The children, on the other hand, were systematically turned against their parents and taught to spy on them and report their deviations. The family had become in effect an extension of the Thought Police. It was a device by means of which everyone could be surrounded night and day by informers who knew him intimately. ibid.
And in the general hardening of outlook that set in ... practices which had been long abandoned – imprisonment without trial, the use of war prisoners as slaves, public executions, torture to extract confessions ... and the deportation of whole populations - not only became common again, but were tolerated and even defended by people who considered themselves enlightened and progressive. ibid.
The complex circumstance of our day make it necessary for public authority to intervene more often in social, economic and cultural matters. The Second Vatican Council 1965 at p75
It may seem like the odds are stacked against us, but this is mere illusion. Great efforts have been made to suppress us, and to stifle out true power and potential, in order to control us. We’ve been conditioned into a state of perpetual apathy, distraction, fear and ignorance. We’ve been dumbed-down, brainwashed and misled. There has been an ongoing assault on our perception of reality, on our boundaries of possibility, and on our collective sense of self. Most importantly though, we have been divided. The oppression of the many by the few has only been possible because we’ve been manipulated into fighting amongst each other, over trivial differences such as race, gender, age and religion, to divert us from the fact that we’re all in the same boat – a boat which is rapidly sinking, and will continue to at an ever-increasing rate until we abandon our petty differences and preconceptions of each other, realise that we have the same enemy and start working together to take back responsibility and control of our own lives. John Nada, Wake Up Call
The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country ... We are governed, our minds are molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of. This is a logical result of the way in which our democratic society is organized. Vast numbers of human beings must cooperate in this manner if they are to live together as a smoothly functioning society ... In almost every act of our daily lives, whether in the sphere of politics or business, in our social conduct or our ethical thinking, we are dominated by the relatively small number of persons ... who understand the mental processes and social patterns of the masses. It is they who pull the wires which control the public mind. Edward L Bernays, Propaganda
Propaganda is the executive arm of the invisible government. ibid.
If we understand the mechanism and motives of the group mind, it is now possible to control and regiment the masses according to our will without them knowing it. ibid.
Washington – A massive database that the government will use to monitor every purchase made by every American citizen is a necessary tool in the War on Terror, the Pentagon said yesterday. Fox News
The capacity to assert social and political control over the individual will vastly increase. It will soon be possible to assert almost continuous control over every citizen and to maintain up-to-date files, containing even the most personal details about health and personal behavior of every citizen in addition to the more customary data.
These files will be subject to instantaneous retrieval by the authorities. Power will gravitate into the hands of those who control information. Our existing institutions will be supplanted by pre-crisis management institutions, the task of which will be to identify in advance likely social crises and to develop programs to cope with them.
This will encourage tendencies through the next several decades toward a technetronic era, a dictatorship, leaving even less room for political procedures as we know them. Finally, looking ahead to the end of the century, the possibility of biochemical mind control and genetic tinkering with man, including beings which will function like men and reason with them as well, could give rise to some difficult questions. Zbigniew Brzezinski, Between Two Ages: America’s Role in the Technetronic Era
Society dominated by an elite whose claim to political power would rest on allegedly superior scientific know-how. Unhindered by the restraints of traditional liberal values, this elite would not hesitate to achieve its political ends by using the latest modern techniques for influencing public behavior and keeping society under close surveillance and control. ibid.
Nation state as a fundamental unit of man’s organized life has ceased to be the principal creative force: International banks and multinational corporations are acting and planning in terms that are far in advance of the political concepts of the nation-state. ibid.
The technetronic era involves the gradual appearance of a more controlled society. Such a society would be dominated by an elite, unrestrained by traditional values ... Soon it will be possible to assert almost continuous surveillance over every citizen and maintain up to date complete files contained even the most personal information about the citizen. ibid.
We began to investigate and find out where in the body does the temperature change the most rapidly. We spent over a million dollars in taxpayers’ money. And when the results came back, it was determined that there were two places in the body that were ideal for the microchip: one was just below the fore-line on the forehead; the other place was the hand, the right hand preferred. Carl Sanders, designer of RFID chip
Julian Huxley talked about the coming system of Control where they would definitely use pharmacology and use hypnotic techniques of persuasion on television ... Arthur Kessler as declassified was an agent for them – he worked with the United Nations during the 60s on projects to find ways of lobotomizing the human brain chemically, or through viral or bacterial means – they discussed the means of directing bio-warfare techniques right to the brain itself by injections. He said we can do it through the food; we can do it through the water supply: their only problem was how to actually introduce it. And of course the public was not to know. Alan Watt, interview Alex Jones December 2009
There have been times, living in America of late, when it seemed I was back in the Communist Moscow I left a dozen years ago. Switch to cable TV and reporters breathlessly relay the latest wisdom from the usual unnamed ‘senior administration officials’ ... Everyone, it seems, is on-side and on-message. Just like it used to be when the hammer and sickle flew over the Kremlin. Rupert Cornwell, The Independent
One of the things we’re doing is developing all sorts of technology, not to spy on the Russians, not to spy on the Chinese, not to spy on Osama bin Laden, but to control the American people. We have satellites ... We have a programme known as Echelon, where they listen to every telephone call, every email, record every fax here in the United States ... as we move from freedom to fascism. Dr Stan Monteith, physician, author, radio host
Community Policing is a program introduced under the Clinton administration ... authorised and financed under the Violent Crime Act in ’94. Community policing is a theory that individual rights have broke[n] down the moral fibre of society ... Either you’re an asset or a problem. Niki Raapana, author 2020: Our Global Future
You cannot control what happens to you, but you can control your attitude toward what happens to you, and in that, you will be mastering change rather than allowing it to master you. Brian Tracy
My fault, my failure, is not in the passions I have, but in my lack of control of them. Jack Kerouac
If everything seems under control, you’re just not going fast enough. Mario Andretti
Thinking about what you can’t control only wastes energy, and creates its own enemy. Star Trek: The Next Generation s1e19: Coming of Age, Worf to Wesley
Following the logic of Marcuse’s argument, the new student left set out to attack this system of social control. It was summed in by the slogan, ‘There is a policeman inside all our heads. He must be destroyed’. And that policeman was going to be destroyed by overthrowing the state and the corporations that put it there. Adam Curtis, Century of the Self, BBC 2002
A system driven by and selfishness did not have to lead have to chaos. He proved that there could always be a point of equilibrium in which everyone’s self-interest was perfectly balanced against each other … Selfishness always led to a safer outcome: it was called the Prisoners’ dilemma. Adam Curtis, The Trap: What Happened to Our Dream of Freedom: Fuck You Buddy, BBC 2007
80,739. In the early ’60s R D Laing set up a psychiatric practice in Harley Street in London. He offered radical new treatments for schizophrenia and quickly became a media celebrity. But his research into the causes of schizophrenia convinced him that a much wider range of human problems were caused by the pressure-cooker of family life. Laing decided to investigate how power and control were exercised within the world of normal families. And to do this he would use the techniques of Game Theory. ibid.
Laing produced matrices which showed how just as in the Cold War couples use their everyday actions as strategies to control and manipulate each other. His conclusion was stark. That what was normally seen as acts of kindness and love were in reality weapons used selfishly to exert power and control. From this research, Laing argued that the modern family, far from being a nurturing caring institution, was in reality a dark arena where people played continuous selfish games with each other. ibid.
Laing was radicalised by his findings. He believed that the struggle for power and control that he had uncovered in the family was inextricably linked to the struggle for power and control in the world. In a violent and corrupt society the family had become a machine for controlling people. Laing believed that this was an objective reality revealed by his scientific methods, above all by Game Theory. But these very methods contained within them bleak, paranoid assumptions about what human beings were really like, assumptions borne out of the hostilities of the Cold War. ibid.
The system that was trying to control your mind and destroy your freedom … What Laing and the counter-culture were doing was tearing down Britain’s institutions in the name of freedom. ibid.