The Veil
The Veil is a magical spell cast on the masses to quite simply obfuscate the true fundamental questions facing society and shape public opinion into seemingly disparate schools of thought that taken together produce a simulacrum of democracy, free will and choice.
In reality people are being channeled into one of several “acceptable” opinions. Anybody who has ever been a parent or caregiver to a child has learned this trick from experience, “Would you like to eat your vegetables with the blue spoon or the red fork? Good choice!”
Robert Greene, in his seminal work “The 48 Laws of Power” identified this as Law 31: Control the Options – Get Others to Play With the Cards You Deal
“The best deceptions are the ones that seem to give the other person a choice; Your victims feel they are in control, but are actually your puppets. Give people options that come out in your favor whichever one they choose. Force them to make choices between the lesser of two evils, both of which serve your purpose. Put them on the horns of a dilemma: They are gored wherever they turn.”
On a societal level this is executed via mass media, pop culture and what passes for “news”.
Rather than inform the public, or even more outlandishly, telling them the facts – mass media indoctrinates, molds and conditions the public consciousness.
It is in a word: Propaganda.
Alternative history aficionados and sci-fi geeks often like to posit narratives wherein a present-day dystopia is averted by some selfless time traveller going back and strategically assassinating some single figure who set it all in motion (usually Hitler). They always miss the point. They should really have had their sights set on Edward Bernays – the nephew of Sigmund Freud and the father of propaganda as we know and experience it today.
You go girl!
His methods were used for simple commercial gain in the early parts of the 20th century (like convincing women that it was fashionable to start smoking “Victory Sticks”, ideally those manufactured and sold by the fine folks at Phillip Morris) – it wasn’t taken to a population-wide industrial level until Joseph Goebbels read all his books and realized therein lay the keys to elevating the Nazis to power.
He owed a particular debt to Bernays’ Crystallizing Public Opinion from which he derived his basis for creating public opinion against the Jews of Germany. (Bernays was reportedly startled by this “[it] shocked me. … Obviously the attack on the Jews of Germany was no emotional outburst of the Nazis, but a deliberate, planned campaign.”)
Nobody aspring to political power has ever forgotten or disputed the practical lessons learned by the Nazis. Every political campaign and policy initiative since has been run around the principles invented by Bernays.
In fact Bernays himself directly participated in early public / political opinion shaping exercises that set the trend for future US Imperialism when United Fruit hired him to convince the American public that Guatemala’s democratic and legally elected president (Arbenz Guzman) was a dangerous communist and thus justified the CIA led coup to overthrow him. (This chapter in our history is where the phrase “Banana Republic” originated”).
In Bernays’ own words:
“The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country. …We are governed, our minds are molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of. This is a logical result of the way in which our democratic society is organized. Vast numbers of human beings must cooperate in this manner if they are to live together as a smoothly functioning society. …In almost every act of our daily lives, whether in the sphere of politics or business, in our social conduct or our ethical thinking, we are dominated by the relatively small number of persons…who understand the mental processes and social patterns of the masses. It is they who pull the wires which control the public mind.”
– Propaganda
The delivery mechanisms for propaganda to the public today are the major media outlets. Television, radio, newspapers crystallize into an inverse-Pareto structure (80% of the media outlets are owned by a very few number of conglomerates who are firmly entrenched within the Corptocratic wing of the The System.)
The challenging entity to the apparatus of The Veil is the internet, which we’ll discuss a little later.
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