The General Public As Disinformation Agents

Back in the days of COINTELPRO and Operation Mockingbird the United States Government went to what I’ll call “extreme measures” to influence public opinion and world events. When I say “extreme measures” I mean a covert action which if exposed to the American public would not be approved of. Don't get me wrong, they still go to "extreme measures" but that's not the point of this article.

I think the United States has reached a new level of disinformation mechanisms : the American public. The American public, woefully uneducated on history, philosophy and logic can be rather quick to “suck up” what has been fed to them. Large numbers of people lacking the mental mechanisms to separate fiction from fact create a new “fact”, the “public opinion fact”. “Public opinion” is that Iraq has WMD. It doesn’t matter that they don’t it only matters that the public thinks they do. In this sense Average American Citizen becomes an agent of disinformation. Taking up debate against these disinformation agents is a daunting task. They are self assured that they are correct even in light of not having researched an issue or knowing much about it in general. They don’t know logic therefore the logic you use against them is a foreign body and as such they quickly reject it.

Here’s one for you : ask someone what percentage of the brain people use. A lot of people will respond “10%”. Now ask them how they know this. “I just heard it” or “I forget where” or “I saw it on TV”. Chances are most will be unable to recount how they “learned” this “fact”. The problem is it’s not a fact, it’s a myth that’s been repeated over and over and people just come to believe it. They don’t bother to “fact check” it, that’s a thing of the old days. The American public doesn’t need to fact check, that’s what TV is for.

There are two things which have helped created John Q Public as a disinformation agent : the public education system and mass media. The public education system dumbs them down, teaches them to obey, teaches to the lowest common denominator. There are international test out there that show American students, students “learning in the greatest nation on earth” who score below students from countries I’ve never even heard of. It’s important to an aggressive war machine that the public not be well educated. They need people to be dumb so the state (read: the elite) can go about doing however they wish on our dime using our citizens as cannon fodder.

I received both public and private education up till the 12th grade. After this I attended one year at a community college. I was never taught logic, I was never taught philosophy, I was never taught critical thinking. With the help of others on the internet and by my own initiative I taught myself these things. But in the throws of a capitalist war machine society it’s not a good idea that John Q Public is well versed in fallacies, philosophy or other types of critical thinking. Most ads on TV are full of fallacies. “Political debate” is an embarrassment to the word debate. If John Q. were aware of such things he might *gasp* not buy that new car, not vote for candidate X, not allow his country to do all the dirty things it does in the international arena.

It could be said that the mass media is the disinformation agent but I disagree. Without John Q Publics mental consent of outright lies the mass media could not function the way it does. It could be said that public education is responsible for all this but again, I disagree. I’m a product of the public education system as many of you are. Yet you and I know of logic, fallacies and ponder on philosophy and history. In the end in my humble opinion it is John Q. Public who chooses to be an agent of disinformation, outright lies. At some point they chose to not know, to not want to know and they continue to make this choice. My brother is not my keeper, the media is not my keeper, the government is not my keeper. John Q. Citizen is responsible for the contents of his mind just like I am.
It is true the education system, mass media and our capitalist society sing us lullabies which encourage us to not think or to use illogical means of thinking but in the end we are all individually responsible.


And there are more factors than just the public education system and the media influencing this.

The major thing that pops into mind is groupthink - I don't think that most people choose not to know - most people think that they do know, because everyone around them, and all or most of their sources of information agree with them.

From the time the "average American" is born, they are surrounded with quite a bit of social engineering -

Their parents - their parents have most likely followed the "plan" for living - went to school, maybe college, got a job, a suburban house etc. They work, watch TV, and are concerned with their immediate blood relations. They associate with a small group of people, a clique for lack of better terms, and rarely participate in any form of intensive critical analysis of any topic, if they do at all. Humans are pretty impressionable when they are young - a baby's mind is more or less a blank slate. The mind gets filled with their parent's (or whoever they're around really) priorities, opinions, and skills. Breaking through what you are told and forming your own opinions on things takes critical thought, and if someone isn't encouraged to excersize this when they are young, they very well might not develop it later - especially if they don't need to.

Then the average american goes to school. The public education system, as I'm sure everyone here is well aware, doesn't really do much for kids in the way of education in the academic sense. What I learned in school was that sucking up to the people in a higher position of power than myself, and not questioning what I was told would get me ahead, and I think that that is the education system's main purpose.

In addition to the school system itself, a child is surrounded by. . . well . . .other children. There is certainly more variance in the personalities and mindsets of the children in the school than the average American child had been exposed to up until that point. However, since most of the kids will be from average American families, most of them will have similar mindsets. The ones that don't generally end up being social outcasts, or changing their mindset, conciously or not, for desire of acceptance or whatever.

For most people, average americans or not, the ability and tendency to apply critical thought (or rather to be and adult mentally) comes somewhere in the ages 13-18. Middle and high school. However, since most kids are at that age attending a middle or high school, social pressures - peers forming cliques - and the system itself encourages conformity and groupthink and discourage critical thinking.

If people don't by this time figure out for themselves that they should be analyzing what they are told, more often than not, they never do.

Go back to sleep.