1984: Thread

[grarpamp]

http://thesaker.is/gaslighting-the-psychology-of-shaping-anothers-reality/
https://cynthiachung.substack.com/

Gaslighting: The Psychology Of Shaping Another's Reality

    “But I don’t want to go among mad people,” Alice remarked.
    “Oh, you can’t help that,” said the Cat: “we’re all mad here. I’m
mad. You’re mad.”
    “How do you know I’m mad?” said Alice.
    “You must be,” said the Cat, “or you wouldn’t have come here.”

    – Lewis Carroll’s “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland”

We are living in a world where the degree of disinformation and
outright lying has reached such a state of affairs that, possibly for
the first time ever, we see the majority of the western world starting
to question their own and surrounding level of sanity. The increasing
frenzied distrust in everything “authoritative” mixed with the
desperate incredulity that “everybody couldn’t possibly be in on it!”
is slowly rocking many back and forth into a tighter and tighter
straight jacket. “Question everything” has become the new motto, but
are we capable of answering those questions?

Presently the answer is a resounding no.

The social behaviourist sick joke of having made everyone obsessed
with toilet paper of all things during the start of what was believed
to be a time of crisis, is an example of how much control they have
over that red button labelled “commence initiation of level 4 mass
panic”.

And can the people be blamed? After all, if we are being lied to, how
can we possibly rally together and point the finger at the root of
this tyranny, aren’t we at the point where it is everywhere?

As Goebbels infamously stated,

    “If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will
eventually come to believe it. The lie can be maintained only for such
time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic
and/or military consequences of the lie. It thus becomes vitally
important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent,
for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension,
the truth is the greatest enemy of the State [under fascism].”

And here we find ourselves today, at the brink of fascism. However, we
have to first agree to forfeit our civil rights as a collective before
fascism can completely dominate. That is, the big lie can only succeed
if the majority fails to call it out, for if the majority were to
recognise it for what it is, it would truly hold no power.

The Battle for Your Mind

    “Politicians, Priests, and psychiatrists often face the same
problem: how to find the most rapid and permanent means of changing a
man’s belief…The problem of the doctor and his nervously ill patient,
and that of the religious leader who sets out to gain and hold new
converts, has now become the problem of whole groups of nations, who
wish not only to confirm certain political beliefs within their
boundaries, but to proselytize the outside world.”

    – William Sargant “Battle of the Mind”

It had been commonly thought in the past, and not without basis, that
tyranny could only exist on the condition that the people were kept
illiterate and ignorant of their oppression. To recognise that one was
“oppressed” meant they must first have an idea of what was “freedom”,
and if one were allowed the “privilege” to learn how to read, this
discovery was inevitable.

If education of the masses could turn the majority of a population
literate, it was thought that the higher ideas, the sort of “dangerous
ideas” that Mustapha Mond for instance expresses in “The Brave New
World”, would quickly organise the masses and revolution against their
“controllers” would be inevitable. In other words, knowledge is
freedom, and you cannot enslave those who learn how to “think”.

However, it hasn’t exactly played out that way has it?

The greater majority of us are free to read whatever we wish to, in
terms of the once “forbidden books”, such as those listed by The Index
Librorum Prohibitorum. We can read any of the writings that were
banned in “The Brave New World”, notably the works of Shakespeare
which were named as absolutely dangerous forms of “knowledge”.

We are now very much free to “educate” ourselves on the very “ideas”
that were recognised by tyrants of the past as the “antidote” to a
life of slavery. And yet, today, the majority choose not to…

It is recognised, albeit superficially, that who controls the past,
controls the present and thereby the future. George Orwell’s book
“1984”, hammers this as the essential feature that allows the Big
Brother apparatus to maintain absolute control over fear, perception
and loyalty to the Party cause, and yet despite its popularity, there
still remains a lack of interest in actually informing oneself about
the past.

What does it matter anyway, if the past is controlled and rewritten to
suit the present? As the Big Brother interrogator O’Brien states to
Winston, “We, the Party, control all records, and we control all
memories. Then we control the past, do we not? [And thus, are free to
rewrite it as we choose…]”

Of course, we are not in the same situation as Winston…we are much
better off. We can study and learn about the “past” if we so desire,
unfortunately, it is a choice that many take for granted.

In fact, many are probably not fully aware that presently there is a
battle waging for who will “control the past” in a manner that is
closely resembling a form of “memory wipe”.

*  *  *

William Sargant was a British psychiatrist and, one could say,
effectively the Father of “mind control” in the West, with connections
to British Intelligence and the Tavistock Institute, which would
influence the CIA and American military via the program MK Ultra.
Sargant was also an advisor for Ewen Cameron’s LSD “blank slate” work
at McGill University, funded by the CIA.

Sargant accounts for his reason in studying and using forms of “mind
control” on his patients, which were primarily British soldiers that
were sent back from the battlefield during WWII with various forms of
“psychosis”, as the only way to rehabilitate extreme forms of PTSD.

The other reason, was because the Soviets had apparently become
“experts” in the field, and out of a need for national security, the
British would thus in turn have to become experts as well…as a matter
of self-defence of course.

The work of Ivan Pavlov, a Russian physiologist, had succeeded in
producing some disturbingly interesting insights into four primary
forms of nervous systems in dogs, that were combinations of inhibitory
and excitatory temperaments; “strong excitatory”, “balanced”,
“passive” and “calm imperturbable”. Pavlov found that depending on the
category of nervous system temperament the dog had, this in turn would
dictate the form of “conditioning” that would work best to “reprogram
behaviour”. The relevance to “human conditioning” was not lost on
anyone.

It was feared in the West, that such techniques would not only be used
against their soldiers to invoke free-flowing uninhibited confessions
to the enemy but that these soldiers could be sent back to their home
countries, as zombified assassins and spies that could be set off with
a simple code word. At least, these were the thriller stories and
movies that were pumped into the population. How horrific indeed! That
the enemy could apparently enter what was thought the only sacred
ground to be our own…our very “minds”!

However, for those who were actually leading the field in mind control
research, such as William Sargant, it was understood that this was not
exactly how mind control worked.

For one thing, the issue of “free will” was getting in the way.

No matter the length or degree of electro-shock, insulin “therapy”,
tranquilizer cocktails, induced comas, sleep deprivation, starvation
etc induced, it was discovered that if the subject had a “strong
conviction” and “strong belief” in something, this could not be simply
erased, it could not be written over with any arbitrary thing. Rather,
the subject would have to have the illusion that their “conditioning”
was in fact a “choice”. This was an extremely challenging task, and
long term conversions (months to years) were rare.

However, Sargant saw an opening. It was understood that one could not
create a new individual from scratch, however, with the right
conditioning that was meant to lead to a physical breakdown using
abnormal stress (effectively a reboot of the nervous system), one
could increase the “suggestibility” markedly in their subjects.

Sargant wrote in his “Battle of the Mind”: “Pavlov’s clinical
descriptions of the ‘experimental neuroses’ which he could induce in
dogs proved, in fact, to have a close correspondence with those
war-neuroses which we were investigating at the time.”

In addition, Sargant found that a falsely implanted memory could help
induce abnormal stress leading to emotional exhaustion and physical
breakdown to invoke “suggestibility”. That is, one didn’t even need to
have a “real stress” but an “imagined stress” would work just as
effectively.

Sargant goes on to state in his book:

    “It is not surprising that the ordinary person, in general, is
much more easily indoctrinated than the abnormal…A person is
considered ‘ordinary’ or ‘normal’ by the community simply because he
accepts most of its social standards and behavioural patterns; which
means, in fact, that he is susceptible to suggestion and has been
persuaded to go with the majority on most ordinary or extraordinary
occasions.”

Sargant then goes over the phenomenon of the London Blitz, which was
an eight month period of heavy bombing of London during WWII. During
this period, in order to cope and stay “sane”, people rapidly became
accustomed to the idea that their neighbours could be and were buried
alive in bombed houses around them. The thought was “If I can’t do
anything about it what use is it that I trouble myself over it?” The
best “coping” was thus found to be those who accepted the new
“environment” and just focused on “surviving”, and did not try to
resist it.

Sargant remarks that it is this “adaptability” to a changing
environment which is part of the “survival” instinct and is very
strong in the “healthy” and “normal” individual who can learn to cope
and thus continues to be “functional” despite an ever changing
environment.

It was thus our deeply programmed “survival instinct” that was found
to be the key to the suggestibility of our minds. That the best
“survivors” made for the best “brain-washing” in a sense.

Sargant quotes Hecker’s work, who was studying the dancing mania
phenomenon that occurred during the Black Death, where Hecker observed
that heightened suggestibility had the capability to cause a person to
“embrace with equal force, reason and folly, good and evil, diminish
the praise of virtue as well as the criminality of vice.”

And that such a state of mind was likened to the first efforts of the
infant mind “this instinct of imitation when it exists in its highest
degree, is also united a loss of all power over the will, which occurs
as soon as the impression on the senses has become firmly established,
producing a condition like that of small animals when they are
fascinated by the look of a serpent.”

I wonder if Sargant imagined himself the serpent…

Sargant does finally admit: “This does not mean that all persons can
be genuinely indoctrinated by such means. Some will give only
temporary submission to the demands made on them, and fight again when
strength of body and mind returns. Others are saved by the
supervention of madness. Or the will to resist may give way, but not
the intellect itself.”

But he comforts himself as a response to this stubborn resistance that
“As mentioned in a previous context, the stake, the gallows, the
firing squad, the prison, or the madhouse, are usually available for
the failures.”
How to Resist the Deconstruction of Your Mind

    “He whom the gods wish to destroy, they first of all drive mad.”

    – Henry Wadsworth Longfellow “The Masque of Pandora”

For those who have not seen the 1944 psychological thriller “Gaslight”
directed by George Cukor, I would highly recommend you do so since
there is an invaluable lesson contained within, that is especially
applicable to what I suspect many of us are experiencing nowadays.

The story starts with a 14 year old Paula (played by Ingrid Bergman)
who is being taken to Italy after her Aunt Alice Alquist, a famous
opera singer and caretaker of Paula, is found murdered in her home in
London. Paula is the one who found the body, and horror stricken is
never her old self again. Her Aunt was the only family Paula had left
in her life. The decision is made to send her away from London to
Italy to continue her studies to become a world-renowned opera singer
like her Aunt Alice.

Years go by, Paula lives a very sheltered life and a heavy somberness
is always present within her, she can never seem to feel any kind of
happiness. During her singing studies she meets a mysterious man (her
piano accompanist during her lessons) and falls deeply in love with
him. However, she knows hardly anything about the man named Gregory.

Paula agrees to marry Gregory after a two week romance and is quickly
convinced to move back into her Aunt’s house in London that was left
abandoned all these years. As soon as she enters the house, the
haunting of the night of the murder revisits her and she is consumed
with panic and fear. Gregory tries to calm her and talks about the
house needing just a little bit of air and sun, and then Paula comes
across a letter written to her Aunt from a Sergis Bauer which confirms
that he was in contact with Alice just a few days before her murder.
At this finding, Gregory becomes bizarrely agitated and grabs the
letter from Paula. He quickly tries to justify his anger blaming the
letter for upsetting her. Gregory then decides to lock all of her
Aunt’s belongings in the attic, to apparently spare Paula any further
anguish.

It is at this point that Gregory starts to change his behaviour
dramatically. Always under the pretext for “Paula’s sake”, everything
that is considered “upsetting” to Paula must be removed from her
presence. And thus quickly the house is turned into a form of prison.
Paula is told it is for her best not to leave the house unaccompanied,
not to have visitors and that self-isolation is the best remedy for
her “anxieties” which are getting worst. Paula is never strictly
forbidden at the beginning but rather is told that she should obey
these restrictions for her own good.

Before a walk, he gives as a gift a beautiful heirloom brooch that
belonged to his mother. Because the pin needs replacing, he instructs
Paula to keep it in her handbag, and then says rather out of context,
“Don’t forget where you put it now Paula, I don’t want you losing it.”
Paula remarks thinking the warning absurd, “Of course I won’t forget!”
When they return from their walk, Gregory asks for the brooch, Paula
searches in her handbag but it is not there.

It continues on like this, with Gregory giving warnings and reminders,
seemingly to help Paula with her “forgetfulness” and “anxieties”.
Paula starts to question her own judgement and sanity as these events
become more and more frequent. She has no one else to talk to but
Gregory, who is the only witness to these apparent mishaps. It gets to
a point where completely nonsensical behaviour is being attributed to
Paula by Gregory. A painting is found missing on the wall one night.
Gregory talks to Paula like she is a 5 year child and asks her to put
it back. Paula insists she does not know who took it down. After her
persistent passionate insistence that it was not her, she walks up the
stairs almost like she were in a dream state and pulls the painting
from behind a statue. Gregory asks why she lied, but Paula insists
that she only thought to look there because that is where it was found
the last two times this occurred.

For weeks now, Paula thinks she has been seeing things, the gas lights
of the house dimming for no reason, she also hears footsteps above her
bedroom. No one else seems to take notice. Paula is also told by
Gregory that he found out that her mother, who passed away when she
was very young, had actually gone insane and died in an asylum.

Despite Paula being reduced to a condition of an ongoing stupor, she
decides one night to make a stand and regain control over her life.
Paula is invited, by one of her Aunt Alice’s close friends Lady
Dalroy, to attend a high society evening with musical performances.
Recall that Paula’s life gravitated around music before her encounter
with Gregory. Music was her life. Paula gets magnificently dressed up
for the evening and on her way out tells Gregory that she is going to
this event. Gregory tries to convince her that she is not well enough
to attend such a social gathering, when Paula calmly insists that she
is going and that this woman was a dear friend of her Aunt, Gregory
answers that he refuses to accompany her (in those days that was a big
deal). Paula accepts this and walks with a solid dignity, undeterred
towards the horse carriage. In a very telling scene, Gregory is left
momentarily by himself and panic stricken, his eyes bulging he snaps
his cigar case shut and runs after Paula. He laughingly calls to her,
“Paula, you did not think I was serious? I had no idea that this party
meant so much to you. Wait, I will get ready.” As he is getting ready
in front of the mirror, a devilish smirk appears.

Paula and Gregory show up to Lady Dalroy’s house late, the pianist is
in the middle of the 1st movement of Beethoven’s Piano Sonata #8 in C
minor. They quickly are escorted to two empty seats. Paula is
immediately immersed in the piece, and Gregory can see his control is
slipping. After only a few minutes, he goes to look at his pocket
watch but it is not in his pocket. He whispers into Paula’s ear, “My
watch is missing”. Immediately, Paula looks like she is going to be
sick. Gregory takes her handbag and Paula looks in horror as he pulls
out his pocket watch, insinuating that Paula had put it there. She
immediately starts losing control and has a very public emotional
breakdown. Gregory takes her away, as he remarks to Lady Dalroy that
this is why he didn’t want Paula coming in the first place.

When they arrive home, Paula has by now completely succumbed to the
thought that she is indeed completely insane. Gregory says that it
would be best if they go away somewhere for an indefinite period of
time. We later find out that Gregory is intending on committing her to
an asylum. Paula agrees to leave London with Gregory and leaves her
fate entirely in his hands.

In the case of Paula it is clear. She has been suspecting that Gregory
has something to do with her “situation” but he has very artfully
created an environment where Paula herself doubts whether this is a
matter of unfathomable villainy or whether she is indeed going mad.

It is rather because she is not mad that she doubts herself, because
there is seemingly no reason for why Gregory would put so much time
and energy into making it look like she were mad, or at least so it
first appears. But what if the purpose to her believing in her madness
was simply a matter of who is in control?

Paula almost succeeds in gaining the upper-hand in this
power-struggle, the evening she decided to go out on her own no matter
what Gregory insisted was in her best interest. If she would have held
her ground at Lady Dalroy’s house and simply replied, “I have no idea
why your stupid watch ended up in my handbag and I could care less.
Now stop interrupting this performance, you are making a scene!”
Gregory’s spell would have been broken as simple as that. If he were
to complain to others about the situation, they would also respond,
“Who cares man, why are you so obsessed about your damn watch?”

We find ourselves today in a very similar situation to Paula. And the
voice of Gregory is represented by the narrative of false news and the
apocalyptic social behaviourist programming in our forms of
entertainment. The things most people voluntarily subject themselves
to on a daily, if not hourly, basis. Socially conditioning them, like
a pack of salivating Pavlovian dogs, to think it is just a matter of
time before the world ends and with a ring of their master’s bell…be
at each other’s throats.

Paula ends up being saved in the end by a man named Joseph Cotten (a
detective), who took notice and quickly discerned that something was
amiss. In the end Gregory is arrested. It is revealed that Gregory is
in fact Sergis Bauer. That he killed Alice Alquist and that he has
returned to the scene of the crime after all these years in search for
the famous jewels of the opera singer. The jewels were in fact rather
worthless from the standpoint that they were too famous to be sold,
however, Gregory never intended on selling these jewels but rather had
become obsessed with the desire to merely possess them.

That is, it is Gregory who has been entirely mad all this time.

A Gregory is absolutely dangerous. He would have been the end of Paula
if nothing had intervened. However, the power that Gregory held was
conditional to the degree that Paula allowed it to control her.
Paula’s extreme deconstruction was thus entirely dependent on her
choice to let the voice of Gregory in. That is, a Gregory is only
dangerous if we allow ourselves to sleep walk into the nightmare he
has constructed for us.

    “When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone,
    “it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.”
    “The question is,” said Alice, “whether you can make words mean so
many different things.”
    “The question is,” said Humpty Dumpty, “which is to be master – –
that’s all.”

    – Lewis Carroll’s “Through the Looking Glass”