Thank you for this, Glenn English! WOW! Absolutely excellent! This is so incredibly spot on and, yes!, indispensable reading, contemplating, absorbing, and potentially transformative in an ongoing way for us all.
Noam Chomsky has said that Americans are “a profoundly propagandized people.” It takes courage and support, intention and perseverance, humility and a relentless quest for truth to lift the veils, one by one by one, of how duped we’ve been. And committing ourselves to the pursuit of truth again and again and again. At least this has certainly been my experience.
I had unearthed the deeper truths about the Clintons some time back and was well aware of HRC's history. But I was completely misled and caught off guard by Obama. That was such a hard one for me to truly look at, understand and accept, and come to terms with. I wanted to believe that one political party was Good and the other Bad. Black/white, us versus the Other. Period. It is hard to give up what we have believed to be true which brought us comfort and hope. There are also countless other experiences that have humbled, chilled, scared, grieved, and ultimately changed me over and over again.
Because we do not live in a healthy, loving culture and world, it is my belief that there are ever present opportunities to do the hard work of clearing away the fog of illusions and separation that most of us have unknowingly absorbed.
We just have to want to know what we do not know. We have to want in our deepest being to pursue the threads of truth wherever they may lead ― and even if that means that the world as we've understood it collapses out from under us. Again and again. Which has happened to me more times than I can count. Thank God/Goddess/Creator!
May this be our lifetime’s practice ― seeking to know what we do not know. And may we help and support and comfort each other along the way. Embodying this deep ongoing quest for truth is not an easy path to root into. It certainly hasn't been easy for me. We all need each other. And we're all in this together. 🙏 Molly
By Glenn English
In light of the dizzying hypocrisy of the current crisis, I feel compelled to point this out… Self-righteous indignation is a profoundly and dangerously powerful drug. Every bit a much so as cocaine, meth, and opioids. That’s not hyperbole.
About a decade ago, dopamine researchers, studying gambling addiction, found that the dopamine hit from intermittent reward systems was as addictive, if not more so, than those drugs. In fact, they found that the dopamine rush from several different triggers is so powerful that it can literally override direct sensory input. In other words, people are known to embrace the information that triggered a dopamine hit, even if it contradicts what they see right in front of them.
Out of that that research, the psychometrics industry was born, and the world will never be the same. It was the Rosetta Stone of propaganda. Out of curiosity, those researchers started to look at what other states might trigger a powerful dopamine response, besides intermittent reward systems, and they found several, including sanctimonious indignation.
The research eventually found that one particular trigger, identity, was powerful enough to trump them all. Powerful enough to trump direct sensory input, including sight. At first, those findings were very controversial. There were evolutionary biologists who argued that it was in direct conflict with evolutionary theory, because the mouse who doesn’t believe that a cat is standing in front of him doesn’t last long enough to reproduce.
As the evidence became increasingly more irrefutable, a new theory developed, holding that with humans, social bonds are so deeply integral, that there are times when there is actually a survival advantage to ignoring the truth by adopting a shared belief, even when in direct contradiction with sensory input.
The result was a tool so powerful that in the right hands, even core beliefs can be flipped. Psychometrics algorithms put a whole new spin on the old question, “Who are you gonna believe, me or your lying eyes?”
Spent your whole life obsessively bashing Russia as the source of all evil, but now the political leaders that you identify with need you to cheer them on to support their financial interests? No problem! In no time flat they’ll have you cheering Vladimir Putin like he scored the winning home run at your kid’s baseball game.
Spent your whole life wringing your hands at the visceral idiocy of the right wing knuckle-draggers who think that human rights are a communist conspiracy? No problem! In the time it takes to order a half-caff almond milk vanilla latte, targeted psychometric algorithms will have you sabering-rattling like the second coming of Joe McCarthy.
This isn’t about y’all being good or bad people. It’s about all of us, myself included, being manipulated on a daily basis. It’s about the illusion of choice, and the manufacturing of consent.
I’m as vulnerable as the next person, but as someone who used to regularly consult with neuroscientists, think tanks, and human-computer interface researchers on the ways that cognitive neuroscience is used to communicate and shape perception, what’s happening in the last few years is the realization of some of my worst fears.
A couple of decades ago I was on a radio program as the guest expert to talk about the ways in which new research in cognitive neuroscience was being used by corporate and government interests to shape reality. At the time I noted that I was actually surprised by how bad they were at it. Now I’m absolutely terrified by how astoundingly good they are at it, thanks to the psychometrics industry.
It can be extremely hard to fight because the genius of psychometrics is that by exploiting identity triggers with carefully designed algorithms, it makes you feel that manufactured opinions are your own. More than that even, they make you feel that those manufactured feelings and beliefs form the core of who you are as a person, creating identity feedback loops that snowball.
Because I’ve had a whole lot more time to prepare for what’s happening than most, over the years I’ve developed some tools to try to combat manufactured consent. They aren’t always perfect, but they help.
First off, and this is the hardest part for many folks, you have to let go of the notion of “trusting your gut.” Gut feelings are the easiest things for psychometrics algorithms to manufacture and exploit. Gut feelings are the industry’s bread and butter. The algorithms are designed to trigger your gut (literally) into releasing the dopamine it produces into your system, which then creates a neuro-associative feedback loop, connecting that reinforcing chemistry with the algorithmic trigger that instantiated it.
Unfortunately, the experience of gut feelings and conditioned prejudices are phenomenologically indistiguishable for the most part. That’s why you will often hear prejudiced people say, “I don’t know why I don’t trust that black/brown/Jewish/Latino guy, I just have a bad feeling about them.”
That doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t listen to your gut feelings, but it does mean that you shouldn’t put blind trust in them, as many newagers would have you do. Doubting your own gut can feel incredibly counterintuitive, but it’s profoundly necessary.
Another important tool, which is particularly hard for folks with a powerful addiction to the dopamine hits they receive from sanctimonious indignation, is to step back and ask yourself with as much honesty and humility as you can muster, how social media interactions, particularly those with a degree of finger-wagging, make you feel?
Ironically, if they make you feel good, that’s a big red flag. Talking about the ills of the world isn’t supposed to feel good. We all know folks, social justice warriors across the political spectrum, who are extremely addicted to the dopamine rush that they get from finger-wagging. Folks who are every bit as dependent on the rush of sanctimonious indignation as malignant narcissists are on narcissistic supply.
I’m well aware of the fact that many folks believe me to be one of those people, because I’m outspoken, but the truth is, the vast majority of the time, sociopolitical posts, including this one, make me sick to my stomach. In all honesty, I write such posts because I feel morally obliged to speak up. I take little pleasure in it.
One more exceptionally useful tool is take a third-person perspective on the issues that you feel passionate about, and look for inconsistencies in continuity of reason. For example, if you’ve been a peace activist all your life, and you find yourself allying with war mongers and their rationalizations for regime change and proxy wars, ask yourself why?
These last weeks, I’ve seen the same exact people who offered up endless apologia for “Hillary’s war,” (the regime change in Libya that reduced the country with the highest standard of living in the region to a post-apocalyptic wasteland) posting about how morally outraged they are about Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, which is truly jaw-dropping. They are absolutely right that the latter is a travesty, but psychological manipulation through psychometric algorithms targeting identity triggers has blinded them to the astounding hypocrisy, that blinded them to the horrors of the former.
HRC boasted about orchestrating every element of that genocide from start to finish. It’s why Libya is the human trafficking capitol of the world, and why dark-skinned women are now being sold on open-air auction blocks.
It put massive weapons caches into the hands of brutal terrorists. When HRC’s pleas to do the same thing in Syria were rejected on the basis that it would be genocidal and open the door to world war, she was infamously infuriated, and as Sec of State, led the CIA’s proxy war there, carried out by the terrorist mercenaries that we sent there, armed with the weapons confiscated from Qaddafi, in order to create a bloodbath in an effort to destabilize Assad.
Other horrifying, genocidal examples include Iraq, Yemen, Afghanistan, and Honduras. The glaring commonality there is those were wars on POC, as opposed to the White Europeans in Ukraine.
It’s more than two-dimensional racism; it’s the psychometric industry’s manipulation of identity triggers. It’s the same reason that people were so disproportionately more upset by the terrorist attack in France than they were the bombing of schools, hospitals, mosques, farms, food supply infrastructure, and humanitarian aid centers in Yemen.
Use third-person perspective to flush out such disproportionate responses, and consider that no matter how strongly you feel about it, you may be being manipulated, and your beliefs may be manufactured.
There is no stepping out of the Matrix, so to speak. It’s an imperfect and never-ending process and it requires great humility. It also requires allowing yourself to feel uncertain and insecure. Bewildered even.
The manipulation of identity triggers by the psychometrics industry relies on the security afforded to us by clinging to manufactured polemics. It’s comforting to know which side we are on, and bonding over our perceived moral superiority over the people on the “other side” is intensively addictive, which is why folks will ignore evidence, even overwhelming evidence, when it subverts those manufactured beliefs.
Unfortunately, willingly stepping into that uncomfortable space of bewilderment and philosophical agnosticism, is the only way to break through the shackles of the manufactured narratives used to construct our world view via corporate news and social media. To be clear, I recognize that there can be power in teaming up, but we have to learn to be more consciously aware of it, and we need to be diligently on the lookout for our identity bonds being exploited to manipulate us.
No matter how hard we try to do the right thing, we’re still going to fail much of the time, but please, don’t give up. I know you all have good in your hearts.
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