From previous posts in the series, the following topics have been covered:
Mental coercion.
Menticide, “killing the mind.”
Social conditioning through repeated speech.
Political conditioning in more subtle forms.
But does the average person seek out this type of conditioning and reinforcement? Why? In-group behavior can help explain this. The drawing in of an audience into a hypnotic state can also explain this. More specifically, the feedback loop of in-group behavior — involving a ‘speaker’ and a ‘listener’ and/or a group thereof, as well as the ‘state of mind’ brought on by the reinforcement mechanism can also explain this.
Over time, the ‘imprinting’ of an inner Pavlovian bell — the bell that makes all other bells silent (the reason why you can’t talk about ‘it’)— is completed, and there can be no breaking through the barrier instilled. This is part and parcel of the long-term strategy of demoralization, polarization, and self-censorship being conducted and imposed upon the will of the afflicted.
The Urge to Be Conditioned
One suggestion this chapter is not intended to convey is that Pavlovian conditioning as such is something wrong. This kind of conditioning occurs everywhere where people are together in common interaction. The speaker influences the listener, but the listener also the speaker. Through the process of conditioning people often learn to like and to do what they are allowed to like and do. The more isolated the group, the stricter the conditioning that takes place in those belonging to the group. In some groups one finds people more capable than others of conveying suggestion and bringing about conditioning. Gradually one can discern the stronger ones, the better adjusted ones, the more experienced ones, and those noisier ones, whose ability to condition others is strongest. Every group, every club, every society has its leading Pavlovian Bell. This kind of person imprints his inner bell ringing on others. He can even develop a system of monolithic bell ringing: no other influential bell is allowed to compete with him.
Another subtler question belongs to these problems. Why is there in us so great an urge to be conditioned, the urge to learn, to imitate, to conform, and to follow the pattern of family and group? This urge to be conditioned, to submit to the communal pattern and the family pattern must be related to man's dependency on parents and fellow men. Animals are not so dependent on one another. In the whole animal kingdom man is one of the most helpless and naked beings. But among the animals man has, relatively, the longest youth and time for learning.
The innate urge to limit social ostracization by imitating in-group behavior. The create of an “inner bell” that precludes all other bells from “competing.” A working example of this kind of conditioning behavior is patently obvious in the throngs of
This ring of an “inner bell” is why no one, no data, no studies, and not even the personal experience of being diagnosed with a severe medical issue as a result of the genetic injections can break the spell of those in servitude.
Puzzlement and doubt, which inevitably arise in the training process, are the beginnings of mental freedom. Of course, the initial puzzlement and doubt is not enough. Behind that there has to be faith in our democratic freedoms and the will to fight for it. I hope to come back to this central problem of faith in moral freedom as differentiated from conditioned loyalty and servitude in the last chapter. Puzzlement and doubt are, however, already crimes in the totalitarian state. The mind that is open for questions is open for dissent. In the totalitarian regime the doubting, inquisitive, and imaginative mind has to be suppressed. The totalitarian slave is only allowed to memorize, to salivate when the bell rings.
It is not my task here to elaborate on the subject of the biased use of Pavlovian rules by totalitarians, but without doubt part of the interpretation of any psychology is determined by the ways we think about our fellow human beings and man's place in nature. If our ideal is to make conditioned zombies out of people, the current misuse of Pavlovianism will serve our purpose. But once we become even vaguely aware that in the totalitarian picture of man the characteristic human note is missing, and when see that in such a scheme man sacrifices his instinctual desires, his pleasures, his aims, his goals, his creativity, his instinct for freedom, his paradoxicality, we immediately turn against this political perversion of science. Such use of Pavlovian technique is aimed only at developing the automaton in man, not his free alert mind that is aware of moral goals and aims in life.
Corporate Disinformation Outlets have effectively become managers of this ‘misuse’ of Pavlovianism. Maintaining a hypnotic state over their audience, transforming many of them into nothing more than salivating dogs waiting for the ring of a bell.
Part 5: The Rape of the Mind