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Blueprints of Control
00:06:36
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| You know, we've all felt it. | |
| That uneasy sense that we're being managed, we're being controlled, not governed, not educated, not informed, just managed, led, steered, guided, handled. | |
| It isn't superstition or paranoia, it's history. | |
| And the evidence isn't hiding. | |
| It's published, footnoted, archived, and proudly taught in universities and indoctrination centers that helped design it. | |
| Let's trace this blueprint. | |
| From the laboratories of Tavistock to the press rooms of Operation Mockingbird to the social experiments that turned obedience and obeisance into a science. | |
| Because if you understand how they built the machinery, you can finally see the cage. | |
| It begins sort of with Tavistock, London, 1921, a seemingly modest clinic claiming to help soldiers recover from shell shock, what we now call PTSD. | |
| But behind the brass plaque and the accoutrements of legitimacy, the veil of legitimacy, something else was happening. | |
| You see, Tavistock's founders discovered that trauma isn't only destructive, it's instructive. | |
| You see, a mind, your mind, our mind, a mind in pain is open. | |
| A frightened population, a frightened group, is cooperative, more pliable. | |
| So they studied not just therapy, but control. | |
| How people respond to authority, how they conform to group pressure, how identity, individual identity itself, dissolves under stress. | |
| The Tavistock method combined psychoanalysis, systems thinking, kind of our new kind of neural programming that we like to talk about with AI and what they called infant observation. | |
| Watching a baby and family in their home without intervention, learning how dependence, trust, and attachment are formed. | |
| This is critical. | |
| What began as compassion evolved into calibration. | |
| They realized the same principles, the same identical principles that shape a child can shape a nation, a group, a population. | |
| See, observation becomes prediction. | |
| And prediction became programming. | |
| And now bring in the godfather, Edward Bernays, Freud's nephew, the man who turned, in essence, unconscious desire into public policy. | |
| Bernays read his uncle's theories on repression and instinct and saw not medicine, but marketing, control, marketing. | |
| He called it public relations. | |
| Rather innocuous. | |
| And governments and corporations called it salvation. | |
| Because Bernays taught them that people, people don't act on reason. | |
| They act on what amounts to emotion. | |
| Emotion that's wrapped in the illusion of reason, or what they think is reason. | |
| You don't sell a product, you sell identity. | |
| You don't impose censorship. | |
| You, in essence, manufacture consensus. | |
| You know he's famous for this. | |
| He made women smoke, in effect, cigarettes by branding cigarettes torches of freedom. | |
| I know you're laughing at now, but it was true. | |
| Bernays was a genius. | |
| He masterminded campaigns that reshaped, we don't even realize this, but reshaped modern persuasion. | |
| For Procter and Gamble, he turned ivory soap into a national ritual by encouraging children to carve sculptures, linking, making the connection between cleanliness and patriotism. | |
| In 1929, he staged General Electric's Lights Golden Jubilee, transforming in effect Edison's light bulb anniversary, rather innocuous, into a worldwide celebration of American progress. | |
| One small step for man. | |
| Sound familiar? | |
| In 1954, he rebranded United Fruit's corporate crisis in Guatemala as an anti-communist cause, noble, paving the way, in essence, what amounted to CIA-backed coups. | |
| Beyond any single campaign, Bernays built the modern public relations industry itself, legitimizing, in effect, lobbying. | |
| validating polling and celebrity endorsements and influencing and staging media events and political events and false flags as instruments of social control, disguised in essence as what we would call democracy, an overused words which I'll talk about later. | |
| But he proved that democracy itself, it could be directed not by not by ballots, but by imagery and repetition. | |
| Bernays wasn't a propagandist. | |
| No, no, no. | |
| Don't confuse the two. | |
| He was an engineer of consent. | |
| And once politicians saw what he could do for corporations, well, the line between the two disappeared. | |
| You see, then came, and it gets better, Operation Mockingbird. | |
| The Cold War turned information into a weapon. | |
| Information is a weapon, it's currency. | |
|
Remember the Lineage
00:09:03
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| And the CIA decided that the battlefield was now the newsroom. | |
| They didn't just silence journalists. | |
| No. | |
| They hired them. | |
| No. | |
| If you can't beat them, join them or hire them. | |
| Hundreds of writers, editors, producers, and anchors were quietly placed on agency payrolls, not to invent stories, but to shape them, to shape the headlines, to tilt headlines, to omit context, steer the tone. | |
| You don't need to burn books when you own the publisher. | |
| By the 1970s, nearly every major media outlet, every single one, had a mockingbird or a mockingbird rep in the room. | |
| And Americans thought, this is even better, Americans thought they were hearing the free press. | |
| This is what they were told. | |
| This is what they believed. | |
| Remember the time also, the zeitgeist? | |
| They were hearing the state reading from Bernay's playbook, refined by Tavistock psychology, but the laboratories weren't done. | |
| We're not done yet. | |
| They still needed to quantify obedience. | |
| They still needed to work on the psychology in the various matrices. | |
| How far will an ordinary person go when an authority says, do it? | |
| That answer came in 1961 at Yale University under psychologist Stanley Milgram. | |
| Oh, this is famous. | |
| Everybody knows this. | |
| Volunteers were told that they were part of a learning experiment. | |
| Each time the student answered incorrectly, the teacher, the real subject, was instructed to deliver an electric shock. | |
| With every error, the voltage increased. | |
| And as the learners screamed, the scientists in the lab, the lab coat standing by the authority, calmly insisted, proceed, please continue. | |
| 65% went all the way. | |
| Of course, this didn't actually happen, but they didn't know better. | |
| They went all the way to the highest setting labeled danger severe shock. | |
| No gun, no threat, no reward, just authority. | |
| That's all it took. | |
| Milgram concluded that ordinary people, when placed inside a system that appears legitimate, will commit extraordinary cruelty, provided someone else takes responsibility. | |
| I'm only doing my job. | |
| Interesting, that was done concomitantly with the Eichmann trial. | |
| Now imagine that principle scaled to millions through television and institutions and social media. | |
| That is modern governance, modern control. | |
| You see, then came the refinement, what psychologists called learn helplessness, one of my favorites. | |
| In 1967, Martin Seligman shocked dogs in cages. | |
| At first, they tried to escape. | |
| But after enough failures, they stopped. | |
| Even when the door was opened, they lay down and whimpered. | |
| They had learned that nothing they did mattered. | |
| Now replace the dogs with citizens. | |
| Replace the cage with bureaucracy. | |
| Replace the shock with inflation and censorship and chaos and crime and constant crisis. | |
| When people begin to believe that their vote and their voice, their protest or their prayers make no difference, they stop resisting. | |
| That is learned helplessness at scale. | |
| And it's not accidental. | |
| It's efficient. | |
| But to fully master the human herd, you need to understand the herd itself. | |
| And Sir Gustave Le Bon, the 19th century French sociologist who wrote The Crowd, a study of the popular mind. | |
| Oh, love this guy. | |
| Le Bon noticed that individuals, when gathered in crowds, lose their capacity for reason and adopt a collective emotion. | |
| Sound familiar? | |
| No kings. | |
| You see, a crowd is impulsive, irritable, suggestible. | |
| It doesn't think, it reacts. | |
| He wrote that whoever can supply the crowd with illusions becomes the master. | |
| Bernays read him. | |
| Tavistock taught him. | |
| Mockingbird broadcast him. | |
| And Milgram proved him. | |
| Together, they revealed a single devastating truth. | |
| If you can trigger emotion faster than logic can catch it, you own the outcome. | |
| You control it. | |
| Now compress all of that into the 21st century. | |
| The algorithms of social media or the new Tavistock clinicians. | |
| They observe your infantile attention, your primitive impulses, your dopamine hooks, your social attachments. | |
| And they feed them data the way a researcher feeds a subject stimuli. | |
| Every notification, every headline, every flash of outrage is another calibrated shock. | |
| The endless doom scroll is learn helplessness with graphics. | |
| The feed is a Milgram box. | |
| The influencer is lab coat authority. | |
| And you, you are the subject who keeps pressing the button. | |
| You keep telling yourself it's voluntary. | |
| They've replaced fear of punishment with fear of exclusion. | |
| You don't obey the state. | |
| You obey the algorithm. | |
| And you call it freedom. | |
| So what do we do? | |
| We start by naming the experiment. | |
| Because you can't escape a maze until you realize you're in one. | |
| First, remember Bernays, emotion is the lever. | |
| Guard your emotions like currency. | |
| Ask yourself, who profits, qui bono, qui protest? | |
| Who profits when you're enraged or terrified or hopeless? | |
| Second, remember Milgram, the authority is the costume. | |
| The lab code can be a credential, a platform, or a headline. | |
| Challenge every order that begins with expert say. | |
| Third, remember Seligman, helplessness is learned. | |
| Powerlessness is a habit. | |
| And habits can be broken. | |
| Take back one small act of control every day. | |
| Create, plant, teach, pray, refuse. | |
| Each choice rewires the circuitry they built to cage you. | |
| And finally, remember Le Bon. | |
| The crowd is contagious. | |
| Do not become its echo. | |
| In a mob, the loudest voice rules. | |
| In solitude, conscience rules. | |
| See, they cannot manipulate the individual who thinks before reacting. | |
| The program doesn't need you to believe it exists. | |
| It only needs you to keep behaving as if it doesn't. | |
| It feeds on distraction and despair and dependence. | |
| But the human mind, that unpredictable, rebellious creation, still, it still holds one final weapon, awareness. | |
| Once you see the strings, you can't dance to the tune. | |
| Once you name the pattern, the spell breaks. | |
| This isn't about running to the hills or unplugging from technology. | |
| Oh, no, no, no. | |
| It's about remembering what Tavistock forgot, that consciousness cannot be standardized. | |
| It's about, again, what Bernays taught us and what Bernays never predicted, that people can wake up from conditioning. | |
| It's about what Milgram never measured, that obedience has a limit, and it ends where truth begins. | |
| You were never meant to be data. | |
| You were never meant to be programmable. | |
| You were never any of that. | |
| You were meant to discern, to question, to refuse, to think. | |
| So the next time they tell you what to fear, or what to hate or what to feel, stop. | |
| Breathe. | |
| Remember the lineage of manipulation. | |
| The lineage that brought us here. | |
| And then, quietly, without fanfare, do the most radical thing left in this engineered age. | |
| Think for yourself. | |
| Because once you do, the experiment ends. | |
| And civilization begins again. | |
| You can do this. | |
| Listen to what I am saying. | |
| Pay attention, dear friend. | |
| Pay attention and act accordingly. | |