Category Archives: Propaganda

Are We Ruled by Wizards??

In the public interest.  Be mindful of propaganda.

We Are Ruled By Wizards

We Are Ruled By Wizards

Bending reality is as simple as bending people’s perception of reality.

Throughout history, the mythology of civilizations around the world has been full of tales of men and women who mastered a mysterious, esoteric art which enabled them to use language in a way that bends reality to their will. They’ve been called wizards, witches, magicians, sorcerers, warlocks or enchanters, and the utterances they speak have been known as spells, magic, incantations, conjurations or enchantments, but the theme is always more or less the same: a member of a small elite group with the ability to voice special utterances which shape reality according to their will in a way that transcends the mundane mechanics of this world.

People have long held a general intuition that language holds a power far beyond what ordinary mortals use it for, especially since the advent of the written word which was long mysterious to all but the most elite classes in a given society. This intuition has been spot on, though perhaps not exactly in the way that ancient mythologies have envisioned.

When I say “Bending reality is as simple as bending people’s perception of reality,” I’m not making some sort of mystical or otherworldly claim; I’m just making a factual observation about the influence that narrative control has over events big and small which transpire in our world. Many people whose brains lack a healthy empathy center–i.e. sociopaths, psychopaths and other narcissists–already understand this on some level.

Humans are storytelling creatures; everything about our understanding of the world is made up of narratives that are made of language. “My name’s Alice and I was born in Detroit” is a narrative. “The universe is 13.772 billion years old” is a narrative. “If I drink that bottle of bleach I’ll probably die” is a narrative.

Narratives don’t need to be based on any objective fact at all. “I can fly by flapping my arms” is a narrative. “God says you should mail me ten percent of your income” is a narrative. “You live in a free democracy and everything you read in The New York Times is an accurate representation of reality” is a narrative.

Ordinary people use language and narratives to understand and connect with each other, so they tend to favor narratives that are true. People who lack healthy empathy centers have no interest in understanding or connecting beyond the extent to which it can get them what they want, so they’ll happily use lies, half-truths, distortions and lies by omission to obtain power, control, money, sex, or whatever it is they’re after. They have a completely different relationship with language and narrative than people with healthy empathy centers, and they learn to exploit that difference.

Anyone who has escaped from a relationship with a manipulator will have an experiential understanding of what I’m talking about here. You start off under the mistaken impression that the abusive partner uses language the same way you do, so you keep trying to use it to form an understanding and connection, but it’s like your words just get turned around and twisted and used against you in a way you can’t really keep up with. You are fed narratives about yourself which have no bearing on reality: “You’re crazy”, “You’re not remembering things correctly”, “You’re dishonest”, “I’m not abusing you, you’re abusing me”, etc. You are fed narratives about your abuser which have no bearing on reality: “I’m the only one who’ll ever love you”, “I’m too nice, that’s my problem”, “I’m the real victim here”, etc.

When you escape from such a relationship it’s common to have to spend months or years afterward sorting out fact from fiction, reality from narrative distortion. Depending on the skill of the manipulator and how long you were with them, they may have inserted some very disorienting beliefs deep inside your consciousness in order to control you, and they can take a lot of work to uproot.

Large-scale manipulation of entire populations works more or less the same way small-scale manipulation of individuals does, and unlike abusive partners who have to more or less figure out their infernal art on their own, there’s been a concerted collaborative effort to refine the science of propaganda for well over a century.

Our world is set up in a way that rewards sociopathy with wealth and power, which means adept manipulators tend to rise to the top in business, government, and media. This is no accident: while ordinary healthy people were concerning themselves with learning the truth and forming connections, those in our world with no interest in such things have been engineering power structures to reward a lack of empathy. People who are willing to manipulate narratives toward their advantage without regard for truth or justice rise above those who aren’t in such systems.

We now therefore find ourselves ruled by those who use language not to connect and understand, but to bend reality according to their will. We are ruled, in a sense, by wizards.

Vast troves of treasure are poured into controlling the dominant narratives in our society as they relate to those in power and what they want to achieve. The government is your friend. The news man is trustworthy. You live in a democracy and your countrymen can influence government policy and behavior by voting. That bad guy in that other country needs to be taken out. Those people telling you we’re lying are Russian propaganda and need to be censored.

The spells are cast, and before you know it the bombers are deployed, the sanctions are implemented, the dissident is censored, the journalist is jailed, the political leader has been installed, the consent has been manufactured. Reality has been bent by simply using language to bend people’s perception of reality.

The more powerful the government, the more skillful the wizards. Chomsky once said that “Any dictator would admire the uniformity and obedience of the US media.” Narrative spells are cooked up by wizards in opaque intelligence agencies and uncritically regurgitated in anonymously sourced news reports, and before you know it Saddam has weapons of mass destruction, Russia is attacking American democracy and China cooked up the coronavirus in a Wuhan laboratory, and as always please know that the status quo is normal and is totally working great for everyone.

The good news is that this kind of word magic is not only accessible to esoteric masters reciting incantations from the pages of a dusty grimoire (which interestingly has the same etymological root as the word “grammar”). Anyone who understands malleable nature of narrative is capable of fighting back against the enchantments which pull the wool over the eyes of the rank-and-file public day in and day out, and can advance narratives that are based on facts and reality rather than lies and distortions.

You can be a wizard too. You can use language to influence the world by pushing back against the narratives spouted by the establishment spellcasters.

The better you understand the nature of narrative and its all-pervading role in our consciousness and our society, the better a wizard you can be. Pay attention not just to the large-scale narratives believed by masses of people, but the small-scale narratives believed by yourself as well. Find out what subtle stories you’ve been holding onto even in the darkest recesses of your subconscious mind which have been bending your perception of reality in a way which does not benefit you. If you want to master narrative wizardry, you must first attain mastery over its role in your own operating system.

Put truth first always, in all ways. Set the intention to use your healthy empathy center to connect, to understand, and to be honest: with those to whom you speak, and with yourself.

The more lucid you become in this way, the more potent your linguistic magic will grow. Narrative control is too important to be left to the manipulators, propagandists, liars and sociopaths.

See through the illusion. Shine truth on the lies.

You’re a wizard, Harry.

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Thanks for reading! The best way to get around the internet censors and make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list for my website, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, liking me on Facebook, following my antics onTwitter, checking out my podcast on either YoutubesoundcloudApple podcasts or Spotify, following me on Steemit, throwing some money into my hat on Patreon or Paypalpurchasing some of my sweet merchandise, buying my books Rogue Nation: Psychonautical Adventures With Caitlin Johnstone and Woke: A Field Guide for Utopia Preppers. For more info on who I am, where I stand, and what I’m trying to do with this platform, click here. Everyone, racist platforms excluded, has my permission to republish, use or translate any part of this work (or anything else I’ve written) in any way they like free of charge.

Advice on How to Tell Fake News from Accurate Reporting

In the public interest.  Caitlin Johnstone is a journalist. Her website is https://caitlinjohnstone.com/2020/04/17/we-are-ruled-by-wizards/

I have noticed a spin company on my blog who look at the alternative media and then spin the opposite.  So be aware of misinformation it comes in many guises from those authoritative or unknown social media fronts.

How To Tell Real News From Useless Narrative Fluff

by Caitlin Johnstone

When Zen teacher Issan Dorsey was asked to describe the essence of Zen art, he answered, “Nothing extra.”

“Nothing extra” is also of course the essence of Zen living itself: perceiving life as it actually is, as opposed to perceiving it through a bunch of believed narrative filters about yourself, about others, about reality, and so on. These narrative filters are an extra pile of layers that are added on top of the actual experience of life, and they give a distorted view which causes a lot of confusion and suffering. Relinquishing belief in them brings clarity and peace.

This is also the essence of clearly understanding what’s really going on in the world. Like so much else, the approach to the large is the same as the approach to the small, which is to say the approach to seeing clearly in the big picture is the same as the approach to seeing clearly as an individual: you need to learn to look at it without the extra narrative overlay.

Because the news media are controlled by plutocrats who have a vested interest in protecting the status quo upon which their kingdoms are built, almost everything in the news is useless narrative fluff. It doesn’t tell you what’s really going on, it rather tries to influence what’s going on by manipulating the perceptions of the audience. It does this by either (A) distracting from what really matters by focusing on what doesn’t matter, or (B) actively working to manipulate how the audience thinks about a given issue.

When you strip away all the empty fluff and manipulative spin, there are basically only four often-overlapping pieces of information that really matter in the big picture: (1) where the money is going, (2) where the resources are going, (3) where the weapons are going, and (4) where the people are going. When it comes to understanding world dynamics, accurate information about these four things is the only real news you’ll ever encounter. Everything else is empty narrative spin meant to justify, distort, or distract from information about these things.

If you ignore everything else and only focus on finding the most accurate information possible about these four items, you will have an infinitely clearer understanding of what’s really going on in the world than someone who trusts news reporters to walk them through it.

Watch where the money is going because you can trust the raw numbers of financial transactions a lot more than you can trust the stories people are telling. A massive percentage of daily news coverage goes toward analyzing the latest foam-brained gibberish that came out of Donald Trump’s mouth even though we all know he’s going to contradict himself two days later, but the fact that he’s been heavily funded by an oligarch who happens to have been a longtime proponent of the Iran policies this administration has been advancing is much more solid.

Zoom out and watch where the money is going in the big picture and you’ll see that a grossly disproportionate amount of it is moving away from the general public and toward a very small group of people, which we just saw illustrated in the historically unprecedented multitrillion-dollar wealth transfer in the US corporate bailout. If you watch this small group and pay attention to the projects, candidates, think tanks and media outlets they pour their wealth into, you will notice that they exert an incredible amount of influence on all four crucial factors: where the money goes, where the resources go, where the weapons go, and where the people go.

Watching where the resources are going gives you an even clearer image of what’s going on because resources, unlike money, are completely independent of narrative. There is no such thing as “money” without the thoughts that humans agree to collectively think about it, but oil would still be oil even if all humans were wiped off the face of the earth. When you see the US ramping up escalations against Venezuela, ignore the narratives about “drug trafficking” and what a bad, bad man Nicolás Maduro is, and look at what resources lie beneath the ground in that nation to find out what this is really about. Mentally “mute” the soundtracks the political/media class spout about who’s doing what to whom and just watch where the resources are going, and who’s controlling them. That way you’ll be able to discern the powerful from the disempowered and the takers from their victims.

Watch where the weapons are going because those are another non-narrative factor which exerts a huge influence on the world; a bullet will stop a beating heart regardless of what the mind thinks about it. Ignore the irrelevant narrative fluff about where the coronavirus originated and whether or not it’s racist to say “Wuhan virus”, and look at the ring of US military bases encircling China and the way the Marine Corps is shifting its attention onto that nation. Ignore Trump’s gibberish about ending wars and note that he’s been expanding them and increasing foreign troop presence. Ignore the Democratic Party’s nonsense about Trump having loyalties to Russia and watch his administration’s many dangerous nuclear escalations against that nation. Ignore international finger-wagging at humanitarian abuses by Israel and Saudi Arabia and look at who’s still selling them weapons and supporting them militarily.

Watch where the people are going for another important piece of real information that isn’t dependent on narrative. Where are the prisoners? Where are the refugees, where are they going, and what are they fleeing? Where are people moving to, and what do they want?

With each of these four items you can simply watch raw data and ignore all the stories the establishment spinmeisters tell about that data. As long as you make sure you’re getting the most accurate data possible, it’s like you’re looking at a globe and watching lines in four different colors moving around in it from place to place and person to person. And without anyone’s stories tainting your view.

You will notice that there’s a heavy degree of overlap between these four items. You see the weapons moving toward China and you notice that’s the nation with the US hegemony-threatening Belt and Road Initiative (where the resources are moving) and the key player in the US dollar-threatening Shanghai Cooperation Organization (where the money is moving). You see Julian Assange locked in prison (where the people are going) for exposing US war crimes (where the weapons are going). You see US troops illegally occupying Syrian oil fields (where the weapons and resources are going) to prevent the Syrian government from using it to rebuild the nation (where the money is going). And so on.

Nearly everything that makes it to the top of the daily news churn is either propaganda distortion or distracting drivel, and either way you can safely ignore it. Just watch where the money is going, where the resources are going, where the weapons are going and where the people are going, and ignore all the narrative chatter.

Nothing extra.

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Thanks for reading! The best way to get around the internet censors and make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list for my website, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, liking me on Facebook, following my antics onTwitter, checking out my podcast on either YoutubesoundcloudApple podcasts or Spotify, following me on Steemit, throwing some money into my hat on Patreon or Paypalpurchasing some of my sweet merchandise, buying my books Rogue Nation: Psychonautical Adventures With Caitlin Johnstone and Woke: A Field Guide for Utopia Preppers. For more info on who I am, where I stand, and what I’m trying to do with this platform, click here. Everyone, racist platforms excluded, has my permission to republish, use or translate any part of this work (or anything else I’ve written) in any way they like free of charge.