Narrative Warfare: The Poisoning of the Mind

Yesterday, author Brian Niemeier wrote a post that did a great job of explaining why we hear so much harping about Muh Representashun. You can read it here, however the key point is below:

This phenomenon has become so widespread that many readers may not know that other modes of consuming fiction exist. The reason is as simple as it is unsettling. Drawing audiences in to vicariously live the emotional ups and downs of a story as if experiencing them firsthand is the main mechanism of propaganda. The skilled propagandist creates a hero who serves as an empty vessel into which the audience pours their hopes, fears, and desires. They do not merely identify with the character, they impose their identity on a character-shaped blank slate. When the cardboard cutout wins according the morality the propagandist wants to push, the audience gets a dopamine hit.

Younger audiences’ diminished ability to relate to any other kind of character is a testament to how saturated with propaganda pop culture has become. In fact, it’s been that way for decades. Harry Potter has no discernible personality. He can only be described by his circumstances. Similarly, the main characters from the Star Wars prequels are famously impossible to describe without referring to their jobs or appearance. Fans of the former billion-dollar IP notoriously personalize their attachment to the brand. It should be noted that fans of the latter, even among the counterculture, display a similar penchant for self-insertion. That’s leaving aside Disney’s conscious decision to make the lead role in their Star Wars sequels an utter nonentity. Megacorps have trapped the average Millennial in a fantasy world of cardboard.

Propaganda.

That's what you're seeing here. It explains all of the otherwise-bizarre operational decisions, because propaganda is always done to serve the advancement and reinforcement of an ideology that otherwise cannot persist because the ordinary forces of life do not permit it, and the Death Cult is exactly that.

The detrimental effects are often spoke of here, at Brian's blog, and elsewhere but for this post I want to focus on one thing: the inability to satisfy the audience. Because the aim of propaganda is to manipulate a mass audience into conforming with the ideology, and thereby support its implementation as public policy to be backed up by lethal force applied as required or desired, it has no incentive to satisfy the needs of the audience.

Instead, the incentive is to weaponize that unmet need against the audience much the same way that food, water, and shelter can be weaponized. "Only those that obey get their hits of dopamine" sounds stupid, but that is exactly what "Bread and Circuses" means and so long as the manipulators are able to maintain control against the population they can succeed, and targetting women and children first and foremost--two classes well-known to be far more susceptible to such manipulation due to being insecure and anxious vs. men across the board--is how that control is established and maintained. Create weak men so they permit hard times, usurp the hard men that create the good times, use the good times to expand the weak men, use the weak men to rerun hard times at will to repeat the cycle.

That is exactly what has happened, and you can lay the practical end of this propaganda victory at the feet of the man that weaponized psychology against the masses: Edward Bernays, nephew of Sigmund Freud, the author of Propaganda and co-creator of the contemporary discipline alongside Walter Lipmann- two men that Noam Chomsky would credit with inventing the manufacture of consent.

By seeking to prompt children to emotionally invest in Death Cult propaganda from a young age, they become open to indoctrination and by keeping possible threats out of the way--such as by ensuring that both of their parents spend most of their waking hours away from home working a job to pay to stay alive--they will fully assimilate the Death Cult dogma by the time they come of age and will not abandon their false religion unless that emotional bond is broken. Now your children are theirs, as surely as if they were bitten by zombies or made into Borg drones, and they will be used against you. This, by the way, is why the Death Cult doesn't care about their own demographics; they just steal yours to replace their own.

Manipulative media is at cross purposes to creative media. Seeking to entertain the audience by meeting their needs in good faith is something people can notice; if it were not so, the American comic industry would not be getting steamrolled by their Japanese counterparts and this increasingly true of animation also, and if it gets truly dangerous in the eyes of the Death Cult then you can count on seeking government intervention against competition.

The same is true with novels. There is a reason that Military SF dominates the SF field, much to the chagrin of OldPub sorts and their dying bookstore business model, and that factor is it. It is that desire to entertain first and foremost that makes the difference, and you will know this is true when the media outlets under Death Cult control shift to move more and more to cut off access to all alternatives they don't control. Propaganda cannot work without constant reinforcement.

Now go back to the major media works out of Hollywood over the last 20+ years. See how many of them are actually propaganda, and you'll see how long this has gone on, and remember that those pushing it hate you, want you dead, want to rape your kids, and they think it's all very funny. Don't give money to people who hate you.