Electronics or freedom
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Dear Editor,
A secret war is taking place in our schools. The two opponents involved hold different conceptions of reality. One side claims that humans operate purely on the basis of stimulus-response, like machines or Pavlovian dogs. The other side claims humans think for themselves and prize freedom of action.
A thought-form is a particular response to a stimulus meant to guide behavior. A dominant thought-form in civilization today is: universal rule through mega-corporations that owe no allegiance to any nation and are colluding with governments, their bureaucracies and intelligence agencies, and technological elites all hooked to a global surveillance operation with media control. As to why such a thought-form should come to dominate human affairs, the simplest explanation is: because it works and the young are easily molded.
Populations are undergoing a quiet revolution. We can cite some of the reasons: television, computers, education, social media, the Surveillance State, government organizations who follow a “zero tolerance” policy, and advertising.
There are a number of companies who are dedicated to measuring “audience response” to ads and other public messages. This is electronic measuring. They can use biometric bracelets, for instance, that record students’ emotional responses to teachers in classrooms. Then, there is facial recognition geared to the task of revealing how people are reacting when they sit at their computers or use smart phones. How about those cute little computer watches?
“Yes, I want to live like this. I want to be inside the system. I want to be analyzed. I want to be evaluated. I want to accept the results. I want to be part of the new culture. Put bracelets on me. Give me a smart phone or watch. Measure my eye movements, my throat twitches that indicate what I’m thinking, my skin electricity, and my brain waves. Control my life. I look forward to it.” The Surveillance State takes on a whole new meaning.
In this new world, the process of thinking, comparing, independently judging, and the freedom to make individual choices is not encouraged. It’s too unpredictable. We don’t have time for that sort of thing. No, we have to achieve compliance. We have to seek out the lowest, common denominators. This is what universal surveillance is all about; the observation of those denominators and the variances from them—the outlying and therefore dangerous departures from what your master’s have decided.
“Well, we’ve tracked Mr. Jones’ classroom for a year now, and we’ve collated all the measurements of reactions from the students. It was a wonderful study. But we did notice one thing. All the students showed similar patterns of reactions over time…except two students. We couldn’t fit them into the algorithms. They are not responding correctly. It was almost as if they were intentionally defecting from the group. This signals some kind of disorder. We need a name for it, how about Oppositional Defiance Disorder? We recommend attaching electrodes to those two students’ skulls, so we can get a better readout of their brain activity in real time.” Better yet, let’s drug them.
There is an irreducible thing. It’s called freedom. It is native to every individual. Sometimes it rears its head in the middle of the night, and the dreamer awakes. And he asks himself: what is freedom? And then he begins a voyage that no device can record, measure, or analyze. If he pursues it long enough, he no longer is a stimulus-response mechanism.
Pavlov thought the individual should allow himself to be a “natural object”, see himself as a clean and stimulus-response mechanism, as planned inputs cause him to behave in various ways. In other words, he would have no life of his own.
The freedom of the individual, his innate capacity to make wide-ranging choices, is the monkey wrench in the program. It is anti-stimulus-response. This is why you would have to search far and wide to find, in any school, anywhere, on any level, a course that examines and promotes individual freedom. It is anathema to the plan. It is the silver bullet for the vampire. Freedom comes from within the individual, not from without.
National Socialism in Germany before WWII realized they had to change the children. They realized the difficulty in indoctrinating the older generation. You will notice it is the younger generation, who in large groups of people, are the ones playing with their smart phones and/or watches. COVID-19 killed more of the older generation than any other age group.
Aldon Maleckas
Custer Township