We hear a great deal about mass formation and mass psychosis these days. The psychological theories are palatable and familiar enough to be distributed amongst those who can recognize truths, associate them with our two-year nightmare and easily communicate them to others. Free floating anxiety, personal anxiety, isolation, segregation, engineered fear through propaganda for social division and control. These are all interconnected but they require greater examination for comprehending the machinations of our information age, especially the propaganda side of the equation which is really the wellspring of resultant psychological responses. The propaganda of today is not your grandmother’s propaganda.
Here one could dive into the nature of propaganda, its history and all the literary staples of propaganda studies, but in trying to convince others that what they believe to be true is actually propaganda, this methodology might be as effective as that David Foster Wallace story about fish comprehending what water is. With the ubiquitous nature of propaganda today, a life source for millions of misguided world views and beliefs, a different approach is required.
The most impressive and fascinatingly spectacular thing about propaganda today is the people trapped in its spell believe they are simply and passively engaging art, education, cinema, late night entertainment, online news and information searches and consumption. This is how the powers that be can socially engineer a catatonic state of blissful ignorance and total obedience in millions of people around the world through one series of events. Their lives are constantly controlled. Their impressions and stimuli always carefully managed. Their perception of it all is under the spell that they are freely making choices for information that haven’t already been made for them through behavioral conditioning and predictive engineering.
All of the above is related to the process of passively accepting information, rather than discerningly choosing information. The former is done for you, the latter requires a dedicated effort that results in not being a manipulated ignoramus. I don’t mean to insult you reader but this is a far more profound collective crisis than a virus, and most of the past two years does not happen if the majority out there were not lazy, passive acceptors of information.
Now that the introduction is concluding and your attention spans are fading, the impulse to depart this essay and return to your regularly scheduled programming is going to be too overwhelming soon, if I keep writing you’ll leave, another sentence and you’ll be gone…Let’s play a game!
A. A novel coronavirus was transmitted at wet market in Wuhan, China through a bat and an intermediary animal before infecting humans. The novel virus was first identified from an outbreak in December 2019, and attempts to contain it there failed, allowing it to spread across the globe. To protect their citizens governments across the west had to lockdown societies to keep the virus from spreading and hospitals from becoming too overwhelmed with patients. In addition to necessary lockdowns, health experts implemented other safety measures to slow the spread of the virus, including masks, social distancing and contact tracing using human and digital surveillance technologies. Thanks to scientific breakthroughs in biotechnology vaccines were quickly developed, tested and approved for mass distribution around the world. The vaccines are safe, effective and necessary to protect the health and safety of citizens, especially the most vulnerable. They should be mandatory for everyone to participate in society to protect the health of everyone else.
B. A coronavirus may have escaped from a laboratory in Wuhan, China in December of 2019, where important research on bat coronaviruses was being conducted. The virus was identified and sequenced by the Chinese government and distributed around the world for companies to begin the process of developing vaccines. Government imposed lockdowns were necessary to keep hospitals from being overwhelmed with patients. Other measures and safeguards were put in place to buy time until the vaccines could be safely tested and then approved for emergency use. Some of these measures were more effective than others but governments and policy makers did the best they could with a rapidly evolving situation. The masks turned out to not be as effective as we were told, and the vaccines not as effective or safe as they initially believed but are still a useful tool in protecting the health and safety of those who want them.
