Are We Being Psychologically Manipulated, Again?

It seems we are in another chaos cycle. Resist. Find the Light.

Here in Glasgow things are moving a pace, as exam results are in we see the attainment gap has widened further as standards fall. This will come as no surprise to anyone who has been paying attention, not least

Scottish Union for Education

who have been working tirelessly to draw attention to the myriad of problems driving the car crash in our school and university settings.

Good education is the cornerstone of stable societies, what we are seeing now is not education but politically motivated programming eroding actual learning. If we are raising ideologues we cannot expect reason, nor clear and critical thinking - which seems to be in short supply at the minute.

Stable societies are what is needed right now as England faces civil unrest in the wake of the Southport attack in which three young girls were murdered brutally at a dance class and others injured. Our media and government have been strangely slow to inform the public as to the motivation behind this attack, which has further eroded trust. Community cohesion has been fracturing for sometime, exacerbated by economic downturn and a sharp rise in migration. The lack of transparency has exacerbated problems.

In the meantime Scotland’s Former First Minister and a sitting Minister for Parliament Humza Yousaf decries the events stating that he and his wife are considering emigrating. I find this utterly shocking, cowardly and a dereliction of his public duty. Surely as a political leader he should be emboldened to do better for the people he has been elected to serve? This sadly is a reflection of the political class we have at the moment.

It doesn’t help that the media and politicians (including Yousaf) have framed any conversation around events as ‘far right’. The Southport community was denied their space to grieve and to express righteous anger. The painting of anyone trying to address the reasons behind the attack is labelled far right have become a silencing tactic. I have no doubt bad players are involved in the ramping up of emotions and escalation of violence. I have no doubt in certain instances there are boys and men who are keen for a fight. In my own neighbourhood boys are known to set bins alight in the middle the night with fireworks for lack of discipline, responsibility or purpose. I can only imagine *some* might easily get caught up in a tide of violence.

In recent years we have seen much action on the legislation of morality than on meeting the physical needs of the electorate. It is no secret that we have a crumbling infrastructure, our healthcare and education system need a major overhaul and the economy is in tatters. Legislation of virtue (such as the Hate Crime Bill, proposed Conversion Therapy Legislation, ‘embedding LGBT education’ into the curriculum etc) are often unnecessary (ie. duplicating existing laws with new branding) or harmful (as in the case of LGBT ‘education’ which has no proof of efficacy and clouds actual learning).

On the matter of immigration the notion that ‘everyone is welcome’ is a nice sentiment but is this practical or safe? I am a migrant, as many of my neighbours. We went through long (and expensive) processes in order to grant us our right to stay here. Surely it’s practical to ensure there are adequate resources to support incoming residents? 2023 saw the UK with 1.22 million incomers in comparison to 2012 when figures were 630,000. That is a huge increase and understandably has caused friction in certain communities.

But these things are never simple or easy. We would expect and hope our leaders to call for calm and rationality to LEAD people to shared purpose, and reinstate a sense of security. But this is not what we have seen. Keir Starmer seems to have issued an inflammatory statement which has done nothing to mitigate the issues. Citizens are forced to ‘try and find’ information discovered a host of videos of violent madness across the country building confusion, fear and paranoia (not to mention a public statement in the case of Humza Yousaf is beyond selfish). In Scotland, where there have been no events, we have another public servant Graham Campbell, SNP Councillor and Chair of the Education committee calling for ‘citizen militias’ to patrol the streets. This is grossly irresponsible.

Thinking on all this I am reminded of a time years ago whilst I was ‘making art’ in Prague. Eastern Europe was experiencing torrential rainfall which resulted in significant flooding. Yet my memories of the time are not of floods but drifting across the Charles River Bridge amongst sandbags in the glow of the Bohemian street lamps in a romantic embrace of a certain gentlemen with whom I had been spending time. The floods… meh. There was no social media, no mobile phones to access global information just me and my guy able to live in and enjoy our ‘real time’ moment. Which we did.

In my hostel later a report from CNN flashed onto the communal television screen showing a home floating down a waterfall. In a flash second I thought ‘thank God I’m not there… oh wait a minute I am there’. The report was on the floods in the Czech Republic, where I was. Don’t get me wrong, the floods were devastating for a lot of people. But on the main the humans involved were able to speak to one another and work it out. Mostly we got on with things as is necessary. As throughout all the crises in human history.

This comes to mind as I contemplate the chaos load of news from the past week which is getting people ramped up. I am not suggesting for one minute that these things are not worthy of getting worked up about. Or maybe not. What I think is that the framing of these stories might detract from what is important, what we need to be working towards and how our fear might enable some notorious things to embed both individually and from government. And this - in the current climate- is not easy. Fear is a remarkable tool for someone to wield over us. We must remember that.

And it’s hard to know the truth. Because - as proven in the story above - selective telling of things gives the notion that *these are things to be worried about for ME* and this worry turns off our critical faculty and ability to see the variety, the light, the nuance of what is happening… and what is needed. And without it we risk having a shadow become a ghost become a monster.. in our imagination.

I can consider the videos I have seen online of riots down south. And they are AWFUL. But IS this a wide scale issue? Or is this another single tragic home floating down the river? Is our fear going to lead us to allow terrible things? As I am writing this I see Keir Starmer has put into place new powers for facial recognition technology. It has been suggested that social media is to be micro managed. Australia has tabled social credit scores for social media in it’s parliament, and whilst not actually implemented the fact it is being discussed shows the shifting of the Overton window. What do we give away for our safety? Are we really in danger?

Reflecting on the past decades it occurs to me that this obfuscation of truth and wilful manipulation of public perception has already served to usher in some damning political and legal precedents. These have eroded trust, set back civil liberties decades and destabilised the foundations of our communities. This is always a risk. Democracy is not free from the risk of tyranny. We cannot be complacent.

As I mentioned before I felt as though I was in the centre point of the September 11th attacks in 2001. Sitting in my parents home outside of Philadelphia I remember the complicated emotions I felt as I heard of the disasters of the World Trade Centre to the North of me, The Pentagon to the South and the Pennsylvania plane crash to the West. That day a shutter went down across America as citizens were told they were no longer able to criticise the US government or the President.

Bush was a really unpopular guy up to that point, I recall a funny show ‘That’s my Bush’- a deliberately provocative program about American politics created by the writers of South Park. All the sudden any speech or opinion that wasn’t ‘the American party line’ was framed as ‘dangerous’. And people believed. The show got cancelled. The media - which previously had been reporting openly about issues citizens were concerned about- went shtum.

In the face of this fear and prescribed patriotism George W. Bush signed into law the USA Patriot Act. This Act has been widely criticised for codifying unconstitutional acts leading to many long term implications on national and global democracy. We can see this legacy in the Scottish Hate Crime legislation which allows a person to judge a person’s speech as being dangerous and harmful and therefore criminal.

Fast forward to today. The past four and a half years has seen a torrent of ‘happenings’ which have succeeded in ‘ramping people up’ and ‘getting them in line’ for certain government diktats. In the meantime what is not being reported on?

Covid lockdowns saw the most egregious attacks on personal freedom and bodily autonomy in the history of humanity. Whilst we were locked in our homes, forced to take experimental injections, and the social fabric of human history assaulted through the ‘rule of three’, two metres, and masking of small children and other literal madness- the West saw the largest transfer of wealth in history. One of the little spoken about origins of our spectacular economic disaster is rooted in this.

My neighbourhood opened a food bank in that time, it was not needed before. Now it serves 250 families a week. (including families that work for the Yousaf and Sarwar family ahem…). I do believe this breakdown damaged us immeasurably and made many individuals prime fodder to soak up what was to come….we lost common sense.

Laura Dodsworth’s book ‘State of Fear’ outlines how governmental state operatives worked to create fear mechanisms to manipulate the population during the Covid-19 crisis. There is no doubt these are working hard today. We must hold onto to reason, we must not succumb.

When governments sow fear they must reap a bitter crop. This is a fascinating consideration of how fear has been used again and again throughout history and in one civilisation after another, so that governments and others in authority might get their own way. -Neil Oliver

In Glasgow I feel as though we have been on a constant political/social/community reaction loop - the American George Floyd incident led to the explosion of the Black Lives Matter movement (and in America - riots), followed by COP26 in Glasgow, the Ukraine War Cause, Free Palestine Movement and now the Southport related 'Race Riots’ (and lots in between). Each provided a significant problem which played on the most primal instinct (for security) and ‘demanded’ a response. In *each* example individuals have mobilised to ‘the cause’. Are you exhausted yet? I certainly am. Are you so exhausted you are not paying attention? Are you so exhausted you are becoming desensitised to certain things? Are you pulling away? Retreating? What is going on?

In the meantime I see the same ‘kinds’ of people ‘do exactly’ as would be expected. I remember after the George Floyd incident certain neighbours standing in the local park with ‘Black Lives Matters’ signs. (in the meantime: local food banks. In the meantime a Scottish ‘black’ friend of mine told me she and her kids would laugh at the signs in people’s windows and in fairness how else could they respond?). I wonder if this gathering is more to do with the individual need to belong, to believe in something than actually making a difference in the wider world. I also wonder if societally we are being trained like Pavlov’s puppies to respond to triggers. I feel as though things are more divided then every before. It’s almost as if change is not wanted by people in charge.

To make changes to systems that are broken one has to be able to recognise the nuance and to be able to discuss things with people from different backgrounds. I can predict with great accuracy who will be the foot soldiers of the above movements - because it seems to be the same people every time.

When Trump was elected to office the first time I bumped into one of these ‘types’ of people on my street corner. She said to me “I cannot believe so many Americans are so racist”! She really believed that people voted for Trump because they hate ‘black’ people. This is where we are. She could not see (what we see playing out here in the UK) the incredible disenfranchisement of the traditional working class, abandoned by and demonised by the democratic machine, struggling to make ends meet and being ignored.

Ironically this person did not see the Trump supporters as fully human, as she did not recognise the ‘good’ reasons they might have for voting for him, only the bad. So many are comfortable to show up for.a march and preach the right script, but don’t do any physical action to improve the lives of people in the communities where they live (like the goddamn football pitch locally). There is little virtue in doing the everyday. But it’s the everyday which is the life-force for everything.

Take a step back - ask yourself what are these emotion triggering occurrences making you do? Are you caught in the torrent of emotions related the story, getting you in the current - like the home facing down the river? or can you take a step back? Is this real? Is this relevant to YOUR life? What do you need to know? What do you need to do?

I recently came across this image of the Þrídrangar lighthouse in Iceland. Built in 1939 until 1950 (when a helicopter pad was installed) - in order to reach the top men would have scaled the cliff face. Reading on the remarkable feat of it’s construction makes me realise how very soft we have all become…

It was originally built by hand without machinery, and it was accessible only by scaling the tallest of the three rocky stacks, whose top is 36.5 metres (120 ft) above the sea.^[1] It was built under the direction of Árni Þórarinsson [Arni G. Thorarinsson], who recruited experienced mountaineers to scale the sea stack. Their climbing tools did not allow them to bite into the rock near the top, and there were no handholds, so they made a three-person "human stack" - one man on his knees, a second on top of him, and a third one climbing on the second one - for the final pitch.^[5][6] According to Þórarinsson:

The first thing we had to do was create a road up to the cliff. We got together experienced mountaineers, all from the Westman Islands. Then we brought drills, hammers, chains and clamps to secure the chains. Once they got near the top there was no way to get any grip on the rock so one of them got down on his knees, the second stood on his back, and then the third climbed on top of the other two and was able to reach the nib of the cliff above. I cannot even tell you how I was feeling whilst witnessing this incredibly dangerous procedure.^[5][7]

The crew stayed on the rock in tents for a month, during the construction.^[4] Electricity was installed three years later.^[4]

Yeah they just made a ‘human stack’ - in the middle of an ocean, on a cliff face, with wind and weather whipping around AND carrying construction tools. (!!!!). WHY? Because it was needed. Because before lighthouses the navigation of seas were a very dangerous endeavour where ships would get caught in dangerous shallows and perilous coasts. A ship might not make it safely to harbour. They offered a vital service which serves vessels to this day.

I feel we are again in a lighthouse situation. As chaos swirls in the waters below we collectively must find a way to scale the metaphoric cliff face in order to be a beacon. It’s a mad time. It’s hard to know what or who to believe, what is true, where to go. We are all in the swirling waters, most just trying to swim - it is easy to get caught in current. Not unlike the original master constructors of the lighthouse we must find our way above the swirling seas. To speak truth and be a beacon for others to get to shore. It’s not easy. But we must.