Protecting Your Head & Heart in the Fog of PSYCHOLOGICAL WARFARE
If the carnage isn't bad enough, pernicious forces are also being used to modulate our mental states!
For many of us, a terrible outcome seems inevitable. Whether we think it’s already escalated to that point, or we foresee the worst-case scenario, potential WW3 on the nuclear horizon, we sense it in our bones.
The most powerful feelings, however, are in our hearts and minds. And getting your heart and mind on the same page, it seems, may be one of those omnipresent struggles of living. Perhaps, the greatest struggle of all who have ever lived.
Regardless of your position on the current war(s) we all see plastered across our screens and echoed about our airwaves, one thing stands certain: there are two types of warfare happening now.
The Battlefield is Closer Than You Think…
One is the one we viscerally discern with our senses - or even, consciously avoid - and the other, the far less overt, is the war of psychology. The battle for beliefs, the drive to seize, change, and even monetize our thoughts and emotions.
Call it propaganda, call it psychological persuasion, call it subtle or blatant manipulation or coercion. One thing you can’t call it is ineffective because these time-tested, valid, and reliable methods have worked across societies, events, periods, and populations since time immemorial.
Hate it or love it, deny it or accept it, we are all somehow impacted by these influences at one time or another:
“Propaganda is a set of methods employed by an organized group that wants to bring about the active or passive participation in its actions of a mass of individuals, psychologically unified through psychological manipulations and incorporated in an organization.”
But what are the vehicles of this “set of methods” that can orchestrate our “active or passive participation”? The answer is as clear as day. Because it’s the very thing put right in front of us, sometimes so close to us that we look right through it without ever realizing it’s there…
How War-Torn Screens Target the Mind’s Eye
When it comes to war, we all know the typical imagery. Leveled city blocks, helpless refugees, black clouds of destruction and death contrasted with the sleek, sophisticated gleam of cutting-edge weaponry. Despotic leaders and white knights. Virile fighters, innocent women, distraught and disheveled children caught in the fray.
The power of the wartime visual cannot be overstated. Something like 94% of all information your brain receives is transmitted through a visual form.
Merely consider the way your brain and eyes interpret visual signals:
The Brain Can Register an Image in Just 13 Milliseconds
Eyes Can Register 36,000 Messages in One Hour
65% of People Learn Visually
In today’s increasingly digitized world, where the line between what is real and what is not is perpetually blurred, it’s easy to see why this can become problematic. You can be manipulated and hijacked, even without conscious awareness.
And even if you are consciously aware and want to forget or challenge something, sometimes it feels like it’s embedded in there. Just consider one study, in which students retained 80% of visual information three hours after a presentation, and still 65% three days after the presentation.
Meanwhile, students could only recall 25-72% of the written information after three hours, and in three days, that amount dropped precipitously to only 10-20%!
Clearly, the brain prioritizes visual information, and there’s good reason! Without it, we’d be largely screwed as a species. Evolutionarily, we have always required visual processing “for basic adaptive behaviors such as finding food, mates, and shelter; as well as more complex behaviors such as parental care and the formation of social hierarchies.”
The modern age only further intensifies this need for strong visual processing to adapt and succeed.
Unfortunately, that propensity for massive visual digestion is being weaponized against us every… single… day. Oftentimes, beneath our own fields of detection.
Are Subliminal Influences Subverting Your Conscious Mind?
Surf the web, scroll through Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram. Look around you, anywhere, at any time. What catches your eyes first and resonates the most? Words or images? How about when both are paired?
In one critical meta-analysis of 12 studies and nearly 2,500 participants, researchers found that adding photographs, positive images, and health-related images resulted in substantial increases in persuasive power.
This, of course, comes as no surprise. So-called infographics are considered by marketing departments to be significantly more useful and convincing than words or images alone. Some of the cleverest advertisers even fuse the two, creating visual imagery from or within the written text.
This dual nature is also why so-called memes, or text-image constructions, can spread like wildfire, even when the premise is false, or the facts/statistics are grossly inaccurate. As researchers have found, the presentation of political messaging in memes has a particular effect on viewers’ perceptions and behavioral intentions.
But all of this is merely the tip of the iceberg. What about the vast majority of impacts and potential influences that exist deep beneath the waters, in the subconscious? What about images and messages that nudge you toward a certain belief, stance, or thought process during - for example - a time of violent war?
Seeding The Subconscious for Death & Destruction
Generally speaking, subliminal messaging refers to any stimuli that are conveyed to your mind but escape your conscious register. While we often think of subliminal messaging as low-frequency commands and planted impulses of violence out of some strange, totalitarian movie or novel, the real ones are - at least at first - seemingly innocuous.
As seminal research indicates: “Exposure to simple drive- or affect-related subliminal stimuli can produce ecologically significant, temporally stable changes in attitudes and behavior, and therefore may have potential for use as propaganda tools.”
Consider, for instance, the role of subliminal messages and images in advertising. In one case, the mere inclusion of a subliminal smiling emoji significantly affected consumers’ rankings of hotels. All participants had to do was watch videos, and when the emoji appeared in videos of certain hotels, it subconsciously seeded feelings of warmth, positivity, and trust in the accommodation.
What does this have to do with wartime, you ask?
While you may be wondering what this has to do with anything war-related, just think of the neurochemical implications. In the study on hotel selections, participants showed a marked reduction in their beta brainwaves, with marked increases in their theta brainwaves, leading to lower levels of stress and anxiety, as well as greater feelings of acceptance and peace.
In fact, these two brain wave frequencies are known for being highly dissimilar:
Brain waves are like waves at the beach: they can be big or small, and fast or slow. The speed of the brain waves is called frequency, measured in a unit called hertz (Hz). Hertz tells us how many times the brain waves happen in 1 second. One of the slowest brainwaves is called theta and it occurs four to eight times per second (4–8 Hz). Theta happens while people are very relaxed or during sleep. A faster brainwave, called beta, occurs twelve to sixteen times per second (12–16 Hz). Beta is usually found when people are awake and conscious.
In other words, beta is associated with being active and doing work, while theta is associated with being at ease and resting. Beyond this, theta waves may be associated with docile, easygoing, compliant states, whereas beta waves may contribute to higher arousal, focus, and performance.
According to electroencephalographs (EEGs), the beta state is strongly associated with active, external attention and the thinking process that coincides with discerning that outside world. Theta, by contrast, is a state of deeply relaxed inward focus whereby you explore your emotions and intuitions in a free-flowing, “autopilot” manner.
If you’re an advertiser trying to market a product or service, which state do you want your consumers in?
If you’re a defense contractor trying to market a war, which state do you want people in?
Perhaps you want people to tacitly accept what is going on and not question it. Perhaps, you want people riled up and emotional, unable to think rationally. Perhaps you just want people thinking about their internal selves and immediate surroundings, while drifting through the world on autopilot.
All of these states can be manipulated. And if you think the effects of subliminal messaging are short-lived, momentary things, think again.
In one study, subliminal verbal and nonverbal item pairs affected participants’ deliberate decision-making roughly half an hour after the subliminal messages ended.
While half an hour may not be a long time, think about the ramifications. Studies have already indicated that if multiple subliminal messages are delivered in sustained, incremental doses, they may impact decision-making in the long term.
In another illuminating study, subliminal messages about age stereotypes actually increased elders’ physical functioning after four one-week periods. More impressively, the effects lasted for three weeks after the final intervention period.
But positive messaging is not the only potentially powerful modulator of your mind. Negative subliminal messaging may be even more powerful. As researchers found, participants were most accurate when responding to subliminal messaging with a negative connotation.
Study participants were shown a series of words on a computer screen. Each word appeared for only a fraction of a second, at a speed which was specifically designed to be too rapid for the participants to consciously read the word. Words were chosen by the researchers for their positive (e.g. cheerful, flower and peace), negative (e.g. agony, despair and murder) or neutral (e.g. box, ear or kettle) connotations. After each word, participants were asked to decide whether the word was neutral or 'emotional' (i.e. positive or negative), and how confident they were of their decision. The researchers found that the participants gave the most accurate answers when they responded to negative words.
The study indicated that responding to negative stimuli might be more adaptive. After all, in the past we had to understand what was posing a risk and what was not. It was an evolutionary imperative that we stay safe and ward off danger.
In times of war, manipulating this unconscious mechanism could be vital to skewing public perception.
Other research has provided a possible neurostructural basis for this, showing that a prime driver of learning and memory, the hippocampus, can unconsciously form and retrieve various types of knowledge and memory.
Are our brains being subconsciously hacked and re-hardwired?
When it comes to subliminal messaging or merely repetition of messaging for that matter, we need only think of the past few years. Consider how the “COVID Era” propaganda shaped and guided our behaviors.
What repetitive messages did we hear and see?
Who can forget the incessant COVID-19 case and death tickers across every major news station?
And what about the monolithic media’s mantras, such as “Flatten the Curve,” “All in This Together,” “Trust the Science,” “Trust the Experts,” and “Safe and Effective.” While these statements are not subconscious, they were surely repeated ad nauseam, burrowing into our minds and affecting our attitudes and behaviors.
Cognitive researchers call this the illusory truth effect, in which the more often people encounter a statement, the more truthful they perceive it to be.
In theory, you could have subliminal messages priming you to think or behave one way, while having supraliminal (or consciously registered) messages telling you to think the same way. This might lead to an extra powerful motivation to behave or think a certain way. Likewise, you might have messages discouraging you from doing certain things.
But what happens if the conscious and unconscious messages you receive are diametrically opposed? How would your mind handle that? Could it cause cognitive disarray?
Trigger schizotypal symptomatology?
But forget all that. Forget contradicting inputs or even voice-to-skull (V2K) patents which can use “pulse-modulated microwave radiation” to “transmit sound into the skull of persons or animals.”
And forget the countless stories of self-proclaimed ‘targeted’ individuals (TIs), who are otherwise everyday people reporting idiopathic messages, sensations, and psychosomatic phenomena believed to be caused by directed energy weapons and other intelligence agency technologies.
Let’s, for a moment, just focus on obvious examples of supraliminal messaging. Take, for example, background music in a store. Have you ever noticed what this background music is playing? If you’re in a jewelry store or large retail facility, what kind of music is on? Do you even pay attention to it?
What if it’s subtly impacting your consumer behavior or changing your brain wave state to make you more amenable to certain purchasing decisions?
Now think about when you’re at home. Maybe you’re in the kitchen or another room doing something, and the television is on. You may not be actively listening to the T.V., but the messages are entering your brain, nonetheless.
Think about repetitive messages, consistent narratives, common words, and phrases that are pumped over and over and over into your brain.
In one seminal study from 1982, Ronald Milliman discovered something quite startling about the use of ambient music in stores. Based on the tempo of the music alone, Milliman found that customers exposed to fast rhythms moved more quickly and made fewer unplanned purchases. When slow-tempo music was played, consumers took their time and were more likely to make those impulse buys.
By just playing slower music, the supermarket increased its daily profits significantly.
The style of music also impacts consumer behaviors without them realizing it. In another study at a wine shop, alternating French and German music increased corresponding wine sales over a two-week period. After taking a questionnaire concerning the unannounced study, customers admitted that they had no idea their purchasing decisions varied based on the music.
Of course, music and ambient noise are only one small part of propaganda that can be used to manipulate the populace. Whether it’s extremely subliminal, registered just at the fringe of consciousness, or blatant and clear as day, motivated messaging can have very powerful effects on the human mind.
Just consider a time of war.
Warring Forces for Your Mind
Not only does wartime require a massive output in wealth and production, but it - perhaps more importantly - demands the public’s approval, at least tacitly. This is why fighting for your heart and mind is literally an industry unto itself.
Consider the iconic Uncle Sam “I Want You” poster for the U.S. Army in World War 1, or the Rosie the Riveter factory worker empowering women to join the WW2 effort, exclaiming, “We Can Do It.”
Sorta sounds like a far more recent mantra of solidarity, “We’re All in This Together.”
But I digress. If these clear efforts to persuade the public aren’t obvious enough, simply revisit the roles of even more emotive appeals to get the populace on board. What seemingly works better than most?
Children.
From charities for childhood leukemia to donations for Third World hunger, the emotional appeal of children cannot be denied. Companies know this, and whether their intent is pure or malevolent, using children as agitprop is nothing new. It touches on something inherent to us all.
It doesn’t matter if it’s a cute boy proclaiming he enjoys a certain cereal or a wide-eyed, emaciated child in a war-ravaged village, the persuasive potency of the appeal endures across time and space.
So then, it’s probably no surprise that some of the most compelling propaganda pieces throughout wartime have stemmed from the exploitation of children and outright lies featuring children:
Nonetheless, image propaganda and censorship are extensive during wartime and demonstrate the press’ complicity in state propaganda. For instance, powerful images such as “tales of Fascist barricades made of the bodies of living children” mutilated babies in WWII Belgium, and removal of babies from incubators in hospitals by the Iraqis during the Iraq-Kuwait War, were commonplace and often subsequently found to be untrue as noted by the former veteran TV commentator, John Chancellor, of NBC.
And if you think that propaganda during wartime extends to just, well, acts of conventional war, you need only look back several years. Although many people think of COVID-19 and all it entailed as a pandemic, the highly organized campaign behind it was nothing short of astounding.
A War for Your Mind?
Aside from the previously mentioned propaganda talking points, consider that they’re actually trying to revive COVID-19.
How could they do this? Well, one way would be to prime the general public in advance, using subliminal and supraliminal messaging to extract our unconscious consent.
All you have to do is look at the mainstream media narrative shift from all things COVID-19 to all things Ukraine just a short while ago. People responded as expected, showing their initial support by changing their profile pics on social media and proudly raising the blue and yellow outside their home facades.
In many ways, it seemed the public conscience shifted overnight, with many people who were fervently tracking case and death totals no longer interested in a supposed ongoing pandemic, now transfixed by horrifying images of destruction, condemning one side with unwavering certainty while anointing the other as the epitomical ‘good guys.’
And yet. as quickly as the collective attention was shifted to that war, it has been shifted to another…
But let’s take a step back. Again, how did we seemingly go from everything virus and pandemic and much-needed mRNA injections to everything war, struggle, and much-needed relief and military aid money?
Was it… subliminal messaging? A color-coded agenda implanted in our minds and hearts? Did the same color scheme for so much of the COVID-19 advertising and marketing make for a seamless transition to “We Stand with Ukraine”?
Consider the roles of these colors in general. Yellow connotes warmth, happiness, optimism, and stimulation of health and vitality. Meanwhile, blue is pretty ubiquitous. Blue skies, blue waters, blue colors on your social media like Facebook, Twitter, Skype, and LinkedIn.
What better colors to engender trust, acceptance, and even happiness when thinking about international and national issues?
If the goal was to garner our support, these colors would be perfect, wouldn’t they? You’d feel good about fighting COVID-19 and standing together with your fellow citizens in getting vaccinated. You’d feel good about wearing your blue masks and waving your blue and yellow Ukraine flag, because, after all, you’re a good person supporting a good cause. You care and you want what’s best for people.
But what if your good intentions were weaponized against you? What if your good intentions were used to inject a bioweapon into your own body?
Now, a critic might say this is all crazy. Videos highlighting the blue and yellow threads are merely cherry-picking. It’s just coincidental that organizations like the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and National Health Service (NHS) often use the colors of Ukraine’s flag. Seeing any pattern in this is just confirmation bias. After all, yellow and blue are primary colors. It’s just an innocuous coincidence. Heck, blue and yellow are even used to make it easier for the colorblind to see!
None of this is nefarious, pre-planned, or somehow used in a way to steer public opinion. And if it were somehow guiding public opinion, it’s for the right reasons.
right?
Tying It All Together
They say past behavior is the best predictor of future behavior, and that may be true. But it’s not just your behavior and my behavior in the way we respond to these things. It’s also the behavior of those who are organizing this stuff. If they’ve done it before successfully - which they have since time immemorial - you can bet your bottom dollar they’ll do it again.
So then what do we do?
What do we say or think about all this conflict? It can be exhausting, debilitating even, following the ceaseless flow of information, especially if you’re someone who loves to be connected to the latest updates.
Of course, it’s all about the source of that information, isn’t it? If you’re only getting your ‘news’ from a monolithic conglomerate with pre-approved talking points, institutional gatekeepers, and heavy financial pressures, the ideology is limited.
Besides, you’ve got shit to do. You have a job, maybe a family to raise, errands to run, places to go, people to see, and a life to live outside the mediated reality fed through our blue-light screens.
This is good. After all, being plugged into this nonstop can drive you clinically insane.
But it’s also bad. It’s bad because your exposure is only to a small subset of what’s out there. The truth may be lurking around a tiny corner, squished in a niche and covered up nondescript. You might never even know it’s there.
What you do see is largely filtered and skewed. Heck, what were we just told by certain news networks about a certain missile and a certain hospital?
Yes, War moves fast, and its fog can be denser than some of the pundits who cover it, but what really matters is knowing what’s beneath it. Behind it. Hidden inside it, concealed from view like soldiers in a wooden horse.
Because if there’s one thing you should know in our current age, at the very moment you’re reading this word, it’s to never relinquish. Be mindful of a greater agenda to seize your heart and mind. To steer, shape, and even replace those things you hold dearest inside.
Protect your faculties, safeguard your emotions, and let there be peace in knowing that you have the power, however small, to face this reality.
To paraphrase what a brilliant thinker once said: “The more you know, the more you realize you don't know.”
Perhaps, there’s no better time to know just enough, to know, you’ve never known so little.
Thank you for an informative article and it’s very timely wisdom. Beware the emotional matrix luring us right past our logical, questioning, common sense rational mind! We have certainly learned a great deal about the global cabal’s psyop to further their tyrannical capture of our minds and hearts. Wide awake in the Great Awakening ❤️
Blessings to you for writing a great article!