In response to my post on psychological control of information flow, a blog contributor whose name I’ll keep anonymous tells me that “These animals are masters at fiddling with people’s heads.” I agree with this.
But now this remark makes me understand and say more explicitly why this is the case. Let’s go back to the distinction between makers and takers, taxpayers and tax feeders, the ruled and the rulers, we the people and the state, those who do not have power to aggress and those who wield power. These two groups have different aims and different production functions. Ordinary people produce goods and services. By contrast, the “animals” want power, work for power, take power, and wield power. They are a different animal, a different kettle of fish. Each of these two groups works in different ways, each specializing in what they do. The power-wielders develop, learn, and apply the techniques of fiddling with people’s heads. Whose heads? Mainly those people whom they rule, but also everyone around them, including other power-wielders with whom they compete. We who produce goods and services for others are competing in entirely different ways than the power-wielders. We compete in supplying what others want. The power-animals compete in techniques of control. It’s not surprising that they are masters at it. This is what they do with their lives. They specialize in creating facades, cover stories, lies, manipulations of opinion, doctoring of reality, and so on.
A major problem is that we who are ruled, until we learn better, assume that most people are like us — working to produce goods and services for others. We then assume that the people in power in government are doing a similar job, but on different kinds of goods like “security,” “justice,” “law,” and so on. They perpetuate this myth with such terms as public goods, public service, public servants, sacrifice, general welfare, common defense, etc. They appeal to the nation, tribe, freedom, God, the flag, law and order, and all sorts of other such emotionally-charged triggers in order to achieve support for sanitized versions of what they are actually up to. The books that actually reveal what these animals are up to and how they behave are largely kept out of high school and college curricula. Meanwhile, the media constantly transmit enough alternative stories and noise to neutralize revelations. The net result is that truth competes with sanitized and self-serving fictions, and the latter, concocted and put across by experts at fiddling with our heads, often predominate.
7:02 am on June 22, 2012