June 29, 2014 (#1446)
"Cutting Through the Matrix" with Alan Watt
(Blurb, i.e. Educational Talk)
"No Utopian Passes for the Masses"
© Alan Watt June 29, 2014
Title & Dialogue Copyrighted Alan Watt - June 29, 2014 (Exempting Music and Literary Quotes)
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Hi folks, I’m Alan Watt and this is Cutting Through The Matrix on June the 29th, 2014. Right away I’d like to mention the massive geo-engineering which is going on and has been continuously now since ’98. It’s been pretty well daily across a good part of the planet and of course the weather, you can obviously see, is well-controlled in most parts of the world today. So we’re going through massive changes. We won’t see summers in places like Canada like we used to have, or even in Europe for that matter where at the end of the fall a lot of the grass in parks and so on would turn a kind of hay-colored brown as it was kind of burned by the sun. Those days are all over. Today of course we’ve got more and more rain in a lot of parts of Canada and other countries, and Europe too is getting it as well. We are well under weather control.
Of course it has many other effects apart from controlling the weather, believe you me. Because the big boys who’ve got massive access to your massive amounts of taxation, in other words an endless supply of cash, have no problems taking the cash for all their different projects. And they like many bangs for one buck sometimes so I’m sure they’re doing a lot more with the spraying than just altering the weather. But here where I am in Canada we had six months solid of snow, no thaw and straight into rain. Then every so often, if you get one sunny day or partially sunny day, you’ll always have the trails around and the milky sky with the trails by the spraying. But you’ll definitely get four or five days of continuous rain if you have one half-decent day. That seems to be the pattern, and has been for at least five years now. It’s getting worse and worse, until it’s pretty well miserable.
But that’s the way it’s planned to be, to save us all of course, from global warming. [Alan chuckles.] Meanwhile we’ve have the coldest temperatures all through the winter that I’ve ever had in Canada and a lot of the old-timers say that they’ve never seen it since the 60s and maybe even before that. And today we have temperatures going down to the 40s, sometimes 40 degrees at night here, in the middle and the end of June. So that’s how bad it is.
Now, for the last few talks I’ve given I’ve mentioned power and control and those in control, and how everything that’s happening today was planned generally before most folk were born, by big committees, big think tanks, international committees working with these think tanks, the foundations behind them that supply many of them with money and they’re matched dollar for dollar with your tax money as well. Because the control and the manipulation of the masses is nothing new. It’s a very old idea and it really took blossom and came out openly, I’d say, in the 1800s. In fact, perhaps more so openly because back then they didn’t have the so-called nice etiquettes to conform to; they could simply go ahead and do things from government right down to local levels and the people obeyed. And most of the folk were illiterate actually, or semi-illiterate at the very least, and they had no idea. They just were taught to obey, obey. Authority used brute force when they had to, with impunity.
It wasn’t till really after World War II the people started to see what they thought was for the first time a semblance of freedom – and even liberal freedom in its true sense, not its political party sense today – where they could do things, say things and discuss things that were perhaps forbidden before. But that’s been taken away gradually too under different guises, including terrorism which of course expands on its books; once it’s on the books it expands to take in lots of other things which the governments don’t want. And I mean governments, plural, because they all work in concert. We really do have way more than just the embryo of global government here; it’s in place and it has been for a long time. The transatlantic deals that they’ve been doing for, even since World War I, and working on before World War I to the present day, were all part of that; and I’ve given talks in the past about that.
So as I say, here we are in the 21st century and we’re going full-steam ahead for the Century of Change. And this is it, where all the big changes, of training the people now back into simply obeying authority, don’t think about those in power, just obey. If you notice in fact many politicians now are pretty well hidden from the general public. You get the occasional statements put out by their marketing departments, the Prime Minister or President said this, and it’s a little paragraph somewhere. This is training you not to be involved, to leave this super elite at the top to do their serious work while you do your little stuff at the bottom. That’s basically how you’re being trained into the authoritarian society.
As I say, the big players that helped form this present culture, and planned these present changes including the cultural changes that would have to take place to bring their big plan through, the mass immigration of all countries in Europe and North America, literally they said would be, it would have bigger movements of people eventually than even that of the Industrial Revolution, when people were uprooted, by the millions, and forced into the big cities to work in the slave factories.
With scientific techniques being used on the general population of massive propaganda, incredible marketing, psychologists working with the marketing companies, and the PR machines too for all levels of governance including even your local police in fact – that always comes through a police spokesperson, and it’s generally someone who’s trained in marketing – how to lessen the impact of a truth by omission, etc., to make it palatable. Palatable to the public, that’s how it really works. It’s quite a simple technique in fact. And it works all the time and it’s given all the time. Daily you see nothing but a public relations spokesperson said this or that, whatever it happens to be. And we’re just used to it, we’ve been trained to be used to this kind of thing.
Now, the elite back in the 1930s had already been studying the Soviet system intensely. They were also studying the rise of what they called Nazi Germany, or socialist Germany, National Socialism. They looked and watched these big propaganda techniques being used, and the Soviets really used it first, from the very beginning, by brute force, by the terror, the red terror which they used. They really tried that of course in the French Revolution, the reign of terror. And that’s the first thing that they do after the revolution, is to make sure people obey by simply being terrified of disobeying and the consequences and penalties it had, which were always extreme and well-publicized, which cowed everybody else into conformity.
Now, when we look too at, say, people like Aldous Huxley, the brother of Julian Huxley. Aldous Huxley had written Brave New World, and he also wrote Brave New World Revisited; in the 1950s he wrote that second one. He went through it in the scientific way, rather than a story form, to show you why such a system can be brought in, how it can be brought in, and he shows you the techniques which of course were well understood even back then in the 1930s. It’s still the same techniques today because these truths are really eternal. what works, as Plato said, in one generation, the techniques that are used to make the people do something or comply with something, can be reused over again if you use the same sequence and the format, because it’s all formula, you see. Introduce it without changes, that kind of formula, even though the topic can be different or the purpose can be different, and you will achieve the results that you want.
So in other words, humanity in itself doesn’t really change, the human mind hasn’t changed. And we’re human creatures and we share a lot of things in common. The big boys of course study us intensely through behaviorists and psychologists and neuroscientists. There’s hidden cameras; now it’s even fantastic with all the CCTV cameras everywhere on streets and cities and we’re intensely studied in every situation, for professionals who then use these techniques to manipulate us. It’s rather amazing, really. And the public have been trained now to be used to being on camera wherever they are, in cities especially, and it’s now in towns of course.
Now, this part here is in Brave New World Revisited; it’s page 54 when he talks about democracy. Now remember, these guys, as I always say, they speak with a forked tongue; they speak to their own class. And they also publish these books that anyone can read, knowing that most folk will only see the bits that they want to see and they don’t take in the bits between the lines you might say, that are of vital importance to those who are in the business of controlling nations and continents even. But he said here that…
Democratic institutions are devices for reconciling social order with individual freedom and initiative, and for making the immediate power of a country's rulers subject to the ultimate power of the ruled. (Alan: Now, that’s the ideal form of democracy he’s talking about which really hasn’t been in existence. And the little bit we had came in after World War II, as I say, a little bit after World War I under social reforms but it was more of a show. The same elite were still in power; they don’t have to get elected into power because the politicians aren’t the bosses and never have been.) The fact that, in Western Europe and America, these devices have worked (Alan: …and this was written in the 50s, remember.), all things considered, not too badly, is proof enough that the eighteenth-century optimists were not entirely wrong. Given a fair chance, human beings can govern themselves, and govern themselves better, though perhaps with less mechanical efficiency, than they can be governed by "authorities independent of their will." (Alan: And it’s true, we can be IF we have all this incredible training and indoctrination taken off our backs, and you have other economic conditions and so on.) Given a fair chance, I repeat; for the fair chance is an indispensable prerequisite. No people that passes abruptly from a state of subservience under the rule of a despot to the completely unfamiliar state of political independence can be said to have a fair chance of making democratic institutions work. Again, no people in a precarious economic condition has a fair chance of being able to govern itself democratically. (Alan: And here’s the key too, he says…) Liberalism (Alan: …and I mean old-fashioned liberalism, to speak your thoughts and your purpose of mind without being stoned by a crowd or an opposing group or something like that.) Liberalism flourishes in an atmosphere of prosperity and declines as declining prosperity makes it necessary for the government to intervene ever more frequently and drastically in the affairs of its subjects. (Alan: …and that’s very important to understand that. A little paragraph but…) Liberalism flourishes in an atmosphere of prosperity and declines as declining prosperity makes it necessary for the government to intervene ever more frequently and drastically in the affairs of its subjects.
So we’re seeing this today of course. Because the same boys that planned the Soviet revolution, they planned and they financed Nazi Germany by the way, to rise up, and they financed into being the United Nations, NATO and all the other different groups of course, and they’re still running the world today. They’re running the present wars today. These guys are still in control, and their descendants are still in control, and they have their big, big plans for the future. And they don’t plan to have a democratic society. I’ve mentioned before many times that the Club of Rome, one of their major think tanks, has stated over and over again that democracy would never work. And they have some truths on their side in that there are so many different groups now all clamoring for power and money and so on, and tax money, for more power, that they could never, ever peacefully coexist. And there are radical groups out there too on the political fringes of the different political spheres. So we know that’s true to an extent. But that’s all been encouraged, again, by the same power elite who helped to fund all these groups, in fact create them, these particular groups that are all opposing each other, to show you, to prove that democracy won’t work. It won’t work if they keep funding new radical groups that demand power and rights, and special rights, because today it’s not equal rights they’re after. Everyone who is after rights is for special rights, above the ordinary person. And that’s why they get so much funding too. And once they have their rights, the funding keeps going, so why would you keep funding them if they have their rights, etc. etc.?
These same people brought you, as I say, the free-trade idea. They’ve been on the go for a hundred years with this whole idea, pushing it and pushing it and planning it, and figuring out all the different fallouts from free-trade, including the nations that would be forced into it. The same guys drafted up the integration for Europe, a non-political party, a group actually, a private group, a club you might call it, drafted up the plans for the integration of the whole of Europe, and for the European Parliament to eventually be set up. They also drafted up the one for the NAFTA agreements, and the same boys worked on the free-trade, the transpacific partnerships, etc. etc. It’s always the same groups that put them out and they draft up the big agreements and hand it to the governments to sign. And they’ve actually admitted that in Canada in 2006 or 2007, I think it was. They admitted that when they came on television, a private group, non-elected, unknown by most of the general public, drafted all of that up.
They also, as I say, understood that with free-trade and so on that you would be de-industrialized. That was always the plan, to deindustrialize the Western countries and replace it with what they call a service economy. They talked about it in the 70s that a service economy – where you buy things, import stuff from abroad and resell them, pass them around you might say – could only survive for a limited period of time. Well, welcome to the end of the limited period of time. Because when you take just one factory for instance, one manufacturing company, and all of the subsidiary companies that supply it with different parts, etc., materials, that’s a lot of work just for one place. That’s all gone today. And the boys that brought you free-trade, and gave all your trade to China and made the deals to import all the stuff from China, knew this would happen to all of you across Europe and North America and so on. That’s the real world that we live in today. Never ever believe that they just bungle their way through and mistakes occur and they regret it after the fact. It just simply doesn’t happen. As I say, think tanks plan every piece of the strategy. They go over repercussions of all kinds and they find ways to, again, calm the people and get them over that hump, until they hit the next hump, and on it goes and on it goes.
Now, Huxley goes on to talk in Brave New World Revisited about overpopulation. His kind… I call them, their kind, because he was of a class. His brother called his class, that he belonged to, the Huxleys belonged to, the scientific elite. There was an academic elite, a scientific elite, and there also was the financial elite, and then the aristocratic elite too. So he belonged technically to the aristocratic elite and also the scientific elite. They saw the people as a mass of people, and that’s why they talk about the populations as the masses, in fact, over and over again. Their problem for a long time was to see what would happen in the future… How could they control the masses who are always pushing for more rights or democracy or something, and how could they control that and still keep power? How could they… Could you give so much freedom to the public, what would they do with it? Would they start to lose control of their own classes which they had to have the public listen to and obey all the time? Whenever you hear the famous names of the old families everyone suddenly goes into subservience; would that continue or would it not? But he goes on about overpopulation because, again, they’ve always been terrified of too many people on the planet, till eventually there simply would be too many to ever manage; that’s under their management.
Over-population and over-organization are two conditions which, as I have already pointed out, deprive a society of a fair chance of making democratic institutions work effectively. (Alan: What we have today, definitely, is the over-organization of all government departments, that expand like cancers, constantly. Whenever you create them they very quickly try to take over more powers, each one of them does, every branch does, right down to your police in fact. And the more power they take on the more indispensable they think that they are; that’s the whole idea of taking on more power.) We see, then, that there are certain historical, economic, demographic and technological conditions which make it very hard for Jefferson's rational animals (Alan: …meaning human beings…), endowed by nature with inalienable rights and an innate sense of justice, to exercise their reason, claim their rights and act justly within a democratically organized society. We in the West have been supremely fortunate in having been given our fair chance of making the great experiment in self-government. (Alan: I don’t know when that happened; I think I must’ve blinked.) Unfortunately it now looks as though, owing to recent changes in our circumstances, this infinitely precious fair chance were being, little by little, taken away from us. (Alan: Now, who, what “us” is he talking about here?) And this, of course, is not the whole story. These blind impersonal forces are not the only enemies of individual liberty and democratic institutions. There are also forces of another, less abstract character, forces that can be deliberately used by power-seeking individuals whose aim is to establish partial or complete control over their fellows. (Alan: Now that part is true. From any class whatsoever people can rise up, through bully tactics, over-shouting other peoples tactics, that kind of thing, and they tend to get immense followers, actually; and there’s reasons for that which I’ll go into as this talk goes on.)
Fifty years ago, when I was a boy, it seemed completely self-evident that the bad old days were over, that torture and massacre, slavery, and the persecution of heretics, were things of the past. Among people who wore top hats, traveled in trains, and took a bath every morning such horrors were simply out of the question. After all, we were living in the twentieth century. A few years later these people who took daily baths and went to church in top hats were committing atrocities on a scale undreamed of by the benighted Africans and Asiatics. In the light of recent history it would be foolish to suppose that this sort of thing cannot happen again. It can and, no doubt, it will. But in the immediate future there is some reason to believe that the punitive methods of 1984 will give place to the reinforcements and manipulations of Brave New World.
In Brave New World they called it ‘a painless imprisonment,’ where you would be drugged, you had massive constant propaganda, to keep you in a state of limbo, of emotional limbo, just be fairly contented regardless of the conditions you were actually living in. And that’s what we’re getting today in a sense. As we go down the tubes for years now they keep telling us how good it is, and keep giving us happy little things on the news even. They had meetings in the US and Canada about that. Rather than give them all bad news, meaning the realistic news, they would give you all the little trivial things that have got nothing to do with reality, or your life in fact. Now it says here in the book too…
But in the immediate future there is some reason to believe that the punitive methods of 1984 will give place to the reinforcements and manipulations of Brave New World. (Alan: The techniques would be all used on the general population.)
There are two kinds of propaganda -- rational propaganda in favor of action that is consonant with the enlightened self-interest of those who make it and those to whom it is addressed, and non-rational propaganda that is not consonant with anybody's enlightened self-interest, but is dictated by, and appeals to, passions, blind impulses, unconscious cravings or fears. (Alan: And they understood enough back then of the human mind. Believe you me, they understood the human mind all right, of the primitive part that’s in all human nature. He says…) …blind impulses, unconscious cravings or fears. Where the actions of individuals are concerned there are motives more exalted than enlightened self-interest, but where collective action has to be taken in the fields of politics and economics, enlightened self-interest is probably the highest of effective motives. If politicians and their constituents always acted to promote their own or their country's long-range self-interest, this world would be an earthly paradise. As it is, they often act against their own interests, merely to gratify their least creditable passions; the world, in consequence, is a place of misery. Propaganda in favor of action that is consonant with enlightened self-interest appeals to reason by means of logical arguments based upon the best available evidence fully and honestly set forth. (Alan: And that’s propaganda that comes along to try and persuade you of what’s the best, or better things, or course of action to take. They call it ‘nudging’ as well; even on your computers, the computer actually will try to nudge you to look at particular stories and things like that. That’s to make sure that you have the proper indoctrination as you think you’re just passing your time.) Propaganda in favor of action dictated by the impulses that are below self-interest offers false, garbled or incomplete evidence, avoids logical argument and seeks to influence its victims by the mere repetition of catchwords (Alan: …slogans and so on…), by the furious denunciation of foreign or domestic scapegoats, and by cunningly associating the lowest passions with the highest ideals, so that atrocities are perpetrated in the name of God and the most cynical kind of Realpolitik becomes a matter of religious principle and patriotic duty. (Alan: In other words, authoritarian in a sense.)
In John Dewey's words, "a renewal of faith in common human nature, in its potentialities in general, and in its power in particular to respond to reason and truth, is a surer bulwark against totalitarianism than a demonstration of material success or a devout worship of special legal and political forms." The power to respond to reason and truth exists in all of us. But so, unfortunately, does the tendency to respond to unreason and falsehood -- particularly in those cases where the falsehood evokes some enjoyable emotion, or where the appeal to unreason strikes some answering chord in the primitive, subhuman depths of our being. In certain fields of activity men have learned to respond to reason and truth pretty consistently. The authors of learned articles do not appeal to the passions of their fellow scientists and technologists. They set forth what, to the best of their knowledge, is the truth about some particular aspect of reality, they use reason to explain the facts they have observed and they support their point of view with arguments that appeal to reason in other people.
So he’s talking about the difference between using reason to persuade. But again too, he’s always hinting, and telling you actually, that only the intellectual can understand and respond to reason. And he’s trying to tell you that the more primitive people will respond to passions, blind passions and lose their individuality in the herd, as they say. And that technically is a truth as well. But also too, there has to be a truth to appeal to the herd in the first place to stir them up in one way or another. Something has to be… They can’t just constantly tell lies to them and yell at them. If you’re trying to stir them up you have to respond to things which they’re actually talking about and complaining about, obviously. But this, again, is what Jefferson said…
"If a nation expects to be ignorant and free," said Jefferson, "it expects what never was and never will be. . . . The people cannot be safe without information. Where the press is free, and every man able to read, all is safe." (Alan: Now that’s not really true either because we know there are self-interested groups of people who can be awfully wealthy, even collectively or individually or both, and they can put incredible amounts of money and take parts of the press over. And you still think it is free but you’re getting someone else’s self-interested thoughts put into yours basically, and their spins on things as well. So even if the government steps out of the way you’ve got private organizations and groups to think about too. He says…) . . . The people cannot be safe without information.” Across the Atlantic another passionate believer in reason was thinking about the same time, in almost precisely similar terms. Here is what John Stuart Mill wrote of his father, the utilitarian philosopher, James Mill: "So complete was his reliance upon the influence of reason over the minds of mankind, whenever it is allowed to reach them, that he felt as if all would be gained, if the whole population were able to read, and if all sorts of opinions were allowed to be addressed to them by word or in writing, and if by the suffrage they could nominate a legislature to give effect to the opinions they had adopted." All is safe, all would be gained! Once more we hear the note of eighteenth-century optimism. Jefferson, it is true, was a realist as well as an optimist. He knew by bitter experience that the freedom of the press can be shamefully abused. (Alan: …and that’s true, as I say, by special groups and so on.) "Nothing," he declared, "can now be believed which is seen in a newspaper." (Alan: …and that was at the present time that he lived in! Everything back then, in Jefferson’s day, was propaganda.) And yet, he insisted (and we can only agree with him), "within the pale of truth, the press is a noble institution, equally the friend of science and civil liberty." Mass communication, in a word, is neither good nor bad; it is simply a force and, like any other force, it can be used either well or ill. Used in one way, the press, radio and the cinema are indispensable to the survival of democracy. Used in another way, they are among the most powerful weapons in the dictator's armory. (Alan: Now remember too, what applies to a dictator can apply to an oligarchy as well, who simply run government, generation after generation.) In the field of mass communications as in almost every other field of enterprise, technological progress has hurt the Little Man and helped the Big Man. As lately as fifty years ago, every democratic country could boast of a great number of small journals and local newspapers. Thousands of country editors expressed thousands of independent opinions. Somewhere or other almost anybody could get almost anything printed. Today the press is still legally free (Alan: …and this is back in the 1950s...) but most of the little papers have disappeared.
Now, I’ve gone through the big private institution that’s got a lot to do with this, the Royal Institute of International Affairs – and the Council on Foreign Relations which is the same branch for America and other parts of the world – and how the Rockefellers who ran them, they helped start it up in the States, the US branch, and they also monopolized industry, also monopolized the media. They brought in top experts to do surveys, to do their statistics and studies and all the rest of it in think tanks, and they found that if they could control, at that time, only 30 newspapers across the whole of the US or North America then all the other papers would follow and copy what they said. So as I say, you cannot be utopian about anything because believe you me, there are always other parties with their own particular self-interests who have their own particular agendas, and don’t want the public to be free to read any bit of real true news that happens to be obtained. Huxley goes on to say in regards to propaganda…
In regard to propaganda the early advocates of universal literacy and a free press envisaged only two possibilities: the propaganda might be true, or it might be false. They did not foresee what in fact has happened, above all in our Western capitalist democracies -- the development of a vast mass communications industry, concerned in the main neither with the true nor the false, but with the unreal, the more or less totally irrelevant. In a word, they failed to take into account man's almost infinite appetite for distractions. (Alan: Actually there was a group that did certainly not forget that, and supplied them. That’s the culture industry of course. Because they well understood from ancient Greek philosophy and so on that if you put people in the cities you must give them lots of entertainment. Because even back then the city-state was an artificial creation; they couldn’t produce anything; everything was brought into it.)
In the past most people never got a chance of fully satisfying this appetite. (Alan: …for entertainment that is.) They might long for distractions, but the distractions were not provided. Christmas came but once a year, feasts were "solemn and rare," there were few readers and very little to read, and the nearest approach to a neighborhood movie theater was the parish church, where the performances, though frequent, were somewhat monotonous. For conditions even remotely comparable to those now prevailing we must return to imperial Rome, where the populace was kept in good humor by frequent, gratuitous doses of many kinds of entertainment -- from poetical dramas to gladiatorial fights, from recitations of Virgil to all-out boxing, from concerts to military reviews and public executions. But even in Rome there was nothing like the non-stop distraction now provided by newspapers and magazines, by radio, television and the cinema (Alan: …movies.). In Brave New World non-stop distractions of the most fascinating nature (the feelies (Alan: …as he called them…), orgy-porgy (Alan: …they’ve got lots of sex and so on…), centrifugal bumble-puppy) are deliberately used as instruments of policy, for the purpose of preventing people from paying too much attention to the realities of the social and political situation. (Alan: As you go down the tubes, in other words, as I was saying, financially, economically, you get more and more, cheap, cheap, cheap, never-ending entertainment, just churned out like machines churn them out.) The other world of religion is different from the other world of entertainment; but they resemble one another in being most decidedly "not of this world." Both are distractions and, if lived in too continuously, both can become, in Marx's phrase, "the opium of the people" and so a threat to freedom. Only the vigilant can maintain their liberties, and only those who are constantly and intelligently on the spot can hope to govern themselves effectively by democratic procedures. A society, most of whose members spend a great part of their time, not on the spot, not here and now and in the calculable future, but somewhere else, in the irrelevant other worlds of sport and soap opera, of mythology and metaphysical fantasy, will find it hard to resist the encroachments of those who would manipulate and control it.
In their propaganda today's dictators rely for the most part on repetition, suppression and rationalization -- the repetition of catchwords which they wish to be accepted as true (Alan: …and that goes for all the movements that you hear, and special interest groups, they all have their catchwords and phrases and so on.), the suppression of facts which they wish to be ignored, the arousal and rationalization of passions which may be used in the interests of the Party or the State. (Alan: They use that for war, you know; you find that Saddam Hussein was supposedly bayoneting babies in their incubators, when they invaded Kuwait, and all that nonsense. But it works every time.) As the art and science of manipulation come to be better understood, the dictators of the future will doubtless learn to combine these techniques with the non-stop distractions which, in the West, are now threatening to drown in a sea of irrelevance the rational propaganda essential to the maintenance of individual liberty and the survival of democratic institutions.
Now here you find that Huxley goes on to talk about the Nazi tyranny of Germany in the 30s and 40s. He never goes into so much the propaganda techniques that were learned by them, from the Soviets because Hitler studied them awfully well and they had lots of communications and go-betweens and advice from the Soviets in their early days, remember. So the truth is the truth regardless of who uses it. It says…
At his trial after the Second World War, Hitler's Minister for Armaments, Albert Speer, delivered a long speech in which, with remarkable acuteness, he described the Nazi tyranny and analyzed its methods. "Hitler's dictatorship," he said, "differed in one fundamental point from all its predecessors in history. It was the first dictatorship in the present period of modern technical development, a dictatorship which made complete use of all technical means for the domination of its own country. Through technical devices like the radio and the loud-speaker, eighty million people were deprived of independent thought. It was thereby possible to subject them to the will of one man. . . . (Alan: Now remember too, there has to be a problem there to begin with to even get the people to listen to you; and he kind of glosses over that.) Earlier dictators needed highly qualified assistants even at the lowest level -- men who could think and act independently. The totalitarian system in the period of modern technical development can dispense with such men; thanks to modern methods of communication, it is possible to mechanize the lower leadership. (Alan: And here’s what he sees about mechanization of the lower leadership…) As a result of this there has arisen the new type of the uncritical recipient of orders." (Alan: And that is really what you find in all, when tyrannies come in, those who do all the nasty, dirty, dirty jobs and are put on trial later say I was just doing my job; they are the recipient of orders, the obedient uncritical recipient.)
In the Brave New World of my prophetic fable, technology had advanced far beyond the point it had reached in Hitler's day; consequently the recipients of orders were far less critical than their Nazi counterparts, far more obedient to the order-giving elite. Moreover, they had been genetically standardized (Alan: …that’s eugenics coming into it.) and postnatally conditioned to perform their subordinate functions, and could therefore be depended upon to behave almost as predictably as machines. (Alan: They were specially bred in incubators basically, and churned out, mass-produced people in different classes for different functions. That’s what they call ‘the division of labor’ but here they use eugenics to do it.) As we shall see in a later chapter, this conditioning of "the lower leadership" is already going on under the Communist dictatorships. The Chinese and the Russians are not relying merely on the indirect effects of advancing technology; they are working directly on the psycho-physical organisms of their lower leaders, subjecting minds and bodies to a system of ruthless and, from all accounts, highly effective conditioning. "Many a man," said Speer, "has been haunted by the nightmare that one day nations might be dominated by technical means. That nightmare was almost realized in Hitler's totalitarian system." Almost, but not quite. The Nazis did not have time -- and perhaps did not have the intelligence and the necessary knowledge -- to brainwash and condition their lower leadership. (Alan: ...completely.) This, it may be, is one of the reasons why they failed. (Alan: So in other words, a technique which could brainwash everyone right down the ladder, to the very bottom, would be far more effective.
Since Hitler's day the armory of technical devices at the disposal of the would-be dictator has been considerably enlarged. As well as the radio, the loudspeaker, the moving picture camera (Alan: …the movies…) and the rotary press, the contemporary propagandist can make use of television to broadcast the image as well as the voice of his client, and can record both image and voice on spools of magnetic tape. Thanks to technological progress, Big Brother can now be almost as omnipresent as God. (Alan: And it’s true, you see the pictures everywhere in the movies, for instance, of 1984, of Big Brother.) . . . Since Hitler's day a great deal of work has been carried out in those fields of applied psychology and neurology which are the special province of the propagandist, the indoctrinator and the brainwasher.
Remember too, your cameras and all that that you’re being used to seeing everywhere, are part of this technique too. You’re simply not seeing the face of Big Brother. What you’re seeing is basically his eye, his camera; it has the same effect on you subconsciously. You’re being watched everywhere you go and your behavior will alter. They’ve done a lot of, again, secretly recorded documentaries on people’s behavior changing when they know they’re on camera being watched in the streets and so on and so on and so on. So subconsciously you’re all being trained, and it works very, very effectively without the picture of Big Brother staring at you. The camera is Big Brother, the system. He goes on to talk about these guys who helped to indoctrinate you and change your minds and prompt you and so on…
In the past these specialists in the art of changing people's minds were empiricists. By a method of trial and error they had worked out a number of techniques and procedures, which they used very effectively without, however, knowing precisely why they were effective. Today the art of mind-control is in the process of becoming a science. (Alan: Well, it has since then. Incredible tax money has gone into this kind of thing, into the top research to find out all about how we tick and how we think and how we come to our conclusions and so on. In fact, most of the conclusions you have are not yours today.) The practitioners of this science know what they are doing and why. They are guided in their work by theories and hypotheses solidly established on a massive foundation of experimental evidence. Thanks to the new insights and the new techniques made possible by these insights, the nightmare that was "all but realized in Hitler's totalitarian system" may soon be completely realizable.
But before we discuss these new insights and techniques let us take a look at the nightmare that so nearly came true in Nazi Germany. What were the methods used by Hitler and Goebbels for "depriving eighty million people of independent thought and subjecting them to the will of one man"? And what was the theory of human nature upon which those terrifyingly successful methods were based? These questions can be answered, for the most part, in Hitler's own words. And what remarkably clear and astute words they are! When he writes about such vast abstractions as Race and History and Providence, Hitler is strictly unreadable. But when he writes about the German masses and the methods he used for dominating and directing them, his style changes. Nonsense gives place to sense, bombast to a hard-boiled and cynical lucidity. In his philosophical lucubrations Hitler was either cloudily daydreaming or reproducing other people's half-baked notions. In his comments on crowds and propaganda he was writing of things he knew by firsthand experience. In the words of his ablest biographer, Mr. Alan Bullock, "Hitler was the greatest demagogue in history." Those who add, "only a demagogue," fail to appreciate the nature of political power in an age of mass politics. As he himself said, "To be a leader means to be able to move the masses." Hitler's aim was first to move the masses and then, having pried them loose from their traditional loyalties and moralities, to impose upon them (with the hypnotized consent of the majority) a new authoritarian order of his own devising. "Hitler," wrote Hermann Rauschning in 1939, "has a deep respect for the Catholic church and the Jesuit order; not because of their Christian doctrine, but because of the 'machinery' they have elaborated and controlled, their hierarchical system, their extremely clever tactics, their knowledge of human nature and their wise use of human weaknesses in ruling over believers." Ecclesiasticism without Christianity, the discipline of a monastic rule, not for God's sake or in order to achieve personal salvation, but for the sake of the State and for the greater glory and power of the demagogue turned Leader -- this was the goal toward which the systematic moving of the masses was to lead.
. . . The first principle from which he started was a value judgment: the masses are utterly contemptible. They are incapable of abstract thinking and uninterested in any fact outside the circle of their immediate experience. Their behavior is determined, not by knowledge and reason, but by feelings and unconscious drives. It is in these drives and feelings that "the roots of their positive as well as their negative attitudes are implanted." To be successful a propagandist must learn how to manipulate these instincts and emotions. "The driving force which has brought about the most tremendous revolutions on this earth has never been a body of scientific teaching which has gained power over the masses, but always a devotion which has inspired them, and often a kind of hysteria which has urged them into action. Whoever wishes to win over the masses must know the key that will open the door of their hearts." . . .
Hitler made his strongest appeal to those members of the lower middle classes who had been ruined by the inflation of 1923, (Alan: And that was a deliberate inflation of course. When Germany lost World War I in 1918, at least that’s how it ended up being, and there was a revolution that started within Germany too of communism, then of course they had the big convention and then the big treaty was signed and so on. But Germany had to pay massive reparations which brought on incredible inflation. And in 1929 of course too they also had the depression starting. So they already had massive inflation, then a depression.), and then ruined all over again by the depression of 1929 and the following years. "The masses" of whom he speaks were these bewildered, frustrated and chronically anxious millions. To make them more masslike, more homogeneously subhuman, he assembled them, by the thousands and the tens of thousands, in vast halls and arenas, where individuals could lose their personal identity, even their elementary humanity, and be merged with the crowd. (Alan: The same techniques, by the way, that are well understood in the music industry, and big halls, and outside and indoor concerts, huge, huge things, where folk become hysterical but they’re guided by the manipulators of course, not just on stage but those around them too. Lights, etc., all these techniques are used upon them to get a kind of behavior out of them. But they definitely lose their individuality, as you know. You find the same thing happens when there’s been a mass excitement, preceded by great advertising on a super sale somewhere, and they crowd in and they even stamp over each other in the rush. Normally they wouldn’t do that, naturally, but when they become a crowd they lose their individuality.)
A man or woman makes direct contact with society in two ways: as a member of some familial, professional or religious group, or as a member of a crowd. (Alan: …and that’s so important.) Groups are capable of being as moral and intelligent as the individuals who form them; a crowd is chaotic, has no purpose of its own and is capable of anything except intelligent action and realistic thinking. Assembled in a crowd, people lose their powers of reasoning and their capacity for moral choice. Their suggestibility is increased to the point where they cease to have any judgment or will of their own. They become very excitable, they lose all sense of individual or collective responsibility, they are subject to sudden accesses of rage, enthusiasm and panic; in a word, a man in a crowd behaves as though he had swallowed a large dose of some powerful intoxicant. He is a victim of what I have called "herd-poisoning." (Alan: It’s also called ‘collective poisoning’. And it’s also called ‘collective contamination’; the Communists called it that.) Like alcohol, herd-poison is an active, extraverted drug. The crowd-intoxicated individual escapes from responsibility, intelligence and morality into a kind of frantic, animal mindlessness. (Alan: …which you all know as mass hysteria.)
During his long career as an agitator, Hitler had studied the effects of herd-poisoning (Alan: …or collectivism, the collective mindset you might say.) and had learned how to exploit them for his own purposes. He had discovered that the orator can appeal to those "hidden forces" which motivate men's actions, much more effectively than can the writer. Reading is a private, not a collective activity. (Alan: So is thinking of course.) The writer speaks only to individuals, sitting by themselves in a state of normal sobriety. The orator speaks to masses of individuals, already well primed with herd-poison. (Alan: …they’re conditioned for it.) They are at his mercy and, if he knows his business, he can do what he likes with them. As an orator, Hitler knew his business supremely well. He was able, in his own words, "to follow the lead of the great mass in such a way that from the living emotion of his hearers the apt word which he needed would be suggested to him and in its turn this would go straight to the heart of his hearers." (Alan: So he could convey emotion straight to them you might say.) Otto Strasser called him "a loud-speaker, proclaiming the most secret desires, the least admissible instincts, the sufferings and personal revolts of a whole nation." Twenty years before Madison Avenue embarked upon "Motivational Research," (Alan: …as we know, behaviorism is part of it in marketing.) Hitler was systematically exploring and exploiting the secret fears and hopes, the cravings, anxieties and frustrations of the German masses. It is by manipulating "hidden forces" that the advertising experts induce us to buy their wares -- a toothpaste, a brand of cigarettes, a political candidate (Alan: …or whatever.). And it is by appealing to the same hidden forces -- and to others too dangerous for Madison Avenue to meddle with -- that Hitler induced the German masses to buy themselves a Fuehrer, an insane philosophy and the Second World War. (Alan: But again too, there had to be a basis for it. It would never have happened if it wasn’t for this massive inflation and then massive depression, and again massive immigration coming in during the depression too and they felt like they were all losing their home basically or their country even. So it all worked together for the man to come along and say all these things and agitate them and become the leader. It was like an accident waiting to happen you might say.)
Unlike the masses, intellectuals have a taste for rationality and an interest in facts. (Alan: Remember too, the Huxleys were incredible snobs but they also spoke a lot of truth because they sat in on all these big top think tanks and world meetings.) Their critical habit of mind makes them resistant to the kind of propaganda that works so well on the majority. Among the masses "instinct is supreme, and from instinct comes faith. . . . While the healthy common folk instinctively close their ranks to form a community of the people" (under a Leader, it goes without saying) "intellectuals run this way and that, like hens in a poultry yard. With them one cannot make history; they cannot be used as elements composing a community." Intellectuals are the kind of people who demand evidence and are shocked by logical inconsistencies and fallacies. They regard over-simplification as the original sin of the mind and have no use for the slogans, the unqualified assertions and sweeping generalizations which are the propagandist's stock in trade. "All effective propaganda," Hitler wrote, "must be confined to a few bare necessities and then must be expressed in a few stereotyped formulas." These stereotyped formulas must be constantly repeated, for "only constant repetition will finally succeed in imprinting an idea upon the memory of a crowd."
Such as for instance, you have weapons of mass destruction… etc. etc., over and over again. You must remember too, that the leader doesn’t have to be incredibly, highly, what we call, educated or even intelligent. But he can be wiry and wily, a very wily person who is streetwise in a sense, who understands these things innately. We know that psychopaths have the same ability; they have that very, very well. And they can read people’s minds. They can read the feelings of individuals, or crowds, and they can manipulate the masses quite easily too if they put their mind to it and they have something to benefit or self-gain for themselves. But the sad truth is too, that an intellectual is often neglected by the people. And the person that is seen as the man of action, who is loud, bombastic, etc., is the person they will follow, often to their detriment. But it says here…
In Hitler's words, the propagandist should adopt "a systematically one-sided attitude towards every problem that has to be dealt with." He must never admit that he might be wrong or that people with a different point of view might be even partially right. Opponents should not be argued with; they should be attacked, shouted down, or, if they become too much of a nuisance, liquidated. The morally squeamish intellectual may be shocked by this kind of thing. But the masses are always convinced that "right is on the side of the active aggressor." (Alan: …very important to understand that. And Huxley went on to say that…)
The survival of democracy depends on the ability of large numbers of people to make realistic choices in the light of adequate information. A dictatorship, on the other hand, maintains itself by censoring or distorting the facts, and by appealing, not to reason, not to enlightened self-interest, but to passion and prejudice, to the powerful "hidden forces," . . .
Now remember, that equally applies to oligarchies IN democracies, that run democracies, because you’re seeing all of these techniques used today… Constant repetition, withholding of all points of view, and all the facts. I’ve never ever seen all the facts presented on anything, any argument, put out by the press. You’re always told what to believe and what opinion to conclude; it’s given to you basically, you’re led to it, you’re guided to it, again, scientifically through the way it’s put out, in psycho- or neuro-linguistics as they call it now. So I’ve never seen it. And the big boys today don’t believe they’re ever going to allow you to have what they call real democracy. Democracy isn’t looking around for somebody else you’ve missed out to elevate up to a special position, some tiny, tiny fringe of a minority, or even the cut-off fringe of a fringe of a fringe of a minority – and that’s how bad it’s getting today. That’s not what democracy is. That’s the pretense of what democracy is. Democracy is supposed to be for everyone, literally everyone, and that means even those collectively, who are the majority, in any particular democracy, to have their say just the same as everyone else, and their beliefs and their opinions too. We don’t have that and it looks like we never shall have it, today, with the techniques being used upon the public, on all of us.
Now, Huxley also talks about the incredible strides that advertising and marketing have taken, because they’re able to go so far today, especially, even back then, because of their understanding of commerce and persuading people to buy, whether it’s a political party or whatever. They exploit the subconscious fears and sell you promises and hope. The same thing is done when an economy goes bad; the politicians use the same techniques and when they go for election they always talk about the same things, jobs and so on and so on, the basic fears of the public. But we all have fears built into us because we’re human, and these are exploited to the maximum, by all parties, whether it’s political or advertising or marketing companies for big corporations. He talks about, for instance, the simple – for many, many years – simple lanolin was used for facial cream for women. Lanolin comes from sheep; it’s from wool fat and water which they beat up into an emulsion, and you can give it all the fancy names you want. But here’s what he says…
They give it some picturesquely voluptuous name, talk ecstatically and misleadingly about feminine beauty and show pictures of gorgeous blondes nourishing their tissues with skin food. (Alan: In other words, very young.) "The cosmetic manufacturers," one of their number has written, "are not selling lanolin, they are selling hope." For this hope, this fraudulent implication of a promise that they will be transfigured, women will pay ten or twenty times the value of the emulsion which the propagandists have so skilfully related, by means of misleading symbols, to a deep-seated and almost universal feminine wish -- the wish to be more attractive to members of the opposite sex. The principles underlying this kind of propaganda are extremely simple. Find some common desire, (Alan: It can be sexual, whatever it is…) some widespread unconscious fear or anxiety; think out some way to relate this wish or fear to the product you have to sell; then build a bridge of verbal or pictorial symbols over which your customer can pass from fact to compensatory dream, and from the dream to the illusion that your product, when purchased, will make the dream come true. "We no longer buy oranges, we buy vitality. We do not buy just an auto, we buy prestige." And so with all the rest. In toothpaste, for example, we buy, not a mere cleanser and antiseptic, but release from the fear of being sexually repulsive. In vodka and whisky we are not buying a protoplasmic poison which in small doses, may depress the nervous system in a psychologically valuable way; we are buying friendliness and good fellowship, (Alan: …and you’re also buying party time and sex too; that’s how they advertise it.) the warmth of Dingley Dell and the brilliance of the Mermaid Tavern. With our laxatives we buy the health of a Greek god (Alan: …and not just a laxative… [Alan chuckles.]), the radiance of one of Diana's nymphs. With the monthly best seller we acquire culture, the envy of our less literate neighbors and the respect of the sophisticated. In every case the motivation analyst has found some deep-seated wish or fear, whose energy can be used to move the consumer to part with cash and so, indirectly, to turn the wheels of industry. Stored in the minds and bodies of countless individuals, this potential energy is released by, and transmitted along, a line of symbols carefully laid out so as to bypass rationality and obscure the real issue. (Alan: And that’s what visual advertising is too. It’s all symbolic of something. It sells you a symbol, of health, beauty, whatever it happens to be.)
Sometimes the symbols take effect by being disproportionately impressive, haunting and fascinating in their own right. Of this kind are the rites and pomps of religion. These "beauties of holiness" strengthen faith where it already exists and, where there is no faith, contribute to conversion. Appealing, as they do, only to the aesthetic sense, (Alan: So they’re talking about ritualistic visual signs and so on, and parades.) they guarantee neither the truth nor the ethical value of the doctrines with which they have been, quite arbitrarily, associated. As a matter of plain historical fact, the beauties of holiness have often been matched and indeed surpassed by the beauties of unholiness. Under Hitler, for example, the yearly Nuremberg rallies were masterpieces of ritual and theatrical art.
Of course we saw the same thing with Red Square in the Soviet Union too, massive pageants and the rolling of the massive armaments industry, and again, the masses, the masses marching in step, of men who had lost their individuality by being in the military. That’s one of the first things that the military teaches you, is that you’re not an individual anymore. So you find that it’s been well understood, well used. It works awfully well on the subconscious and very few folk can fail to be impressed in some way or another by these mass demonstrations, which the state is perfectly aware work so well on the people.
So I’ve always tried to make people think for themselves. And don’t just attack religion either, by the way, because remember, man is a spiritual creature in some way or another. He’s always asking all the questions as to the whys of things, and often the whys we’re given simply aren’t enough. We have to look further. But remember too, as they said too, Jesus said, the kingdom of God is within you. In other words, you have to look for it yourself. He’s not talking to a crowd; he’s not saying it’s in all of you. He’s saying, he’s telling you there’s a path to thinking and finding out the answers for yourself. And I think that’s the only way any of these particular religions can possibly work, is thinking for yourselves, on your own path, and not simply taking all the precepts of a religion, all the doctrines and believing in them because you’re told to, even the things that don’t make sense to you; that’s rather silly of course.
So remember, think for yourselves on every possible thing, be careful what you buy, and don’t keep buying promises. Today too, the advertiser, even in pharmaceuticals, and even in the herbal industry, use the same techniques of giving you a lot of promises of utopia in you, that simply never come true. Whatever they’re going to sell you, it’s all basically based on hope, and they’re very expensive too.
Remember too and think about everything that you read and hear and you see. Think very, very carefully. Don’t simply take anything at face value, especially the media, or any of the stories that are certainly put out today by the media on some war or whatever. They’re all much the same, they never tell you the truth, NEVER tell you the truth of the wars being economic wars. And it’s not for countries to benefit, it’s for the big private international corporations that form the present new international feudal system along with the very old, old aristocracies, etc. You cannot believe anything that they tell you today. The people have always been useful idiots and it’s always from the bottom ranks that they get the masses into their big militaries, the cannon fodder, the pawns in the game. And nothing has changed from thousands of years ago to the present time on that matter. You take home your little gold tin medal at the end of it and that’s you, whether you lost a leg or whatever, or even your hope for living. It doesn’t matter, you’ve done what you were paid to do and that’s all you were paid to do. The big corporations end up with the resources that you helped to acquire for them, on their behalf, by using the taxpayers’ money of course. Nothing changes. It’s a disgusting system. And it’s far, far from democracy. And personally I cannot see democracy ever coming in because you’ll always have those organizations, powerful organizations with incredible amounts of wealth, that can network together, take over whole areas of information, and eventually even education, and indoctrinate all of you.
It’s a very difficult thing to find the truth today and you’ve got to leave no stone unturned. As I say too, remember that the West and big powerful bankers in the West financed the rise of the Soviets and also the rise of Adolf Hitler too. Don’t forget that all the so-called tyrants that we’ve been knocking down across the Middle East and Asia were put in by the West and they were their boys for a long, long time. The only problem is, the West wanted eventually all the resources, and of course there were other reasons too, by other outside countries that were highly interested in those particular regions, that are very powerful and very, very wealthy indeed too. So there’s always much, much more to something than is put across in the simplistic one-sided propaganda that we’re given.
From Hamish and myself from Ontario, Canada, it’s good night and may your God or your gods go with you.
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cuttingthroughthematrix.com and alanwattsentientsentinel.eu
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