Dacia Iluministă

Sexual Liberation of Society:

“I do think I’m a bit of a masochist. It’s not something I’m proud of, and it’s not something I noticed until recently. I think it’s common for people who witness abuse in their household. They can never smell how beautiful a rose is unless they get pricked by a thorn.” –Rihanna (fan of being spanked!)

People are continually acting out domination-submission rituals in all aspects of their lives. It’s time for this sado-masochism to be removed from the social, economic, political and psychological spheres. Instead, it should be located in the sphere of sexual play. Our sex lives should become far more ritualised and BDSM-oriented.

There are four sexual types: dominants, submissives, “switches” (who can switch between either role with equal enthusiasm – many people are in fact stuck in one role or the other so switches are quite rare) and “equals” (who are neither dominant nor submissive but who could probably play at being switches).

Radical psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich was convinced that the solution to the problems of society lay in the free flow of sexual energy. Most people have become armoured and locked in terms of their character and sexual persona. Their orgasms are either disappointing or non-existent. There’s an epidemic of frigidity, erectile dysfunction and sexual neurosis. Few people have genuinely great sex lives. Hence, in Reich’s view, there’s a huge amount of psychic tension, frustration and resentment in the world that finds neurotics and psychotic outlets. Most disturbed behaviour is caused by unsatisfactory sex lives.

Reich dreamt of a world of “orgone accumulators” that could literally bathe the world in orgasmic energy and release all of the orgasmic blocks that beset people.

We agree with Reich that the world needs far more high quality sex. Sex should be at the core of the New World Order. The religious leaders of the Old World Order have tried to demonise sex and confine it to the missionary position in the dark in the bedroom, with no noise, between married couples only. We advocate dungeons, torture chambers, orgies, black masses, sex magick, sex rituals, sky clad ceremonies, burlesque, striptease, peep shows – a whole world of sexual exploration; everything that makes Jews, Christians and Muslims apoplectic. The burqa should henceforth be turned into fetish gear for kinky dom-sub sex. Sex is a perfect weapon to kill Abrahamism. It’s time for a Reichian sexual revolution, for rivers and oceans of orgasm, for orgasm to rain from the heavens as delicious orgasmodrops that make the land bright and fertile.

Orgasm melts those dreary fanatics with long beards and strange clothes.

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Hypersex.

We’re all Kinky Now:

So, you think you’re well clued up on the state of sex in the world today? Think again. Take Britain as an example. This country is undergoing an extraordinary sexual revolution where regular sex is being replaced by a much more powerful and purer form of sex – hypersex.

Consider the following cases. On a popular Internet dating site, a beautiful 19-year-old Londoner says she’s looking for adult fun with a married man over 30. She says she ‘gets wet just thinking that he is cheating on her’ and promises to let him ‘cum all over me’ on their first date. A breathtaking 18-year-old blonde from Cumbria who describes herself as very posh says she’s seeking a black hunk, or maybe two, for an ‘intimate encounter’. A Yorkshire blonde sporting an impressive cleavage in her photo declares her exclusive interest in men in uniform: policemen, soldiers and sailors. But, she adds, traffic wardens and members of the Salvation Army need not apply.

The sex lives of these women are driven by a particular sexual peccadillo. Only partners who can satisfy it are sought. The conventional route to sex – falling in love/lust with someone for their own sake and then going to bed with them – has become redundant. Now sexual fantasy takes precedence over romance.

The French philosopher Jean Baudrillard, the champion of the concept of the hyperreal (the ‘more real than real’), put forward a persuasive case that the modern world is groaning under fakeness, artificiality and simulation, to the extent that these have become more representative of our real experiences nowadays than reality itself.

Why is a TV show like Friends so popular? For Baudrillard, the reason is that this programme presents a simulated, idealised, hyperreal account of friendship that’s vastly more appealing than the messy friendships we actually have. Viewers start to relate more to Rachel, Joey, Chandler etc and to take more interest in their fake lives and dramas than they do in the real lives of their real friends. The same is true of the protagonists of soap operas, dramas, Reality TV and so on. If Baudrillard is right then the prefix ‘hyper’ can be attached to every human activity. Islamic and Christian fundamentalism become examples of hyperreligion where people start to adopt a preposterously idealised and inflexible view of their beliefs, rendering compromise impossible. Self-immolation, as the final expression of the ideal, becomes practically mandatory.

The Virginia Tech killer, Cho Seung-Hui, went out in a blaze of hyperviolence, leaving tapes to immortalise himself that he would never see. The wealthy are more and more the hyperwealthy, demanding greater and greater rewards for their increasingly nebulous talents, and engaging in hyperspending to flaunt their riches. The overweight aren’t just fat these days, they’re hyperfat (“morbidly obsess”). Supermodels are hyperbeautiful. Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt aren’t merely famous, they’re hypercelebrities. We’re drowning in a hypersea of impossible ideals and fantasy lives, and everyone craves their share of hyper experiences for fear, ironically, of missing out on ‘real’ life. Enter hypersex, the one supremely potent arena where most people can hope to get a slice of the action.

Baudrillard describes an extraordinary sexual event that he witnessed in Japan: ‘Prostitutes, their thighs open, sitting on the edge of a platform, Japanese workers in their shirt-sleeves (it is a popular spectacle), permitted to shove their noses up to their eyeballs within the woman’s vagina in order to see, to see better – but what?’ Incredibly, he has missed the whole point. Seeing ‘something’ isn’t the issue for these Japanese men. What could be more hypersexual than to pop out from work at lunchtime, and within minutes to have your head lodged between a beautiful model’s glistening thighs and be pressed right up against her pudendum, smelling her perfume, feeling the embrace of her flesh, in intimate contact with the most intimate part of her body. It’s hypersex overload, a bombardment of all the senses and requires no further explanation or justification. If you don’t “get it”, your libido’s obviously shot.

In the jaw-droppingly bizarre TV show Sex in Court, a woman is found “guilty” of not giving her fiancé oral sex and is ordered to attend a course on fellatio. The “jurors” were obsessed with the concept of reciprocity. If he licked her, they asserted, she should suck him. None of them considered the precedent they were setting: that a woman should be “persuaded” to perform sexual acts abhorrent to her. This is just one step from advocating that she should be pressured to have sexual intercourse against her will.

In the “newspaper” The Sunday Sport, a parade of glamour models were asked to comment on whether they enjoyed “bum fun”. Two teenagers were interviewed by the paper and allegedly claimed they were Britain’s biggest “slappers”, had slept with hundreds of “lads” and particularly enjoyed gangbangs and “roastings”. On an online dating, a brand new profile appeared on one of the sites, posted by a beautiful brunette (37, and a mother) from the North East of England. She said she was in an unhappy, sexless marriage and, rightly or wrongly, she was now seeking adult fun. Within twenty-four hours, fifty-five men had listed her as one of their favourites and many had rated her photograph as ten out of ten. In all probability, she received scores of offers of casual sex. Many would be from weirdos and desperadoes, of course, but no doubt a few were from hunky, desirable men. Imagine this woman’s state of mind. One minute she felt like an unwanted frump, the next she was being treated as a goddess by a legion of slavering men. She had opened the door to the hyperreal and, above all, to hypersex.

Soon, she was online constantly, no doubt addicted to the cyber veneration she was receiving. The number of men who rated her as a favourite continued to grow, soon passing one hundred. So, go on ladies, if you’re feeling a bit unloved and in need of an ego massage, post an attractive picture of yourself on a dating site, declare that you’re actively seeking adult fun and within minutes your inbox will be deluged with messages from men begging you to sleep with them. The script for how the brunette’s online sexscapade would inevitably play out was written long ago. She would meet several men for casual sex, her behaviour would alter radically, and even her inattentive husband wouldn’t fail to notice. Arguments would erupt, the truth would come out in the midst of one blazing row, and in six months’ time she would be separated from her husband, and awaiting divorce. She would join the ranks of single mothers, and she and her ex-husband would be searching for separate homes, thus doing their bit to fuel the housing boom. Such is the relentless logic of hypersex.

Of course, most postings on dating sites still belong to “old-world” sex. Dinosaur women still provide ridiculous lists of the qualities they demand from prospective partners. Their musings reflect the tedious Mills and Boon/Pride and Prejudice mindset to which so many women seem bonded. One declares that her ideal first date would be “walking hand-in-hand on a deserted beach in the moonlight listening to the waves.” Contrast this with the hypersex posting of a 28-year-old Merseysider who listed her interests as: “sex sex sex blow jobs pussy lickin anal.” Sensational semi-nude photos accompanied her profile. She said of herself: “hay guys u can see what am intrested in so come and get me i like to **** as much as i can been caled a slut in the past but hay i like sex i do do come on message me xxxxxxxxxxx.” Her ideal first date would be: “drinks then some of the above…”

There’s simply no debate about which of these two will attract more male attention. Hypersex always wins, so when are the dinosaurs going to get with the programme? Another beauty, a Scottish stripper, said in relation to a prospective first date: “no date just sex.” This could easily be the motto of hypersex. She said of herself: “hi i am a single woman looking for a man for no strings attached sex i like trying new things like loads of kinky sex mmmmmmmmm if u think ur brave enough leave me a message if not **** off.”

An Ann Summers’ “sex shop” prominently displayed an eyecatching nun’s outfit, given a suitably hypersex spin, of course (i.e. you would never catch a real nun wearing one). Perhaps it won’t be long until hijabs, niqabs and burqas are similarly fetishised. Think of the irony; the very items of clothing designed to protect a woman’s modesty will be transformed by hypersex into the precise opposite – the quintessence of immodesty. What will those who wear these garments do if they discover that nymphets using the self-same garments as fantasy-sex aids populate bedrooms all over the country? The power of hypersex is unstoppable, sweeping aside all obstacles and all religious taboos.

The “dogging” (outdoor casual sex with strangers, often in group situations and with spectators) and swinging industries continue to grow apace, and activities like bukkake (best not to ask!) are increasing in popularity. Then there’s the well-known phenomenon of old romances being re-ignited by sites like Friends Reunited, often fatally undermining current marriages.

The stark truth is that the sexual terrain of Britain has changed beyond recognition. People can indulge their sexual fetishes as never before. Hardcore porn, catering for every conceivable taste, is easily accessible on the Internet. Homes are awash with R18 adult DVDs and a plethora of sex toys (women are addicted to Rampant Rabbit!). Conventional relationships can’t keep up and no longer accommodate people’s sexual natures. Hypersex is here to stay, and it’s time society faced up to the revolution that’s occurring in bedrooms all over the country.

All debates about sex, drugs, education, marriage, the family etc ought to be viewed through the prism of hyperreality. The tragedy is that no politicians, no policy-makers, no Think Tanks, no opinion formers, are philosophically literate, and they certainly haven’t heard of Baudrillard. They continue to churn out their ancient nostrums, their “solutions” to the problems of an old world that no longer exists. They haven’t begun to comprehend the nature of the new paradigm we have all entered.

The logic of hyperreality has chilling consequences. Increasing polarisation is inevitable. The gap between rich and poor will widen. Eventually there will be a violent standoff between the hyperrich and the hyperpoor. The hypereducated will soon be like a different species to the hyperuneducated. The hyperreligious will come into open conflict with the hypersecular. Hypercelebrities will bestride the world like Olympian gods, and sprinkle hyperdepression in their wake as all the rest of us look on and know that our lives will never match these dream existences. Hyperdrugs will wreak havoc; hypersex will destroy the traditional family. Computer-generated hyper-virtualreality will further erode any sense of what is real. People will live in online fantasy worlds such as those provided by Second Life.

Britain has been declared the worst place in the advanced world in which to bring up a child. Not a single commentator observed that hyperreality is the true cause of this catastrophe. The British, with their poisonous hypertabloid newspapers, their hyperdisdain for intellectuals, their enslavement to hypercelebrity and hyperreality TV, their slavish devotion to fairytale hyperroyalty, their hyperconsumerism, hyperobsession with house prices and propensity for weekend hyperbingeing on alcohol have created a hyperhell. They are the hyperdamned.

When will the world face facts? We’re all kinky now, our excesses are out of control and are destroying us. Sure there are medicines – hypermedicines – but they’ll make us feel hypersick before they make us better, and none of us has the stomach for that. It’s time for a hyperreality check.

From the book Hypersex by Adam Weishaupt (coming soon).
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Trouble in the Promised Land:

“The fight to make a living even for people who have a decent job creates a lot of side effects. People are bitter and angry in a country that is rich but the people are poor.” –Shai Dagan

People are starting to talk of an Israeli Summer following the Arab Spring. It’s said that 90% of the Israeli population are discontented with the direction of their country. While a few Israelis are fabulously rich, the average take-home salary is £18,350. The people are now beginning to perceive that they themselves are in a sense victims of a dictatorship – not of the Arab kind but of the plutocratic kind. Israel’s economy, like that of America, is a plutonomy – it’s for the rich and driven by the rich.

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An old Jewish joke – “If you have three Jews in a room, you’ll get four opinions.” Don’t they mean six given that all Jews are two-faced? When will Jews do the decent thing and renounce and denounce their Devil-God, abandon circumcision and declare that they are not the Chosen People?
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Is Sarah Palin an Illuminist?:

Sarah Palin recently denounced “crony capitalism” and America’s “permanent political class.” All we need now is for her to pronounce community superior to family and to proclaim the God of Abraham the Devil and we could be giving the hockey mom a call. Then again, she would need an intellect transplant to raise her IQ by about 100 points before that could ever happen.
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The Psychological Experiments that should terrify everyone:

PEOPLE ARE DELUDED ABOUT THEMSELVES. One subject that has ruthlessly exposed the ugly truths of human beings is psychology. A series of notorious experiments should be etched permanently on people’s minds to remind them of what they really are. These experiments touch on every aspect of the human condition and reveal why human history has taken the shape it has, and why people believe and act as they do.
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The Obedience Experiment:

The infamous Stanley Milgram experiment proved that two thirds of human beings, under the direction an authority figure in a white coat, would be prepared to administer a fatal electric shock to another person who had failed to answer questions correctly. Milgram and others guessed that perhaps only 1% – psychopaths – would deliver the lethal shock. In fact, two out of three of us will do it. And now we know why the Germans who worked in the death camps did what they did. And we know that two thirds of us who express our revulsion for the Nazis would do exactly the same as the Nazis did if we were ordered to (particularly, if we had been indoctrinated to hate a certain group of people and if we were told we would be executed if we disobeyed the orders).

When you consider the Nazis, don’t regard them as “Other”, regard them as “Us”. Scratch the surface and we are all Nazis underneath, none more so than the Jews themselves as their Bible proves conclusively and as their conduct in the West Bank and Gaza Strip demonstrates.
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The Conformity Experiment:

American social psychologist Solomon Asch showed in the 1950s that at least a third of us are conformist to an extreme degree. Conformists crave the approval of others and are terrified of straying from the consensus. They are the perfect victims of peer group pressure.

Asch’s experiment involved nothing more elaborate than straight lines of different sizes drawn on pieces of card. The subjects of the experiment had to compare the cards and say which line was longer, and the answer was always entirely obvious. The catch was that each subject was sitting amongst a group of what he thought were follow subjects but who were actually stooges working for Asch and who were under instructions to confidently say that line A was longer than line B even though this was patently false. Rather than disagree with the group opinion, one third of the test subjects chose to agree that A was longer, contrary to the blatant evidence of their own eyes. Many others were extremely uncomfortable when it came to contradicting the others. This is a perfect test of “other-directedness” – the tendency to let others shape your behaviour.

Asch’s experiment was extreme. A less blatant version of the experiment would have raised the proportion of other-directed individuals to even higher levels. Most people like to think of themselves as “individuals”. They’re not – they’re members of groups and they are excessively susceptible to group think.

Advertisers, marketeers, politicians, religious leaders and opinion formers are cynically aware of the extent to which people should be treated as groups rather than individuals, thus massively simplifying the opportunity to manipulate and exploit them. Once a tipping point is reached within a group dynamic, the whole group rapidly adopts the same opinion. Look at the rise of Islam. In its earliest years, most people easily resisted Islam (in fact for the first thirteen years of Islam there were only 100 – 150 Muslims), but Mohammed managed to produce an extremely strong group identity amongst his followers and they didn’t buckle under the pressure. Indeed, it was their minority group that then began to sway the less strong-minded and less cohesive majority group and, when the tipping point was reached, the majority came across almost as one to join Islam. It might have been expected that many would have held out against this strange new semi-Jewish religion of monotheism, but they didn’t. Soon, that entire part of the world was fanatically Islamic and has remained so to the present day, and continues to convert many others in Third World countries.

This shows how a small group with an extremely strong identity can overpower much larger groups with a less established identity. People are desperate to have an identity and the group that can offer the most solid identity always wins. That’s why crazy religions have been so successful. Why did Christianity defeat the Roman Empire? – because the identity of the Romans became fragmented. The Empire was vast and, by the end, all sorts of barbarian tribes were classed as Roman citizens. They often had extremely little in common, and subscribed to radically different cultural and religious beliefs. They had precious little in common with Rome. The Christians on the other hand were a fanatically cohesive group, willing to die for their beliefs. Where others were full of doubts and fears, the Christians had absolute conviction. Their victory thus assured. The fanatics always win.

In 146 BCE, long before Christianity cursed the world, the Romans destroyed the city of Carthage, killed or enslaved the entire Carthaginian population and practically erased all traces of Carthage’s existence. Cato the Elder’s insistent demand of “Delenda est Carthago” (Carthage must be destroyed) was carried out to the latter, though he himself was not there to see it, having died three years earlier.

If Christianity had come up against the Romans of Cato’s era, every one of them would have been crucified. Christianity would have been exterminated. The Roman identity of Cato’s era was easily the match for Christianity. The Romans of that time had a monumentally powerful identity and will, as any conquering nation must in order to create a great empire. They would have recognised the danger of Christianity and dealt with it. By the time of Rome’s decline, the Romans no longer had the will or identity to resist and they were at the mercy of Christianity.
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Chinese Whispers – the inevitable erosion of meaning:

British psychologist Sir Frederic Bartlett working at Cambridge University during the First World War was inspired by a game of Chinese Whispers to see what would happen when people were asked to repeat an unfamiliar story they had just read. What he discovered was that people change the story to fit their existing knowledge, and it’s the revised story that they then remember, and often it has little relationship with the original story.

Bartlett proposed that people operate within a ‘schema’ – a cultural, historical and intellectual framework in which to place and organize their memories. Everyone applies a particular personal context to things that happen to them and it’s not an event per se that they remember but the event intertwined with this context which they have placed over it but which had absolutely nothing to do with the event itself. This has serious implications for such things as eyewitness testimony and false memory syndrome. A court is expecting a person to accurately report what they observed, not to embroider it with a schema that completely changes the raw data.

False memory syndrome can be caused by an invalid and distorting schema being applied to a certain event. The schema “memory” is then remembered rather than what actually took place. A religious person, for example, may refuse to believe that they have behaved in an unholy way, and, with the help of their constructed religious schema, they will reinterpret whatever took place to ensure that their behaviour was consistent with their schema i.e. they make up a story that suits their own beliefs about how they conduct themselves. Such people are lying through their teeth but genuinely believe they are being truthful. They would pass a lie detector test. People who lie to themselves and believe their own lies can fool anyone. After all, they fooled themselves.

If you were working on artificial intelligence, would you apply a schema memory to an android or get it to report exactly what it observed? If you did the latter, you would have made it radically inhuman. If you did the former, you would make it extremely unreliable – just like real humans!

We think Bartlett’s work has even broader significance. It affects everything – humans do nothing but apply schemas. Abrahamists apply an Abrahamist schema to all of their experiences. They are looking for ways to validate their belief system, and reject anything that casts doubts on their beliefs. In other words, schemas are like “rose-tinted spectacles”. They make you see everything in a certain way and you become blind to anything you don’t want to see. We’ll say that again – you BLIND yourself to what you don’t want to see.

Why are so many lovers fooled by the infidelity of their partners? It’s not that they don’t see what’s going on. They certainly do. However, they then apply a schema which removes their suspicions and they go on living in blissful ignorance. It’s a brilliant ego defence mechanism. Who wants the truth? For most people, the truth is unbearable so they devise ways to ignore it.

Another crucial consequence of schemas is that they shape the way in which you understand something. If you read our website for a second time, you will have a radically different understanding of the material from that which you gained on first reading. The reason for that is that the very process of reading all of that material has changed your schema for understanding it. With anything complex, you often have to read it numerous times to get anywhere near understanding it properly. But people don’t have time to keep re-reading things, so most people go around with a schema for what such and such a thinker supposedly said, but which is often hopelessly wrong. We can tell from the emails we receive that some people get what we’re saying almost spot on, while others have invented their own version of what we’re saying that we can’t recognise at all – in fact sometimes it’s the precise opposite of our message!

You can’t teach someone more than they know. What they know is their schema. An Abrahamist couldn’t hope to understand Illumination. Their Abrahamic schema would make the task impossible. To learn, you must be highly rational and open minded, able to keep adjusting your schema. If you are locked into a dogmatic schema, you can’t learn. It’s almost impossible to teach Muslims anything because they are locked into the Koranic schema which shuts down all open and honest thinking.

You grow in knowledge to the extent that you can alter your knowledge schema. What we have discovered is that once a person exceeds a certain level of knowledge, their schema becomes almost infinitely flexible. This means that they can learn new things at an astronomical rate and grasp an author’s intentions immediately. It’s as if they are able to apply the schema that the author himself applied. Whereas most people have to wait for new knowledge to slowly penetrate an existing schema (this is what “learning” means), a really smart person grasps meaning instantly i.e. learns on the spot. They thus acquire knowledge and understanding at a dizzying rate.

Just as money goes to money (i.e. the rich get richer) so does intelligence go to intelligence i.e. the smart get smarter. A “genius” is a person who has passed the tipping point of acquiring new knowledge. He learns new things effortlessly, as soon as he hears them or reads them. He instantly forms creative new connections with his existing knowledge base, and new ideas spill out an astonishing rate. A genius becomes a kind of God in their field of expertise. He understands it inside out. While others are plodding along in the slow lane, the genius is on the fastest autobahn in the world with no other traffic, and his foot is pressing on the accelerator ever more heavily. He’s heading for escape velocity – into areas beyond all existing human knowledge. And that’s the precise definition of a genius – someone who thinks what no other human has ever thought or imagined. In his area of expertise, a genius is smarter than the whole human race. He’s smarter than seven billion people! He’s smarter than everyone who has ever lived. Can you even begin to conceive how smart that is? Could God himself know more?

But for those following in the genius’s wake, it’s as if they’re trying to climb Mount Everest without oxygen. They’re desperately trying to adjust their schema to his, but for most it will take a hell of a long time, if indeed ever. Even today, most people have ZERO idea of what Einstein achieved.
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Man’s inhumanity to man:

In the shocking Stanford Prison experiment in 1971, Philip Zimbardo set up a mock prison in the basement of the Stanford psychology building to study the psychological effects of being assigned the role of prisoner or prison guard. Twenty-four students were randomly assigned roles in the prison. To the amazement of Zimbardo, the students playing the prison guards quickly adopted extreme authoritarian personas and subjected some of the more troublesome prisoners to torture! As for the prisoners, most became highly passive and suggestible. They meekly accepted physical abuse, and even attacked each other at the instigation of the guards. The experiment grew so out of hand that it had to be stopped after six days. Decades later, Zimbardo gave expert testimony on behalf of one of the soldiers accused of abuse in the Abu Ghraib scandal since it was all horrifically familiar to him.

It appears that the situations people are placed in and the roles assigned to them can turn them into monsters or pathetic victims. Once again, we see a psychological defence for the actions of the Nazis in the death camps. Simply to be a guard in such a place is almost to guarantee that you will become a monster. If liberal Stanford students could abuse fellow students within hours, what would Nazis do to Jews they were raised to despise?

Yet the Stanford experiment perhaps goes much further than just the prison situation. What about police brutality? Why are police so uniformly appalling in every part of the world? What about managers in offices? Why do so many seem like little Hitlers? To give a uniform to a person or to place them in a position of authority often seems to release an inner monster. It’s as though they have been given official permission to become mini-tyrants.

And perhaps the concept of PERMISSION is the true meaning of the experiment. You don’t in fact need a uniform and you don’t need official authority. Look at the rioters and looters in the UK. Some of them behaved appallingly towards anyone who got in their way. One man was actually killed for standing up to them. Many people were burned out of their homes. Did the fact that so many people were involved give all of the participants the notion that they had group permission for what they were doing? If a person believes himself to have permission, does he lose all personal accountability? Does he think he can get away with anything?

The people at the top of banks and businesses seem to lose all sense of restraint. They believe they can do whatever they like. The law has granted them permission. They are masters of the universe. They are untouchable. And thus they become psychopaths.

Richard Nixon thought he could get away with anything in the White House. Why wouldn’t he think that? He had killed endless thousands in illegal bombing missions in South-East Asia during the Vietnam War. Did anyone stop him?

If you have no internal moral compass, do you have any limits?
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The Bystander Effect:

In New York in 1964, a young woman was savagely killed in front of 38 witnesses. None made any attempt to intervene and none called for help. This has been labelled the “Bystander Effect”. If there are many people present, each person thinks that someone else will do something, so in the end no one does anything. No one sees it as their job to get involved. No one wants to endanger themselves. And thus criminals can do whatever they like in broad daylight and stand a good chance of getting away with it.
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The Fake Patients:

Between 1969 and 1972, clinical psychologist David Rosenhan arranged for eight psychiatrically healthy individuals (three women and five men, including himself) to have themselves admitted to psychiatric hospitals around the United States. They each presented with a single symptom: that they were hearing a voice which said things like “empty”, “dull” and “thud”. They had been instructed beforehand by Rosenhan to act completely normally once admitted. Despite the fact that they were all completely sane, they were detained for periods as long as eight weeks. Seven were given a diagnosis of schizophrenia, which was said to have gone into “remission”. None of them were told they were sane. All were forced to admit to being mentally ill even though they had said they were now feeling fine and had stopped hearing voices. As a condition of their release, they had to agree to take antipsychotic drugs.

After Rosenhan’s revelations, one of the institutions exposed by him challenged him to send new “pseudo-patients” and said it would detect them all. In the following weeks, 193 new patients were admitted and of these 41 ordinary patients were identified by clinical consultants as “impostors” and 42 more were suspected of being impostors. Rosenhan then devastatingly announced that he had in fact sent no one.

Rosenhan’s paper on the scandal appeared in Science in1973 and was called “On Being Sane in Insane Places”. It dealt a devastating blow to the psychiatric profession, suggesting that they were not merely diagnostically incompetent but actually a serious danger to their patients. Rosenhan concluded, “It is clear that we cannot distinguish the sane from the insane in psychiatric hospitals.”

It was also apparent that once a certain label had been applied to a patient, it was almost impossible to escape this label, no matter how wrong it was. Moreover, there was a huge element of dehumanization involved. Patients’ opinions about their own condition were completely ignored. They were regarded as unreliable witnesses. Their protestations of sanity were frequently taken as deliberate attempts to deceive the psychiatrists and further proof of their mental illness. This was classic Catch 22 territory. In order to get out, a sane person had to agree he was mad, but if he admitted he was mad then he had provided justification for keeping him in. The successful strategy for being released was to completely agree with the psychiatrist’s opinion regarding your condition. If you agreed with him that you were a schizophrenic in remission, and that you would take your drugs, then he would let you go. If you told the truth that there was nothing wrong with you, that you felt fine and didn’t need any drugs then you would be detained.

When he was first admitted to the psychiatric ward, Rosenhan noted: “Minimal attention was paid to my presence, as if I hardly existed.” So, psychiatric wards go a long way to making sane people mad, or mad people much madder.

Is it not truly shocking that normal people are not detectably sane in the opinion of the so- called experts on the subject? Does that mean we’re all mad, or that psychiatrists are mad?
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To Choose or not to Choose:

In 1976, Ellen Langer and Judith Rodin conducted an important study in a New England nursing home called Arden House. The experiment was simply to investigate what would happen to the residents of two different floors of the House if they were allowed slightly more or less control over their lives. The residents of both floors were given plants and film shows, but whereas those on one floor got no say over their plant and how to tend it or when to view the film, those on the other could choose the plant and look after it themselves, and also choose which night of the week to watch the film. Eighteen months later, twice as many of those in the “choice group” were alive compared with the non-choice group. Taking control of your life, it seems, makes you live longer.

If you passively wait for things to happen, as most people do, you are already dying inside. You must be active in life, taking the initiative, choosing your path through life.

The rich elite are always on the front foot and they live much longer on average than the passive hordes waiting for their lives to be decided for them. People learn to be helpless and prove extremely good at it – so good they die earlier!

TAKE CONTROL OF YOUR LIFE. LIVE LONGER! If you don’t control the agenda, someone else will, and not to your advantage. Control the agenda or it will control you.
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Learning to see:

Vision is astonishingly complex. Most people think of an eye as much like a camera, taking objective pictures that some kind of “inner viewer” then “sees”. But the case of a blind man who recovered his sight tells a disturbingly different tale.

Born in 1906, Sidney Bradford lost his sight at 10 months old. Corneal grafts restored it at the age of 52. Sadly, he found the rediscovered world a confusing and disappointing place and died just two years later.

Studies on blind people who have had their sight restored indicate that we “learn” to see. Our visual system operates nothing like a camera. If it did, a blind person who regains his sight should immediately see exactly like a normal person. It would be as if we had cleaned dirt off the lens of the camera. But blind people with restored sight have no idea what they’re seeing. They have to be taught.

Our visual system is more like a self-learning camera that is continually adjusting itself to make sense of what it is being pointed at. It is the product of a complex accumulation of visual knowledge. A blind person who has not undergone that process is presented with an incomprehensible array of unidentified shapes. He can’t make any sense of what he’s seeing. Perhaps the baffling visual distortions that accompany an LSD trip give some indication of how it must seem for a blind person to suddenly see again.
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The Benefits of Patience:

In 1968, the psychologist Walter Mischel wrote a seminal book called Personality and Assessment. Curious about the way his own three daughters were highly impulsive at age 3 and much less so a year or two later, Mischel constructed an experiment in delayed gratification at the Bing Nursery at Stanford University.

The experiment was simple. Hundreds of 4-year-old children were asked to decide whether to have one marshmallow right now, or wait a while and get two. By chance, Mischel discovered an amazing fact. Those children who waited to get the two marshmallows were much less likely to drop out of college, use cocaine, get fat or end up in prison. The kids who just couldn’t hang on and grabbed the marshmallow asap tended to have considerably less good outcomes.

Nearly everything worthwhile in life comes from a core of disciplined behaviour. A star student is someone who can apply self-discipline when it comes to his studies. All hard work involves deferred gratification. Alcoholism, drug addiction, obesity, crime and getting into debt are all manifestations of instant gratification. You have to have something NOW. You can’t wait another moment. And if you can’t wait, you inevitably fail in life.

With the marshmallow test, we could literally identify all of the future problem people at 4 years old! We could then take remedial measures to stop them screwing up their lives. We could condition them to become much more disciplined. We would save tens of millions from lives of dismal failure brought on by their addiction to instant gratification. Sadly, capitalism is an economic system based on instant gratification and panders to everything that is worst in people.
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Group Think:

Henri Tajfel, a Professor of Social Psychology at Bristol University, developed a series of experiments known as the Minimal Group Studies. He was seeking to establish the minimum basis on which people could be made to identify with their own group and show bias against another group. In 1971, boys at a comprehensive school viewed abstract paintings by Klee and Kandinsky and were then assigned to the “Klee” group or the “Kandinsky” group. The assignments were entirely at random although the impression was given that the boys had indicated a preference for the group they were put in. Even though the boys didn’t know who else was allocated to their group, whenever they were offered the chance to award “points” to anonymous members of the Klee or Kandinsky group, they always gave more to “their” group. So even though the boys neither knew who was in their group nor who was in the other group, the mere fact of being assigned to a group made them start to prefer that group and see the other group as “different” and somehow as the enemy. The boys always sought to advance the interests of their group and penalise the other group, even though they had no idea who was who.

We almost instantly identify with a group. Group identity is astonishingly powerful and we can see its power in all areas of life: sexism, racism, nationalism, classism and religious bigotry. It’s always “them and us”. “We” are the good guys and “they” are other, different, strange, the enemy.

Patriotism and religious extremism are designed to milk group identity to the full. It’s easy to treat others badly once they are exposed as “them”.
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Unreliable Witnesses:

Elizabeth Loftus is famous for her experiments showing that memory does not provide an accurate record but is in fact influenced by what happens after a witnessed event. It’s as if the memory is a kind of unstable clay mould and, before it gets the chance to set, it can be heavily influenced by subsequent events. The “memory” that eventually gets stored is massively contaminated by everything that happened afterwards (which had nothing at all to do with what was actually witnessed). Questions by police can change the way an event is remembered. If they suggest something, their suggestion can easily become part of the memory. If some piece of information is shown to the witness – such as a colour, a piece of clothing or whatever, that information is incorporated into the memory.

What this means is that witnesses are extremely unreliable. Their memories can be reconstituted as a result of post-event experiences. Just as police are expected not to contaminate crime scenes, nor should witnesses have their memories contaminated if they are to be in any way reliable.

Loftus went on to show that just as a memory can be reconstituted by suggestions and information coming after the witnessed event, so can the same mechanism be used to implant a whole false memory. She demonstrated that 30% of subjects could be given specific information in the present day that then resurfaced as part of a false childhood memory.

Memory is astonishingly and alarmingly fluid. Many people may be capable of inventing entirely fake versions of things that happened to them. They can forget terrible things they did and invent a new scenario in which they did nothing wrong. Many religious people simply ignore their endless sins and imagine themselves paragons of virtue.

As usual, Nietzsche got there first: “People lie unspeakably often, but afterwards they do not remember it and on the whole do not believe it.” In other words, people continually create false memories of their own conduct. They would be genuinely astonished if you accused them of lying.

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Shouldn’t all of these experiments be well known? Why are they stuck firmly in academic circles? Most people believe utter bullshit about themselves and others. They have no idea just how flawed, fallible, vulnerable, manipulable and exploitable most people are, including themselves.

Isn’t it time to take the radical step of telling people the truth about themselves? The truth will set us free!
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The Book of Pho’:

Look out for The Book of Pho’ – published by Hyperreality Books – coming out soon.

Visionary hip hop artist Pho’ is now the Movement’s BAD BOY. Is he angel or demon? Is he a sinister Nation of Islam infiltrator forcing women to wear burqas? Is he riding two horses with only one saddle? Will he fall off? Is he a “Smurf in a Gargamel cloak” (as the Inquisition labelled him)? Is he actually an Illuminatus? Is he “A Riddle Wrapped in a Mystery Inside an Enigma”? Man of Mystery, Pho’ will reveal all. It’s the publishing sensation of the decade. His book blows open the conspiracy.
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