Dream Diary Entry recorded June 10, 2018

I remember very few details of the last two nights' dreams, except that they were large, elaborate, almost cinematic stories. They took place in locales similar to the repeated environments of many of my dreams - urban but pretty landscapes, indoor shopping/working complexes - but were seen by me as works of fiction, stories in which I may have been actively involved, but stories nonetheless, as opposed to anything that felt like it was a genuine experience.

One scene this morning arrived at the end, right before I woke up, and was somewhat lucid and controlled by my waking mind: It is interesting to me now that I was still able to hold on to the special effects methods and control the story in this way - hey, to my understanding, that's what lucid dreaming is about, ideally. Anyway, we had arrived at an endpoint in the story I was imagining, where the good guys had the bad guy trapped in the good guys' lair/lab. It was a kind of a futuristic or science fiction lab or control room setting, and it seemed we did not physically have the bad guy in the room with us, but enough of his image - holographic? VR? - that we could control him and make him feel things. One of our good guy team had experienced or witnessed the bad guy doing horrible deeds, and this good guy was very angry. And now he was holding the hologram of the bad guy by the collar. While doing so, the good guy reached down and picked up a can of gasoline, and doused the hologram's head with it. The hologram began flickering with reddish light over the bad guy's head where the liquid had been poured, but the good guy did not set it on fire, although he indicated he was about to do so. The bad guy was screaming. I stepped in and said that that was enough. We're not the bad guys, we don't torture or kill or set on fire, we are not going to be like them. I felt a little for the good guy, because his anger had indeed been somewhat justified and the opportunity for revenge was not something he really could resist. But it was not the way that the team I was on should do things. Then, I woke up, sat and thought and marveled at how the dream story even that soon was dissipating in the morning air, and got the dogs ready for their morning potty walk.

My June 10 Twitter Thread on Social Manipulation

This is a compilation of a long Twitter thread I composed and posted a little earlier this morning. I've put it all together here for easier reading via other systems.

1. We have a great deal to gain from the interconnected nature of life: Human beings, their commonalities and differences, the diversity of precious life on earth, and the vast and fascinating marketplace of ideas, all of this is beautiful and wonderful and awe-inspiring.

 

2. We also have an awful history that got us to where we are today: Industry and commerce, expansion and empire, acquisition of wealth and establishment of governments, all of these forms of progress have also carried with them inhumane practices, exploitation, and enslavement.

 

3. The art of deception is part of that progress. So is the art of broadcasting and publishing information and entertainment, messages that can have a profound effect on a population, on a nation, on the world. Deception and broadcasting can be used together powerfully.

 

4. Those who deceive for exploitation and profit, those most successful at it who use the power of broadcast and publication to influence millions and preserve their own wealth, do not owe this frightening and socially destructive ability to the majority of humanity being stupid.

 

5. A population is not stupid. People are suggestible, especially when encountering new information and an upset to their environment, to what is known. Wealth and power insulates a few from many of the worse effects of the vicissitudes of life that would impoverish most of us.

 

6. That these fortunate few - speaking in terms of population ratio; their numbers are large enough to achieve aims unthinkable for one or a handful, and their working together could even enhance their powers - damage the social fabric to preserve their power is shocking and sad.

 

7. History bears out, however, that it is not surprising. It, like our suggestibility, is a note of caution about being human organisms with human brains, human ambitions, and the consequent human responsibilities.

 

8. The war of capitalist and socialist ideas, with the concomitant smear campaigns by the advocates of each side against the other, can be seen as, among other views, a war of the manipulators against the manipulated. And the sides drawn in this war may not be clear as they seem.

 

9. It is possible that great thinkers on all sides of a great many ideological arguments have advocates whose rhetoric has been distilled and promoted to prominence by the powerful few, with both sides' words getting popularized to perpetuate prosperity, profit, exploitation.

 

10. Boiling down complex issues until they look like there are only two sides to them - "If you're not for us, you're against us!" - is a manipulative method of simplification that is very popular among power brokers. Certainty and polarization outsell uncertainty, ambiguity.

 

11. People rush to simple explanations that promise a release from chaos and uncertainty - and some of those people can then be depicted by one side or the other of the message-manipulators as being either ignorant or out of touch.

 

12. Again: It's not a case of being stupid, of being out of touch. It is humanity being human, and of those who exploit taking advantage of our suggestibility. Great control is exercised over who gets to wield the best tools for such influence.

 

13. A great many good ideas become marginalized by the powerful, with think-alike behavior being promoted above it, because of this: Who becomes influential is important to preserving the wealth of the powerful, and maintaining our exploiting social order.

 

14. America was founded by revolutionary thought, attitudes, and actions. So were movements for freedom within our borders and across the entirety of Earth. Whichever side an individual sees themselves as taking, the importance of connection and of being awake deserves attention.

 

15. We are in this for all of us, and for the world around us that does not experience consciousness and thought and volition the way we do. We owe it to all of earthly life, and to our future existence, to resist and to wake up from the manipulation the shrewd and powerful do.

 

16. That manipulation is both seen and unseen in our lives, in our psyches. It will be a difficult fight to resist it and to throw it off. And who knows what effect it will have on the engines the shrewd and powerful have put into place to keep us happy, comfortable, and asleep?

 

17. We have always been fighting this revolution. (Some popular sci-fi stories have even hinted at this through fantastic metaphors.) But now with political manipulation and corporate corruption at the level it enjoys, the fight must also escalate.

 

18. Remember interconnection. Affirm our equality. Stand up for diversity and for the precious world we enjoy daily. And remember that sheep are not dumber than they should be, but are perhaps more suggestible than it's safe for them to be these days, all considered. Let's go.