How One Man Made You Want Hot Dogs & Hate Communism (Plato cave)

I figured out many lies years ago, and then the question arose: how did they create a world for the naive, built on those lies? For me, their biggest achievements are the Kennedy assassination and 9/11, because their official explanations literally break the laws of physics. Yet for so long, those stories were treated as gospel—like the Bible, as if they were dogma. If you question them, you’re treated like a heretic. People look at you as if you’re crazy.

How on earth did they achieve this?

I’ve always said I love physics because it’s the ultimate law. These laws are unbreakable truths. And yet, somehow, the official stories of the Kennedy assassination and 9/11 seem to violate those unbreakable laws of physics.

But here’s the thing: reality doesn’t matter. The only thing that matters is your perception of reality. People are like those in Plato’s allegory of the cave, staring at shadows on the wall and believing those shadows are real. Everyone thinks they think for themselves, but…

To understand how the tendency of human beings to engage in group-identification renders the masses manipulable, we must turn to one of Freud’s ideas which heavily influenced the manipulation techniques developed by Bernays. In his book Propaganda, published in 1928, Bernays explained:

“It is chiefly the psychologists of the school of Freud who have pointed out that many of man’s thoughts and actions are compensatory substitutes for desires which he has been obliged to suppress. A thing may be desired not for its intrinsic worth or usefulness, but because he has unconsciously come to see in it a symbol of something else, the desire for which he is ashamed to admit to himself. A man buying a car may think he wants it for purposes of locomotion…He may really want it because it is a symbol of social position, an evidence of his success in business, or a means of pleasing his wife.” (Propaganda, Edward Bernays)

What Freud suggested is that often there is a divorce between one’s conscious thoughts, and feelings and desires which do not fit with one’s self-image and which are therefore suppressed. This fact, Bernays recognized, renders human beings manipulable. For what it implies is that if one can design propaganda or psychological operations that bypass the conscious and rational faculties of the individual, targeting instead suppressed emotions and hidden desires, it is possible to move people to adopt beliefs and behaviors without them being aware of the underlying motivations leading them on. As Bernays explained:

“…men are very largely actuated by motives which they conceal from themselves…It is evident that the successful propagandist must understand the true motives and not be content to accept the reasons which men give for what they do.” (Propaganda, Edward Bernays)

Through philosophy and psychology, you come to understand that your thoughts are not entirely your own, and accepting this is the first step. Reality is so different from what we’ve been fed all our lives that it’s difficult to accept. The first step is acknowledging that your mind isn’t solely yours—that they have manipulated your thoughts, just as they’ve manipulated all of ours.

This manipulation happens not only through the propaganda we see but also through influences on the unconscious mind from a young age. This part I struggle to fully understand. I grasp the effects of propaganda, but there’s a deeper, unconscious level of manipulation at work. Even though I’ve tried, I don’t completely understand what they’ve done to us.

What I do know, however, is that we cannot change the world for the better as long as people’s minds remain trapped in the reality they’ve constructed. Anyone who believes their thoughts are entirely their own has already lost the battle for personal physical and mental freedom.

When you understand you can leave the Plato cave they created for you and see the world for what it truly is and what they have hidden from you.

I suspect not everyone is familiar with Plato’s allegory of the cave, so here’s a philosophical content that’s easy to understand and might also deepen your appreciation for the classic movie that I think everyone saw: The Matrix.

“The tyranny exercised unconsciously on men’s minds is the only real tyranny, because it cannot be fought against.”(The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind – Gustave Le Bon)

“Each individual…has a share in numerous group minds – those of his race, of his class, of his creed, of his nationality, etc. – and he can also raise himself above them to the extent of having a scrap of independence and originality.” (Group Psychology and The Analysis of the Ego, Sigmund Freud)