Psy -War, False Flags & The Psychology of Shaping Another's Reality or How Mass Perception is Manufactured
We live in strange times today. For the first time, possibly in all of our history, we live in a world where the differentiation between reality and unreality, fiction vs non-fiction, hallucination vs sight, truth vs falsehood among the masses have become so blurred and intermingled, that many have more recently found themselves even doubting at times their own sanity. Then again, what is really sanity in a world where there is no agreed upon reality, where there are no universal truths that we can apparently acknowledge and uphold together?
Our world has become increasingly schismed, divided, and there is a great deal of blame being directed at one group or another for how we found ourselves in such a situation. In this short presentation, I hope to provide some insight into how we found ourselves in such a predicament and how we have found ourselves being the tools of those who have manufactured our mass perception.
No one has been untouched by this, since no one has for the most part been raised outside of this cultural matrix, which includes our religions and our belief systems. We all have been touched by this cultural matrix. We have all received a daily onslaught of this from our education, our television shows, our music and our news agencies, even our churches. Thus, everyone today is faced with a certain degree of manipulation in their perception of the world they live in, in the values they hold and how we view those who we perceive are different from our cultural matrix. This also includes how religion itself is being manipulated today, which I will explain further shortly.
In order to begin to address this, we need to be aware of some very important developments that occurred in the field of psychology in the 20th century.
This scientific dictatorship would be waged on several fronts. One of these key fronts was by the British psychiatrist William Sargant who is one of the Founding Father’s of modern “mind control” techniques in the West, with connections to British Intelligence and the Tavistock Institute, which would influence the CIA and American military via the program MK Ultra. Sargant was also in close communication with Aldous Huxley, and references Aldous numerous times in his books, one of these references we will look at shortly.
Sargant was also an advisor for Ewen Cameron’s infamous LSD “blank slate” work at McGill University, funded by the CIA.
Sargant accounts for his reason in studying and using forms of “mind control” on his patients, which were primarily British soldiers that were sent back from the battlefield during the Second World War with various forms of “psychosis”, as the only way to rehabilitate extreme forms of PTSD (post traumatic stress disorder).
The other reason, was because the Soviets had apparently become “experts” in the field, and out of a need for national security, the British would thus in turn have to become experts as well…as a matter of self-defence of course.
The work of Ivan Pavlov, a Russian physiologist, had succeeded in producing some disturbingly interesting insights into four primary forms of nervous systems in dogs, that were combinations of inhibitory and excitatory temperaments; “strong excitatory”, “balanced”, “passive” and “calm imperturbable”. Pavlov found that depending on the category of nervous system temperament the dog had, this in turn would dictate the form of “conditioning” that would work best to “reprogram behaviour”.
The relevance to “human conditioning” was not lost on anyone.
It was feared in the West, that such techniques would not only be used against their soldiers to invoke free-flowing uninhibited confessions to the enemy but that these soldiers could be sent back to their home countries, as zombified assassins and spies that could be set off with a simple code word. At least, these were the thriller stories and movies that were pumped into the western population. How horrific indeed! That the enemy could apparently enter what was thought the only sacred ground to be our own…our very “minds”!
However, for those who were actually leading the field in mind control research, such as William Sargant, it was understood that these Hollywood depictions were not exactly how mind control worked. The Manchurian Candidate was ultimately geared towards making the Western public panic-stricken believing that the communists were capable of sophisticated levels of precision “brainwashing” such that this Western public would be induced to support their own government’s work into that very thing, using the justification that this was being done in self-defense and would only be used on the communist enemy. If only the people knew that such programs coming out of the Tavistock Institute and MK Ultra would be used on their very own people, including within their own military, in varying degrees, and going so far as to institutionalize people against their will using downright acts of torture and calling them forms of “psychiatric treatment.”
However, such work in wiping the mind clean and inserting a new identity and purpose was ultimately a massive failure.
For one thing, as William Sargant acknowledges in his book ‘The Battle for the Mind’ the issue of the individual’s “free will” was getting in the way.
It was found that no matter the length or degree of inducing electro-shock, insulin “therapy”, tranquilizer cocktails, induced comas, sleep deprivation, starvation etc, it was discovered that if the subject had a “strong conviction” and “strong belief” in something, this could not be simply erased, it could not be written over with any arbitrary thing. Rather, the subject would have to have the illusion that their “conditioning” was in fact a “choice”. This was an extremely challenging task, and long term conversions (months to years) were rare.
However, Sargant saw an opening. It was understood that one could not create a new individual from scratch, however, with the right conditioning that was meant to lead to a physical breakdown using abnormal stress (effectively a reboot of the nervous system), one could increase the “suggestibility” markedly in their subjects.
In addition, Sargant found that a falsely implanted memory could help induce abnormal stress leading to emotional exhaustion and physical breakdown to invoke “suggestibility”. That is, one didn’t even need to have a “real stress” but an “imagined stress” would work just as effectively.
The Blitz was a German bombing campaign against the United Kingdom over an eight month period from 1940 to 1941, during the Second World War. The term was first used by the British press and originated from the term Blitzkrieg, the German word meaning ‘lightning war’.
Sargant goes over the London Blitz in his book ‘The Battle for the Mind.’ During this period, in order to cope and stay “sane”, the British people rapidly became accustomed to the idea that their neighbours could be and were buried alive in bombed houses around them. The thought was “If I can’t do anything about it what use is it that I trouble myself over it?” The best “coping” was thus found to be those who accepted the new “environment” and just focused on “surviving”, and did not try to resist it.
Sargant remarks that it is this “adaptability” to a changing environment which is part of the “survival” instinct and is very strong in the “healthy” and “normal” individual who can learn to cope and thus continues to be “functional” despite an increasingly unstable environment.
It was thus our deeply programmed “survival instinct” that was found to be the key to the suggestibility of our minds. That the best “survivors” made for the best “brain-washing” in a sense. Since the focus was purely on adaptation to the environment in order to survive and not in questioning nor challenging our surrounding circumstance.
This observed phenomenon during the London Blitz has been one of the core tools used in mass conditioning. The entertainment industry has pushed this idea that the best we can do as we are told we are heading towards an apocalyptic future is to merely survive. However, there is a new twist in this idea of survival and that is survival at all cost even if it means we must become monsters in order to do so.
We can see the continuation of William Sargant’s work in today’s entertainment industry…
We have been conditioned to actually find a sort of morbid comfort in this idea of a survival at all cost, that is, “survival of the fittest,” within a “post-apocalyptic world.” We have learned to view this as our “liberation,” this false and delusional idea that as long as one can survive, such a life is worth living. We have been conditioned to not question our circumstances or how we got here, we have been conditioned to think that there is no solution and the only thing we can do is just accept the increasingly bleak future we are told is necessary and inevitable. Our life becomes a life similar to that of a lab rat, who has no choice but to abide by the parameters of the game they were put in and figure out any means for survival. And in such a life, we have been conditioned to view that freedom and liberation can be attained if you earn the gold medal in such apocalyptic Olympic games. Freedom is no longer about questioning , resisting and challenging the oppression and enslavement of a society, but rather to become its best subject so to speak, its best survivor who can best wield the sort of behaviour its controllers want to see.
One individual in particular who was very aware of what he was a part of was Theodor Adorno (another is Aldous Huxley who we will discuss shortly). In the case of Adorno, it was the utilization of music that was the ultimate tool in mass social behaviourism.
Theodor Adorno, in his youth was a promising future concert pianist, who later studied in Vienna under the atonal composer Arnold Schoenberg. In 1946, while in the United States working on the Frankfurt School’s “Cultural Pessimism” agenda, he wrote the book “The Philosophy of Modern Music,” a diatribe against Classical culture, writing:
This was to be one of the major undercurrents that shaped the philosophy of the COUNTER-Culture movement. The name said it all. And the so-called freedom from the “shackles” of classical culture was to take the form of invoking schizophrenic traits through the domain of the aesthetic consciousness (aesthetic means the set of principles that underlie how we define and appreciate a standard for “beauty”).
Thus schizophrenic traits were purposefully induced in the listener of modern music as per the Frankfurt School prescription. This was achieved by encouraging a sort of looping of fragmentation. It is for this reason that today’s popular music is so repetitive, it is not only meant to induce a trance like sedated state, but it is also meant to encourage the fragmentation of thought.
The advent of social media has accomplished in the domain of information exchange, what modern music accomplished in its promotion of atonalism. Social media, especially such platforms such as twitter X, instagram and tik tok encourage an attention span that focuses on a subject for only a few seconds. This is another form of encouraging the fragmentation of thought. If content that is increasingly stressful or disturbing is added to the information feed, it will function to increase suggestibility and decrease our awareness of what is entering our subconscious and creating the backdrop to what later forms our perceptions of reality, including on matters of morality.
Thus, the more fragmented the mind the more suggestible.
Adorno insisted that all forms of beauty had to be purged from our culture. He wanted to encourage a mental breakdown of society on a mass scale to effectively reboot the system.
This was to use the very same methods being studied by William Sargant, that to effect the greatest control of mass thought and perception, one would have to induce maximum stress to increase suggestibility. Only then could the subject accept that it was their own choice to accept whatever behavioural conditions were being suggested.
In order to achieve maximum suggestibility Adorno itemized them as the following:
In fact, the work of the Frankfurt School and their interest in creating “shock” like effects within the arts to increase schizophrenic like states fits in perfectly with what the CIA was working on with MK Ultra.
The Tavistock Institute was founded in 1920. The above image is the coat of arms of the Tavistock town, which traces its recorded history back to at least 961 AD when Tavistock Abbey, whose ruins lie in the centre of the town, was founded. Tavistock remained an important centre of both trade and religion until the Dissolution of the Monasteries—the abbey was demolished in 1539, leaving the ruins still to be seen around the centre of the town. From that time on, the dominant force in the town became the Russell family, Earls and later Dukes of Bedford, who took over much of the land following the Dissolution.
Tavistock is tied from late medieval times with the Russells, the family name of the Earls of Bedford and since 1694, the Dukes of Bedford. This is clearly seen from the history of the town. The second title of the Duke of Bedford is the Marquess of Tavistock…It is believed that the Russell family retains considerable interests in the locality….It is this Russell family connection through the Bedford Estates which gives the name by ownership to Russell Square and Tavistock Square in London, famously home to the Tavistock Clinic.
Aldous Huxley would be greatly influenced by Bertrand Russell (who he was in contact with for most of his life and who travelled in the same circles of) as seen in his work ‘Brave New World’ which closely draws from Russell’s ‘The Scientific Outlook’ for its theme - a scientific dictatorship.
Aldous Huxley who worked with MK Ultra, quotes Dr. Erich Fromm, in his “Brave New World Revisited” (1958). Dr. Erich Fromm was a “philosopher-psychiatrist” from the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory.
Aldous had a very clear interest in how one could bring about a schizophrenic state chemically, also allowing for heightened suggestibility. Six years before writing ‘Brave New World Revisited,’ in 1952, Huxley would arrange to meet a Dr. Humphrey Osmond who had just published a psychiatric study titled “A New Approach to Schizophrenia.”
Osmond, the man who would coin the term “psychedelic” meaning “mind-revealing,” had been working with mescaline and had asserted in his study that psychedelics produced a psychological state identical to schizophrenia.
Osmond was studying mescaline for its chemical similarity to adenochrome, a substance produced in the body through the oxidation of adrenaline and linked to inducing schizophrenic traits.
It was Huxley’s experience taking mescaline in the presence of Dr. Humphrey Osmond in 1953 that would inspire his writing “The Doors of Perception,” considered the bible of the counterculture movement.
Both Aldous and Gerald Heard played central roles in developing the Human Potential Movement (HPM) to which the Esalen Institute is recognised as officially launching.
The founders of the Esalen Institute, Richard Price and Michael Murphy, got the idea for Esalen’s core raisons d’être largely from Aldous’ lecture on “Human Potentialities” in 1960, at the University of California, San Francisco Medical Center. In this lecture, Huxley had challenged the budding students to figure out ways to tap into the full potential of humankind that had become latent over the centuries. In his lecture, Aldous discusses how it would be a good idea if an institution could launch a program to research methods for actualizing “human potentialities”, along the lines of his Brave New World, to be studied, evaluated, and put to use by society. Murphy and Price were enthralled.
The Esalen Institute, founded in 1962, held their first series of seminars, which they called “The Human Potentialities”. It included a seminar entitled “Drug Induced Mysticism”. The institute was staffed with LSD 25 researchers, and drugs circulated through-out the seminars. It launched what became known as “The Human Potential Movement”.
The Human Be-In was organised as an LSD-25 event. It had a turnout of anywhere between 25,000 to 50,000 people. Free sandwiches were distributed laced with LSD and the “Summer of Love,” otherwise known as the first manifestation of the Brave New World, was born.
In 1956, psychiatrist R.D. Laing trained on a grant at the Tavistock Clinic in London, where he remained until 1964.
Thus, the inducing of schizophrenic breaks was considered a “function-heightening experience,” or so the poor sops were told. The key to reaching maximum human potential was through the induction of madness, the fragmentation of the mind through schizophrenic breaks, with the promise that one would have a higher IQ at the end of the whole affair.
The relevance of the Esalen Institute’s “revisioning of madness,” and Laing as the Crusader for the promotion of the clinically insane, was something that had entirely been spear-headed by the Tavistock Institute, and clearly, not for our benefit.
The reality is that the revolutionary alternative to the practice of mainstream psychology, that was sold to the masses by cult figures like R.D. Laing, was entirely controlled and shaped by the Tavistock Institute, to which MK ULTRA is a branch.
The point of all of this is that this plan for a scientific dictatorship combined with a world religion as promoted by HG Wells, Bertrand Russell, Aldous Huxley and today’s new gurus such as Muraresku is that this is nothing new. This has been a process that has been developed and fine-tuned over millennia.
Thus unless you approach the problem from this understanding, you are likely being used to pit your group against other groups that are not in fact at the root of the problem. In this context the entire Cold War shaping of mass perception has been a trap to pit the west against the east and the east against the west in permanent warfare until both weaken themselves sufficiently for the chosen one world government to take form. We live in a world where the majority of the problems we are facing were engineered to be there, from false scarcity, with those claiming there is not enough food or energy to go around, to false sense of a threat. There is no way that is better at manipulating the masses than to pit them against what they have been told is their common enemy.
This is why the “Pearl Harbour Moment” has been studied by the RAND Corporation to justify the War on Terror after 9/11. Americans went from thinking the Vietnam War was to no benefit of any country, and had men return to their families broken and addicted to heroin - to justifying entering into a state of permanent warfare with no clear objective.
In 1962, General Lyman L. Lemnitzer, head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, proposed Operation Northwoods, which was a proposed false-flag operation against American citizens, which called for CIA operatives to both stage and actually commit acts of terrorism against American military and civilian targets and subsequently blame the Cuban government in order to justify a war against Cuba. The plan was drafted by General Lemnitzer specifically and has a striking similarity with NATO’s Operation Gladio.
There was not a single item in the Northwoods manual that did not amount to a blatant act of treason, yet the U.S. military establishment dispatched “Top Secret – Justification for U.S. military Intervention in Cuba” straight to the desk of Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, for onward transmission to President Kennedy.
America had entered into its era of Psy-War (an extension of Tavistock and MK Ultra) and once again, such tactics (overseen by the CIA through such men as Lansdale who played a central role in the Vietnam War) were justified use on the American people among a growing number within American intelligence and military.
Needless to say, President Kennedy rejected the proposal and a few months later General Lemnitzer’s term was not renewed as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, having served from October 1st 1960 to September 30th 1962.
However, NATO lost no time, and in November 1962 Lemnitzer was appointed commander of U.S. European Command and as Supreme Allied Commander Europe of NATO, the latter to which he served from January 1st, 1963 to July 1st, 1969.
Thus, most interestingly, even the Los Angeles Times acknowledged that the event of 9/11 had worked effectively as a Pearl Harbour 2.0, which had reinvigorated Americans’ desire to wage war abroad, and gave their government a “justified” cause to do so (even though it was still breaching international law) in what became the complete failure of a crusade which they rather ironically called their “War on Terror.”
In the mid-1950s, Roberta Wohlstetter, Albert’s wife and RAND peer, produced her seminal analysis of Pearl Harbour, recognised by the Pentagon as a definitive work of twentieth-century American military history. The study began as an internal RAND document based on unclassified documents drawn from the congressional record.
Roberta, an authority on the “academic historical” work around the attack on Pearl Harbour and the psychological uses this had, had great insight into what could stir the sleeping madness that slumbered within the most powerful nation in the world.
Her work was used, by Albert and others at RAND, in scare-mongering and manipulating the mind-set of the military and the American population into thinking another Pearl Harbour was always just around the corner. It would be the foundation upon which Albert based all of his “hypotheses” and “revelations” in nuclear strategy.
Together, Paul Nizte, Albert and his wife Roberta Wohlstetter (all RAND associates) would dominate the theory and policy surrounding nuclear strategy towards the Soviet Union during the Cold War. In Nov. 1985, Reagan would award all three with the Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian honor.
It was discovered by RAND and its peers at PNAC that the threat of another Pearl Harbour was the ingredient needed to justify perpetual warfare to the shocked and awed American public through Psy-War tactics. Is it any wonder that a great number of its most outspoken members were former Trotskyists?
Thus, when Jake Sullivan, coauthor of the Pivot to Asia with Hillary Clinton and former National Security Advisor under the Biden Administration, observes that there is not enough anti-China sentiment to bolster an image of the United States as a “saviour of mankind” against China around a discussion that America is in need of a “Pearl Harbour moment” I would be very wary [for the transcript of his disturbing interview refer here.]
Recall that in Orwell’s 1984 the world is divided under the regions of “Oceania”, Eurasia and Eastasia. They are in a permanent warfare against the other, or at least that is what they are told though they cannot be certain since the war is fought in distant lands. Nevertheless, it this permanent warfare against the said “enemy” to which Orwell even acknowledges changes back and forth between Eurasia and Eastasia though the Orwellian state denies this and claims the said enemy has always been the same. The only thing that is clear as an outcome is this state of permanent warfare - what has justified the enslavement of the people of Oceania in this Orwellian police state…
Those that share the ideology of PNAC have shown that they are willing to do anything for that “Pearl Harbour moment.” We would truly be fools at this point to allow ourselves to once again be used as their instrument in achieving this, we would essentially be working towards our own enslavement as well as that of the world while deluding ourselves to the very end that we were in fact the harbingers of freedom.
We would be mistaking the shadows on the wall for reality.
Cynthia Chung is the President of the Rising Tide Foundation and author of the books “The Shaping of a World Religion” & “The Empire on Which the Black Sun Never Set,” consider supporting her work by making a donation and subscribing to her substack page Through A Glass Darkly.
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Brilliant 👍
This journalism is a breath of fresh air, succinct, relevant, and conclusive.
We much appreciate your good work Cynthia.
Will shift to paid subscriber this month.
God bless.
Truth, Beauty and Goodness reign forever!