We’re all propagandized

This blog entry’s going to be complex in places but I’ll make it as simple as I can.

You likely know someone who proudly proclaims he or she is immune to propaganda.

Except, that’s nonsense. Talk to cult deprogrammers and cult survivors (including regime defectors). They’re likely going to tell you that even being a genius doesn’t make you immune to having your mind messed with in ways you won’t be aware of. In fact, in some cases, it could make you even more susceptible because smart people tend to be more open to experience. Even the simplest trick in the cult recruiter’s book – oh, we know you won’t fall for that, you’re too smart – sometimes works like a charm. People love having their egos stroked. And then watch that supposedly superior mind get hoodwinked into believing all sorts of nonsense. As we also know, it’s much harder for people to admit they’ve been fooled, so watch that person come up with elaborate scenarios showing that no, he or she hasn’t been fooled. And then, at some point, that person’s going to get lost in their own maze of delusions.

So many of those gurus, cult leaders, and life coaches walk around like they can read the mind of God. In fact, it’s often just a mask to hide their arrogance and greed. Anyway, there was a particular cult leader who, for some strange reason, managed to mentally enslave extremely rich women while all he had to offer was a word salad. Nonsense masked as profound insights. But, when delivered with authority by a handsome man, that was enough to charm and seduce these gullible women with big bank accounts. It’s just like with wealth. ”When you’re rich, they think you really know.” Recognize these famous words? And they are very much true. That’s why I say money is magic because if you’re wealthy, your words are like magic. People often automatically assume whatever you say is some kind of a profound wisdom and you must be right. You can spout nonsense, it doesn’t matter.

You have a propagandized psyche. I have a propagandized psyche. We all have propagandized psyches. Now, that’s no excuse for moral relativism where anything goes because everyone lies. That’s exactly what Russian propagandists want and they don’t even hide it.

Genocide is genocide, end of story. And it must be ended and the perpetrators – from soldiers to propagandists – punished. What kind of punishment, here or in the hereafter, that’s not for me to decide. I actually wonder if there’s a noosphere (a sphere of human thought) that’s affecting us just as much as all the other electromagnetic pollution, and so on.

At the same time, if you truly believe the West is Satanic, then sending an Oreshnik missile to, say, Warsaw, would be justified and even an act of goodness in your mind. I’m sure that’s how many, if not most, jihadis justify their actions – they are on the side of the light, and we’re all evil for not adhering to the same doctrine. Running over twenty people with a truck? No problem. Worse yet – a duty opening up the gates of paradise. You can’t negotiate with that mindset, because whatever you offer is earthly, ephemeral, transient versus eternity.

Gurus, cult leaders, and some life coaches often claim to be free thinkers and they want to show you the way to being a free thinker like them. To wake you up so you aren’t like the sheeple. So you can truly empathize with another person and how they see the world and not be biased by any propaganda. Catchy phrases, we’ve all heard them. Except, in my opinion at least, there are no free thinkers at all. First, we’re all propagandized to an extent. Socialization is propaganda, to an extent, anyway, even though I know many would disagree.

You’d need to be a feral child – no socialization whatsoever, just barking. No language, nothing. But then you’d be even further away from understanding another person. Much further away. Impossibly so.

To be a free thinker would mean being the perfect profiler, i.e. understand the perspective of another person without any filters and prejudices of your own. You’d be you and the other person at the same time and you’d have to turn off your biases completely. But you can’t do that because the very fact you’re aware of being alive means you’ve been shaped by a concrete set of experiences. By the language you speak. And many, many more factors we’re not even aware of, unless someone points them out to us.

These experiences, no matter how much you’d like to deny it, make you biased. So, it’s like with an act of observation influencing the outcome of an experiment. Imagine an infinite canvas with endless worlds and lives on it and then observing that canvas. You focus on a specific world or even a specific life in that world. You can only collapse the wavefunction, so to speak, when you focus, no matter how small that focus is. And that focus requires awareness, the act of observing.

The only being capable of fully experiencing the perspective of another person exactly as that person experiences it – is God. Otherwise, even if you could fully experience what another person is going through, your own state of awareness, observation, would taint your experience of antoher person’s world. No matter how minuscule the bias, you’d never truly, fully, experience the life as another person, and you’d have no way to measure your bias because there’s only so much bias we can see in ourselves. Only God – a truly impartial mind of infinite intellect – can see the extent of the bias. Also, why are you – you – and not some guy down the street? That, to me, is either a cosmic accident or proof of God assigning roles in an (infinitely?) complex theater of life. Or maybe it’s something else entirely. Only the Creator knows.

We really are programmed on a deep level, often taking things for granted that are actually random, just fossilized by time and socialization. Makeup was popularized by a Polish Jew, Maksymilian Faktorowicz. Before that, it’s my understanding, makeup was associated with less-than-savory groups. It wasn’t even called makeup because the word, be it a noun or a verb, was popularized by Mr. Faktorowicz.

The punkization, or clownization, if you will, in prisons involves makeup because it signifies womanhood, though I doubt the prisoners know the origins. They don’t think about it. That’s how deep these things go. Indeed, memes are a form of socialization and conditioning, as well. While they seem funny and trivial, their omnipresence influences our behavior in more ways than we’d care to admit.