The founders of the United States believed that power corrupts, so they designed a governmental system that would spread rather than concentrate power. This blog deals with the nature of the power that corrupts.
Most will probably remember the episode where the Jedi Obi-Wan Kenobi did a "Jedi mind trick", using the words "these are not the droids you are looking for" when he was helping the Rebels (YouTube).
That popular sci-fi movie illustrated the hypothesis that memes in memory can be changed.
As this blog has illustrated with science fact, not fiction, there is a growing change in direction, within scientific circles, a change in direction that is heading toward the conclusion that toxins of power can corrupt the pattern of memes even while they are in memory.
The following video has a similar theme, i.e., that the government has done a mind trick on vast numbers of people by using the MOMCOM media to spread propaganda.
The individual being interviewed in the video below is an explosives expert (the attached videos after the first are not recommended).
Specifically he is an expert who has experience working for the famous Controlled Demolition, Inc., a company that does controlled demolition of large structures:
Here is a video of a Nebraska nuclear power plant in trouble due to flooding, a situation that was originally guarded to keep most people unaware:
The powers that be shut down that video, so here is another one:
That is, they can change into a different structure, a variant meme, while still in memory, a notion that is resisted by some scientists.
In those posts we specifically advanced the notion that the toxins of power alone could trigger such a morph.
Then in the post The Toxic Bridge To Everywhere, we added another specific mechanism whereby the toxins of power could trigger such a morph by working within an already existing structure in the subconscious Amygdala.
A new study supports such a notion, and like this series, challenges an existing theory:
The team's study challenges the theory that memories cannot be modified once they are stored in the brain.
(Science Daily). The study shows how certain drugs can cause memory morphs by unlinking certain threads of memory.
But at another level, in another context, the realm of marketing, certain researchers in that discipline are quite bold to declare that memory in the brain can be morphed:
A group of US marketing researchers claim that brand owners can make their customers believe they had a better experience of a product or service than they really did by bombarding them with positive messages after the event. Advocates of the technique, known as "memory morphing", claim it can be used to improve customers' perceptions of products and encourage them to repeat their purchases and recommend brands to friends.
"When asked, many consumers insist that they rely primarily on their own first-hand experience with products – not advertising – in making purchasing decisions. Yet, clearly, advertising can strongly alter whatconsumers remember about their past, and thus influence their behaviours," he writes in his book, How Customers Think. He says that memories are malleable, changing every time they come to mind, and that brands can use this to their advantage. "What consumers recall about prior product or shopping experiences will differ from their actual experiences if marketers refer to those past experiences in positive ways," he continues.
(Memory Morphing in Advertising, cf. PDF, emphasis added). Actually, this realm is described elsewhere as a gigantic business which has itself morphed from product marketing into the political arena known as marketing "political products".
The world renowned linguist Noam Chomsky points out that it is common practice to market politicians in a manner not at all unlike the advertising of a commercial product:
And one of the striking features of the modern period is the institutionalization of that process, so that we now have huge industries deceiving the public — and they're very conscious about it, the public relations industry. Interestingly, this developed in the freest countries — in Britain and the US—roughly around time of WWI, when it was recognized that enough freedom had been won that people could no longer be controlled by force. So modes of deception and manipulation had to be developed in order to keep them under control.
And by now these are huge industries. They not only dominate marketing of commodities, but they also control the political system. As anyone who watches a US election knows, it's marketing. It's the same techniques that are used to market toothpaste.
(Noam Chomsky, emphasis added). It is the specific intent of an election team to convince you, during a re-election campaign, that your experience with the candidate was better than you thought it was.
That is just like the marketers who seek to morph your memory about the use of a commodity, a product you have been using, into a better recollection than what you actually experienced ("brand owners can make their customers believe they had a better experience of a product or service than they really did", see "Memory Morphing in Advertising" link above) .
The event alluded to above, this "changing of the mind", requires a morph of the type we have been discussing in this series, i.e., the corruption of memes.
In this series memetic memory morph ("meme corruption") has now been demonstrated to occur, whether such corruption comes by deliberate actions, by personal experience within a meme complex, or by some subconscious working of the toxins of power upon memes in an individual's memory via some manipulation of the amygdala.
We can add this: one who has proper knowledge of the constitution is an antitoxin carrier, which is demonstrated clearly by this individual who is caught up in a place where the toxins have caused an obvious power-disease outbreak.
He uses the antitoxins to inoculate those infected officials who, coincidently, should be grateful to him, not resentful.
He is an example we all need to emulate, because this guy prevailed because he knew his rights and stood up for them.
But what may be a surprise to a lot of people is how the toxins of power promulgate through a political system to eventually transform that political system until it reaches the maximum intoxication level.
How that intoxicated political system then morphs further to become the "perfect" authoritarian state may also seem a bit surprising to many:
... research reveals that authoritarian followers drive through life under the influence of impaired thinking a lot more than most people do, exhibiting sloppy reasoning, highly compartmentalized beliefs, double standards, hypocrisy, self-blindness, a profound ethnocentrism, and--to top it all off--a ferocious dogmatism that makes it unlikely anyone could ever change their minds with evidence or logic. These seven deadly shortfalls of authoritarian thinking eminently qualify them to follow a would-be dictator. As Hitler is reported to have said, “What good fortune for those in power that people do not think.”
(The Authoritarians, page 81, PDF[they "lost" it so: use the Wayback Machine Copy (free download)]). Authoritarian followers are those who believe that "the king can do no wrong" making them asymptomatic carriers of the toxins of power:
The Government presents an impressive array of theories which would preclude it from any liability ... we ... hold that the Government should escape unscathed ... It is often said that the doctrine of sovereign immunity is a derivative of the common law maxim "The King can do no wrong." But conceptually it is far older. Zeus himself carried an aegis or breastplate, a buckler, and a thunderbolt which made him, the mythological sovereign, immune from all that could beset him. And common law provided its sovereign with the immunity of Zeus ... The tide of history is running clearly against the concept of sovereign immunity. The disfavor into which the doctrine has fallen was observed as far back as ... 1939 ... [and] this Court pointed out that the assault upon the citadel of immunity continues presently apace.
(The Battle of Immunities And Diseases). It really is no secret that the judicial system of the USA became infected with the toxins of power early on:
During that legendary era when royal fictions were being conceived and cherished, it is said that a court favorite returning from afar brought home to his Queen a highly decorative undergarment for the royal legs. Details leaked to the peasants, and the incident became the object of much idle speculation and some embellishment. Suspecting that the Queen's carefully concealed legs had become the table topic of the realm, the court one day officially decreed: "The Queen has no legs". So was another royal fiction born. Thanks to what might loosely be called keen judicial notice, this one was never a part of the common law. Even in American legal circles it has been generally conceded that the anatomy of a female sovereign differs neither in form nor substance from the standard of a reasonable woman. But other fictions of the resourceful and imaginative European courts have proved hardier, and some, like "the King can do no wrong", survived transplanting to a completely foreign political climate to thrive as conspicuous anachronisms. The royal fiction of sovereign immunity has long been the despair of American legal writers. Legislatively, piecemeal attacks on it date from the mid-nineteenth century. But the doctrine has been jealously guarded in the courts, statutes purporting to waive immunity have been strictly construed, and the Supreme Court has repeatedly reaffirmed sovereign immunity in tort claims. Against this backdrop, pressures for a federal statute ameliorating the harsh immunity doctrines being pursued in federal courts mounted steadily in the early decades of the twentieth century.
(Twilight Zone of Federal Tort, page one, emphasis added [they "lost" it so use The Wayback Machine copy (free downloads)]). That "transplanting to a completely foreign political climate to thrive" was only possible because the authoritarian followers whose cognitive abilities have been infected by the massive propaganda engine hidden in their midst, "let it be".
They became the foreigners their forefathers had left behind in England because the toxins of power never sleep nor slumber.
Regular readers know that Toxins of Power Blog has previously considered the territory that the toxin of power increasingly inhabits, in the sense of idea propagation, or meme propagation, via various group dynamics.
Likewise this blog had a series which discussed how toxins of power can cause ideological change or "memetic morph," once ideas or memes are in memory.
The amygdala nodes are midbrain between the ears
Now, in this post Toxins of Power Blog will try to get to the nitty gritty, try to get to the main entry point where the toxins of power produce the initial trigger which intoxicates / morphs ideas or memes within the memory of the brain.
This is a vast subject, however, if we stick to the fundamentals initially, there are elements that can be quickly and easily grasped:
The amygdala's response and regulation are thought to be critical to people's social behavior through the monitoring of daily life events such as danger signals.
(Science Daily, "New Clues"). Social behavior is a result, in some degree, of the dynamics of our amygdala:
During studies of the almond-shaped part of the brain called the amygdala – a region associated with processing emotions ... scientists have uncovered a cellular mechanism underlying the formation of emotional memories, which occurs in the presence of a well known stress hormone ... noradrenaline ... by controlling chemical and electrical pathways in the brain responsible for memory formation.
"This is a new way of understanding how neurons form long term memories in the amygdala," Dr Faber said.
"Our strongest and most vivid human memories are usually associated with strong emotional events such as those associated with extreme fear, love and rage."
"For many of us, our deepest memories are mental snapshots taken during times of high emotional impact or involvement," she said.
(Science Daily, Traumatic Memory, see also Hypothesis: The Cultural Amygdala). What this means is that ideas or memes that are already in memory, already part of a circuit, can be overridden in whole or in part by subsequent events, using either a technique or a phenomenon called fear conditioning, working on specific circuits:
There is a large amount of data indicating that the amygdala, a particular structure in the brain, is strongly involved during the learning of "conditioned" fear. However, until now, the underlying neuronal circuits have remained largely unknown.
Now, research ... has been able to identify, for the first time, distinct neuronal circuits within the central nucleus of the amygdala which are specifically involved in acquisition and control of behavioural fear responses.
(Scientific Daily, "New Circuits"). Long term use of such techniques or phenomenon can cause damage to the amygdala:
... a primitive region of the brain responsible for sensorimotor control also has an important role in regulating emotional responses to threatening situations. This region appears to work in concert with another structure called the amygdala to regulate social and emotional behavior ... researchers have recently discovered that activation of ... the deep layers of superior colliculus (DLSC), elicits defensive behaviors such as an exaggerated startle, hypervigilance, cowering, and escape. Researchers say it is possible that a prolonged activation of this defense system may lead to emotional disorders.
(Science Daily, "Emotional Balance"). These papers work hand in glove with previous posts on Toxins of Power blog.
For instance, in a series beginning with "A Structure RE: Corruption of Memes" we looked at how modification of ideas or memes can occur when circuits of memory are disrupted in individuals.
Then, in the post "The Territorial Realm of Toxins of Power" we attempted to graphically show how these mechanisms work on ideas or memes in the social group context we call meme complexes (see also "ruling group mind" below).
In conclusion, the toxins of power use circuits on the bridge of the amygdala to get to existing ideas or memes, cause a morph, then those morphed ideas or memes propagate within a meme complex (social group), and then ultimately they get to areas outside that meme complex.
The article "What Orwell Didn't Know" by Professor George Lakoff is in accord with this post:
Probably 98 percent of your reasoning is unconscious - what your brain is doing behind the scenes. Reason is inherently emotional. You can't even choose a goal, much less form a plan and carry it out, without a sense that it will satisfy you, not disgust you. Fear and anxiety will affect your plans and your actions. You act differently, and plan differently, out of hope and joy than out of fear and anxiety.
Thought is physical. Learning requires a physical brain change: Receptors for neurotransmitters change at the synapses, which changes neural circuitry. Since thinking is the activation of such circuitry, somewhat different thinking requires a somewhat different brain. Brains change as you use them-even unconsciously. It's as if your car changed as you drove it, say from a stick shift gradually to an automatic.
(What Orwell Didn't Know, pp. 68-9; cf this). The amygdala can become "propaganda central" since it gets a first look at all incoming sensory perception, that is, before the "conscious brain" gets a look at it:
So some of the key interconnections of the amygdala — and these connections actually define what it does in a sense, at least with respect to fear — the amygdala gets sensory information directly from the various sensory systems that process the external world. So the visual system, the auditory system, olfactory, touch, pain, and so forth. All of these kind of come together, or converge, in the amygdala.
(see video below). Regular readers know that this blog hypothesizes that the toxins of power hijack the process of normal pattern formation in the brain circuitry, so as to convert that pattern into a corrupt pattern.
Thereafter, the meme complex (social group) helps propagate the corrupted idea or meme.
A classic example is detailed in a Dredd Blog post, where an individual knew that a memetic or ideological morph was taking place within his brain, but he was unable to get help or otherwise do anything about it.
Moving on to the civilization level, the issue of mass murder in the form of Ecocide engenders a discussion that focuses on subjects such as the meme complex, vaccime, and other group thinking, such as ruling group mind.
Professor LeDoux on the amygdala ...
