http://edwardcurtin.com/self-destructive-social-habits-loneliness-and-propaganda/
Self-Destructive Social Habits, Loneliness, and Propaganda
We are the hollow men
We are the stuffed men
Leaning together
Headpiece filled with straw. Alas!
T.S. Eliot, “The Hollow Men”
When many people share thoughts, speech, or conduct that is frequently repeated and becomes automatic, it is fair to call it a social habit. Such habits tend to become invisible and unspeakable. They become part of our taken-for-granted-world.
When I recently wrote an essay about hoarding – “The Last Temptation of Things,” many people got angry with me. A friend wrote to me to say: “I congratulate and curse you for writing this.” He meant it as a complement. I took it as meaning I had touched a raw nerve and it touched off a series of further thoughts about social habits and people’s angry reactions when they are challenged.
Some people who criticized me absurdly complained that I was supporting Klaus Schwab and the World Economic Forum’s “You Will Own Nothing” campaign, something I have opposed from the start. Others said that I was attacking people who kept mementos and photographs, etc. and that I was advocating living in a shack. This was clearly false. Some got it, of course, and knew that I was using an extreme example to make a point about excessive saving of all sorts of things and how debilitating it is to surround ourselves with far more than we could ever use, need, or even know we have. My case study was a friend’s house that my wife and I had just cleaned out in an exhaustive case of what felt like an exorcism.
Now I see that there is a clear connection between hoarding – or whatever word you choose to give it when the saving of things is excessive – and propaganda. Both are forms of habitual clutter, one mental and the other physical, the former imposed from without and accepted passively and the latter self-created to try to protect from loss. In both cases, the suggestion that your social habits need to be examined is often greeted as a threat to one’s “existence” and elicits anger or dismissal.
Sociologists, of which I am one, have various terms for what I am calling social habits. They don’t speak the language of ordinary people, and so their lingo rarely enters into common discourse to be heard by most people. Such verbiage often just mystifies.
But habit is a plain and clear word, and social habit simply extends the meaning I am referring to. José Ortega Y Gasset, the Spanish philosopher, and Max Weber referred to it as “usage” before settling on habit. While usage is accurate, it lacks the stickiness of habit, which is the simplest word and one everyone understands as behavior that has become automatic through frequent repetition.
For example, in the inconsequential realm of clothing fashions, men are now wearing tight leg-fitting pants, and it seems normal to most, just as loose pants did in the past. It will change, of course, and a new or ”old” social fashion habit will replace it and most will go with it. Either way you choose you lose – or win – depending on whether or not you follow the fashions of dress, which mean little or much depending on whether you interpret them symbolically as signifying more than their appearances present.
It is true that all ideas, language usage, and behavior become second nature until they are not. For example, “my bad” may no longer be good, as far as I know, a phrase I have avoided along with “a ton of fun,” “you guys,” and “overseas contingency operations.”
Some social habits persist for a very long time because they are continually reinforced with propaganda that created them in the first place. As Jacques Ellul has emphasized, such propaganda is not the touch of a magic wand. “It is based on slow, constant impregnation. It creates convictions and compliance that are effective only by continuous repetition.” Like a slowly dripping faucet, it drips and drips and drips to reinforce its point.
Take the hatred of Russia promulgated by the U.S. government. It is more than a century old. Few Americans know that the U.S. invaded Russia in 1918 to try to stop the Russian Revolution. Today’s U.S. war against Russia is nothing new, yet many people buy the daily lies about the war in Ukraine because it is a habit of mind, part of their taken-for-granted-world.
Take the CIA assassinations of President Kennedy and his brother, Robert. For decades the U.S. media has worked hand-in-glove with the CIA to reinforce the official lies by calling those who have exposed those lies “conspiracy theorists,” a term that the CIA itself promoted and the media continues to use daily to ridicule dissent. The phrase “conspiracy theorist” is a handy social usage regularly used now to dismiss critics of any official claim, not just the Kennedys’ murders. Additionally, it is used to lump together the most absurd claims available – e.g. a Martian woman gives birth to a cat in Las Vegas – with the exposure of real government conspiracies in order to dismiss both as ridiculous.
Take the U.S. government assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. that has been covered up by giving MLK, Jr. his own holiday and reducing his message to pablum. Now you can have a day of service to forget King’s passionate denunciation of the U.S. government as the most violent nation on the earth and the government’s murder of him for his powerful anti-war stance and his campaign for economic justice for all.
Take the attacks of September 11, 2001 and the subsequent anthrax attacks. They too were wrapped in propaganda from day one that has been reinforced since, resulting in the social habit shared by the majority that Osama bin Laden and nineteen Arab hijackers planned and carried out the attacks. This propaganda supported the U.S. invasion of Iraq and the so-called war on terror that has never ended, the destruction of Libya, Afghanistan, the ongoing war against Syria, the aggression toward China, and the U.S. war against Russia, to name the most obvious. And it ushered in twenty-one years and counting of the squelching of civil liberties, government censorship, and surveillance. All this with no mass resistance from a population lost in the taken-for-granted world of mind control. Their minds cluttered with lies.
Take the Covid pandemic propaganda that introduced the New Normal in March 2020 and continues today. Destroying small businesses, crippling the economies, fattening up the elites and the wealthiest classes and corporations, injecting millions with untested mRNA so-called vaccines, this diabolical Big Lie has accustomed people to accepting further restrictions on their natural rights under the guise of protecting their health while severely damaging their health. Despite the fact that all the official claims have been proven false, the fear of death and disease, promoted for many years, has dramatically entered into the social bloodstream and additional censorship of dissenting voices has been embraced.
In all these examples and so many more, people’s minds have been slowly and insidiously filled with ideas and distorted facts that are false and controlling, similar to a hoarder’s accretion of objects that can overwhelm them. The propagandists have stuffed them with “things” that can assuage their fear of emptiness and the consequent possibility of being able to think clearly for themselves. Excessive information is the last thing people need, for as C. Wright Mills said sixty years ago, “… in this age of Fact, information often dominates their attention and overwhelms their capacities to assimilate it.”
Ellul describes the modern person thus:
Above all he is a victim of emptiness – he is a man devoid of meaning. He is very busy, but he is emotionally empty, open to all entreaties and in search of only one thing – something to fill his inner void …. He is available and ready to listen to propaganda. He is the lonely man …. For it, propaganda, encompassing Human Relations, is an incomparable remedy. It corresponds to the need to share, to be a member of a community, to lose oneself in a group, to embrace a collective ideology that will end loneliness. Propaganda is the true remedy for loneliness.
And whenever one questions any of the social habits that sustain people’s illusions, their reactions can be sharp and shrill. To suggest that people collect too many things out of a fear of emptiness, as I did with the hoarding piece, becomes a direct attack on some deep sense they have of themselves. As if the “stuff” were an extension of their identities without which they would drown. Even more threatening to so many is to question their opinions about Covid 19, JFK, RFK, the U.S war against Russia, 9/11, etc., and to suggest they have swallowed massive doses of deep-state propaganda. This often infuriates them.
It is “unspeakable,” as the Trappist monk Thomas Merton said, as quoted by James W. Douglass in his extraordinary book, JFK and The Unspeakable:
One of the awful facts of our age is the evidence that the [world] is stricken indeed, stricken to the very core of its being by the presence of the Unspeakable …. It is the void that contradicts everything that is spoken even before the words are said; the void that gets into the language of public and official declarations at the very moment when they are pronounced, and makes them ring dead with the hollowness of the abyss. It is the void out of which Eichmann drew the punctilious exactitude of his obedience …
Social habits are very hard to break, especially when they are reinforced by official propaganda. They tend to be addictive. Ownership and use of the cell phone is a prime example. Such phones are a key element in the digital revolution that has allowed for increased social control and propaganda. Few can give them up. And when your mind is filled with years of propaganda that has become second-nature, your ability to think independently is extremely limited. There is no place for the creative emptiness that leads to genuine thought. Dissent becomes “conspiracy theory.”
Hollow heads filled with straw indeed.
But Eliot may have been wrong in the way he ended his poem:
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.
It may end with a bang while many just whimper.
....
https://www.globalresearch.ca/covid-reset-day-reckoning-coming/5797611
COVID Reset: The Day of Reckoning Is Coming
As noted in an October 10, 2022, GB News article1 by British presenter Mark Dolan, we have a long list of challenges facing us at the moment. There’s the global economic crisis, the European energy crisis, runaway inflation and the threat of escalating war, just to name a few.
But on top of all of that, there’s the “COVID industry,” to use Dolan’s term, which is not about to let go of the pandemic anytime soon. And, why would they? After all, it’s the justification for the global biosecurity state; the perfect excuse to usher in biological surveillance, digital identities, The Great Reset and the Fourth Industrial Revolution (i.e., transhumanism).
Calls for Renewed COVID Measures Are a ‘Sick Joke’
So, as we head into fall and winter, the COVID industry is ramping up for another round of freedom-robbing countermeasures. In the U.K., the BBC has already kicked off the fearmongering, making a big ado about a supposed rise in COVID “cases.” Are people still buying into that worn-out fraud? Must we really spend another winter explaining how the PCR test cannot identify infection? We’ll see, but I hope not. Dolan writes:2
“The Beeb’s [BBC News] obsession with COVID at the expense of everything else was pointed out by former ONS statistician Jamie Jenkins this week.
‘A rise in COVID cases and Hugh Pym at the BBC is all over it for the main news bulletin even when there’s little impact on serious illness — for the majority. Excess deaths for months for non COVID reasons in under 60s, and nothing on main news that I’ve seen. Selective BBC reporting just shocking.’
At this point, hearing these siren voices calling for more restrictions is just a sick joke, given the damage these people have inflicted on our country — two and a half years of experimental lockdowns that show no discernible benefit to countries and regions that stayed open and carried on as normal.
We borrowed half a trillion quid to pay perfectly healthy people to stay at home, and we closed once viable businesses. All at the behest of those who thought you could control a seasonal respiratory virus.
Well, the data is in, the numbers are there for all to see, and the graphs are clear. Stop it we did not. Can you imagine if we had more economy destroying measures in the months to come? We are surely just a couple of lockdowns away from being so broke as a country, we will be deciding which of our offspring to eat first.”
Refuse All Continued COVID Measures
I can only agree with Dolan, who believes “there should be zero [COVID] measures ever again.” We have up to two years’ worth of data on most of the measures, and NONE has proven fruitful.
Instead, they’ve all been shown to be harmful — to economic stability, mental health, physical health, education, life expectancy, quality of life and more. The global response has been nothing short of disastrous, and following the same playbook once more is pure insanity.
There’s only one reason to return to strategies proven harmful, and that is because the harmful outcomes are actually desired. Unfortunately, that appears to be the case, because COVID tyranny is about to be unleashed yet again.
“Mark my words, the mask mandates will return, economically damaging work from home directives will kick in and vaccine tyranny, will no doubt rear its ugly head,” Dolan writes.3
“Although it’s hard to sell now, given that Denmark have effectively banned the vaccine for anyone under 50 — you’ve got to have a doctor’s note and evidence of a serious medical condition to get the [jab]. And Norway have done the same, for the under 65s. If you are under 65 in Norway you will not be able to get boosted …
[And] news just in — the Australians as well, as revealed by US journalist Alex Berenson. Australia, one of the most jab happy the countries in the world, who have been drinking the zero COVID Kool-Aid for two years have stopped offering the vaccine to under 50s …
Why would that be? I wonder if the Norwegians and the Danes and are concerned about both the efficacy of the vaccine — in other words if it works, and the safety. Perhaps they’ve been looking at a report published in the Lancet from the University of Oxford, suggesting the vaccinated are 44% more likely to get COVID. Get jabbed to get the disease. That’s some vaccine isn’t it …
Perhaps I’m putting two and two together and coming up with five, but it looks to me like these countries — Denmark, Norway and even Australia, are running for the hills. It’s my instinct, that a day of reckoning in regard to the vaccines is coming, and I can’t wait. I’ll be bringing popcorn …
It’s time to live with this virus, as we do with all others, and push back on any measures, that threaten the economy, children’s education, our mental and physical well-being, our freedoms and our way of life. [To] those calling for more measures, which have already broken our country and broken our society, just say no.”
Florida Surgeon General Censored
In the U.S., Florida is pretty much alone in following the path of Norway and Denmark. October 7, 2022, Florida Surgeon General Dr. Joseph Ladapo issued a new COVID jab guidance,4,5recommending men between the ages of 18 and 39 abstain from the COVID jab, as data show an 84% increase in heart-related death within 28 days of injection.
Ladapo posted the updated guidance on Twitter the same day.6 Twitter promptly removed the tweet for violation of Twitter rules, but eventually restored it. According to the October 7 guidance:7
“The Florida Department of Health (Department) conducted an analysis8 through a self-controlled case series, which is a technique9 originally developed to evaluate vaccine safety. This studied mortality risk following mRNA COVID-19 vaccination.
This analysis found there is an 84% increase in the relative incidence of cardiac-related death among males 18-39 years old within 28 days following mRNA vaccination. Individuals with preexisting cardiac conditions, such as myocarditis and pericarditis, should take particular caution when considering vaccination and discuss with their health care provider.
As such, the Florida Department of Health has issued the following guidance: Based on currently available data, patients should be informed of the possible cardiac complications that can arise after receiving a mRNA COVID-19 vaccine. With a high level of global immunity to COVID-19, the benefit of vaccination is likely outweighed by this abnormally high risk of cardiac- related death among men in this age group.
The State Surgeon General now recommends against the COVID-19 mRNA vaccines for males ages 18-39 years old. Individuals and health care providers should also be aware that this analysis10 found: Males over the age of 60 had a 10% increased risk of cardiac-related death within 28 days of mRNA vaccination …
The Department continues to stand by its Guidance for Pediatric COVID-19 Vaccines issued March 2022, which recommends against use in healthy children and adolescents 5 years old to 17 years old.
This now includes recommendations against COVID-19 vaccination among infants and children under 5 years old, which has since been issued under Emergency Use Authorization.”
Post-Jab Autopsy Results Withheld
Like Dolan, I believe a day of reckoning is coming. It seems our public health authorities know this as well, which is why they’re fighting tooth and nail to slow the release of COVID jab data to a slow drip. They’re probably all hoping they’ll be dead and buried by the time the whole truth comes out.
The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention spent 15 months fighting a legal battle to prevent the release of V-Safe data11,12 (ultimately losing that fight), and now we find out that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration is refusing to release autopsy results of people who died post-jab. As reported by The Vaccine Reaction:13
“The FDA has refused a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request to release the autopsy results of people whose deaths were reported to the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) after receiving a COVID-19 shot. The FOIA request was submitted by The Epoch Times newspaper …
According to The Epoch Times, the FDA declined to release any autopsy reports of VAERS deaths, even redacted copies, citing FOIA section (8) (A) which allows federal agencies to withhold information from the public if an agency ‘reasonably foresees that disclosure would harm an interest protected by an exemption,’ with the exemption being ‘personnel and medical files and similar files the disclosure of which would constitute a clearly unwarranted invasion of personal privacy’ …
All of the FDA’s stated concerns about protecting privacy seem rather bogus, as the autopsy results sought through the FOIA request could be released with personal information blacked out.
‘The personal information could easily be redacted without losing the potential learnings from [the] autopsy,’ said Kim Witczak, a drug safety advocate who serves as an adviser to the FDA.
Besides, Witczak logically points out: ‘If someone submits their experience to VAERS they want and expect to have it investigated by the FDA. This includes autopsy reports. Autopsies can be an important part of postmortem analysis and should be done especially with increased deaths following COVID-19 vaccination.’”
CDC Has Ignored Clear ‘Death’ Signal
While the CDC has insisted that no safety signal has ever been triggered in any of the adverse event collection databases, analyses of both the V-Safe and VAERS data suggest otherwise.
Of critical importance is the CDC’s apparent failure to identify a massive warning signal for death. In an October 3, 2022, article,14 Kirsch pointed out that the formula the CDC uses to trigger safety signals — described in its VAERS standard operating procedures manual15 — is “seriously flawed,” as the more dangerous a vaccine is, the less likely it is that a safety signal will be triggered.16,17,18
However, the COVID jabs are so incredibly hazardous that even the CDC’s flawed formula cannot cover up their lethality. Using the CDC formula, “death” still meets all the safety signal criteria and should have been flagged, yet the CDC has kept mum.
The FDA is following the same playbook, refusing to release data that rightfully should be made public. We paid for it. The data belong to the American public, and the only reason the FDA, as the CDC, is hiding it is because it proves they’ve acted in bad faith and haven’t followed the data at all.
A Reckoning Is Surely Coming
The crimes committed by the “COVID military-industrial complex” — which includes governments, Big Tech, media, Big Pharma and the bioweapons research industry worldwide — are now so numerous and so egregious in nature, it’s hard to fathom they’ll get away with it forever.
Surely, a day of reckoning is in the making, as more and more people start to wake up to reality. The CDC and FDA aren’t the only entities whose crimes against humanity are being exposed. Here’s a short-list of other recent exposures:
- Getting the COVID jab to protect others was always a lie, and there was never any legal basis for COVID passports — These truths were confirmed by Dutch Parliament member Rob Roos in early October 2022.19
During a COVID hearing, Roos questioned Pfizer’s president of international developed markets, Janine Small, about whether Pfizer had in fact tested and confirmed that their mRNA jab would prevent transmission prior to its rollout. Small responded, “No. We had to really move at the speed of science … and we had to do everything at risk.”20
As noted by Roos, “this means the COVID passport was based on a big lie. The only purpose of the COVID passport: forcing people to get vaccinated.” Roos added that he found this deception “shocking — even criminal.”21
- Medical boards are showing their true colors by censoring doctors — The Federation of State Medical Boards (FSMB) is calling on states to create laws that punish doctors for sharing medical information that does not align with “consensus” opinion. Punishment would include stripping doctors of their medical license.
The American Board of Internal Medicine and the American Board of Family Medicine support the FSMB’s position and have warned doctors certified by their boards that spreading misinformation could prompt the board to revoke their certification.
While physicians who are speaking honestly about the vaccine science are labeled “misinformers” and may face disciplinary action, the “consensus” would never be a consensus of physicians treating patients, but of those powerful few who have assumed the role of oversight and whose focus is political policy and future agenda, not patient care.
- U.S. government is illegally censoring Americans by proxy — Over the past couple of years, it’s become abundantly clear that government officials are trying to circumvent the U.S. Constitution by calling on and/or threatening private tech companies to censor on their behalf.
Brazenly power-drunk, many have not even tried to hide it. They’ve admitted it publicly. In other cases, FOIA’s and lawsuit discovery procedures have forced the release of documents proving government has been violating Americans First Amendment rights by colluding with private companies on whom and what to censor and ban.
As reported by Tablet magazine, “At least 11 federal agencies, and around 80 government officials, have been explicitly directing social media companies to take down posts and remove certain accounts that violate the government’s own preferences and guidelines for coverage on topics ranging from COVID restrictions, to the 2020 election, to the Hunter Biden laptop.”22
- Financial institutions show their colors by punishing users for opinions — We’ve also seen how financial institutions are weaponized to keep the public in check.
For example, the U.S. and European Union banned Russian banks from the Swift system,23 and then seized more than $30 billion in assets owned by Russian oligarchs plus another $300 billion in Russian Central Bank reserves.24 Following that same pattern, Canadian banks froze the bank accounts of hundreds of individuals who donated to or participated in the Freedom Convoy.25,26
This stunning display of authoritarian tyranny shocked many into waking up to the reality that government now views its own citizens as the enemy, and is willing to use any means to control us. Realizing they’d pushed too far too fast, at least one bank apologized for freezing bank accounts,27 but the damage to trust was already done.
Most recently, PayPal sent out a revised terms of service notice announcing it would begin to fine users $2,500 for the spread of misinformation, starting November 3, 2022.28 The updated terms of service resulted in thousands of users swiftly closing their accounts and taking their outrage to social media. Even its own former president, David Marcus, called the new terms “Insanity.”
The backlash was so great, PayPal quickly apologized for causing “confusion,” claiming the new terms of service had been sent out in error. However, this is rather impossible when you consider the many steps a company like PayPal has to go through before a terms of service update actually gets authorized and sent out.
Interestingly, Fortune magazine reported this story October 10, 2022, and within two days, deleted the article. Fortunately, someone archived it.29
We’ve Been Deceived and Sold Out
When you add these and other revelations together, it’s quite clear that we are being “herded” into The Great Reset, and that a wide range of industries have been weaponized against us for this purpose, most notably the medical industry, the financial industry and Big Tech.
Government, which was set up to be “of the people and for the people,” has been infiltrated and turned against us as well, and it’s now using every power at its disposal to suppress and control the population while simultaneously allowing the systems we depend on for life to be dismantled and destroyed, such as the food, energy and financial systems.
There can be only one reason for this, and that is that government (not just the U.S. government but also others around the world) are onboard with The Great Reset, which will result in a totalitarian dystopia.
Stand Up, Speak Out, Turn the Tables
The good news is that we still outnumber these megalomaniacs by tens of millions to one, if not more. And, believe it or not, they need our cooperation. If enough of us withhold our cooperation, their plans start falling apart.
Two of the most important things everyone can do right now is 1) prepare ourselves and our families for hard times (if you were not a prepper before, now’s the time); and 2) start building parallel structures and systems to replace the ones that are being dismantled.
The idea is to survive and rebuild a world of our own choosing rather than being forced to accept theirs out of sheer desperation. Strategies that can strengthen individual and local resilience to the stresses facing us include the creation of local food systems and the strengthening of neighborhood and community connections.
Prepare for the inevitable financial catastrophe and become as independent and resilient as possible. Shore up supplies and figure out how to live in an “off grid” scenario, in case daily conveniences suddenly vanish. This year I have offered many articles on how you can prepare for food, water and other crises, which you can find in my Substack library.
Aside from “investing” in storable food, a water catchment system and other essentials that will only go up in price or become unobtainable, you may also consider buying physical precious metals, which can help protect against currency devaluation. Investing in real assets, such as land could be another.
It’s also essential to become as healthy as possible. A recent study showed that 93% of U.S. adults are metabolically unhealthy, and those stats were four years old. It’s likely that number is now over 95%. You want to be the 1 person in 20 who is healthy. So, make it your goal to be in that group and start getting metabolically fit now.
Also prepare yourself mentally, emotionally and spiritually for what could be stressful and challenging times as the globalist cabal continues to push The Great Reset forward, which will require more “emergencies.”
Lastly, remember professor Mattias Desmet’s instruction that limiting the social harm inflicted by a totalitarian regime requires nonviolent resistance and outspokenness. Continue to speak out against the narrative in clear, rational and nonabusive ways. Dissenting voices keep totalitarian systems from deteriorating into abject inhumanity where people are willing to commit heinous atrocities.
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