Chapter Eleven in Edward Bernays’s Propaganda is called ‘The Mechanics of Propaganda.’ Here Bernays talks about how propaganda gets transmitted to the public.
Bernays defined propaganda here as “the establishing of reciprocal understanding between a person and a group.” Therefore, there is no practical limit to the number and type of media that may be employed to transmit propaganda (one wonders what Bernays would have made of the Internet).
He writes about how the public meeting was the best means of propaganda 50 years ago (i.e. in the 1870s), but people have become “sick of the ballyhoo of the rally,” and prefer to get information from the radio and newspapers. The propagandist must keep up with the shifting patterns of the popularity of various media, as well as anticipate future changes.
Bernays notes here that there is almost no item of news that, if published, would not benefit the interests of some people and harm the interests of others. He notes also that the newspaper does not care about the propaganda value of a piece of information, but only about its news value. Thus, propaganda that is also news is more likely to get propagated.
It’s important to tailor the message to the audience. The propagandist must create propaganda items with specific audiences in mind. To this end, magazines are different to newspapers because they’re not obliged to print news. This also means that magazines are kind of naturally like propaganda organs.
The propagandist might like to consider supplying a propaganda organ with a series of articles that puts the case to a particular audience. This is especially likely to succeed if that organ feels like they can derive prestige from the association with the company the propagandist works for.
Hilariously (with hindsight), Bernays is able to speak about the radio when it was a new invention and its development uncertain. He notes that many newspaper enterprises have moved into radio, correctly in his estimation. Anticipating the Internet, he predicts that various groups will have an ev ever-increasing interest in buying media space for the sake of propagandising.
Incredibly, Bernays was able to write 90 years ago that Hollywood films were major propaganda devices. He also predicts the rise of the cult of personality by noting that “the public instinctively demands a personality to typify a conspicuous corporation or enterprise.” This is acutely true in New Zealand, where our Prime Ministers have little to go on apart from the personality cults.
Bernays notes that the public has already become cynical to attempts at manipulating them through the media, but some interests are universal. People will always have a need for food, for amusement, for beauty and for leadership. For this reason, they will always seek out sources of propaganda.
He leaves us with the statement: “Intelligent men must realise that propaganda is the modern instrument by which they can fight for productive ends and help bring order out of chaos.” This statement must be read in the light of World War I, which was itself the result of the old methods of fighting. In this sense, Bernays and this book herald a shift from an Age of Iron to an Age of Silver.
The Government released news this week about the exact form of the cannabis referendum question at next year’s General Election. The Cannabis Legalisation and Control Bill, currently in draft form, will serve as the basis for next year’s referendum question. Long-time cannabis law reform campaigner Vince McLeod, author of The Case For Cannabis Law Reform, gives his thoughts on the proposal.
The proposed law is weak, but it’s a realistic compromise with the forces of evil.
Most importantly, it makes the possession of up to 14 grams of cannabis, a small homegrow and licensed retail cannabis sales all legal. As far as the cannabis-using community is concerned, this achieves most of the long-stated goals of cannabis legalisation. It’s broadly in line with what other states and territories in North America have introduced.
Section 18 of the Cannabis Control Bill will allow up to 14 grams of cannabis to be possessed in a public place, and for cannabis to be smoked at home. People are allowed to possess more than this if they are transporting it from one person’s home to another. There appears to be no limit on how much cannabis one is allowed to possess at home.
This will mean that it will no longer matter if a Police officer smells cannabis on you in public or while during a visit to your house. Evidence of cannabis will no longer, by itself, be a sufficient cause for the Police to attack you. Even if the case of smoking cannabis in public, which will still be illegal, the punishment is only a $200 infringement fee.
Section 15 of the Bill will allow for two plants to be grown at home per person, and up to four plants to be grown per household.
Two plants is not a lot. However, if you grew four plants in a small grow tent under a 600W light you could get ten or twelve ounces per grow. Assuming that you’re able to get hold of clones, this would mean ten or twelve ounces every eight to ten weeks. In other words, a household could meet its demands for recreational cannabis easily enough by growing it themselves.
Moreover, there is no proposed restriction on the size of the two plants, as has been the case in some North American jurisdictions. This suggests that people will be allowed to put down a couple of honking sativas in an outdoors greenhouse and get them both up to ten feet tall. Such an arrangement would make it legal to grow a year’s worth of cannabis in one season, sparing the need for the environmentally-unfriendly grow tents.
Section 19 of the Bill allows for recreational cannabis sales. Purchases will be limited to 14 grams per day, but this is at least two weeks’ worth by any reasonable measure. Aside from this, it appears the proposed model will be fairly similar to the cannabis cafe model that has existed in the Netherlands since the 1970s.
In other words, it appears that the proposed model is intended to allow for recreational cannabis sales in cafes in a similar fashion to how alcohol is already sold in pubs. Section 49 of the Bill makes reference to “consumption licences” which will allow certain premises to allow people to consume cannabis in public. Such premises will not be allowed to also sell alcohol, and will therefore follow closely to the Daktory model that Dakta Green has already established in New Zealand.
Despite these major wins, the Bill has a number of flaws from the perspective of the average member of the cannabis-using community.
Nowhere in the Bill has provision been made for running a mother plant that clones can be taken from. If one household can only have four plants, it makes having a mother plant that one can take clones off difficult. Against this criticism, however, is that it appears the Bill will allow for retail sale of feminised seeds.
It’s also a mistake to set the legal limit at 20. For one thing, it implies that cannabis is more dangerous than alcohol, which is entirely false. For another, it means two years where young Kiwis will be legally allowed to drink booze but not smoke weed, which will mean two years of exposure to the more destructive of the two drugs. Legal cannabis has been shown to lower rates of alcohol use overseas, and the sooner an alternative to alcohol was available the better.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, the Bill doesn’t address our right to use cannabis for spiritual purposes. Absolutely zero acknowledgement is made of the fact that cannabis is a spiritual sacrament, but this is not unexpected if one considers that New Zealand has been ruled by completely godless people since the turn of the century, and that for their sort spirituality is mental illness.
Also predictably, there is no provision for an official Government apology for conducting a war against them without their consent. The War on Drugs has been the worst human rights violation to occur in the West since World War II. The Government’s role in this war has involved decades of lying to the public about the effects of cannabis and putting people who defy them in cages. Their conduct has been obscene, and an apology should be part of legalisation – but it won’t be.
Perhaps worst of all, the Government is still committed to minimising cannabis use from the standpoint of cannabis use being inherently harmful. It’s possible that they have calculated that legalising cannabis would make it possible to strangle cannabis culture through ever-increasing taxes and red tape, as they have almost successfully done for tobacco. More likely, however, is that they have shifted thinking so that cannabis is now (rightly) grouped with alcohol and tobacco and not heroin and methamphetamine.
There are many possible criticisms of the Bill, but ultimately it is definitely worth supporting. All of the legitimate criticisms relate to aspects of cannabis law that could best be fine-tuned after the referendum has been passed.
Realistically, what the proposed Cannabis Leglisation And Control Bill means is an end to the fear. It would be taking away that dark, nauseating feeling that comes with being marked as a criminal. People smoking or growing cannabis at home will no longer have to fear saying the wrong thing or inviting the wrong person to their house, and the net result will be a reduction in the suffering of the New Zealand people.
The story of Clown World is a story of collapse. Therefore, it’s unsurprising that all of the signs and symptoms of social collapse in other mammalian species can also be observed in our societies today. The concept of the ‘behavioural sink‘ is an ethological observation that applies just as well to human society.
In the 1950s and 1960s, ethologist John Calhoun ran a series of experiments with Norwegian rats. This involved creating a controlled environment where the rats could thrive – food and quality shelter were limitless. These are sometimes called the Mouse Utopia Experiments on account of that the environment was so conducive to life.
In one of these experiments, known as “Universe 25”, the easy nature of life led to a population explosion, as the natural birth rates of the r-selected rodents (mice in this instance) were not kept in check by the natural death rate that would have existed had they lived in the wild. The overpopulation eventually reached such an extreme degree that the inhabitants of Universe 25 began to exhibit some strange behaviours.
Beyond a certain degree of overpopulation, asocial and then antisocial behaviour became much more common.
First the rodents would start to become asocial. The typical expression of this was a passive form of withdrawal. Some rodents would avoid the others during the daytime, only becoming active at night when the others had settled down. Other rodents, dubbed the “beautiful ones”, came to devote all of their time to grooming, withdrawing from social interaction completely.
If overcrowding became worse than this, the rodents would become aggressive. They would start to randomly attack each other, sometimes fatally. The slightest irritation could trigger a murderous assault. At its worst, infant mortality came close to 100%, as the rodents came to completely neglect their parental duties. Eventually the population would collapse on account of all this homicidal and suicidal behaviour.
Calhoun coined the term ‘behavioural sink’ to describe this societal collapse. He described it as a kind of “spiritual death” that preceded physical death. Observing the disintegration of rodent society on account of this overpopulation gives us great insight into the nature of Clown World. The terrifying truth is that the human animal in Clown World is not so different from the rat and the mouse in the Mouse Utopia Experiments.
The human animal did not evolve in a state of overcrowding. For the vast majority of the 100,000 or so years that humans have existed on this planet, we did so in small bands like the other primates. These bands rarely exceeded 150 or so – if the population of one band would swell beyond this, part of it would split off and form a colony elsewhere.
Because living conditions were so harsh during this time, there was never a time when the birth rate was significantly higher than the death rate. Hunger, disease, natural disaster, tribal warfare and predation from larger animals all worked to keep the human population in check.
This all changed when sanitation and then modern medicine were invented. These two advances meant that the death rate dropped sharply. Because the birth rate initially stayed the same, the human population ballooned. The human population has quintupled since 1900, and most of that growth has been concentrated in urban areas close to the major international trading hubs.
By 2019, the human animal is presented with a set of living conditions very similar to the rats in Calhoun’s study. Perhaps inevitably, we have responded in a similar fashion. The essence of Clown World is the collapse in social behaviour that has come about from the massive overpopulation on our planet. We are exhibiting the same behaviours as the rodents of Universe 25.
In Clown World, many people have withdrawn from social contact completely. This phenomenon is one that we share with the Mouse Utopia. The overpopulation of Clown World has led to a sense that all possible social niches are filled, therefore striving for social success is futile. Many of these people have turned to cyberspace, which offers social contact without being forced into close physical proximity with extremely unpleasant people.
The phenomenon of the beautiful ones is replicated with the rise of the hipster. The 21st century hipster, with his grooming obsession, is simply the result of heavy overcrowding. This is why he is only seen in urban areas. As with the rodents, the modern hipster does not pursue females for reproduction and he does not fight for dominance with the alpha males. He simply withdraws.
Parental incompetence is another feature of overpopulation that the Mouse Utopia shares with Clown World. In the Calhoun experiments, rats in heavily overcrowded pens failed to look after their offspring properly. It was as if the rats became even more r-selected, and adopted attitudes to their offspring normally held by reptiles and amphibians.
This shift towards r-selected patterns of child rearing is also replicated in humans. There have never been a higher proportion of deadbeat dads than there is today. Never before have there been so many single mothers on welfare. Despite the protestations of many conservatives, this isn’t because the welfare system is too generous. It’s because people no longer give a shit.
Consequently, a number of children are growing up feral in Clown World. Their parents have all but given up on life, and so the children wander the streets of their neighbourhoods looking for entertainment. Many of these children end up joining the recluses on the Internet. Others, as in A Clockwork Orange, turn to mindless crime. This breakdown of social order is at the core of Clown World.
A third feature that the Mouse Utopias share with Clown World is this mindlessly random violence. Just this week there was a diversity incident in London where two passers-by were killed by a knife-wielding Muslim. These incidents are becoming so common that they are hardly news anymore. It’s just taken for granted that people are under so much stress nowadays that some will randomly flip out and start killing others.
It’s impossible to understand Clown World without understanding the concept of the behavioural sink. Calhoun’s Mouse Utopia Experiments gave us the chance to observe the behaviour of social mammals in a state of extreme overcrowding. Now, with 8,000,000,000 people on the planet, we can see those same behaviour patterns arising in humans.
We’re going down the plughole of the behavioural sink.
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This article is an excerpt from Clown World Chronicles, a book about the insanity of life in the post-Industrial West. This is being compiled by Vince McLeod for an expected release in the middle of 2020.
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In the aftermath of World War II, certain ideas came to be blamed for the war, and so became extremely unfashionable. Anti-Semitism, supremacist nationalism and eugenics were among the foremost of these ideas. However, much like slavery after the American Civil War, some of these ideas just changed form rather than disappear.
When the Industrial Revolution swept over the Western World, it brought with it a godless kind of materialism. It taught us that the way to wealth and power was mastery of the material world and its laws, and that spirituality was merely a distraction. In the wake of this came an entirely new set of moral values that had not previously existed.
One of these new moral values was the idea of productivity. This meant that the people who did more work for their masters were prized higher than those who did less. This idea of productivity meant that the world became divided into the deserving productive and the undeserving unproductive. The idea of getting rid of people who weren’t productive enough followed in short order.
Within a few hundred years, this latter idea had evolved into what was called eugenics. This is the deliberate effort to improve the genetic stock of the nation by encouraging the breeding of those considered to have good genes, and discouraging the breeding of those considered to have bad genes. The idea is that the lazy, dumb, infirm etc. will become fewer in number if those likely to produce them are coerced into breeding less.
The breeding restrictions that come with eugenics are motivated by a variety of reasons, but what those reasons boil down to is an appeal to the greater good. Usually this means that the continued existence of the person killed would have been a detriment to the greater good because of the waste of the resources necessary to keep them alive. Sometimes it is suggested that it’s cruel to keep people alive when they appear to be suffering.
Although the idea of eugenics is most typically associated with the Rassenhygiene of Germany before and during World War II, the idea was first popularised in America just after World War I. Adolf Hitler even referenced the work of Americans such as Margaret Sanger as an example of how Germany ought to carry out eugenics programs against their own population.
In Germany, the Aktion T4 program saw the sterilisation, and then the extermination, of several hundred thousand people who were deemed to be either physically or mentally defective. This occurred in a variety of ways, from lethal injection to gas chambers (the idea of exterminating people in gas chambers was first thought up for use on schizophrenics).
This approach can be described as hard eugenics. This is when the Government kills you outright.
As mentioned above, hard eugenics became extremely unfashionable thanks to the German loss in World War II. But the desire of the ruling classes to commit eugenics on their populations did not go away. The fundamental desire to be in charge of a productive population, rather than an unproductive one, didn’t change.
It was observed, after hard eugenics became unfashionable, that the people who had been slated for extermination all had one quality in common: they were poor. Being mentally or physically infirm makes it all but impossible for one to trade one’s labour for a decent wage. In all but the most exceptional cases, it guarantees a life of impoverishment on society’s fringes.
Therefore, it was possible to institute measures that didn’t directly kill people, but which made their lives so miserable that they killed themselves. All that was necessary was to institute measures that made it hard to be poor. The modern way to do this is by applying constant stress over housing, healthcare and job security.
Soft eugenics, then, is when the Government makes your life so shit that you either kill yourself or withdraw from attempting to reproduce.
Like hard eugenics, this is also achieved in a variety of ways, although the fundamental element to it is the weaponisation of despair. Life is made to appear so hopeless, so meaningless and so pointless, that withdrawal from it seems like the only reasonable option. Despair is used as a weapon, to drive people whose survival is already marginal to suicide.
This has the same eugenic effect as hard eugenics without all the drama.
Soft eugenics has become so fashionable today that average life expectancy is now starting to decrease in America. This decrease is because of the sharp increase in what are called “deaths of despair”. Many of these deaths are suicides by gunshot, and many are quasi-suicides in the form of opiate overdoses. Their common factor is a person who gave up on life.
Making people give up on life is how soft eugenics works. This is primarily achieved by paying shitty wages, so that workers are always in a state of financial precarity. It’s also achieved by destroying communities through mass immigration, so that no-one knows their neighbours. A further tactic is a democratic political system that transparently doesn’t give a fuck about anything other than lobbyist dollars.
The tendency to give up on life is accelerated by a popular culture that only permits discussion of the lowest common denominator of thought. In our current society, anyone who thinks for themselves will be ostracised to such a degree that proper human function becomes very difficult. It’s only permissible to march in lockstep with the hordes of morons – the alternative is to get bullied towards suicide.
Political correctness plays its part in soft eugenics, especially nowadays. The more politically correct a society becomes, the greater the cognitive resources that each individual member of it must devote to self-policing. This means fewer cognitive resources left over for actually living. Therefore, the more politically correct a society is, the more heavily it practises soft eugenics.
Cannabis prohibition has been a central plank in governmental efforts to get the more vulnerable elements of their populations to kill themselves. Many people on the margins have found that cannabis is an essential tool for dealing with the depression that comes with a tough life. Making it harder to get hold of this medicine only serves to push vulnerable people towards suicide. This is the plan.
In the case of New Zealand, we do not practice hard eugenics but the practice of soft eugenics is very strong. New Zealand is a paradise for the wealthy, but a hell for the poor. Our practice of soft eugenics is taken to an extreme degree here, which is why we have the highest youth mortality rate in the entire OECD, even ahead of places like Mexico and Turkey.
We no longer kill the mentally and physically infirm – now we just make their lives so shit that they kill themselves. Because we’re not directly responsible for the suicides, we can claim that it isn’t a form of eugenics. But it is – it’s just a softer form of what the Nazis did.
