Hypnosis in the western world

According to Nielsen ratings in 2017, the average American family spent 7 hours and 50 minutes per day watching TV. And what did that average American family get for selling nearly 8 hours a day of their time to the square screen? A mass state of hypnosis that has carved out social norms that are far from normal, far from healthy, far from financially beneficial and far from unconstrained.

I admit – I love TV.  There are some great shows that are fun to watch.  I get my news from the local TV news stations.  I watch sports and I look forward to certain series of shows that are upcoming.  I hate TV ads and I do my best to eliminate them from my subconscious.  I’m as much a victim in all of this as you are.

If you are anything like me you can see an ever increasing sense of entrapment that people are subjected to.  Most of this has to do with money, but a lot more seems to be about behavior modification.  You can replace the TV with the Internet if you like.  It might be that you think of TV as something your parents watched, but you are still being subjected to the same hypnosis through your phones, your laptop, your YouTube subscription, your Instagram feed, etc.  Anything that you can embed video content in can be used as a weapon to deliver behavior modification payloads.

I’m sure you are not stupid enough to fall prey to the shallow nature of video broadcast media, right?  I mean you are a well educated, well adjusted individual that doesn’t spend your paycheck at the mall each week.  You are responsible for your existence and those that you nurture.   

Unfortunately the vast population doesn’t exhibit those traits.  They will spend $96.18 per month on cable TV.  That is not counting the costs of streaming media services such as Netflix, Amazon, YouTube and other broadcasters as well.  

They will line up like cattle to purchase the latest “hotness” product from whomever has successfully embraced the hypnosis business model.  Often to their own detriment.   

The story of the Hummer

In 2001, the United States was attacked.  We refer to this as 9/11 – The World Trade center attack.  The horrific acts of terrorists took the lives of 3,000 or so innocent Americans.  Our reaction to it was off the chart fear.  It forced all of us to do things we would not normally do.  We enacted laws against our own best interest to protect us – the Patriot Act.  We acted as a nation in war; a society in fear of attack.

This was the gift to psychological marketing and manipulation.  A society now completely open to hypnosis and to use the psychology research based on a theory called the “Reptilian Brain”.  This was a deep psychological state we all have that comes from our emergence thousands of years ago, when man was not the dominant species.  Before we learned to be great tool makers and build our own defenses to attack from predatory species, we had a mindset that was more like how a dog detects threat and reacts to it.  This is deep in our psyche and marketing experts know it.  They can make us do things we would never normally agree to.  Like purchasing $50,000+ of vehicles that the majority would live to regret.

Enter the Hummer.  In 1983, the US Pentagon awarded a production contract to AM General Corporation with more than $1 billion to develop 55,000 High Mobility Mutipurpose Wheeled Vehicles (HMMWV).  They were nicknamed the Humvee and were designed to transport troops and cargo.  They were initially used in the 1989 invasion of Panama and more famously in the first Persian Gulf War in the early 1990s.  General Motors purchased the rights to these vehicles and began selling them as a civilian version, but acknowledged that they were gas guzzling vehicles.  However it didn’t stop Hollywood celebrities such as Arnold Schwarzenegger from celebrating their virtues.  

Families would spend $50,000+ for a military vehicle to drive the kids to school in the morning or go shopping.  Even though it cost you 2x the fuel and was impossible to park.   The Hummer was most famously seen as a military vehicle in Iraq & Afghanistan, and was designed to traverse inhospitable environments, provide some level of protection to gunfire, improvised explosive devices, etc.  It was the vehicle of warzones.  It was not the vehicle of suburbia but it became a popular vehicle purchase option for families that were living in fear – even though they were never directly attacked in their local community in Los Angeles, Austin, Miami, or Springfield.  

The climate was perfect to sell military vehicles and re-brand them as “urban assault vehicles”.  Mothers would joyously embrace the idea of driving down the freeway in a vehicle that had even 1% more defensiveness to attack than the other car.  They looked at every other vehicle on the road as if it housed a suicide vest wearing terrorist and thought, “Well at least I’m safe in my Hummer”.  They’d spend $100+ each time to fill up the tank, only to find that the actual fuel economy was pathetic compared to the neighbor driving their Toyota Corolla.  It didn’t matter, though.  They were safe on the road in case the Zombie apocalypse kicked off.

If you want to understand why, this PBS article is for you.

It shows just how suggestive we can be and just how evil manipulation can create an indebted and enslaved society.  

The Hummer became a success story of marketing in the world of the automotive industry.  Today, even though the threat has passed, people are still asking top dollar for these vehicles.  The hypnosis never seems to go away.  It demonstrates just how brainwashed a society can be and how deep this goes.

Hypnosis as a weapon

We are the most hypnotized society and parrot the same message over and over, because it is fed into our semi-hypnotized brains repetitively.   If you want to understand this, there is no better demonstration of it than Derren Brown.  His book, Tricks of the Mind, pretty much shows our weaknesses to suggestive hypnosis and methods that are used so that you don’t even realize you are being hypnotized.  

TV (for the lack of a better term of organized media) is a method of hypnosis to get you to consume content and is monetized through advertising insertion.  The media publisher who is more able to garner your attention to their message is going to be the clear financial winner here.

We are not better informed by watching TV.  This includes the news, documentary channels, weather, sports, or entertainment shows.  We are just hypnotized.

Who is behind all of this?

I honestly wish I knew, but I don’t believe it is any single organization or government.  I believe that when the ability to manipulate human behavior became so obvious, many embraced it like it was the new Gold Rush.  They saw human hypnosis as a technique that they could use to further their ambitions.  Banks saw this as a way to further enslave society into selling their future out for an ongoing income stream of interest on payments for loans for those Hummers.  Political parties saw it as a way to direct decision making to their benefit.  Special interest groups saw it as a way to further their agendas and enact social change towards some ideal.  Corporations saw it as a way to gain & keep employees and to gain & keep customers.

It would be easy to think of some illuminati or Bilderberg group as being behind this.  It conjures up images of a dark room with oak wood walls, and a collection of old cigar smoking white men, plotting the overthrow of the western civilization so the rich could be richer and the poor, poorer.

It may be hard to prove that, but there are some elements of evidence that does suggest an organized effort to undermine western values.  This interview was done in the 1980s by acclaimed author of the book “The Creature from Jekyll Island”, G. Edward Griffin, of the ex-KGB Soviet officer Yuri Bezmenov.

You can see the systematic use of these techniques and how they are part of our social culture today.  It is scary to see how this has been a successful method used for decades and it supports the US intelligence agencies summation that the Russians have influenced our elections in 2016.  One would think, however, that using our willingness to be hypnotized, that other parties have done far more than just election meddling.  

It is not likely to stop.  Other cultures and political methodologies in the world have a long history of enslaving their citizenry.  Today the Chinese government use a “social score” system to deter certain behaviors and reward others.  As I write this, it was only a week or so ago that we saw the anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre in China, and yet reporting on this topic in Chinese media is forbidden.  The Chinese government have removed all stories of this historical event from their records.  Local citizens don’t even know this happened.  There has been a systemic effort to censor and suppress this from the population, so if that is possible in a country of 1.3 billion people, pretty much anything can be done.  

Here’s a great article on this:  https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/06/30-years-tiananmen-square-state-chinese-censorship-and-digital-surveillance

We live in a very interconnected world.  Our Internet is connected by computer hardware with chips and firmware made all over the world.  It is difficult to control the supply chains and to ensure that a device connected to the Internet is clean and unable to be manipulated by an adversary.  If you spend any time watching techniques of computer hackers you can see just how vulnerable this world of IoT and connected devices are.  So there has never been a better time to use that technology as a weapon against us.

What can I do?

Question everything; trust but verify.  The social norms have to be revisited and re-tested to determine if they still have positive efficacy in society.  Consider yourself as a newcomer to a country and see things through an immigrant’s eyes.  They don’t understand the public school system that you have been raised in (or indoctrinated as many would call it).  They understand the value of hard work and being paid.  They understand about saving money.  They don’t take on debt without having a reason to do so.  Patience is built in.  You don’t need to have everything all at once.  What you do value more than anything else is freedom because that immigrant may have come from a society that was far less free than in the United States, or western Europe, or Australia, etc.  However they understand that societies can be enslaved just as the one they emigrated from and there is wisdom in the naivety of seeing things we all take for granted without questioning it.

I mean if someone tried to sell you 10 years of future debt of $100,000+ to give you the option to spend four or more years in tertiary academics, to study a field where there were either no jobs, or that the pay of the jobs of that field were less than what is needed to service that debt, would you do it?  If you subtract the social norm from this, most people would say no.  It is a stupid business decision.  Yet most of our youth are choosing this path.  We need doctors, lawyers, architects, engineers, etc.   They make the world a better place.  But if 50% of the rest of society are taking on this debt load and selling their future out to banks to be further indoctrinated into a way of thinking, it doesn’t serve them and it doesn’t serve us.  Those debts cannot be defaulted and in the end we all pay because they are not out there earning enough money to buy a house, build families and further move our society forward.  Debt is a governor on growth and our future has been sorely limited because of a perception of the value of a university education.  The graduate finds themselves out in the real world, without the coping skills and wondering why they spent 4 years of their lives studying something that they can’t use in their day to day career.  How many corporate workers have degrees in subjects they are not practicing in their jobs?  Yet we try and pretend that this is ok because of all the subtle side benefits of the university life they were exposed to.

I don’t buy it.  The corporation itself is a social organized method of enslavement.  Going from one institution to another isn’t healthy for individual thought and further perpetuates the hypnosis that our society is now raised with.  

We must question everything if we are to progress.  The answers to life’s challenges are not found in group think.  They are found by rebels in society that want to break free of social dogma and forge their own path into the world.  They are not found sitting in a hypnotic state on the couch watching your share of the 7+ hours a day of TV that we watch.  It isn’t found sitting on social media being bombarded by ad content and click bait, parading itself around as sanitized news stories.  It isn’t being found in journalism where journalists are not being paid to be investigators.  They are being paid to parrot the same catch phrases from government officials, PR representatives of corporations, or shock jocks that want to sell pharmaceutical ads between their broadcast waves.

I am a firm believer that the answers to happiness are local to us.  They are in our local communities and they are about forging relationships with others that are about human contact.  They are about you getting up off the coach and going out into the world.  Learning by participation – not learning by being a spectator.  You have a lot to offer, but it goes nowhere unless you go into a community physically and offer it.  

We can break the chain of hypnosis but it requires some hard work to question everything, go out and roam and see things with your own eyes and then forge your own path based on what makes you really happy without the shackles of fiction and social norms that do not serve you to be a more complete human being.

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