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But it is an addiction that {brainwashes} you. There are two kinds of brainwashing. The one that’s called {hard} brainwashing is the type you’re most familiar with. You’ve got a pretty good image of it from some of those old Korean war movies. They take some guy, an American patriot, drag him into a room, torture him, pump him full of drugs, and after a struggle, get him to renounce his country and his beliefs. He usually undergoes a personality change, signified by an ever-present smile and blank stare.
This brainwashing is called {hard} because its methods are overt. The controlled environment is obvious to the victim; so is the terror. The victim is overwhelmed by a seemingly omnipotent external force, and a feeling of intense isolation is induced. The victim’s moral strength is sapped, and slowly he embraces his torturers.
It is man’s moral strength that informs and orders his power of reason; without it, the mind becomes little more than a recording machine waiting for imprints.
No one is saying that you have been a victim of {hard} brainwashing. But you have been brainwashed, just as effectively as those people in the movies. The blank stare? Did you ever look at what you look like while watching television? If the angle is right, you might catch your own reflection in the screen. Jaw slightly open, lips relaxed into a smile. The blank stare of a television zombie. This is {soft} brainwashing, even more effective because its victims go about their lives unaware of what is being done to them.
Television, with its reach into nearly every American home, creates the basis for the mass brainwashing of citizens, like you.
It works on a principle of {tension and release}. Create tension, in a controlled environment, increasing the level of stress. Then provide a series of choices that provide release from the tension.
As long as the victim believes that the choices presented are the {only} choices available, even if they are at first glance unacceptable, he will nevertheless, ultimately seek release by choosing one of these unacceptable choices.
Under these circumstances, in a brainwashing, controlled environment, such choice-making is not a “rational” experience. It does not involve the use of man’s creative mental powers; instead man is conditioned, like an animal, to respond to the tension, by seeking release.
The key to the success of this brainwashing process is the regulation of both the tension and the perceived choices. As long as both are controlled, then the range of outcomes is also controlled. The victim is induced to walk down one of several pathways acceptable for his controllers. The brainwashers call the tension-filled environment {social turbulence}.
The last decades have been full of such {social turbulence}–economic collapse, regional wars, population disasters, ecological and biological catastrophes. {Social turbulence} creates crises in perceptions, causing people to lose their bearings.
Adrift and confused, people seek release from the tension, following paths that appear to lead to a simpler, less tension-filled life. There is no time in such a process for rational consideration of complicated problems. Television is the key vehicle for presenting both the tension and the choices. It brings you the images of the tension, and serves up simple answers…
Television, in its world of semi-reality, of illusion, of escape from reality, {is itself the single most important release from our tension-wracked existence.} Eight hours a day, every day, through its programming, you are being programmed.
If you doubt me, think about one important choice that you have made recently that was not in some way influenced by something that you have seen on television. I bet you can’t think of one. That’s how controlled you are.
Who’s Doing It?
But don’t take my word for it. Ten years ago we spoke to a man from a think tank called the Futures Group in Connecticut. Hal Becker had spent more than 20 years of his life manipulating the minds of the leaders of our society.
Listen to what he said:
“I know the secret of making the average American believe anything I want him to. Just let me control television. Americans are wired into their television sets. Over the last 30 years, they have come to look at their television sets and the images on the screen as reality. You put something on television and it becomes reality. If the world outside the television set contradicts the images, people start changing the world to make it more like the images and sounds of their television.
“Because its influence is so great, so pervasive, it has become part of our lives. You lose your sense of what is being done to you, but your mind is being shaped and moulded.”
“Your mind is being shaped and moulded.”
If that doesn’t sound like brainwashing, I don’t know what does. Becker speaks with the elan of a network of brainwashers who have been programming your lives, especially since the advent of television as a “mass medium” in the late 1940s and early 1950s.
This network numbers several tens of thousands worldwide. Occasionally one appears on the nightly news to tell you what {you} are thinking, by reporting the latest “opinion polls.” But for the most part, they work behind the scenes, speaking to themselves and writing papers for their own internal distribution. And though they work for many diverse groups, these brainwashers are united by a common world view and common method.
It is the world view of a small elite, whose financial and political power rests in institutions that pass this power on from generation to generation.
They view the common folk like yourself as little better than beasts of burden to be controlled and manipulated by a semi-feudal international oligarchy, whose wealth, power and bloodlines entitle them to rule.
One of the oligarchy’s institutions for manipulation of populations is located in a suburb of London called Tavistock. The Tavistock Institute for Human Relations, which also has a branch in Sussex, England, is the “mother” for much of this extended network, of which Becker is a member. They are the specialists in {both} hard and soft brainwashing.
“Soft” brainwashing by television works through power of suggestion. Television watching creates a state of drugged-like oblivion to outside reality. The mind, its perceptions dulled by habituated viewing, is ready to accept any new illusion of reality as presented on the tube. The mind, in its drugged-like stupor of television watching, is prepared to accept that the images that television {suggests} as reality {are} reality. It will then struggle to form fit a contradictory reality into television image, just as Becker claims.
Another Tavistock brainwasher, Fred Emery, who studied television for 25 years, confirms this. The television signal itself, he found, puts the viewer in this state of drugged-like oblivion. Emery writes:
“Television as a media consists of a constant visual signal of 50 half-frames per second. Our hypotheses regarding this essential nature of the medium itself are:
1) The constant visual stimulus fixates the viewer and causes the habituation of response. The prefrontal and association areas of the cortex are effectively dominated by the signal, the screen.
2) The left cortical hemisphere–the center of visual and analytical calculating processes–is effectively reduced in its functioning to tracking changing images on the screen.
3) Therefore, provided, the viewer keeps looking, he is unlikely to reflect on what he is doing and what he is viewing. That is, he will be aware, but unaware of his awareness….
“In other words, television can be seen partly as the technological analogue of the hypnotist.”
The key to making the brainwashing work is the {repetition of suggestion} over time. With people watching the tube for 6 to 8 hours a day, there is plenty of time for such repeated suggestion.
Some Examples
Let’s look at an example to make things a bit clearer. Think back about 20 years ago. Think about what you thought about certain issues of the day. Think about those same issues today; notice how you seemed to change {your} mind about them, to become more tolerant of things you opposed vehemently before.
It’s your television watching that changed your mind, or to use Becker’s terms, “shaped your perceptions.”
Twenty years ago, most people thought that the lunacy that is now called environmentalism, the idea that animals and plants should be protected on an equal basis with human life, was screwy. It went against the basic concept of Christian civilization that man is a higher species than and distinct from the animals, and that it is man, by virtue of his being made in the image of the living God, whose life is sacred.
That was 20 years ago. But now, many people, maybe even you, seem to think otherwise; there are even laws that say so. This contrary, anti-human view of man being no more than equal to animals and plants was inserted into our consciousness by the suggestion of television.
Environmental lunacy was scripted into network television shows, into televised movies, and into the news. It started slowly, but picked up steam. Environmental spokesmen were increasingly seen in the favorable glow of television. Those who opposed this view were shown in an unfavorable way. It was done over time, with repetition.
If you weren’t completely won over, you were made tolerant of the views of environmental lunatics whose statements were morally and scientifically unsound.
Let’s take a more recent example the war against Iraq. That was a war made for television. In fact, it was a war {organized} through television.
Think back a year How were Americans prepared for the eventual slaughter of Iraqi women and children? Images on the screen Saddam Hussein, on one side, Hitler on the other.
Looking at the question more broadly, where did your children get most of their values, if not from what they saw on television? Parents might counteract the influence of the infernal box, but they could not overcome it. How could they, if they themselves have been brainwashed by the same box and if their children spend more time with it than them?
Studies show that most of television programming is geared to a less than 5th grade comprehension level; parents, like you, are themselves being remade in the infantile images of the television screen. All of society becomes more infantile, more easily controllable.
As Emery explains “We are proposing that television as a simple constant and repetitive and ambiguous visual stimulus, gradually closes down the central nervous system of man.”
Becker holds a similar view of the effect of television on American’s ability to think: “Americans don’t really think–they have opinions and feelings. Television creates the opinion and then validates it.”
Nowhere is this clearer than with politics. Television tells Americans what to think about politicians, restricting choices to those acceptable to the oligarchs whose financial power controls networks and major cable channels.
It tells people what has been said and what is “important.” Everything else is filtered out. You are told who can win and who can’t. And few people have the urge to look behind the images in the screen, to seek content and truth in ideas and look for a high quality of leadership.
Such an important matter as choosing a president becomes the same as choosing a box of laundry detergent – a set of possibilities, whose limits are determined, by the images on the screen. You are given the appearance of freedom of choice, but that you have neither freedom nor real choice.
That is how the brainwashing works. “Are they brainwashed by the tube,” said Becker to the interviewer. “It is really more than that. I think that people have lost the ability to relate the images of their own lives without television intervening to tell them what it means. That is what we really mean when we say that we have a wired society.”
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