We are bombarded constantly with more information than our minds can comprehend. Click on this news story, watch that video, reply to this email, share this blog, respond to that twitter comment. Triaging this deluge of information is a full-time job, that condemns many of us to a life of reacting, leaving precious little time for the introspection a healthy psyche requires. If there is one thing Bagholder has learned in the last two years of living in the 24/7 Covid news cycle, we are overwhelmed with information, but as a society, we are woefully inept at discerning what information is true, and what is false.
Bagholder has pondered for some time, how can we be the most informed, and at the same time, the most inept at recognizing truth. The answer is rooted in the ruling elite’s penchant for controlling the behavior of the masses. They carefully script news stories to exploit our confirmation bias, a psychological tendency we all have to some degree. Through a highly coordinated campaign, government, big tech, and the media (The Ministry of Truth) provide just enough information and talking points for us plebes to feel informed. Making matters worse, social media allows us to customize our news with “confirmation bias” friendly feeds. The streaming reinforcement has the effect of turning our (often questionable) beliefs into certainty. Once certainty takes hold in the psyche, critical thought is disabled, as there is no need to think about things you know to be true. With critical thinking disabled, we become highly susceptible to the official narrative, as there is simply no way to separate fact from government bullshit.
Our overlord’s ongoing management of the prevailing narratives grants them ever-increasing control over our lives. They recognize that the narratives are the key to defining our reality and opening the door of seamless assimilation into the collective. As a result, institutional power and reach grow, and individual freedom is diminished. Most of us just allow it, going with the flow, content to be a slave to the current. Mindlessly offloading the burden of thought to institutions leaves us more time to chase endorphins by scrolling our feeds, virtue signaling, creating safe spaces, and of course, keeping up with the Kardashians.
The Ministry of Truth’s go-to weapon in creating narratives is to frame the range of allowable discussion on the news topic du jour.
For example: discussing whether Assange or Snowden are war criminals for violating government laws about secrecy is within the frame of acceptable debate; discussing whether the government should be spying on their citizenry in the first place, is not.
In Noam Chomsky’s 1998 book “Understanding Power” he said:
The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum.
Chomsky gets it. When our overlords frame a topic, they are careful to provide each side of the spectrum with heroes, victims, people to hate, and people to blame. At a base psychological level, that is all most human beings require. Who is on our side, are they are one of us…. or …I hate them, it’s their fault, they did this to me. These caveman-like sentiments are carefully woven into every narrative, and then dangled in front of us like a worm to a fish. Of course, our primitive human nature being what it is, we can’t resist rising to the bait and swallowing it whole.
And so, we are left debating whether whistleblowers like Assange & Snowden are heroes for what they did, or whether they should be locked in a dungeon somewhere. In the meantime, those they blew the whistle on, the government apparatchiks spying on all of us, are outside the frame, conveniently absent from the forum of public debate. It’s not just the whistleblower story either; EVERY story in the news has a frame around it, limiting discussion…..
You want to debate whether Ketanji Brown Jackson is qualified, or not qualified, to sit on the Supreme Court; that’s within the bounds of allowable discussion. If you want to debate the merits of why the search for a supreme court justice was limited to only black women, you are racist for even thinking it should be discussed.
Every four years, we argue like cats and dogs whether to elect the arch-criminal with the blue tie, or the arch-criminal with the red tie. What never gets discussed, is why we have a system where we are always deciding which of the two arch-criminals is the lesser evil.
You pick the news story. Look hard enough, with an open mind and critical thought, and the expertly disguised frame becomes obvious. Color inside the framed lines, and you are in the proverbial safe space. But wander outside the frame, well, that’s the domain of racists, transphobes, heretics, conspiracists, white men, or any other trending group at which the masses can piously direct outrage. Bagholder is sick of it.
The cultural rot passing for news leaves all of us isolated and confined, viewing reality on our screens through one professionally framed meme after another. Our overlords script the nightly news, social media, and internet rabbit holes with frames that demand tolerance and acceptance from us, while they themselves are devoid of it. Conform…or be canceled. The holier-than-thou woke mob currently running our country, is the first to espouse equality and justice for all, while at the same time censoring dissent like the ruthless authoritarians they are.
The only path forward from here, is for every one of us to be aware our belief systems, and thus our reality, is formed through our perceptions. We must seize control, and manage those perceptions ourselves. If we do not, our rulers will continue to manage them for us, with a non-stop barrage of cute memes, neatly packaged sound bites, tightly framed news stories, and carefully crafted narratives. The first step on the path to liberation is acknowledging narratives only exist to define your beliefs, confine your thoughts, and shape your reality. The truth is, we can not honestly be free until we recognize that our cultural conditioning is caging us all.
Bagman, I’ve sent this to about 10 people, it is syrupy smooth and perfectly explained. Well done indeed.
I add my own penny:
Skepticism of all things, including one's own perceptions.
Freethinking of and from basic principles.
Constant re-visiting (with skepticism!) of those individually arrived-at basic principles.
Allow others to disagree (and make differing views part of one's freethinking/re-visiting).