The Achilles Heel of Culturally Constructed Anti-Information Packages:
1984, by George Orwell, and Anthem, by Ayn Rand, are two of many books about future dystopias that are based on the premise that people can be trained to accept absolutely anything. In both of these stories, society has fallen under some sort of totalitarian control. Certain words have been eliminated from the English language, so the ideas those words refer to have been eliminated from the public’s collective consciousness. Both of those books are great illustrations of just how much it’s possible to control a population and the decisions they’re going to make by controlling the information the public has to work with. However, both of those books stretch that premise beyond the bounds of scientific reality, because neither of those authors realized how much of human consciousness originates from that universal brain structure of humanity versus how much is learned from the outside. Although to their credit, both of those books were written in the first half of the 20th century, and how closely those authors were able to predict the future based on the information they had to work with at the time is chilling.
But I’m going to disprove the possibility that people could be trained to forget ideas that originate within their universal human brain structure right now, and you’re going to help me. I’m going to show you some words with missing letters, and you’re going to tell me the first words that come to mind based on the letters you see. Ready?
B _ t c h
S l _ t
S _ x
T _ t
A s _
D _ c k
C _ n t
F _ _ k
What are those words?
Obviously, the words are Batch, Slot, Six, Tot, Asp, Duck, Cent, and Fork. What did you think they were, you pervert?
If you’re like me, when you saw this test you immediately saw what the letters could spell, but then just to try to outsmart the test you figured out some other words they could spell. But that doesn’t matter, because you already know the words that first sprang to mind.
These words refer to ideas that are very important to you, and very important to everyone else in the world, and that have been very important to people as long as the human race has been around. Even if the words didn’t exist, you would still think about these ideas, and so would everyone else in the world.
Just about everyone in America has been taught not to use these words, because supposedly they refer to bad things—even though they’re things that everyone thinks about. But because certain people have tried so hard to train us not to think about these words, we’ve all attached a lot more emotional meaning to these words than we have to most other words, so these words are permanently etched into all of our consciousnesses.
Suppose the next president of the United States was a Jehovah’s Witness, and he filled his whole cabinet with Jehovah’s Witnesses. Then he decreed that the concept of “fucking” shall cease to exist in America, because the word “fuck” shall no longer be used by anyone. Saying the word “fuck” will now be a federal offense, and will carry a sentence of 25 years to life in prison. All movies, books, and magazines that contain the word “fuck” will be confiscated. What the f*ck do you think would happen?
A huge counter-cultural movement would spring up, and people would say “fuck” just for the f*ck of it. Maybe they’d form secret societies that would meet in basements of abandoned buildings at midnight where people would exhibit art, music, and poetry with the word “fuck” in it, and the pass phrase to get into these secret society meetings would be “Jesus fucking Christ”. More likely, everyone would just accept that pretty much everyone still used the word, and nobody would rat anybody else out for it regardless of whether or not it was supposed to be wrong. And you can be sure that there would be a blackmarket for movies, books, magazines, or anything else that contained the word “fuck”. If artwork containing the word “fuck” was made very hard to get, that would make it a status symbol, and that would create a market for it among anyone who could afford to pay for it. Basically, the word “fuck” would become the marijuana of the future.
By trying to abolish a word that refers to an idea that everyone in the world shares, you would just be calling more attention to the word, the idea, and the fact that you were trying to abolish them both. Your economy would collapse before this public retraining program could be carried out, because every single person in the country would have to be watched every single minute of their lives. That would be an awful lot of people who would have to devote their lives to doing this instead of doing anything else, and who everyone else would have to work to feed, clothe, house, and everything else.
Seizing control of the media and getting political, religious, and cultural leaders to cooperate 100% wouldn’t be sufficient. That trick has been tried. And even Mormons still think about sex.
On the other hand, doing the exact opposite of this hypothetical public retraining procedure is possible. If you read my last book, you know about a whole lot of ideas that everyone carries in their universal human brain structure, whether people know words to refer to those ideas or not. Everyone who read my last book now knows a lot of words to refer to ideas that everyone in the world has, they know the same set of words to refer to those ideas, and although my presentation style won’t work for everyone, everyone who read my last book understands enough about where those ideas came from that they can figure out other ways to present the same information to pull those ideas out of peoples’ subconsciousness.
For ideas that everyone thinks about but everyone has been taught not to talk about or think about, that isn’t hard at all, as I’ve already shown you. However, when people are taught to believe certain things are true and their natural perceptions agree that they’re true even though they aren’t true, those culturally taught information packages reinforce their natural misperceptions of the world. Teaching people to consume as many material commodities as possible is one example, because they can’t naturally perceive the effects their lives have on the environment, and they certainly can’t perceive the effects that everyone’s lives combined have on the environment. So that’s where things get complicated…