Poison #2
Provoking Clarity
The Fine Art Of Socratic Psychological Warfare
Back when Socrates was palling around with his proteges Plato and Aristotle among other colleagues, and having all of his famous Socratic dialogues immortalized by Plato, he was ultimately put on trial by the worlds first democracy for questioning the established views and morals of the society of the day. Essentially, he was put on trial and sentenced to death by the consumption of hemlock, for creating the infamous Socratic method, one of the fundamental foundations of reason and science that we take somewhat for granted now, if we’re even aware of it given the current state of education. But the Socratic dialogues are just the outward component of an inner Socratic dynamic, the so-called inner dialogue, which is a fundamental part of any genuinely thinking process.
The outer Socratic dialogue can at best only facilitate the process of the inner dialogue. But that requires the voluntary participation of the subject in question, or nothing will ever penetrate their thick unwilling skulls. But even if facilitation is impossible, they may be able to be provoked into engaging in the process anyway. But provoke them hard enough and you might just go the way of Socrates, even in a ‘democracy.’ In times of greater than normal conflict, confusion, and turmoil, this becomes more likely than not, and ever increasingly so unless somehow reversed, forcing everyone to live in some real life version of the Genesis song Land of Confusion.
Provoking an unwilling subject without excessive consequences, essentially requires a milder and subtler form of cult deprogramming, a microcosm of psychological warfare in miniature by stealth and cunning. This is of course easier said than done. Cult members can become very violent when they’re challenged. Any effort at deprogramming must take into account the actual programming and how the programming occurred to begin with. Different cults may have different details to their programming, but the methods of programming are mostly the same. There are just only so many ways to skin a cat brain.
Shouting the truth at them, even if it’s the absolutely perfect and complete truth, as if any such a thing could ever be humanly possible to begin with, never works, no matter how much you shout or how loud. Under the barrage of counter programming, one’s resistance to suggestion will tend to increase rather than decrease. They will react defensively if not violently under the attack of what they have been lead to believe is the evil of the world incarnate in the messenger, possibly even literally shooting the messenger. You can lead a drone to a library, but you can’t make them think, without possibly getting shot for your troubles.
A while back a ways, talk show host Alex Jones appeared with Pierce Morgan on CNN. While I may agree mostly with the substance of what he had to say, he came off as nothing more than a barking meathead sci-fi televangelist. Shouting a barrage of correct information, trying to fill every spare moment of airtime with truth, no matter how true, causes the barrage to miss the mark, or even backfire, in the only way that matters. It does no good to shout the truth, no matter how true, if it just bounces off the target, or the target audience in the room. Even if the target audience to counter programming is not in the room, the response is likely to be the same, almost completely counterproductive.
The emotional use of anger as a tactic of motivation, in and of it self will lead to dismissive, if not violently defensive response. Whenever I hear anger in someone’s voice, I tend to dismiss it, if not be annoyed at the source. Because anger makes people stupid. It may make people physically stronger and somewhat braver temporarily, due to adrenaline, but no one can really think that well under it’s influence. I believe righteous indignation to be the product of cold blooded reason and logic. Otherwise, it’s just emotional noise that most people simply won’t listen to unless they already agree to some extent.
The Socratic method works by questioning rather telling, never mind shouting. You lead the subject through questioning to consider for themselves how to answer based on what they think they know and believe. In the step by step process of question and answer, you lead the subject to come to their own conclusions after having gone though the inner dialogue that otherwise might be absent. The key problem in countering programming is getting the subject to question something they were programmed to never question. This cannot be done directly so much a peripherally, like crop dusting rather than landing and fumigating on the ground.
The key, no doubt, is to attack the edges of the programmed beliefs, while avoiding a direct questioning of the core of their programming, where the programming is bound to have been most severe, and their defenses are bound to be at their strongest. It is at least partially a question of assessing relative weaknesses versus relative strengths, but not of what you think their strengths and weaknesses are. It’s more of a question of where they think they are strong, versus where they think they are weak. Everyone will naturally want to talk about things that they are more confident, and will want to avoid talking about things that they are less confident about.
But programming distorts the perception of strength and weakness, because, by necessity, it’s meant to view the cult and the cult programming as a source of strength, and anything counter to it and it’s interests as a source of weakness, if not outright evil incarnate. The key, in my view, is to get them talking about whatever they want to talk about, and engage them on that basis, on their terms, and work your way past their defenses from there. Being cult members, they will naturally want to evangelize. So let them evangelize, and engage them gently at first by following up and asking them probing questions about it, while trying to lead the conversation gradually further and further into the core, steadfastly avoiding any unnecessary statement of your own contrary beliefs that might raise their defenses.
It is often said that when confronted by a lunatic, it is safer to humor their lunacy than to confront them. It is also a potential stealth attack vector against their programming. In the first season finale of the TV show Burn Notice, one of the main characters by the name of Sam Axe gets captured and then beaten and interrogated for information by some heroine smuggling ex special forces. During the interrogation, the smuggler notices a pattern in Sam’s behavior and makes reference to what may be an apocryphal special forces training to handle such situations, stating “admit nothing… deny everything… make counter accusations,” almost as if they were trained to behave like cult members under pressure.
Of course, if you make accusations, they will admit nothing and deny everything, because their defenses will be up. And no doubt they will make counter accusations of you being an agent of evil, which will most likely be the end of the conversation, either that or when the bullets start to fly. For a Socratic approach, it is absolutely vital to take the opposite approach to that of the interrogator. We will never have to option of tying someone down and forcing them to deal with us and our questioning and accusing. And depending on the cult member, you just might have to engage them while you’re the one tied down, something to be avoided at virtually any cost.
Rather than making any accusations, always ask probing and leading questions about what they want to talk about. If they’re accused of nothing to begin with, there is nothing to admit or deny, and they are less likely to make conversation ending counter accusations or gunshots. The key vector of attack in common to virtually every cult member, is cognitive dissonance. The indoctrination of a cult must necessarily involve some willful contradictions of convenience, that are either glossed over by the cult, or utilized to create cognitive dissonance on purpose in order to suppress critical reasoning, via gaslighting, pathological confusion by systematic willful contradiction rather than persuasion through reason.
With excessive cognitive dissonance resulting from indoctrination in willfully contradictory doctrines, critical reasoning is suppressed by the cognitive dissonance in order to avoid the discomfort that comes from it’s rational examination. In this state of mind, the doctrines in question become something for the emotions to fixate upon, rather than the mind to think about. Always ask probing leading questions designed to lead the conversation towards those contradictions, in order to engage the dissonance directly. But one should almost never engage with accusations, almost always with questions.
Even if you yourself may be questioned by the cult member, answer as best as you can without confrontation, and redirect with a follow up question. Always end on a question mark. People tend to respond to questions with an almost knee jerk feeling of a need to answer to some extent, unless their guard is up. Discomfort is the best and only real weapon here. But it must be a discomfort coming from facing their own cognitive dissonance, not by being accused of something or simply being told what is true. They must be provoked into facing that by virtue of the Socratic dynamic.
It is often said that to duty of the press is to ‘comfort the afflicted and to afflict the comfortable.’ But when press are cult members themselves, their job becomes to comfort the programmed, and to reinforce their programming, as well as to afflict and target those who resist the programming, in order to discourage any discomforting noise from the those who might otherwise escape the programming. If society is run by such cult members, then we are faced with the task of discomforting the system, from a position being little better than the prisoner in the Burn Notice episode mentioned before, effectively attempting what is known as a reverse interrogation, where you have to respond to interrogation by leading he interrogation towards the subjects where the interrogators feel cognitive dissonance. This is tactic of last resort to be sure, as discomforting your cult member interrogators is probably a good way to get yourself tortured and killed.
Assuming we can stay out of the cult members hands, discomfort from a distance is at least somewhat possible, but of limited effectiveness. Without direct engagement with a question and answer process, we may find it extremely difficult to direct the questioning adequately. Socratic psi ops would then have to focus on propaganda centered upon the key elements of cognitive dissonance within the mass programming of society. Again, it must properly focused on the questions rather than challenging accusations, or even just shouting the truth from the rooftops. If accusations are to be made, they should always focus on these key areas, but always with the emphasis on questions as opposed to answers. Even bogus accusations can force a defense of something logically indefensible, if the bogus accusation is targeted carefully enough.
Even more effective than questions and targeted accusations, bogus or otherwise, is the power of humor. Humor is essentially an evolved detection and correction mechanism for the willful irrationality of the human mind. But the cognitive dissonance that suppresses critical reasoning also tends to suppress the sense of humor, causing the cult members to be increasingly humorless and hyper emotional, prone to violent reaction when their sacred programming is being mocked and ridiculed. You definitely don’t want to be around when these freaks are provoked, but by all means provoke them from a distance.
I happen to believe that nihilism in some form or another, to some extent or another, is the wellspring of all humor. The veil of the sacred within peoples minds, shields absurdity from being detected by the human mind thus afflicted with sacredness. The more sacred cows you believe in, the less absurdity there is to be recognized and corrected by humor. With an overall proliferation of sacred cows by the cult members, humor begins to die a slow smothering death by sacredness. With a nihilistic world view, nothing is sacred, and absurdity is plainly obvious, and can be readily exploited by targeted humor, as a weapon of psychological warfare. When it comes to the future of humanity, it may be decided by the answer to the question ‘what happens when the unstoppable farce meets the immovable herd?’ Something stupid has to give!
Beduh Beduh Beduh Beduh Beduh Beduh Beduh…
That’s All For Now Folks!
Feel Free To Make Noise Among Yourselves!
And May The Best Noise Win!
Ozymandias The Mad 