Note from Blog: Despite these interesting and perhaps poingnat anylysis of the US Culture....or lack of it.....no one seems to be mentioning the reason for Christmas.....Where is Christ? Perhaps if all these indiviudals who have lost thier individuality remmeber the true reason for CHRISTMAS....perhaps things might be different.
December 3, 2013 by
Brandon Smith
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“Men (people) are rarely aware of the real reasons which motivate their actions.” — Edward Bernays, Propaganda, 1928
The winter holidays are traditionally supposed to embody a certain
ideal of that which is best in the hearts of human beings. As the world
around us retreats into ice and snow and the Earth’s northern cycle
returns to death once again, the holidays represent a time of
contemplation, as well as an opportunity to shine a light in an
otherwise dark and dreary period. This heritage is as old as history,
dating back to an era in which agriculture was paramount and men
garnered far more respect for the tides of nature. The parallel
relationship between social “renewal” and seasonal renewal has served
the collective psyche of Western society, in my view, for the better.
Unfortunately, this process has all but vanished today, twisted and
mutilated into something sinister and poisonous.
Those of us who pay attention are well aware of a trend of cultural
decline within our Nation, and this problem is disturbingly visible from
Thanksgiving to Christmas. It’s not just the highly publicized Black
Friday (now Black Thursday) riots over semi-cheap Chinese-made garbage.
Those are certainly vile examples:
Rather, it’s the behavior of people throughout the season on a daily
basis that is most disconcerting. I have personally witnessed, as I’m
sure many people have, a magnified and astonishing disregard for
conscience and basic decency growing worse each year for at least the
past decade. That which is most unsettling about our society today is
somehow unleashed with wild abandon every year at this time.
The idiocy and barbarism seems to span all economic “classes” — from
the upper-middle-class snob screaming at bewildered cashiers over a
coupon worth 50 cents, to the middle-class suburbanites brawling on the
sticky floors of Wal-Mart over flat-screen TVs, to the part-time
employee who sold her soul for minimum wage and now yells at people on
Thanksgiving eve to stop filming the mindless brawls that her corporate
masters encourage because such videos might “reflect badly” on the
company image. The dark side truly knows no social or financial bounds.
Every year, we see this behavior, shake our heads in dismay and look
forward to the beginning of January, when Americans go back to being
only moderately disdainful toward each other. This time, however,
instead of merely gawking in disbelief at the circus sideshow, I would
like to challenge people to explore more deeply the true motivations of
the mob itself, as well as the motivations of the elitists who
manipulate the mob for their own purposes. Let’s take a look at the
fundamental dynamics of the psychology of mobs and the madness of
crowds.
Filling The Emptiness
In
You Should Feel Sorry For Sheeple; Here’s Why,
I outline the inner life, or rather the lack of inner life, common to
the average sheeple. Many of my compatriots find it increasingly
difficult to muster any pity for the sheeple subculture, and I can see
why. When given ample opportunity, sheeple always sink toward the worst
humanity has to offer usually in an effort to aggrandize themselves.
But let’s set aside that sick feeling in our stomachs when thinking
of sheeple and really consider what their existence is like. What does a
sheeple’s daily life consist of?
In most cases, he lives what he believes to be the American dream. He
wakes up in the morning swelling with superficial concerns of personal
gain, scheming ways in which he can raise his perceived stature among
the other sheeple around him. He then then travels to his place of
employment, usually a job he hates, in order to accumulate enough wealth
(scraps from the plates of government and corporate financiers) to buy
all the “things” he assumes everyone else wants. In the process, he
pawns off his children to state-run schools designed to crush their
spirits; and he becomes estranged from his spouse, who begins to forget
why they ever got married in the first place. He returns home physically
and emotionally drained, knowing that he did nothing worthwhile with
his time, only to sit apathetically in front of his television for a few
hours being bombarded with cancerous marketing propaganda and barely
talking with the family he tell himself he works so hard for.
Think about it. Think of the pitch-black void that his life has
become. Think of all the abandoned dreams, all the missed opportunities
for experience and joy, all the moments of reflection and self-education
that were missed because he was “too busy” trying to elevate himself
within the ranks of a heartless collective.
Now, for one frightening moment, imagine this is your life. No sense
of legitimate pride or individualism. No understanding of the underlying
events that affect your environment or the high-placed people who
determine your future. No thoughts outside the mainstream box. No
recognition of possible alternative ways to live or how to break free.
No hope for tomorrow but the endless drudgery of today’s mediocrity.
Think of the unconscious rage you would have brewing inside like a
putrid ball of sulfur and magma.
This rage is what sheeple use to fill the emptiness inside themselves
once they subconsciously realize that no amount of frivolous
consumerism will make them whole. Typically, they are on constant
lookout for opportunities to vent their anger at unsuspecting victims in
drive-by fashion.
Somehow, the holidays appear to have become a prime period of
opportunity during which society opens the door for the dark side to
come out and for sheeple to passively or not-so-passively project their
failings onto others. For now, we might presume that this behavior is
somewhat contained and relegated to particular moments of seasonal
insanity, but the consequences of the willfully ignorant strata of
American culture could go far beyond what most morally conscious people
want to predict.
The Psychopath Next Door
“If thirty years ago anyone had dared to predict that our
psychological development was tending towards a revival of the medieval
persecutions of the Jews, that Europe would again tremble before the
Roman fasces and the tramp of legions, that people would once more give
the Roman salute, as two thousand years ago, and that instead of the
Christian Cross an archaic swastika would lure onward millions of
warriors ready for death — why, that man would have been hooted at as a
mystical fool.” — Carl Jung, Archetypes And The Collective Unconscious,
1938
In his book,
The Undiscovered Self,
one of the fathers of modern psychology, Carl Gustav Jung, discusses
the tension-filled relationship between the individual versus the
collective and the state. In particular, he studies how individuals
become swallowed up in the actions of the collective mob and how this
momentum invariably leads to mass atrocities that defy imagination. A
point of primary importance in Jung’s work is his discovery that at
least 10 percent of any population at any given time is made up of
individuals with latent psychopathic or sociopathic tendencies. Meaning
at least one out of every 10 random people around you today was born
with the capacity for psychopathic behavior, including the ability to
completely ignore inherent conscience.
The idea that one out of every 10 people near you might suddenly
burst into an overwhelming animalistic blood fever is, of course,
terrifying to many people. But generally, latent psychopathy in a person
does not surface in immediately recognizable ways; and many people with
that potential live their entire lives without ever acting on it. Some
even come to terms with it through self-awareness and dispel it
altogether. Problems arise, though, as Jung warned, when a society
creates an environment in which emotionally or physically violent
psychopathic acts become “acceptable” to the collective. That is to say,
individual latent psychopaths and sociopaths are not so much a danger
on their own; but when they get together in an organization or mob, the
terrible floodgates open.
During national crisis, or during great ideological shifts towards
collectivism, the 10 percent are given ample opportunity to act out
their inner impulses. The corrupt state will often give latent
psychopaths free reign or seek them out for positions of petty
authority, leaving the gates to hell ajar, as it were.
Another dangerous reality is that these same people tend to pursue
positions of authority, or they unconsciously gravitate toward events
and situations that allow them to act on their darker side without
facing consequences. One might even suggest that there will always be a
potential for despotic regimes exactly because the 10 percent will
likely always be around to be used as a weapon by dictatorships.
The mass rage and self-absorption we witness during the holidays
feels ominous to us because it is just a glimpse of the greater shadow
side of the American public. It is a glimpse of the kind of mentality
that makes all human catastrophe possible. Like the tip of a shark fin
cutting the surface of the water, we swim fearing not the dorsal, but
the monster we
know it is connected to.
The Magicians Of Mass Hysteria
Jung, once a favorite of Sigmund Freud’s, broke sharply with Freud’s
analytical school when he realized Freud would not accept the idea of
inherent psychological properties beyond base instincts. Freud believed
that conscience, morality, artistic ability, reason, etc. were all
extensions of environment and experience. Freud’s theories on psychology
focused on the idea that man was driven by animal urges at his core,
that people have no complex inborn contents and that all one needed to
do was manipulate his environment to make himself “healthy.” Jung’s
studies proved otherwise, finding that there are vast layers of inborn
knowledge and personality in every individual.
It was not until Freud was near death that he admitted the merit of
Jung’s work. Jung was shunned by the mainstream and labeled everything
from a “charlatan” to an “anti-Semite” because of his opposition to the
Freudian method.
Some industrious elites did find Freud’s notions of environmental
manipulation useful, though, including his nephew, Edward Bernays, who
saw it not as a way to make people healthy, but rather, to make them
unhealthy. Bernays wrote extensively on the use of propaganda to control
what he called “herd instinct,” believing (as most elitists believe)
that self-governance of common people was “dangerous” and that the
irrational public had to be controlled for their own good and the good
of the nation. His entire philosophy is summed up in this quote:
The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the
organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in
democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of
society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling
power of our country. … We are governed, our minds are molded, our
tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard
of. This is a logical result of the way in which our democratic society
is organized. Vast numbers of human beings must cooperate in this manner
if they are to live together as a smoothly functioning society. … In
almost every act of our daily lives, whether in the sphere of politics
or business, in our social conduct or our ethical thinking, we are
dominated by the relatively small number of persons… who understand the
mental processes and social patterns of the masses. It is they who pull
the wires which control the public mind.
Bernays was instrumental in promoting Freudian psychology in the
United States, where it became the mainstay of universities across the
country. He helped establish the Tavistock Institute, a globalist
think-tank much like the Council On Foreign Relations, focused on
molding public opinion. He was also instrumental in promoting
psychological propaganda models in everyday corporate marketing and
political campaigns. He called this “engineering consent.”
It was Bernays who taught the marketing world how to appeal to the
basest instincts of human beings and to use those instinctual desires to
covertly control them. Corporations used Bernays’ strategies to create
an atmosphere of decadent consumption in America that has lasted since
the end of World War II. The idea was simple: Convince the public that
buying corporate products will satisfy their animal urges. All
commercialism to this day revolves around this method (which is why
almost every beer commercial for several decades has included scantily
clad women or sexual innuendo, for example).
But Bernays was not only teaching corporations how to tap into
existing human impulses, he was also teaching corporations and
governments how to use psychological trickery to manipulate the
citizenry to
rely on their basest impulses. Essentially, Bernays
taught the establishment how to convince people, or shame people, into
ignoring their greater selves and indulging their psychopathic and
sociopathic urges. Bernays taught the establishment how to turn people
into zombies.
We see the clear results today all around us as we enter into the
absurdity that Christmas has become. The ramifications are dire. The
holidays have come to represent not hope, but despair; not reflection,
but callowness; not compassion, but narcissism and selfishness. They
have become a yearly measure of our Nation’s sharp fall into something
more or less horrific, something ironically inhuman.
The only solution is to strive with everything we have to remind
others, and ourselves, that we are more than the sum of our darker
instincts. That we have been living in the midst of a carefully crafted
lie meant to make us impotent and non-threatening to the establishment.
That there are greater and more meaningful contents at our core, and
these elements of our being can only be satisfied by one thing: the
truth.
–Brandon Smith
