How a man is made into a puppet

2024 Author: Seth Attwood | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 15:55

In one city, local media reported that sugar prices would soon skyrocket as the government plans to impose additional taxes on sugar producers. The population of the city was divided into two main groups.

The first group consisted of those who believed and rushed to buy sugar until it rose in price. The second group consists of those who decided that the reports about the additional tax were not based on any real basis. The second group realized that the sugar traders were simply spreading a rumor that favored them in order to spur demand for their product. However, the second group in full force also rushed to the store and, just like the first, began to buy sugar at an accelerated pace.

Of course, when the whole city began to chase after sugar, prices for it went up without any tax imposition, which gave the first group a reason to be convinced of their "rightness", "wisdom" and "perspicacity." With the first, everything is clear - these are suggestible and gullible people who fell for the bait of swindlers. But why did the behavior of the latter, the smarter and more discerning ones, ultimately not differ in any way from the behavior of the former?

To answer this question, it is necessary to analyze how an intelligent person reasoned in this case. Yes, he knew that no one was going to introduce any new taxes, and sugar prices should not rise. But he assumed that there would certainly be those who would believe the ordered articles in the press and run to buy! Then the prices will still rise, and all the "idiots" will have time to buy sugar at a low price, and he, so burnt and shrewd, will be forced to overpay.

Many are quite convinced that they always make their own decisions. The very idea that someone is secretly controlling them at this time turns out to be completely unbearable and is rejected by consciousness. In fact, those who think so turn out to be the easiest prey for all kinds of charlatans. Such people are most controllable precisely because they do not believe in the very existence of manipulation and do not want to defend against it.

It seems to them that their intelligence, rich life experience, practical acumen guarantee their independence of thought. Meanwhile, the above example shows that even the techniques from the arsenal of a novice specialist in turning people into a crowd devoid of their own will turn out to be effective. What can we say about those cases when hardened wolves get down to business!

Does the above mean that it is impossible to defend against manipulation? No, it doesn't. And that's why. The power of the manipulator lies precisely in the fact that most people do not even try to defend themselves. Some, as I already said, are simply let down by self-confidence, others have no idea how exactly the brainwashing takes place.

Consciousness manipulation is often referred to as mind programming. Quite often, more harsh words are used, such as "fooling", "moronization" and the like. But what exactly is manipulation? It is not so easy to give a short, clear and at the same time exhaustive answer to this question. It is not difficult to illustrate the manipulation with specific examples, it is much more difficult to build a clear definition. Where does persuasion end and manipulation begins? And is manipulation for the good possible? To answer these questions, you still have to start with an example.

Here are parents who want to teach their child to wash their hands before eating. How to convey to children information that poor hygiene can be hazardous to health? The child is still too young to understand what microbes are and how they can harm. It is useless for him to tell about this, therefore, it is necessary to use the conceptual apparatus to which the baby has grown up. In this case, adults often say that Baba Yaga (Koschey the Immortal) comes to the dirty people and drags them off to distant lands, and therefore it is necessary "for all good boys and girls to keep their hands clean."

There is undoubtedly a manipulation of consciousness taking place here. And for the good. The child makes a choice without understanding, frightened of non-existent characters. And that's the hallmark of brainwashing. Parents also went on a downright lie, but this is a secondary point. Manipulation is not limited to lies, although in manipulative techniques, lies are always present in one form or another. Action without understanding is the key point from which any manipulation begins. Conversely, persuasion is based on providing a person with complete and reliable information. The person, in this case, makes his choice with utmost awareness, perfectly understanding what is at stake.

Note that the manipulator puts into other people's heads what he obviously does not believe. The parents did not believe in Baba Yaga, who was stealing a filthy bastard. The sugar sellers knew that no one was planning to introduce any additional tax. By spreading false information, they pushed people into a very narrow corridor of possible solutions, each of which led to the victory of the manipulator.

After all, both those who believed the paid tales and those who did not, in the end, did what the customers of the "sugar" brainwashing campaign wanted in advance. Having accepted other people's rules of the game, all human actions, formally committed of their own free will, were doomed to become only throwing puppets on strings. And even those who understood what was really happening were held hostage by the more stupid, naive, gullible and incompetent. As you can see, it is worth making only a part of society dance to the tune, so soon everyone else will dance too.

The old principle: "the winner is not the one who plays well, but the one who sets the rules", appears here in all its glory. But it all started with misunderstanding and ignorance. I think the examples given are enough to finally give a rigorous definition.

So, manipulation of consciousness - the process of instilling deliberately false information that predetermines further actions of a person.

To make the definition more rigorous, it is necessary to explain what is meant by suggestion.

In the classical works of Bekhterev, Boldwin's definition is given, who understood by suggestion "a large class of phenomena, a typical representative of which is a sudden intrusion into consciousness from the outside of an idea or image, becoming part of the stream of thought and striving to cause muscle and volitional efforts - their usual consequences." In this case, the suggestion is perceived by a person without criticism and is carried out by him almost automatically, in other words, reflexively.

Sidis modified this definition as follows: “Suggestion means the intrusion of an idea into the mind; met with more or less personal resistance, it is finally accepted without criticism and performed without condemnation, almost automatically .

Bekhterev, basically agreeing with Boldvin and Sidis, points out that in a number of cases the person does not resist at all and the suggestion occurs completely imperceptibly for a person.

But what if someone who underwent "brain programming" believed in the truth of the false information suggested to him by the manipulator, and then began to spread the suggested ideas himself? Can you call him a manipulator? It is necessary to dwell on this point in more detail.

It was said above that the manipulator knows that the information that comes from him is false. And repeats someone else's lies from a pure heart. In this case, he is not a generator of ideas, but a repeater and a puppet. Let's call this phenomenon secondary manipulation.

We all know from school that a significant number of living organisms do well without a developed brain. They feed, multiply, evade enemies, perform the most complex actions and for this they do not need reason. Look at the ants. How high is their social organization! They wage wars, take care of the offspring, strict order reigns in the anthill, there is even a division of labor. And all this is in the absence of intelligence.

Look now at human society. It is no coincidence that the famous sociologist Alexander Zinoviev called such a society a human being. The problems that most people solve are not fundamentally different from the problems that ants face. In the morning we wake up and already know in advance that we will go to work, we know how long we will stay there, we know that we will then go to the grocery store and buy there, most likely exactly what we bought yesterday. Our behavior is standard, and therefore predictable and easily manageable. The less we think, the more we live by a routine, the more vulnerable we are. Be aware that standard behaviors are well understood by those who program the mind.

Of course, after completing the daily routine, we still have a lot of time that we can spend at our discretion. And the manipulator sets the goal of making sure that in our free time we live according to templates. The manipulator's dream is a person who does not analyze the information that is offered to him, and acts in accordance with ready-made stamps. Reducing the thinking process to a minimum, making us make decisions, in fact, reflexively - this is the main problem for manipulators. And, unfortunately, they made significant progress in solving it.

When I state these, in general, obvious things, I am often accused of belittling a person. “A man is not an ant for you, and there is nothing even to compare,” some are indignant. “We live by reason, not instinct,” others add.

Well, let's figure it out. So you accidentally touched a red-hot soldering iron, what will you do? I bet that you instantly, without hesitation, pull your hand. Reason has absolutely nothing to do with it, your actions in this case are completely determined by reflexes. Reflexes can be innate, they are inherited and inherent in all people. And there are the so-called conditioned reflexes, that is, acquired under the influence of external circumstances. They can be shaped. And this opens up tremendous opportunities for manipulators. They have the tools for constructing conditioned reflexes. Yes, we ourselves often form reflexes in ourselves, sometimes without even noticing it.

Now Pavlov's experiments and results seem trivial, but at one time they were regarded as a sensation. When the dog is offered food, it instinctively produces saliva. Everyone knows this, they knew about it even before Pavlov. The very expression "drooling" was applied to a person. In accordance with the laws of Nature or God (as you like), the smell of food for many animals is a signal for salivation. This is an unconditioned reflex that is inherited. Pavlov decided to become the Creator himself and set the goal of forming such reflexes in animals as he wants, and explaining the mechanism of their appearance. He succeeded, which in those years literally shocked the scientific community.

A bell was placed next to the dog's feeder, and whenever food was offered to the dog, it would ring. After some time, one sound of a bell was enough for the animal to start producing saliva. Food was no longer required, the sound became the signal for salivation.

Of course, some people realized that Pavlov's technology could be applied not only to dogs, but also to humans. Experiments have even been carried out on children.

The story of a child named Albert was included in psychology textbooks. The following experiment was carried out on a little boy who was not yet a year old. He was shown a tamed white rat, and at the same time a loud gong was heard behind him. After several repetitions, the child would start crying when the animal was first shown to him. Five days later, experimental fanatics (Watson and Reiner) showed Albert objects resembling a rat, and it turned out that the child's fear spread to them. It got to the point that the baby began to be afraid of a coat of sealskin fur, although initially the tame rat did not cause any negative emotions in him.

There is Huxley's wonderful dystopian novel Brave New World on this subject. The author describes the life of a society divided into castes: alpha, beta, gamma, delta and epsilon. Children of the future are raised in "test tubes-bottles", and from the very first seconds embryos of different castes receive different care and nutrition. Representatives of castes are shocked, artificially forming conditioned reflexes in such a way as to maximally adapt them to the performance of various social roles.

Of course, Huxley's book is satire, grotesque, but look around, is our modern life so different from a science fiction novel? How are we raised from early childhood? How and what are we taught at school? What is considered moral in our country, and what is subject to ridicule and censure? And who determines all this? To instill in a child an aversion to anything, it is not necessary to shock him. Modern manipulators have more humane means. To force adults to buy clothes of a certain style, it is enough to declare this style fashionable.

But who is announcing this? The so-called "elite couturiers" decide what women will wear in the new season. What the young guys will drink is decided by the customer of the beer advertisement. The music producer decides what they will sing. And how their fathers and mothers will vote, the political PR specialist will determine. Etc. Well, of course, everyone will be firmly convinced that he made a decision on his own, without any coercion. And the hand reached for the beer not at all because a thousand times from the TV screen they said that "this beer is for the most advanced."

And he voted for a stranger without even reading his programs, not because a well-paid team of political consultants did a good job. And he dressed up in jeans that were lowered to the floor, not at all because he spied it on the rapper, the tenth child in the family, who was used to wearing the oversized jeans of his older brother.

Often people do not know the reasons for their behavior. The classic "devil beguiled", "eclipse found" - correctly reflect the essence of what is happening. And this account was carried out many experiments, a textbook example was the experience of Lewis Cheskin, who took two obviously identical goods and placed them in two different packages. Circles and ovals were drawn on the first, triangles on the second. The result exceeded all expectations.

The vast majority of buyers not only preferred the product in the first package, but also confidently declared that different packages contain goods of different quality!

That is, people did not say that they liked the packaging with circles and ovals more, but said that the product itself was of a higher quality.

Well, how is that? Where is the rationality? Where is the mind, sung by the humanists? And then a person with an important air will “rationally” justify his action with such “objective” characteristics of the product as its quality.

Here's another experiment. The women were given butter and margarine for testing. And asked to determine where, what. So, almost all housewives, who knew perfectly the taste of both butter and margarine, made a mistake. The trick was to make the butter white and the margarine yellow. That is, people followed the stereotype: butter should be yellow, and margarine should be white. And this stereotype turned out to be stronger than the organs of touch. Needless to say, yellow margarine soon appeared on sale, and they began to buy it much better than traditional white margarine.

Here's another interesting example. People were given the same washing powder but in three different packages: yellow, blue, and blue-yellow. The majority of those participating in the experiment stated that the powder in the yellow package corroded the laundry, in the blue one did not wash well, and the one in the blue-yellow box was assessed as optimal.

These and many other experiments have shown that, while exploring the motives of human behavior, one should not rely too much on objective reality, which is supposedly always of paramount importance. If the decision is made not by the mind, but by the subconscious, then it is not surprising that a person is unable to correctly explain what he wants and why he wants it. That is, a person is far from being as rational and reasonable as it seemed.

Those who know the peculiarities of the human subconscious gain considerable power. Manipulators rule our world now. People were deprived of their own will. What Huxley prophesied came true during his lifetime. What then a deliberate choice during voting, that is, in a democracy, can we talk about?

Dmitry Zykin