Control 101: Creating Consensus Reality
Patrick Henningsen, New Dawn
Waking Times
By carefully controlling mainstream media and educational institutions, elite social engineers are able to control the flow of public discourse in order to serve their own goals and interests. By doing this, they create something akin to ‘consensus reality’. In other words, by controlling the perception of public consensus on any particular issue or event, you effectively control the prevailing reality.
A leading example of this social engineering phenomenon today is in the relentless promotion of war and global conflict throughout the media and education systems. Their carefully coordinated efforts can be boiled down to a simple concept: establishing legitimation and delegitimation in relation to the state or state institutions.
In today’s formative education, school textbooks and assigned reading material are powerful tools used to shape students’ views. Often what is imprinted in one’s memory is not particular details and facts but rather an atmosphere, an impression, or a tone.1 It can be argued this impression may be more influential in forming a pupil’s contextual world or nationalist view.
Professor of Education Dr. Michael H. Romanowski, explains:
“The authority of textbooks coupled with the ‘objectivity’ of the technical knowledge that they communicate encourages students to accept unquestionably the impressions and worldview created by the language of textbooks.”
“Although textbooks claim rhetorically not to promote a particular understanding of history and to be objective, they advance a value-laden perspective of reality. Because the selection and structure of knowledge affect our perception of the world, the language and context used to articulate knowledge are crucial. Textbook authors select particular language that creates impressions in the minds of students. These impressions have power and authority because they are presented in the printed and bound textbook with its aura of an authority that is beyond question and criticism. Although textbooks are used in many different ways, they are still dominant and powerful educational tools that shape students’ views.”
In his study Romanowski goes on to describe how through the careful use of language, US school textbooks depicted Japanese internment camps in the United States during World War II in a manner that marginalised Japanese-Americans, while subtly mitigating any real criticism of the US government’s actions. Some might call this indoctrination, while others may call it brainwashing.
Much of the ideological instruction for educational institutions is provided through the global governance system run and funded by multilateral institutions like the United Nations and the World Bank. The global management and cultural continuity of this European and North American-led ‘soviet’ is run by a myriad of Non-Governmental Organisations (NGOs), specifically through the UN’s “Agenda 2030”, a set of global directives for the next two decades. Previously these were the UN “Millennium Goals” which have since been overhauled and upgraded by the self-appointed culture experts and social engineers in New York City and Geneva. Through this globalised system, social engineers are able to streamline language and political thought internationally, while simultaneously preparing the next generation to accept a new sanitised political reality.
In the last two decades, the corporate mainstream media’s efforts to spin endless war narratives on behalf of the state and its defence industry have become more pronounced. Despite numerous critiques and thousands of online articles and activist campaigns, the Establishment is simply doubling-down on their positions.
Australian journalist and filmmaker John Pilger has emerged as one of the leading voices in recent generations exposing institutional Western war propaganda. He is also one of the few members of the media to challenge the carefully crafted “man of peace” US President Barack Obama.
Pilger writes:
“In 2009, President Obama stood before an adoring crowd in the centre of Prague, in the heart of Europe. He pledged himself to make ‘the world free from nuclear weapons’. People cheered and some cried. A torrent of platitudes flowed from the media. Obama was subsequently awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. It was all fake. He was lying. The Obama administration has built more nuclear weapons, more nuclear warheads, more nuclear delivery systems, more nuclear factories. Nuclear warhead spending alone rose higher under Obama than under any American president. The cost over thirty years is more than $1 trillion.”2
Regarding the lack of due diligence and complicity by the mainstream media, Pilger adds:
“Had journalists and broadcasters done their job and questioned the propaganda that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction; had the lies of George W. Bush and Tony Blair not been amplified and echoed by journalists, the 2003 invasion of Iraq might not have happened, and hundreds of thousands of men, women and children would be alive today.”
From these examples, it’s easy to see how the state, the education system, and the media all compliment each other to manufacture Western public consent for the business of global military adventurism.
Today, much less visible new means of control are being perfected. Digital monopolies are run by mega-corporations like Google whose vast informational and ‘smart’ data networks allow a relative handful of people to exert enormous influence over billions of people – without them ever knowing what is happening behind the curtain.
From a social engineering perspective, this could be described as a form of mass mind control. By employing various strategies designed to manipulate search engines and their results, any cabal can influence public opinion on a range of subjects and issues – which in turn help determine which policies are implemented, political outcomes, and even what laws are passed. Once again, by controlling consensus reality, elites create the reality of their choosing.
Writer Robert Epstein provides some insight into how something as simple as searching for information has been commoditised and modelled by the digital overlords at Google. He explains:
“The Google search engine is so good and so popular that the company’s name is now a commonly used verb in languages around the world. To ‘Google’ something is to look it up on the Google search engine, and that, in fact, is how most computer users worldwide get most of their information about just about everything these days. They Google it. Google has become the main gateway to virtually all knowledge, mainly because the search engine is so good at giving us exactly the information we are looking for, almost instantly and almost always in the first position of the list it shows us after we launch our search – the list of ‘search results’.”3
Another disturbing trend is the state’s increasing role in administrating intellectual tyranny in the 21stcentury. This idea goes much deeper than just state snooping on its own citizens when you consider the consequences of people becoming afraid or overly self-conscious about which web pages to visit or which search terms they input into Google.
What happens when our private lives become public property? In the world’s premier police state, the UK, Home Secretary Theresa May recently announced a new bill, known as the “Snooper’s Charter,” which gives Orwellian powers to the state and its security services for tracking UK citizens’ Internet use and web browsing history dating back two years – without the need for any judicial check. Similar invasive measures have already been passed in Australia.
Technocrat May was accused of rushing the new surveillance laws into place in order to avoid more public scrutiny from critics and civil liberties groups.
When asked, one anonymous government source provided The Independent newspaper with the standard party line:
“Terrorists and criminals are operating online and we need to ensure the police and security services can keep pace with the modern world and continue to protect the British public from the many serious threats we face.”4
This sounds like a line straight out of Terry Gilliam’s film, Brazil.
Scottish comedian Frankie Boyle tries to make light of this situation:
“No more drunken Googling: all it takes is a misspelled search for ‘bong-making’ and suddenly you’ll be in an orange jumpsuit getting beaten with a pillowcase full of bibles.”
He continues:
“This law will create lots of new jobs, as the person charged with reading all our communications (who will see more unsolicited erections than customer services at Skype) will regularly feed their screaming face into a meatgrinder.”5
Once again, governments continue to recycle the same tired old talking point by insisting the only people who need worry are those who have something to hide. If that’s the case, shouldn’t we be allowed to snoop on the state? They really shouldn’t mind. It is every citizen’s duty to know everything the state and its corporate partners are up to.
About the Author
Patrick Henningsen is the founder and editor of the news and analysis website 21st Century Wire, and is an independent foreign and political affairs analyst for RT International. He is also the host of the SUNDAY WIRE radio program which airs live every Sunday on the Alternate Current Radio Network. Learn more about this author at: www.patrickhenningsen.com.
Footnotes
- ‘Problems of Bias in History Textbooks’ by Michael H. Romanowski, www.socialstudies.org/system/files/publications/se/6003/600310.html
- ‘A World War Has Begun’, http://21stcenturywire.com/2016/03/23/pilger-a-world-war-has-begun-now-break-the-silence/
- ‘The New Mind Control. “Subliminal Stimulation”, Controlling People without Their Knowledge’ by Robert Epstein, http://aeon.co/essays/how-the-internet-flips-elections-and-alters-our-thoughts
- ‘Snooper’s charter: Theresa May to present revised Investigatory Powers Bill with tougher privacy protections’ by Nigel Morris, The Independent, 1 Mar 2016
- ‘The snooper’s charter: one misspelled Google search for “bong-making” and you’ll be in an orange jumpsuit’ by Frankie Boyle, The Guardian, 11 Nov 2015
The above article (Control 101: Creating Consensus Reality) appeared in New Dawn 156 (May-June 2016) and is re-posted here with permission.
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