We have been conditioned. Most people probably haven’t noticed. It was an easy thing to do, albeit a time-consuming effort. But it worked: we are on the precipice of a socialist takeover.
On the upside, more and more normal freedom-loving Americans are understanding just how “off” everything feels. There’s a slow “enough is enough” burn simmering just beneath the surface of everyday life. Jason Aldean’s song “Try This In A Small Town” is just one of the several indicators showing how thin our level of tolerance is becoming. Regardless of the outcome of the upcoming election, I believe we’re in for a huge explosion within the next year.
The premise here, though, is that of being conditioned. So let’s look at what this actually entails.
The most subtle form of conditioning outside of politics is advertising. While it’s meant to be informational and therefore benign, all forms of advertising are effective to a degree. And it’s been around for thousands of years.
Oral forms of product endorsement date from the 11th to 7th century BC. The oldest written form of advertisement was found in the ruins of Thebes in Egypt.
The ruins of Pompeii, destroyed in 79 AD by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius, revealed ancient ads for local establishments such as inns and even brothels. Obviously, content restrictions didn’t exist then.
Here’s another example from the ancient world to consider. Christ’s parable of the Good Samaritan (Luke 10:29-37) makes mention of the Samaritan taking the wounded traveler to an inn. Obviously, this inn was well-known along the route. How did it advertise? (Just a thought….)
The invention of the printing press in 1440 by Johannes Gutenberg introduced a new medium for advertising. It could be argued that the printing of indulgences for the Catholic Church in 1454 was the first commercial use of print to sell something. Print remained the dominant form of mass media until the late 19th century.
Radio was invented by Guglielmo Marconi in 1890. The first official broadcast was in 1897. By the 1920s, radio was common in most American homes. So common that AT&T needed to find a way to make money from it. The first paid commercial radio ad was in 1922 on station WEAF in New York for apartments.
Television was also being developed in the late 1800s. 1884 saw the invention of TV, and it took another decade for a commercially viable model could be introduced. There was also an early German patent in 1904 for color TV.
American inventor Philo Tayler Farnsworth started working on early TV models in 1920. By 1927, he demonstrated his first results with a broadcast on Sept. 7th of that year. By the 1930s, there were only a few hundred TVs in the entire country. Radio and print were still the dominant media.
The first television commercial was broadcast on July 1st, 1941. It was an ad for Bulova watches. With post-WW2 prosperity, television became more popular than radio and the 1950s saw an amazing increase not only in sales of TV units but also in content.
This brings us to where we are today. We now have the fourth generation of citizens who have grown up with electronic media of some kind. Along the way, we’ve become immune to advertising. We’re used to it; it’s so pervasive and subtle we fail to realize the power it has.
This ability to ignore what’s going on around us (or so we think) is what the content creators of the information age want.
The never-ending stream of material tends to actually blur any real truth that we seek. Terms like misinformation and disinformation exist to keep us off balance.
Through social media, now available on every smartphone, we’re conditioned to accept, not question. That’s how orchestrated smash-and-grab riots become “mostly peaceful gatherings…of youth.”
All artistic endeavors, music in particular, are controlled to meet certain criteria. We’re told what to like; what is good; and what is supposedly not.
The Great Wuhan Kungflu Overreaction (i.e. COVID), is probably the best example, in fact the best proof, that we have been conditioned. Enough people are conditioned to believe the “experts” so that entire nations and their economies were shut down. The same sheep continued to listen to the “experts” regarding vaccines.
This happened because so many are conditioned to accept certain agendas and narratives. The reality is that never before in human history has so much information been available to so many, so quickly.
What kept us from going full-tilt socialists is that there does remain a remnant who practice critical thinking, use empirical wisdom, and understand the Hegelian Dialectic and how it’s applied.
Remember, when it comes to all media and information, if they can turn it on, they can turn it off.
But…so can we. We can turn off our support and our compliance.
