618 mind control

On our modern gods

The other day my brother and I were talking about current events. Somehow, the old notion of "tv is the new god" came up. 

That was a popular idea a few years ago, that television had replaced religion as the place where we get our values. But TV has been dethroned by the phone, so the question came up, is the phone the new god?

But then there's the old god, which isn't the oldest god, and seems to be holding strong as the meter for what's appropriate behavior for some people. A lot of people.

And that line of thinking gave me some fresh insight into our current world. 

See, here's the thing. Let's set aside right/wrong/true/untrue for a minute, and examine mind control through the ages.

In the forgotten past, that may have looked a lot like some tribes still alive now, we were hunter-gatherers and lived in family-esque groups. Those groups had various beliefs about the world, that were handed down by tribal elders, male and female, through the oral tradition. A lot of the stories they told were based on the stars and planets they watched every night in the sky. 

Those groups didn't necessarily have a strong central leader. (In North America the idea of a "chief" was largely invented after colonization so that the patriarchal colonizers could have someone they deemed "worthy" to negotiate with.) 

Over time, in many places in the world, those stories about the stars turned into stories about human-like gods. These are the old "pagan" gods, like Mars and Thor (both the 4th planet). The stories got so good that the tale tellers went pro, calling themselves priests and priestesses and building temples to make the stories more impressive. 

People who believed these stories would give the priests money, food, and animals. It was a pretty good gig for a long time. 

But over time, there grew to be many gods and temples, and they were competing with some new mind control devices. 

First, there was the state. Lots of times, the ruler, king or whatever, was also a high priest. But with so many gods around, the leader of the state had lots of competition for mind control. 

Second, there was money. Created to make trade easier, money had another magical property: it was made by someone. (Usually a king or emperor.) And whoever did the making had some level of control over the money. 

The state controls people by telling us what to do. Money controls us in this other way, by becoming the focus of everything we do. Because without money, the reasoning goes, we're dead. 

So at this point, we've got religion, the state, and money all flexing to tell us what to do. 

Enter TV. 

No, wait, enter mono-theism. These are religions with only one god. Judaism, Christianity, Islam. Monotheism was a big adjustment, where all the little god stories were rolled into one, and all the little temples were torn down and the stones reused to build churches for the one true god.

This was a pretty strong move, and in the west at least, one emperor, Constantine, a Roman, saw the writing on the wall, and decided to join in rather than fight it. So he made Rome give up all the little gods and go with the one, Christian god.

So he controlled the state, religion and money. 

 And then a bunch of stuff happened, and let's fast forward to TV.

So we sat through most of the 20th century scratching our heads and marvelling at the images dancing around in this little box. The images told us about the world, what was happening, who was doing what, and importantly, what we should buy to fit in to society. 

It all seemed pretty legit, and we bought it. This was the classic "tv is the new god" period, of roughly 1950-2000.

But then came the Internet, and smart phones. And while it's tempting to call the smart phone "the new god," there are a couple reasons I won't. First, it would appear that the smart phone is really just a portal. A portal to what? Technically, the cloud. But really, to pop culture. The smart phone is like interactive TV, where we can be part of the story. 

But here's the main reason I won't call the smart phone the new god: it's bigger than god. More people got hooked on phones faster than any of these other control mechanisms, ever. Could you imagine if every kid on earth spent 5, 6, 10, 16 hours a day praying?

In today's mindscape, we have many "gods" competing for awareness. The god of religion, as well as the god of money, the god of pop culture, and the god of the state 

To truly control people, a leader needs to corner all four.

Religion has been truly whily, a border-crossing ideology that has had many state-leaders flummoxed for a long time. (So long that the King of England had to come up with his own bible to try to control the narrative.)

Pop-culture is a new out-of-control force, embodied by big tech today, who are basically all just coming up with ways of attracting our eyeballs. (How AI will play into all of this, I'm not sure. Traditionally, power has come from controlling people. Now, we have these simulations of people. Will there still be power when there are no people being commanded? Will people be in charge of AI?) Anyway, I guess we could say Algorithms are a new god.

To conclude, we are again living in a world with multiple mind-control mechanisms. Religion, money, the state, and pop-culture (I'm sure I'm forgetting a few, too.)

Now why does this matter? 

Because your brain, your mind, is being controlled, right now, in an epic way. 

And part of why dear leader is so popular, or at least noteworthy, is he's deep into all of these control mechanisms. He came out of the world of money, born rich, lost it all but segued into the world of pop-culture, became a TV star, then put out his own bible on his way to climbing the throne of the state.

And here we are, in modern mind control 101.