Lies, Damned lies, and Reality

This months episode looks at how our brains cope and process reality and how the psychopathology we create is actually a powerful way of protecting us and maintaining our sanity. It also looks at how this wonderful gift works against us when people wish to control and manipulate us. Finally it looks at some of the ways we can protect ourselves from manipulation.

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Menticide, Brain washing, Totalitarianism and the role of psychopathology as a form of protection and happiness in the world.

There’s and expression I was taught as a young man and it goes like this “there’s lies, there’s damned lies, and then there’s statistics”

and that was the inspiration for todays’s podcast.

“ When did we stop telling the truth? Did we ever tell the truth? How do we go about living our lives when bombarded with lies? Was there ever a thing called truth?”

Good morning, as you will have realised very quickly, this is not going to be a light hearted journey through your mind. Today I am going to tackle a very important topic - your, or rather “our minds”, how they work for us and against us and how they can be exploited and how we can fight back and maintain our sanity in an uncertain and at times apparently insane world. I can’t promise that this will be comfortable listening, but you can be sure that it will be interesting if you are not versed in the psychopathology of interrogation, mass compliance, brainwashing, totalitarianism, and various manipulations of reality. So buckle up, be prepared, as we dive into the world of your mind, your consciousness and our perceptions of reality.

The first place to start is to try nd answers the question of what reality is to us. Reality is perceived, and that means by definition it is interpreted, and if it is interpreted this means that it can be manipulated by ourselves and others around us. If we accept this, we have effectively admitted to ourselves that there can be no one definition of reality and therefore we all see the world around us differently. 

This makes us really rather special as a species on this planet. Most animals, and I say most because we are always finding that what we think we know about animals is often wrong. Most animals then, live in what psychologists would describe as “PRIMARY REALITY”. An animal wakes up, and goes looking for food, the food is either there or it is not there and this will determine what happens next. The tree they sleep under daily will either be there or not there, their fellow animals will either be there or not there depending on whether they are dead or alive, present or not. Life in primary reality is binary in a sense, black or white and this is accepted in primary reality. There is no reasoning as to the potential scenarios around which a certain situation has arisen. The squirrel doesn't for example wonder why there is no acorn under his favourite tree this year, he simply goes in search of another acorn tree near by. 

Humans by contrast at some stage in their history evolved an intellectual capability to IMAGINE. when this happened we were able to step out of PRIMARY reality and into a personal or imagined reality. We were for example capable of wondering, unlike the Squirrel why the acorns had not formed on the tree this year and to wonder whether a giant acorn spirit had descended from the stars above to eat all our acorns as some form of cosmic punishment for our transgressions on earth! 

One of the effects of being able to imagine is that we are able to reduce primary reality to a conceptual manipulation of consciousness. 

Once the acorn stops being just and acorn, it can then become anything we want it to be. This means that we can entertain falsehoods about the reality around us and treat them as equally as real as anything else. Take for example the classing acorn “One man’s terrorist is another mans freedom fighter”, we are talking about a man here in the primary reality sense, but due to our ability to manipulate reality we have split our understanding of this man into a dichotomy - he or she, is now either a freedom fighter or a terrorist or just a man or a woman,  a child,  a son, a Jihadist, the great Satan - as you can see the list is suddenly endless. 

This is what our minds are brilliantly capable of. Something which is beautifully simple - a man, has now become an infinite source of imagery, context and understanding. When you think about it in this way you suddenly realise what a remarkable thing our brain is to be able to conjure up infinite variations of reality. If you ever wonder how the human race became so successful as a species, then look no further than this point.  

As a result of this marvellous aspect of our human development scientists have estimated that upto 80% of the knowledge and perceived facts that we carry around in our heads on a daily basis are in fact false or factually incorrect. This is quite a sobering thought when you think about it, it actually gives credence to the idea that we live in an illusion, how else could it be if everything or at least 80% of what we think we know is wrong or incorrect?

We in fact have 4 types of reality which we consciously interact with on a daily basis. I have mentioned primary reality, the second is empirical reality, this is the world of facts and data which we use to support our conclusions about the work we see around us. Unfortunately this reality is limited by measurement in the sense that if you can’t measure it or don’t know what to measure the data you collect is at all times incomplete. This is why scientists are always at pains to point out that they are never giving absolute conclusions from their research. This is a form of sense making that we undertake as a species in an attempt to understand things better, The third form of reality is what is termed CULTURAL REALITY  and this is the reality that is reflected back to us by society and cultures around us. In a way these are shared and accepted norms that we have decided to accept as a true representation of how we have collectively decided to see reality. Notice I am not stating that these realities are true, only that they are the shared realities we have decided to believe it. Examples of cultural realities are the United States of America’s accepted reality that they live in the land of the free, or The British belief that they are a “great” nation and stand undefeated as a beacon of democracy and honesty in the world today, to the French belief that they have the best cuisine in the world, to the state of Israel’s belief that they are the home of God’s chosen people. These are all examples amongst millions of cultural realities and they continue down to organisations, family units, regional biases, even down to product brands. These belief systems are accepted norms in certain areas of society and culture world wide depending on where you are at the time. 

So as a mere mortal in amongst all of these huge topical realities one has to ask where is the self in all of this? Well we are the fourth reality - we inhabit our own PERSONAL REALITY and this is a mix of the three we have already discussed and what we decide to make of them plus a bit of fairy dust that is our own raw imagination. (remember the cosmic acorns)

So in a sense our reality is an acorn (primary reality) which is abnormally small this year taken as sample of the last 10 years (Empirical reality) because the soil has been exploited through over production and intensive climate damaging farming practices (Cultural reality) which just shows why the Aliens that have been protecting us through a cosmic forcefield have to come and sort this mess out soon (Personal reality).

All of this is made worse when we realise that our ability to distort reality is actually a force for good. Research shows that we benefit hugely from this trait. The reality is that life is hard and the world is quite often not a very pleasant place with many things a source of suffering. If we were to engage permanently with this state of primary reality we would effectively go insane. So as a form of protection our mind distorts reality as a form of self-deception in order us to exist side by side with primary reality without becoming pathologically depressed. In a sense “sanity is not desirable” for our own good. We therefore as humans tend to live in a self constructed form of reality within our imagination. We actively reject data and information that contradicts this reality as a form of self preservation. Take for example our understanding of war, famine, starvation, rape, ethnic cleansing and other things that are a permanent feature of our Primary reality on planet earth today. We do not as humans sit down and try hard to understand the true horror of these things - that way is the way of a madman as many a soldier with post traumatic stress disorder will tell you and many a spirit who ended their lives to end the suffering of not being able to escape their primary reality by any other means.

We instead give a euro to the charity box when asked, in the conveniently constructed  belief that we are helping, this way we avoid having to think about the subject we are donating to - we effectively reject the harsh reality and instead embrace the warmth of a charitable donation and ignore the convenient fact that almost no aid you give actually ends up helping who you thought you were helping and are especially pleased when your friend notices this and compliments you on your generosity (this is an example of cultural reality reinforcing personal reality whilst ignoring both primary reality and all empirical realities).

The truth is that dealing with primary reality, empirical reality and cultural realities and trying to live in a state of critical assessment and challenge is simply far to challenging intellectually and requires a huge amount of effort from us. It is simply much easier to go with the flow and believe the lies we sometimes tell ourselves and not to think to much about it. By doing this it has been shown that we suffer less depression, remain motivated, productive, happier, and capable of dealing with more stress and hardship than normal when it arises.

What a bonus, we have an inbuilt reality distortion field that keeps us all well and happy and we don’t even need to upgrade our software system once a year in order to benefit from the feature, it all comes preloaded. We are in effect built to see the world as we would like to see it rather than how it really is - that is the basic nature of the human psychological condition.

This is called a SELF SERVING COGNITIVE BIAS in technical terms.

So we can now start to see that if we are all engaging in this behaviour then cultural realities must simply be an aggregated societal mass delusion that we have voluntarily entered into for our own good. So things like, Democracy, freedom, capitalism, globalism, the developed world, the under developed world, class, monetarist policies, socialism, communism and so on are all forms of shared societal illusion. We voluntarily enter into these realities because compared to the primary reality, they present an attractive alternative which offers solutions to the hardships of the time. These are healthy mental habits, the healthiest thing our brains can do for us is to keep reality at bay and in doing so there is an almost limitless level of cognitive error our brains can introduce in order to achieve this. 

In order to see this at work we don’t have to look  very far to see how easily we will don the cloak of unreality in order to protect ourselves from the harsh realities around us. One of my many favourite quotes is from a movie called 

“A few good men” starring Jack Nicholson when he is asked under oath about the situation he is testifying about:

The lawyer shouts at Nicholson :  I want the truth!

And Nicholson responds with : You can't handle the truth! 

Son, we live in a world that has walls, and those walls have to be guarded by men with guns. Who's gonna do it? You? You, Lieutenant Weinberg? I have a greater responsibility than you can possibly fathom. You weep for Santiago, and you curse the Marines. 

You have that luxury. You have the luxury of not knowing what I know -- that Santiago's death, while tragic, probably saved lives; and my existence, while grotesque and incomprehensible to you, saves lives.

You don't want the truth because deep down in places you don't talk about at parties, you want me on that wall -- you need me on that wall.

This is such a powerful scene and talks directly to the nature of society and our choice of reality and how we prefer to share a sanitised glorified and safe version of reality despite the facts that are there for us to consider anytime we wish to make the effort. It also paradoxically stands as an excellent example of cultural reality and pushed the idea into our minds that the military establishment is honourable because they protect us from all the evil that is out there. 

You see how massively creative our imaginations have to be in order to cope with this sort of nonsense.

This process is called REIFICATION it is the filtering of noxious data by our brain  and simplifying things for us so that we don’t engage in damaging or effort sapping activity, we accept societal artefacts called MENTI-FACTS which are fictitious categorisations of things that allow us to maintain our illusory understanding of things.  In this example the accepted menti-fact is armies protect us from evil. full stop. no further explanation or enquiry is required and if you do question it, here’s a list of evil people who have tried to rule the world in the past.

This is where we go down the Rabbit hole I am afraid. This where the Cheshire cat says “I'm not crazy, my reality is just different than yours”.

We have a unique ability to hold two completely contradictory  sets of information at the same time - this is called “Trance- logic”. 

As the Queen says to Alice in the book Alice in Wonderland 

“Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.” 

If you want an example of how tenuous our grip on reality is, I will tell you a true story about a Mercedes test driver - he spent most of his working life testing Mercedes cars on race tracks and in the final few years of his career, they introduced virtual reality tunnels for him to drive in so that they could test reflexes, driver reaction times and behaviours under simulated situations.

Mercedes realised they had a problem after the gentlemen started running people over on his journey home each day. It turned out that having spent so long in virtual reality, he was no longer capable of distinguishing reality in a car anymore. As a result Mercedes had to provide him with a chauffeur for the rest of his life in order to protect him and everyone else around him.

We have versions of this phenomenon all around us and permanently unresolved. We have people who believe that Russia is an enemy to the west and yet continue to trade with them and set up businesses in Russia, we have people who believe they are only a meter a way from catching a highly contagious and mortally dangerous disease despite being told it is neither dangerous or likely. We have whole nations who both believe they live in peace and freedom whilst effectively restricted in travel, beliefs and expression.

The truth is that “trance logic” is alive and well in society globally today and is protecting us from cataclysmic mental breakdown. In effect our own dissociation from reality allows society to exist. 

As humans our biggest weakness mentally is our genuine and fundamental need to be loved, to be accepted by those around us. It is perhaps one of the most powerful motivations that we have, and it is one of the reasons when you consider our quite considerable ability to delude ourselves, we all have a propensity to move en masse into blind alleyways, destructive systems of behaviours, poor forms of self rule, dangerously unstable socio economic structures that cause recessions, collapse, poverty, misery and pain throughout the world.

At all times we choose to accept mentifacts, and undertake reification as a form of self protection. But it is our need to conform that is the biggest danger we face as a race as well as individuals.

Let’s take the current world situation as an example as it is both current and global in nature.

Let’s deal with the empirical reality first:

• There is empirical data supporting climate change, species extinction, overfishing, land degradation from extensive farming methods, overpopulation of farmed animals and so on
• There is empirical data supporting overpopulation and our inability to feed an increasing population moving forward
• There is a large amount of empirical data showing that poor diet and lifestyles leads to poor health outcomes
• There is empirical data supporting information warfare and digital warfare across the world
• There is empirical data supporting some sort of virus in the world

I think I will stop there before we all get too depressed

Now lets deal with the cultural reality:

• First of all we need to point out that there are many cultural realities relating to the empirical realities we have spoken about:
   
  • There are cultural realities that do not acknowledge the empirical realities we have mentioned and they support their cultural realities with counter-information
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  • Some cultures do not see the diet and lifestyle issues we talk about because perhaps they have a healthy diet and lifestyle so the empirical reality we are talking about doesn’t exist for them - this is the case in China where western cultural realities around processed foods are still not prevalent
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  • Most of the worlds population don’t have any supporting empirical reality relating to information warfare because they don’t have access to the internet - so they won’t have a reality based on this area.
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• Some parts of the world are now colder and wetter than they have been in living memory, so these populations understanding of climate change is completely different to others where hotter drier weather is prevalent - their cultural reality might well be global cooling.

You can start to see that cultural reality is based on the information you have around you and the primary reality to support it. If empirical reality doesn't match your primary reality, it is unlikely you will support the cultural reality that is being pushed for. In a sense this is one of the reasons climate change has been such a slowly adopted cultural reality for most, the primary reality simply didn’t support the empirical reality. It’s easy to see how challenges to peoples perceptions of reality are quite complex and interrelated. 

Now lets deal with Primary reality:

• Everything around me seems the same as it always does
• Or - I have seen one example of this, but one swallow does not a summer make as they say

The situation is made more complex as governments and influencers start to manipulate facts, amplify key messages, sensor data and generally drive messages home in order to try and control peoples realities through the construction of strong cultural realities. This has a polarising effect on the population - some will readily accept things on face values and change their own reality to match that of the cultural reality and if a lot of other people are doing this they will feel comfortable accepting these supposed mentifacts and falling in line. Others on the other hand who do not accept things on face value will find contra-facts easily and refuse to accept the programming.

First of all I wish to make the point that all three realities stated above are interchangeable depending on what reality you decide is fitting for you. So there is no right or wrong answer here, there is no opinion here, just an assembly of realities for consideration and depending on how you decide to assemble them it will determine your attitude and behaviour as an individual and towards others around you.

Your reality is likely to have come from what you have been told, because like most people we consume media and news 24 hours a day. A constant soup of MENTI-FACTS that inform and move you towards a commonly formed narrative. At the heart of this narrative are two things which are proven at moving whole populations towards submission and acceptance. these are fear and guilt.

You can see clearly what I am talking about when you look at the global information campaign surrounding COVID19

The media would have you believe that you are about to die horribly (fear) and they ask you to isolate and vaccinate to protect others who have been infected by people like you (Guilt). Interesting when we consider that as of today only 32% one the worlds population has been fully vaccinated  despite the fact that CNN states this number as only 10% and most of the world are only vaguely aware that there is even a virus going round. “Trance logic”. We are currently in a situation where we desperately want to do the right thing as defined by our cultural reality that we are prepared to hold a mass of contradictory information at bay and just comply. We accept restrictions on our economic activity, our movement, our access to basic services, our freedoms all on the basis that we will be accepted by the crowd and are free from the guilt we might be made to feel. We will do anything to stop the exhaustion that we feel by trying to understand all the contradictory information we are being fed on a daily basis. 

On my linkedin feed there isn’t a day goes by where someone states in exhausted disbelief “does anyone understand what’s going on, this doesn’t make any sense at all”. Well that is the point. If you want to gain compliance from a population you become illogical and dishonest and inconsistent and the sheer mental effort you demand of your population as a result exhausts them to a point where they find it easier to give up and go with the flow. This is why interrogation techniques work so well - in the end, sheer mental exhaustion of trying to logically analyse misinformation and illogicality leads to a form of mental breakdown. 

The truth is - If you have enough time, you can make anyone do your bidding!

Analysis of interrogation techniques over the last century has shown that we are, with time, almost incapable of dealing with these sophisticated brain washing techniques. The problem with capitulation in these circumstances is that there are two damaged people in the relationship, not just one. Your interrogator or power structure must get others to force the rest of society into a new way of thinking, so they must forcibly break the willing volunteers or weak minded and then get them to break others too. As we have seen our ability to lie to ourselves is infinite.  Choosing one reality over another doesn’t mean that you are not aware of the alternative you have chosen to ignore, so if you are forced to adopt one reality over another you will at some level accept that internal conflict within yourself and resent the decision. This resentment is magnified when you force others to make the same choices that were foisted on you. So although on the face of it both you and your oppressor seem to have accepted a commonly shared reality, the truth is that both of you are just as angry and bitter and both of you resent the trade off you had to make - Hence why we see so much anger thrown at people who haven’t been vaccinated by vaccinated people. 

This is at the heart of why most dictatorships never last as they are founded upon resentment at an Ego level in the general population, and it is why resistance movements always grow in these environments. Oppression causes societal psychopathology that seeks to protect itself and bring back balance through resistance. It is why revolutions tend to happen over night and in huge numbers and are unlikely to be quashed by the state. The repression of guilt, anger and bitterness behind the facade of capitulation is often sudden and violent and far wider spread than anticipated.

So now that we know a little bit about how we see the world and how our biggest asset can also be our biggest weakness, what can we do to help ourselves and protect ourselves from “group think” and nefarious attempts by psychopaths to influence and take control of our lives? I refer of course to anyone who’s desire and main driving force is to control and manipulate other people as psychopaths as they demonstrate a goodly degree of psychopathology - but not the healthy type.

So lets deal with how you identify different realities and menti-facts and their influence on you.

• First of all lets get the obvious out of the way - if you were educated in a school then you will be full of cultural-reality and empirical-reality and very little primary reality. If you were read-to as a child then you will in all probability have a very healthy imagination which will mean your ability to Reificate will be phenomenal.
• If you watch any form of media or read any kind of media or listen to any kind of media, you will unwittingly have accepted a huge amount of code as a result. Most of it incorrect, false, either unintentionally or intentionally.
• If you feel any of the following things in your daily life then your reality is being passively and actively manipulated
   
  • Fear
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  • Intimidation
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  • Dramatic persuasion
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  • Mass suggestion
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  • Humiliation
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  • Loneliness
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  • Isolation
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  • Over-burdoning
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  • The imposition of hardship
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  • Decontextualisation
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  • Forced choices
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  • Potentiel sanctions
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It is not always easy to identify how these tools are being used -  as subtlety is the key to mass acceptance - If this list seems familiar to you, it should, we have all have been subjected to about 6 years of mass communication since President Trump got into power and the show got under way. In fact Trump is probably most famous for opening up pandoras box and shining a light on how media is used to manipulate elections and cultural realities.

• Even if you choose to ignore this sort of list, there is another list of things that tend to give away the game and that is the list of promises:
   
  • Things will improve if
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  • You will get this if you
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  • We will be better off if you
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  • You will be safe if you
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  • Your children will be safer if
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  • You will get more money if you
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The promise of better times and gifts is one of the most powerful weapons the interrogator has over his prisoner, remember Cypher in the film the Matrix when he says:

You know, I know this steak doesn't exist. I know that when I put it in my mouth, the Matrix is telling my brain that it is juicy and delicious. After nine years, you know what I realize?

Ignorance is bliss.

We all want that blissful ignorance  b   and we will almost always ignore and excuse things that are detrimental to us in order to benefit from this temporary bliss that is on offer.

This has been a pretty heavy podcast, you might be excused for thinking that i am contradicting the position I take in most of my podcasts that the role of community and shared values is important. I am not. I am instead advocating a level of mental sovereignty which you have a right to exercise on your own behalf and on the behalf of others too. You can be part of a community and also maintain a healthy psychology at the same time, but it requires constant vigilance and hard work to do so. It requires you to withdraw yourself from media in all its forms and to go delving into areas you might not normally pursue to find facts and check that the acorns are still on the tree and the tree remains where it should be and hasn’t moved because someone else told you so.  We are living in a world where much of the media is created by AI or manipulated as a form of information warfare between cultural realities on the planet. The intelligence services have for years planted agents in news networks to influence and control information and stories, Our psychological health has never been as uncertain as it is now and it is our individual responsibility to take care of it. We have to be vigilant and careful about what ideas we let into our minds and the type of reality we chose to live in. There are so many examples littered through history of where we have as a population allowed another reality to overpower our own and have yielded either through exhaustion, fear or confusion to a form of totalitarianism which only world wars have solved at the cost of millions of lives.

Don’t be under any illusions here we are in a Global information war at present and we are the pawns being used to conduct that war. Be careful, be watchful, look for the acorns, anchor yourself in reality, face the horrors, find strength in others that share your understanding, stand strong and stand true. The world needs everyone of you at this moment in time if we are to remain on the righteous path.

I will leave you with one of my favourite passages from Pulp fiction:

“The path of the righteous man is beset on all sides by the iniquities of the selfish and the tyranny of the evil men. Blessed is he who, in the name of charity and goodwill, shepherds the weak through the valley of darkness, for he is truly his brother's keeper, and the finder of lost children. And I will strike down upon thee with great vengeance and furious anger those who attempt to poison and destroy my brothers. And you will know my name is the Lord when I lay my vengeance upon thee!”

Be strong my brothers and sisters.