Brainwashed Nation

An interesting question in the field of hypnosis stems from the fact that everyone, everyday, drifts into what we would call hypnotic states.  Likewise, there are natural persuaders who use hypnotic techniques without even realising that they are doing so.  Generally, we all accept this.  However, should someone intentionally learn and use such techniques, then we start questioning their morality.  In other words, it’s okay to accidentally influence someone, but it’s not okay to do it on purpose.

I bring this up because of another natural phenomenon called social conditioning.  Like hypnosis, it is a conditioning process, but it is incredibly complex and varied.  Through this process children learn about their society, their place in society, appropriate behaviours and expectations in society, and so on.  They become adults with a fixed worldview that is relatively similar to others in their society.

This is all a normal, natural process of human development.  Traditionally, the prime architects of this conditioning process were the parents, the church, and the community.  Today, we can add the mass media and state schools to the list.  The conscious and unconscious instructions from these architects are then reinforced through repetition and experience within a social context.

If we think of the human mind as a computer,  Nature provides the hardwired pre-installed software and Nurture is the additional software installed through social conditioning.  So in a sense, we are all brainwashed in that we all have been programmed through external forces.  Ideally, a person reaches a level of maturity where they take control of their programs, but many still run with the basic software.

The process of social conditioning is largely haphazard and accidental with limited focus.  But what if an institution chose to take control of the process in order to program individuals within society to a particular worldview and for a particular purpose?

When we look back over history we find that certain periods had particular prevailing attitudes, worldview, and set of social programs running.  This is called zeitgeist, or “spirit of the age”.  I like to think of it as the culture of an era, after all, the past is a foreign country.

In each particular zeitgeist, we find a prevailing political point of view.  I call this the political sphere for that era.  So for example, the 19^th Century was dominated by Classical Liberalism (not to be confused with modern Liberalism).  As the dominant political sphere, any questions of left or right politics existed within the parameters of this sphere.  This is different from the modern dominant political sphere which is Socialism.  Today, any questions of left or rights exist within this sphere.  I'm using the term socialism in a very broad sense as the acceptance of the premise of the necessity for central economic and social planning and not necessarily strict by the book Marxism.

Political debate in the British media today is dominated almost exclusively by the question of how the government is running people’s lives and never the question should it be running people’s lives.   As an American living in the United Kingdom for the past thirteen years I find this exclusion extraordinary.  The question of “should” is simply no longer in the public political debate anymore.

Classical Liberalism, the political ideology that dominated British and American political thought throughout the 19^th Century is still alive in America through libertarianism, but has been almost completely eradicated in Britain.  I find this absence not only in the media, but also in the education system and in the understanding of the people.  However, they are well versed in Socialist theory.  Several years ago, BBC Radio 4 had a listener’s poll asking who the greatest philosopher of all time was.  Karl Marx won.  I also find it interesting that Karl Marx is taught in Scottish universities in Sociology courses.  In America, Marxism is considered political theory and Sociology is considered a science.  When I point this out to people that I meet in Scotland they see no issue.

I find it amazing that Victorian political writers described and warned against our current political sphere, but we today cannot even conceive of their zeitgeist outwith stereotypes.  Likewise their arguments against the dangers of over-reaching government do not even exist in the current political debate.  Again, the debates focus on the “how” and not “should”.

Now, one may argue that the Victorian views are irrelevant in today’s social context.  And yet when you read them you find them to be uncannily appropriate.  For example, Samuel Smiles wrote in 1859:

Whatever is done for men or classes, to a certain extent takes away the stimulus and necessity of doing for themselves; and where men are subjected to over-guidance and over-government, the inevitable tendency is to render them comparatively helpless.

According to the Scottish Government’s official website:

The Scottish Survey of Adult Literacies (SSAL) 2009 represents the biggest survey of adult literacies levels undertaken in Scotland. The survey measured three dimensions of literacy skills (prose, document and quantitative) for almost 2000 people living in Scotland.

The survey found that:  73.3% of the Scottish working age population have a level of literacies that is recognised internationally as appropriate for a contemporary society; around one-quarter of the Scottish population (26.7%) may face occasional challenges and constrained opportunities due to their literacies difficulties, but will generally cope with their day-to-day lives; and within this quarter of the population, 3.6% (one person in 28) face serious challenges in their literacies practices.  SSAL found that one of the key factors linked to lower literacies capabilities is poverty, with adults living in 15% of the most deprived areas in Scotland more likely to have literacies capabilities at the lower end of the scale.

So, one in four Scots are at best functionally illiterate and that this illiteracy is most pronounced among the poor.  However, this is a socialist country.  These so-called poor might just as well be called the underclass.  The people most dependent upon socialists programs, such as benefits and free education, are also the most illiterate, despite all of the support and opportunities that they have been given, which can be seen as an indicator of social helplessness.

I do believe that Samuel Smiles predicted this would happen, but that is not my point here.  My point is that there is a point to be debated and discussed that is not being addressed.  In a similar vein, the prominent Victorian jurist A.V. Dicey supported the idea that those dependent upon state benefits not be allowed to vote because it constituted a conflict of interest.  The beneficiaries would vote for whichever politician or party promised them the biggest share of the public purse.  We see this happening in politics today.  A politician is judged by his position on public services more than public policy.  But this alternative view is not only ignored, it is as if it never existed.  Let us call this the crime of omission.

Then there is the crime of misrepresentation.  In his book, Inventing the Victorians, Matthew Sweet makes the case that the popular stereotype image of the Victorians is largely slander concocted by early 20^th Century socialist to discredit Classical Liberalism as a viable political ideology.  Today, any promotion of Classical Liberal tenants, such as free markets and limited government, is met with invocations of alleged Victorian social horrors and Dickensian living conditions.  Yes, there was poverty, but the Victorian era saw the greatest reduction of poverty in the history of the world.  This fact is ignored.

Finally, there is the crime of verbicide, a word coined by Oliver Wendell Holmes to describe the twisting of language.  George Orwell in his appendix to 1984 discusses New Speak and uses the example of the word free.  The word free originally meant to be free from something.  As in, this cat is free from fleas.  In political discourse, freedom meant to be free from government coercion.  Today, free means free to an entitlement from government at the expense of the public at large.  One of my favourites has always been the use of the word “the people” when they really mean those elected from the ruling political class, in other words, the government.

What I have laid out here is the concept of social conditioning with the people of each culture or zeitgeist being conditioned to be part of their unique place in space and time.  I then contrasted the dominant political spheres of the 19^th and 20^th Centuries.  Finally, I covered the crimes of omission, misrepresentation, and verbicide.  Now you may be wondering what all this has to do with brainwashing a nation.

There are three key features of a cult.  One is banning any knowledge not consistent with the views of the cult.  The second is discrediting those who have not embraced the cult.  The third involves the manipulation of language in order to control how people within the cult conceptualize and discuss reality.  I see all of these features active in the United Kingdom and even in the United States. We see this same process illustrated in Orwell’s 1984.

  This brings us back to the question I posed at the beginning of this essay. “What if an institution chose to take control of the natural social conditioning process in order to program individuals within society to a particular worldview and for a particular purpose?”

When I discuss politics with people in Scotland and get either knee-jerk emotional responses or clichéd answers taken from the party playbook, I start to get a bit concerned.  When I watch news programs and hear nothing but pro-government control positions, I worry.  When I see student protestors take to the street demanding more government regulation, I begin to think the world is up-side-down.  They may protest a particular party, politician, or policy, but their proposed solution is to give more power to someone else over their lives.  I thought student were suppose to be rebels.

The primary agents of social conditioning are parents, the community, churches, mass media, and the state educational system.  So let us suppose that the education system teaches one point of view exclusively, such as socialism in Scotland.  Those children grow-up and become parents, members of the community, teachers, and creators of mass media. 

Let’s suppose a quarter carry the state’s message as unquestioned reality into the world.  They pass it on consciously and unconsciously to the next generation.  They mature and pass it on.  Now you have a new zeitgeist.  A view of reality accepted by the majority and constantly reinforced by society itself rather than some ominous external force.  Any vestige or memory of the old zeitgeist is either ignored, forgotten, omitted, or misrepresented in fact and in language.

In 1994 I worked in a copy shop.  One day a teacher came in with the pictures that her  students made for Earth Day.  The topic was, "What can we do to save the planet".  Sounds pretty benign.  However, what she is telling the children is that the planet is in danger.  Today, those kids are probably pushing thirty and probably accept the theory of man-made climate change without question, even though seventeen years later it is still a highly debated issue.

The problem is not whether the theory of man-made climate change is valid or not.  The problem is that the children were being socially conditioned to believe a very specific worldview at the exclusion of opposing points of view and before their reasoning faculties had fully developed. I believe this process is occurring throughout the education systems in both the US and Britain.

I know what it is like to move from one culture to another.  I know what it is like to move from your native land to an entirely different society with completely different social rules that you have not been socially conditioned towards.  I have lived in Scotland for thirteen years and I still feel like an outsider.

It gives you a different perspective.  I can see what the Scots take for granted.  I hear the background music of their lives that they no longer notice.  I know what they do not know that they don’t know.  This perception isn’t due to anything special on my part.  It’s simply because I do not share their social conditioning.  I just haven’t been brainwashed in the same way so I do not blindly accept the things that they accept without question.  I ask “Why?”

That is the key.  I mentioned at the start that despite social conditioning there comes a time when an adult begins to take responsibility for his own programming.  This means looking for answers outside the box that you have been given.  It means questioning what you believe to be true.  It means taking responsibility for your mind.  This process marks the difference between an adult and a child, between a human being and a sheep, and between a free man and a peasant or a slave.