Senso-Linguistic Infiltration Programs (SLIP)
A belief commonly accepted is that if you are reasonably well informed and educated it is easy to fend off propaganda-attacks. On the contrary, it seems that if you cannot read you are less vulnerable to propaganda and intellectuals are the best targets of Perception Management, not only for their predictable worldviews but due to their implanted feeling of being immune. To read means to decode, to be infected by a virus. Classic terminology distinguishes two fronts for the battle for human minds: the First Front of mass indoctrination through censorship and propaganda and a Second Front of individual mind control. Huge interest is placed on creating an in-formed opinion, to form public opinion as a whole by a hypnotic web of "facts" with no apparent correspondence to reality. A routine practiced by illusionists and Perception Management cognitive engineers. Psychological Consolidation Activities by Committees on Public Information target the population in order to achieve a desired behavior which supports their objectives.
In covert or Subversive Propaganda and Black Operations the message is made believable by the fact that it appears to be coming from within the target population itself. Deep Propaganda and Subpropaganda are aimed at habits, customs, the definition of good and bad and the standards and norms of life.
Normative-Empathetic Warfare involves parsing value schemata of the target and creating situations where the value schemata are biased in favor of an action leading to the control of the victim or placing it in a restricted position. Similarly a trap is a device that by design hides its function. The non-lethal weapon industry focuses on low intensity conflict/war on nations and population segments in PSYCOP (Military Psychological Operation Unit) experiments of behavior modification.
The transcendence of the human condition in stylized relations creates a desire to happily make sacrifices for work, war and enforced leisure in exchange for a Weltanschauung, luring the bedazzled into the graceful existence of slavery, the self-centered freedom of marionettes, and the eloquence of automatons.
Social Styling
Creating anxiety and fear, inducing states of high suggestibility and controlling relationships to assure loyalty and obedience are standard management techniques of the social body. Desensitization through language abuse, propaganda and junk-information, as well as the elimination of individual ideas through repetition of chants and phrases or the inducement of dependence by introducing sports, games or TV shows with obscure rules, are part of a large set of social styling methods.
Pumping up disorientation, susceptibility to emotional arousal is increased by depriving the nervous system through special diets of junk-food, prolonging mental and physical activity and withholding rest and sleep. False intimacy is created through emotionalism and the need to belong is exploited while suppressing resistance through peer pressure. Affirmation of lifestyle by denouncing other values and beliefs combined with encouraging blind acceptance and rejection of logic is achieved through complex incomprehensible doctrine.
Strategies of influence include removing individuality by demanding conformity to dress codes and accomplishing automatic acceptance of beliefs by discouraging questions. Loss of ability to evaluate logically is achieved by preventing privacy and destroying the ability to evaluate information, personal reactions, and body functions in relation to passage of time. The destruction of individuality is advanced through confession of personal weaknesses while creating a false sense of identity by pointing to the shortcomings of others.
Other methods include composing child-like obedience by orchestrating child-like behavior and disinhibition, while inducing regression and disorientation by soliciting agreement to seemingly simple rules which regulate lifestyle; promoting acceptance of authority by promising advancement and power while maintaining confusion by alternately rewarding and punishing similar actions. Encouraging bunkering in and dumbing down through induced loss of reality by separation from communal life and rational references, while the spectacle is designed to give the illusion of sociability, public interaction, and of choice.
Spell Checking
The iconography of the old media-underground has become mainstream, selling soft drinks and accessories, using artists as test pilots for the newer media and as suppliers of public relation and digital manipulation. The accelerating co-opting of cultural expression creates a market for the art of vanishing, and strategies dealing with this phenomenon of ever faster appropriation of artistic expression by corporate business involve tactical invisibility and immersion in the age of biocybernetic self-reproduction. The skilful traveler leaves no traces, through the recombination of signs out of the pink noise of the semiotic ghosts in search of a body. The nets are used by cultural activists as meta-data tools according to a new artistic tradition of inspired interpretation of data within a panopticon of commodified worldviews. Guerrilla semiotics replaces the supposed act of creation with recombinant cultural synthesis of the techno-voodoo telememetic environment.
When on high the heaven had not been named,
Firm ground below had not been called by name,
Naught but primordial Apsu, their begetter,
And Mummu-Tiamat, she who bore them all,
Their waters commingling as a single body;
Enuma Elish, 2000 BC
State Control
Automatic activities like taking a shower or driving a car allow daydreaming and favor states of hyper suggestibility. Drifting from an alert state into a different level of consciousness, brain activity shifts as these states change. Everyone goes through altered states of consciousness at least twice a day - when you awaken and when you go to sleep. Being aware of things going on around you doesn't mean you're not hypnotized or subject to hypno politics. Even when in hypnosis, you remain conscious of everything that is going on. Experiencing this light or medium hypnotic state is generally more effective than deep level hypnosis for purposes of behavior and habit control. Becoming more conditioned to the hypnotic state through successive sessions, the subject will continue to go deeper into trance each time.
Particular states of selective hyper suggestibility are brought about by the use of a combination of relaxation and fixation, directing attention to imagined activity, dialogue, or event resulting in literal interpretation of speech and severe reduction of conscious thought.
Structural Delusion
Many research documents make it clear that there is evidence of tendencies to misperceive random data and see patterns where there are none. The misinterpretation of incomplete or unrepresentative data often leads to extra attention for confirmatory data while drawing conclusions without attending to or seeking out conflicting data. Biased evaluations of ambiguous or inconsistent data tend to be uncritical of supportive data and very critical of contrary data.
There is a conflict between what is true and what is valid, if the basis is false and the conclusion is therefore false the argument is still valid. In order to tell whether an argument is valid, there is no need to know whether the statement and conclusion are true and it is not even required that they are true. Validity is dependent on what is possibly the case, rather than what is actually the case. Equivocal negations are examples of valid arguments that present a possible event, although not the actual event, and in this sense they are logical. Consequently they are also examples of rational communication because they follow the constraints of valid logical arguments. Illusory communication can be said to be rational insofar as effective deceptive communication works like an effective valid logical argument. Self-deception may not always be a flaw and may even be desired at times. Becoming too brutally honest and objective about abilities and about life situations in general might debilitate by depression. A self-serving bias has been demonstrated countless times, a majority believes that they are smarter and better looking than average; most drivers believe themselves more skilled than the average driver; most college students believe they will outlive their predicted age by 10 years, and so on. Cognitive illusions are not so much about what one doesn?t know but what one believes to know which is not so. Many types and variations of such structural mistakes of judgment have been analyzed, showing a rich spectrum of apparently irresistible tendencies for errors of reason. Cognitive illusions come in many flavors and beyond the self-serving and overconfidence bias there is a diversity of effects like anchoring, probability blindness or conjunctive and disjunctive fallacies. Other delusions are based on ease of representation, availability and so-called magical thinking, where even when one knows something is not true, still believes that it is.
Symbolic Order
A technology such as writing, although external to ourselves, supplements and extends our internal brain memory system. Like a Shadow out of Time, the equivalence of dreams and books becomes apparent in the long tradition of dreambooks. According to ancient traditions a cosmos is contained in the alphabet and letters are pictures of supernatural realities and universal archetypes in complex non-linear relationships, not just mere abstract signs or phonemes. Canonical texts in this tradition were written as hypertext with various layers of meaning and corresponding ideographic visualization methods, many of them linking stars and script and abstract entities. The book of law for the Data Body is a living Book of the Dead, a silicon necronomicon of digital demons, a Julia-set picture of irrational numbers and self-fulfilling prophecies on liquid paper. Intelligent libraries of autopoietic grimoires, self-modifying databases and intelligent software entities in hieroglyphic codices are trained to detect and react to patterns of activity sets on a wired planet. Anything transferred in symbolic exchange is the vehicle of meaning and information just as cults and believe systems have always functioned as informational networks and have been media itself.
Synchronous Isopraxis
Human tendencies to imitate clothing styles and to pick up the nonverbal mannerisms of others are rooted in paleocircuits of the reptilian brain. Paleocircuits are subcortical nerve nets and pathways which link bodily arousal centers, emotion centers and motor areas of the forebrain and midbrain, with muscles for the body movements required by nonverbal signs. Imitation is a deep, reptilian principle of mimicry, i.e., of copying, emulating, or aping a behavior, gesture or accessories including impulsive tendencies to, e.g., clap as audience members nearby applaud. Researchers isolated specific "cute" features in the face, establishing the existence of an infantile cuteness schema and a set of features and proportions attractive both in male and female.
Isopraxis is behavior where people dress like their colleagues and adopt the beliefs, customs, and mannerisms of the people they admire or feel inferior too. Appearing, behaving, and acting the same way makes it easier to be accepted, looking alike suggests same views and feels safe. The highly ritualized and time-based practice of coded outfit and appearance is not only a social synchronization device but also a system of classification and identification of complex social strata and hierarchical uniformities. The element of choice appears to be mostly an illusion but as a dynamic instrument of control it is superior to passive cattle branding methods because patterns are internalized in the subjects. In contrast to its cheerful image, fashion is not only a very effective multilevel system of group cohesion but even more so an efficient tool of social disciplinary action.
Special Agents at USFBI report that they have found that getting people to breathe at the same rate, blink at the same rate, head nod, and do other gestures at the same time is very effective in establishing deep communication. This creates rapport by behavior feedback subtly matching non-verbal communication, especially voice patterns and eye contact patterns. Facial movements provide sufficient peripheral information to drive emotional experience. The facial feedback hypothesis proposes that facial expression (smiling, frowning etc.) affects emotional expression and behavior, smiling produces a weak feeling of happiness.
EEG-research proved a resonance-like rapport of brain waves upon external optical or acoustic stimulation. The brain's own frequencies tune in with the frequencies of the stimulus, an effect called "photic driving" or "frequency following response" (FFR). The frequency bands from 0.1 ? 40 Hz are associated with psycho-physical states (Gamma, Beta, Alpha, Theta and Delta) although these categories cannot cover the complex spectrum of wave activities of the brain, and only offer a vague outline of psycho-physical effects.
In remote areas of south-east Asia, certain species of firefly flash rhythmically in unison. The emergent synchrony of these fireflies which can number in the thousands differs markedly from many other forms of apparent synchronization in nature where perceived synchrony in these cases highlights the tendency of human observers to impose rhythmic patterns. After all, human behaviors are often characterized by synchronization and rhythm.
Synthetic Cults
Social disorganization develops crisis cults or projective systems resulting from culture strains. These cults and systems serve the function of self-identification of its adherents to a certain set of values. The syncretism within those cults relates to the diversity of the origins of cult elements, belief elements and artifacts gathered from religions, folklore and spiritism, and is actualized through rituals in the frame of postideological techno-cracy.
Researchers on the field of mind control suggest that the UFO-abduction phenomenon is staged by the intelligence community as a cover for their illegal experiments. Abductees claim that they were transported to an underground facility. Almost every federal agency or military institution has several secret underground facilities all over the USA, some of them so secret, that there are only rumors about their existence. Otherworldly journeys to strange underground places are common in UFO abductions and the question arises if the abductees did undergo hypnoprogramming during the kidnapping. The Cult Abuse Network?s definition of what is a destructive cult closely matches the practices of domestic human testing of involuntary subjects: "A destructive cult is a closed system whose followers have been unethically and deceptively recruited through the use of manipulative techniques of thought reform or mind control. The system is imposed without the informed consent of the recruit and is designed to alter personality and behavior."
Synthetic Worlds
A broad spectrum of scientific disciplines is located at this interface of computer simulation and the visualization of information in dataspace. The interaction with complex technical systems or complex data in many cases requires leaving the two-dimensional on-screen menus behind to navigate in spatial structures. The synthetic representation of the world is a system of game rules and symbols for codified perception. Especially those research areas concerned with game theory, where complex worlds are outlined by game rules, play an increasingly significant role. Scientific and military research is focusing on the creation of virtual worlds and the highly realistic simulation of complex, dynamic processes in multi-dimensional space. Major development efforts have been placed in Synthetic Theater of War (STOW) capabilities, a military set of hardware and software products that comprise Synthetic Battlefield Environments (SBE). Simulations are not just for joint training in tactically significant environments but interfaced with real C4I battlefields through High Speed Data Networks.
Perception Analysis of military operation often reveals the problem of mirror imaging by overlaying the own value set, culture and thought processes on persons or groups to asses or anticipate. Therefore applications of virtual reality schemes employing neural networking and genetic coding to provide avatars that act as opponents have been introduced. In these adaptive virtual environments avatars assume the personality, culture, religion, and education of the opponent. The virtual actors learn and get smarter with time and experience and this representation of the opponent gets more difficult to beat with the passage of time in these adaptive sessions.
But the entertainment industry is following suit in creating 3D visualization thus further gaining economic significance of Synthetic Worlds. Today, through the mass production of powerful multimedia computers for a broad market and the computer game industry, many results of this research and development can be found in generally available programs. A new dimension of digital space is evolving in software-generated architectural structures, intelligent software environments, and in the algorithmic spawning of the software itself.