I posted this over on my thread about Heroes - Heroes, Anti-Heroes, Villains and Fools... Research, Discussion and Thoughts on Heroism. It seems relevant here too:
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I was reading an interesting commentary on Social Engineering and Control today - The War on Consciousness posted on VISUP. It includes a short section on the use of archetypes in social manipulation and propaganda:
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According to social critic Jacques Ellul, a state of personal alienation makes an individual totally susceptible to propaganda ...:
(Propaganda: The Formation of Men's Attitudes, pg. 169)To be alienated means to be someone other (alienus) than oneself; it can also mean to belong to someone else. In a more profound sense, it means to be deprived of one's self. That is definitely the effect of propaganda. Propaganda strips the individual, robs him of a part of himself, and makes him live an alien and artificial life, to such an extent that he becomes another person and obeys impulses foreign to him. He obeys someone else.
Twilight language is used to manipulate men through their subconscious. People, so submerged in the collective, begin to identify with archetypes while their own personalities are savagely suppressed. Continuing with Ellul:
(Propaganda: The Formation of Men's Attitudes, pg. 172)In this process of alienation, the individual loses control and submits to external impulses; his personal inclinations and tastes give way to participation in the collective. But that collective will always be best idealized, patterned, and represented by the hero. The cult of the hero is the absolute necessary complement of the massification of society. We see the automatic creation of this cult in connection with champion athletes, movie stars, and even abstractions as Davy Crockett in the United States and Canada in 1955. This exaltation of the hero proves that one lives in a mass society. The individual who is prevented by circumstances from being a real person, who can no longer express himself through personal thought or action, who finds his aspirations frustrated, projects onto the hero all he would wish to be.
The Hero is of course one of Jung's prime archetypes and one that appears time and again in the twilight language of mass media. But this is nothing new. Despots throughout history have tried to get their subjects to identify with archetypes rather than finding themselves:
(The Masks of God: Primitive Mythology, Joseph Campbell, pg. 240)The highest concern of all mythologies, ceremonials, ethical systems, and social organizations of the agriculturally based societies has been the suppressing the manifestations of individualism; and this has been generally achieved by compelling or persuading people to identify themselves not with their own interests, intuitions, or modes of experience, but with the archetypes of behavior and systems of sentiment developed and maintained in the public domain.
On the flip side of the coin, public relations gurus also created negative archetypes, which Walter Lippmann referred to as stereotypes, to demonize before the public so that anger is misplaced. Historian Peter Levenda notes:
(Peter Levenda, Sinister Forces: Book One, pg. 127)Stereotypes can be created, and manipulated, by the gurus of mass communications and psychological warfare. Stereotypes are culturally-loaded and therefore not 'value neutral.' We make snap judgments based on the nature of the stereotype; in the hands of the psy-war expert, a stereotype does not contain much complexity or depth. The idea is not to make the target think too clearly or too profoundly about the 'text' but instead to react, in a Pavlovian manner, to the stimulus it provides.
That the mass man continue to identify with archetypes while fearing and loathing stereotypes is crucial to the American way of life. It is only through the total subjection of the individual to the collective consciousness that modern Americans could be expected to make the sacrifices that they have in terms of privacy invasions, loss of freedom, work, taxation, etc. For instance, Americans work more hours than any other peoples on Earth except for the Chinese and Japanese yet a common stereotype set forth by the media is one of a domestic population s riddled with doles and sloth that it general refuses to work. This in turn inspires the population to identify more with their righteous, hard working corporate overlords rather than the 'trash' that comprises the lower classes of this country. That corporations take more in doles via the Federal Reserve's 'quantitative easing' policies that all the common folks combined is never even allowed into the debate and would be a concept barely even understood or believed by most potential voters if it were.
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