The Reality Of Social Engineering

I'm not talking about those deceptive hackers that use basic human psychology to manipulate individuals into giving away their passwords and other sensitive personal information.

_{source: Wikimedia Commons}

I mean the other type of social engineering used by those in power to regulate development and behavior of entire populations; it's the technique by which our incognito rulers engineer society to respond in predictable ways to certain stimuli. In his 1928 book Propaganda, Edward Bernays explains in Chapter one, the opening sentences of the book:

"The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country."

Another excerpt:

"In almost every act of our daily lives, whether in the sphere of politics or business, in our social conduct or our ethical thinking, we are dominated by the relatively small number of persons...who understand the mental processes and social patterns of the masses. It is they who pull the wires which control the public mind."

This should send shivers down your spine. It should make you angry, to be honest; my blood boils when thinking about this.

Bernays was a nephew of Sigmund Freud and it's another indication of the rampant social engineering we, the people, are subjected to that everybody knows of Freud, but almost no one in my generation or before has ever heard of Bernays, when the latter is by far the bigger force in human history. It's like everyone knows Edison, but far less knew who Nicola Tesla was before Elon Musk adopted the name for his cars. And even now people know the name Tesla, but I doubt many know just how bad he got screwed over by history. He was the greatest inventor, the greatest thinker of his time, but his name is buried in our history books' footnotes. When an interviewer asked Albert Einstein what it felt like to be the smartest man to ever have lived, his answer was "I don't know, you should ask Nicola Tesla." That should tell you something, even if his answer was in jest (Tesla frequently criticized Einstein publicly).

_{Image by Mike Mozart - source: Flickr}

Social engineering is real. I personally believe that the outburst of psychological ailments like stress, depression and a feeling of alienation are caused by the constant lies we're fed, the strong dissonance between what's painted by our leaders and the reality of our every day lifes. And in the same time blurring the line between what's real and what's fiction. Do you believe the popular series "24" aired in a decade when security cameras had to be publicly accepted? That series in particular introduced us to heavy use of security-cam footage.

I suspect that through these kinds of series, where a lot of the footage looks like it's filmed through one of these spy-cams, and the many movies and detectives, where the plot hinges on some security footage, we are literally trained to not be bothered by them. On the contrary; we often even applaud the advent of the panopticon society, when another case where the camera caught a criminal makes the news. Constant spying is slowly but surely normalized. We've been perfectly conditioned to accept the surveillance state.

This used to be a dystopian science fiction trope people. But we're actually living it now and we respond in the way our rulers have trained us to respond; passive, accepting. Wake up. It's not okay when we're all constantly spied upon. And spare me the argument of "I have nothing to hide". Think again. I'm sorry, I just get so infuriated when I think about this, when I read Propaganda by Edward Bernays. I'll stop here and if you want, you can read the book for free right here: Propaganda.

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