Imprisoned by propaganda - knowledge is the key to our liberation

When one is “intrinsically motivated” it means that you are driven more by internal rewards, as opposed to some external result like money, fame or power. Most of us are driven by the urges of the senses and the biological instincts of eating, sleeping, mating and defending. But when you tap into a "higher taste" for consciousness and awakening to truth, then the lower demands are less important. With wisdom and awakened consciousness, a realization dawns that the real treasure is within. We all already have all we need and all we seek - within ourselves. It’s just a matter of perception.

In youth the cravings of the body and senses are hard to deny and it’s not healthy to suppress the hormonal drives artificially. However, they should be regulated and disciplined by a system of some sort, where we are taught to see the bigger picture, to see things in perspective. Unfortunately modern civilization, built on the engineered consumption, does the opposite. Today we are led by media marketing manipulation techniques first used by the nephew of Sigmund Freud, named Edward Bernays who capitalized his uncle’s speculations that we are all driven by our most primal motivations.

Freud is famous for seeing everything as sexually motivated and his nephew took this to its natural conclusion and turned it into a strategy of propaganda to manipulate the mostly unconscious minds of the masses via this very weakness for the allures of the senses. This man is known as “the father of public relations” and even published his original great work called “Propaganda” in 1928 where he wrote:

“The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country. We are governed, our minds are molded, our tastes formed, and our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of…. It is they who pull the wires that control the public mind.”

The engineering of consent
We have been led to believe that we are free to choose, but our very choices have been prompted by mass marketing from the day we’re born. What is today called branding, was once called public relations, a term invented by Berneys, but before that it was known simply as propaganda. Curiously Berneys started off marketing war. He helped President Woodrow Wilson promote the idea of war to the American citizenry during WW I. He was the man who gave leaders the means to control and regiment their citizens into becoming compliant without them realizing it.

It’s ironic that one of his biggest admirers was Goebbels, who literally adopted his techniques to promote Hitler’s Nazi Party before WW II. And Berneys was a Jew. As Minister of Propaganda for Hitler, Goebbels actually used Berneys’ ideas to promote the “Fuhrer cult” that swept Hitler to power. It was pure propaganda in the classical sense of the term.
But that’s not where propaganda ends. We are still being manipulated today, under the guise of advertising and free speech. And not always for our ultimate good. In fact it is literally for our detriment and the gain of a small group of shareholders who get rich on our destruction. Take cigarettes for example.

Bernays was the one who launched the campaign to make smoking look attractive. He went further and strategically overcame the taboo against smoking among women. He promoted it as a sign of women’s equality, calling the cigarette their “torches of freedom”. This is how sick and disgusting the propaganda of engineered consent, known as advertising, really is.

In the 1930s it was Berneys who promoted cigarettes as soothing to the throat and slimming to the figure. Meanwhile at home he was trying to persuade his wife to stop smoking by throwing her cigarettes away every time he found them around the house. He was aware already of the early studies on smoking being a cause of cancer. And in later years, when he turned 100 in 1991, he became an active supporter of anti-smoking campaigns, to his credit.

But it’s not just one man who is the embodiment of wickedness, it is a system, the modern western system based on the illusion of “freedom” and “free speech”, where under the ideology of “capitalism” all’s fair as long as it makes a profit. It doesn’t need to be truthful. It doesn’t have to be healthy or right or correct. In fact it is perfectly fine to sell you the poison with which you will slowly kill yourself, as long as the profit from selling the poison is good for the shareholders. What kind of freedom is that? What kind of sanity is that? It is commercialized inhumanity, and it is all we know in the modern world.

Do you think the pharmaceutical companies are any better? They are the biggest killers for profit, next to the weapons industry that makes millions on the lies and false propaganda of the “war on terror”. That’s how the military elite engineered consent in the recent years. They made a modern equivalent of Pearl Harbour, a classic false flag propaganda strategy to scare the citizens into embracing a never-ending war against an unknown enemy for the profit of a few, while murdering over a million innocents in multiple nations.

But this is not a discussion about the war propaganda machine. It is about our lack of awareness of how we are all being manipulated by a ruthless few at the top who have sold their morals and their humanity for money. And even more than that, it is about how we are victims of our own uncontrolled minds and senses. These manipulative social engineering techniques of propaganda disguised as advertising happen to work because we, as individuals, are not in control of our own mind and five senses.

We are in such deep illusion and under the control of the primitive part of the brain, that we can be manipulated like donkeys. It just takes a big enough carrot and we are lulled and lured to take the bait, all the while ignorant of the deadly hook that lies within ready to kill us quickly or slowly, while we pay our murderers for the poison that kills us. It’s not only cigarettes but many products today are sold under false pretenses based on total lies and fabrications as to their benefit or detriment. We are the victims of the propaganda of our own governments and the elite corporations who have us with the noose round our five senses, addicted to the toxic products, lifestyle and very perception of reality that leads us like a lamb to the slaughterhouse.

Knowledge is the key
But if we are fortunate enough to gain access to some knowledge of ourselves, of our mind and body, of who we are and how this reality works, then we can be spared a lifetime of anguish and poverty of consciousness, a lifetime of enslavement to our own minds and five senses. The handbooks on consciousness have always been there, though it is relatively recently in the past century that these ancient Sanskrit wisdom literatures, called the Vedas, have been translated into English for us. For example we find a verse which says

विषया विनिवर्तन्ते निराहारस्य देहिनः ।
रसवर्जं रसोऽप्यस्य परं दृष्ट्वा निवर्तते ॥ ५९ ॥

viṣayā vinivartante
nirāhārasya dehinaḥ
rasa-varjaṁ raso ’py asya
paraṁ dṛṣṭvā nivartate

“Though the embodied soul may be restricted from sense enjoyment, the taste for sense objects remains. But, ceasing such engagements by experiencing a higher taste, he is fixed in consciousness.”

Bhagavad Gita as it is ch 2:59 translated by Swami A. C. Bhaktivedanta

Unless one is a liberated soul, s/he will be driven by the senses to engage in pleasure-seeking. Such is life. But by hearing this text we can begin to understand that we are not the body comprising of five senses, but are an “embodied soul” as the text says. And despite restricting ourselves, like for example a sick person is obliged to with certain foodstuffs, still the taste for such pleasures often remains. We cannot artificially expect renunciation. However, the secret is to obtain a taste for something higher, like health, real liberty and full consciousness.

Usually this comes in later years, once one has finished with chewing the chewed, and realizes there must be something more, something higher. But we needn’t wait until the end of life. We need to be informed as soon as possible. I have seen the strongest of men, the richest of women and the smartest of kids all fall victim to their own uncontrolled mind and senses, only to be brought to their knees or their deathbed by over-consumption, addiction and the lower urges, simply due to lack of knowledge. And all of them are only partially to blame, although we are all responsible for our actions.

We also have to lay some of the blame on the propaganda that is being fed to us by the unscrupulous leaders, politicians and big corporations who have shown again and again that they do not have our best interests at heart. They have their own selfish profit in mind, and they will crush us under foot and under tank if necessary, to squeeze out every ounce of profit from us as they lure us on via the ring in our noses and the other four senses to which we are so easily chained. The elite know us very well, they know the frailties of human nature and they are exploiting those vulnerabilities daily in every way they can to ensnare us into life-destroying habits and soul-destroying lifestyles.

It’s up to us to inform ourselves, to find out who we really are and what is really going on here in this rare and valuable human form of life, before it’s too late and we find ourselves being dragged out of the body, having missed the opportunity of a lifetime because we were too distracted by the senses or too tricked by our slave masters in this material prison, the human body aka in the “city of nine gates”.