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Social Engineering at Its Worst
30/6/2020
One of the first experiences I encountered when returning to ‘work’ in the 3D/4D was the highly emotionally charged, exceedingly divisive culture within current social media. In my area, I’m finding that people are generally losing all sense of rationality, humaneness, and becoming primal in their rage.
Division and disagreement over various issues have never been so vehement. Particularly disconcerting is the divide over the issue of wearing face masks as recommended by many governments, and aggressively propagandised by both mainstream and social media. This propaganda is the basis of social engineering at its worst and helps to fuel the fires of hatred and divisiveness. Please allow me explain.
What is Social Engineering?
Societal culture is sum total of all of its practices, codes and ethics. This includes those that are written such as laws and regulations, as well as those that are not- social etiquette, or appropriate body language, for example.
Societal culture is formed by common consensus. When a large majority of people decide that something is acceptable then that becomes integrated into society and becomes part of its culture. That is to say, it becomes normal.
Various societies and its respective cultures naturally evolve over time as a response to evolving situations. These situations may be organic such as technological advances, climate change, and famine. They may also be inorganic such changes caused by wars and other political and/or religious directives.
Social evolution is necessary for its growth and survival. History has recorded the fate of stagnant societies that failed to appropriately evolve. Take ancient Egypt for example. This once great society imploded on itself through its failure to evolve past its socio-religious leaders and their increasingly irrelevant doctrines.
Are we being emotionally manipulated?
We are at a time where we are witnessing a forced, inorganic societal culture change brought about by the COVID-19 pandemic. This culture change is being aggressively propagandised by the media in an attempt to bring it to fruition. The culture change that I am speaking about is in reference to wearing face masks.
There will be hardly anyone who has not come across the words, ‘the new normal’ repeated ad nauseam in reference to wearing face masks. Mainstream and social media is trying its best to create a new ‘normal’ way of living where wearing face masks becomes a cultural imperative.
Far beyond simply suggesting that wearing face masks is ‘the new normal’ and thus socially acceptable, they are demanding compliance by encouraging unfounded fear, hatred and even violence on people who do not wish to wear face masks. They do this by playing on humans’ primal instincts.
The first base emotion that is manipulated is fear. Popular media are pushing a constant stream of the same rhetoric – by not wearing masks you are putting yourself and everyone else at risk. This is a statement that is only partially true in certain instances, yet the caveats to this statement are conveniently omitted. Statements such as these can often provoke an irrational fear into the minds of most people who take the information presented as absolute truth. The result is that panicked people are likely to lash out.
The other primal emotion that is being played to is that of belonging. Anthropologists have long found that mankind is naturally gregarious. Scientist-philosopher Ervin Laszlo has even attributed this instinctual nature to a quantum/spiritual holotropic attractor that sees organisms organise into complex, coherent wholes, far removed from what might be expected from the laws of entropy. (1)
In these communities, outsiders to the norm are often treated with fear, scorn and violence. Such was the case in many primitive tribes, and it is apparent that social and mainstream media are pushing a devolution in modern societal culture to such primitive extremes.
Take as just one of many examples, this article by Forbes, a mainstream publication, entitled, ‘Wearing a Mask is a Sign of Mutual Respect During the Coronavirus Pandemic’. Without reading the article, the headline itself is enough to send a powerful message to those who who advocate wearing masks. The message is one that plays on yet another emotional need of individuals, that of respect, and convinces mask-wearers that they are being disrespected by innocent people who chose to not wear masks.
Now, what is the usual automatic response to being disrespected? In most cases it is to respond in kind. So the very presence of a non-mask wearer is enough for a mask wearer to be provoked into a disrespectful, and sometimes even hateful and violent reaction. Particularly so when they have already been manipulated into a panicked and irrational fear.
In the vast majority of cases, people who chose to not wear masks do so not because they truly wish to put themselves, loved ones, or other people at risk, but because they are aware of both the potential harms and benefits that masks provide and choose to exercise their lawful right to not potentially harm themselves by wearing masks.
Despite all the media hype, the World Health Organisation (WHO) is ambiguous in its position on the wearing of face masks. In some places the WHO advocates the wearing of masks, while in other places it acknowledges its limitations. See for example this statement,
“At the present time, the widespread use of masks by healthy people in the community setting is not yet supported by high quality or direct scientific evidence and there are potential benefits and harms to consider…”
Now why haven’t you seen this statement by the WHO anywhere before? None of the mainstream media houses will carry content that is antithetical to the mask-wearying advocacy, and social media has been quite blatant in censoring content that runs counter to the mask-wearing propaganda- despite the legitimacy of the sources.
Rather than being unbiased, popular media has been very selectively focused on a one-sided coverage to dangerous extremes. It is precisely this type of behaviour that was recognised and acted upon by the president of arguably the most powerful nation in the world, the United States of America.
In the preamble to his Executive Order on Preventing Online Censorship, US President Donald Trump writes,
“Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube wield immense, if not unprecedented, power to shape the interpretation of public events; to censor, delete, or disappear information; and to control what people see or do not see.”
In other words, these companies practice a type of social engineering. In this case, social engineering at its worst.
The question that may be asked now is, ‘Why is the popular media engaged in destructive social engineering?’ President Trump mentioned political bias in his executive order as being one of the reasons. This is certainly true, yet I suspect that there may be other reasons as well- but that is another matter entirely. Whatever the reason, there is no doubt that popular media is guilty of destructive social engineering.
Is there hope for society?
With this background, it is easy to see why there is so much fear and hatred being spewed online and offline. Many people are being mind-controlled without even realising it. This is true even of highly educated people.
It takes a high degree of emotional and intra-personal intelligence to become aware of one’s ‘trigger points’, and to be aware when one is ‘being played’. Unfortunately, as a former professional educator, I know for certain that the traditional education system is largely focused on the traditional domains of intelligence- mathematical and linguistic being paramount. There is yet very little focus on the other domains that make us, well, people.
So are we doomed as a society to regress into a primitive tribal state? No, there is hope. The very same quantum/spiritual holotropic attractor that Laszlo speaks of guarantees increasing levels of cooperation, cohesiveness and harmony at higher levels of being.
This is the same attractor that sees single-celled organisms organise into highly complex multi-cellular organisms, such as humans and animals, with extremely high degrees of cohesion amongst its individual parts. It is this same attractor that sees primitive tribal groups work in harmony, forming ever more inclusive societies working for the greater good.
This current state of fear, hatred and divisiveness is only temporary. These attempts at destructive social engineering are doomed to fail.
Social and spiritual evolutionary imperatives demand that there be ever greater love, peace, trust, harmony, and cooperation among all members of the whole. This entire social debacle is a necessary part of the birthing process as we evolve as a society into a more cohesive, and inclusive, whole.
References
Laszlo, E. (2020). Reconnecting to the Source: The New Science of Spiritual Experience, How It Can Change You, and How It Can Transform the World. St. Martin’s Publishing Group, New York.