Manipulating Minds and More

Prompt 32: December 1, 2023

Picture this scenario:

Your self-driven busyness keeps you from interest in the goings-ons of any national news.  These matters typically have nothing to do with you or anyone else you know, or else you’d hear about it like any interesting information brought up in casual conversation.  All of a sudden, every school in your town has closed.  You find out that they have closed, followed by a cascading number of businesses, because an NBA player contracted a contagious cold, (though the testing mechanism for the specific virus is nearly indeterminate).  Though this player, as well as many other high-profile victims to the disease recover in a few short days, the reaction to the spread of this new sickness has brought disruption to every facet of life.  Churches stop practicing the sacraments. Your grocery runs are limited to an arbitrary number of items. Police are no longer enforcing traffic laws. Barbershops and salons are outlawed. And no one is allowed to sit in a restaurant.  After all attention is funneled to the major media outlets, you’d believe everyone who contracts the virus is a dead man, though the local hospital is totally empty since they too have closed off their “nonessential” services.  On top of all the economic, social, spiritual, and institutional disruption, contempt fills the void in each anxious heart to lead the most agitated among us to lash out at complete strangers over the slightest of offenses.

Three years later and it still feels weird to talk about what happened to us; we were manipulated. 

Kevin Lee recommended a book to me several years ago, which I just got around to reading.  When (in college) I had shared with him my enthusiasm, after reading Nancy Pearcey’s Saving Leonardo, he advised that I look into her instructor recommending a book called How Should We Then Live: The Rise and Decline of Western Thought and Culture by Francis Schaeffer.  After a thorough study, I can’t recommend it enough.  Schaeffer details the history of the West through its philosophical assumptions and the insufficiencies to live up to Christ’s example.  He articulates the differences of how people have traditionally conceptualized truth, morality, government, law, purpose, art, nature, and people through specific examples of the writings, architecture, and art across the ages1.  Though Schaeffer wrote the book over fifty years ago, his prophetic conclusion is that the deterministic suppositions of the modernists would inevitably be codified throughout the world, to reshape man into the perfect specimen of the state.  Whether communist or liberal, each nation would focus on manipulating its own citizenry toward the aims of their elite.  He writes:

At that point [where order is lost] the words left or right will make no difference. They are only two paths to the same end. There is no difference between an authoritarian government from the right or the left: the results are the same. An elite, an authoritarianism as such, will gradually force form on a society so that it will not go on to chaos. And most people will accept it–from the desire for personal peace, and affluence, from apathy, and from the yearning for order to assure the functioning of some political system, business, and the affairs of daily life.  

After reading this, I began to consider what agendas we are being served through some of the most apparent of institutional lies.

Remember the attack in the Gulf of Tonkin? – Lie (See Note 2)

Remember the food pyramid? – Lie (See Note 3)

Remember Iraq’s “weapons of mass destruction”? – Lie (See Note 4)

Remember the “mostly peaceful” riots? (See Note 5)

Remember “safe and effective” – Lie (See Note 6)

These are just a few of the most audacious lies that have recently reaped catastrophe on our culture.  How many more have subtly warped our worldviews?  How many more have shaped the actual methods of developing our worldviews?  This is where conspiracies fill the imagination where only patterns are observable.  Paul’s warning to the church in Ephesus is a sobering reminder about the power of such phenomena:

For we do not wrestle against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers over this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places. 

Ephesians 6:12

If the culture in which we live is antithetical to the kingdom of God, how should we then live?

The thread is open. Create boldly, and may the Spirit guide us all

Notes

1. See attachment for summarized values and understandings that defined each era of western culture.
2. On my last visit with my late uncle, he shared some memories of his navy days patrolling these waters prior to the outbreak of the Vietnam war.  His quote “yeah, I knew our government was crooked back then.”

3. Several dietary fads have cropped up to give people more confidence in their food choices. Though they may not give a complete answer to the ideal diet, they all address the failures of the USDA’s food pyramid of 1992.

4. We will likely continue to be inundated with declassification of past crimes of our government, but the impulse to war has to be the most egregious.  

5. There are plenty of hilarious memes about the summer of love, but this article lays out the ominous comparison to the soviet union.

6. For an endeavor in“trusting the science”, the tyrannical mandates during the covid years have made it impossible to measure the actual long-term safety of the mRNA injections.  As for the efficacy of the injections, this video is a fantastic portrait of the collapse of this corporate narrative.