The information below (on what percentage of the population is highly susceptible to hypnotic suggestion) dovetails very neatly with my sense that only a “militant” minority of the population is actually falling for any of the blatant nonsense of the past 18 months or so. Hat tip to Charlotte Brown for putting me on to the explanatory power of Hypnosis regarding all this. I’ve been working with the concept of “brainwashing” for so long that I forgot that the parent-process of Brainwashing is, in fact, Hypnosis. Mass Hypnosis to be specific.
Can any correlations be drawn between the susceptibility to Mass Hypnosis… and Class? Anecdotally speaking, I suspect so, in a way. All classes may seem to fall prey, largely, to one form of Mass Hypnosis or another but what may vary according to class would be the nature of the most effective post-Hypnotic suggestions. “Buy buy buy/ Consume consume consume!” may be more effective among certain classes and “Fight fight fight!” may be more effective among others. Specifically, the post-Hypnotic suggestion to “Show obedience to Authority and Experience Endorphin-Hits of Self-Righteousness” seems to target the Blue State/ college grad/ Middle Manager Class more effectively than any other and this very specifically seems to be the engine driving Plague Panic Compliance. The “plague,” of course, is an hallucinated post-Hypnotic artifact. Nothing could be clearer to us of the c. 10% (apparently) who can’t be hypnotized. So, between the c. 20% who are absolutely hypnotized and the c. 10% who can’t be, that leaves the c. 70% who are probably mildly amenable to post-Hypnotic suggestions but don’t seem to be falling for the post-Hypnotic artifact of the mass-hallucinated “plague”: why are those millions who march in protest (yet probably fell for advertizing, or religion, et al) not buying it? My theory is that more powerful post-Hypnotic suggestions may be conflicting with the the new suggestions being broadcast this year and the year prior. For example, Christian Hypnosis has been a powerful force for centuries… this is clearly too difficult to override with recent post-Hypnotic commands. And so forth.
Anyway: read the stats, which are of some interest:
“Various experts have estimated the percentage of individuals capable of such profound effects. George Estabrooks gave the proportion as one in five (20 percent). In a summary of six studies performed between 1931 and 1958, E. R. Hilgard (1965) reported a range of 3 to 29 percent with an average of 13 percent. The discrepancies result from different criteria used to define hyper-suggestibility. For the Stanford Hypnotic Susceptibility Scale: Form A, perhaps historically the most widely used test, Hilgard reported that 11 percent of subjects fell into the category he called “very high,” defined by a score of 11 or 12, out of 12, on the test. During my years there the Stanford laboratory often used a criterion of 9 or greater on the test to define high susceptibility, a criterion that would include approximately 23 percent of those tested. Overall, Estabrooks estimate that about one person in five is capable of the most profound effects of suggestion seems reasonable.”
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2.
CRUSADING FREE SPEECH ADVOCATE CJ HOPKINS posted something peculiar, recently (urging his followers to share a post, by Disinfo Expert Glenn Greenwald, which actually said the opposite of what Hopkins seemed to think it said: Greenwald’s post was pro-Wackzeen-mandate)… I (being at this point fed up with the self-indulgent cults of personality too many of us actually look to for guidance in perilous times) called CJ on this bizarre and damaging error. Hopkins subsequently blocked me from his FACEBOOT page. CJ could have pointed out exactly where I was mistaken, instead, eh? I am more than prepared for a righteous, fact-filled, irrefutably rational tongue-lashing… in fact, I’d genuinely love one for a fucking change, but all I tend to get are appeals to authority, robo-gainsaying and/or being blocked/ deleted/ moderated into limbo. Prove me wrong, People-Who-Object-to-My-Words, please. Just stop with the Bullshit. And stop with the Dystopian-feeding, Charismatic Pied Piper-ing…
Hey, it’s better to be sheep following CJ than sheep following BIDEN/ FAUCI/BILLIE EILISH… but it’s best not to be sheep at all, no… ? I also couldn’t help noticing how demoralizingly defeatist many of CJ’s editorials have been, lately. With a relatively large following, his Escalating Defeatism (in which he relies on figures implied by Propaganda to keep him abreast of how many are falling for the Propaganda) probably explains why his site, unlike many Radical sites with threatening numbers, is still up and running. Demoralizing the Resistance (wittingly or not*) is a thing in Modern Warfare.
CJ had posted:
I responded:
CJ’s followers, so proud of “seeing through” whatever it is they see through, let CJ misread Greenwald’s simple paragraph for them and dutifully agreed with CJ on whatever CJ had to say, irrespective of the facts. As of the moment CJ blocked me (well it wasn’t as though I was ever one of his followers; I was alerted to the bizarre post by someone who posted it on FACEBOOT), there were three readers in the thread, beside me… out of several dozen, I guess… who were actually able to read AND think despite the offered convenience of letting CJ do it (erroneously) for us. A few dozen (or hundred or thousand) people dutifully repeating “2+2= 5″.
Is a “non-conformist” Hive Mind better than the other kind…?
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*CJ is not witting. At least I doubt he is. He’s just suffering from the effects of writing from deep within a Bourgeois/Bohemian Bubble. This is also John Steppling’s problem. Both were formed by the academic system that handed them their early successes and rendered them uneasy with Non-Bourgeois/Bohemian-Intellectual relations. The biggest suckers of the Brainwashing (see above) represent great blue swathes of both Hopkins’ and Steppling’s networks. All of the academics I know (and I used to know a network or two of them) only interact with other academics or students or fringe-dwellers of the University System (it’s shocking, how many writers and artists this cohort encompasses)… which is, as it happens, the heart of the Brainwashing Machine. Now I hang out nearly exclusively with musicians, many of whom were born (as I was) poor… and worked their way to the upper end of Poverty. This is where the social and psychological filaments connecting various tiers of Duh Masses intersect. And guess what? Duh Masses ain’t, in general, buying it.
*Why is CJ Hopkins still allowed to post? Possible answer: his radical texts have a usefully defeatist edge.
*Why is John Steppling still allowed to post? Possible answer: his radical ideas are passed through his Academic Obscurantizer before you get to read them.
*Why am I still allowed to post? Possible answer: very few (well, not more than c. 300 people) have heard of me! (A sweet-spot?)
(Re: CJ’s ironic use of “supercilious”: he is far, far hairier than I… despite how much I actually enjoy being called an “adolescent” at the age of 62! I really like his use of the word “outburst,” too. Is CJ playing a Gym Coach, acting as a substitute teacher on a Friday, in this play…?)
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3.
“Most people who fail tests fail because they have no idea when they’re taking one.”
—Pastor Prime
4.
Hear about the floods in Germany this week? c. 200 dead, from unusually strong rains, Southwest of where I am. No one was warned to evacuate… though they clearly could have been. No military assistance for the people dying. The more deaths, I suppose, the greater the “Climate Change” fear they can hope to inspire with such events. Well let’s just hope they weren’t seeding those clouds beforehand, right? Because that would mean they’re attacking on any front they can, and who wants to think such a thing…? Hey: remember “Katrina”? Maybe the goal was/is more than Climate Fearmongering; maybe it has to do with permanently vacating an accumulation of Serfs from certain areas, too…?
5.
I was a defective teen in several ways but the defect most relevant to this essay is the fact that I never had posters of any pop or rock or sports stars on my bedroom wall. No writers or actors or artists, either. I liked lots of music at the age of 17, of course and, of course, almost none of it was the kind of music I was supposed to like: I was into a record label called Nonesuch, which specialized in niche markets, and I went to the record shops to buy avant garde electronica and Renaissance Fanfares on the Nonesuch label. I was into the prog rock band YES, too, but I never put a poster of Jon Anderson, in all of his fey twee pomp, on the panelled wall in my room in the third floor of the funeral home I lived in in Philly. I was very much into the music but if Jon Anderson himself had told me to vote for this or that, or dress a certain way, I wouldn’t have done it. I would have continued to do whatever it was I was already doing, right or wrong, without Jon Anderson’s or John Lennon’s or John Belushi’s input. What would liking someone’s music or TV persona or novels have anything to do with anything else? I was fairly rational for a 17-year-old and, if not for my natural struggles with the mind-altering hormone-flood, and sex-drive-related changes to my worldview (now long since integrated), of adolescence, I would have been as rational at 17 as I am now, which being: highly.
Two or three or more rational people can share a level of understanding that is, more or less, equivalent to the level of communication between people who all speak French, or English, et al. It’s no guarantee that you all agree on absolutely everything, or like the same cultural artifacts, but it guarantees enough tacit agreement, regarding fundamental coordinates of the shared Perceptual Universe, to keep the intellectual white noise of confusion/chaos to a bearable minimum.
Imagine two dozen rational humans of varied description, in age ranging from 33 to 70, all speaking English or Urdu or Kiswahili (or whatever), all agreeing that the space in which they have gathered… say, a large white room of 100 x 100 x 100… is a comfortable temperature of 20 degrees Celsius, and that it’s 18:00 in the evening on the 21st day of June in the year 2022 because (for the sake of argument) it is. Or whatever the variables are, including the spot’s longitude and latitude.
All two dozen people agree on all of that and agree also that, despite the fact that it’s wholly possible that the space is permeated with invisible beings from another dimension, or under cosmic waves of astrological influence, or splitting off into alternative realities with every “quantum decision” made on a subatomic level… that it’s best to ignore these infinite hypothetical possibilities until such time as they are as detectable and/or as provable as the banal variables already agreed upon. In other words, in the absence of even strong circumstantial evidence supporting the reality of any of the wilder hypotheticals, these wilder hypotheticals are safely (profitably) ignored … or at least “kept to oneself”. It doesn’t mean that one or two or all of the wilder hypotheticals won’t one day, possibly, with finer tools, be proven true… it just means that being rational involves being rigorously proactive in the cutting down of the aforementioned intellectual white noise that is, until further notice, neither here nor there. (The passionate injection of neither-here-nor-theres, in a forum of rational debate, is properly dismissed as “sophomoric”.)
Our two dozen rational humans can now address, as a group, analytically, any issue they chose to confront. Being all rational, and able to crowd-source experience/ intelligence, they are a powerful “think tank”… especially so if any issue they choose to confront happens to fall within a technical sphere in which one or more of the “think tank” has specific knowledge. If not, let’s grant our hypothetical think tank the power to add members who do possess the relevant knowledge to confront and analyze any given issue. This think tank will be very difficult to bamboozle. Such a think tank represents, in my mind, a nearly-ideal kind of “citizenship”. It could only be better by filtering it for “Evil”… which is a quasi-Biblical term for Psychopathy, say. In the interest of downplaying the Bible as an influence (as riddled with the Irrational as it is and as Irrational as it is that this book is venerated), say we agree to refer to “Evil” as Psychopathy and we filter our think tank, of nearly-ideal citizens, for Psychopathy. Say we politely ask two of our think-tankers to leave the group, on those grounds, and end up with two and half dozen non-psychopathic, wholly rational citizens: 30 benign, rational, un-bamboozlable people capable of unraveling most riddles and solving most problems and living decent lives.
Imagine a situation in which these 30 Un-bamboozlable are together in the living room of the white cube in which they live and I introduce (as a disembodied hand? A voice emanating from a cloud?) a wide-screen Television set. Say the set is already broadcasting a soccer match or coverage of the aftermath of a “terrorist” event or a popular Sitcom. “What is this device and what is it showing you?” I ask the assembled hypotheticals and I then lead a spirited discussion/ debate on the device and the images it displays. Wouldn’t individuals among the 30 conceivably point out that the device itself represented specific electronics firms involved in its production? And the standards involved in its construction are governed precisely by regulatory agencies hardly representative of the intended consumer of the device? One of the 30 (with technical knowledge) might mention the alpha-state-inducing flicker-rate of the screen, or psychoactive frequencies in the audio signal. Several would probably mention that the “news” is a product pushing a POV unlikely to contradict the goals of those owning the product (nor would the employees of same) etc. The 30 would analyze the “Television” device and come to the obvious conclusion that it’s a technology that can’t be trusted to do anything but further the goals of its actual owners/ distributors/ programmers… masters.
Now contrast our group of 30 with any group of 30 people you actually know. Can you imagine putting together such a team with 30 people of your acquaintance? Can you imagine yourself on such a team? Contrast our cast of hypotheticals, that is, with The Real World of Our Daily Experience.
You see?
6.
“The Powerful do what they will, especially when the Weak are sleeping.”
—Napoleon Fanon
7.
As I posted on FACEBOOT recently:
THE IMPERIALIST 