Tag Archive for: Psychology

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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

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

Matt Kahn | the simple difference between clarity and confusion

"Most people don’t see their beliefs. Instead their beliefs tell them what to see. That’s the simple difference between clarity and confusion."

Matt Kahn

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

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

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

Susan Sontag | Authoritarian political ideologies have a vested interest in promoting fear

"Authoritarian political ideologies have a vested interest in promoting fear, a sense of the imminence of takeover by aliens and real diseases are useful material."

Susan Sontag

Voltaire | It is hard to free fools from the chains they revere

"It is hard to free fools from the chains they revere."

Voltaire

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

Paul Henri Spaak | Stupidity is the strangest of all diseases

"Stupidity is the strangest of all diseases. The sick person never suffers from it. Those who suffer painfully are the others."

Paul Henri Spaak

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

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

George Orwell | Who controls the past controls the future

"Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past"

George Orwell

Neil deGrasse Tyson | If you want to assert a truth

"If you want to assert a truth, first make sure it’s not just an opinion that you desperately want to be true."

Neil deGrasse Tyson

Leo Tolstoi | The power of government rests on the ignorance of the people

"The power of government rests on the ignorance of the people, and it knows this and therefore will always fight against enlightenment."

Leo Tolstoi

Yuval Noah Harari | In a world flooded with irrelevant information

"In a world flooded with irrelevant information, clarity is power."

Yuval Noah Harari

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

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

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

Prof. Dr. Franz Ruppert | Anyone who actually feels the need to get their hands on the levers of power

"Anyone who actually feels the need to get their hands on the levers of power in order to control other people, to tell them what to do, to scare them, is mentally disturbed."

Prof. Dr. Franz Ruppert

Goethe | Whoever wants to deceive people

"Whoever wants to deceive people must first of all make absurdity plausible."

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

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

Margaret Mead | Children must learn how to think, not what to think.

"Children must learn how to think, not what to think."

Margaret Mead

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

Plato | Those who are able to see beyond the shadows and lies of their culture

"Those who are able to see beyond the shadows and lies of their culture will never be understood, let alone believed, by the masses."

Plato

Voltaire | throw stones at those who are showing a new road

"Our wretched species is so made that those who walk on the well-trodden path always throw stones at those who are showing a new road."

Voltaire

Thomas Paine | A long habit of not thinking a thing wrong

"A long habit of not thinking a thing wrong, gives it a superficial appearance of being right, and raises at first a formidable outcry in defense of custom. But the tumult soon subsides. Time makes more converts than reason."

Thomas Paine

Joseph Goebbels | If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it

"If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie. It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the State."

Joseph Goebbels

Dave Chappelle | Being “awake” isn’t cool

"Being "awake" isn't cool. It means having to dumb down 98% of your conversations every day so you don't sound like a lunatic."

Dave Chappelle

Frank Ocean | When you’re happy you enjoy the music

"When you're happy you enjoy the music, but when you're sad you understand the lyrics."

Frank Ocean