Somnambulant
Society
Sam Aurelius Milam III
I
went to Wal-Mart recently to buy a surge suppresser. That's a power
strip that, in addition to providing power to electrical equipment, also
protects the equipment from power surges in the power line. They
had at least a dozen different kinds. Each kind had a different combination
of features. The main thing that they all had in common was that
they were all mislabeled. Each one of them was labeled "surge protector".
To
suppress something is to push it down, to reduce its magnitude, freedom,
variability, or some such thing as that. To protect something is
pretty much the opposite, that is, to preserve whatever condition or characteristics
it already has. Thus, a surge suppresser would be a device that suppresses
surges. A surge protector would be a device that protects surges.
That's the way the rules of grammar are supposed to work in this language.
So, there's a serious problem here. The two terms are opposites,
yet people use one for the other.
Why do they do that? Maybe it's a consequence of being "educated"
in the government schools, which do a lot more brainwashing than educating.1
Actually, it's even worse than brainwashing, but I didn't realize that
until just recently.
While
I was trying to write this article, I was thinking a lot about Orwell's
book 1984, about doublethink, Winston Smith and The Ministry of
Truth, Ingsoc,
The Newspeak Dictionary, and the goals of the Party.
As I worked on the article, an unexpected thing happened. I realized
that, during all of my years of thinking about the book, I'd been missing
something important. I hadn't followed Orwell's teaching far enough.
He wasn't only trying to teach us about brainwashing. He was trying
to teach us about conditioning. Now, in retrospect, it seems so obvious
that I wonder why I didn't see it sooner. Maybe I still haven't completely
recovered from my own conditioning. After all, I did spend 19 years
in the government schools and 15 years in the government corporations.
Anyway,
brainwashing involves propaganda, misinformation, the promulgation of false
assumptions, and so forth. It's a response of a police state to the
necessity of dealing with people who can think. In a police state,
thinking is a threat to orthodoxy, and must be repressed or controlled.
People must be discouraged from arriving at unapproved conclusions.
They must be manipulated into arriving at desired conclusions. Unapproved
conclusions can be discouraged by punishing people who arrive at them.
In Orwell's book, thoughtcrime was one of the aspects of that control.
Today, hate crime is such a tool. Hate crime, like thoughtcrime,
addresses not what people do, but what they think. People can be
made to arrive at the desired conclusions by controlling the context of
their thinking. Thus, the propaganda, misinformation, and promulgation
of false assumptions, previously mentioned. What's important, however,
is that regardless of all of the punishment and manipulation, brainwashing
still allows thinking, which is a conscious process. Such things
gang aft a-gley. A police state needs something more reliable than
that.
Brainwashing
promotes incorrect thinking. Conditioning eliminates thinking.
Conditioning is to not think at all, but merely to respond. So, everybody
needs to be properly conditioned. Maybe that's why attendance at
the government schools is mandatory, so that nobody can avoid the conditioning.
Maybe the mislabeling of the surge suppressers is a test, to see if it's
working. Consider that when protection and suppression
(the words) mean the same thing, then the difference between protection
and suppression (the ideas) will disappear. After that, the
government can tell people that it's protecting their liberty when, in
fact, it's suppressing their liberty.
It
doesn't really matter if the conditioning is the result of an actual conspiracy
or of the normal modus operandi of all governments. Either way, if
people have been successfully conditioned, then they won't think about
things at all. They'll just behave as required, wave the flag, and
love Big Brother.![10x5 Page Background GIF Image](../../Images/10x5_Page_Background.gif)
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^
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See additional excerpts
in The Sovereign's Library. |
August 2015 |
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