracy may be a continuing one; actors may drop out and others may drop in; the details of operation may change from time to time; the members need not know each other or the part played by others; a member may not need to know all the details of the plan of the operation; he must, however, know the purpose of the conspiracy and agree to become a party to a plan to effectuate that purpose.
— cited from the Californiia Court of Appeals decision, Craig v. U.S. C.C.A. Cal. 81 F2d 816, 822.

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Information Control is Mind Control

September 28, 2011 – 6:35 pm

Part 2 of 4 in the series Sheeple

In a 12 November 1816 letter to George Logan, Thomas Jefferson wrote, “I hope we shall take warning from the example [England] and crush in it’s [sic] birth the aristocracy of our monied corporations which dare already to challenge our government to a trial of strength and bid defiance to the laws our country.” ¹ By December 2000, of the world’s 100 largest economic entities, 51 were corporations and 49 were countries, according to information compiled by Sarah Anderson and John Cavanagh of the Institute for Policy Studies in their Report on the Top 200 corporations as reported by the Corporations.org website.²

Source: Media Reform Information Center

According to the Media Reform Information Center:

In 1983, 50 corporations controlled the vast majority of all news media in the U.S. At the time, Ben Bagdikian was called “alarmist” for pointing this out in his book, The Media Monopoly. In his 4th edition, published in 1992, he wrote “in the U.S., fewer than two dozen of these extraordinary creatures own and operate 90% of the mass media” – controlling almost all of America’s newspapers, magazines, TV and radio stations, books, records, movies, videos, wire services and photo agencies. He predicted then that eventually this number would fall to about half a dozen companies. This was greeted with skepticism at the time. When the 6th edition of The Media Monopoly was published in 2000, the number had fallen to six. Since then, there have been more mergers and the scope has expanded to include new media like the Internet market. More than 1 in 4 Internet users in the U.S. now log in with AOL Time-Warner, the world’s largest media corporation.³

In 2004, Bagdikian’s revised and expanded book, The New Media Monopoly, shows that only 5 huge corporations – Time Warner, Disney, Murdoch’s News Corporation, Bertelsmann of Germany, and Viacom (formerly CBS) – now control most of the media industry in the U.S. General Electric’s NBC is a close sixth.

As former intelligence insider Mark Phillips notes, “Information control is mind control.” Phillips with Cathy O’Brien co-authored Trance: Formation of America in 1995 submitted for Congressional Record and Access Denied: for Reasons of National Security in 2004 about Mind Control slavery in America.

“The Old Gray Man of the CIA,” William “Bill” Colby, known for exposing The Company’s “family jewels” from his tenure as Director in the 1970s – abruptly replaced by George H.W. Bush – to Colby’s suspicious disappearance and death in late April 1996, let us know that “the Central Intelligence Agency owns everyone of any significance in the major media.” ⁴

A documentary at the YouTube.com website, “The CFR Controlled Media Cabal (Part 3),” reports:

It’s a sobering fact that the hidden power structure of international finance has exherted tremendous influence over public opinion in this country through its virtual control of higher education and major segments of mass communications.⁵

Source: Mind Control in America: Exposing the Strategy to Manipulate Your Mind

As the website MindControlInAmerica.com notes:

Under the right circumstances, people can be led to believe things that are not true.… On October 30, 1938, thousands of people fled from a crisis that had no existence except in their imaginations. A radio broadcast of H.G. Wells’ “The War of the Worlds” led thousands of listeners to believe that the planet earth had been invaded by Martians! “We are ready to believe almost anything if it comes from a recognized authority,” writes Howard Koch in his book, The Panic Broadcast. Koch wrote the radio script performed by Orson Welles and his Mercury Theater on CBS.⁶

Related audio

The War of the Worlds (October 30, 1938), The Mercury Theatre on the Air, at http://www.mercurytheatre.info, MP3 at http://sounds.mercurytheatre.info/mercury/381030.mp3 (retrieved: 3 January 2011).

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Obedience to Authority

September 28, 2011 – 7:11 pm

Part 3 of 4 in the series Sheeple

During the 1970s, neobehaviorists performed countless experiments on adults and children alike. Colleges jumped at the opportunity to test new theories.

In 1971, the Stanford Prison Experiment demonstrated that normal people can easily turn into sadistic “guards” while reducing their “prisoners” to blind obedience. Scheduled to run two weeks, the study was halted on day six due to ethical concerns. According to Stanford News:

The arrestees were among about 70 young men, mostly college students eager to earn $15 a day for two weeks, who volunteered as subjects for an experiment on prison life that had been advertised in the Palo Alto Times. After interviews and a battery of psychological tests, the two dozen judged to be the most normal, average and healthy were selected to participate, assigned randomly either to be guards or prisoners. Those who would be prisoners were booked at a real jail, then blindfolded and driven to campus where they were led into a makeshift prison in the basement of Jordan Hall.

Those assigned to be guards were given uniforms and instructed that they were not to use violence but that their job was to maintain control of the prison.

[Psychology Professor Philip] Zimbardo’s primary reason for conducting the experiment was to focus on the power of roles, rules, symbols, group identity and situational validation of behavior that generally would repulse ordinary individuals. “I had been conducting research for some years on deindividuation, vandalism and dehumanization that illustrated the ease with which ordinary people could be led to engage in anti-social acts by putting them in situations where they felt anonymous, or they could perceive of others in ways that made them less than human, as enemies or objects,” Zimbardo told the Toronto symposium in the summer of 1996.¹

According to the Standford Prison Experiment PrisonExp.org website:

There were three types of guards. First, there were tough but fair guards who followed prison rules. Second, there were “good guys” who did little favors for the prisoners and never punished them. And finally, about a third of the guards were hostile, arbitrary, and inventive in their forms of prisoner humiliation. These guards appeared to thoroughly enjoy the power they wielded, yet none of our preliminary personality tests were able to predict this behavior. The only link between personality and prison behavior was a finding that prisoners with a high degree of authoritarianism endured our authoritarian prison environment longer than did other prisoners.²

Prisoners coped with their feelings of frustration and powerlessness in a variety of ways. At first, some prisoners rebelled or fought with the guards. Four prisoners reacted by breaking down emotionally as a way to escape the situation. One prisoner developed a psychosomatic rash over his entire body when he learned that his parole request had been turned down. Others tried to cope by being good prisoners, doing everything the guards wanted them to do.… By the end of the study, the prisoners were disintegrated, both as a group and as individuals. There was no longer any group unity; just a bunch of isolated individuals hanging on, much like prisoners of war or hospitalized mental patients. The guards had won total control of the prison, and they commanded the blind obedience of each prisoner.³

[By the fifth night it became apparent the experiment had to be stopped. The experimenters had created] a situation in which prisoners were withdrawing and behaving in pathological ways, and in which some of the guards were behaving sadistically. Even the “good” guards felt helpless to intervene.⁴

Christina Maslach, a recent Stanford Ph.D. brought in to conduct interviews with the guards and prisoners, strongly objected when she saw our prisoners being marched on a toilet run, bags over their heads, legs chained together, hands on each other’s shoulders. Filled with outrage, she said, “It’s terrible what you are doing to these boys!” Out of 50 or more outsiders who had seen our prison, she was the only one who ever questioned its morality. Once she countered the power of the situation, however, it became clear that the study should be ended.⁵

In 1974, Stanley Milgram published his infamous Obedience to Authority study. He discovered that normal people were willing to inflict excruciating pain on a subject at the behest of an instructor as related by Muskingum University:

People who are doing a job as instructed by an administrative figure are following the instructions of that administrative outlook and not the outlook of a moral code. The feelings of duty and personal emotion are clearly separated. Responsibility shifts in the mind of the subordinate from himself/herself to the authority figure. There is a well defined purpose behind the actions or goals of the authority, and the subordinate is depended upon to help and meet those goals.⁶


© The Simpsons

According to a short biograpgy of Milgram compiled by Michael Goret et al:

In most versions of this experiment two individuals would arrive at a testing center simultaneously. Here they would meet an instructer who appeared to be conducting the experiment. This instructor superficially appeared as an authority figure by displaying the necessary crudentials [sic] as a professor such as a white lab coat and clip board. The two “subjects”were then taken to a room where one was strapped in a chair to prevent movement and an electrode was placed on their arm. Next, the other individual who was called the “teacher” was taken to an adjoining room where he/she was instructed to read a list of two word pairs. He/She would then ask the “learner” to read them back. If the “learner” got the answer correct, they would then move on to the next set of words in the series. However, if the answer was wrong the “teacher” was informed by the instructor that they were required to administer shock to the “learner”. These shocks first started at 15 volts and increased to 450 volts for each incorrect response. This occured in 15 volt increments. The “teacher” was never cohersed into doing so they were simply told by the instructer that the experiement required them to continue. This in fact is what made this study so intiguing; the “teacher” could have discontinued the experiment at any time but you will soon see that the majority continued to shock. The “teacher” was fully under the assumption that he/she was administering discipline to the “learner” however, they were never really doing so. The “learner” was actually a confederate,a student or actor, who were never actually harmed.…

Today the field of psychology would deem this study highly unethical because of the great deal of stress layed upon the subjects, however it is quite evident that this research yielded some extremely important findings. The theory that only the most severe monsters on the sadistic fringe of society would submit to such cruelty is disclaimed. Findings indicated that, “two-thirds of this studies participants fell into the category of ‘obedient’ subjects. These participants represented ordinary people drawn from the working, managerial, and professional classes” (Obedience to Authority). Ultimately 65% of all of the “teachers” punished the “learners” to the maximum 450 volts.⁷

Herd Mentality

September 30, 2011 – 12:15 pm

Part 4 of 4 in the series Sheeple

“Herd mentality describes how people are influenced by their peers to adopt certain behaviours, follow trends, and/or purchase items,” explains the EveryTherapist.com website:

People in these herds are broken up into two groups, explains Friedrich Nietzsche, a philosopher who coined the phrase. One lended itself to the religious points of views — their beliefs and how those dictated their actions — while the other lended itself to influence by the media — based upon what others perceive as ‘right’ (following trends, social norms, etc.). Nietzsche perceived these two forms of subservience to be a weakness among the common man, and that the “Superman” as Nietzsche terms is the one who overcomes the values of the fallible herd.…

Herd mentality implies a fear-based reaction to peer pressure which makes individuals act in order to avoid feeling “left behind” from the group. Herd mentality is also sometimes known as “mob mentality.” ¹

“Researchers discovered that it takes a minority of just five per cent to influence a crowd’s direction — and that the other 95 per cent follow without realizing it,” reports the PsychCentral.com website:

[University of Leeds Professor Jens Krause], with PhD student John Dyer, conducted a series of experiments where groups of people were asked to walk randomly around a large hall. Within the group, a select few received more detailed information about where to walk. Participants were not allowed to communicate with one another but had to stay within arms length of another person.

The findings show that in all cases, the ‘informed individuals’ were followed by others in the crowd, forming a self-organizing, snake-like structure.

“We’ve all been in situations where we get swept along by the crowd,” says Professor Krause. “But what’s interesting about this research is that our participants ended up making a consensus decision despite the fact that they weren’t allowed to talk or gesture to one another. In most cases the participants didn’t realize they were being led by others.” ²

Tinfoil Hat – Mind Control and Coercive Psychological Systems

Introduction

Notes

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Information Control is Mind Control

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Obedience to Authority

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Herd Mentality

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