Mind control and the villains of vice

“One believes things because one has been conditioned to believe them.”

― Aldous Huxley, Brave New World

Your order from the scholastic flyer is in!

Ripping open the package and fumbling through its contents, you pull out and unravel a knot formed around a plastic coin. Okay, you probably could have made this thing yourself, but you spent $2 from your allowance, so it must be the real deal. A few minutes later and it’s all ready to go, your very own a hypnosis kit.

Abracadabra? On the count of 4? … 10? When I snap my fingers? Hmm… for some reason this thing doesn’t work. Why won’t the dog stop eating Kleenex? Is it too cheap? Did I do it wrong? Maybe hypnosis isn’t real? All these questions swirl through your head as your perception of reality is broken by the futility of this thing.

Of course, as a kid that’s as far as it goes. You take the $2 loss, move on to the next shiny object and eventually grow out of it. But not everyone is like you and me. Some people never move on, grow up and leave the shiny object behind. Their minds twist and wrap around an absurd fantasy, succumbing to a primeval darkness, and a sickly desire to control others — even control the entire world.

Over the past few years, one concept should be clear: not only is mind control real, but it’s extremely effective and affects a large portion of the population. Before then, I thought it was science fiction, and still have difficulty reconciling its effectiveness.

From my distraught realization, I began a journey to understand.

The Elephant by Martin Schongauer (ca. 1485)

Despite its tremendous raw power, how do you tame an elephant?

In Myanmar and Thailand, elephants are tamed by Elephant crushing, which is a system that crushes an animal’s spirit through cruelty and corporal punishment.

In the nice version, the elephant is bound to a tree with heavy chain. With all its might and strength, the powerful beast thrashes and stomps in an attempt to break free, but proves futile against the heavy chain. Tragically after a period of time, the elephant no longer thrashes or stomps. When the elephant has relinquished, the heavy chain is replaced with a lighter one, which could easily be broken, but since despair has crushed the elephant, it never attempts to rediscover its freedom.

“An elephant born in captivity is brought up amongst human beings and its training is humane from the day it begins; but a wild beast parted from the herd and its mother must suffer agonies before its will is broken.”

— Gone Astray - The Care and Management of the Asian Elephant in Domesticity

Sheep are also trained through reinforcement.

In a small pen, a halter is fitted on a sheep, and light pressure is applied through a rope stopping its escape, then hand fed as a reward. Hand feeding makes for a good little sheep! Halter exercises are used to accustom sheep to human contact.

Halter training is all about Pressure and Release! To start with you will teach you sheep to give in to light pressure when you gently pull the rope towards you. If they give in to the pressure and start to take a step in the right direction you reward them with a release of pressure on the rope and you can give them some some feed too. You can use feed to encourage them in the right direction whilst applying gentle pressure too.

— Taming, Training and Making Friends with your Sheep!

Food is positive reinforcement and corporal punishment is negative reinforcement.

Feed them daily or twice daily a small amount and they will soon get used to you and realise you ain’t so bad!

For some sheep their natural flight instinct will override their desire to eat but you can over come this by putting them is a smaller enclosure and spending a lot of time with them.

— Taming, Training and Making Friends with your Sheep!

In psychology, the use of positive and negative reinforcement is called operant conditioning, which is an associative learning process that develops a relationship between a desired behaviour and stimuli. This is commonly expressed as the idiom “carrot and stick,” which is a reference to the caricature of a rider using a carrot to bait a donkey into a desired direction, and slapping it with a stick when it veers off.

I’m sure we know many asses easily ‘baited by a carrot and guided by a spank.

"Europe 1916" an anti-war cartoon by Boardman Robinson

“Thus, be every device from the stick to the carrot, the emaciated Austrian donkey is made to pull the Nazi barrow up an ever-steepening hill.”

— Winston Churchill

Together with pavlovian conditioning, which is the general process of associating a conditioned stimulus (e.g., food cravings) with an unconditioned stimulus (e.g., a bell in pavlov’s case), classical conditioning is used in behavioural therapies, conditioned drug response, conditioned emotional response (e.g., fear conditioning), and more.

Oddly though, humans — unlike animals — can be conditioned through abstraction.

Examine Table 1 described in Wood, S., & Schulman, K. (2021). Beyond politics — promoting covid-19 vaccination in the United States. The New England Journal of Medicine, 384(7), e23. https://doi.org/10.1056/nejmms2033790.

Read this chart carefully. Many of these strategies act as reinforcement mechanisms.

For example:

1. Prompt anticipated regret induces guilt, and fear of illness and death.
   (Negative reinforcement.)

2. Fear of missing out induces anxiety that access to the product is limited.
   (Negative reinforcement.)

3. Promote compromise options produces the appearance of choice and freedom.
   (Positive reinforcement.)

4. Use analogy induces a positive sentiment through a comforting narrative.
   (Positive reinforcement.)

For fun, take a gander at any well funded mass media campaign, and you’ll more than likely spot reciprocating language that induces both positive and negative reinforcement. Unsurprisingly, this technique is also prominent in advertising, where cognitive stress is perceptually alleviated through the purchase of a product.

After examining similar studies, along with my own observations, I developed a simple framework describing how these techniques work, which logically explains and weaves together irrational and emotionally extreme behaviour.

Bear with me on the technicals.

Sketch for ‘Psyche before the throne of Venus’ by Henrietta Rae (circa 1892)

In general, abstract perception relates to reinforcement through the following:

1. Perceptual opposition → Cognitive dissonance → Negative reinforcement.

2. Perceptual agreement → Cognitive affirmation → Positive reinforcement

The goal in this conditioning model is to flip a “belief” through cycles of stress and relief via perceptual opposition and agreement in sequence. This is easier to explain using modal logic¹ with its rules to reason about necessity and possibility.

1. Consider “perception” and “belief” as modal phrases of “possible,” “not possible,” “necessary” and “not necessary.”

2. In English, there are multiple synonyms for “possible” and “necessary,” such as “can,” “could,” “maybe” and “has to,” “needs to,” “should,” “must,” etc.

3. Equivalences: “not necessary” is equivalent to “possible not” and “not possible” is equivalent to “necessary not.”

4. Reflexivity: if “x has to be true” then “x is true.”

5. Necessitation: if “x is true” then “x has to be true.”

For example:

If “it’s not possible for the sky to be green” then “the sky must not be green.”

Using the reflexivity axiom, “necessary” becomes “is” as below.

If “the sky must not be green” then “the sky is not green.”

By combining conflicting modals (e.g., necessary and not possible), perceptual opposition results in cognitive dissonance and creates negative reinforcement. Similarly, perceptual agreement through equivalent modals creates positive reinforcement. Thus, this technique approximates psychological conditioning as a phrase sequence.

Let’s revisit the elephant.

1. “Have to leave” is the belief when initially in captivity.

2. “Not possible to leave” is perceived when constrained by heavy chain.

3. Perceptual opposition (have to + not possible) creates cognitive dissonance.

4. Cognitive dissonance produces a negative emotional state.

5. The spirit of the animal is crushed after enough negative cycles.

6. “Have to leave” belief is replaced by “not possible to leave.”

7. Perceptual affirmation produces a positive (less negative) emotional state.

8. The belief is reinforced to “have to not leave.”

9. Through reflexivity, eventually “not leave” becomes the behaviour.

As a simple model, it reasonably describes key states during a conditioning sequence. Behaviour in this model is ultimately produced by a dominant necessity statement, implying a “needs to” or “has to” is behind every action, even the really crazy ones, and a conflicting modal lurks behind negative emotions.

Now, consider:

1. “Trump is a fascist!”

2. Necessitation translates to “Trump has to be a fascist!” and via equivalence “It’s not possible for Trump to not be a fascist!”

3. Using this model, cognitive dissonance is experienced when a conflicting modal is introduced.

4. So, “Trump is a fascist!” and “It’s not possible for Trump to be a fascist!” produces cognitive dissonance and a negative emotional state.

5. However, cognitive affirmation produces a positive emotional state, such as “Trump is a fascist!” and “It’s not possible for Trump to not be a fascist!”

6. Notice how with a slight word adjustment “Trump needs to be a fascist!” is also part of this frame of reference and tied to maintaining the positive emotional state.

This is a simple yet interesting model of the supposed Trump derangement syndrome (TDS) merely using modal logic and psychological conditioning principles.

Think someone isn’t behaving logically? Try using a different system of logic.

• As a thought experiment, think about something that aggravates you, and examine the mental chatter for a conflicting “needs to” or “has to.”
  Think about something that worries you, and examine the mental chatter for a conflicting “maybe” or “could.”

• As another thought experiment, think about the following phrase “John has to pick up the kids. John did not show up.” What did John “have to” do? What “should” he have done? What does he “need to” do? Is there a conflict containing a modal phrase causing frustration from John’s behaviour?
  Try it with other scenarios in your head.

Similarly, behaviour can also be trained through positive or negative word associations. This explains why Nazi and fascist are overused, because these words induce negative emotions, and when combined with words inducing positive emotions, like safe or protect, word phrase combinations may condition behaviour.

e.g., “There are Nazis! We need to protect society from their hate to keep us safe.”

<Nazis, protect, hate, safe> = <{-}, {+}, {-}, {+}>

Notice the “need to” modal attempting to influence behaviour.

But, something is still missing.

How is this related to behavioural changes in significant numbers of the population?

A Useless Moral Lesson by Godfried Schalcken (c. 1690)

A system of morality which is based on relative emotional values is a mere illusion, a thoroughly vulgar conception which has nothing sound in it and nothing true.

— Socrates

Morality is an internal system that distinguishes right and wrong behaviour. From the modal logic perspective, these are statements of necessity. e.g., Have to protect children, have to not steal, etc. Various philosophies extend or modify morality through ideals, such as egalitarianism. e.g., Have to ensure an equal outcome, have to protect rights, etc.

If the objective is to achieve the highest level of control over a population, then the goal is to corrupt traditional morality and replace with an emotive one. This idea is pivotal in Yuri Bezmenov’s ideological subversion framework, which was allegedly used by the USSR to implement totalitarianism on a national and world scale.

Only about 15% of time, money, and manpower is spent on espionage and such. The other 85% is a slow process which we call either ideological subversion or active measures [meaning] psychological warfare…

What it basically means is to change the perception of reality of every American to such an extent that, despite the abundance of information, no one is able to come to sensible conclusions in the interests of defending themselves, their families, their community, and their country.

— Yuri Bezmenov

Demoralization is the process of corrupting traditional morality and instilling new values through education and media, thus altering the public’s perception of reality. This new perception of reality results in conflict — especially with traditional norms and values — creating perceptual opposition (i.e., cognitive dissonance) providing an opportunity to further influence behaviour through conditioning. Positive reinforcement is achieved by perceptual agreement as well as physical gratification, such as drugs, junk food, stimulating media, etc. to cope with the increased negative stimuli in society.

The resulting dysfunction presents an opportunity to drastically alter a population’s behaviour through Destabilization, Crisis and Normalization. As a war-games tactic, this is more efficient than direct conflict since the enemy compromises itself first.

The Temple of the Mind by Albert Pinkham Ryder (1847 – 1917)

If you command the morals and vice of a society, you control its population. The will of an addict is subsumed by their vice; control the vice control the addict. Control what is right and is wrong, and control the lost and fearful minds seeking coherent direction. When morality is surrendered, the mind is as malleable as the sheep’s, easily controlled through the tug of a rope and a hand full of feed.

Unfortunately, a significant portion of the population has to be told what to think, since their will is governed by an external morality and vice. What would happen if murder were legal? How many minds would march in symphony through the stroke of a pen? If we expect others to come to an epiphany, a realization that changes their behaviour, we’re being naive because their will is not free to do so.

While all hope is not lost, there’s still a top to this nasty pyramid of control.

Driving of the merchants from the temple by Scarsellino (1580 and 1585)

Jesus entered the temple courts and drove out all who were buying and selling there. He overturned the tables of the money changers and the benches of those selling doves.

— Matthew 21:12

The cleansing of the Temple narrative describes Jesus expelling money changers, modern day bankers, from the Temple. If interpreting the word Temple as the mind, then the narrative can be interpreted as clearing the mind from the influence of money and replacing it with a sound moral framework, because money easily corrupts the mind and betrays our most sacred values.

Then one of the Twelve, the one called Judas Iscariot, went to the chief priests and asked, “What are you willing to give me if I hand Him over to you?”

And they set out for him thirty pieces of silver.

— Matthew 26:14-15

Money as a medium of exchange for goods and services acts a natural system of positive and negative reinforcement, where productivity is rewarded and idleness is punished. Normally, real wealth would be needed to exert control, which is not feasible for a large population, but in a fiat monetary system, an issuing authority can reallocate wealth from the population to control its multitude through inflation.

“Permit me to issue and control the money of a nation, and I care not who makes its laws!”

— Mayer Amschel Rothschild

Mass mind control has existed for a long time. It’s called money.

And fiat money is one of the ugliest, and most evil spells of all — so far.

With the fiat monetary system firmly in place, nothing is capable of stopping its corrupting and perverse influence on all levels of government, legislation and corporate interest, since wealth is magically reallocated from currency users and put into the hands of those who readily bark, salivate and lie on command. Our societal mass madness is fuelled by inflation, and if history is a guide, it may escalate even further — far beyond our wildest imaginations. But there’s still hope. Your spirit need not be crushed like the elephant’s, because our shackles are mental constraints, which can be broken through counter conditioning and a strong spirit.

“It’s impossible!” “I can’t” “But I have to!” are all conditioned modals that can be conditioned out, after some suffering that is. Cleanse your mind from the nefarious influence of money and never betray your moral framework, then perhaps you may assume the role of a shepherd, guiding the flocks of fearful sheep. And when dealing with a demoralized zealot, temper your frustration, because their souls have long since been crushed, their morals sold and their will commandeered by vice.

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Repentance literally means “think again.”

To repent is to regret so deeply as to change the mind or course of conduct in consequence and develop new mental and spiritual habits.

— Etymology Online: Repent

Remember, you still have the gift to change your mind, which can change the world.

1. Used in philosophy, game theory, moral theory and many other fields.