This used to be the rallying cry for getting people to participate in the National Lottery. There is a certain logic to that statement, because, taken at face value, it is undeniably true. However, the odds of you actually winning, along with the extremely disruptive effect it will have on your life, seldom influence anyone’s decision about whether to buy a ticket or not. That one phrase instantly conjures up a narrative that imagines the winner will finally be without a care in the world and no financial worries for the rest of their lives, striding said world like a colossus.
It also feeds into the group identity idea. All over the country, people just like me are also risking their money for the grand prize, and we are all in it together. The lucky winner will be instantly elevated above the common herd and be given a free pass out of the garden of earthly woes. What’s not to like?
Why am I talking about the National Lottery? Because, having talked quite a lot about psyops, I have often been asked about how to mitigate the effects. It isn’t easy, but it is possible. The above example shows that the purpose of such phrases is to get the receiver to create the narrative that the sender wishes them to have; thus, compelling them to act on that narrative without further enquiry. In the above case, yearning to make happen what they have just imagined compels them to buy a ticket. After all, you have to be in it to win it! I rest my case.
This kind of manipulation is based on the emotion triggered by the uncertainty principle. What if I don’t buy the ticket, and the person who comes in after me buys it and wins? How could I possibly bear it, having already invested so much of myself in my new life? By investing emotionally in the imaginary narrative, it’s extremely difficult to walk away. Yet, it was just an imaginary narrative, wasn’t it? Surely you don’t have to take it seriously.
Let’s look at something else. Climate “warming”. I have put this in quotations because it has undergone several changes since the eighties, the most spectacular of which was going from global cooling to global warming. Like Covid. The symptoms change to fit the specific narrative needed at the time. I have yet to see the definitive symptom list that distinguishes Covid as a separate illness from a bad case of flu. I have also yet to see any climate modelling that is even remotely accurate; even the weekly weather forecast is hit and miss.
Anyway, enough of my scepticism on these subjects. What I want to say is that both these topics were, and still are, talked about in phrases deliberately constructed to get you to form a catastrophic narrative in your mind, which then results in a lot of people exercising rigid self-control within the limits suggested — or sometimes demanded — by those in actual control, in order to ward off an internally constructed future disaster.
The uncertainty principle comes in here too. What if I follow my instincts and ignore this, and it turns out to be true? There is a phrase for this too. With Covid, it was “granny killer”, or “look him in the eye and say you won’t wear a mask”. Will you really take the risk of being selfish at the expense of other people’s lives? With climate change, the narrative conjured up is like something out of Hieronymus Bosch, which is enough to terrify anyone.
All psyops are predicated on getting you to do it to yourself. The phrases used to get you to conjure up the correct narrative are the “nudges” that Call Me Dave was so enamoured of. There is an exercise in Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT) that is helpful here. Make yourself aware of what is coming into your mind and then let it go, without paying further attention to it, and focus on something else. For those of you brave enough to remember my past ramblings, you might frame it as not attending to that aspect of the overall pattern, just because it is screaming for attention.
Taking back control of your thoughts and dampening down your immediate need to respond to the emotions of your imagined narrative is a very hard thing to do. You have to make yourself responsible for what you allow your brain to process, trusting that it will always override your conscious musings if there is a real chance of danger.
An experiment — which you are definitely not advised to try at home: in that hotbed of craziness that was the sixties, psychologists wanted to find out if all phobias were learnt, or if some were ingrained from birth. One experiment dealt with fear of heights. A happy, relaxed three-month-old baby was placed on a sheet of glass over a six-foot drop. The drop was covered in chequered squares so that depth perception was more difficult. As soon as the baby was let go of, it started to scream and draw its legs up to its chest. No amount of soothing calmed it, until it was taken off the glass. Babies are not as daft as you think when it comes to survival.
System override will prevent most people from staying in a potentially dangerous situation, so, if you’ve got time to construct a narrative and worry about it, it’s probably not an immediate catastrophe. In these sad times of reduced speech, one can still have useful conversations in one’s head, even if there isn’t a trusted person available at the time.
I have just talked about Covid and climate change, but we have more up-to-date things to reflect on: the assisted dying and the full-term abortion bills that have just been passed. There is no uniting the two sides on these topics. And why would that be? Well, one of the key things in developing a narrative about anything is that the person imagining always puts themselves at the centre of the story.
So, with the assisted dying bill, they either imagine themselves saved from a world of pain or, conversely, forced into death so that a relative can get the deposit for a mortgage and not have to pay for care with the money instead.
With abortion, the narrative conjured up is either a picture of a child damaged by its mother, who sees this as a reasonable way of having unprotected sex, struggling to take its last breath before it dies in pain; or of a sensible woman saving a potentially human foetus from a lifetime of pain and distress by ending the pregnancy, thus proving her respect for the phrase “every child a wanted child” by not bringing a child into the world born to suffer. As with assisted death, the nudge descriptors result in the formation of binary views, which then compete with each other for attention.
Most important topics are now presented to the public in this way, and have been for some years now, if you think about it. Then add in the uncertainty principle, as described above, and you have a recipe for war — not peace — in resolving these societal problems.
In reality, if you let these strong narratives go through your awareness and don’t focus on them, you can look more independently at the complexity of the issue and come to a personal understanding of it that fits in with your moral sense and conscience, without disadvantaging anyone else.
So, I can imagine several scenarios where I would be in favour of both abortion and assisted dying, as well as several scenarios where I most definitely would not. I do not reserve the right to judge others on these matters, but I also reject the right of others to force me to comply with what I disagree with, because somebody I don’t know had a bad experience. In other words, hard cases make bad laws.
When someone makes a statement or suggestion that triggers a narrative based on evoking strong emotions, try letting it pass through with as little attention as you can manage. Then, when you are ready, think about the topic raised and how it would or wouldn’t fit into your own pattern-matrix. Your instincts, if you are in a legal frame of mind, will protect you from immediate damage if there is no actual threat. This is only one of many ways of protecting yourself from psychological threat and damage in the “new world”.
I will be writing about others in future articles. In the meantime, stay safe and don’t give up. There is always a way out!