Desirable Incarceration

"None are more hopelessly enslaved, than those who falsely believe they are free." Famous words by Goethe from two centuries ago, but maybe more relevant today than ever before. We're free, right? As individuals we think we are. Why then, is our behavior so damn predictable when looking at the large numbers?

_{Image by JAM Project - source: Flickr}

Our society has not evolved into the totalitarian dystopia as described in George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, or at least not in the sense that the dictatorship is out in the open for everyone to see; we don't have a literal Big Brother who appears on our multitude of screens to have us recite the State's motto, or to reprimand us when we fail to meet even one of the State's very "reasonable" demands. Instead, our reality has gone the way of Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, a society in which citizens are kept peaceful and docile through the constant consumption of a soothing, happiness-producing drug called soma. We don't use soma, but we are being kept happy and docile by the age old strategy of bread and circuses.

The Ancient Roman government began the "bread and circuses" program to prevent civil unrest within the large empire. As noted, the program sought to feed the poor and keep them entertained. Roman leaders believed that if these two needs were met - food and entertainment - the poor would be less likely to notice, complain, or revolt against the empire.
_{source: Brainly}

Constant distractions designed to keep your thoughts shallow, to limit your attention span to mere seconds, just long enough to sell you on some idea or product, fitted on a carousel for convenient high-frequency repetition of the same nonsense, until it's rooted in your psyche as just another fact of life; this is what mainstream media has served up fo decades now. They have never been the fourth estate, the watchdogs that keep politics and politicians honest, but instead have been their mouthpiece, spreading their propaganda to complement the mindless entertainment with mindless infotainment.

Aldous Huxley spoke at the California Medical School in 1961 and said this:

"There will be, in the next generation or so, a pharmacological method of making people love their servitude, and producing dictatorship without tears, so to speak, producing a kind of painless concentration camp for entire societies, so that people will in fact have their liberties taken away from them, but will rather enjoy it, because they will be distracted from any desire to rebel by propaganda or brainwashing, or brainwashing enhanced by pharmacological methods. And this seems to be the final revolution."
_{source: Alliance for Human Research Protection}

_{source: Wikipedia}

This method of enslavement relies heavy on principles of behavioral conditioning as developed by B.F. Skinner; he already established that operant conditioning through positive reinforcement is much more effective, producing longer lasting results, than through negative reinforcement. So you give the rat a treat when it does something right, instead of giving it a shock when it does something wrong. We're the rat, and the dopamine rush we get when we buy ourself something new, or when we get a like or upvote, or when we feel the support from our in-group while fighting today's manufactured out-group of choice, is the treat. There's the paradoxical irony that we believe the ability to satisfy our desires sets us free, when it is in fact one of the main methods by which we are being kept docile and manageable. Here's some words by B.F. Skinner:

"Now that we know how positive reinforcement works and why negative doesn't, we can be more deliberate and hence more successful, in our cultural design. We can achieve a sort of control under which the controlled, though they are following a code much more scrupulously than was ever the case under the old system, nevertheless feel free. They are doing what they want to do, not what they are forced to do. That's the source of the tremendous power of positive reinforcement - there's no restraint and no revolt. By a careful design, we control not the final behavior, but the inclination to behave - the motives, the desires, the wishes. The curious thing is that in that case the question of freedom never arises." - source Walden Two

It's not that this prison is invisible to our eyes, and even in mainstream media and entertainment this idea is put forward for everyone to see. "Are you not entertained" in Gladiator, "I'm mad as hell" in Network or even the evil mission of super-villain "Screenslaver" in Incredibles 2; the "enslavement through entertainment" theme is dangled before our collective noses as if to mock us. And why not? The psychology behind it seems solid; what Skinner's rats can do, we can do even better... yes? Yes we can. We love our prison, even if we can see the bars... Much of today's post is from the video linked below, so watch that, it's very good and closes with some words of wisdom by an actual conscious slave...

_{Aldous Huxley and Brave New World: The Dark Side of Pleasure}

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