It’s Worth It
By Andy Valencia
What would you guess your political view is worth? What would it cost to change it? The 2020 election could have gone differently if just the right 100,000 voters had voted differently. Given that our federal government prints $1 trillion dollars every three months or so, you could easily justify spending $10 million dollars for each of those voters.
And yet, it isn’t really about money. It’s about manipulating minds. We choose stuff to buy: which soap, phone, car, or house. And there are all those advertisers, always chasing us. They want a say in how we choose these products.
The massive size of our federal government makes the political view we hold of the world more valuable than all those other purchasing decisions added together. When they’re trying to convince you about a car, you can usually point at the screen and say “car ad.” When they’re working on how you view the world politically, you should be able to point at the screen and say “psyop.”
A “psyop” is the shorthand term for a psychological operation. It is a large family of techniques that exist to manipulate you without your being aware of the manipulation. If Candidate X is on your screen saying that they’re great, but Candidate Y is horrible – that is not a psyop. It also doesn’t work very well. However, there are many techniques that work very well indeed.
A classic psyop is “gaslighting,” the art of making someone doubt the evidence of their own personal experience. The term comes from a 1938 play where a gas-fueled light is made to dim and brighten, and the husband then pretends that his wife is imagining it. This causes the wife to doubt her own senses. When you read about our great Jobs-Jobs-Jobs! economy during your third dreary month of job-hunting? Gaslighting.
Once the evidence for the problem becomes overwhelming, a common technique that typically follows gaslighting is the limited hangout. With this, you acknowledge a limited part of the problem as if you were addressing all of it.
Applied to inflation, a limited hangout might be played like, “Sure eggs are a little expensive, but did you know core inflation is well below 2%?” The trick is to define “core inflation” to exclude food, gas, heating and electricity, housing, transportation, and healthcare. This limited hangout tries to make you feel that you’re being petty in worrying about a minor point, when the big picture is wonderful.
It’s on you to remember that food, gas and all the rest are necessary to evaluate inflation; it’s an abusive word game to try and make you forget things which are, in fact, very important.
Gaslighting leads to limited hangouts. A typical third stop in the psyop game is called upon when you’ve stopped doubting your senses and insist on looking at the big picture. Enter the “dangle.”
A dangle can be almost anything; its point is to grab your attention. A violent crime covered in lurid detail will do the job. A war will also suffice, as would a horrific accident. In last month’s “Hypernovelty” article, I mentioned the need for a certain coldness of mind, and dangles require that. When the media delivers a wall of sound and fury concerning some new disaster or outrage, early on you need to turn off the media and ask yourself: “What have I just forgotten?”
Your mental equilibrium is one of your most important assets. If you maintain it, you can still care about world events, while also remembering to protect you and your family’s interests: things like privacy, dignity, savings, and even health. Your mind can only hold so many “current events” at once; don’t let the media fill it with with fear, anger, and dismay.
You owe them nothing. Certainly not control of what you think, believe, remember, and decide. The more you learn the techniques of psyops, the less they can be used against you. Think of psyops as carefully designed distractions; as you deflect them, you leave your mind free to find new ideas and possibilities.
