Action-as-propaganda can reinforce an oddly reassuring feeling of certainty, helping to bend reality into line with a distorted and propagandistic image of the world. It also distorts our perceptions of this reality so that the gap between public perception and official propaganda is further diminished.

Tags: society, psychology, propaganda on 2008-07-15 -All Annotations (2) -About

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New Interest in Vertical Farms for Urban Areas

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The Science of Evil: The Insider Wannabes

Tags: pathocracy, ponerology, society on 2008-07-10 -All Annotations (0) -About

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Ponerology: The Science of Evil: Psychopathic Bosses Get Promoted

In a Reuters article Bad bosses get promoted, not punished?: we learn that "In the study to be presented at a conference on management this weekend, almost two-thirds of the 240 participants in an online survey said the local workplace tyrant was either never censured or was promoted for domineering ways."

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The Science of Evil: Good Times, Bad Times 1: The Hysteroidal Cycle

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Girls are as competitive as boys – just more subtle - being-human

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How Your Brain Makes Political Decisions

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The Gospel of Consumption | Orion magazine

Tags: society, capitalism, corporations, resources on 2008-07-06 and saved by10 people -All Annotations (0) -About

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Since much of what industry produced was no longer aimed at satisfying human physical needs, a four-hour workday, he claimed, was necessary to prevent society from becoming disastrously materialistic. “By not shortening the working day when all the wood is in,” he suggested, the profit motive becomes “both the creator and satisfier of spiritual needs.” For when the profit motive can turn nowhere else, “it wraps our soap in pretty boxes and tries to convince us that that is solace to our souls.”
Business leaders were less than enthusiastic about the prospect of a society no longer centered on the production of goods. For them, the new “labor-saving” machinery presented not a vision of liberation but a threat to their position at the center of power
According to Edward Bernays, one of the founders of the field of public relations and a principal architect of the American Way, the choices available in the polling booth are akin to those at the department store; both should consist of a limited set of offerings that are carefully determined by what Bernays called an “invisible government” of public-relations experts and advertisers working on behalf of business leaders. Bernays claimed that in a “democratic society” we are and should be “governed, our minds . . . molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of.”
one of the leading legal theorists in the United States, federal judge Richard Posner, declared that “representative democracy . . . involves a division between rulers and ruled,” with the former being “a governing class,” and the rest of us exercising a form of “consumer sovereignty” in the political sphere with “the power not to buy a particular product, a power to choose though not to create.”
Huntington warns against an “excess of democracy,” declaring that “a democratic political system usually requires some measure of apathy and noninvolvement on the part of some individuals and groups.” Huntington notes that “marginal social groups, as in the case of the blacks, are now becoming full participants in the political system” and thus present the “danger of overloading the political system” and undermining its authority.
As those workers well understood, any meaningful democracy requires citizens who are empowered to create and re-create their government, rather than a mass of marginalized voters who merely choose from what is offered by an “invisible” government. Citizenship requires a commitment of time and attention, a commitment people cannot make if they are lost to themselves in an ever-accelerating cycle of work and consumption.

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Opinion: Surveillance doesn’t prevent criminal activity | watched, behave, tend : Clovis News Journal

People who are closely watched by authorities tend to avoid anything that might create attention, even if they are doing nothing wrong. They tend to watch what they say. It’s quite nervewracking, actually, to be watched by someone with the authority to arrest or roust you.

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The Making of a Zombie Culture

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Studies in Psychopathy

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The development of human personality and its capacity for proper thinking and accurate comprehension of reality unfortunately demands overcoming comfortable laziness and applying the efforts of work and science under conditions different from those under which we have been raised, which is often linked to a certain amount of risk.
The most valuable advice a ponerologist can offer under such circumstances is for a society to avail itself of the assistance of modern science, taking particular advantage of data remaining from the last great increase of hysteria in Europe.
Let us therefore bring this process of the origin of pathocracy closer, methodically isolating it from other phenomena we can recognize as being conditional or even accompanying.
Schizoid characters aim to impose their own conceptual world upon other people or social groups, using relatively controlled pathological egotism and the exceptional tenacity derived from their persistent nature.
Societal interpretation of such activities is broken down into the main trifurcations, engendering divisiveness and conflict.
Schizoidia has thus played an essential role as one of the factors in the genesis of the evil threatening our contemporary world. Practicing psychotherapy upon the world will therefore demand that the results of such evil be eliminated as skillfully as possible.
It also appears that this process tends to intensify with time; initial activities are undertaken by persons with milder characteropathic features, who are easily able to hide their aberrations from others. Paranoid individuals thereupon become principally active. Toward the end of the process, an individual with frontal characteropathy and the highest degree of pathological egotism can easily take over leadership.
They therefore insinuate themselves into a movement preaching revolution and war with that unfair world so foreign to them.
Thus they climb up the organizational ladder, gain influence, and almost involuntarily bend the contents of the entire group to their own way of experiencing reality and to the goals derived from their deviant nature.
Within this system, the common man is blamed for not having been born a psychopath, and is considered good for nothing except hard work, fighting and dying to protect a system of government he can neither sufficiently comprehend nor ever consider to be his own.
The rejected majority and the very forces which naively created such power start mobilizing against the block. Ruthless confrontation with these forces becomes the only way to safeguard the long-term survival of the pathological authority.
At this point, using the name of the original ideology to designate this phenomenon is meaningless and becomes an error rendering its comprehension more difficult.

Chellis Glendinning: Every Move You Make

“Inverted totalitarianism,” as he calls it in his recent Democracy Incorporated, “lies in wielding total power without appearing to, without establishing concentration camps, or enforcing ideological uniformity, or forcibly suppressing dissident elements so long as they remain ineffectual.” To Wolin, such a form of political power makes the United States “the showcase of how democracy can be managed without appearing to be suppressed.”

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