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A Digest of Urban
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32 tips: How to
overcome mass propaganda and manipulation
The greatest challenge to our liberty and to our success at
survival is to overcome the propaganda of government and its politicians and
bureaucrats, especially in the age of the "basement president" and
his media sycophants.
Governments must destroy the identity of the individual and
subvert each person to the mass conscience and control by the state. Hence,
government authority and propaganda seek to fade the individual into group
consciousness.
We are the most conditioned, programmed beings the world has ever
known. Not only are our thoughts and attitudes continually being shaped and
molded, but our very awareness of the whole design has also been erased. Few
question anything, and those who do are "canceled."
Almost everything you think and do is against your best interest
and you don't even realize it. It's planned that way.
The state seeks absolute control of your mind, body and spirit.
Can the state succeed? It has, but only a precious few ever know. One important
thought here: A person's IQ or education level has absolutely nothing to do
with their perception of reality. Higher education is higher brainwashing.
Sometimes it seems that the more education, the bigger the fool.
So how do we escape this programmed existence? First, we must
recognize and acknowledge the actual goal of government is conformity and
control; and that the mainstream media and the education system are equal
partners in the mass brainwash of individuals. Next we must understand the
various ways in which the system manipulates and programs us without our
awareness.
Here is some important information on navigating mass propaganda.
It is written by alternative news writer Caitlin Johnstone and first published
at CaitlinJohnstone.com.
Thirty-two Tips For Navigating A Society That Is Full Of
Propaganda And Manipulation
For as long as there has been human language, humans have been
using it to manipulate one another. The fact that it is possible to skillfully
weave a collection of symbolic mouth noises together in such a way as to
extract favors, concessions, votes and consent from other humans has made
manipulation so common that it now pervades our society from top to bottom,
from personal relationships between two people to international relationships
between government agencies and the public.
This has made it very difficult to figure out what's going on,
both in our lives and in the world. Here are thirty-two suggestions for
navigating this complex manipulation-laden landscape, whether it be for
navigating the manipulations you may encounter in your small-scale personal
interactions, or the large-scale manipulations which impact the entire world:
1 — Understand the fact that humans are storytelling animals, and
that whoever controls the
stories controls the humans. Mental narrative dominates human consciousness; thought is
essentially one continuous, churning monologue about the self and what it
reckons is going on in its world, and that monologue is composed entirely of
mental stories. These stories can and will be manipulated, on an individual
scale by people we encounter and on a mass scale by skillful propagandists. We
base our actions on our mental assessments of what's going on in the world, and
those mental assessments can be manipulated by narrative control.
2 — Be humble and open enough to know that you can be fooled. Your
cognitive wiring is susceptible the same hacks as everyone else, and
manipulators of all sorts are always looking to exploit those vulnerabilities.
It's not shameful to be deceived, it's shameful to deceive people. Don't let
shame and cognitive dissonance keep you compartmentalized away from considering
the possibility that you've been duped in some way.
3 — Watch people's behavior and ignore the stories they tell about
their behavior. This applies to people in your life, to politicians, and to
governments. Narratives can be easily manipulated and distorted in many
different ways, while behavior itself, when examined with as much objectivity
as possible, cannot be. Pay attention to behavior in this way and eventually
you'll start noticing a large gap between what some people's actions say and
what their words say. Those people are the manipulators. Distrust them.
4 — Be suspicious of people who keep telling you what they are and
how they are, because they're trying to manipulate your narrative about them.
Be doubly suspicious of people who keep telling you what you are and how you
are, because they're trying to manipulate your narrative about you.
5 — Learn to see how trust and sympathy are used by manipulators
to trick people into subscribing to their narratives about what's going on.
Every manipulator uses trust and/or sympathy as a primer for their
manipulations, because if you don't have trust or sympathy for them, you're not
going to mentally subscribe to their stories. This is true of mass media
outlets, it's true of State Department press releases which implore you to have
sympathy for the people of Nation X, and it's true of family members and
coworkers. Once you've spotted a manipulator, your task is to kill off all of
your sympathy for them and your trust in them, no matter how hard they start
playing the victim to suck you back in.
6 — Be suspicious of anyone who refuses to articulate themselves
clearly. Word salading is a tactic notoriously used by
abusive narcissists, because it keeps the victim confused and unable to figure out
what's going on. If they can't get a clear handle on what the manipulative
abuser is saying, they can't form their own solid position in relation to it,
and the abuser knows this. Insist on lucid communication, and if it's refused
to you, remove trust and sympathy. Apply this to people in your life, to
government officials, and to 8chan propaganda
constructs.
7 — Familiarize yourself with cognitive biases, the glitches in human
cognition which cause us to perceive things in a way that is not rational. Pay
special attention to confirmation bias, the backfire effect, and the illusory truth effect. Humans have an
annoying tendency to seek out cognitive ease in their
information-gathering and avoid cognitive dissonance, rather than seeking
out what's true regardless of whether it brings us cognitive ease or
dissonance. This means we tend to choose what we believe based on whether
believing it is psychologically comfortable, rather than whether it's solidly
backed by facts and evidence. This is a weakness in our cognitive wiring, and
manipulators can and do exploit it constantly. And, again, be humble enough to
know that this means you.
8 — Trust your own understanding above anyone else's. It might not be perfect, but it's a damn sight better than letting your understanding be controlled by narrative managers and dopey partisan groupthink, or by literally anyone else in a narrative landscape that is saturated with propaganda and manipulation.
You won't get everything right, but betting on your own
understanding is the very safest bet on the table. It can be intimidating to
stand alone and sort out the true from the false by yourself on an
instance-by-instance basis, but the alternative is giving someone else
authority over your understanding of the world. Abdicating your responsibility
to come to a clear understanding of what's going on in your world is a
shameful, cowardly thing to do. Be brave enough to insist that you are right
until such time as you yourself come to your own understanding that you were
wrong.
9 — Understand that propaganda is the single most overlooked and
under-appreciated aspect of our society. Everyone's constantly talking about
what's wrong with the world, but hardly any of those discussions are centered
around the fact that the public been manipulated into supporting the creation
and continuation of those problems by mass media propaganda. The fact that
powerful people are constantly manipulating the way we think, act and vote
should be at the forefront of everyone's awareness, not relegated to occasional
discussions in fringe circles.
10 — Respect the fact that the science of modern propaganda has been in research
and development for over a century. Think of all the military advancements that have been made in
the last century to get an idea of how sophisticated this science must now be.
They are far, far ahead of us in terms of research and understanding of the
methods of manipulating the human psyche toward ends which benefit the
powerful. If you ever doubt that the narrative managers could be advanced and
cunning enough to pull off a given manipulation, you can lay that particular
doubt to rest. Don't underestimate them.
11 — Understand that western mass media propaganda rarely consists
of full, outright lies. At most, such outlets will credulously publish the
things that are told to them by government agencies which lie all the time.
More often, the deception comes in the form of distortions, half-truths, and
omissions. Pay more attention to discrepancies in things that are covered
versus things that aren't, and to what they're not saying.
12 — Put effort into developing a good news-sense, a sense for
what's newsworthy and what's not. This takes time and practice, but it lets you
see which newsworthy stories are going unreported by the mass media and which
non-stories are being overblown to shape an establishment-friendly narrative.
When you've got that nailed down, you'll notice "Why are they acting like
this is a news story?" and "Why is nobody reporting this??"
stories all the time.
13 — Be patient and compassionate with yourself when it comes to
developing your narrative navigating skills. Like literally any skill set,
you'll suck at it for a while. If you learn you've been wrong about something,
just take in the new information, adjust appropriately, and keep plugging away.
Don't expect to have mastered this thing before you've had time to master it.
Like anything else, if you put in the hours you'll get good at it.
14 — Find reliable news reporters who have a good sense for
navigating the narrative matrix, and keep track of them to orient yourself and
stay on top of what's going on. Use individual reporters, not outlets; no
outlet is 100 percent solid, but some reporters are pretty close on some
specific subjects. Click this hyperlink for an article on
one way to do build a customized and reliable news stream. Click this hyperlink for a list of all
my favorite news reporters on Twitter right now.
15 — Don't let paranoia be your primary or only tool for
navigating the narrative matrix. Some people's only means of understanding the
world is to become intensely suspicious of everything and everyone, which is
about as useful as a compass which tells you that every direction is north.
Spend time in conspiracy and media criticism circles and you'll run into many
such people. Rejecting everything as false leaves you with nothing as true. Find
positive tools for learning what's true.
16 — Hold your worldview loosely enough that you can change it at
any time in the light of new information, but not so loosely that it can be
slapped out of your head by someone telling you what to think in a confident,
authoritative tone. As Carl Sagan once said, "It pays to keep an open
mind, but not so open your brains fall out."
17 — Speaking of confident, authoritative tones, be suspicious of
confident, authoritative tones. It's amazing how much traction people can get
with a narrative just by posturing as though they know that what they're saying
is true, whether they're an MSNBC pundit or a popular conspiracy Youtuber. So
many people are just plain faking it, because it works. You run into this all
the time in debates on online political forums; people come at you with a
supremely confident posture, but if you push them to present their knowledge on
the subject and the strength of their arguments, there's not actually anything
there. They're just accustomed to people assuming they know what they're
talking about and leaving their claims unchallenged, and it completely throws
them off when someone doesn't buy their feigned confidence schtick.
18 — Be aware that sociopaths exist. There are people who, to
varying degrees, do not care what happens to others, and these are the types of
people who will use manipulation to get their way whenever it serves them. If
you don't care about truth or other people beyond the extent to which you can
use them, then there's no disincentive to manipulating.
19 — Be aware of projection, and be aware of the fact that it cuts
both ways: unhealthy people tend to project their wickedness onto others, while
healthy people tend to project their goodness. Don't let your goodness trick you
into thinking there aren't monsters who will deceive and manipulate you, and
don't let sociopaths project their own sinister motives onto you by telling you
how rotten you are. This mixes a lot of good people up, especially in their
personal lives. Not everyone is good, and not everyone is truthful. See this
clearly.
20 — Be suspicious of those who excessively advocate civility,
rules and politeness. Manipulators thrive on rules and civility, because they
know how to manipulate them. Someone who's willing to color outside the lines
and get angry at someone noxious even when they're acting within the rules
makes a manipulator very uncomfortable. Often times those telling you to calm
down and behave yourself when you are rightfully upset are manipulators who
have a vested interest in getting you to adhere to the rules set they've
learned to operate within.
21 — Meditation, mindfulness, self-inquiry and other practices are powerful tools
which can help you understand your own inner processes, which in turn helps you
understand how manipulators can manipulate you, and how they manipulate others.
Just be sure that you are using them for this purpose, not for escapism as most
"spiritual" types do. You're trying to become fully aware of what
makes you tick mentally, emotionally and energetically; you're not trying to
become some vapid spiritual bliss bunny. The goal isn't to feel better, the
goal is to get better at feeling. Better at consciously experiencing your own
inner world.
22 — Be relentlessly honest with yourself about your own inner
narratives and the various ways you engage in manipulation. You can't navigate
your way through the narrative control matrix if you aren't clear on your own
role in it. Look inside and consciously take an inventory.
23 — Understand that truth doesn't generally move in a way that is
pleasing to the ego, i.e. in a way Hollywood scripts are written to appeal to.
Any narrative that points to a Hollywood ending where the bad guy gets karate
kicked into lava and the hero gets the girl is manufactured. Russiagate and
QAnon are both perfect examples of an egoically pleasing narrative with the
promise of a Hollywood ending, either by Trump and his cohorts being dragged
off in chains or by the "white hats" overcoming the Deep State and
throwing all the Democrats and Never-Trumpers in prison for pedophilia. Ain't
gonna happen, folks.
24 — Try to view the world with fresh eyes rather than with your
tired old grown-up eyes which have taught you to see all this as normal. Hold
an image in your mind of what a perfectly healthy and harmonious world would
look like; the sharp contrast between this image and the world we have now
allows you see through the campaign of the propagandists to normalize things
like war, poverty, ecocide, and impotent electoral systems which keep seeing
the same government behavior regardless of who people vote for. None of this is
normal.
25 — Know that the truth has no political party, and neither do
the social engineers. All political parties are used to manipulate the masses
in various ways, and nuggets of truth can and do emerge from any of them.
Thinking along partisan lines is guaranteed to give you a distorted view.
Ignore the imaginary lines between the parties. You may be certain that your
rulers do.
26 — Remain always aware of this simple dynamic: the people who
become billionaires are generally the ones who are sociopathic enough to do
whatever it takes to get ahead. This class has been able to buy up near-total
narrative control via media ownership/influence, corporate lobbying, think tank
funding, and campaign finance, and are thus able to manipulate the public into
consenting to agendas which benefit nobody but plutocrats and their lackeys.
This explains pretty much every major problem that we are facing right now.
27 — Understand that nations are pure narrative constructs; they
only exist to the extent that people agree to pretend that they do. The
narrative managers know this, and they exploit the fact that most of us don't.
Take Julian Assange, perfect example: he was pried out of the embassy and
imprisoned by an extremely obvious
collaboration between the US, UK, Sweden, Ecuador, and Australia, yet they
each pretended that they were acting as separate, sovereign nations completely
independently of one another.
Sweden pretended it was deeply concerned about rape allegations,
the UK pretended it was deeply concerned about a bail violation, Ecuador
pretended it was deeply concerned about skateboarding and embassy cat hygiene,
the US pretended it was deeply concerned about the particulars of the way
Assange helped Chelsea Manning cover her tracks, Australia pretended it was too
deeply concerned about honoring the sovereign affairs of these other countries
to intervene on behalf of its citizen, and it all converged in a way that just
so happened to look exactly the same as imprisoning a journalist for publishing
facts. You see this same dynamic constantly, whether it's with military
interventions, trade deals, or narrative-shaping campaigns against non-aligned
governments.
28 — Understand that war is the glue which holds the
US-centralized empire together. Without the carrot of military/economic
alliance and the stick of military/economic violence, the US-centralized empire
would cease to exist. This is why war propaganda is constant and sometimes so
forced that glaring plot holes become exposed; it's so important that they need
to force it through, even if they can't get the narrative matrix around it
constructed just right. If they ceased manufacturing consent for the empire's
relentless warmongering, people would lose all trust in government and media
institutions, and those institutions would lose the ability to propagandize the
public effectively. Without the ability to propagandize the public effectively,
our rulers cannot rule.
29 — Remember that when it comes to foreign policy, the neocons
are always wrong. They've been so remarkably consistent in this for so long
that whenever there's a question about any narrative involving hostilities
between the US-centralized power alliance and any other nation, you can just
look at what Bill Kristol, Max Boot and John Bolton are saying about it and
believe the exact opposite. They're actually a very helpful navigation tool in
this way.
30 — Notice how the manipulators like to split the population in
two and then get them arguing over how they should serve the establishment.
Arguing over whether it's better to vote Democrat or Republican, arguing over
whether it's better to increase hostilities with Iran and Venezuela or with
Syria and Russia, over whether you should support the US president or the FBI,
arguing over how internet
censorship should happen and whom should
be censored rather than if censorship
should happen in the first place. The longer they can keep us arguing over the
best way to lick the imperial boot, the longer they keep us from talking about
whether we want to lick it at all.
31 — Watch out for appeals to emotion. It's much easier to
manipulate someone by appealing to their feely bits rather than their capacity
for rational analysis, which is why any time they want to manufacture support
for military interventionism you see pictures of dead children on news screens everywhere
rather than a logical argument for the advantages of using military violence
based on a thorough presentation of facts and evidence. You see the same
strategy used in the guilt trips they lay on third-party voters; it's all
emotional hyperbole that crumbles under any fact-based analysis, but they use
it because it works. They go after your heart strings to circumvent your head.
32 — Pay attention to how much propaganda goes into maintaining
the propaganda machine itself. This is done this because propaganda is just
that central to the maintenance of dominant power structures. Much effort is
spent building trust in establishment narrative management outlets while sowing
distrust in sources of dissent. You'll see entire propaganda campaigns built around
accomplishing solely this.
-- Caitlin Johnstone
Human liberty and personal survival in our time must originate in
truth no matter how incredible and shocking to our conditioned minds.
Governments control the public mind with disinformation and confusion…avoid the
lying smear-mongers which emanate from leftist media and politicians almost
hourly.
SIDEBARS
Many Americans are
rightfully worried about the future of America.
·
Record-high government
debt and counting (projected to hit $31.4 TRILLION by 2030)
·
Taxes that could rise
significantly. In fact, NYT reports, “Biden Wants to Raise Your Taxes”
·
A Federal Reserve who
just confirmed it would keep interest rates near 0% until the economy recovery
gains ground. So all the handcuffed Fed can do is basically print more
money (look out inflation!).
The currency
you use to acquire things you need is not money. Federal Reserve Notes are not
notes. They are not IOUs. You cannot exchange them for silver. They are not
dollars, and they do not satisfy the definition of money. So, what are they?
They are commercial paper. The rules governing commercial paper are found in
the Uniform Commercial Code. And so do many of your answers to any inquiries of
IRS agents. Remember, government consumption competes with the consumption of
the people. The tax system is a masterpiece of deception and trickery…
Let’s go
straight to the authority of modern government finance, John Maynard Keynes. In
his book of 1919 titled Economic Consequences of the Peace, he made a very
revealing statement. This one statement reveals the whole concept of so-called
income taxes, as well as our economic system: If government should refrain from
regulation, (taxation) the worthlessness of the money becomes apparent and the
fraud upon the people can be concealed no longer.
This is not taught anywhere in America,
including in the public or private school systems. It is not taught at any
university or college. The reason is that you are not to know that government
creates its own money and has used it to steal the wealth of the American
people and the world.
Silver sold off by more
than $1.00 last week to test support at $25/oz. Gold, meanwhile, held up
relatively better – while palladium neared an all-time high above $2,700/oz.
Precious metals bulls will be eyeing a
potential end to the first quarter “rally” in the dollar.
While the U.S. currency may be temporarily
strengthening versus other fiat currencies, unrestrained government spending
and Federal Reserve accommodation put the dollar on a one-way path to long-term
depreciation.
|
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Everyday Americans will
get smacked with higher taxes as a result…PERIOD!
The greatest domestic threat Americans face is internal…the
Radical Left socialists/globalists [aka: Dems]
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