Inception is a 2010 science fiction action filmwritten and directed by Christopher Nolan, who also produced the film with his wife, Emma Thomas. The film stars Leonardo DiCaprio as a professional thief who steals information by infiltrating the subconscious of his targets.
The plot goes like this...Dominick "Nick" Cobb and Arthur are "extractors": they perform corporate espionage using experimental military technology to infiltrate the subconscious of their targets and extract valuable information through a shared dream world.
Their latest target, Japanese businessman Saito, reveals that he
arranged their mission himself to test Cobb for a seemingly impossible
job: implanting an idea in a person's subconscious, or "inception".
To
break up the energy conglomerate
of ailing competitor Maurice Fischer, Saito wants Cobb to convince
Fischer's son and heir, Robert, to dissolve his father's company. In
return, Saito promises to use his influence once the job is done to
clear Cobb's apparent criminal status, which prevents him from returning
home to his children.
Though Arthur believes the task is impossible, Cobb insists that
it can be done. Cobb accepts the offer and assembles his team: Eames, a
conman and identity forger; Yusuf, a chemist who concocts a powerful sedative for a stable "dream within a dream" strategy; and Ariadne, an architecture student tasked with designing the labyrinth
of the dream landscapes, recruited with the help of Cobb's
father-in-law, Professor Stephen Miles. While dream-sharing with Cobb,
Ariadne learns his subconscious houses an invasive projection of his
late wife Mal.
After Maurice dies in Sydney,
Robert Fischer accompanies the body on a ten-hour flight back to Los
Angeles. The team (including Saito, who wants to verify their success)
uses this as an opportunity to sedate and take Fischer into a shared
dream. At each dream level, the person generating the dream stays behind
to set up a "kick"
that will be used to awaken the other sleeping team members from the
deeper dream level; to be successful, these kicks must occur
simultaneously at each dream level, a fact complicated due to the nature
of time, which flows much faster in each successive level. They use "Non, je ne regrette rien" as an auditory cue to help coordinate the kicks. The first level is Yusuf's dream of a rainy Los Angeles.
The team abducts Fischer, but they are attacked by armed
projections from his subconscious, which has been specifically trained
to defend against such intruders. The team takes Robert and a wounded
Saito to a warehouse, where Cobb reveals that while dying in the dream
would normally wake Saito up, the powerful sedatives needed to stabilize
the multi-level dream will instead send a dying dreamer into "limbo":
a world of infinite subconscious from which escape is extremely
difficult, if not impossible, and in which a dreamer risks forgetting
they are in a dream.
You see, this concept of dream architecture follows agreement reality, it follows subliminal messaging, the use of propaganda, brainwashing with its tokens for mass hypnosis...all with the aim of getting people on board with an agenda that is not their own (a fake reality that has a grip on those using it and as long as they continue to use it, with the continual fake feed that drives it, they will live in a fake reality which will either run down or loop eternally).
This explains the reality in which we live. Yes, it is an agreement reality but it is the fake one. It follows with all those ideas of fake feed input that will have it run down or loop forever. There was a real construct. But, it fell. So, what we are seeing and or experiencing is not the original. That's because at the beginning an opposing directive caused an error in the basic construct.
The original was violated/corrupted and the existing one is only a fake ... or poor copy of the real one caused by error which was brought on by doubt 'second guessing' the real architecture and its true architect. For sure, those that are creating Ai that grows or evolves must be concerned about this very thing. Lest they forget they are dreaming.... a deception.
We need to wake up to the fact of our 'fake' agreement reality or like in the movie risk forgetting we are in a 'dream' looping eternally in a 'fake' reality architecture or rather very poor copy of the original.
The poorly-run Manor Farm near Willingdon, England, is
ripened for rebellion from its animal populace by neglect at the hands of the
irresponsible and alcoholic farmer Mr. Jones. One night, the exalted boar, Old Major,
organizes a meeting, at which he calls for the overthrow of humans and teaches
the animals a revolutionary song called "Beasts
of England".
When Old Major dies, two young pigs, Snowball and Napoleon, assume command and stage a revolt,
driving Mr. Jones off the farm and renaming the property "Animal
Farm". They adopt the Seven Commandments of Animalism, the most important
of which is, "All animals are equal". The decree is painted in large
letters on one side of the barn. Snowball teaches the animals to read and
write, while Napoleon educates young puppies on the principles of Animalism.
Food
is plentiful, and the farm runs smoothly. The pigs elevate themselves to
positions of leadership and set aside special food items, ostensibly for their
personal health. Following an unsuccessful attempt by Mr. Jones and his
associates to retake the farm (later dubbed the "Battle of the
Cowshed"), Snowball announces his plans to modernize the farm by building
a windmill.
Napoleon argues against this idea, and matters come to head, which culminate in
Napoleon's dogs chasing Snowball away and Napoleon declaring himself supreme
commander.
Napoleon enacts changes to the governance structure of
the farm, replacing meetings with a committee of pigs who will run the farm.
Through a young pig named Squealer, Napoleon claims credit for the
windmill idea, claiming that Snowball actually was only trying to win animals
to his side. The animals work harder with the promise of easier lives with the
windmill. When the animals find the windmill collapsed after a violent storm,
Napoleon and Squealer convince the animals that Snowball is trying to sabotage
their project and begin to purge the farm of animals Napoleon accuses of consorting with
his old rival.
When some animals recall the Battle of the Cowshed, Napoleon
(who was nowhere to be found during the battle) gradually smears Snowball to
the point of saying he is a collaborator of Mr. Jones, even dismissing the fact
that Snowball was given an award of courage while falsely representing himself
as the main hero of the battle. "Beasts of England" is replaced with
"Animal Farm", while an anthem glorifying Napoleon, who appears to be
adopting the lifestyle of a man ("Comrade Napoleon"), is composed and
sung. Many animals who later claim to be helping Snowball in plots are executed
by Napoleon's dogs, which troubles the rest of the animals.
Despite their
hardships, the animals are easily placated by Napoleons retort that they are
better off than they were under Mr. Jones, as well as by the sheeps’ chant of
“four legs good, two legs bad”. Mr. Frederick, a neighbouring farmer, attacks the
farm, using blasting powder to blow up the restored
windmill. Although the animals win the battle, they do so at
great cost, as many, including Boxer the workhorse, are wounded. Although he
recovers from this, Boxer eventually collapses while working on the windmill
(being almost 12 years old at that point).
He is taken away in a knacker's van,
and a donkey called Benjamin alerts the animals of this, but Squealer quickly
handwaves this by persuading the animals that the van had been purchased from
the knacker by an animal hospital and that the previous owner's signboard had
not been repainted. Squealer subsequently reports Boxer's death and martyrizes
him with a festival the following day. (However, Napoleon had in fact
engineered the sale of Boxer to the knacker, allowing him and his inner circle
to acquire money to buy whisky for themselves.)
Years pass, the windmill is rebuilt, and another
windmill is constructed, which makes the farm a good amount of income. However,
the ideals that Snowball discussed, including stalls with electric lighting,
heating, and running water, are forgotten, with Napoleon advocating that the
happiest animals live simple lives. In addition to Boxer, many of the animals
who participated in the rebellion are dead or old. Mr. Jones, having moved away
after giving up on reclaiming his farm, has also died.
The pigs start to
resemble humans, as they walk upright, carry whips, drink alcohol, and wear
clothes. The Seven Commandments are abridged to just one phrase: "All
animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others." The
maxim "Four legs good, two legs bad" is changed to "Four
legs good, two legs better." Napoleon holds a dinner party for the
pigs and local farmers, with whom he celebrates a new alliance. He abolishes
the practice of the revolutionary traditions and restores the name "The
Manor Farm".
The men and pigs start playing cards, flattering and praising
each other while cheating at the game. Both Napoleon and Mr. Pilkington, one of
the farmers, play the Ace of Spades at the same time and both sides begin
fighting loudly over who cheated first. When the animals outside look at the
pigs and men, they can no longer distinguish between the two.
One has to wonder if we have moved past Animal Farm and live in its aftermath..."And the LORD God made garments of [skin] for Adam and his wife, and He clothed them.
Then
the LORD God said, “Behold, the man has become like one of Us, knowing
good and evil. And now, lest he reach out his hand and take also from
the tree of life, and eat, and live forever...”
Therefore the LORD God banished him from the Garden of Eden to work the ground from which he had been taken. So
He drove out the man and stationed cherubim on the east side of the
Garden of Eden, along with a whirling sword of flame to guard the way to
the tree of life" ~ Genesis 3:21-24.
Adam and Eve chose to do evil... the skins given them were 'animal flesh'. What does this mean in context of the fallen event? It means that the creation left the construct of spirit being and fell into their own doing... just like on the animal farm.
The True Story of Brainwashing and How It Shaped America: Fears of Communism during the Cold War ... By
Lorraine Boissoneau smithsonianmag.com
Journalist Edward Hunter was the first to sound the alarm. “Brain-washing
Tactics Force Chinese Into Ranks of Communist Party,” blared his
headline in the Miami Daily News in September 1950. In the
article, and later in a book, Hunter described how Mao Zedong’s Red Army
used terrifying ancient techniques to turn the Chinese people into
mindless, Communist automatons. He called this hypnotic process
“brainwashing,” a word-for-word translation from xi-nao, the Mandarin words for wash (xi) and brain (nao), and warned about the dangerous applications it could have. The process was meant to “change a mind radically so that its owner becomes a living puppet—a human robot—without the atrocity being visible from the outside.”
It wasn’t the first time fears of Communism and mind control had seeped into the American public. In 1946 the U.S. Chamber of Commerce
was so worried about the spread of Communism that it proposed removing
liberals, socialists and communists from places like schools, libraries,
newspapers and entertainment. Hunter’s inflammatory rhetoric didn’t
immediately have a huge impact—until three years into the Korean War,
when American prisoners of war began confessing to outlandish crimes.
When he was shot down over Korea and captured in 1952, Colonel
Frank Schwable was the highest ranking military officer to meet that
fate, and by February 1953, he and other prisoners of war had falsely
confessed to using germ warfare against the Koreans, dropping everything
from anthrax to the plague on unsuspecting civilians. The American
public was shocked, and grew even more so when 5,000 of the 7,200 POWs
either petitioned the U.S. government to end the war, or signed
confessions of their alleged crimes. The final blow came when 21
American soldiers refused repatriation.
Suddenly the threat of brainwashing was very real, and it was
everywhere. The U.S. military denied the charges made in the soldiers’
“confessions,” but couldn’t explain how they’d been coerced to make
them. What could explain the behavior of the soldiers besides
brainwashing?
The idea of mind control flourished in pop culture, with
movies like Invasion of the Body Snatchers and The Manchurian Candidate
showing people whose minds were wiped and controlled by outside forces.
FBI director J. Edgar Hoover referred to thought-control repeatedly in
his book Masters of Deceit: The Story of Communism in America and How to Fight It.
By 1980 even the American Psychiatric Association had given it credence, including brainwashing under “dissociative disorders”
in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders-III. Had
Chinese and Soviet Communists really uncovered a machine or method to
rewrite men’s minds and supplant their free will?
The short answer is no—but that didn’t stop the U.S. from pouring resources into combating it.
“The basic problem that brainwashing is designed to address is the
question ‘why would anybody become a Communist?’” says Timothy Melley,
professor of English at Miami University and author of The Covert Sphere: Secrecy, Fiction, and the National Security State. “[Brainwashing] is a story that we tell to explain something we can’t otherwise explain.”
The term had multiple definitions that changed depending on who
used it. For Hunter—who turned out to be an agent in the CIA’s
propaganda wing—it was a mystical, Oriental practice that couldn’t be
understood or anticipated by the West, Melley says. But for scientists
who actually studied the American POWs once they returned from Korea,
brainwashing was altogether less mysterious than the readily apparent
outcome: The men had been tortured.
The early 1950s marked the debut of the military’s studies into
psychological torture, and instead of concluding the American soldiers
needed rehabilitation, military directors came to a more ominous
conclusion: that the men were simply weak. “They became less interested
in the fantasy of brainwashing and became worried our men couldn’t stand
up to torture,” Holmes says. This resulted in the Survival, Evasion,
Resistance, Escape program (SERE), meant to inoculate men against future
attempts at psychological torture by using those same torture
techniques in their training.
Robert Jay Lifton, one of the psychiatrists who worked with the
veterans and late studied doctors who aided Nazi war crimes, listed eight criteria for thought reform
(the term for brainwashing used by Mao Zedong's communist government).
They included things like “milieu control” (having absolute power over
the individual’s surroundings) and “confession” (in which individuals
are forced to confess to crimes repeatedly, even if they aren’t true).
For the American soldiers trapped in the Korean prison camps,
brainwashing meant forced standing, deprivation of food and sleep,
solitary confinement, and repeated exposure to Communist propaganda.
“There was concern on the part of [the American military] about
what had actually happened to [the POWs] and whether they had been
manipulated to be [what would later be known as] a ‘Manchurian
candidate,’” says Marcia Holmes, a science historian at the University
of London’s “Hidden Persuaders” project. “They’re not sleeper agents, they’re just extremely traumatized.”
Meanwhile, the American
public was still wrapped up in fantasies of hypnotic brainwashing, in
part due to the research of pop psychologists like Joost Meerloo and
William Sargant. Unlike Lifton and the other researchers hired by the
military, these two men portrayed themselves as public intellectuals and
drew parallels between brainwashing and tactics used by both American
marketers and Communist propagandists. Meerloo believes that
“totalitarian societies like Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union or
Communist China were in the past, and continue to be, quite successful
in their thought-control programs… [and] the more recently available
techniques of influence and thought control are more securely based on
scientific fact, more potent and more subtle,” writes psychoanalyst Edgar Schein in a 1959 review of Meerloo’s book, The Rape of the Mind: The Psychology of Thought Control—Menticide and Brainwashing.
Psychiatrists, as well as writers like Aldous Huxley, were aided by
the dominant theory of the human mind at the time, known as
“behaviorism”. Think of Ivan Pavlov’s slobbering dogs, trained to
salivate upon hearing a bell, even if they weren’t tempted with food.
The basic assumption of behaviorism was that the human mind is a blank
slate at birth, and is shaped through social conditioning throughout
life. Where Russia had Pavlov, the U.S. had B.F. Skinner,
who suggested psychology could help predict and control behavior.
Little wonder, then, that the public and the military alike couldn’t let
go of brainwashing as a concept for social control.
With this fear of a mind-control weapon still haunting the American
psyche, CIA director Allen Dulles authorized a series of psychological
experiments using hallucinogens (like LSD) and biological manipulation
(like sleep deprivation) to see if brainwashing were possible. The
research could then, theoretically, be used in both defensive and
offensive programs against the Soviet Union. Project MK-ULTRA began in
1953 and continued in various forms for more than 10 years. When the
Watergate scandal broke, fear of discovery led the CIA to destroy most
of the evidence of the program. But 20,000 documents were recovered
through a Freedom of Information Act request in 1977, filed during a Senate investigation
into Project MK-ULTRA. The files revealed the experiments tested drugs
(like LSD), sensory deprivation, hypnotism and electroshock on everyone
from agency operatives to prostitutes, recovering drug addicts and
prisoners—often without their consent.
Despite MK-ULTRA violating ethical norms for human experiments, the
legacy of brainwashing experiments continued to live on in U.S. policy.
The same methods that had once been used to train American soldiers
ended up being used to extract information from terrorists in Abu Ghraib, Iraq and Guantanamo Bay.
“Here, then, is the brief history of brainwashing,” Melley writes in a 2011 paper for Grey Room.
“The concept began as an [O]rientalist propaganda fiction created by
the CIA to mobilize domestic support for a massive military build-up.
This fiction proved so effective that the CIA’s operations directorate
believed it and began a furious search for a real mind control weapon.
The search resulted not in a miraculous new weapon but a program of
simulated brainwashing designed as a prophylactic against enemy
mistreatment. This simulation in turn became the real basis for
interrogating detainees in the war on terror.”
While few people take seriously the notion of hypnosis-like brainwashing (outside Hollywood films like Zoolander),
there are still plenty who see danger in certain kinds of control.
Consider the conversations about ISIS and radicalization, in which young people
are essentially portrayed as being brainwashed. “Can You Turn a
Terrorist Back Into a Citizen? A controversial new program aims to
reform homegrown ISIS recruits back into normal young Americans,”
proclaims one article in Wired. Or there’s the more provocative headline from Vice: “Inside the Mind-Control Methods the Islamic State Uses to Recruit Teenagers.”
“I think a program of isolation and rigorous conversion still does
have a life in our concept of radicalization,” Melley says. But outside
those cases related to terrorism it’s mostly used facetiously, he adds.
“The notion of brainwashing, no less than radicalization, often obscure[s] far more than it reveal[s],” write Sarah Marks and Daniel Pick
of the Hidden Persuaders project. “Both terms could be a lazy way of
refusing to inquire further into individual histories, inviting the
assumption that the way people act can be known in advance.”
For now, the only examples of “perfect” brainwashing remain in
science-fiction rather than fact. At least until researchers find a way
to hack into the network of synapses that comprise the brain. Editor's note, May 25, 2017: The article previously misstated
that Robert Jay Lifton studied Nazi doctors' war crimes before studying
American prisoners of war, and that he coined the term "thought
reform."
Persuasion is NOT Manipulation - Manipulation is coercion through force to get someone to do something that is not in their own interest. Persuasion is the art of getting people to do things that are in their own best interest that also benefit you...
Have you ever been persuaded to do something that you may not have thought of doing or sought to do past/present/future? Many people have and some have without their knowledge as we have pointed out through the use of propaganda, subliminal messaging and through the use of herd mentality. Could the current crisis be a persuasive means to coral people together (get them in their homes scared) to get them on board with a greater agenda: top down engineered controlled thought and behavior program, a big brother prison society, a cashless society... a global world order? It starts to appear as if something much bigger is on the horizon.
Why would there be such an agenda? Well, believe it or not...not everyone's social imagination is like yours exactly. It may seem that way when you think you have a few things in common or are brought into agreement through social contract that says you can do this and not that. That's why we have government, that's why there are politicians, elections, declarations, constitutions, laws, ordinances etc. Because, your social imagination is... its likely not mine. Take the time to make an in-depth observation... sit in a parking lot at any Walmart or any Supermarket, or uptown deli and you will be amazed. There are plenty of low level social imaginations milling about. Now, I happen to think that following suggested practices to keep this situation under control is wise.
Yet, daily I see people out and about (shopping) barefoot in their shower shoes a.k.a flip flops or sometimes sneakers, shorts/pants, and ball caps or sunglasses (men/women/children and seniors) but with no mask or gloves. There are slow pokes, dumpy folks, too skinny folks, short and tall and most of all, lacking situational awareness. Or, they just have not been persuaded. Those self-righteous 'you know whats' argue that they have the right to do whatever they want. But, these days, their right to disregard suggested health safety practices might be seen as involuntary manslaughter. But, there they are young and old, overweight, unkempt, poorly dressed and ignorant of other's rights... to life. This kind of behavior sounds like it needs to be corralled, doesn't it? At least, in the eyes of the social engineers. And, so there are those that can engineer persuasive measures that will slowly get people on board with their social imagination....not yours. It just takes a little friendly persuasion. That is getting people to do things that are in their own best interest that also benefit you...
So, what's in their own best interest that also benefits you (which is not you but them - those that are doing the persuading). Well, they get people of the lower level social imagination to be subject to change that benefits them in ways that best benefit those engineering the changes. Are you being persuaded yet? If not now, then perhaps later, when you think you have a choice but really don't. Those at the top, the social engineers, want you to think they know what is best for you... that's how persuasion benefits them and you...COVID. And, somehow, that abbreviation sounds more like a manipulation of the social imagination... or am I just 'socially' imagining it.
The problem we are facing is an unseen enemy. It doesn't mean it isn't real or just imagined. Its been engineered to do a job/task and its doing it. How? That's what we have been talking about in the last blogs posted here on the Social Imagination.
*Submission to Authorities Everyone must submit himself to the governing authorities, for there is no authority except that which is from God. The authorities that exist have been appointed by God. Consequently,
the one who resists authority is opposing what God has set in place,
and those who do so will bring judgment on themselves.…Romans 13: 1-2.
But...Do not put your trust in princes, in mortal man, who cannot save.
When his spirit departs, he returns to the ground; on that very day his plans perish...Psalm 146:3-4.
