Sultan Knish
We often talk about a culture war, but we don't usually talk about what that means beyond protests over movies and art exhibits.
Culture is programming. The culture war is a programming conflict. Ideas are code. They're viruses. They're memes.
Our form of code is communication. A man alone isn't an island, he's one
of those feral wolf children that sometimes turn up in abusive
households or backward countries. And those children are never fully
human because they are missing something basic. They have never been
shaped by talking with another member of their species.
The communication that we engage in, through reading and talking, comes
to define who we are. It programs us with concepts and ideas, which we
bash up against other concepts and ideas, both very sophisticated and
very simple.
Brainwashing is the hostile takeover of a human mind. The most effective
way to brainwash someone is to take a lonely individual and embed him
into a peer group which bombards him or her with love and acceptance
that is conditional on accepting an idea or belief.
That is how cults do it and it works frighteningly well. Governments
attempt to replicate it on a national scale, but it never works as well
as it does in a compartmentalized cult or ideological cell. And as a
history of Communist groups around the world shows, the two can be very
hard to tell apart.
The second most effective way is to take that individual and place him
at the disposal of people who have complete control over him. This is
how police extract false confessions on a regular basis, sometimes even
without meaning to. And at the opposite end of the law enforcement
scale, this is how Stockholm Syndrome works.
People adapt to the group. Unlike animals, we are verbal creatures. We
depend less on non-verbal signals for flocking behavior and more on
direct communication to tell us where the group is going and what we are
supposed to do to fit in with it. That is why controlling communication
also means control of the group.
Cultural programming is a simple thing.
Like Pavlov's dogs, people are programmed through emotional control
points. Empathy, guilt, love, hate, fear, pride, etc. Instead of
associating a ringing bell with food, an idea, attitude or worldview is
associated with a particular emotion or set of emotions.
Suppose you want to program your test subjects to hate guns. The simple
way is to keep showing them dead kids and guns together. And that's
something you can see on every television news hour. Children are a
primal control point. It's a button that everyone overlays a message on.
In this case, the message is that guns kill but government can keep you
safe.
Programming isn't debating. Not in the conventional sense. It's about
instilling responses that are emotional, even if the subject convinces
himself that they are actually the result of his own careful
consideration of an issue. Those responses then short circuit any more
reasoned approaches with an emotional response overlaid with a
'shortcut' message.
A 'shortcut' message is code. It encompasses a larger idea in an easily
accessible form. Think of it as an anti-virus program for the meme. Once
the meme has been implanted, it's used to defend against any competing
ideas. An anti-gun meme might be, "Do we care about kids or about guns?"
while a pro-gun meme might be, "Guns don't kill people, people kill
people."
People have open idea receptors. The meme's goal is to flip those
receptors from open to closed by bonding with the idea receptors. From,
"I want to learn more about this" to "I already know what I think and
this is it and I don't want to hear any more about it except if it
reinforces my beliefs."
The goal of cultural programming is to create an automatic response
system for a set of ideas that operates below the conscious level. This
is the automatic response system that we farm out work to that we don't
want to waste time consciously dealing with. It's a sub-program running
on the mind that we have conscious control over, but, like viruses on a
computer, whose existence we are not always aware of. The task of a cult
deprogrammer lies in removing all these subprograms, these automatic
responses, to free the person within by engaging their core emotions and
intellect.
If you have ever tried to win an argument with someone who fundamentally
disagrees with you, only to realize that it is going nowhere, the
reason is because you are spending as much time arguing with his
sub-programs as you are with him. Eventually both of your sub-programs
argue with each other and it becomes a festival of cliches.
Deprogrammers, police interrogators and other people in a line of work
that requires them to get past automatic responses focus on engaging the
core person through their emotions while bypassing the sub-programs as
much as possible.
Sometimes these sub-programs are consciously programmed by us. We
program ourselves to get up at a certain time. We program ourselves to
avoid foods that are fattening. We program ourselves to like certain
people that we dislike, and to our surprise it works if we are really
serious about it. But we're not the only ones programming ourselves. We
are also being programmed.
Culture is programming. The moment we link up to other people, we begin
getting signals that trigger other signals. This is communication that
eventually sets up automatic responses that become the sub-programs that
run in the background. We learn to ignore certain people and pay
attention to others. And the same goes for the ideas that they
communicate.
Mass culture is the same thing, except much bigger. It's a mass group
signal from something that isn't a group. NBC News is not a peer group,
but its mass broadcasting power makes it seem like one. Lean Forward is
flocking information. So is Forward! even if it is, lemming-style, over a
cliff. People automate enough of their behavior so that they can be
programmed to do stupid and evil things.
People have murdered babies while following orders. They have jumped off
cliffs while undergoing training teaching them to obey unquestioningly.
Once the sub-programs run, you can build your own army of suicide
bombers programmed to go off when they are told to, even if the
programming code is in an ancient book known as the Koran. Once you
convince an individual to outsource the decision making to a subprogram
that is programmed by an outside authority, then you have something that
begins to resemble a killer robot that is aware of what it is doing,
but does not feel entirely in control of it..
Mass culture however is a slightly different kind of programming. Its form of communication is the ancient one of the narrative.
Human beings are natural storytellers. We tell and receive stories, both
real and fictional, and respond emotionally to them. The basic story
has a protagonist who seeks to accomplish a worthwhile goal and an
antagonist who seeks to prevent him from accomplishing that goal. Mass
culture programs people by providing narratives in which the protagonist
mirrors its goals while the antagonist has the goals of an opposing
philosophy.
Narrative is how we identify with others. The stories that other people
tell us enable us to form deeper bonds with them. Mass culture programs
ideas by maximizing identification with the hero of the story and by
extension with his ideas using existing archetypes.
The plucky underdog struggles against the powerful evil man is a theme
that most people can identify with. In mass culture, the plucky underdog
becomes an environmental crusader fighting an evil corporation. But to
flip things around, he can just as easily be an inventor with a
brilliant new technology fighting the EPA. It's the same story with
different masks and the choice of masks reveals the agenda of the
programmers.
Programming associates the archetype with the idea until the idea
becomes shorthand for the archetype so that when we think plucky hero,
we think environmentalist or social justice crusader. And while we may
not think that way, a generation of teenagers has grown up with that
archetype. Association is one of those sub-programs that runs in the
background, sorting and classifying items according to their perceived
relevance. Manipulating associations is one of the simplest forms of
programming.
The narrative forms the personal and tribal identity. It tells us who we
are individually and as a group. When media types talk about
"Explaining America to itself", they mean using mass media to define
tribal identity through narrative. Their choice of narrative is meant to
form specific associations. Run enough stories about America's racism
and that becomes the association. Run enough stories about America at
war and we become a nation of soldiers.
Associations alone do not brainwash an individual. What they really do
is shift his affinities. That is what advertisers do with commercials,
which don't immediately convince customers to buy a brand, but build up
positive associations with that brand so that when you think of Coca
Cola, you think of Santa and polar bears and traditional Americana, or
modernism, new generation and fun when you think of Pepsi. But
ideologies are after bigger things than just influencing your
preferences.
Affinity shifting prepares people for brainwashing by making them
receptive to the actual ideology. It breaks down their boundaries and
opens their minds to a more complete program. A trojan in a computer
just opens the door for other malicious programs to get in and take
over. The goal of any ideology is to open a door. Once the door is open,
by any means, a lot of other things can come inside.
True brainwashing goes beyond just running sub-programs. Its goal is
total identity reprogramming. Identity reprogramming means that the
individual must adopt a new identity that is based on the ideology so
that the individual and the ideology are inseparable and the
identification is so total that the individual becomes willing to die
for the ideology. Then the individual is no longer running "Communism"
sub-programs covering a set of responses to domestic repression and
foreign capitalism, but he has achieved total identification and has
actually become "Communism".
Before this can happen, the sub-programs must begin running linking his
emotions to automatic responses. People program most naturally in
response to personal experience. A liberal is a conservative who got a
drug test. A conservative is a liberal who got mugged. The association
generates new sub-programs. Conservatives are associated with
authoritarianism. Liberals are associated with crime. Arguments between
the two are handled by sub-programs running on the emotions generated by
the original experience so that the experience has become the ideology.
Radicalization is the process by which the sub-programs become the
program and the individual experience becomes the generalized collective
experience of the group. The radical leader embodies the ideology with
his ego. The radical follower subsumes his ego into the ideology. The
two are no longer responding to the ideology as a function of their
individual or group interests. The ideology is now the group and there
are no more individual interests. There is only the program whose
perfection of purpose will achieve all their goals in some unspecified
way.
Purity of purpose is the difference between the program and the
sub-program. Sub-programs are never pure of purpose. They are
subservient to the individual and the group. Programs are the pure
purpose. They are subservient to nothing. Not even the death of the
people running them.
The sub-programs become the program as they take more and more of the core functions of the program.
The core functions are how we do things and why. The sub-programs allow
us to cope with the external. The core programs are the motivations for
the things that we do. Sub-programs automate existing motivations and
associate them with ideas.
An environmental sub-program tells us we should vote for Democrats to
avoid being killed by pollutants, taking an existing motivation, the
avoidance of harm, and linking it to an idea. An environmental program
however tells us that we should die sooner to avoid being a burden on
the planet. This reprograms a natural motivation, survival, and replaces
it with a new group motivation that is suicidal, on individual terms,
and even for the species, but that runs on hijacked emotions.
A programmed person does not own his emotions and therefore he does not
own his motivations. The program decides what he will feel and in
response to what. The program can make death seem beautiful and
self-defense seem horrible. It can make children seem vile and the
murder of children an act of empowerment.
At the start, the program runs by associating a person's interests with
its goals. By the end, the person is utterly incapable of identifying or
defending his own interests and the emotions once associated with his
interests are welded to the program's goals.
Collectivism occurs when mass culture hijacks group communications. By
transforming group identity through programming, mass culture can
promote any number of horrors from genocide to mass suicide. People can
be taught to kill themselves for the survival of the group ideology.
Martyrdom being the idea so compelling that people will die for it.
Collectivism offers the individual immortality and transcendence through
the destruction of the self. By accepting the program, the individual
becomes more than the self, he becomes the group. With the program he
transcends his flaws and takes on the imagined strengths of the
collective. His identification with the group is so total that he does
not fear death. As Muslim terrorists chant, "You love life, we love
death."
The ideology is not truly the group, it is an idealized version of the
group that becomes a substitute for the group, even to the point of a
willingness to destroy the group for its idealized version. Think of
Japan in WW2 or Western liberals today who care more about the moral
high ground than national survival. The idealized group is so
transcendent because it is elevated above all individual and group
limitations. It is impossibly perfect and destined to fail.
By hijacking group messaging, mass culture falsely conflates the
ideology with group welfare and survival, so that, for example, being
American comes to mean following international laws of war, supporting
immigration and international democracy, when it really has nothing to
do with any of this. But by associating America with a set of values, in
the hope that those values then come to be shorthand for America, the
absence of those values then comes to be defined as the death of
America. Those values become the things that we would rather let America
die than allow it to abandon.
Programs like these penetrate trojan style, by pretending to be
something that they are not. Educational systems disguise Liberalism as
Americanism. The ideology gets inside by pretending to represent the
group. Ideological programming is conflated with group flocking
behavior. Once a sub-program begins running, then group interests become
overwritten by ideological agendas. That is what happened to many
minority groups in America, including the Jews.
The left has always excelled at using cultural technology like this in
its culture wars. It studies the mechanics of how people can be
convinced of something with far more intense interest than any car
salesman. It is not interested in winning the debate, but in rigging the
debate. It does not want to convince you that it is right, but to
change you into the sort of person who innately understands that it is
right.
It is trying to program you. It has been doing so since you were born.
It will go on doing it every time you turn on the television or set foot
in a movie theater. It will do it through your interactions with those
who are already running its programs or sub-programs. It will target you
demographically, by race, sex, income level, regional area and so on
and so forth. It will combine all the information it has about you with
all the information about what types of arguments will work best on
someone like you and it will hit you with them over and over again.
This election was a warm up. For the first time, the left had the
backing, money, power, expertise and technology to really do what it has
always wanted to do in this country. And it worked. The left is not any
good at policy, but it is very good at controlling people. Like the
world's worst car company, they can't make a car that works, but they
have a hell of a sales staff.
We are in a culture war and that means it is time to understand the
nature of that conflict. For the left, American identity and any other
kind of identity, just scroll through the many options on the rainbow
coalition of the Obama campaign site, is a program to be overwritten by
their program using their cultural technology. Resisting that effort
requires awareness and learning to use those same tools to fight back by
spreading awareness, building mental anti-virus programs to fight
infection and virus programs that attack the mental programs and
sub-programs of the left.
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