On Propaganda: Are You A Cognitive Miser? Or Critical Thinker?

Perhaps we all deem ourselves critical thinkers–above the influence of propaganda. But are we? Really?

The cognitive miser theory suggests that due to limited time, attention, knowledge… and regardless of intelligence, we typically exert less, rather than more cognitive effort & use cognitive shortcuts to make inferences & judgments.

These mental shortcuts, apply efficient methods of approaching problems, but do not necessarily ensure unbiased or optimal conjectures & can often lead us astray.

I found this particular set of mental processes, or heuristics, relevant to our current crisis & the ways by which many, rather–most, seem to be processing information:

• representativeness heuristic assesses similarity between a stimulus/event & standard/process & organizes around the prototype of that category.
  • i.e. Many, believing polio was safely & effectively eradicated by vaccines, presume that Covid-19 will be safely & effectively eradicated by vaccines. However, what they may not know, is that the first roll out of polio vaccines, in 1955, resulted in tragedy–now known as The Cutter Incident: Of 200,000 children vaccinated, 40,000 contracted polio, 200 became paralyzed, 10 died.

• social proof heuristic is common in large, social settings where people tend to copy the actions of others–often presuming others are more knowledgeable.
  • i.e. If the majority of one’s peers received the shot, with no immediate, adverse reactions, one may presume, they too will be fine. What many don’t know is that in earlier animal trials of mRNA vaccines, they initially appeared to thrive. It was not until months later, when exposed to the virus in the wild, it was revealed vaccines had the opposite of the desired effect. The animals developed enhanced susceptibility to disease (ADE) & died. In spite of pleas to test for ADE prior to mass distribution, no such tests were conducted. A published study by the NIH found this risk has in fact been obscured from recipients, “obviating truly informed consent.”

• familiarity heuristic is applied to various situations in which individuals assume that the circumstances underlying the past behavior still hold true for the present situation and that the past behavior thus can be correctly applied to the new situation.
  • i.e. Basing the safety of an, unapproved, experimental shot on previously received FDA approved vaccine.

So are we indeed, critical thinkers? Or might our decisions be insidiously orchestrated by propaganda?

To answer, let’s begin by defining the terminology:

Critical thinking:

“The analysis of facts to form a judgment […] the rational, skeptical, unbiased analysis, or evaluation of factual evidence.”

—Wikipedia

Is our analysis rational? Or emotional?

Do we have all of the facts?

How are we defining “facts”?

Where are these facts coming from? Are they biased? Trustworthy?

In THE MANUFACTURING OF CONSENT: THE POLITICAL ECONOMY OF THE MASS MEDIA, Edward Herman & Noam Chomsky highlight the inherent conflict of interest created by the ways in which corporate media is structured (e.g. through advertising, concentration of media ownership or government sourcing). This structure creates and therefore acts as propaganda for anti-democratic elements. It is therefore vital, that as we inform ourselves we consider:

• Ownership
• The medium’s sources of funding
• Sourcing of the news 
• Flak: efforts to discredit organizations or individuals who disagree with or cast doubt on the prevailing assumptions 

Might there be an agenda here?

• There were 1,502 pharmaceutical lobbyists in 2020, 63.58% of whom were former government employees.
• The top pharmaceutical lobbyist in 2020 was the Pharmaceutical Research & Manufacturers of America (PhRMA), which spent $25.9 million, making them the third top lobbying spender overall.
• The Wellcome Trust is a top funder of health research globally and has been a major player in the COVID-19 pandemic, even though it’s invested heavily in companies making COVID-19 treatments.

—The Defender, Big Pharma’s Big Spending on Lobbying Netted Big Contracts in 2020, 4/7/21

A review of the meetings past, present & planned at The World Economic Forum plainly emphasize a “fusion of [gene sequencing, nanotechnology, quantum computing…] technologies & their interaction across physical, digital & biological domains.”:

A catalyst was needed to reset.

“The pandemic represents a rare, but narrow window of opportunity.”

—Klaus Schwab, Founder of The World Economic Forum

MEETINGS & PUBLISHINGS AT/FROM THE WORLD ECONOMIC FORUM

• 2014: The Reshaping of the World: Consequences for Society, Politics & Business

• 2015: WEF publishes “We Need to Press Restart on the Global Economy”

• 2016: How to Reboot the Global Economy

• 2017: Publishes “Our World Needs a Reset in How We Operate”

• 2018-2019: WEF, Pharma, China, Johns Hopkins, CIA, Media & Gates simulate fake pandemics (Event 201) which insist on a merging of “public-private cooperation.”

Segment 4 of Event 201 focuses on the manipulation & control of public opinion.

In his 2018 book, SHAPING THE FOURTH INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION, Schwab ominously asserts:

“We must stop looking at technology as a wholly exogenous force.”

But I digress…

Where were we? Ah yes–defining terminology to ascertain if we are indeed critical thinkers.

Propaganda:

“Communication that is primarily used to influence an audience and further an agenda, which may not be objective and may be selectively presenting facts in order to encourage a particular synthesis or perception, or using loaded language in order to produce an emotional rather than a rational response to the information that is being presented.“

—Wikipedia

Commensurate with Herman & Chomsky’s assertions regarding mass media’s conflicts of interest & its role in creating anti democratic propaganda, Edward Bernays states:

“Professionally, [public relations] activities are planned and executed by trained practitioners in accordance with scientific principles, based on the findings of social scientists. Their dispassionate approach and methods may be likened to those of the engineering professions which stem from the physical sciences.”

The grave threat of engineered consent in democracy is emphasized in THE CONSENT OF THE GOVERNED, by John Livingston & Robert Thompson:

“Under modern conditions of political advertising and manipulation, it has become possible to talk of the engineering of consent by an elite of experts and professional politicians. Consent that is thus engineered is difficult to distinguish in any fundamental way from the consent that supports modern totalitarian governments.“

Let’s consider a few, of the many tenets of the propaganda ubiquitous in the world today:

• Appeal to the emotions:
  • i.e. fear of the virus &/or appealing to virtue–a yearning to be a good, upstanding citizen–performing a “patriotic duty.”
• Repetitive slogans:
  • i.e. “safe & effective”
• Controlled presentation of a single sided argument–dismissing discourse
• Disparaging of certain groups
  • i.e. dismissingly calling questioners “anti-vaxxers” “conspiracy theorists” guilty of the “Dunning Kuger Effect.”
• Use of psuedo-science
  • i.e. PCR tests prone to generating inordinately high number of false positive are now being run on fewer cycles, cleverly increasing the efficacy rates of the shots.
  • i.e. CDC erroneously attributing an exorbitant number of deaths to Covid: https://youtu.be/7x-biB_JrcU
• psychological warfare intended to reduce the opponents morale

Below is a miniscule sampling of the propaganda that has, for a number of what should be obvious reasons, left me aghast:

the engineer of consent must create news. News is not an inanimate thing. It is the overt act that makes news, and news in turn shapes the attitudes and actions of people… The developing of events and circumstances that are not routine is one of the basic functions of the engineer of consent… The imaginatively managed event can compete successfully with other events for attention. Newsworthy events, involving people, usually do not happen by accident. They are planned deliberately to accomplish a purpose, to influence our ideas and actions.”

—Edward Bernays

Edward Bernays’ extraordinary influence on identity, culture, politics, economics & of course, psychology on the world, cannot be overstated. Bernays was named one of the 100 most influential Americans of the 20th century by Life Magazine, for, amongst other things, transforming the world from individuals whose purchases were based on need, to consumers whose base desires were preyed upon to maintain an order beneficial to “the engineers of consent.”

Some of Bernays’ clients included: President Coolidge; President Hoover; the CIA; the military; tobacco industry… His work consisted of manipulating the masses to, for instance, smoke. For the most part, women did not smoke until Bernays staged an appearance of actresses & feminists from The Women’s Party to join an Easter Parade, puffing away–appealing to women’s suppressed desires by referring to cigarettes as “Torches of Freedom.” He also enlisted the assistance of medical experts to promote smoking, in lieu of sweets, & pushed the ideal of thinness throughout the media. The campaign was more successful than anyone imagined & for years, Bernays attempted to get his own wife to quit.

Bernays also successfully assisted The CIA in a covert military coup d’état code-named Operation PBSuccess to remove the democratically elected President Jacobo Árbenz & replace him with the military dictator Carlos Castill Armas. I would do an injustice in attempting to succinctly relay the monumental transition in society from the self as an individual, to the self, as consumer Bernays is responsible for. His insidious implementation of psychoanalysis created an emotional bond, between individuals & corporations & continues to be used by governments & institutions to this day. Hence, the masses staunch, naive devotion to Pharma & medical authorities.

Perhaps my perspective is atypical. What to me, appears egregiously blatant, text book propaganda, has proven to be far less obvious to the masses. I have been stupefied–bearing witness to the extreme poverty of judgement as the masses succumb to propaganda’s nefarious influence.

In my presentation of an NIH study regarding the suppression of risks from shots, an acquaintance refused to consider or weigh the implications of those risks. Instead, he sent me this:

The complete dismissal of hard facts is a tragic & dangerous consequence of propaganda.

“Exposure to true information does not matter anymore. The facts mean nothing to him. Even if I show him information with authentic proof, with documents, with pictures–even if I take him by force to the Soviet Union & show him concentration camps, he will refuse to believe it.”

—Yuri Bezmenov, former KGB defector warning America of the 4 steps towards creating a totalitarian regime

Again I ask, are you a critical thinker? Or cognitive miser?

Questions a Critical Thinker Might Ponder:

• Why were PCR tests used–in spite of the awareness of extraordinarily high false positives? And why now, after the rollout of the shots, have cycles been reduced–thereby fraudulently increasing the efficacy of shots?
  • Nobel Prize Winning inventor of the PCR test Kary Mullis, who died in 2019, asserted the test should not be used for detecting viruses.
  • An administrative stay of action was filed urging all positive test results be verified using gold-standard DNA sequencing.
• Why have safer alternatives like Nobel Prize Winning Ivermectin, or Hydroxychloroquine been suppressed?
  • The campaign to kill the competition wound up being based on a fraudulent study written by a Sci-Fi writer & porn star!
  • Tragic coincidence: the 2nd largest hydroxychloroquine factory in the world exploded, December 2020.
  • Why such fierce censorship of Ivermectin?

• Why are world renown scientists, medical professionals, researchers & all who raise questions, concerns or voice dissension being censored & silenced? Sharing peer reviewed publications, government documents, & (in my case a Pfizer study) have gone against “community standards” & been deceptively labelled “false.”
• Is this a democracy?
• Why are mandates being imposed for work, school & soon travel, for unapproved, risky, medical intervention?
• Why did FB hire former CDC director, Richard E. Besser to run their Orwellian Ministry of Truth (AKA factcheck.org) ? https://greatgameindia.com/facebook-factcheck-funded-vaccine-lobby/
  • Why are ~15% of the organization’s assets J&J stock?
• Why are the least vulnerable–children, being subjected, when immunologists all around the world insist it is unnecessary & presents more risk than benefit?
• Why are those who have already contracted the virus being subjected, when immunologists insist, contrary to the assertions of the propaganda machine, that natural immunity is greater & longer lasting than inoculation? Why introduce unnecessary risk?
• Why are the most credentialed, world renown scientists not given a public forum?

I can go on, but you get the drift. I hope & pray.

The ignorance of some, is a grave threat to freedom & democracy for us all.

Now tell me, are you a critical thinker? Or cognitive miser?