psychology – Page 84

VJMP Reads: Edward Bernays’s Propaganda VIII

This reading carries on from here .

The eighth chapter of Edward Bernays’s Propaganda is called ‘Propaganda for Education’.

Bernays opens this chapter with the contention that the public is yet to fully appreciate the value of education. Here he laments that the role of educator has not kept pace with social change, and is operating according to obsolete logic. This is a common theme throughout this book, which is striking for having been written in 1928.

Teachers ought to understand that they have a job as propagandist as well. This is not only in regard to what they teach, but they have to propagandise for the same reason as any other concern, such as a business: public understanding of the teacher’s role, and their acceptance and goodwill, is necessary.

This is not only of advantage to the teachers, who will get a higher salary if their work is more appreciated, but is of advantage to society as a whole, because the profession will be able to attract a higher grade of person. It is necessary to do this because the higher education system gets funding from central governments, and the actions of these governments are subject to public goodwill.

It’s important that institutions of higher learning don’t become dependent on endowments, because this risks that they lose political independence. If the funding is dependent on industry men, those industry men are liable to coerce the university into becoming closer to a polytechnic. As such, the cultural benefits of the institution are lost.

To this end, many of these institutions have employed public relations men. This is one of several points in the book at which Bernays appears to act as a public relations man for the public relations industry itself.

Propaganda can do more for the education industry than to simply raise its profile. Through using a public relations man to stay onside with the newspapers, and thereby establishing friendly relations with the public, the colleges and universities can make sure to attract the best quality of person.

All of the general principles outlined earlier in this book also apply to education. The fact that the public now takes an active interest in the affairs of the companies and businesses that share space with it is noteworthy. This has created a new demand for propagandists, whose job is to keep the public onside.

Bernays concludes this chapter with a warning. Propaganda can be abused. It can be used to create a false image of an institution in cases where such a false image is of benefit to that institution. In this sense, education is little different to business or politics. “There can be no absolute guarantee against its misuse.”

If you enjoyed reading this essay, you can get a compilation of the Best VJMP Essays and Articles of 2018 from Amazon for Kindle or Amazon for CreateSpace (for international readers), or TradeMe (for Kiwis). A compilation of the Best VJMP Essays and Articles of 2017 is also available.

Clown World Chronicles: What is a ‘Baizuo’?

The English language has stolen another word, this time from the Chinese. ‘Baizuo’, pronounced ‘bye-tswaw’, translates directly as ‘white left’, and refers to a particular kind of ignorant and arrogant liberal leftist who seems too ridiculous to be possible, but who actually thrives in today’s world. This article explains.

Strong men create good times. Good times create weak men. Weak men create bad times, and bad times create strong men. This is the course of history.

We are currently at the end of the good times creating weak men phase of history. The West has been so prosperous for so long that most of us can no longer see reality accurately. This is because we are no longer punished for seeing reality inaccurately, because our wealth is such that we still have full bellies, shelter and entertainment – even if we make mistakes, and usually even if we make an endless string of mistakes.

This means that the natural corrective mechanisms that Nature uses to prevent people from becoming too dumb no longer function. Stupidity is allowed to flourish, because it no longer makes us suffer, go hungry or die. The stupid have therefore come to thrive under these new conditions – and stupidity has become the new normal.

Many Chinese Internet dwellers have noticed this in their online encounters with Westerners, and have become fascinated by the phenomenon, labelling those Westerners as ‘baizuo’. Baizuo mentality appears similar to the mindset of the Romans at the time of Nero. It’s a consequence of the decadence brought about by the presence of great wealth over several generations.

There are a large number of people in the West whose entire lives have been lived among plenty. They have no conception of how it is to grow up poor, and so they don’t understand the problems that come with being poor, which are little more than the problems caused by our metabolic needs in a state of Nature.

The major problem with growing up poor is that a poor life is unforgiving. If you damage or lose an item of clothing, getting a replacement is not a simple matter. Paying an unexpected bill doesn’t mean dipping into the savings fund, it means going without somewhere. And God help you if you damage anything valuable, for the punishment for that, usually from parents, can be swift and merciless.

But there is also a major benefit with growing up poor. This is, in the same way some amount of yang always exists even at peak yin, one is forced to see reality accurately. One can thereby develop a perceptual edge over one’s otherwise more privileged fellows.

The baizuos no longer see reality accurately, because they no longer understand Nature. As such, they no longer believe in Nature. They do not believe that men and women are different, and they don’t understand that the various groups of people around the world are different. The joke is that they think food comes from supermarkets.

The baizuo phenomenon is essentially the mass psychosis of a generation raised in such wealth that they could get away with losing touch with reality. Unlike generations raised in poverty – such as the Chinese – the vast majority of Westerners under the age of 40 have been raised in such a total absence of poverty that they have forgotten entirely that life on Earth is fundamentally an eternal struggle.

There are several facets of this phenomenon that the Chinese find especially fascinating, as does any rational Westerner trying to make sense of his fellows.

One is the obsession with political correctness, to the point of the baizuo’s own detriment. Whereas the Chinese loves to make jokes that defy the ruling authorities, and whereas most Chinese have a VPN to evade Government censorship, the humourless baizuo appears to desire more authoritarianism and more free speech restrictions and crack downs.

Another is the astonishing, almost child-like naivety when it comes to the dangers of the world. The majority of baizuos are asleep and dreaming when it comes to the issue of mass Muslim and African immigration. They absolutely refuse to listen to the experiences of people who have seen the deleterious effect of mass Muslim and African immigration on other nations, especially those in Europe.

Baizuos believe that all of the poor people of the world truly yearn for peace and tolerance and understanding for all, if only we would give them the opportunity to move to the West. That this has never been the rule in history doesn’t bother them, for they don’t believe in history any more than they believe in biology. They genuinely believe that all other groups of people are just like them, and think just like them.

A third is the arrogance with which the baizuo is stupid. In a state of Nature, stupidity is punished with pain, so that people who demonstrate stupidity soon become humble. The stupidity of the baizuo does not get punished, and, as a result, baizuos come to think they are right about everything all the time. Their arrogance is unchecked.

Whereas a well-travelled person could talk to a typical Chinese about the problems caused by Islam and be understood, the baizuo response would be to shout ‘racist’ and imply that the traveller must have been biased against Muslims all along, their observations merely confirmation bias. Most baizuos have never travelled outside of their own language zone, but are still conceited enough to think they know everything about the world.

The baizuo mentality, then, can be thought of as a form of slave morality. The baizuos are the weak men who lead to bad times, but their influence is already peaking. This means that the bad times are coming, and with their arrival the baizuos will disappear.

An ANZAC Lesson: The Real Enemy Is Always Behind You

My grandfather Fred was born in West Auckland, on the land that is now McLeod Park, named after his father Harry. Fred saw action in North Africa and Italy with the 2nd New Zealand Division and the British Eighth Army. He survived the war, returned to New Zealand, and raised a family. This essay is about one of the lessons he taught me.

He had, like tens of thousands of other Kiwi men, volunteered to fight in World War Two. Having volunteered, and then having experienced war and decided that it was a complete waste of time and something best avoided, he wanted to teach his offspring some lessons to help them avoid ending up fighting overseas.

He only ever spoke of combat, or of the general deprivations of war, to his wife, but he did tell us grandchildren a lot of stories about the lessons he had learned from his war experience. These generally involved insights about psychology, whether general or specific to the various nationalities he had encountered, or relating to military life and the nature of organisations.

One of his favourite stories related an experience that occurred shortly after the German surrender in May 1945. He was on the back of a troop transport truck with the other members of his company, when they encountered a column of German prisoners of war being marched along the road in the other direction. Upon seeing this, the officer in command of the New Zealand troops ordered the company to not acknowledge the presence of the German troops – after all, the war was not technically over yet.

But when the two forces met, the Kiwi troops spontaneously broke into a cheer, and waved to the Germans, who waved back with similar sentiments. It didn’t matter that they had been ordered not to do this, for the war was over, and that meant that the inhumanities of war no longer needed to be inflicted upon each other. Open fraternisation was, of course, not possible, but it was clear that no genuine illwill existed at the level of the average soldier.

It took a while to fully appreciate the import of this story. The first lesson was the magnitude of the relief that the soldiers must have felt upon understanding that the war was over. The realisation that all the killing and dying had ended would have been a joy that is barely comprehensible to someone who has never experienced combat. This joy would have been powerful enough to override any remaining sense of obligation to follow orders.

I spoke with him about this story once, after it had occurred to me that this feeling of goodwill towards the German soldiers was stronger than any goodwill he felt towards his own leaders, who were, after all, on his side. At this point he gave me a lesson, with an admonition to never forget: the real enemy is always behind you.

The apparent truth is that your enemy is the guy on the other side of the battlefield shooting at you. The real truth is that your enemy is the guy behind you, the one who coerced you into fighting in the first place. Never mind the fact that the guy behind you speaks your language – you still have more in common with the working-class man on the other side of the battlefield than you do with your own commanders.

This truth was illustrated by another, darker story, that took place in Italy. Fred’s company had taken a number of German soldiers prisoner during the battle of Monte Cassino. In the heat of the moment, one of the younger German soldiers broke down in tears, apparently under the conviction that he was about to be shot dead.

Fred offered the young German a cigarette, and instead spoke to him. Why would we shoot you in cold blood? he asked. Do you think we are monsters? The German replied that he had been told that the British were, indeed, monsters, whose insatiable greed had led them to try and take over the entire world and to subjugate it and all its peoples. It was in trying to stop this greed that the Germans had been drawn into the war.

Fred realised, of course, that he had been told exactly the same stories about the Germans. Moreover, the men who had been the ones to tell those stories had not themselves been subjected to the horrors of combat. The New Zealand politicians who had organised the war effort were safely back at home, fat and happy, as were the newspaper men. The sense of betrayal he felt upon realising this inspired the lessons he had to teach me.

Never, ever trust the politician or the newspaper who tells you how evil and terrible some men overseas are. It’s all but guaranteed that the politician and the newspaper are lying to trick you into sacrificing yourself for the commercial interests of their sponsors. World War Two was a banker’s war, Fred taught me, and the soldiers who fought in it were coerced into doing other men’s dirty work for them. There was nothing glorious or honourable about it anywhere.

There are two ways to get a man to do your dirty work for you. The first is to force him, the second is to trick him.

New Zealand’s involvement in World War One had at first been a voluntary affair, but it became a matter of force on the 1st of August 1916 with the passing of the Military Service Act. In total, almost 20,000 Kiwi men were conscripted for military service, roughly 20% of the total who served. Some 3-4,000 of these men were killed in battle.

By the time World War Two rolled around, the propaganda of the Establishment had become a lot more sophisticated. This was thanks, in large part, to men such as Edward Bernays, who had studied the use of propaganda and how to make it more effective, and who had written about it in books such as Propaganda. So they knew how to use the apparatus of mass media to convince men to join the Army.

This meant that the Establishment media could simply pump out enough stories about how the Germans bayonetted babies, and how they were trying to take over the world, and how Hitler was a unique evil that demanded a unique response, and enough people would believe it so that they didn’t need to conscript anyone any more. Men would simply volunteer to fight.

Fred raised me so as to never fall for the propaganda. Never to believe the politician, never to believe the media. Because, at the end of the day, the real enemy is always behind you. Your real enemy is not the opposition soldier but the one who raised the company, battalion or Army that you are now a member of. He’s the real enemy because the opposition soldier is, in the final analysis, only protecting himself from you.

Once, after I had been studying some military history, I remarked to him about conscription. Sure, I knew that the reasons behind the Vietnam War and the Gulf War were equally as false as for all the other wars. I could be smart enough to know that the television was lying to me about the need for me to participate in the next war, but if enough people my age were also aware of this, what would stop them going back to conscription?

What would I do if a conscription officer came to my house?

His reply was simple, and borne of the bravery that comes from having to face combat: “Shoot the bastard.”

The Case For Cannabis: Cannabis Does Not Make People Impotent

Everyone by now has seen the propaganda image on the back of the tobacco packet that depicts a droopy cigarette, imitating erectile dysfunction. Cannabis has undergone a similar propaganda attack, with many people coming to believe that cannabis can make people impotent. This article shows that the truth, once again, is very different to what we have been told.

Like many things that the authorities want to forbid, cannabis has variously been blamed for pretty much everything that could go wrong in a person’s life. Cannabis causes psychosis, it causes cancer, it causes crime, and we’re also told that it makes people impotent.

Now, it’s certainly true that smoking things is not healthy. Smoking anything, cannabis or tobacco, leads to unhealthy lungs and worse circulation. It also leads to heart disease. All of this makes it much harder for smokers to get healthy erections, as this is a function of the health of the circulatory system.

It’s also true that not all cannabis users are healthy. Part of the reason for this is because they smoke things (as mentioned above), but most of the reason is that cannabis is a medicine, and medicines are not typically used by healthy people. People who aren’t healthy also tend to be sexually dysfunctional, for obvious reasons, so there’s a clear reason to expect the presence of a link between the two.

However, the simple facts are that cannabis does not make people impotent. In fact, like so many of the things that people have come to believe about cannabis on account of the propaganda, the truth is closer to the opposite of what we have been told. In fact, cannabis is an aphrodisiac, and has been employed as such for a very long time.

Indeed, cannabis has been known to be an aphrodisiac for millennia. There are references to it in Ayurvedic folk medicine from 2,500 years ago, and its use as an aphrodisiac may be as much as 3,000 years old. The efficacy of cannabis for such purposes is well-known among young and free-thinking people today.

There are several reasons for this, as any hippie could tell you. Most of the reasons are psychological, the most obvious being one that cannabis shares with alcohol: it’s an anxiolytic. People are often too physically anxious and wound up to be able to make love, because their bodies are in fight mode, and so being touched releases cortisol instead of oxytocin.

Cannabis can change that by putting a person into a calmer, more relaxed mood. It can have the effect of stopping runaway, neurotic or aggressive thoughts and replacing them with more placid and appreciative feelings. Cannabis has the ability to get people into the right mood for sex, probably a combination of its anxiolytic effects and the increased physical sensitivity it offers.

Another psychological obstacle to enjoying the sexual experience is deep religious brainwashing in childhood. Many people have been deeply conditioned, since early childhood, to believe that sex was evil and that enjoying the sexual impulse was an act of evil. For some of these people, it’s no longer possible to enjoy having sex while in a normal state of mind.

Yet another common psychological obstacle is previous sexual trauma. Many women who have been sexually molested or raped have difficulty letting go of the trauma enough to trust a man in bed. Likewise, many men find it difficult to achieve the desired level of responsiveness on account of previous humiliations. These kinds of prior traumas often make it difficult for a person to properly enjoy having sex.

Cannabis can help overcome all of these obstacles, thanks to the deconditioning effect that it has on the mind. Because cannabis is good for breaking down old thought patterns, it can break down the conditioned emotional response that occurs when a person is exposed to a stimulus that reminds them of a previous trauma.

One reason why cannabis has become associated with psychosis is because it makes people more open and more willing to explore. This is also one of the reasons why cannabis does the opposite of making people impotent. Sometimes a person is closed off to the idea of intimacy, and not because of trauma or any of the above reasons, but from sheer natural boringness. Cannabis can be what’s needed to open such a person up.

Of course, all this is part of the reason why cannabis was banned in the first place. It’s the basis for the “Reefer makes darkies think they’re as good as white men” comment that led to the prohibition of cannabis. The deconditioning effect of cannabis is a danger to those who benefit from the initial conditioning. Those brainwashers have a profound influence on our lawmakers.

Again, the correct approach must be one that maximises freedom while minimising new danger and risk. The apparent paradox that daily cannabis use can decrease sexual function, while occasional cannabis use can increase it, needs to be recognised. This can only become possible if our current dishonest approach to cannabis is replaced with an honest one.

From there, it will be possible to both get medical treatment for those who use too much cannabis, and to get medical treatment for those who have problems with impotency and who could benefit from cannabis. The humane thing to do would be to legalise it so that people can get the help they need, when they need it, without interference from the law.

This article is an excerpt from The Case For Cannabis Law Reform, compiled by Vince McLeod and due for release by VJM Publishing in the summer of 2018/19.