This is the first post in what I envision becoming a regular “column” emerging from my studies of propaganda and mind control. (The two are the same thing; more on that separately.)
NOTE: Having gained some feedback on this from people who got the drift but felt it needed footnotes, I realise that a model of the method would be useful as a reference point. Feel free to contact me if you find it difficult to digest, to tell me what might help you come to grips with it more effectively.
This is an analysis of a tweet to illustrate how you can break down statements to discover what is really going on. Once you know what is going on, you can make an informed choice about whether to take on something someone says, to further evaluate it, or to disregard it.
In a tweet dated 1 Jan 2020, a Twitter account @Voodoo_Pork shared this thought:
If you are unable to see the image above, the tweet is accompanied by four photographs taken in various bushfire situations, each chosen to illustrate the red, glowing nature of a “hellscape”.
In this analysis, we will go from the lowest level (the ‘visual movie’ level) of the content itself and then zoom out further and further so you can see the the framing and meaning-making that’s actually going on.
First up, let’s acknowledge the most immediate apparent meaning. To acknowledge it means your brain can stop shouting at you and we can go deeper.
So, the most immediate apparent meaning of this tweet is that Australia’s fires are:
- the result of the greed of 12 anonymous persons
- able to be stopped ‘any time’.
Now that this is out of the way, let’s have a look at the programs that are running.
Part 1: Hellscape
“Hellscape”. A landscape reminiscent of, or depicting, Hell.
Hell is a Christian concept. Famous depictions of Hell tend to focus on torture, death, and pain; think of Brugel’s Mag Mag; Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights; or Blake’s Punishment of Thieves. Dante Aligheri’s Divine Comedy includes “inferno” (which is Italian for ‘Hell’) in its first part.
The term is relatively recent in our vocabularies, too. Hell, meaning the infernal regions is a meaning as late as 1834. It is from the Late Latin term infernus, which means ‘the lower world’. Its meaning of ‘a large, raging fire’ is first attested in 1928.
So, a large, raging fire is an inferno; inferno itself means Hell; therefore we come to a hellscape of Australia as a depiction of a virtual Hell. Note that the tweet doesn’t capitalise Hell, even though it is a proper name; this may be an indication of either an underlying belief system (not jiving with Christianity, for example), or an absence of formal forms which does tend to characterise tweets.
In any case, it tells us that there is a Christian frame to the meaning that this person has constructed, whether they believe it or not.
Meaning is connected here through a few frames of meaning:
- Hell is a bad place
- Hell is a place that is on fire in an intense and fierce way
- Therefore a place that is apparently all afire is a bad place
- My core belief system, which is likely the one I was raised within, has told me that Hell is a bad place, which is why I believe it.
Part 2: People who are rich
“Because 2 dozen people need to continue to be rich.”
We don’t know who these mystical dozen people are, but we can see that they are already rich (‘continue to be’), and for some reason they have a survival mechanism that is a requirement for that condition (of being rich) to continue.
First, a question: Who are the anonymous 24? You could suggest that they are some kind of disciple, if you follow the Christian framing idea. Jesus apparently had 12. You might also suggest that they are politicians: In Australia’s senate, each state bequeaths 24 persons to the senate. If the latter, the question then becomes, ‘which states’?
More to the point, though, how does this account know these 24 persons’ innermost needs and desires? Does this account know them personally? And if I guess at who the two dozen are, will I be right, and how will I know that I am right?
There is a lot of missing information here.
As a noun, “need” emerges from the Old English term nied, which meant (among other things) duty, hardship, what is required or desired, necessity, etc. It comes from a meaning of ‘violence, force’, which is Proto Germanic, and is itself from nauðr, meaning “distress, emergency”, and has roots therefore in anxiety and fear.
“Rich” is an adjective. It describes strong, powerful, or high-ranking people. It comes to us down a long lineage of languages describing kings in various ways. Its form meaning ‘wealth and magnificence’, is from the Romantic languages, in which the French, Spanish, and Italian for wealth, combined with the Frankist for powerful emerge as rich.
Therefore, the sentence under examination tells us that 24 powerful, high-ranking people who are wealthy feel that they will experience hardship, anxiety or fear if they lose that wealth or rank, which is why it must continue.
Continuing to unravel the frames at work, we learn:
- that there are 24 persons of high rank and who have wealth
- the 24 persons must continue to retain their status or they will suffer
- this is the cause of the hellscape (of fires).
If you’re a perceptive person, you’ll have recognised here a logical snag. The statement is that the fires in Australia are caused by the anxiety of 24 people who want to—nay, who must, to keep the anxiety and fear of hardship in abeyance—continue in their status.
And yet, fires are lit because something ignites them. That something is a spark, a flame, or a natural event (like lightning or some other form of combustion). They develop into raging fires—infernos, or Hell—because of fuel loading or weather conditions, or both, and/or perhaps an inability to extinguish them, whether that is access, time, people, skills, or the lack of the means to extinguish them (fire blankets, foam, water, denial of oxygen, denial of fuel).
Moving on.
Part 3: Choice
“We can stop them anytime we choose. We just have to choose.”
First, note the construction of ‘We’.
‘We’ means: You (the reader), and me (the writer). It means that the writer is in your community, is one of you, is part of your collective. You are on the same side, fighting the same fight.
This type of pronoun use is sneaky because it enables a writer to gain buy-in without having to do much work. Simply by using ‘we’, the writer puts itself and you on the same side of the street. If the writer has used ‘you’, then it is separating itself from you. That separation doesn’t exist here.
In the context of this tweet, ‘we’ makes you think: This account is Australian.
Further into the construction, we notice the word ‘them’. You can see that there is now ‘we’ or ‘us’ versus ‘them’. You and ‘them’ are not on the same side.
Additionally, ‘them’ appears to have a dangling condition. It is of course, logically, referring to the 24 persons. But if you read this tweet quickly, it may also refer to the Australian fires, which is the hashtag immediately underneath. This sentence is separated from the first one, which pulls the referent out, and deliberately causes you to associate ‘them’ with the fires.
In my reading, it can go either way, but I choose to associate the referent with the 24 unidentified persons.
This sentence pair says to us that if we make a decision, we can stop the 24 unidentified people. But what it omits is what we can stop them from doing.
Absent is the action. This is critical in understanding how influence and programming functions. Where gaps exist, people fill them with their own imaginations, assumptions, and self-supporting ideas. Gaps also introduce uncertainty, which forces you to lean more heavily on the speaker or writer.
In the context of the tweet, it could be ‘stop them being wealthy’, but it is more likely to mean ‘stop the fires’, because by stopping the 24 people, you remove the cause of the fires.
However, it also raises an even more serious question: How do you choose to stop someone you can’t identify from doing an unspecified action?
Answer: You can’t.
Further, this tweet tells us that ‘we just have to choose’, as though the point of decision-making is the only action required. “Just” in this context takes the meaning of “only” or “simply”.
The frames therefore are:
- choice is an action
- the act of making a choice is enough to make something stop, and enough to cause another person to stop doing a thing.
There’s a problem with this. Do you see it? Firstly, choice is not an action; in fact, ‘choosing’ is something you don’t do consciously: Your body makes choices and you rationalise them afterwards. Secondly, a mental act of a decision or choice does not impact anything or anybody else unless you then act on that choice. Then, even if you do take whatever action the choice dictates, there is no guaranteeing that you can stop a person from doing something, because you do not control anybody but yourself.
Zooming out a bit, and with the help of the media and other narratives on Twitter, including the comments (which you can see on Twitter), we may begin linking the ’24 people’ and the ‘hellscape’ to climate change, and the 24 people specifically to Australian politicians.
If you look at the bio on the account, you will learn that the account is run by a ‘terminally online Marxist’. And, more than this, that they’re American.
Huh. So “we” means that an American (who is not in Australia, and has only experience of Australia’s fires, climate, and culture by way of secondary representations through mass media and social media) and you are on the same side? That’s interesting, isn’t it? And as a loud-and-proud Marxist, there is likely to be some strong and proud ideology coming through in the narrative.
In fact, the person behind this account co-founded a blog for which the tagline is ‘everything is not going to be ok’.
Well, let’s check that out.
The unspoken statements are that the dissolution of Australia’s government is desirable. What else could it possibly mean, when viewed through a Marxist lens?
In summary, Marx felt that Capitalism had turned us all into masters (the ruling classes) and slaves (the proletariat), constantly engaged in a struggle that would inevitably culminate in revolution – unless a major change to society was made. In his [Marx’s] writings, he theorised that a new way of living would and should emerge – one that would see the ‘means of production’ shared by everyone rather than owned and controlled by an elite.
https://metro.co.uk/2018/04/07/what-is-a-marxist-7448375/?ito=cbshare
In the Meta Frame, which is one step away from what NLPers call the ‘visual movie’ or the real time action that you talk to yourself about, we can see that:
- Money is evil
- Being rich is evil
(And this is verified because it caused 24 people to create hellish burning environments in Australia in 2019-20.)
- Climate change dries out the landscape, which contributes to fire
- Therefore 24 unidentified people are controlling the weather.
At another zoom out, the frames that exist are:
- Seeking power and wealth and status creates fire-borne destruction
- You (the reader) and Me (the writer) are not seeking power, status or wealth
- You (the reader) and Me (the writer) have the power (because of point #2 above) with which our decisions alone with stop these unnamed people.
And finally, at the outermost level, it tells us that:
- All you have to do is not be rich, powerful, wealthy, or of status, and you will be ok.
What you have witnessed is the manufacturing of a poverty mindset.
This tweet tells us that the programming of the person who wrote it is of a poverty mindset. We can also see, by the construction of the tweet, complete with its gaps, its unstated information, its lack of clarity, and its broad-sweeping vaguenesses, that it is a point of replication.
I say that it is a point of replication because absolute clarity destroys the construct. If you were to examine this through the lens of memetics, you would see that beliefs are witnessed, onboarded and replicated, through a process of imprinting. This is pertinent, as you’ll see in due course.
By agreeing to and onboarding the statements as they are, you are unwittingly taking on this same program. The critical points that indicate that it is a program are the belief sequences: The places at which rationality and logic are either broken down or absent. As a reminder, those are:
- That the hundreds of bushfires in Australia were caused by (lit by) 12 people’s desire for continued wealth
- That you can stop these 24 people, and by association the fires, simply by making a decision in your own head.
Neither of these two statements is true.
What is true is that this statement and its context serve to create the conditions under which the program will replicate.
The fires are a source of fear and anxiety for many Australians; this stressed condition is exacerbated by the chosen visuals (the images) in the tweet, which look like they’ve come from another world entirely. They serve to heighten a pre-existing state of stress.
In a stressed state, your conscious mind becomes muted. When your conscious mind is muted, your unconscious mind switches into Record Mode, and it becomes more easily imprinted with information.
The extent of that ‘muting’ depends on the degree of stress. If you are on Twitter it’s at the mild end of the scale; if you’re being tortured, it’s at the extreme end of the scale. However, it is the same thing; you can read works by Cathy O’Brien and her studies of PTSD to verify this if you wish. In fact, O’Brien goes so far as to state that people are never tortured for information extraction; they are only ever tortured for information implantation. It is the basis of all trauma-based programming, and is the reason for the persistence of PTSD.
In summary
The program that is being replicated in the tweet is that power and money are bad; that not having power and money is good. It is that not having power and money means that dire bushfires won’t exist. And it is that your choice to stop power and wealth will make everything ok.
The question to ask yourself now is: Are you also running this program? To find out, listen to your most instinctive reaction. If it’s anger, the answer will be yes.
