In a previous post (America is a lie!), I called out America as a lie. In this post, I argue that America is the most brainwashed, as well as brainwashing, country in the history of the world!
First off, what is brainwashing?
Below is an excerpt from Wikipedia – Brainwashing.
Brainwashing (also known as mind control, menticide, coercive persuasion, thought control, thought reform, and forced re-education) is the concept that the human mind can be altered or controlled by certain psychological techniques. Brainwashing is said to reduce its subjects’ ability to think critically or independently, to allow the introduction of new, unwanted thoughts and ideas into their minds,[1] as well as to change their attitudes, values and beliefs.[2][3]
The image below is a harsh reality check of America.
Now, let us examine the subject of “brainwashing and America” by breaking America’s entire life down into four periods as follows:
- The founding days
- The 19th century
- The 20th century
- The 21st century so far.
Let me elaborate on each …
1. The founding days
The image below is worth more than 1,000 words.
Two informative readings:
2. The 19th century
Throughout this century, media misinformation (or brainwashing) in support of media owner agendas was common knowledge. Two prominent examples: John Swinton and Mark Twain. Let me highlight each …
2.1 John Swinton
When asked to give a toast before the prestigious New York Press Club in 1880, John Swinton, the Chief of Staff at the New York Sun at the time, made the following candid confession.
There is no such thing, at this date of the world’s history, as an independent press.
You know it and I know it.
There is not one of you who dares to write your honest opinions, and if you did, you know beforehand that it would never appear in print.
I am paid weekly for keeping my honest opinions out of the paper I am connected with. Others of you are paid similar salaries for similar things, and any of you who would be so foolish as to write honest opinions would be out on the streets looking for another job.
If I allowed my honest opinions to appear in one issue of my paper, before twenty-four hours my occupation would be gone.
The business of the journalist is to destroy the truth; to lie outright; to pervert; to vilify; to fawn at the feet of Mammon, and to sell the country for his daily bread.
You know it and I know it and what folly is this toasting an independent press. We are the tools and vassals of the rich men behind the scenes. We are the jumping jacks; they pull the strings and we dance. Our talents, our possibilities and our lives are all the property of other men. We are intellectual prostitutes.
2.2 Mark Twain
3. The 20th century
Brainwashing was “theorized” in America over this century …
In 1922, Walter Lippmann published a book entitled Public Opinion, which offers an incisive psychological and sociological examination of the emotional, irrational, herd-conformity factors that contribute to people’s opinions.
In 1923, Edward Bernays published a book entitled Crystallizing Public Opinion, in which he argues that “crystallizing public opinion” is essential to a democratic government of large-scale nations: to “govern” a vastly disparate people, you must unify their minds. Bernays criticized Lippmann for knowing the public mind so well, but failing to use that knowledge to manipulate the mind. Bernays spent a long career creating the opinion-making machinery, which would provide the “news” that would become the “history” of the 20th century. The engineered perceptions, not reality, provide the carefully crafted contents of people’s “public opinions.”
3.1 Events
America’s MSM (mainstream media) reports on a stage-managed theater, which they believe to be “events.” The events are carefully crafted by PR (Public Relation) counsels, like Bernays, to generate exactly the media “take” that results. The media buys the illusion, and then does the work of selling it to the public. When interviewed in 1990, Bernays, then nearly 100 years old, told Stuart Ewen (who wrote the introduction to a recent reprinting of Crystallizing Public Opinion), “We, PR counsels, have had no direct contact with the mass media for about 50 years. The job of a PR counsel is to instruct a client on how to take actions that just interrupt the continuity of life in some way to bring about the desired media response.”
It is the MSM whose opinions are manipulated in the first place. They believe they are reporting and editorializing on “news.” But “news” is the creation of media events that induce the desired public opinions, first in the MSM, then in the masses.
3.2 The establishment
To the delight of the “establishment” (i.e., the major political party machines), most people assume the Enlightenment ideal that people form their opinions from evidence and hold those opinions “rationally,” subject to alteration when contrary evidence comes to light. In fact, almost all people are selectively fed their opinions by “authorities,” or the MSM, and they cling to their “opinions” with blind devotion rather than basing them tentatively on rational evidence. Ask them to justify their opinions and you will get a defensive rant, simply regurgitating the “opinion” that has been fed to them – They will often act not unlike an angry monkey jumping around threateningly. You will likely not get a cool rational explanation of the evidence and logic that supports belief in one conclusion and weakens belief in alternate conclusions.
Beliefs are held as “opinions,” not “hard facts or knowledge,” though people usually believe that they “know” things rather than recognizing that they merely “believe” them. Most individual’s opinions, and all public herd opinions, are held emotionally, not intellectually or analytically, so public opinion is created by manipulating people’s emotions and instincts, not their rational minds.
3.3 Propaganda
In his 1928 book, Propaganda, Bernays writes of Lippmann’s predecessors Wilfred Trotter and Gustave Le Bon as follows:
As Ewen writes, Bernays correctly gathered from the likes of Le Bon, Trotter, Lippmann that “without a thorough comprehension of the unconscious and instinctual triggers that stimulate human behavior, the work of the PR counsel would be impossible.”
Insofar as the masses have “reasons” for believing what they believe, they arrive at those reasons after the fact, to justify their beliefs; often they do not think up the reasons. Talk radio and other professional partisans think up and sell prepackaged “reasons.” The masses’ beliefs are not built up deductively from careful examination and coherent compilation of evidence. Often, the reasons they give have nothing to do with the real reason they have the beliefs they have. They were told what to believe, showed what to believe, and they form their “opinions” in that way.
More on this subject in Section 7 (“More on the 20th century”).
4. The 21st century
Brainwashing has become a WMD (“Weapon of Mass Destruction”) for America, both at home and abroad! Eight examples:
- Iraq
- Afghanistan
- Libya
- Iran
- Syria
- Ukraine
- Russia
- China.
Let me highlight each …
4.1 Iraq
Iraq’s WMD was uniformly presented by the MPC (Media-Political Complex) as the “reason” behind the Iraq War.
WMD was the media event. The subsequent media coverage and public opinion on the Iraq War universally focused on this engineered diversion of WMD. Two alternate American motives for the Iraq War:
- Alan Greenspan’s claim that it was “largely about oil.”
- My assertion that President George W. Bush launched the Iraq War, at least partially, for the sake of his 2004 re-election bid.
Did any America’s MSM outlet do any in-depth investigative reporting of these alternate American motives?
No!
They all fell for the bait, and sold WMD as the reason to the world!
4.2 Afghanistan
Two images below highlight the war in Afghanistan.
For more, read Wikipedia – War in Afghanistan (2001-2021).
4.3 Libya
Why did NATO wage war on Libya (2011 military intervention in Libya)?
The sales job for the MPC was that NATO was supporting the Arab Spring against Gaddafi’s “brutal” regime. By all credible accounts, Libyans’ support for Gaddafi’s regime was far higher than Americans’ support for “Obama’s regime” at the time (e.g., Congress disapproval rating at 87%). Therefore, should NATO support an Occupy Wall Street military takedown of the “massively unpopular” Obama regime in the protection of the 99%?
Or, if you like, should NATO support a Tea Party military takedown of the “tyrannically oppressive” Obama regime in the defense of the U.S. Constitution?
Was there any logic behind NATO’s thinking and action, at all?
No, of course not!
The image below highlights the end-result.
For more, read Clinton on Qaddafi: “We came, we saw, he died”.
4.4 Iran
Is Iran’s nuclear program (Nuclear program of Iran) really such a big threat to anybody, even more so than the nuclear weapons extant in Pakistan or India?
No, of course not!
Many Americans have swallowed whole the media event, the illusion, that America’s talks to engineer regime change in Iran is about nuclear threats and democratic revolution. Some manipulative students of Bernays dreamed up these plausible but unproven scenarios. Some political mouthpiece announced them in a “media event,” and these fabrications become the subject of America’s MSM attention and then morph the “opinions” of many Americans: “Should America permit a nuclear Iran?”
The image below highlights the biggest American lie about Iran!
4.5 Syria
“Should America support the freedom fighters in Syria?”
The other possible motives for American action against Syria never saw the light of media coverage or American herd opinion. It was all about “patriotism” and “making the world safe for democracy” via regime change!
For more, read American-led intervention in the Syrian civil war.
4.6 Ukraine
It is just yet another American proxy war against Russia, fought with Ukrainian blood and American weapons! But America’s MSM has been selling it as “Ukraine is fighting for freedom.”
Nothing can be further from the truth!
Two informative readings:
- Pope Francis Says NATO Started War in Ukraine by ‘Barking at Putin’s Door’.
- The war in Ukraine: one year on.
4.7 Russia
The image below highlights the biggest American lie about Russia!
For more, read Will America lie all the way into WW III?
4.8 China
The image below highlights the biggest American lie about China!
For more, read President Biden in the Real World of Three New Kingdoms.
5. Discussion
Today, brainwashing in America is so bad that any time a credible but politically unpalatable explanation for a real-world event is expressed in the American public sphere, it is often denounced as “conspiracy theory,” then dismissed and studiously ignored by the MSM. Public opinion, the public herd mind, obediently follows suit and closes itself to any such crazy conspiracy talks.
Many of the American “news and opinion leaders” start with a basic proposition and then report on what they can find in the events of the day, which can spin to support their thesis. Three recent examples:
- Rush Limbaugh: He was a big crowd pleaser and provocateur. But he was so shallow that he left no thoughtful works behind, not even a single line of quotable!
- Fox News: Rupert Murdoch says Fox stars ‘endorsed’ lies about 2020. He chose not to stop them.
- CNN: These days, many anchors start with the word “unprovoked” to describe the war in Ukraine, which clearly is a lie (Pope Francis Says NATO Started War in Ukraine by ‘Barking at Putin’s Door’).
These people were not looking to expand their minds but simply to confirm what they had locked firmly in their beliefs. Unfortunately, some of their viewers might feel they were learning something about the news but most were simply engaging in the same belief confirmations.
Paul Craig Roberts, Under-Secretary of the Treasury in Ronald Reagan’s administration and now a prolific online presenter of truths that contradict MSM narratives, calls the MSM “presstitutes” (short for “press prostitutes”)!
6. More discussion
What is news?
North, East, West, and South!
It simply means news comes from all directions, especially for international news.
Why, then, can’t America’s MSM match China’s MSM to show both sides of the stories on (1) Iraq and Afghanistan, (2) Iran and Syria, and (2) Russia and Ukraine?
They can, but they will not.
Why not?
Because America’s MSM is not truly “free,” either spiritually (“free” as in freedom) or monetarily (“free” as in free food), as highlighted by the image below!
Two informative readings:
7. More on the 20th century
In 1922 Bernays’ uncle Sigmund Freud published a book entitled Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego, in which Freud observed that the opinions of a group are not formed by a kind of democratic or truth-seeking consensus among the members but rather the members conform their opinions to those of the dominant personality within the group. An implication of this group psychology phenomenon is that, rather than consensus among the members of a group indicating that the group is converging toward the truth of the matter and they all see the same truth, consensus likely indicates that one member holds very strong opinions and a dominance hierarchy is in play.
Even scientific knowledge is subject to the influence of group psychology!
In 1962 Thomas Kuhn published a book entitled The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, in which he quoted Nobel Prize winning physicist Max Planck from Planck’s 1949 book Scientific Autobiography and Other Papers.
A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.
7.1 The scientific paradigm
The “leaders” of a scientific field are committed to what Kuhn calls their “scientific paradigm.” A paradigm is a theoretical structure within which the evidence can be accommodated and logically organized to provide an understanding of how some part of reality “works.” The new paradigm provides a lot of explanatory power of the existing evidence and its logical implications offer rich directions for new observation and discovery of further evidence that confirms the validity of the theoretical paradigm.
Eventually it becomes clear that not all the evidence can be accommodated within the paradigm’s logical structure. There are “anomalies” whose existence and effects cannot be explained within the paradigm. But because the leaders of the field have built their careers on the existing paradigm, they resist abandoning it and instead denounce the evidence as unimportant or otherwise irrelevant. The leaders block the efforts of less senior members of the scientific field from doing research outside the logical walls of the paradigm, so the scientific field lapses into malaise.
Then in a flash of insight somebody – almost always a newcomer to the field or an outsider who does not know the “established limits” of “what is and is not possible and allowable” – sees a bigger picture paradigm in which the anomalies are no longer inexplicable and ignored but are readily explainable within the expanded walls of the new paradigm. More of the evidence – more of reality – is now logically comprehensible to the science. But the leaders of the old paradigm never accept this new scientific truth. They die clinging to their old opinions, and imposing those opinions on all the “junior” members in their field.
Kuhn republished an expanded version of his book in 1970 to answer all the outraged scientific critics who could not believe they were laboring within incomplete and in many ways false paradigms that would eventually be overthrown by better theories and clearer understanding.
7.2 Manufacturing consent
Finally, here is a famous publication in 1988: Wikipedia – Manufacturing Consent.
Bottom line: America was totally screwed up by the end of the 20th century, leading to the beginning of the end of America, as we knew it, in the beginning of the 21st century.
For more, read History 2.0 – China’s Comeback vs. America’s Decline.
8. Back to Edward Bernays and his legacy
Bernays died in 1995, before the Internet and the blogosphere really got going. But he surely would have recognized the free flow of unmanaged information as an existential threat to his profession of molding public opinion to serve powerful moneyed interests. While we thoughtfully observe that America’s MSM misinforms Americans, Bernays explains that the media itself is being systematically misled, and merely passing along the illusions as “news.”
Most members of the media are not “lying” when they present demonstrably false or ideologically corrupted information as “The News”. Most of them believe the information is true and believe the ideologically blinded and absurdly biased worldview from which their opinions emerge is objectively well grounded and rational. It is not because members of the media are especially stupid or credulous. It is because after a century of tweaking and perfecting their staging of Bernays-style “media events,” the perpetrators of the misinformation have become astonishingly psychologically sophisticated and effective at brainwashing nearly everybody.
Even if members of the media get twinges of seeing or suspecting that they are writing lies, most of them are subject to a phenomenon observed by Upton Sinclair that most people value their livelihood over the truth.
9. Profound reasoning
Specifically, two questions:
- Does the MSM remain the “intellectual prostitutes” as John Swinton called it in 1880, or “presstitutes” as Paul Craig Roberts called it recently?
- Can the same thing be said about the politicians, including the American Presidents?
Two informative readings:
- Trump’s false or misleading claims total 30,573 over four years.
- The seven biggest lies Biden told this week.
Once again, a harsh reality check of America …
Bottom line: Everything you think you know about America is wrong, thanks to brainwashing throughout the entire history of America!
With that, is it reasonable to conclude that America is the most brainwashed, as well as brainwashing, country in the history of the world?
Three informative readings:
- Two great American public intellects: John Mearsheimer and Jeffrey Sachs.
- America is a lie!
- Colonial America 1776-2030?
Now, to relieve your stress from reading this post so far, below is a meme off the Facebook to brighten your day, hopefully …
10. Closing
America is deeply brainwashed and deeply brainwashing!
America, reform our failing political system, as I have suggested (History 2.0 – China’s Comeback vs. America’s Decline), or face a bloody revolution (A quarter of Americans open to taking up arms against government, poll says)!
You are propaganda my dear! Bless your heart!