Reviewing the Psychology of Compliance

Why Did So Many Submit to Totalitarianism?

I’ve been working on longer personal read on the nature of money and surviving in the Thai jungle and stuff, but this Offguardian piece by Kit Knightly really caught my eye. Being in psychology and sociology in undergrad and graduate school I was familiar with all of the studies (except for the five monkeys one; I guess I did go to a good school). You can spot aspects of the Milgram Experiment, and the Asch study, and the Stanford Prison Experiment in a lot of places, so it is good to get a review on what they are. I thought the Ash study had conformity levels around 67%, but this is nitpicking. My hat is off to Kit Knightly for the following summary of this:

“But the point of this article is not to just make you, the reader, understand these experiments…it is also meant to remind you that they do.

The people in charge, the elite, the 1%, “The Party”. The powers that be – or shouldn’t be – whatever you want to call them.

They know these experiments. They have studied them. They’ve probably replicated them countless times on grand scales and in unethical ways we can barely imagine. Who knows exactly what takes place in the dank dark dungeons of the deep state?

Just remember, they know how the human mind works.

• They know they can make people do anything if they reassure them they won’t be held responsible.

• They know that they can rely on people to abuse any power they’re given, OR believe they are powerless if they’re treated that way.

• They know that peer pressure will change a lot of people’s minds even in the face of undeniable reality, especially if you make them feel completely alone.

• They know that if you offer people only a small reward for completing a task, they will make up their own psychological justification for taking it.

• They know that people will mindlessly do whatever everyone else is doing without ever asking for a reason.

• And they know that people will happily believe something that never happened if it is repeated often enough.

They know all of this. And they use that knowledge all the time – All. The. Time.

Every commercial you see, every article you read, every movie they release, every item on the news, every “viral” social media post, every trending hashtag.

Every war. Every pandemic. Every headline.

All of them are constructed with these principles in mind to elicit specific emotional reactions that steer your behaviour and beliefs. That’s how the media works, not to inform you, not to entertain you…but to control you.

And they have it down to a science. Always remember that.'‘

When I was in graduate school I was so naive and excited about exploring human behavior and the human mind. Most sociologists relied on existing data sources and exploratory analysis to write their master’s thesis or simple observation and case study. This is because experiments in this space are often impossible or unethical (i.e. studying teen pregnancy by randomly getting some teenage girls pregnant and following their life trajectory afterwards). But I always wanted to do a real experiment, even a small one. I became fascinated with the placebo effect, and devised a way to study it:

Studying the Placebo Effect: A Study in Top Down Narrative Control

It didn’t occur to me until recently that the government grant that I would have needed to pull off my experiment would have likely come from the NIH. And who was controlling the NIH? Dr. Anthony Fauci. Exploring healing modalities that did not relate to a patentable drug compound was verboten. Always follow the money.

I have no doubt they’ve done these experiments. Big pharma would have paid a lot of money to understand psychological influences that tip the scales in their favor. Every tyrant is interested in how to achieve 100% compliance. Every advertiser wants to sell their product to everyone. Conmen need to get away. It’s not for your own good, though. That’s why these studies went underground.

I’d ask what their dark experiments are now, but it seems to me it’s out in the open for all to see. How long before people notice the slow motion collapse of the world as they knew it? What level of isolation, physical and psychological trauma can they endure before they snap? How many injections can the human body withstand? How long can the denial last? Is there a point where they storm the Bastille or do they just starve to death in cages like in China? Under what circumstances does one or the other happen?

Is there a point where the many come together and aim their attention squarely at the few? That’s the real game…Or do we just keep fighting among ourselves forever?

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