Regarding an Iran war: why was the buildup so quick, and why aren’t they even trying to create a narrative this time?

Regarding an Iran war: why was the buildup so quick, and why aren’t they even trying to create a narrative this time? It’s because the “world of the naive” is finally crumbling.

In this post, I would like to touch on the subject of the reality of naive people I constantly talk about. I would like to start with the main video attached to this post featuring Col. Larry Wilkerson, whom I really respect. In one of his appearances on Judge Napolitano’s show, Larry said to the judge that he himself is a war criminal — and he didn’t say it with pride. You could genuinely see the pain in him. I respect that.

That’s the difference, for example, between him and someone I dislike and don’t respect — Jeffrey Sachs, who still tries to present himself as innocent. In my opinion, he was correctly described by Michael Hudson as the “Butcher of Yugoslavia” for what he did.

Meanwhile, Col. Larry Wilkerson admits his wrongdoing and acknowledges his guilt. What he does now is try to repent for his past actions. That’s why I respect Col. Larry Wilkerson, and why I feel the opposite about Jeffrey Sachs.

Anyway, here is a fragment I would like to point out:

 

9:56

Col. Larry Wilkerson: Um, but I am kind of surprised that the F-15 got hit because just as I was surprised when Scott told me about the one in the Western Desert in Iraq, um, I didn’t know when was shot down and I was I was monitoring that war from the Pentagon with the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. So, um, these things happen sometimes and they don’t get out too widely. This one, of course, was picked up pretty quickly because we’re monitoring this war in a way that is probably a little more intense and it’s less military friendly.

You know, the Desert Shield, Desert Storm was managed in a way that uh actually as a military man, I was in favor of, but as a citizen, I wasn’t necessarily in favor of. We co-opted the press for that war. The press reported basically what we wanted them to report, but it wasn’t coercion. It actually was co-option. And it was done fairly well, demonstrated most dramatically by I think it was a CNN reporter who’s in a foxhole with some of the GIs during the war, the ground phase of the war.

And he’s reporting from the foxhole, and he ends his reporting with, “But I’m here with them. I’m not in any way biased.” [laughter] Of course, we’d captured him and put him in a foxhole and told him what, you know, dude, this is what this is what’s happening. This is what’s happening. That was probably the most managed press in the history of warfare involving the US.

What Col. Larry Wilkerson is talking about is something that is very well explained in the documentary film made by John Pilger titled “The War You Don’t See.” It’s a movie I have used many times in my posts, and it is very important to watch, especially for those who are stuck in a naive understanding of reality.

I carefully select everything I use in my posts. For every video I include, there are about a hundred that I leave out, so I can assure you that every video I share is worthwhile. However, I don’t know whether people have watched it, or if they will watch it when they see this post. So, I will highlight a few fragments that are particularly important.

28:42

“

Dan Rather: This was in the almost immediate wake of 9/11 and that’s the way I genuinely felt I was responding as an American citizen in a personal way and I have said that whether those of us in journalism want to admit it or not then at least in some small way fear is present in every newsroom in the country a fear of losing your job fear of your the institution the company you work for going out of business the fear of being stuck with some label unpatriotic or otherwise that you will have with you to your grave and beyond; the fear that there’s so much at stake for the country that by doing what you deeply feel is your job or sometimes we invariances; all of these things go into the mix but it’s very important for you say because I firmly believe it I’m not the vice president in charge of excuses that we shouldn’t have excuses what we should do is take a really good look at that period and learn from it and you know suck up a courage.

56:56

John Pilger: Carne Ross was a senior British diplomat at the UN responsible for imposing the embargo on Iraq.

You gave evidence on the impact of sanctions.

Carne Ross: Yes.

John Pilger: And this is what you said “the weight of evidence clearly indicates that sanctions cause massive human suffering among ordinary Iraqis in particular children we the US and UK governments were the primary engineers and defenders of sanctions and were well aware of this evidence at the time but we largely ignored it or blamed all these effects on the sad on government sanctions effectively denied the entire population the means to live” unquote. that’s that’s a shocking admission.

Carne Ross: Yeah I agree well I stand by it today.

John Pilger: Why didn’t you speak out during those four and a half years?

Carne Ross: There is a certain macho culture in foreign policy circles that too to talk about things like humanitarian suffering when you’re dealing with Saddam Hussein is a bit wet you know that it’s it’s not what the issues really about the governments do security that’s the kind of hard thing that we’re there to provide and I think however wrong your decisions may be whatever damage you may do to other individuals, there is at the end of the day no accountable accountability whatsoever. We had extraordinarily good resources to put together our story to find little facts to justify their story factoids I began to call them.

John Pilger: And how eagerly would journalists set these factoids?

Carne Ross: They had very little chance to do anything other than accept our version of events and more or less relay it on unedited to the public government is an information machine and we would control access for journalists to us to governments. When I was a news department in the in the foreign office we would control access to the foreign off to the foreign secretary as a form of reward to journalists if they they were critical if they we felt they were they were too hostile to our account of events we would not give them the goodies of trips with the foreign secretary around the world or you know into exclusive interviews every now and then we did the same in New York if journalists were not particularly supportive to our account we would freeze them out we would make life harder for them. But there is a subtle and private relationship between them which is basically of of you know favoritism that certain journalists are rewarded with access for for being supportive of the story they will basically tell journalists you carry on with that line that that kind of unjustified criticism of our government policy on x,y said we will punish you. and that is very explicit about those kinds of threats. What happened was not an intelligence based process, it was basically a PR process run by number 10 to produce a document that was much more politically credible than the evidence suggested.

John Pilger: It was a major deception, wasn’t it?

Carne Ross: I think it amounts in effect to that yes I remember before I was sent to me Orkin late 97 I did the round of departments in London saying to them okay I’m going to New York I’m going to be doing Iraq what do I need to know and I went to see non-proliferation Department in the Foreign Office. and I was expecting a briefing on the vast piles of weapons that we still thought Iraq possessed and the desk officers sort of looked at me slightly sheepishly and said well actually we don’t think there’s anything, we don’t think there’s anything in Iraq. I said that’s extraordinary. I mean I thought we had sanctions because we thought Iraq had large amounts of weapons. He said no, the justification for sanctions is basically that we have our unanswered questions about how those stocks were destroyed in the past. But what I feel I mean I feel very guilty about it I feel very ashamed about it I feel ashamed about it sitting talking to you you know I feel actual shame running my body when I talk to you about it.

John Pilger: Should journalists feel the same as those who pass on the deception?

Carne Ross: Absolutely, we should all be accountable to each other and I think that’s the only way to have a civilized society is some kind of transparency with each other and accountability and people holding people morally accountable for what they do and that applies to journalists as much as it applies to anybody.

19:13

John Pilger: This is Rageh Omaar reporting for the BBC from Baghdad he described the arrival of the Americans as a liberation people have come out welcoming them holding up be signs this is an image taking place across the whole of the Iraqi capital today but it was not happening across the rest of Iraq this was another illusion. The toppling of the statue of Saddam Hussein was seized upon by the invading force as a target of opportunity. What was not news was a US Army investigation describing how they exploited what they called a media circus they’re almost as many reporters as Iraqis says the report it was an American psyops officer who ordered the statue brought down the resulting TV pictures gave no sense of the bloody conquest of Iraq that was already well underway.

Rageh Omaar: You know I didn’t really do my job properly. I think I’d hold my hand up and say that one didn’t press the most uncomfortable buttons hard enough.

As you describe the arrival of the Americans you didn’t tell us the story of how that whole statue was itself manipulated and why not.

Rageh Omaar: The entire live cameras of the world’s press were on the balcony of the Palestine hotel and that was really the only events that they saw about Iraq coming out so it was a sort of made-for-tv moment. and the most telling moment in that whole day was when an American soldier climbed up a crane and put the American flag over the statue’s face because in fact that was a true iconic moment of what had happened that America had taken ownership.

To those of you supporting Ukraine — believing Putin is uniquely evil and solely responsible for this war — and those who think Iran is the world’s greatest state sponsor of terrorism: you are living in a world of the naive.

Anyone who buys into these narratives isn’t living in the real world. Instead, they inhabit a manufactured reality built on “made-for-TV moments,” like the toppling of Saddam Hussein’s statue. I have heard so many otherwise intelligent people believe this nonsense simply because they are told to. After all, how could they not? If what they see on television weren’t true, it would imply a massive conspiracy — and there couldn’t possibly be such a thing, right? Conspiracies are only for “cuckoo” people, aren’t they?

The Wall Street Journal, The Guardian, and other “respectable” Western news sources would never lie to you, would they? If they did, the lies would eventually be exposed; to keep them hidden would require a coordinated effort — a conspiracy. And again, only “cuckoo” people like me believe in those.

I first recognized this “naive reality” around 2005 or 2006 during the Iraq War. I was watching mainstream media, but things didn’t add up. I don’t take anyone’s word at face value; I analyze everything myself. That’s why I turned to the “wild west” of the internet back then. Because I understood English, I discovered Al Jazeera English back when it was still a genuine source of information. As this movie says:

18:32

Evidence that the invaders had terrorized civilians was provided by Al Jazeera and other Arab TV networks whose fearless unembarrassed amateur crews became a threat to military propaganda they gave voice to people who refused to be betrayed simply as victims

That’s why Al Jazeera’s headquarters were literally bombed by the American military. It was then that I understood there are two distinct realities: one representing the real world, and another which I call the “world of the naive,” constructed through propaganda and narratives.

Today, this “naive reality” is perpetuated not only by the media but also through an education system that I deeply despise. Ironically, the most educated people are often the ones most deeply ingrained in this false reality. After all, they have spent years studying the world in school; to them, it is inconceivable that what they learned was not the truth, but rather a facade built on narratives — a world for the naive.

It makes me laugh when I hear someone like Alexander Mercouris claim he “studied history” and that specific period, only to follow it up with something completely incorrect. He didn’t study history; he studied the fake reality of the naive, just like most people. The real world and its true history are hidden — a fact perfectly illustrated by this short video featuring Patrick Clawson.

I frankly think that crisis initiation is really tough, and it’s very hard for me to see how the United States president can get us to war with Iran. This leads me to conclude that if, in fact, compromise isn’t happening, then the traditional way America gets to war is what would be best for U.S. interests.

Some people might think Mr. Roosevelt wanted to get us into World War II; as mentioned, you may recall we had to wait for Pearl Harbor. Some people might think Mr. Wilson wanted to get us into World War I; you may recall he had to wait for the Lusitania episode. Some people might think that Mr. Johnson wanted to send troops to Vietnam; you may recall they had to wait for the Gulf of Tonkin episode. We didn’t go to war with Spain until the USS Maine exploded. And may I point out that Mr. Lincoln did not feel he could call out the federal army until Fort Sumter was attacked, which is why he ordered the commander at Fort Sumter to do exactly that thing which the South Carolinians had said would cause an attack.

So if, in fact, the Iranians aren’t going to compromise, it would be best if somebody else started the war. -Patrick Clawson

If you were to go to a university and repeat what this man just said, they would think you’re crazy. That is because, in a university, you aren’t learning about the real world or real history; you are learning the “reality of the naive.”

Notice the laughter among the people in that room? They aren’t laughing because what he said is false or stupid; they are laughing because he said the quiet part out loud — something you aren’t supposed to know. They are laughing at all of you “intellectuals” with higher education who believe his words are just conspiracy theories because that’s how you were trained to think in school. I bet Alexander also believes it’s “conspiratorial” to suggest these events were false flags, simply because that isn’t the history he was taught.

This blind belief in authority and “conspiracy phobia” is exactly what people with higher education are indoctrinated with; it’s why I call higher education brainwashing. Fortunately, I am not burdened by this blind faith in authority or this fear of conspiracies, which allows me to analyze things with an open mind and consider all possibilities.

There are people — like the members of “The Washington Institute Policy Forum” where Patrick Clawson spoke — who know and understand the truth of the real world. They know that what they teach the masses is a load of nonsense designed to maintain this world of the naive. You aren’t supposed to understand the truth; you are supposed to believe the truth is a “conspiracy theory” and keep living in a world where Putin is Hitler, the war in Ukraine was unprovoked, and Iran is the biggest sponsor of terrorism. You are supposed to be like the cattle Orwell wrote about:

…like cattle turned loose upon the plains of Argentina, they had reverted to a style of life that appeared to be natural to them, a sort of ancestral pattern. They were born, they grew up in the gutters, they went to work at twelve, they passed through a brief blossoming-period of beauty and sexual desire, they married at twenty, they were middle-aged at thirty, they died, for the most part, at sixty. Heavy physical work, the care of home and children, petty quarrels with neighbours, films, football, beer, and above all, gambling, filled up the horizon of their minds. To keep them in control was not difficult. A few agents of the Thought Police moved always among them, spreading false rumours and marking down and eliminating the few individuals who were judged capable of becoming dangerous; but no attempt was made to indoctrinate them with the ideology of the Party. It was not desirable that the proles should have strong political feelings.

In 1984, Winston receives a book titled The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism, supposedly written by the Party’s arch-enemy, Emmanuel Goldstein. Our real world is just like 1984. There are books and school that feed you nonsense and maintain this “world of naivety” that the Party wants you to believe in.

There are also “forbidden” books and authors — the ones I frequently mention in my posts, such as Carl Oglesby, Whitney Webb, Douglas Valentine, Peter Dale Scott, Carroll Quigley, and many others. Their works represent the real-life versions of The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism. Just as Goldstein’s book was forbidden in 1984, these books are silenced in our world.

However, the people truly in power — those behind the curtain — study this real history. They understand the world exactly as I do, as Patrick Clawson’s comments revealed. Do you honestly think Zbigniew Brzezinski would have been able to write The Grand Chessboard if he believed in the fake, naive reality you are taught? Do you really think Henry Kissinger believed the version of history taught in universities?

Iran and the present

As Colonel Larry Wilkerson said, Iraq was the peak of this “world of the naive,” but we have begun to see the first major cracks in this fake reality during the war in Ukraine. I am still surprised they were able to successfully suppress the presence of Nazis in Ukraine or silence questions regarding the Nord Stream sabotage. However, programs like The Duran represent the first significant fractures in this reality of the naive most people inhabit. As I’ve shown, according to Media Bias/Fact Check, The Duran is:

The Duran – Bias and Credibility

QUESTIONABLE SOURCE A questionable source exhibits one or more of the following: extreme bias, consistent promotion of propaganda/conspiracies, poor or no

Overall, we rate The Duran as a Questionable source based on far-right-wing bias, promotion of Russian propaganda, right-wing conspiracies, a lack of transparency, use of poor sources, plagiarism, and failed fact checks

During the Second Iraq War, voices like TheDuran would have been silenced. Similarly, not long ago, I wouldn’t have had a chance to be heard. But now that people like me can post and reach an audience, they are panicking. Here is the video I wanted to quote:

5:22

But you’re going to have to hear it one more time. We can really unpack everything that’s happening here. And you know, I grew up around a lot of white supremacists. Um, so I kind of get it—like the massive cognitive dissonance and like getting so close to actually understanding what’s going on and just missing it completely. So, uh, let’s roll it.

Since October 7th, but really before then, there have been huge shifts in America on how people think about Jews and Israel. And I think that is especially true of young people. So, we are now wrestling with a new, I think, generational divide here. And I think that’s particularly true in that social media is now our source of media.

And this, you know, it used to be that the media you got in America was American media. And it was pretty mainstream. You know, it generally didn’t express extreme anti-Israel views. You had to go to a pretty weird bookstore to find global media and fringe media. But today, you’d have to go to an actual leftist bookstore—not something that you find in Obama’s library. Hey, we have social media, which is a global medium, right? It is shaped, its algorithms are shaped by billions of people worldwide who don’t really love Jews. And so while in the 1990s, you know, a young person probably wasn’t going to find Al Jazeera or someone like Nick Fuentes, today—

I’m going to stop interrupting this, but putting Nick Fuentes and Al Jazeera like on the same freaking medium is kind of crazy.

Those media outlets find them. They find them on their phones. It’s also this increasingly post-literate media. Less and less text, more and more videos. So you have TikTok just smashing our young people’s brains all day long with video of carnage in Gaza. And this is why so many of us can’t have a sane conversation with younger Jews because anything that we try to say to them, they are hearing it through this wall of carnage. So I want to give data and information and facts and arguments and they are just seeing in their minds carnage and I sound obscene and you know I think [laughter] Yeah. Yeah. Nailed it.

Fortunately, the very smart, I think, bet that we made on Holocaust education to serve as anti-semitism education in this new media environment, I think that is beginning to break down a little bit because, you know, Holocaust education is absolutely essential. But I think it may be confusing some of our young people about anti-semitism because they learn about big strong Nazis hurting weak emaciated Jews and they think, “Oh, anti-semitism is like anti-black racism, right? Powerful white people against powerless black people.”

So when on TikTok all day long they see powerful Israelis hurting weak, skinny Palestinians, it’s not surprising that they think, “Oh, I know the lesson of the Holocaust is you fight Israel. You fight the big powerful people hurting the weak people.” No shit we can’t have that.

Yeah. Uh, I—a lot has been said and we will say about the last point that she made, but the first thing that’s really wild is when she says upfront like, it used to be that you fucking idiots only listen to the propaganda that we fed you, right? Like this is so condescending. Um, you know, she was an Obama speech writer and she said, “Back in the good old days when Obama was president, you had to go to a lefty bookstore to hear anything other than the drivel that I force-fed you.”

Um, and the fact that the global media is the enemy here because, god forbid, people in the US have found out about perspectives from other parts of the world—and this is so threatening to Zionism and the US imperial project. It’s just to me that’s almost the wildest part of what she said out loud and it’s so insulting. How can you not as a US citizen be so insulted by that?

Unfortunately for that Zionist who was Obama’s speechwriter, I knew English and was watching Al Jazeera back when it was a source of real news — back when the U.S. military was bombing its headquarters. That was when I discovered all the leftist thinkers they didn’t want us to know about. Sim Kern essentially summarizes it best: ” it used to be that you f**king idiots only listen to the propaganda that we fed you, right?”

But since people have stopped listening to the propaganda fed by so-called “respectable” mainstream media and have started listening to people like me — or what they label as “Russian propaganda,” “right-wing conspiracists,” so sources like The Duran — hey feel they need to stop it. That is why this forum is banned in Poland, and why it will soon be banned elsewhere. Programs like The Duran are exactly what these people believe must be stopped.

Their grip on the narrative and this “fake reality of the naive” is slowly fading. They couldn’t even firmly maintain the Ukraine narrative; that’s why they didn’t even bother trying to create a proper narrative for Iran — they knew it would fail. They will never again have the same grip on the public that they had during the second Iraq War, a time John Pilger’s documentaries and Col. Larry Wilkerson talks about.

Because they couldn’t hold the narrative on Ukraine, we now see all this talk about “fighting misinformation” and silencing people. The first to be targeted will be the sources I use in my posts, followed by me, and eventually The Duran itself. Even if The Duran doesn’t go as far as I do, they still refuse to swallow the propaganda they are fed.

If you wonder why there was no long-winded, manufactured narrative about Iran like the “WMDs” in Iraq, it’s simply because they can’t pull that off anymore — at least, not as long as they are unable to fully suppress “misinformation,” which is just another word for the truth.

Let me cite Michael Parenti’s brilliant lecture on Yugoslavia here to prove the point.

40:19

Do you really trust U.S. leaders and the corporate-owned U.S. news media?

I said to a friend of mine that a Serbian news source on the internet reported that cluster bombs were being used. He asked, “Oh, you’re trusting Serbian sources?” I replied, “Well, which sources are you trusting? Are you trusting Bill Clinton’s sources? Bill Clinton wouldn’t lie to us, would he?” As it turns out, they were using cluster bombs. It turns out they are using depleted uranium; our own government admits it now.

Do you remember the story about the 500 premature babies that the Iraqis supposedly ripped from incubators in Kuwait, laughingly throwing them onto the hospital floors? There were vivid, detailed descriptions — even the names of some of the poor victims. It turned out the story was a total fabrication. In all of Los Angeles County, there are no more than 50 incubators, and half of them aren’t even being used at any given time. Did Kuwait somehow specialize in premature births? Instead of just accepting it, we should have been saying, “Wait a minute, what is this story about? What is going on here?” Yet, it was repeated again and again.

I don’t know of any war where rapes are not committed — which is not to dismiss such awful things. Two rapes are two rapes too many. However, the San Francisco Chronicle had a headline just two weeks ago stating: “Rape is an official Serb policy, Kosovo refugees say.” Oh, they know all about “official policy.” But when you read two columns down, you finally see an OSCE official stating that the rapes have only numbered in the dozens—very few dozens, as a matter of fact. That is not an “official policy.”

If Bill Clinton is looking to stop a few dozen rapes, well, that’s just a slow two months in Washington, D.C. He could start much closer to home; he could concentrate on Capitol Hill, as a matter of fact, or even closer. It is so touching to see our leaders finally concerned about rape, but it’s so odd that they have to look so far away to fight this crime.

A Bosnian Serb commander was quoted throughout our media as declaring an official policy of rape. The Bosnian Serb Army, which numbered only about 30,000 men at the time, was accused of raping between 25,000 and 100,000 Muslim women while involved in bitter, desperate military combat. Again, we should have asked, “Wait a minute, what’s going on here?”

The name of that “Serb commander” was never found. They never produced him; they were never able to trace the quote back to anyone—except to Ruder Finn. That is the special PR group that boasts about how it convinced much of the progressive community in America that genocide, ethnic cleansing, and mass rape were occurring. When questioned about the unverifiable, unconfirmed nature of those reports, they said, “Our goal is public relations; we’re not here to get confirmation. And we achieved our goal.”

Remember the “babies in incubators” in Kuwait? Remember the “Serbian mass rapes”? Remember the stories about Gaddafi handing out Viagra to his soldiers to facilitate rape?

Or perhaps you remember more recent claims, like those regarding Russian mass rapes and the distribution of Viagra?

Russia using rape as ‘military strategy’ in Ukraine: UN envoy | CNN

Russia is using rape and sexual violence as part of its “military strategy” in Ukraine, a UN envoy said this week.

“When you hear women testify about Russian soldiers equipped with Viagra, it’s clearly a military strategy,”

Now, think about all those Iranian protesters who were supposedly killed.

Iran Protest Death Toll Could Top 30,000: Local Officials

As many as 30,000 people could have been killed in the streets of Iran, two senior officials of the country’s Ministry of Health told TIME.

Disappeared bodies, mass burials and ‘30,000 dead’: what is the truth of Iran’s death toll?

Testimony from medics, morgue and graveyard staff reveals huge state effort to conceal systematic killing of protesters

Thirty thousand people killed, right? Just like the “100,000 Muslim women raped” in Yugoslavia, the “500 babies in incubators” in Kuwait, the Viagra given to Gaddafi’s soldiers, or the Russian army handing out Viagra today. All of this must be true, right? After all, our Western media said so, and they would never push propaganda or lies to create a fake reality for the naive. It’s all true, right?

I will end this with a short video of Michael Parenti.

6:17

We saw Hillary Clinton stand before a congressional committee and say, “The U.S. is losing the information war.”

I didn’t know it was a war. I thought information was meant to enlighten people, not to capture, envelop, or indoctrinate them. She began talking about Russia Today, France 24, and Al Jazeera. Then, almost shrilly, she said, “And China is building a global news network in English!”

I thought to myself: That will be interesting. We will get another perspective; we will get coverage of all sorts of stories that weren’t covered before. We will have another viewpoint to play against the ones we’ve been fed since the beginning.

But she sees it as a threat. That is what the Empire is about: it’s about controlling people everywhere in the world, both at home and abroad, and giving them as little as possible so that the few at the top can get as rich as possible. The hungrier you are and the poorer you are, the harder you will work for less and less.

Unfortunately, that is what the world is all about. For you to think that our leaders are stupid — for you to think that the people who own this world, who have built hundreds of military bases and are controlling people and getting them to kill others to advance and protect the interests of the top elite — if you think these people are stupid, you’re being a bit stupid yourself

 

I will end it here, thanks to everyone who stuck with me until the end. And, as always…

 

“Knowledge will make you be free.”

― Socrates

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“Knowledge isn’t free. You have to pay attention.”

― Richard P. Feynman

=

“Freedom is not free, you need to pay attention.”

― Grzegorz Ochman

 

“The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country. We are governed, our minds are molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of…in almost every act of our daily lives, whether in the sphere of politics or business, in our social conduct or our ethical thinking, we are dominated by the relatively small number of persons…who understand the mental processes and social patterns of the masses. It is they who pull the wires which control the public mind, who harness old social forces and contrive new ways to bind and guide the world.” 

― Edward Bernays

 

Behavioral science is clearly moving forward; the increasing power for control which it gives will be held by some one or some group; such an individual or group will surely choose the purposes or goals to be achieved; and most of us will then be increasingly controlled by means so subtle we will not even be aware of them as controls. Thus whether a council of wise psychologists (if this is not a contradiction in terms) or a Stalin or a Big Brother has the power, and whether the goal is happiness, or productivity, or resolution of the Oedipus complex, or submission, or love of Big Brother, we will inevitably find ourselves moving toward the chosen goal, and probably thinking that we ourselves desire it. Thus if this line of reasoning is correct, it appears that some form of completely controlled society—a Walden Two or a 1984—is coming. The fact that it would surely arrive piecemeal rather than all at once, does not greatly change the fundamental issues. Man and his behavior would become a planned product of a scientific society.

― Carl Rogers

 

“A great point is sometimes made of the fact that modern man no longer sees above his head a revolving dome with fixed stars…True enough, but he sees something similar when he looks at his daily newspaper…The newspaper is a man-made cosmos of the world of events around us at the time. For the average reader it is a construct with a set of significances which he no more thinks of examining than did his pious forebear of the thirteenth century…think of questioning the cosmology.”

― Richard Weaver

 

“In 1931, when Brave New World was being written, I was convinced that there was still plenty of time. The completely organized society, the scientific caste system, the abolition of free will by methodical conditioning, the servitude made acceptable by regular doses of chemically induced happiness, the orthodoxies drummed in by nightly courses of sleep-teaching — these things were coming all right, but not in my time, not even in the time of my grandchildren…Twenty-seven years later, in this third quarter of the twentieth century A.D., and long before the end of the first century A.F., I feel a good deal less optimistic than I did when I was writing Brave New World. The prophecies made in 1931 are coming true much sooner than I thought they would… The nightmare of total organization…has emerged from the safe, remote future and is now awaiting us, just around the next corner.”

―Aldous Huxley