As things start to “hot up” in the material world, the principals of applied psychology seem to be used with increasing frequency, albeit mostly behind the scenes. Therefore, I think it might be time to take a closer look at my discipline and tease out at least some of the ways it is being weaponised against populations, not only in this country, but of the rest of the world too.
It could also explain why so many people have given up even trying to think for themselves. Most of today’s information is no longer given in what I would call an honest way and so the choice can only be very firmly binary: believe and be applauded for your humanity, or question and be reviled for the subhuman creature you are.
So, what do I mean by weaponised?
Well, when I first trained, I believed that a psychologist would use the knowledge and insights gained from the past and present of people working in the field to help others who had mental illnesses or personality difficulties, which either developed as they went through life, or that were there from birth due to neurological or developmental problems, or acquired through accident or injury. I believed that my brief was to help the person either cope with or overcome whatever it was in order to enrich their quality of life and make them as independent as possible in the world. To do this, I had to learn how the brain processes information, differences in personality traits, how memory operates, how people cogitate information and the effect of external forces on brain wiring and development.
Of course, the problem with all this is that even now there is very little known about any of these things, in spite of endless theoretical papers written over the last two hundred years. But, there are some things that have stood the test of time and I would suggest it is those that are being what I would call abused. A lot of the accepted knowns go back a couple of thousand years, were the same across all cultures but expressed differently than we would today, which is why people often think current versions are new discoveries.
The most famous one is Epictetus who basically said “it’s not what happens to you, it’s how you take it that determines the outcome”. This is the basis of cognitive behavioural therapy, which is very popular today with both the public and the psy ops lot; who want to make sure you take it in the right way!
Brain development research, especially in children, has uncovered some helpful information about development. The years between birth and six are crucial to the development of a child and any trauma within this wiring in period can lead to lifelong problems in one form or another. Before I get a lot of comments on what readers might have overcome, I need to say that although, like everything else it is not an absolute definitive, the count is high enough worldwide, to be very significant. This ties in with the famous Jesuit saying; “give me a child until he is seven and I will give you the man”. A sinister statement which explains why the education system is so vital to the cabal.
Crowd influence is another thing that has been known of since time immemorial. Charismatic figures, who inspire heightened emotion and sometimes seem able to read our thoughts can never be evaluated fairly, as we are not in what you might call equilibrium when we try to form opinions about them. People we are attracted to, or feel are like us, benefit from what is called the “halo” effect and we tend to overlook these people’s short comings, often to our regret.
All the things I have mentioned have been known about for millennia in one form or another, because man is a natural psychologist. There is an innate curiosity about how we work and why we do the things we do in all but the most damaged of individuals. People observe repeating patterns and compare, passing on this knowledge to others. You may well ask that if that is the case, why are so many people ignorant or seemingly uncaring of what goes on in the present day?
Well, because in the past, people were dealt with in real time and more accurately. One was able to form judgements based on real life experiences of which a good ninety percent took place within a person’s local environment. It may have been parochial, but at least it was real, and people had a more solid sense of self to be grounded in. Think about the first time you went abroad. The pattern would have been completely different and you would have had to spend time acclimatising to a different culture as well as a different climate if you wanted to understand what was going on and join in. More adventurous individuals did so, but others clung to what they knew and stayed apart.
Although we are adaptable as a species, we are also very gullible too. The need to retain shelter in a group of “like me’s” has been ingrained in us since the beginning and it is not many people who can stand apart from that for very long. Even today, ostracism and solitary confinement are considered worse than death by some people.
The few principless of what it means to be a human being that I have just described are the main ones that have been weaponised. Some modern-day experiments that prove the continuation of long known behavioural truths took place in the sixties. Obedience to conformity backed up by certain triggers to obey were tested. People in the west are culturally attuned to accepting what people in white coats and/or carrying clipboards would say, these being cues to identifying a doctor, an expert or an important official. Giving someone a particular role in a group would cause them to behave in ways they wouldn’t when not in the role, even though the role might mean they went against long-held beliefs. The prisoner and guard experiment showed this tendency beautifully.
Again, it was discovered that if your immediate social circle, be it work or home, believed something that you didn’t, then if it was pushed at you often enough, you would in time change your mind and fall in with their beliefs. This was more elegantly explained in Asche’s book on conformity. The psychiatrist Bernard Henri Levey discovered that delusional fantasists who repeatedly involve others with their beliefs, often end up getting more than a few converts. He writes about this more recently with reference to the Covid years.
Asche’s and Levey’s work form the basis for the public gaslighting that is going on, although I’m sure that was not what they intended.
Just lately, a paper has come out about the unreliability of the met office. Almost simultaneously, the media immediately switched from Gaza to remind people that global warming was just about to kill them if they objected to the government’s green agenda. No gap was to be left in order to allow people time to think it all through. If you shout about your deluded briefs long enough, people will start to believe you!
I have seen more than a few psychologists who work with dangerous prisoners start to actually believe that the prisoner had no choice but to commit the acts of atrocity they did, due to spending too much time listening to their delusions. There is a weird kind of glamour attached to unusual and dangerous people and you can be pulled in before you know it, prepared or not. I can only assume that is the reason for some very dangerous people getting a lot of fan mail in prison.
The interesting thing is, although many people believe that they know all this and that they are not being influenced, subconsciously they are. Think about how you put words together when you speak now and then think about some of the things you would say without thinking twenty years ago. Just about everyone’s conscious mind is denying what is going on underneath its surface. This is why anyone who speaks spontaneously about what they really think and believe is seen as so dangerous to the public discourse. They may, if not stopped, encourage other people in that direction too.
These prescribed “moral” changes are packaged as society getting better, or kinder if you prefer, which is guaranteed to make most people shut up, as no one wants to be seen as wicked or unkind. The fight that a lot of people have between what they experience going on around them and what they are told is a great strain; so much so that for the sake of survival, the average person gives in and converts to the accepted norm. That sort of gaslighting is psychologically cruel. People should change their minds because they want to, not out of some desperate need to avoid penury, ostracism and unbearable confliction.
So, is psychology good or bad? Well, like everything else, it depends entirely on who’s using it.
Finally a word of warning. Most people who fight like mad to keep some sort of private life often have no hesitation in filling in questionnaires after articles about lifestyle, travel or single-issue health care problems. As these are regularly produced in “respectable” newspapers such as the Telegraph and it is just seen as a bit of fun, or a way to take better care of yourself. It is not. It is a subtle way of data collecting on your state of health and current beliefs under the guise of attaching it to something you want to know. A typical example is “find out if you are in danger of a heart attack”. Or, “could you be pre diabetic”? A more obvious one is “would you still go to Spain”? After an article on the protests against foreign tourists.
We are taught to expect that scammers and information gatherers live in the shadows. They don’t. They are alive and well and have been mainstream for years. Next time you are tempted to “find out” something by questionnaire, ask yourself why don’t they just give the information and let you apply it or not to yourself in private.