Technology
Cultivate Attention and Discernment (3)
Photo by Spencer Imbrock on Unsplash
“There is no consistent, integrated conception of the world which serves as the foundation on which our edifice of belief rests. And therefore… we are more naive than those of the Middle Ages, and more frightened, for we can be made to believe almost anything.”
Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business (1985)
Reading time: 20-25 mins
Fear, Superstimuli, Indoctrination
Fear is a wake-up call to pay attention and see truth. But this instinct can be easily subverted to an irrational and automatic body-mind reaction for survival and self-protection against a perceived threat. The father of propaganda Edward Bernays, the Rockefeller dynasty and their social science directives; Freud and psychoanalysis; Alfred Kinsey and his sexual revolution and the ever-present mainstreaming of occult directives have flowed through the mass mind and shaped Western societies toward a highly narrow conception of reality.
Education, mainstream media, entertainment, art, fashion, advertising, marketing, public relations – even our family unit, peer groups and working life – all reflect the above directors of an Official Culture. All are defined by consumption, commodity, image, sensation and artifice. The original source of these traditions and pursuits have lost their psycho-spiritual meaning and now float in a sea of narcissistic irrelevancy.
Instead of bringing out the true meaning of human existence – to love, learn, bond, create and commune – our current reality is a constellation of subverted constructs which are pathological due to a predominance of psychopathic and sub-deviant human beings who have taken control of societies. They have continually re-interpreted and subverted the best of human ingenuity and innovation toward their own conscienceless, machine-like perception. This continuing psycho-materialist paradigm has been translated and mediated into so-called normative social, political and cultural structures. They continue to exist purely due to a consensus trance reinforced by cultural hypnosis, of which most people are entirely unaware.
“Never have so many been manipulated so much by so few.”
Aldous Huxley, Brave New World Revisited (1958), Chapter 3, p. 19
The overriding and long-term objective behind this inculcation is toward complete control of the mass mind. The Three Establishment Model via their corporate oligarchs and power-brokers are the aforementioned 4C’s alongside economic, political and sociocultural warfare using three main prongs of attack:
Cultivate Attention and Discernment (2)
“Dark ages are times of forgetting, when the advancements of the past are underutilized. If we forget how to use our powers of deep focus, we’ll depend more on black-and-white thinking, on surface ideas, on surface relationships. That breeds a tremendous potential for tyranny and misunderstanding. The possibility of an attention-deficient future society is very sobering.”
— Maggie Jackson, Distracted: The Erosion of Attention and the Coming Dark Age
Reading time: 10-15 mins
Cultural Hypnosis / Consensus Trance
What are we paying attention to?
21st Century culture is a pseudo or secondary reality in which we are all deeply immersed.
Although it might seem illogical, our present social and cultural constructs are birthed from a world of inductive economic and political ideas amounting to a form of hypnosis. The behavioural dynamics of this reality exist in the mass and individual mind with no proof or experience to validate it. In order to make sure that our attention never gets out of the nose-bag of fear, sex, hunger and i-phones, it is imperative that our generational rulers keep cultural hypnosis firmly in place.
According to master hypnotist Mark Anthony, this is a: “… catch-all term that covers the mass of influence from a wide range of people, institutions and situations that each human being is affected by from the moment of conception till death within a given, definable and limited culture matrix. Less euphemistically, cultural hypnosis is aka PROGRAMMING.” [1] Similarly, the consensus trance that eventuates, is defined as “normal” consciousness wholly adapted to current sociocultural constructs. Or as psychologist Charles T. Tart describes it: “… when you automatically think, behave, and feel “normally,” when the internal workings of your mind automatically echo most of the values and beliefs of your culture”. [2]
Cultural hypnosis leads to the induction of a consensus trance and its perceived “normality” which leads to a consensus reality. When we interface with reality through trance-like states we are not thinking for ourselves, we are not questioning that consensus – our minds are not working consciously.
We will take a generalised look at how the social dominators use various methods of cultural induction, inculcation and conditioning to induce mass hypnosis and the resulting trance in Western civillisation and in varying degrees, global populations.
Dissociation
Everyone daydreams to the point of distraction at some point during the day. Many of us experience mild dissociative episodes for much of lives and can function within the social norms of society without too many problems. Lesiure pursuits from golf to cinema allow us respite from the rigours of work and other demands on our energy so that relaxation and imagination can take over. Watching TV or sitting in front of a movie screen are good examples of temporarily suspending our relationship to consensus reality. When we relax and enter into these movie states, our conscious awareness is literally absent – we are fully running, laughing, feeling and fearing all that happens in front of us, whether we intellectualise it or not. We are hypnotised by light and sound and dissociate one part of consciousness from another. It would be a form of psychosis if certain triggers were not present. But the TV is switched off, the credits roll and the lights come up. We stretch and yawn and make our way home.
Strive For Simplicity, Economise on Energy (7)
Image by Karen Arnold from Pixabay
“He is richest who is content with least, for contentment is the wealth of nature.”
— Socrates
Reading time: 10-15 mins
SEE
In this final post on Strive for Simplicity, Economise on Energy (SEE) we’ll summarise what’s gone before and end with a list of what we can do to get the ball rolling and a few other nuggets of interest to whet your appetite for change.
We looked at how SEE is expressed through Taoist traditions, the I Ching, Wabi-Sabi and Nature. This was followed by an exploration of how Western culture has lost sight of living simply with an unhealthy adherence to civil law and its development of “bureaucratic insanity.” A useless complexity bound by rigid absolutism enforced by an army of “robopaths” is in direct opposition to Natural and Common Law – not least the human wish to work together and seek self-sufficiency. A resurgence in voluntary simplicity and the natural community virtues that arise if cooperation were given the needed nourishment were also explored.
The challenge of simplifying our lives in order to reconnect with beauty and truth in practical ways can only be achieved with knowledge of how we use our energy – thoughts, feelings/emotions and body awareness. Our task is to use our energy more productively so that we turn towards creativity in everyday life. As a primer for further discussion on energy as it relates to applying SEE, we reviewed the nature of energy and the centres/chakras from a 4th Way perspective. The role of our planet, organic life and the moon as largescale sources that might drain our energy were reviewed, with a brief description of ancient and modern myths.
We then looked specifically at energy economy and conservation. After using the analogy of the house as our body-mind system we returned to Taoist and I Ching symbolism through the archetype of The Well as our fundamental resource, The Mouth as nourishment and The Cauldron as the alchemical vessel by which consciousness is refined to make SEE a possibility. This acted as a backdrop to the subject of sex and sexual energy which was briefly explored from a cultural perspective and the divisions and pathology which has led our sexual-creative centre being misused.
Beginning with a confirmation by science of the reality of the Chinese energy system we delved into the nature of sexual energy and back to the 4th Way views of the sex centre’s role in relation to culture, sexual relations and masturbation – a dynamic that is not just focused on the gentials but appears throughout our culture under different guises, all of which lead to the loss of intellectual, emotional, physical and spiritual energy.
Finally, a brief look at the brain as the hub of energy refinement and loss was covered, along with some pointers on a digital detox from social media and other forms of infotainment – a major source of energy drain. Two bio-mechanisms of procreative sex and pair-bonding were highlighted and the role of dopamine in the reward circuitry of the brain leading to a circle of unrecognised addictions. In light of these, we delved further into a narcissistic and orgasm-centred culture predicated on addictive behaviours which have displaced intimacy and bonding behaviours. This was followed with an introduction to the love-making art of Karezza as the most useful method for sustaining intimacy and harmony within a relationship.
Strive For Simplicity, Economise on Energy (3)
“I have long held an opinion, almost amounting to conviction, in common I believe with many other lovers of natural knowledge, that the various forms under which the forces of matter are made manifest have one common origin; or, in other words, are so directly related and mutually dependent, that they are convertible, as it were, one into another, and possess equivalents of power in their action.”
— Michael Faraday, English Physicist and Chemist
Reading time: 20 mins
Energy
What is energy?
Energy is a property of matter, space, objects and fields. It can be transferred and converted, but it can’t be destroyed – or created. Energy can be chemical, thermal electrical and kinetic, all of which exists in and around the mind-body system.
For our focus it is potential energy which can be stored and qualitatively accumulated which is of interest.
Energy can be refined in order to get more vitality for your voltage, so to speak.
Since sufficient energy is the fuel for all manner of action, (and The Work) it stands to reason that the more energy you have within your mind-body system the more enhanced the capacity for change. With enough stored, (and the “space” ready to store it) we have a greater chance of changing our physical, mental and emotional states.
With a greater store of energy on tap, this might even provide the “nourishment” and power needed to fuel overall meta-physical transformation.
At this point in history the demands on our time and energy are relentless. Many of us have become mentally ill or physically debilitated due to environmental and psycho-social factors. In this technological age there are reasons to fill every waking hour with activities and distractions which feed our restlessness but give little in terms of true nourishment. If we cut out the clutter and re-organise our daily lives so that things become simpler we make better use of our time. Time management goes hand in hand with simplicity. Economising conserving and simplifying are mutually inclusive.
What is crucial to your life and what is just repetitive, useless busy-ness? Is that moving centre sending into you spirals of pointless activity in order to displace energy that could be useful to personal transformation? Ask yourself honestly: Is your attention habitually fixed on getting things to feel better? Has this focus overshadowed what’s truly important in my life?
If that’s true and like so many of us, you have been caught up in finding too much satisfaction in possessions (or possessing people) then it’s a cue to simplify and to realise that attachment to beliefs and their possessions are often the greatest obstacle to living a more harmonious life. Or, as German poet and playwright Johann von Goethe expressed it: “Things that matter most must never be at the mercy of things that matter least.”
To achieve simplicity we have to conserve our energy in thought and action. One thing is for sure, you’ll need every ounce of it if you are to transform your inner life. By gettting rid of that which ultimately drains you, it opens up the space for an ongoing process of spring-cleaning, much like you do with your flat or house. And it’s amazing how much more can be achieved by decreasing one’s complexity.
Why Young Lives are Losing Meaning and Purpose II: The Big Three and 11 Factors
Photo by Dmitry Ratushny | unsplash.com
“Community connectedness is not just about warm fuzzy tales of civic triumph. In measurable and well-documented ways, social capital makes an enormous difference in our lives…Social capital makes us smarter, healthier, safer, richer, and better able to govern a just and stable democracy.”
Reading time: 20-25 mins
In the last post I looked at the decrease in meaning and purpose parallel to the increase in loneliness and isolation for today’s millennial and Z generations. Sociologists, economists and psychologists generally all agree that the key to developing and holding on to meaning, purpose and well-being is sufficient social interaction with a core group of friends and family that define one’s support. This is not the same as an extended family that usually arises from enforced socio-economic factors, but one that naturally evolves based around shared vision of support and nourishment because it is both practical and sustainable, offering real world benefits.
John F. Helliwell, a prominent expert in the economics of happiness believes the quality of our relationships determines the quality of our lives at the deepest levels. And the quality of those relationships is reflected in how well we have activated our response-ability and activities that offer a form of service to the community – whatever form that might be. This is what creates and deepens ties with others: constructive actions alongside key initiatory ideas. Helliwell draws his work from very large data sets called the World Values Survey which has accrued answers from people in over 150 countries about life satisfaction along with other socio-economic information. When Helliwell crunched the data he and other researchers found that there were six reliable and consistent factors which accounted for well-being:
- Social support
- generosity
- trust
- freedom
- income per capita
- healthy life expectancy [1]
Four from the list are connected with social interaction within a community. The other factors are relational and occur as a response to, or as a natural property of social support. So a stratum of support covering all aspects of human aspiration is a really big deal, the lack of which will play a large part in the development of our social ills.
The Big Three
It seems to me, the development of meaning and purpose is rooted in three foundational products of social interaction which, if healthy, underpin a successful society, the constituents of which all operate symbiotically and grow parallel to each other. Thus, the creation of an individual emerges and is informed by:
- Parents
- Family
- Community
Obvious perhaps, but in crisis nonetheless. These three make up the strata in the soil of society/culture which is dependent on the level of access to community (should it even exist) a solid connection to nature and the quality of the environment upon which all three rest. [2] Similarly, the healthy functioning of the three will have within them poor psycho-spiritual “nutrients”, or a rich, fertile ground that is self-sustaining and therefore community-sustaining. The presence of Helliwell’s six factors will be informed by the quality of the Big Three.
Why Young Lives are Losing Meaning and Purpose I
By M.K. Styllinski
Photo by Mikito Tateisi on Unsplash
“Young adults are facing more stressful conditions than older generations, such as an increasingly competitive labor market, rising costs of housing, an increase in higher education costs, and issues of self-identity and confidence driven by more widespread use of social media.”
— Morag Henderson, sociologist at University College London
Reading time: (25-30 mins)
The crisis of meaning and purpose is something many of us are grappling with today. Girls and boys and young adults in particular are not succeeding in this battle. The path which defines our lives up to middle and retirement age is for the majority, mostly a constellation of conditioned responses encouraged by Official Culture. It replaces true meaning with a role that serves the technosphere as opposed to our true calling. Not always, but all too frequently. Then we are back to that existential crisis of youth where something deep inside knows that to find true creative balance takes a life time of struggle against forces that oppose any kind of spiritual liberation. Unless that is, we have the support to explore the transformation that comes knocking at the door of consciousness at various stages of our lives. To even have the awareness to heed that call requires a very different society than we have now.
Life is extremely complicated for young people these days, whether they are in Western, Asian, African or Middle Eastern societies. The predisposition of tyranny from our hierarchical institutions and social systems means that such a danger will always be there, even when there is momentum toward autopoietic * social innovations. The imbalance inherent within state authority and the unceasing drive of so many to live outside it’s influence is growing. This is a welcome reaction against the finite and unsustainable nature of cartel capitalism and rampant state-sponsored crimes against humanity. But we haven’t yet found that crucial tension, that balance that provides a psychological inoculation against psychopathic infiltration which so often turns civilisations into crucibles of centralised control.
The corruption of hierarchical power always weakens the structure to the point of catastrophic failure. And there are always young folks who act as literal and symbolic precursors to that descent, usually by embodying those ills and thereby showing us what long term or immediate future lies ahead. Each epoch manifests that see-saw between managed chaos and mass creativity which eventually bursts forth in destructive ways, sweeping away everything that went before. Children and young adults are the tuning fork of future generations in this regard. Nonetheless, there is has been a very wide historical berth when it comes to defining how our youth interact with the world. The older generations have a distinct challenge to make sure our younger generations are correctly tuned to that which offers hope, spiritual strength and resilience to face what is certain to be an unpredictable and challenging future.
But let’s rewind for a moment…
Take Medieval England for example. During that time the majority of medieval people were young with far fewer older people with around thirty-five to forty percent under fifteen years old. There was a distinct and recognised period where the early formative years were largely employed for utilitarian ends. If there were not distinct roles then the family didn’t survive. As a result, the Church law and common law regarded children as equal to adults in many ways. Parenting was just as important and often imbued with strict moral and community-based values inspired by the Church and folklore. Though play was a vital part of growing up and of far greater importance than today, if a child was unprepared for the realities of what was a rather brutal world, it meant that the longevity of the family would be weakened as would the life of the child. Conscientiousness in one’s work had to be learned early on as it was quite often a life and death situation. [1]
The ubiquity of young folks meant there were major social differences in every community and sphere of activity. A feudal hierarchy of industry meant clearly defined roles with a narrow band of what could constitute freedom from our perspective today. It also meant that on average, there was seventeen years’ less experience of life to draw on and very few elders and betters that children had to go to for advice. This high proportion of young people experienced a violent, feudal world which saw hand-to-hand combat; brutality passing for entertainment; state sanctioned slavery and appalling daily health hazards – including periodic visitations of the plague – as the backdrop to their lives. Medieval boys for example, had what amounts to a man’s job from the age of seven and could have his wee hand chopped off if he decided to pinch some fruit from a market stall. If he graduated to a more audacious deed like stealing a hairpin or a Lord’s hat, he could be hanged by his doubtless scrawny neck. Boys could legally marry at aged fourteen and were considered ready to fight in the King’s army. Those born into the nobleman’s life or royalty had material comforts but a different level of responsibility. For example, Prince Edward, at just sixteen years old was in command of whole battalion.
Not a lot of leeway for a “safe space” in that milieu.
The Hissy Fit Generation and The Loss of Free Speech VI: The Jekyll & Hyde of Social Media (3)
Photo by Zulmaury Saavedra on Unsplash
“People will accept ideas presented in technological form that would be abhorrent in any other form. It is utterly strange to hear my many old friends in the world of digital culture claim to be the true sons of the Renaissance without realizing that using computers to reduce individual expression is a primitive, retrograde activity, no matter how sophisticated your tools are.”
— Jaron Lanier, You Are Not a Gadget
Censorship and Fakebook News
Since the fake news trope has been doing the rounds Facebook is now the Establishment’s social media tool of choice to combat the rise of alternative news outlets, as well as more mainstream but editorially more responsible news rooms such as Russia’s wildly popular flagship news network RT. Under the banner of “tackling fake news” Zuckerberg’s crusade is the perfect platform for the terminally offended and the easily swayed by the vast echo chamber of predominantly left-liberal delusions that make up Facebook’s political discourse. News is further filtered, sanitised and put through the algorithmic grinder of FB’s ideology.
It doesn’t matter whether you are left or right leaning in your views – one political belief censored in favour of another is bad news for free speech and democracy. Indeed, in late 2016 Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg decided to employ a few websites that would have the honour of labelling stories as “fake news” according to an agreed media consensus. These include ABC News, Factcheck.org and PolitiFact, and the so-called myth-busting website Snopes.com. According to conservative website The Daily Caller there is a problem: “Almost all of the writers churning out fact checks for Snopes have a liberal background, and many of them have expressed contempt for Republican voters. The Daily Caller could not identify a single Snopes fact-checker who comes from a conservative background. Snopes did not respond to a list of questions from The DC regarding the site’s ideological leaning.” [1] Match this with Facebook curators and you are unlikely to get unbiased news, rather it will be selected according to what is deemed acceptable to modern day, left-liberal thinking. As discussed previously such thinking is no longer the kind of leftism that values free speech but has slipped into opinion-hungry authoritarianism.
Debunking spurious news stories is less admirable when it comes from mega-corporations who are walking in step with Establishment, the cogs of which are greased by psychopathic perceptions. Thankfully, a large proportion of the public are simply not buying it.[2] This is due to the hard evidence provided by independent media of the very thing of which it has been accused: propagating lies and fake news propaganda. This is what makes it so painfully ironic. The mainstream media is, and has always been fake news. It has been caught red-handed, with its pants down on numerous occasions, peddling sometimes subtle psyops and on other occasions ludicrous BS that would have made Machiavelli cry with shame. Whether it’s 24hr fear-mongering, Deep State anti-Russian propaganda, paid-up editorials, or the ping-pong of culture wars, the MSM has been at the forefront of the most atrocious fake news for many decades.
Facebook has elected to take on the “disinformation” circulating from alternative news outlets and conveniently forget the most obvious examples of fake news which was spread by most of the corporate-chained MSM. The explosive details of tacit media support and collusion for the Clinton election campaign exposed in the Wikileaks Podesta emails and by The Intercept was purposely omitted and suppressed by Facebook, Google and Twitter as a matter of policy – policy which is founded on personal opinion of their CEOs and shaped by the Liberal arm of the Establishment. This included drafting news pieces and handing them to suitably “friendly” media plants dotted around MSM outlets. [3] An internal strategy document dated January 2015 reads: “As we discussed on our call, we are all in agreement that the time is right [to] place a story with a friendly journalist in the coming days that positions us a little more transparently while achieving the above goals.” [4] All of this and more was happily shared on social networks with Facebook as the primary disseminator.
The Hissy Fit Generation and The Loss of Free Speech VI: The Jekyll & Hyde of Social Media (2)
“It is no longer possible to stand up for all speech.”
— Sinead McSweeney, Twitter’s vice president of public policy and communications for Europe, the Middle East, and Africa
***
“The First Amendment doesn’t protect a user’s speech on a private company’s site. On the contrary, the First Amendment protects Facebook’s right to say what can appear on its platform.”
— Jack Smith, Business Insider
Whether we have our faces glued to the smartphone in the street or feverishly checking our Twitter and Facebook accounts on our lap top at work, face-to-face interaction is fast being replaced by social media, which has society built around it. These networks offer steadily diminishing returns on social investment since a large proportion is rooted in self-promotion, self-admiration and the endless noise of opinions. The latter is drawn from a long since compromised mainstream media that has the audacity to charge alternative media with propagating “fake news,” a meme expressly created by neo-Cold War strategists within the Deep State to counter the non-existent presence of Russian interference in US elections. Opinions therefore are useful for creating emotional capital and the noise of distraction for the rest of us, so that intel agencies can continue to extract all the data they want.
Meantime, young adults are having to cope with an economic time-bomb; the legacy of poor parenting and a lack of play; minimal contact with nature and poor social skills. On top of a pervasive technology that is re-wiring the brain from easily accessible hardcore porn to virtual and highly superficial forms of exchange which, by their very nature, “optimise” and “compress” information down to soundbites. The pace of information exchange and the ratio of quantity over quality means that the highs and consequent lows are making addicts and infants out of many millennials and Generation Zer’s. The neuro-hacking of culture over the last few decades has given us a crisis in the young, now exacerbated by social media and smartphone technology. Yet, such technology is here to stay. So, can we turn it around and apply its true potential?
First, we must dig deep in order to find out what’s truly going on.
***
Facebook, more popular than Google, is now herding over 2 billion users and growing faster than any year since 2012. According to Tech Crunch the platform hasn’t lost its popularity with”66 percent of Facebook’s monthly users return each day now compared to 55 percent when it hit 1 billion.” The social networking giant has an enormous influence on young minds and society as a whole in ways we are only just beginning to fathom.
Facebook’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg offered his new mission statement to “Give people the power to build community and bring the world closer together.” This has to get the prize for the most disingenuous statement since George W. Bush claimed he was bringing freedom to Iraq. The world is getting closer together all right but we ‘ain’t holding hands. Rather, we are giving over our freedom and the very kernel of our minds to a new form of corporatism and surveillance. Analysts can barely keep up with how Facebook and other social media platforms are literally redesigning our lives and psychology.
As smartphone usage attests, there are voluminous studies indicating how social media (Facebook) is bad for your health. A family member often tells me: “Time just seems to disappear when I’m checking Facebook…It’s like I’m under a spell!” Two hours almost seem like two minutes. Yet, they frequently come away feeling exhausted rather than inspired. Why? University of Kent psychologists wrote in the Journal of Applied Social Psychology that compared to general internet use Facebook and its related stimuli can lead us to underestimate time. Although general internet use has the same effect, Facebook was the worst offender for such time distortion. The distortion of time locks us into a greater exposure to social media and internet surfing than we realise, suggesting that our mind is in a specific state of addictive suggestibility.[1] They found that it was Facebook-related images that changed how we pay attention to this visual stimuli, and likely plays a significant part in the rise of internet addiction as a whole.
The Hissy Fit Generation and the Loss of Free Speech V: Infantilism in America and Beyond
By M.K. Styllinski
Let me tell you about Preschool Mastermind, a daycare for adults in Brooklyn, N.Y. It is not, as I had thought, an April Fool’s joke or even a fetish den but an actual thing. Tall, hairy, wrinkled Americans — I’m assuming they have jobs because you can’t get student loans for kindergarten — pay a grand to recreate their happiest times, spending their days as four-year-olds: fingerpainting, show-and-telling, playing musical chairs, napping with a blankie and a Fig Newton.
— Heather Mallick, ‘The growing childishness of American adults’
Columnist Heather Mallick quoted above comments on mass infantilism and political disengagement which can only lead to the erosion of our civil liberties. She highlights a recent interview of whistleblower Edward Snowden by John Oliver of The Intercept who took a camera to Times Square and asked people who “Edward Snowden” was. Not one person knew. However, when asked if it was okay for the NSA to store photos of their genitals they were vehemently indignant. As Mallick observes: “This is how you get toddlers upset; you mention swimsuit areas.”Hugely important issues that strike at the very heart of our freedoms barely register, unless it’s to do with personal shame.
The freedom to exhibit one’s tackle and the shame of it being viewed (with probable hilarity) by State minions certainly throws up a tangled mess of mixed Freudian messages….
If you think the world is going insane then you can be sure that much of this is due to an inability to process deep change and the horror of having to confront one’s own psychology in the face of uncertainties and shocks. The net result of cultural narcissism means an arrested emotional development which has led to a widespread absence of maturity and responsibility. Nonetheless, you don’t have to be a pathological narcissist to find yourself grappling with such things. Since we live in such a culture, it is probable that all of us have had to confront narcissistic traits and various degrees of trauma in order to truly move forward with our lives. As those who have finally tackled such an ambitious objective can attest – it is not a pleasant experience, which is why those exhibiting symptoms of infantilism find it doubly difficult to claw their way back to adulthood without some appropriate form of therapy. For older individuals who have spent a life time sucking on the dummy of victimhood and entitlement this may be a tall order indeed, since it has become their personality with little room for change.
According to Merriam-Webster dictionary the definition of an adult is “a fully developed and mature: grown-up”. What does it mean to be grown up? Robert A. Hall’s article in the American Thinker gives a suitable description of what an ideal adult might be, taking into account that none of us can live up to this ideal all or even some of the time. The key is to strive to do so, both for yourself and your children since they will follow your example and define the next generation. He lists several descriptors which define a normal adult including: resilience; patience; disciplined; openness; consideration; supporting themselves and their family; altruistic in day to day life and most importantly, they do not take on a victim status but cultivate a sense of responsibility. In a word: true adults have integrity; they have a healthy ego that is kept in check by humility knowing that it’s not all about them and they are aware of their weaknesses but strive to overcome them. As discussed previously, many parents and the cultural cross-currents under which they were immersed in the 60s and 70s were exposed to a range of detrimental social changes which ultimately did no favours for them or their children.
Marketing Infantilism
Our body-centric focus is certainly over-developed alongside an elevated egotism. This infantilism is presiding over the male-female removal of body hair to the normalisation of paedophilia in law and academia. We are seeing generations of men and women who are personifying the psycho-spiritual chaos that has been wrought over the last several decades through emotional impairment, missing certain stages of neurological development through experiences in childhood and beyond. Factor in social engineering, postmodernist inculcation and a legion of other psychic pressures, the concept of adulthood has been twisted out of shape to induce a total reliance on the State for all one’s provisions. The government as provider of social welfare has fed into an assumed right to be taken care of, further eroding the potential of community and the lost creative power of people to nurture, support and nourish each other financially and spiritually.
The Hissy Fit Generation and the Loss of Free Speech IV: The Narcissism Factor (2)
“…the oversensitivity of individuals today, including political correctness and microaggressions, all stem from this idea that people operating under the notion of the pristine self view you as evil because you are showing them something other than love.”
— Howard Schwartz, professor emeritus of Oakland University,
Continuing from the previous post which looked at how narcissism defines our present culture, and how it may feature in the younger generations of today. We now turn to the main sources manifesting normalised cultural and/or personality narcissism and its perpetuation.
Here are six key areas:
Parenting
We have to differentiate between cultural narcissism and the kind of abuse that comes from neglectful parents or what is called the narcissistic family. In the latter, this is a form of emotional abuse or covert narcissism sourced from one or other of the parents’ needs and desires taking precedent over the child’s. From an emotionally deficient family life the child’s sense of self is warped leading to intense shame since the expectation of a nurturing environment is absent. Psychologist Joseph Burgo describes this trauma and arrested emotional development as a result of “disappointed expectations”. When the genetic inheritance that offers a “blueprint of normality” is disrupted in the child, he knows at a deep level, that his fundamental development has gone awry and he feels insecure and unsafe. Burgo explains: “instead of instilling a sense of beauty, an abusive or traumatic environment leaves the infant with a sense of internal defect and ugliness.” [1]
This sense of disgust and shame at the self has huge implications for the processing of feelings and social functioning. However, such covert narcissism is likely not the primary cause of the cultural narcissism we are now witnessing. There is very little empirical data to support it, whereas more modern studies show clear evidence that inflated feedback is the primary cause. In other words, the conditioning of overpraising and over-protection, where the child or infant is told over and over again that s/he is special and unique.
Telling a child that s/he is super smart and intrinsically special has been taught for several generations. Far from providing a healthy self-confidence this focus has encouraged a prince and princess syndrome; a generation of entitled, spoiled children with little defence against the objective realities of this world. Such well-intentioned coddling often results in a role reversal where the child becomes precociously “adult” and the parent reverts to child-like infantilism due to the dominance of the child’s personality – a wholly abnormal state of affairs. Far from feeling a deep-seated shame, the child genuinely believes that s/he is special and superior since it comes from a learned behaviour of entitlement – wired into the brain.
Although authoritarian parenting is most certainly not the answer, the pendulum has now swung toward the opposite extreme where indulgence misinterprets nurturing. Discipline and structure is an essential part of a child’s navigation and learning, but such an “old-fashioned” view is now shunned in favour of letting the child do and have exactly what s/he wants; where the child is constantly love-bombed with no boundaries or limits. And when the child or young adult eventually faces the real world he comes face to face with the fact that his love-cocoon, this pristine self has programmed an essential weakness in the face of life’s vicissitudes. Far from creating self-reliance and resilience this parenting creates the exact opposite, namely, a generation of “snowflakes” where all aspects of living are seen as a form of bullying and act of offence. The capitulation of university campuses when confronted by these collective hissy fits only makes matters much worse.
The Hissy Fit Generation and the Loss of Free Speech III: Millennials and Generation Z
“My life feels like a test I didn’t study for.”
– quote from a Millennial
“…if this nation has any chance of survival, of carrying its traditions deep into the 21st century, it will in no small part depend on members of my generation, Generation X, the last Americans schooled in the old manner, the last Americans that know how to fold a newspaper, take a joke, and listen to a dirty story without losing their minds … We are the last Americans to have the old-time childhood. It was coherent, hands-on, dirty, and fun.” – ‘Why Generation X Might Be Our Last, Best Hope’ By Rick Cohen, Vanity Fair
I am also part of Generation X. We experienced life without the internet, emails, cell and smart phones and navigated through different challenges and struggles, from the revolutions and socioeconomic upheavals of the 1970s; the celebrated greed of the 1980s and the structural transformations of the 1990s. The same challenges exist for today’s young adults but with many more layers of social and cultural complexity. Technology, under the direction of the social engineers is only making things worse, since it offers yet another form of addiction on top of intense political and ideological interference, all of which is channelled through these younger generations who have almost no defences against it.
I found making sense of our Official Culture immensely challenging during my twenties and early thirties manifesting as depression and panic attacks, the struggle of which took up most of my sense of self. It eventually required serious soul-searching and the confrontation of the root causes of these fears and traumas in order to move forward. I was lucky to have assistance in that endeavour even if it was a form of “tough-love” to get me to the place where a more objective perspective was possible. Such a process is deeply unpleasant; often like a form of dying as emotions are healed and the old, false self of programming and egoic survival is stripped away. This takes time, effort and a lot of patience, which is one reason why it is so assiduously avoided.
So, I have sympathy with the psychological crisis that millennials are facing and how important it is that they are given the information and assistance to turn their lives around. But it will be monumental task.
When children have been brought up to be narcissistic and entitled through no fault of their own; where society itself normalises those same qualities, young people have to attempt to navigate through such a morass of conflicting messages and superficial dross that it is no wonder they are floundering. Millennials have (literally) everything at their fingertips but wholly attached to unrealistic aims and ambitions, but detached from social skills and dynamics that would build and sustain them through the inevitable challenges they must face. In one sense, we are witnessing a re-run of the 1960s, that surge in potential awareness of what could be…This time, a genuine millennial passion is shackled by prior conditioning, an unstable foundation that is constantly shifting beneath their feet making it all but impossible to orient themselves. They have been brought to believe themselves special; nurtured to anticipate and expect great things, but they do not have the inner resources to match the outer reality. Hence, the internal or external “hissy fit” when expectations fail to match that reality, be that from differing views or workplace demands.
When seeking to analyse and appraise younger generations and the challenges they must face, there are no doubt plenty of exceptions to this rule and a great many young adults who do not fit into the following psychological profile. Yet, it seems there are not enough, otherwise we wouldn’t be having the symptoms rising up in our youth that we do. Similarly, the following is not designed to rip apart millennials in order to feel better about my own generation. It is concerned with pin-pointing the problems in order to achieve clarity and possible solutions. The older generations have a responsibility to assist those who come after since, as parents, we have also played a part in shaping them. With the right kind of mentoring and the right kind of knowledge, they might develop the self-awareness and life skills they need. Building that knowledge-base will be up to them, as will facing their fears and discovering their own higher nature and creativity within. Our collective future depends on it.
Neuro-Hacking the Mass Mind (I)
By M.K. Styllinski
“…brain-hacking through social engineering and other processes is already a reality, and hackers are our brains. This ‘neuro-hacking’ can involve acting on the hardware, that is to say on the biological and genetic substrate of the brain, but it can also involve acting on the software, that is to say, on the communication code that we learn from society.” – Lucien Cerise
One of the breakthroughs in understanding the level of influence of the Deep State and Overworld dynamics has been through the recent revelations from Wikileaks’ Podesta emails. A veritable Pandora’s Box of connections has led to Pizzagate – now Pedogate – blackmail, corruption, child pornography, sex trafficking, black magick rituals and a plethora of other sordid revelations fanning out from the quest for regime change and the battle for resources in the Middle East. After researchers from all political persuasions and beliefs had been highlighting these horrors for years, these leaked emails, now being sat on by the FBI, are the closest yet to offering proof of the mechanisms which are passed from one Establishment/Deep State generation to the next like a dark baton slippery with blood.
Slowly but surely the why, who and how of our Official Culture and the drivers which ensure that humanity remains under the yoke of World State cartels is being revealed in a way that hasn’t been seen before. Oil/Gas, weapons, drugs, and sex/organ trafficking lie at the top of multi-tiered resource pyramid. The financial architecture that perpetuates these unimaginably toxic channels is achieved through a long tradition of social engineering by Elite factions, the puppets & players of which follow a revolving door of power, irrespective of a President and his administration. This is the facade, the entrenched and inevitable outgrowth of the State that permits a shadow government to remain forever at the control panel of perpetual war and social disruption. As top-level power brokers between the CIA, the NSA and FBI jostle for supremacy let’s not forget that overall, these agencies are primarily engaged in a war for our minds as their primary reason for being.
However, let’s not imagine that the Wikileaks organisation and their poster-child Edward Snowden are somehow working for the greater good, although many in their staff may think so. I suspect that this period of permitted leaks is very probably nothing more than a psychological operation, a limited hangout of the CIA and thus an attempt to acclimatize populations to the ubiquity of surveillance and intelligence that is literally inside your home, phone, T.V. and anything else connected to the internet and the emerging SMART society. This is one facet of the same social engineering project that we’ll discuss below.
It’s a risky game managing the flow of “leaks.” Allow too much information to seep into public consciousness and a momentum begins to emerge, not enough information and they can’t pursue their time-table of phased objectives. Which is why the hacking of lap-tops, smart phones and T.V.’s merely mirrors the hacking of our minds and beliefs – a potentially far more dangerous state of affairs then data mining. For example, the core roots of progressivism and the left have now been infected by ponerological streams of political correctness and narcissism, working in concert with CoIntelpro agents in much the same way as the New Age or Human potential movement as a whole. Thus, social movements such as LGBT, Black Lives Matter and Soros-led “social justice” organisations such as Moveon.org tune into a genuine desire for social equity and “rights” but are created or hijacked early on, driven by Deep State directives that desire the chaos of tribalism as a default setting for society. The younger generation of Millennials – who should be the hope of the world – appear incapable of exploring this dichotomy because they have already been programmed to embody and act out these inverted social-cultural beliefs, ethics and activism. The rise in an epidemic of narcissism in this demographic further encourages feel-good sensation, and a technology-driven buffer to the acknowledgement of nuance, complexity and attention to objective reality. The ability to think outside the box against ingrained conditioning becomes severely limited because it is perceived as an attack against the collective ego mask of self-entitlement.
Thus, Millennials and older generations of the well-intentioned (and not so well-intentioned) are already falling into the many traps, the escape from which will be extremely difficult since the these info-tainment led emotional hooks of manipulation offer benign moral imperatives to seduce a collective projection of unresolved shadows out into the world, thus turning ideology and justice on its head. Controlled opposition has therefore been easy to manufacture, backed up as it is by fake news of the corporate media. Those that are paying attention can see this formula everywhere you look: whether it is the BBC or CNN that promote the Establishment’s agenda of anti-Russian rhetoric to University Campuses engaging in an Orwellian re-branding of vocabulary in an tragi-comic and painfully ironic stand against racsim and bigotry. Such tactics focus away from what really matters and into the realm of skin-deep analysis of feeling and sensation. This bio-chemical template that is burned into the young brains of new generations is the neural pathway upon which social engineering functions and thrives. Indeed, it seems much of the left, new age/green and “socially aware” are now the unconscious cultural foot-soldiers of the Deep State. This is why social engineering has been adopted with such pin-pointed skill and precision over the years and why it needs to be confronted and thoroughly explored.
The awakening to the nature of the MSM as a monolithic exercise in propaganda and thought control is gaining ground, thanks largely to the internet. It is becoming less easy to monopolise information and applied knowledge in this age of independent news feeds, FOI requests, forum research, whistle-blowers and leaked documents, despite the signs of psyops constantly filtering the truth. There is a real chance for moderates from the left and right (and many shades inbetween) to turn down the volume of their beliefs and collaborate against a common foe – that of institutionalised psychopathy. Which is why the war is being fought through the inner shadows and unresolved issues that we all have. These weaknesses can be exploited and used by the Elite through suitably prolonged exposure to new forms of social engineering. It is for this reason that lines between awareness, knowledge and apathy and ignorance are being drawn.
And so to neuro-hacking…
Reality Change I: 16 ignition points
By M.K. Styllinski
“Not everything that is faced can be changed; but nothing can be changed until it is faced.”
– James Baldwin
Unless you have been living in a small cave in the mountains for the last few decades (and that may still be an option) you have probably noticed that we are moving through extremely tumultuous times. Having successfully traversed the Grand Hype and misinterpretations of the 2012 Mayan Prophecy which did not say the world would end but indicate massive change – humanity is still here. Nonetheless, it seems we are in for some truly momentous events. In fact, there is a host of global indicators which, in isolation, or as a non-linear combination, could signal an epic meltdown in the fortunes of humanity whilst offering the possibility of a completely new world.
Do not take the following synopsis as inevitable and that we should all order a bulk supply of dehydrated chicken noodles and chlorinated water tablets, pack our bug bags and find our respective caves … Only that one, or several of these events have an extremely high probability of occurring over the next 2 -10 years. Our history appears to be one long bid to cover up the reality that this planet goes through cycles of catastrophic upheaval – a “reset” if you will. Those that learned to read the signs and took sensible measures to avoid unnecessary future hardship in the face of these dramatic environmental and infrastructure changes were the ones that survived. That means psychological as well as practical awareness.
In lieu of what has gone before in this series, I hope this list helps to place the events in context, whilst offering an easy summary of what we are all facing. A selection of links is included under each heading which are not definitive, merely relevant sources for further reading.
Official Culture Reprise VII: Moving Away From the Psychopath’s Dream (4)
“Perhaps the most important lesson of Ladakh has to do with happiness. Only after many years of peeling away layers of preconceptions did I begin to see the joy and laughter of the Ladakhis for what it really was: a genuine and unhindered appreciation of life itself. In Ladakh I have known a people who regard peace of mind and joie de vivre as their unquestioned birthright. I have seen that community and a close relationship to the land can enrich human life beyond all comparison with material wealth or technological sophistication.”
– Helena Norberg-Hodge, Ancient Futures
Learning from Ladakh
One example of the social consequences of Official Culture meeting pathology-free communities is from the thousand year-old Buddhist people of Ladakh situated in the desert of the Western Himalayas known as : “little Tibet.” There is no romantic gilding here, theirs is a story of survival, endurance and physical hardship set against a harsh environment. The essence and principles of their continued existence and the coming of Western “development” places in sharp relief the kind of values necessary to create a community and to see it function and thrive. Yet, the deep spiritual resource that the Ladakhis embodied and which pervaded every facet of their lives was a lesson in ancient humility and reverence for a sacredness that we have lost – to our absolute detriment. Simplicity, yes, raw nature, indeed. But the Ladakhis appeared to have a spiritual health that was far in advance of our own. Like many indigenous cultures, it is not so hard to see why. For all our intellectual feats of daring-do, our Western populations in particular, remain desperately unhappy and dangerously lost.
So, what does that mean? That we all give up our i-pads and urban lifestyles and go and live in yurts and commune with nature?
INFRAKSHUN 