Our last post on the psychological warfare aspects of the coronacircus received a lot of positive feedback, so we were encouraged to expand on it. In that article, we showed how the ongoing manufactured crisis is principally meant to subvert, foment distrust, and cause revolt; have the people destroy their own institutions, so the parasitic barbarians can swoop in and impose new ones.
Today, we will be covering congruent ideas. First, because the reverse psychology and persuasion techniques deserve more explanation. Second, because the offensive is actually multi-layered: there exist different demographics, each one being targeted differently.
Our goal will be to explain how to actually obtain a revolution. We will show that causing a feeling of revolt is not nearly sufficient. We first need to introduce a concept that game theorists call common knowledge.
Thought Experiment
To really grasp the importance of this, please consider the following puzzle:
On an island where everyone knows each other, there are 100 people who have blue eyes, and the rest have green eyes. Since the beginning of times on that island, no one has ever known their own eye color, as there is no mirror (and no one ever talks about eye color, it’s very taboo). By law, if a person on the island ever discovers he has blue eyes, he must leave the island at dawn on the day of the discovery.
At some point, a well-spoken outsider comes to the island, calls all the people together, climbs on a podium, and makes the following announcement in a loudspeaker: “At least one of you has blue eyes”.
The puzzle: assuming everyone on the island is completely logical and lawful, what is the eventual outcome of that public intervention?
Before reading further, please give it some thought. Remember the outsider hasn’t said anything that the islanders didn’t already know. Indeed everyone can see that there are people with blue eyes among them (even if they don’t ever speak about it, and don’t know their own eye color). The outsider has not taught anyone anything. Still, his intervention will have a profound impact on the island. What might that impact be?
Again, this is a thought experiment; it is not realistic. We are assuming an ideal scenario where everyone is logical. Still, it is useful to illustrate what we mean. Come back to this post after thinking about it for a while.
The Answer
Here is what happens. On the 100th day following the announcement, at dawn, all the blue-eyed people leave the island at once. This works with any other positive number of blue-eyed people (that is, if there are k blue-eyed islanders, they all leave on the kth day).
Here is how it works.
Imagine there’s only 1 blue-eyed islander. When the outsider speaks, that islander understands he must have blue eyes, since he doesn’t see (and has never seen) anyone else with blue eyes. So if there’s at least 1, there can only be 1, and it must be him. He therefore logically leaves at dawn.
If there are exactly two blue-eye islanders: when nobody leaves at dawn on the day of the announcement, they understand they must themselves be blue-eyed. Indeed: they only know of one other blue-eyed islander. Therefore, per the previous paragraph, he should have left on that first dawn. Because he didn’t means he, too, sees another blue-eyed islander. But they must be that other islander with blue eyes, as they can only see one. They both leave on the second dawn.
If there are 3 blue-eyed islanders, they each expect the other 2 to leave on the second day as per above; because they don’t, they each know they must have blue eyes, and all 3 leave together at dawn on the 3rd day.
This inductive argument holds for k > 0, where k is the quantity of islanders with blue eyes. When k > 1, no islander learns anything new from the announcement; the upheaval happens solely based on common knowledge.
Common Knowledge
This thought experiment, however unrealistic because it assumes everyone acts perfectly logically, is still a popular one in game theory to illustrate that in some situations, it is not what people know that is important, but what people know that other people know. Or more precisely, what everyone knows that everyone knows.
What counts is not the fact the islanders heard the outsider say what he said, it’s the fact they all saw all the other islanders listening to him say it. The individual’s perception of the crowd.
This concept is at the heart of the precepts of propaganda, and embodies the role of the mainstream media (and fake polls). Not to convince us of anything, but to convince us that others are convinced of something. The MSM is the metaphorical loudspeaker; if it’s been on CNN, everyone knows that everyone knows. That’s what we intuitively mean when we say “it’s official”. It’s a terribly potent weapon; you don’t need to believe what CNN says, you merely need to believe that other people believe what CNN says.
Think about this: does Apple try to sell us an iPhone by convincing us it’s cool, or by convincing us everyone else thinks it’s cool? Do people buy Nike sneakers because they’re good shoes, or because they think others think they’re good shoes? Answering that question is unnecessary, as we know brands use celebrities to promote their products.
One doesn’t need to believe Beyonce is convinced the product she’s promoting is cool – just that others think she thinks it’s cool. That’s why people will buy a product promoted by Beyonce, although everyone knows she’s paid to do it and doesn’t really “like it”; they know others have seen the ad, and believe they’re the only ones knowing the truth.
Do you see how effective this can be?
Again: to achieve their goals, and to guide action, the propagandists don’t need to convince us that anything is real, apart from the fact that other people think it is.
Propaganda
The barbaric propagandists understand their enemy (the people) can have two very different types of intelligence:
- Dependent Intelligence: this manifests as a fact-based erudition, knowing lots of stuff about many things. This intelligence doesn’t depend upon one’s own mind or one’s own senses; these can be delegated to the collective, the identity group. Its level is measured at the linguistic proficiency at repeating and summarizing, in a more or less elaborate or subtle way, what everyone agrees other intelligent people think. People educated beyond their intelligence usually fall into this category.
- Independent Intelligence: all those who rely on their own eyes and mind to interpret the world. No need to spell it out, as if you’ve made it this far on this website, you’re probably part of that group.
Of course the distinction is a bit coarse; nobody, including of course this author, is ever perfectly free-minded. We can all suffer from conformism and identity biases; as long as we realize it’s the case, it’s OK. Similarly no human is an actual non-playable character; even literal sheep have personality, and a conscience. Still the archetypes are useful.
For the first category, the propaganda is straightforward. From a position of authority, and with nicer words than these, scream in a loudspeaker: Everyone who thinks bearded acrobatic pilots didn’t transubstantiate 3 steel skyscrapers with 2 aluminum airplanes in New York on 9/11 is an utter dumb fuck and here is what he looks like. The loudspeaker is the mainstream media. The screaming is daily. The picture shown is that of a lunatic. The dependent thinkers are thus immediately taken care of, as they rely on other people’s minds, and such other minds have spoken. Whether they have private opinions when they’re alone on the toilet nobody knows, and it doesn’t matter.
For the independent thinkers, the goal is otherwise: first, they need to convince us other people are sheep. That’s why they multiply the labels and the categories, and then caricature every label for every other one. That’s also why the caricatures are so preposterous: the goal isn’t to convince us we’re wrong, but rather that most others are wrong and idiotic.
That, by the way, happens to be false. Yet, that’s what many still believe. In the Solomon Asch conformity experiments, only one third conformed when confronted with peer pressure about obvious geometrical questions.
Back To The Coronacircus
With all of that in mind, we can now explain the multi-layered nature of the coronacircus psyop.
First, the propagandists need to reduce the amount of independent thinkers, and turn them dependent; they might otherwise figure things out, and reject the dialectic altogether. That is done by bombarding us with contradictory information. Misdirection and confusion are the rules of that game. See this excellent short clip from a 2014 Adam Curtis documentary for a primer on what this means (please ignore the idea this was invented in modern Russia, the tactic is actually much older than that).
They want us not knowing what to believe anymore; giving up on relying on our own mind.
That’s another reason why they multiply the preposterous, absurd claims: to cite just a few examples, the coronavirus can spread through farts, people may turn black, estrogen and sex hormones can protect men, uncontacted tribes Indians are contracting the virus, etc.
But we are also being bombarded with outright contradictions:
- There’s no treatment, oh but there is, no wait there isn’t.
- The virus doesn’t affect children, except those it affects, even when they’re unaffected.
- Pets can get the virus, no they can’t, unless they can.
- Masks are useless, unless they are, except when they aren’t.
- The virus is deadly, no it isn’t, except when it is.
- Gloves don’t help, except when they help, with the exception of when they don’t.
- A vaccine won’t be useful, unless it is, still you’ll have to take it, but it won’t protect you.
- You may have symptoms and not be sick, or be sick and have no symptoms, everything can be true, except when it isn’t.
- Etc. (You get the picture)
The confusion and cognitive dissonance this type of propaganda causes results in an entrenchment into identity groups: “I don’t know what to think anymore, so I’ll delegate my mind to [insert the name of an identity anchor]”.
Propagandists are sabotaging our ability to use our minds, in order to make us delegate it to a third-party. That’s how you reduce the quantity of independent thinkers. That’s how people of opposing identity groups can interpret the same piece of news in so vastly different ways; how they seem to be living in completely different realities.
This mechanism of identity anchoring can be seen every time a new US president comes into power. Michael Moore was to Obama as Alex Jones is to Trump; both are playing the exact same role, on opposite sides of the same fake dialectic. That’s how anti-war activists get to love a warmonger, or how evangelical Christians get to admire a New York socialite, beauty pageant organizer and casino owner. Social identity theory catalyzed by confusion and cognitive dissonance.
Second, propagandists understand what Blaise Pascal meant when he said:
People are generally better persuaded by the reasons which they have themselves discovered than by those which have come into the mind of others.
In other words: in order to be truly persuaded, we need to believe we’ve figured it out by ourselves. This seems contradictory with what we wrote above about identity biases, but it actually isn’t at all: identity biases, to qualify, are unconscious. Reverse psychology is much more effective than direct, overt persuasion.
In other words, we elect an identity anchor not because we realize we identify with them, but because we believe we have made a rational choice, and that rational choice is “contrarian”. By listening to him, we aren’t behaving like the other sheep. We think we realize what “they” want us to believe, and we choose to believe the opposite, just like this guy.
Again, we can illustrate this in the US, as that’s where those concepts are the best developed: those who “strongly identify on the left” see “right-wingers” as Bible-thumping, AR-15 waving, barbecue loving inbred racists. Those who “strongly identify on the right” see “left-wingers” as bumbling pink-haired quadrisexual bathroom militant social justice warriors.
All those caricatures are manufactured. None of those archetypes exist in real life in any significant proportion.
So in the coronacircus situation we have on one side the lockdown apologists who are glued to the telescreen, swallow every piece of nonsense fed to them, and snitch on neighbors for walking their dog. On the other side we have the covidiots who hoard toilet paper, participate in armed protest against the lockdown, and don’t care if millions of people die.
Again, these caricatures are not real. They are meant to divide, demoralize and conquer. And ultimately, they are indispensable in the plan to foment revolt.
Tying Everything Together
Manufactured revolutions, as most political change in modern times, are produced using a tried and tested dialectic. Thesis, anti-thesis, synthesis; problem, reaction, solution.
In other words, two seemingly opposing sides need to be confronted, in order to impose a preordained consensus. That fake dichotomy will, this time, most likely revolve around China and the “Chinese model”. Indeed we have observed it being put in place for a while already.
Thesis: China managed the crisis perfectly; its Orwellian model of population control, social credit scores, mass inoculations, ubiquitous surveillance and debilitating censorship is just what we need. The Chinese have shown a totally planned society, and a totalitarian form of government, can succeed; the Chinese are prosperous and happy; we need to be just like them.
Anti-thesis: China created the virus, China actually suffered millions of deaths but are covering them up, the WHO, the media, corporations, Hollywood and every other institution are beholden to China, yellow people represent an existential peril, China is our enemy, we need to totally boycott the Chinese, and why not wage war (economic or otherwise) against them.
In the USA, the proponents of the thesis will be the “deep State”, and all its caricatural, placeholder villains: Bill Gates, Nancy Pelosi, George Soros, CNN, the UN, etc. The proponents of the anti-thesis will be the “resistance” and its various heroes: Donald Trump, Alex Jones, Steve Bannon, Fox News, the Heritage foundation, etc. This dialectic has been long in the making; it does not start with the coronacircus.
In order to correctly herd people in their respective camps, the principles of common knowledge and identity groups we have introduced are the key.
I know that other intelligent people know China created the virus. It was on Fox News. A government report says it’s true. I therefore can safely think it’s true. I am validating my identity by thinking it’s true. The deep State doesn’t want me to know it, but I know it because I’m a free-thinker and immune to propaganda.
I know that other intelligent people know China is the enemy. They want to take over the world, but the dumb sheep don’t realize that. The deep State doesn’t want me to realize that. I am a free-thinker by thinking I don’t want a society built according to the Chinese model.
People who identify with the anti-thesis need to be validated and emboldened; people who identify with the thesis need to be disheartened and discouraged. That is exactly what we have been seeing, and we will continue to see.
Just to be clear: it is obviously true the “Chinese model” is not one to envy. The Chinese have only ever had one form of political ideology: collectivism. The notion that individuals are sacred, that they are born with a right to life and liberty, that they must never be sacrificed for the sake of the herd, is completely foreign to them. What we are saying however is that China is currently part of the same control grid; Mao was a Yale man. The East vs West strategy of tension is fake and scripted; it’s a “we’ve always been at war with Eastasia” type situation.
But that collectivism is the key. As we explained in our previous post, that constitutes the essence of the manufactured synthesis that will arise from this fake confrontation.
Synthesis: China is not the definitive model, but we still have something to learn from it. Look at how they avoided the worst of the financial and economic meltdown; look at how their people banded together, how they were able to put differences aside and maintain order. Look at how its people were able to make important sacrifices. We can all agree our archaic principles of individual liberty are not suited to the modern world.
Conclusion
We have shown how the planned upheaval must take the form of a three-fold dialectic, itself relying on identity groups and reverse psychology, itself relying on what game theorists call common knowledge.
We have also admitted it is very difficult to become immune to such tactics. The propagandists, who are utter barbarians incapable of producing any splendor, who hide behind false paper wealth and whose only tool is language, use our virtue against us. They also loot a lot of resources to study behavioral psychology and turn that knowledge against us.
So how do we defend ourselves? One way is learning about the precepts of propaganda. Gustave Le Bon’s seminal book The Crowd, and Edward Bernays’ Crystallizing Public Opinion and Propaganda are an excellent place to start. These links are to the full book copies (PDF); they are made available for evaluation purposes only.
The best recommendation we can make, however, is this one: trust yourself, your intuition, and your own discernment. If it doesn’t sound right, it isn’t, however many people disagree. It is fine not to have figured everything out yet; this author certainly hasn’t. As long as we trust our inner voice, as long as we don’t delegate our conscience, we will always be able to tell right from wrong.
And finally, please remember the barbarians will fail. Theirs is an exercise in diminishing returns; every lie must be sold in a box of truth. Eventually, enough truths will have been told. They believe in central planning, which Nature abhors; their plan will backfire, as even the faintest speck of light is able to illuminate their whole world of darkness.