As IF Times

link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanley_Milgram

Why do people in societies behave the way that they do? If you consider the myriad of choices that people must make on any given day, from the trivial to the consequential, it’s logical to assume that most will act in ways that would be most self-serving. That seems logical….but real life experience shows that this is not necessarily the case.

The societies I am referring to aren’t those run by notional despots with all kinds of surveillance and controls on their populace.  We can understand the motives of people in those states.  No, what’s more puzzling is the behavior of people in what are accepted as ‘free’ societies, ones in which citizens are supposed to expect some level of self-determination over their lives.  Aren’t people allowed to freely vote for their rulers here?

A quick survey will reveal that these types of societies are rapidly disappearing. Where once you could say categorically that ‘western’ nations were the ones with explicit freedoms, this is certainly not the case anymore. In Europe, both the UK and France have implemented strict prohibitions on what can be said both in public and online and in the case of the UK, even to thoughts! These kinds of restrictions were once thought to be characteristics of autocratic regimes such as China, Russia or North Korea.  In those surveillance states, citizens are spied upon, their speech is limited and the concept of personal rights is non-existent.

However this form of citizen behavior control has made its way into the toolkits of most heretofore free Western nations.  Canada is the most recent example of this erosion of freedoms.

Recently, the Canadians held an election after a prolonged period in which the previous ruler had destroyed virtually all the sacrosanct Canadian traditions of freedom and ethical behavior on the part of government. Finally, the nation could end their 10 year nightmare.  This nightmare included a collapse of virtually every metric of national performance, the skyrocketing of debt, the explosion of illegal immigrants, housing crises in every city, the proliferation of criminal activity and the crushing of personal freedoms.

But, thanks to the relentless and effective gas-lighting campaign by all media outlets (taxpayer supported) a large part of the population apparently voted to keep the same guys in office; the equivalent of ‘please sir, may I have another’.

Even casting aside the rumors of election manipulation, this kind of behavior is not organic.  It is planned.

Politicians and media may be un-liked by the majority of the population, but they are not guileless. At the very core of their being, they know what a very insightful psychologist named Stanley Milgram discovered over 50 years ago in a series of perhaps surprising studies on human behavior, especially in the field of obedience behavior.  He found that if a subject can be convinced that harmful actions on his part are not his fault, then he will continue to perform such actions and separate himself emotionally from those actions just because an authority figure instructs him to do so.  Thus, even as electric shocks applied to control subjects caused obvious distress, the subjects continued to apply them when instructed to do so.

His experiments were driven by an examination of the treatment of Jews by Germans during the Second World War, but what he discovered was that this behavior was not confined to Germans.  It had implications for all populations.

We saw this implemented on a large scale very recently with the massive Covid-19 psyop in the 2020-2023 period.  Doctors and other professionals continued to press on with harmful vaccinations because of the enormous pressure from peers and ‘authorities’.  What chance did the average citizen have of refuting the tidal wave of mandates?

In the case of the recent Canadian elections, naïve people were convinced that US President Trump imposed a more serious existential threat to the nation than 10 years of an inept Liberal government.  With the aid of virtually all media outlets, the story was effectively sold to a large part of the voters.  The knowledge derived from Stanley Milgram worked as it always has and the same government that had been applying electric shocks to the populace was returned to power.

We can expect to see more of this kind of incongruent behavior as time goes on because those in positions of influence are quite aware of Milgram’s work…even as the public is not.  Policies and laws don’t need to have any merit or make any sense, they just need to be sold. When you observe populations acting against their own existence, someone is harnessing Milgram.

Source: Prof lets students choose own grades for ‘stress reduction’

Image from Daily Mail

Now we’re getting to the root of all the vapidity that has infected society like cold sores after a party at the Playboy mansion.

The concept of education as a means of acquiring objective knowledge and enlightenment has given way to the new modern idea that it’s instead a journey of self awareness, perception and warm fuzzy feelings.   Sort of like intellectual yoga, but instead of the body being bent into unnatural shapes, it’s logic that comes out in pretzel form.

The classic joke goes that when you ask an accountant how much is the sum of 2 plus 2, a ‘good’ accountant would respond, “how much do you want it to be?”.  This idea seems to have been adopted as the model for much of today’s education as indicated in the attached link.  The notion that education is all about stress reduction and perfect rainbows is of course, personal choice.  With that being the case, the necessity of getting an education moves towards obsolescence since self actualization can be had by watching You Tube videos and segments of The View.  The problem is, these people wind up being able to vote; and when they vote in numbers, they impose their shrill and malleable fuzzy worldview upon others.

Unfortunately, the age at which people are the most impressionable are in their formative school years and during this time, the wackiest notions can be introduced as knowledge and this becomes hard wired into the students’ minds, possibly permanently.  Instead of confronting the realities of life in the search for knowledge through critical examination, a made up reality which is palatable to gentler sensibilities is instead pursued. Of course, this is a vicious cycle, because some of the newly enlightened graduates become teachers themselves; rinse and repeat.

We know instinctively that graduates from the schools of wishful thinking are likely to be only questionably competent at real life.  We can imagine the diagnoses offered by doctors educated in such a fashion.  “You are not ill sir, only bad people get ill.” Or  the work of engineers who want to build bridges spanning the Atlantic because, “it’s our right to cross the ocean by car.”  The absurdity of such examples is obvious, but the absurdity of the distortions of history are not.  There is no instant logic check on the absurdity of much of today’s worldviews as the re-writing of past events and the distortions of others attain truth status among the ‘educated’.  In fact, history is probably the most important of topics to be properly vetted because otherwise, as the saying goes, we are doomed to repeat it.

The events of the past few days in Charlottesville Virginia shows just how far down the road we are in that regard.  The entirety of the popular media has portrayed this incident as incitement by an odious racist element.  While this is notionally correct, the resulting conflagration came from bad actors on both sides of the issue.   It stretches credibility when the media characterizes the demonstrations as peaceful when attendees carried protest signs that looked remarkably like automatic weapons, bludgeons, bottles of urine, pepper spray and gas masks. Not exactly the tools of free speech.

The balkanization of society, especially by race, has been an easy target for political opportunists for a long time.  Objective studies of history will reveal this, including recent examples in Germany and China.  History tells us that statues and monuments are the beginning, not the end of cultural upheaval.  Books that aren’t in compliance with accepted thinking are the next target on the path to upending all established institutions.  When the mob supplants the rule of law, history tells us that the results are not good.  A legitimate education is supposed to move society away from those kinds of tragedies.  The kind of education that’s in vogue now only serves to produce more naïve stooges for the cultural mob.  If you listen to some of the Orwellian rhetoric coming from the product of today’s schools, you hear about immutable rights and freedoms…as long as it’s acceptable rights and freedoms.