Opinions, Evidence, manipulation : the tools of political seduction.

We can argue about opinions. We can disagree, and argue for our opinions from different perspectives.

That is the mainstream media game, where opinions are so often touted as facts or 'alternative facts', where the deliberate omission of key evidence is a central ploy in their narratives and manipulations. One cannot gain a accurate picture of something if much of the detail is deliberately omitted.

We cannot argue about evidence that exists, that is well documented, that is reliable. It is there.

Which is why the Main Stream Media, and the other sources of propaganda and false/fake news avoids this.

The Invasion of Iraq was and remains a War Crime. Fact.

No mainstream media has reported this fact, alongside the various national and international statutes and ratified treaties that prohibit war and make the prosecution of any war of aggression a criminal offence.

The entire political structure of power depends on the electorate and intelligentsia arguing opinions.

Was Saddam a nasty dictator? 

Yes, he was, albeit his system was much weakened by decades of sanctions. He was not a threat to any State in the West, or anywhere else for that matter, apart from Iraq itself, and then only in terms of being unable or unwilling to help the Iraqi civil Government deal with it's issues.

Was it morally right to remove him?

The only people who had a legal right, and the moral right to remove him were the Iraqi people. They were not afforded that option. Their rights in the matter did not matter to the international community.

Does Blair's opinion that he did the right thing at the time, bearing in mind all available evidence at the time, and the setting of post 9/11 stand as evidence?

Yes, evidence of either his duplicity or his insanity, or both. But it does not get him off the War Crimes charge.

Opinion being touted as evidence in the media, and in politics, as a tactical weapon used against entire populations, to distract, confuse, divide those populations.

"God told me to do it!" George Bush.

The reason why opinion is given such a status, is because most opinions, lacking the evidence, are reflections of personally held belief systems.

There is a lot of emotional attachment to those beliefs.

This means that when a personally held opinion is challenged, the person holding the opinion feels as if it is a personal attack, and the fight or flight sequence kicks in, and it all gets quite nasty very quickly.

So to rile folk, attack their personally held opinions or beliefs. And to get folk to fight each other, attack each sides opinions, using proxies within each community... to make it look like each community is attacking the other. Fake News.

If I want to 'save the world', or work for a healthier political set-up, then  I must study grooming, and I must study my own manipulative behaviours where they occur, and deal with them so that I never manipulate and that will go some way to ensure that I am less likely to manipulated.

Nobody else can do that for me.

This is a task that requires ruthless self honesty and some practice.

A hard road, yet worthy of my best efforts.

It will go some way towards ensuring that trolls, bullies or seducers,  liars, cheats, thieves and political demagogues have less purchase on my conscious and unconscious choices.

I do not watch tripe such as East Enders, Neighbours, X-Factor, Big Brother, The BBC News, etc as I find it deeply uncomfortable to watch dysfunctional behaviour normalised.

I am not 'moved' by puerile movies or triggered into unconscious reactive behaviours by tabloid headlines.

The hero kisses the girl in the midst of a battle.

American troops are scarred by their activities, whilst the deaths of the 'enemy' are relatively consequence free.

Spies are good. etc. it's all dodgy as...

The choice is mine, for I can alter my behaviour far easier than I can attempt to alter another's behaviour.

That is my primary sphere of influence.

Start here and work outwards.

In terms of professional manipulation of people through access to their often unconscious behaviours, I have written in previous blogs about the Behavioural Insights Team, originally attached to the British Government Cabinet, now a private enterprise drawing a steady earner from the public purse for advising Government on psychological tactics to 'nudge' folk into 'better behaviours'....

The assumption behind this 'nudge' is that some people are in a better position or are better 'qualified' to tell others what they should and should not be doing, but becausthose lessor able people are so 'resistant' then they need to be manipulated into behavioural changes. For their own good.

Another area of professional manipulation of electorates is big data, psychographics (psychometrics) and targeting known vulnerabilities to be triggered by 'messaging'.

Big data is a useful tool, and has many applications that will prove to be very valuable in terms of improving people's lives. But, like all tools, it can be used in benign or malign ways.



Brexit and the 2016 US election were new in that a highly sophisticated use of user data across a variety of platforms, apps, media, devices was used in real time to track and locate targets, and then that information about the target was used to designed specific 'messaging' to tap into their vulnerabilities, insecurities, prejudices.

This targeting was aimed at supporters, potential supporters and the other side.

It was coordinated in real time with media outlets and blogs etc with the intention of influencing the electorate, way, way, way beyond any potential that the Russians might have been able to affect. There is plenty of evidence of real time trolling by the media, of issuing reports designed to inflame anger and escalate hatred.

If anything the Russia influence was a distraction, a sleight of hand to hide the real hidden influence. It is basically an advanced high tech form of bullying. A beating that leaves no marks...

Russia aside, none of this would be possible if people in general were less susceptible to being manipulated, if critical thinking and evidence based policy making were core subjects of secondary schooling.

That is one of the key problems the world and all people's face as we slide into 2017.

Kindest regards

Corneilius

"Do what you love, it's Your Gift to Universe"

*If you like this post, if you found the themes resonant, if you agree in part, would you be kind enough to let others know about it? I would really appreciate that. You could drop a comment too, if you felt the urge. Or not. I will moderate contributions, and block any that are abusive. For obvious reasons. Thank you for reading.

The Grooming Culture of Hierarchical Power in Industrial Militarised Cultures.

If I have a personal feeling or sense of identification towards a celebrity, a flag, a state, a company or any other entity that is presented to me for consumption, then I have probably been successfully groomed.

"The grooming (gaslighting) of human vulnerability is one of most vile things any human being can do to another."

These are all internalised values - referring to the fact that the values originate from outside us, and we take them in, we integrate them to such extent, largely through habituation, that they become part of who we sense ourselves to be.

No more Heroes.

No more Saints.

Organised Religion, and Hierarchies of Power, Violence and Wealth are all grooming experts.

They have to be.

Bullies retain dominance by violence or deceit, by creating artificial power disparities, and exploiting them.

Grooming Gangsters.

Brexit and the recent US Elections were both adept well resourced grooming exercises where evidence was routinely ignored on all sides, and people were deliberately triggered on both sides, on all sides, in order to exploit the people's emotional reactions for political advantage.

Gammon vs Traitor, Boomer vs Millennial,  Alpha Male vs Feminazi, Alt-Right vs Leftie, Capitalist vs Communist.... we all fell for it, didn't we? We used these terms in our conversations, and spat them out as petty hatreds that allowed us to vent our frustrations at our political impotence.

Healthy human beings do not do this,  nor do healthy egalitarian cultures do 'celebrity.'

Lady Gaga speaking for Hilary Clinton. Really?

It was a performance, an epic moment of careful grooming.

I thought  and felt that it was utterly appalling. I felt that it was ugly behaviour being normalised because few were willing to call it ugly.

Internalisation.

It might be a difficult thing to do, it was for me, to separate and remove these internalisation's that become part of one's sense of self, but I know this - they are undermining my true self, my emergent self and they are not healthy.

As a good friend put it, "Identity pegged to the pathology of an illusion."

All dehumanisation is based on grooming.  All grooming is dehumanised.

All celebrity likewise.

The existence of the British Monarchy is a prime example of grooming strategies utilised by a power structure.

Take a good look at why the Parliament brought the Monarchy back. (To unite the nation.... to give the ordinary folk, who were in much distress, something to rally behind, to shut them up) or refer back to Magna Carta and the reasons behind the deal made, which both sides abrogated as soon as they could, for very different reasons. Magna Carta had nothing to do with the rights of ordinary humans.

The King as a necessary uniting device.

"For God, King and Country."

How many millions have gone to their deaths, and worse, have participated in slaughter of innocents, with that call reverberating in their minds?

This kind of institutional grooming enables the few to gather the resources of the many, and then claim they are somehow better than then many (because they have hoodwinked them with violence and craft) and so ought hold that wealth to themselves, no matter what the cost to the majority.

The New Age.

New Age Grooming - take the concept of a personal 'spirit animal', for example.

Who claims a slug as theirs, or a rat, or a pigeon or any of the common animals in urban areas? The animals we live with?

Who?

Spirit Animals in animist cultures were about the animals those people lived with, animals they observed, animals the knew well, and the idea of spirit animal as part of their understanding of those animals and themselves in that situation. Totally inappropriate to the urban dweller in the industrial civilisation.

Useless, other than as an entertainment.

And people make lots of money out of it.

"Everything happens for a reason!"

Exploitation. But let's not mention that, let's pretend it is The Universe moving in mysterious ways. God. Learning to live with abuse drives people out of their minds, their hearts, their souls.

It is also a distraction from the issues, personal and communal, that we face.

That distraction is essential to avoid the awareness of exploitation.

Infatuation, 'pulling', seduction, any gift that has an expectation of an outcome, any lobbyists bribe, the ethics of predatory sex, pick up merchants, etc ... all grooming.

Grooming is one of the core dynamics of this 'civilisation' - those who refuse are murdered in their millions.

Grooming is a behaviour pattern known only in hierarchically violent societies.

Grooming gangsters.

The vast majority of pre-conquest cultures that were/are egalitarian hold the autonomy of the person/spirit to be utterly sacred.

They saw and understood that living organisms are all autonomous - they grow their own way.

They understood that they could hunt and eat, but not interfere with their lives apart from that, without causing serious damage to that species and to their own sustainability.

No healthy society hunts prey to extinction, neither do natural predators.

If it does happen there is always a chronic stressor interjecting.

Always.

Most were gardeners, then gatherers, then hunters. In that order, which is logical

You know your world, You see plants and seeds and you assist that to assure food supply, the rest is working with the seasons.

The image of the savage wild hunter, the alpha male 'ug ug'  man competing for position, with females seeking the best competitor is also a culturally dishonest narrative, a mater of grooming, there is no reliable evidence for that assumption.
Grooming is targeting known vulnerabilities to enable exploitation.

Trump excelled in this election in that regard.

So too Nigel Farage.

Jimmy Savile. Cyril Smith. Tens of thousands of clerics.

Media advertising geared to what is called 'aspirational marketing' where the message is if you buy this you will be cool, or if you don't you won't.

Grooming.

The objection to the marketing we see every day in the Tube system is a genuine concern. Is your body 'beach ready'?

Seduction and Education : role reversals in an Institutional setting.

The original meaning of the word seduction is to 'lead away from'... Trump seduced millions. Farage seduced Millions. Blair seduced millions.

In an ironic contrast 'educare' the root of 'Education' means 'to be present at the birth of', as in the role of a good mid wife.

The healthy midwife does not alter the child's psyche. Education, when it is compulsory, totally alters the child's psyche. It is a seduction.

It is a seduction, bur with coercion behind it.  Reward, sanction, test, failure.
Alice Miller noticed that there was no commandment, amongst the ten that Christianity acclaims, which directed folk to honour the child. A serious omission indeed, and this omission is at the heart of the issues we are dealing with.

To honour the child, one must never break the child's boundaries or usurp his or her true self and autonomy.

"All is born of woman, no harm shall come to the children."

The entire structure of hierarchical power rests on the breaking of these lines, those boundaries as a normative.
Austerity cuts are hitting Women and Children across the world, as people are being groomed to accept it as necessary, by dehumanising the vulnerable, lying about the outcomes and dismissing the evidence.

This too is grooming.

ALL WAR IS CHILD ABUSE - all child abuse is war.

Examine the grooming of the British people who did not want to go to war in WWI, or the American people either for that matter.

Examine the grooming in Hitler's Germany, observe it in Japan at the same time.

Colin Powell with a vial of white powder, an authority shouting 'Boogie Man!"

We who are serious about contributing to the welfare of all our contemporaries and all our descendants must get to grips with this, at the personal, institutional and collective levels. Rapidly.
We will only find the truths in this by ruthlessly honest reflection. It cannot be explained in ways that replace it being experienced.

Our attachments and unresolved insecurities will block that.

So don't be too hard or harsh on ourselves, let us take the time to go deep, as we take action.

It is a life's work.

It is good work.

It is love in action.

And so it goes.

Kindest regards

Corneilius

"Do what you love, it's Your Gift to Universe"

*If you like this post, if you found the themes resonant, if you agree in part, would you be kind enough to let others know about it? I would really appreciate that. You could drop a comment too, if you felt the urge. Or not. I will moderate contributions, and block any that are abusive. For obvious reasons. Thank you for reading.