THE ILLUMINATI

Politics, History, & 'Conspiracy'
User avatar
Luigi
Posts: 4234
Joined: Fri Oct 11, 2013 11:01 pm
Reputation: 2931

Re: THE ILLUMINATI

Postby Luigi » Sat Oct 19, 2019 2:34 am

Another topic that interests me is how influential parties foster a mental state that allows control within their influencees. How is ones mind conditioned to be a sheep, or even a slave? Indoctrination from educational institutions, media outlets, and state propaganda is a fairly well understood phenomenon(USSR, Edward Bernays, Goebels, etc). Not as discussed is internal defense mechanisms people use against these such as preference falsification, or in plain terms wearing a mask of social compliance concealing an inward stalwart resistance. A dynamic that complicates it all is that people are perfectly happy to hold contradictory beliefs. I see a fair bit of how this plays out in modern society but I always wonder how people of past eras responded to intellectual manipulation. Images of heretics come to mind, to tie this into the original video the Knights Templar fostered some pretty non-conformist views. There was of course great variance across cultures: Marco Polo recounts when Catholic missionaries visited the court of the Mongols they were shocked that people listened to their teachings but still didn't accept them as true. Why did Mongols and Italians have such different responses to propaganda?

I think that when an idea doesn't have a massive amount of material resources pushing it, it comes down to who can tell the best story. A common powerful story I see used to encourage control is "look how successful we are, surely we cant be wrong." This must have been especially convincing for the early followers of Muhammad's teachings as a coalition of nomad desert tribes wiped the floor with two giant empires. Another common one is "We are weak and downtrodden against insurmountable odds, yet still we persevere." This makes me think of Christian missionaries living in the Roman empire, and the sparrow guy from Game of Thrones. I wouldn't be surprised if when reading this you immediately identify modern examples, because time has not changed the great potency of these old tales.

Sometimes a great story is simply a matter of fact, the life of Alexander the Great for example needs no embellishment. Often however its the result of manipulation. The Greek philosophers who developed rhetoric for example drew the disgust of many contemporaries who saw the most intuitive of sensibilities discarded in favor of the pursuit of victory via manipulation. Greek philosophy actually seems to have started a wider trend away from the intuitive and towards abstract mindframes. The spread of their ideas was followed quickly by the rise of Buddhism, and then by Christianity, perhaps because of direct influence, perhaps as an affect of developments in society, but certainly not by pure coincidence. This era/shift is described as the Axial Age. Perhaps the Mongols visited by Marco Polo had a vastly different worldview because they were Tengrists unaltered by the almost 2000 years of abstract ideas that had already been circulating the Mediterranean at that time. It begs the question, are you and I even capable of reaching the point where we can think like a Mongol?
Image

User avatar
Luigi
Posts: 4234
Joined: Fri Oct 11, 2013 11:01 pm
Reputation: 2931

Postby Luigi » Thu Nov 07, 2019 5:25 am

Image


Return to “The Grand Chessboard”

Who is online

Users browsing this forum: No registered users and 84 guests