All Terrain Thinking

A Compendium of things I think are Important

We are many things, but we are not sugar coated

BRAIN-WASH

Chapter 7

SUBVERSION BY EDUCATION

The evidence of an elitist corruption Is not just what is presented here, it is all around us. The Australian, 2/10/1991. Article: Losing all sense in plain English, quote:

The title of the recent national conference of English teachers held in Brisbane was "New Voices, New Directions: the Politics of Literacy". One might assume that a variety of voices would have been heard and that there was room for disagreement and debate - but this was not the case. 1

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In the jargon of the new orthodoxy the teacher's role is to give students the power to offer "a resistant reading that challenges the ideology of the text".2

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Of course, the intention is not to understand or appreciate what is actually written but rather to "subvert" and "undermine" the text and to give free play to one's subjective and idiosyncratic response. EQ. EA.

1 Knowing what we now know we can see in the title of this conference that it is really about political manipulation through literacy education.

2 They pretend that every text is ideology-directed and should be redirected to their own ideology - they project the impression that politics is just a game of one-up-manship.

The writer of the article, a teacher of English, saw that the ideological fanatics were intent on denying their students a mastery of written and spoken English. The ideas being promoted WERE NOT to ensure that students would understand the text but that they would use their ideologically imprinted desires to read into any text whatever they wanted to see.

One can imagine the difficulty of properly correcting such an exercise in English appreciation. The difficulties posed for the student in any future attempts to know the real world must become insurmountable if this attitude becomes ingrained.

The power of mind-bias over time is totally crippling. Here are a few lines from The Forgotten Language by Professor David Myers (The Australian 4/1/'92); quote:

This decline in literacy at our universities is so grave that many universities insist that all students enrolled in the natural sciences or engineering or business must also pass a subject in written communication skills. This need was highlighted by the Williams report on engineering graduates in Australia, which complained about the illiterate and socially unaware graduates who were nothing but highly specialized technicians.

Conservatives believe that a decline in academic literacy can be ascribed to the decision taken a few decades ago by educators in our primary and secondary schools to stop teaching the boring old rules and practice of grammar and to encourage creative self-expression.

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.. almost half of the incoming students at the new universities are not functionally literate ..

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.. We must acknowledge that the quality of life in our society stems from the quality of our communication.

Although you wouldn't know it from watching TV, the quality of our civilization is more dependent on our literature and on our joy in writing and reading than it is on sex without AIDS, mindless consumerism, cordless telephoning, video-conferencing and gee-whiz technological progress. EQ.

DICTIONARIES, LANGUAGE & LIBRARIES

Our fears are confirmed in many ways including 'newspeak' indoctrination to 'political correctness'. The following is from an article by Dame Leonie Kramer, Chancellor of the University of Sydney; quote:

Much has been written about political correctness. It is a comprehensive idea which includes your attitude to just about everything from politics itself to children's literature ... and language.

The new Random House dictionary must surely be the bible of the language of political correctness ... this dictionary "lends authority to scores of questionable usages".

Here are some examples: "heightism" and "weightism" recognize discrimination against short and fat people but not, you will notice, against tall and thin ones: "herstory ... distinguishes the study of women's affairs from the generic, all-inclusive history". This absurdity is allowed in spite of the fact that the word "history" has nothing to do with gender but comes from the Greek word for "knowing". EQ.

Political correctness is another name for Orwell's 'Newspeak', a form of language abuse and part of the social engineering extremism becoming common today. How do you like "waitron" of "wait person". Yes! The New World Order has saved us from menial jobs like waitressing and also the indignity of being sacked, we are now merely "out-placed" or "de-hired".

"Political correctness", it appears, allows no room for "common sense correctness". Of course, as Dame Leonie says, it is not just words, it is a matter of belief and attitude. Manifestly (sorry, I guess that should be 'personifestly') ridiculous!

Dame Leonie shows her deep consciousness of the essential part played by literature in the progress of civilization in a later article in The Australian (25/11/1991) where she says; quote:

Yet the lesson from links in memory (whether conscious or not) between the disintegration of the Soviet Union, mid-19th century English melancholy in the face of the retreat of faith, Sophocles's tragedies, and Shakespeare's reflections on mortality, is that the memory is an extraordinary flexible and agile power. If it is provided with a great variety of images, sensations, thoughts and experiences, it can rearrange them so as to create new thoughts and images.

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The neglect of history in schools, and the abandonment for many students of literature which has influenced and enriched our ways of viewing the world, has deprived them of the means of making contact with their own heritage. It is very difficult, and for some impossible, to recover for themselves what has been denied in early years.

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[Anne]Wroe compares the purposeful characters of traditional narratives with the merely repetitive stereotypes of [the new novel] 'Scarlett', whose characters "shift from adventure to adventure without growing older or wiser". She sees this as "an apt metaphor for our morally structureless world in which event follows event without particular meaning ..." E.Q. E.A.

Not a bad summary of the matter of our complaint and "morally structureless" reminds us sharply of social sciences literature today.

A later article in The Australian (3/2/'92) by Bettina Arndt (one of the more responsible feminists) also has some interesting comment on political correctness. She is commenting on an argument about whether "Women's Health Centres" are a discrimination against men. Quote:

Those in the know were to regard the man as a crackpot, a threat not only to women's health centres but indeed to the hard-won, government-backed ideology they represent. How appalling to have such a blatant challenge to the established feminist orthodoxy, a frontal attack on the "politically correct" thinking which now prevails.

The notion of "political correctness" is receiving a great deal of attention in the United States at present, as journalists highlight examples of the new intolerance being shown by promoters of sexual and racial equality toward anyone who dares to question their views. On US campuses in particular, the demand for conformity to PC thinking is being enforced by harassment and intimidation - with alarming results. Professors have been forced to drop controversial subjects and have been hounded out of teaching positions. Books are being censored, and courses modified to conform to what has been called the "tyranny of the minority". EQ. EA.

The radical minority are totally unquestioning of the ideology they support. These are the kind of people who murdered millions in Cambodia and the USSR and, THEY ARE government backed.

Members of the general community are inclined to disregard or take lightly the more extremist rantings and ravings but we MUST take seriously the demand for ideological 'politically correct' attitudes. These are dangerous people!

Also do not forget that government today means "political party" and that all parties having governing capability follow the same main directives.

While on the subject of literature, I must mention a newspaper item on libraries that recently caught my eye. Howard Coxon, The Australian, (4/12/1991); quote:

.. if there is a low level of use why retain the material?

Librarians must set their own priorities. It has been too easy for them to surrender this role on the grounds that selection is a decision ultimately for users .. EQ.

There is certainly a problem with the growing mass of printed material; it is expensive to purchase and, for most libraries, impossible to store.

Much of the problem comes from the fact that the information explosion produces such a lot of material that is outdated or duplicated even as it is being printed. But what should be deleted or destroyed? Coxon (a librarian) thinks librarians should make the choice and also that items of low usage should be deleted.

However we have a situation in Australia today where knowledge of our political system is being hidden for political purposes. Many people do not know that Australia has a Constitution and very few know its social importance (and that includes most constitutional lawyers, who confine themselves to the commercial side). Newspapers generally refuse to print letters exposing the evidence.

No doubt there are books in libraries explaining features of our political heritage that are vital if we are to resurrect a democratic future but, by Coxon's ideas, these books should be thrown out because no one asks for them. We can sympathize with staff and the problems of space but imagine the vandalism - the disaster that could result - should the head librarian have a 'politically correct' attitude. This situation clearly has potential for cultural disaster and already showing its fascist/socialist face in the USA.

What is the importance of good library services? Is there any true original thought? Do we build new complexity out of old complexity.

Just as there is no new chance creation of life-forms (all biological changes being merely the result of changing combinations, or deletions, of existing physical genes) all 'new' ideas may be merely the result of "recombinations" of "thought genes". Is an internal combustion engine only a recombination of simple laws of leverage, lubrication, huffing and puffing etc?

I list myself as author of this booklet only because that is the tradition. In fact I see myself as more of a technician in a museum arranging items of history, with explanations, so as to try to make them more easily understood.

Do the original basics of thought, like the alphabets of writing and biology, come to us as a gift?

There are 26 letters in our alphabet and from these have been written all the literature of the English language with no limit in sight.

The genetic code has an alphabet of only four 'letters' but from this base is written the genetic literature of all our animals and including mankind.

At this time there is a great effort being made to protect our natural genetic reserves, a true need, but the genetic reserve is not the alphabet of genes - it is the library. Each life-form could be seen as one large book in that gene library.

Greater than the threat to our gene library is the threat to our thought library; without clear thinking nothing else is safe.

If the political manipulators destroy our literature in order to manipulate future thought and attitude, this is the equal of destroying our mental genetic reservoir.

If we eliminate books of ideas we end up losing our ability to think, express ourselves and live as civilized people.

We should also understand that it is not just a matter of destroying books. It is quite possible for those with power to reprint books in altered form so as to distort the original meaning.

Whether from the sublime or the ridiculous there is now an ever-present attack on our language and heritage. Sensitive people will see that this does not come about by chance but says something about a New World Order of despotic manipulation.

Dr. J W Smith of Flinders University puts it very well in his book The High Tech Fix where he writes about the Multifunction Polis and National Sovereignty; quote p2-3:

America was described by its 1960s critics as a technocracy. However, as we shall see, the Japan model, to be implemented in Australia, is Orwellian in the extent of its oppression and control, where the political process is completely degraded into a form of scientific management of public opinion. As well as this the waters are muddied by an array of complex cultural factors. In conclusion then, the technocracy represented by the Japanese ascendancy is important, not because of its uniqueness, but because of its extent and its intrinsic relationship to the art of technically modifying social relationships. ... But the social, cultural and economic pain felt acutely by Australians, will soon radiate, this book predicts, to engulf the rest of the world.

[We note that the Japanese now claim to be not interested in the MFP but even if this proves true it does not change the nature of our situation or the accuracy of the Smith observations. It merely moves the pawns in the game.]

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.. The control of society - any society - needs to be taken out of the hands of technicians, experts and a panoply of bureaucrats and placed firmly in the hands of the community, which has increasingly been manipulated, managed and controlled as if it were a programmable machine. EQ. EA.

RESTRICTING VOCABULARY

Vocabulary is restricted by restricting reading ability, changing word meanings and directing attention to social glamour, trivia, sport, entertainment, economic worries etc., and includes political games promoting fears and insecurities. TV is a major tool in this.

Human consciousness of self and the ability to think beyond the trivial is dependent on an agreed understanding of words, i.e., vocabulary. Our ability to EXPAND vocabulary was limited until the invention of a form of writing using an alphabet of letters based on sounds or 'phonics'.

Before the phonics-based alphabet, words were represented by signs or symbols. Pictures are a very effective way to communicate with minds at early levels of consciousness. However this form of writing restricts the invention of words and, as a result, the development of abstract ideas.

Today, if we want a new word to describe some new idea, we can make one up that has no relation to any existing word and, although completely new words may be unusual, a phonics-based alphabet gives greatly increased ability to develop and convey new concepts and removes the serious restraints imposed by early forms of writing.

The strength of a phonics-based alphabet is shown by the fact that all words do not have to be strictly phonic.

The recent trend in education, where phonics has been dropped in favour of "Look-See", is a social engineering device to help return the general population to a level of understanding that existed when words were represented by symbols, i.e., meanings represented by "shapes". The planned effect of this is to restrict 'common herd' consciousness to a more primitive level of understanding. The next step would be to "stylize" common words; i.e. as "&" stands for "and".

THE TV AS A PROPAGANDA TOOL

Did you note, in the early Bernays quote (Chapter 2) the use of "subtle" and "worked into the everyday life of people ... in hundreds of ways"? Well, that activity is obvious isn't it?

Have you not noticed that the people depicted in TV 'soapies' are almost all so irrational in their behaviour as to (in the eyes of normal people) appear dim-witted or crazy? I don't mean depicting stupid (except in the 'comedy' form) but behaving stupidly in what are supposed to be normal life situations.

Research has shown that TV characters become "role models" for the young and for those impressionable but no one in his right mind would behave as do most of these characters. A good part of this irrationality comes from the inability of script writers to keep characters "in character": a sensible and considerate schoolteacher will become an inconsiderate oaf; a self-centred and selfish person will become unselfish and wise to serve the needs of the plot.

Parents over recent years have been brainwashed to the idea that children should not be disciplined. Today 'undiscipline' is backed by law even though it is contrary to thousands of years of real-life experience. This unnatural behaviour on the part of parents together with inconsistent behaviour of TV 'heroes' adds to a child's confusion and the impression that irrational behaviour is normal.

Study of the effects of TV has been limited but not so limited as its lack of public reporting would suggest. The findings are, in fact, horrific. TV is shown to not only dull the brain and to give a false impression of reality but, at the same time, it removes opportunity for "real-life" experience. TV is also much better at promoting a 'death' view than a 'life' view.

We are constantly assailed by pitiful scenes of people trying desperately to substitute sex for lack of meaning in their lives. More than a whole generation, more than half our population, now lives and dreams crude ideals and unnatural reactions in place of the natural wonder of human love and commitment.

To more impersonal scenes: do you see a plea for rainforest pictured in the beauty of a forest or a view of destruction? It will take a half hour to show something of the beauty of a living forest - 10 seconds of one frame conveys destruction.

A viewed picture can never replace "being there". With TV we cannot even think about what we see because the images rush on in genuinely hypnotic progression.

In 1975 F.E. & M. Emery (two researchers at the Australian National University) claimed that TV viewing turned people into zombies. This claim was based on experiments in which brain-wave measuring equipment was used to measure the activity of the various areas of the brain before, during, and after watching television. They reported that the part of the brain which makes critical assessment and sorting of information "shuts down" during viewing and for some time after.

Our impressions of life are formed for us by a few people who decide what kind of programs we should see. How insidious is it that TV is efficient at imprinting images of death, trauma and sorrow but cannot duplicate real-life human relationships in a way honest to personal involvement? How well it advertises - how poorly it educates!

Today there are many people who see the characters portrayed on TV as real people. A newspaper report (10/11/'91) referring to the Home & Away TV serial, mentions that one character gets up to 50 fan letters a week including many asking for advice. Although that represents a small minority of viewers, research has shown that both children and adults (even when they know the characters are fictional) are influenced in their expectations and attitudes by role models acted out on TV.

Children TRUST adults to give them reliable images of life! Have you noticed the number of shows that feature a constant portrayal of promiscuity and abnormal family strife - sexual exploitation of women - father incompetence - child wisdom? Most programs would be abused as 'racist', 'sexist', 'pornographic', 'exploitative', 'damaging', 'inhuman' or 'insulting' were they not approved by the establishment.

How much death and destruction results from unrealistic car chase scenes and fantasy violence?

Can we not have good TV? We can, but it's expensive and must be selectively used. There can be no good TV for children outside of direct education and what is meant by education needs to be understood. TV is very good for promoting images - it is a good salesman; but is very poor - almost useless - for in-depth education. In fact it is destructive of reasoning ability because it cannot be stopped for word by word consideration and study.

All children's TV wastes a child's time for essential "real-life" learning experience at a time of life that gives no second chance.Encouragement to TV usage is of clear benefit to brain washing.

EXAMPLES OF MIND RESTRAINT

An interesting sidelight on the difficulty of intelligence to advance spontaneously into areas beyond knowledge (where there is no bridge of accumulated experience) is indicated by the behaviour of dolphins.

Dolphins have large brains - our brain brothers you might say. They are also powerful swimmers and can easily leap out of the water. Nevertheless, they are caught by the thousand in fish nets from which they could easily escape. Furthermore, where humans make provision for their escape, those dolphins who learn of this by experience and wait for release, do not seem to pass the knowledge on to their kind.

Probable reasons for this are:

1) despite what their brain power may be, they are restrained to stone-age consciousness because they have no ability to manipulate matter. They cannot record and pass on an infinite experience and therefore cannot develop their consciousness - not even to the extent of visualizing a leap over an artificial barrier.

They cannot bring to reason something beyond their consciousness. If they are to advance in consciousness it can only be with human help. Chance gives them no chance;

2) living much closer to their Creator and living with the daily reality of eat and be eaten, they do not have the same paranoia about death as do miseducated humans. They appear to be more fatalistic and do not hate humans for causing the death of so many of their kind; they also do not see an urgency in the protection of those unrelated to their own 'tribe'. They seem to view life as primitive man not as modern man.

Another example is the Australian aborigine. These people are known to have inhabited Australia for at least 40,000 years, but, although there are known variations in culture, the general level remained (to all intents and purposes) unchanged until impacted by advanced cultures.

Stone-age mankind worldwide would still be stone-age today (and remain so indefinitely) had there been no external impetus - there could be no NATURAL evolution of consciousness without the impact of some external force - a force having fore-knowledge of the effects of a tool that would give the brain an ability to be conscious of life beyond animal reactions to common environment.

What is said here should not be taken to imply that human consciousness is nothing more than brain plus information. would an advanced form of computer 'see' some purpose in 'living'? Living for a computer only represents work.

Likewise belief in chance creation makes life less 'meaningful' and the suicide rate among young people is rising because belief in a meaningless creation leaves little reason to struggle to overcome difficulty. The suicide level, plus the desire for escape to drugs and reckless living, will continue to rise as the full implication of belief in chance creation becomes more imminent to each individual. As it has been said: if there were no God we would need to invent one.

To break free of restraint to the natural environment required the first (and so far last) scientific and unnatural advance in communication:

THE WRITTEN WORD!

Wireless and TV are only technical means of distributing the 'squeaks and grunts' of the primitive forms of communication, i.e. spoken and sign languages. Conditioning people to dependence on TV and to incompetence in use of the written word, is a way to move 'the profane' (in mass) from understanding the modern world.

With depleting literary skills intellect loses knowledge of past experience that would, in time, take it above the Threshold of Awareness. More and more each generation has to re-learn much of what each generations has already learned.

Brain without an external storehouse of experience, or deprived of the ability or opportunity to use such a store, has no consciousness of anything that requires a broad 'assembly' of information and ideas.

VANDALISM

The word vandal relates historically to people who destroy the beauties of more advanced cultures. Why do they not appreciate what they find? Why do they not take up the 'gold' of civilized advance easily?

Because their level of consciousness is below the level needed to create a particular beauty, that beauty has no beauty for them - they are contemptuous of the (to them) unserviceable, impractical fragility of the cultured artifact.

They can see that the advanced people have created what they cannot create, have powers which they cannot match but have weaknesses which allow them to be overcome by brute force. They despise the refined object and also the people and culture that creates it because they cannot understand it - it makes them feel inferior. However its frailties give them confidence; if they can destroy it then they can feel superior and be happy again.

The cause of vandalism within culture is a degeneration that results in the ability of some young people to understand their own culture. Teenage pregnancies and disease control will not be improved by increase of the education that is destroying their rationality. There is a growing generation gap where some peer groups are below the existing consciousness level. This generates the same frustrations and feelings of incompetence, mixed with contempt and anger, as felt by primitives. This leads to social unrest and violence

Is there any real doubt about the nature and danger of our situation?

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