society

MoonBlog 6.6 the peacemaker

This society, your society, is fake. It is made up, it is constructed. There is nothing to adhere to or join, or need to do.
Suppose someone once said, let’s play tic-tac-toe, because they felt like it. No particular reason, no grand scheme of contemplation and planning, just a simple game of tic-tac-toe.

And people liked playing tic-tac-toe, and people enjoyed watching others playing tic-tac-toe. Some people even starting giving food and shelter or monies to those players of tic-tac-toe.

Some became really good at playing tic-tac-toe and they invented tournaments and trainingcamps and prizes, and medals en achievements, levels and difficulties.

And since in this society, that slowly grew it always rained at 3 in the afternoon, every day at 3 it rained. And someone said, let’s play tic-tac-toe at 7 in the morning to begin with, but let’s never play when it rains.

Slowly over time, people started playing tic-tac-toe in the earliest of the days, and never at 3, we can control how we experience our soceity, so let’s make rules like these, because they make sense and are logical. At some point in time it even became forbidden to play tic-tac-toe when it rained. It became illegal.

And you, me, we all are law abiding citizens, we can not think for ourselves so we not only obeyed the rules but started telling others to abide by this rule too. We started getting up really early in the morning to start playing tic-tac-toe and felt a sense of accomplishment from doing so, from pushing ourselves to get up this early, and be all ready, well dressed, eaten, traveled to the location for playing tic-tac-toe at the earliest at 7 in the morning.

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This is such pervasive conditioning, it became our current belief system

The Century of the Self

This series is about how those in power have used Freud’s theories to try and control the dangerous crowd in an age of mass democracy. Sigmund Freud, the founder of psychoanalysis, changed the perception of the human mind and its workings profoundly.

His influence on the 20th century is widely regarded as massive. The documentary describes the impact of Freud’s theories on the perception of the human mind, and the ways public relations agencies and politicians have used this during the last 100 years for their engineering of consent. Among the main characters are Freud himself and his nephew Edward Bernays, who was the first to use psychological techniques in advertising. He is often seen as the father of the public relations industry.

Freud’s daughter Anna Freud, a pioneer of child psychology, is mentioned in the second part, as well as Wilhelm Reich, one of the main opponents of Freud’s theories. Along these general themes, The Century of the Self asks deeper questions about the roots and methods of modern consumerism, representative democracy and its implications. It also questions the modern way we see ourselves, the attitude to fashion and superficiality.

Happiness Machines. Part one documents the story of the relationship between Sigmund Freud and his American nephew, Edward Bernays who invented Public Relations in the 1920s, being the first person to take Freud’s ideas to manipulate the masses.


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