Tag Archive for: Psychology

Zitate

Christian Slater | We live in a kingdom of bullshit

"Is any of it real? I mean, look at this, look at it! A world built on fantasy! Synthetic emotions in the form of pills! Psychological warfare in the form of advertising! Mind altering chemicals in the form of food! Brainwashing seminars in the form of media! Controlled isolated bubbles in the form of social networks. Real? You want to talk about reality? We haven't lived in anything remotely close to it since the turn of the century! We turned it off, took out the batteries, snacked on a bag of GMOs, while we tossed the remnants into the ever expanding dumpster of the human condition. We live in branded houses, trademarked by corporations, built on bipolar numbers, jumping up and down on digital displays, hypnotizing us into the biggest slumber mankind has ever seen. You'd have to dig pretty deep, kiddo, before you can find anything real. We live in a kingdom of bullshit, that even you have lived in for far too long. So don't tell me about not being real: I'm no less real than the fucking beef patty in your big mac. As far as you are concerned, Elliot, I am very real. We are all together now, whether you like it or not."

Christian Slater

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Philip K. Dick | Today we live in a society in which spurious realities

"Today we live in a society in which spurious realities are manufactured by the media, by governments, by big corporations, by religious groups, political groups... So I ask, in my writing, What is real? Because unceasingly we are bombarded with pseudo-realities manufactured by very sophisticated people using very sophisticated electronic mechanisms. I do not distrust their motives; I distrust their power. They have a lot of it. And it is an astonishing power: that of creating whole universes, universes of the mind. I ought to know. I do the same thing."

Philip K. Dick

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Mind control isn’t hard to understand

"Mind control isn't hard to understand. If you do what the TV says, the TV is controlling your mind and you're not. 2 billion people just pushed an experimental medicine under their skin, which was never healthy, simply because the TV told them to. That's mind control."

Unknown

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Aldous Huxley | The victim of mind-manipulation

"The nature of psychological compulsion is such that those who act under constraint remain under the impression that they are acting on their own initiative. The victim of mind-manipulation does not know that he is a victim. To him the walls of his prison are invisible, and he believes himself to be free. That he is not free is apparent only to other people. His servitude is strictly objective."

Aldous Huxley

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Edward L. Bernays | the manipulation of public opinion

"No serious sociologist any longer believes that the voice of the people expresses any divine or specially wise and lofty idea. The voice of the people expresses the mind of the people, and that mind is made up for it by the group leaders in whom it believes and by those persons who understand the manipulation of public opinion. It is composed of inherited prejudices and symbols and cliches and verbal formulas supplied to them by the leaders."

Edward L. Bernays

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Edward L. Bernays | Mindless Conformity

"Universal literacy was supposed to educate the common man to control his environment. Once he could read and write he would have a mind fit to rule. So ran the democratic doctrine. But instead of a mind, universal literacy has given him rubber stamps, rubber stamps inked with advertising slogans, with editorials, with published scientific data, with the trivialities of the tabloids and the platitudes of history, but quite innocent of original thought. Each man's rubber stamps are the duplicates of millions of others, so that when those millions are exposed to the same stimuli, all receive identical imprints. It may seem an exaggeration to say that the American public gets most of its ideas in this wholesale fashion. The mechanism by which ideas are disseminated on a large scale is propaganda, in the broad sense of an organized effort to spread a particular belief or doctrine."

Edward L. Bernays

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Hannah Arendt | The power of independent thinking

"This constant lying is not aimed at making the people believe a lie, but at ensuring that no one believes anything anymore. A people that can no longer distinguish between truth and lies cannot distinguish between right and wrong. And such a people, deprived of the power to think and judge, is, without knowing and willing it, completely subjected to the rule of lies. With such a people, you can do whatever you want. The aim of totalitarian education has never been to instill convictions but to destroy the capacity to form any."

Hannah Arendt

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Johann Nestroy | Censorship is the living confession

"Censorship is the living confession of the powerful that they can only trample on dumb slaves, but cannot govern free peoples. Censorship is something that stands far beneath the executioner, for the same ray of enlightenment that sixty years ago helped the executioner achieve honesty has recently branded censorship with the stigma of contempt."

Johann Nestroy

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George Orwell | Narrative Essays

“Every war when it comes, or before it comes, is represented not as a war but as an act of self-defense against a homicidal maniac. In our time political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible. But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought. All the war-propaganda, all the screaming and lies and hatred, comes invariably from people who are not fighting. Political language...is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidarity to pure wind. War against a foreign country only happens when the moneyed classes think they are going to profit from it. Nationalism is power hunger tempered by self-deception. War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength. (On the manipulation of language for political ends.) We have now sunk to a depth at which restatement of the obvious is the first duty of intelligent men. If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear. In times of universal deceit, telling the truth will be a revolutionary act.”

George Orwell

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NATO | Cognitive Warfare

"[....]Cognitive warfare is achieved by integrating cyber, information, psychological, and social engineering capabilities. Exploiting information technology, it seeks to create confusion, false representations, and uncertainty with a deluge of information over-abundance or misinformation. This is achieved by focusing attention on false targets, causing distraction, introducing false narratives, radicalizing individuals, and amplifying social polarization to muster the cognitive effects needed to achieve short-term and long-term objectives."

NATO

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Chris Hedges | Empire of Illusion

"A public that can no longer distinguish between truth and fiction is left to interpret reality through illusion. Random facts or obscure bits of data and trivia are used either to bolster illusion and give it credibility, or discarded if they interfere with the message. The worse reality becomes—for example, as foreclosures and unemployment skyrocket—the more people seek refuge and comfort in illusions. When opinions cannot be distinguished from facts, when there is no universal standard to determine truth in law, in science, in scholarship, or in reporting the events of the day, when the most valued skill is the ability to entertain, the world becomes a place where lies become true, where people can believe what they want to believe. This is the real danger of pseudo-events and why pseudo-events are far more pernicious than stereotypes. They do not explain reality, as stereotypes attempt to, but replace reality. Pseudo-events redefine reality by the parameters set by their creators. These creators, who make massive profits selling illusions, have a vested interest in maintaining the power structures they control."

Chris Hedges

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Milosz Matuschek | Permanent Toxic Rape of Consciousness

"Almost a hundred years ago, the philosopher John Dewey said that we are living in the greatest flood of mass suggestion that mankind has ever seen. But in 100 years, the superlative has only swelled, albeit without this being publicized today. Edward Bernays called propaganda the “executive arm of the invisible government”. And he recognized that propaganda is to democracies what violence is to dictators. Perhaps that would be a contemporary definition of propaganda: it is a Permanent Toxic Rape of Consciousness, or PTRC for short. It is a permanent mindfuck by governments and corporate business, mediated by the media, carried out by bought comedians à la Böhmermann, pseudo-journalists à la Lanz, pseudo-intellectuals à la Precht, pseudo-health politicians, such as the pharmaceutical and drugs minister Lauterbach, pseudo-defence politicians such as Strack-Rheinmetall-Zimmermann, and other parvenus such as Mai Thi Nguyen-Kim, Eckart von Hirschhausen, Sarah Bosetti and other stirrup holders in editorial offices, theaters or foundations. "

Milosz Matuschek

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Vernon Howard | The truth , when it arrives

"The truth , when it arrives is always different from what we thought it would be..if we imagine that we already know the truth, that imaginations based on old and habitual ideas. But the truth is always something entirely new to the mind; so we cannot possibly imagine it. Just as we cannot know what a new day is like before we experience it, we cannot think accurately about a new truth until we first live it. As we dare to drop our conditioned opinions, we make room for the truth..."

Vernon Howard

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Noam Chomsky | artificial intelligence

"The human mind is not, like ChatGPT and its ilk, a lumbering statistical engine for pattern matching, gorging on hundreds of terabytes of data and extrapolating the most likely conversational response or most probable answer to a scientific question. On the contrary, the human mind is a surprisingly efficient and even elegant system that operates with small amounts of information; it seeks not to infer brute correlations among data points but to create explanations. Let's stop calling it Artificial Intelligence and call it what it is: Plagiarism Software. It doesn’t create anything, just copies existing works from artists and alters them sufficiently to escape copyright laws. It's the largest theft of property since Native American lands by European settlers. "

Noam Chomsky

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Wolfgang Reinhard | But it is the central ritual of the democratic theater state

"Politicians who want to stay in power have to keep the voters happy, even though the election itself is only symbolic. But it is the central ritual of the democratic theater state. After all, it is no longer about substantive decisions, but only about the confirmation or replacement of political figureheads, who are legitimized by the fact that citizens are allowed to perform this ritual. This symbolically reinforces the fiction of popular sovereignty on which modern constitutional states are founded. In this way, and not through substantive decisions, elections contribute to its stabilization."

Wolfgang Reinhard

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Michael Rivero | Hence, most propaganda is not designed to fool the critical thinker

"Most people prefer to believe their leaders are just and fair even in the face of evidence to the contrary, because once a citizen acknowledges that the government under which they live is lying and corrupt, the citizen has to choose what he or she will do about it. To take action in the face of a corrupt government entails risks of harm to life and loved ones. To choose to do nothing is to surrender one's self-image of standing for principles. Most people do not have the courage to face that choice. Hence, most propaganda is not designed to fool the critical thinker but only to give moral cowards an excuse not to think at all."

Michael Rivero

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