This series of posts will center on how government propaganda, media and its accompanying technologies have not only shaped the minds of the masses, but have manufactured the incremental social and political changes retrospectively witnessed for the last one-hundred years. Who or what sits at the very hub of this grand latter day societal transformation, birthing the prevailing culture(s) of the 21st century?
The answer: Tavistock Institute of Human Relations, masters of psychological warfare and sociological culture creators.
Tightly cloistered within the borders of London, sits the brain trust of global psychological manipulation, the head of a sociological octopus whose tentacles extend to the four corners of the globe. Though its existence goes largely unnoticed by the mainstream media and public alike, there is not a single aspect of global society where the influence of London’s Tavistock Institute of Human Relations is not felt. Whether realized or not, each generation coming of age since the post-war years, extending from the pivotal year of 1947, has been fully bound and tied under the spell of the masters of global mind war headquartered at London’s Tavistock Institute.
For many decades, culture creation has been the forerunner in shaping western civilization through social and political engineering. The younger generation of any given era represents the influential elders of the future. Therefore, to ensure that civilization follows the direction intended by the ruling elites, each coming of age generation must, and always has been, conditioned and inculcated via the sophisticated techniques of mass media into assuming a particular popular cultural identity. From the perspective of the masses, pop culture represents merely a wellspring of entertainment-the modern version of ancient Roman ‘bread and circus’. But, to the ruling elites, the sparkling sheen of pop culture disguises a darker and ulterior agenda in shaping hearts and minds. Decades of music, fashion, or lifestyle sub-culture programming, ostensibly appearing as radical, counter-culture, or rebellious to youthful demographics, has been ironically created and engineered by the mad scientists of Tavistock, on behalf of a calculating ruling elite, to serve established social, political, and economic agendas.
The concept of political and social transformation, disguised in the form of theatrical production, utilizing drama accompanied by music, was first capitalized just prior to the historical enlightenment period, during the 16th century reign of Henry VIII.
Henry’s chancellor, Thomas Cromwell, persuaded his lord and master that live theatrical productions, staged throughout the kingdom, could better serve in persuading the masses towards supporting the king as the new head of the church of England against the hegemonic interests of the Pope and the Vatican.
Later, the invention of the printing press served to exponentially improve the effective spread of government composed propaganda. The overall effectiveness of these comparatively rudimentary technologies and forms of social and political engineering became widespread throughout Europe, reaching an apex during the Shakespearean era.
Fast forwarding to the modern era, this form of theatrical propaganda became even more effective with the invention of radio, television, and still later, the personal computer and hand held smart phone.
RADIO DAYS
The technology of using radio waves to carry information or sound, modulated properties of electromagnetic energy through space, or as high degree mason and occultist Thomas Edison described, ‘the force of ether’, was a technology first developed and perfected by the military, then commercially presented as a household appliance. The widespread commercial distribution of the radio enabled the ruling elites to spread their message to millions instantly, bringing the eventual changes of their social and political agendas forward with greater speed.
Immediately, under the guise of entertainment, the ruling elites realized radio proved an effective technology in controlling the perceptions and minds of the masses. Airing agents of influence in the form of radio personalities, experts, and trusted sources of information appealing to authority, the nascent technology of early 20th century radio offered the vulnerable masses a false sense of security, psychological identity and superficial but palpable importance.
KPFA
“Dialogue can save the world,” so said Lewis Hill in 1942.
Hill was a leftist propagandist and member of the ACLU, and founder of the first so-called independent radio source in the form of KPFA. Although trumpeted as independent, the radio station was in fact established by ruling elite banking families the Carnegie’s, who provided major funding to the Ford Foundation that would later establish the ‘independent’ Pubic Broadcasting Network, or PBS.
As always, in following the flow of money, one shall soon discover the Carnegie’s and Rockefeller’s were also, through the Ford Foundation, major contributors to the establishment of the Tavistock Institute of Human Relations.
One of the more publicly well known Tavistock programs in the 1930’s was the Princeton Radio Project, which produced Orson Welles ‘War of the Worlds’, a mass psychological operation presented as radio entertainment. Two of the most prominent Tavistock agents working on behalf of this well-funded project were John Lazarsfeld, and Hadley Cantril, noted psychologist, pioneer in public research, and then head of Princeton University’s Department of Psychological studies.
In 1935, at the projects inception, Cantril outlined the primary reason this new technology held such promise as a tool of social and political conditioning:
“Radio is an altogether novel medium of communication, preeminent as a means of social control and epochal in its influence upon the mental horizons of men.”
Around this time, Orson Welles, a young upstart radio star after having been employed by Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal Urban Theater Project, was approached by Cantril, along with Doctors John Lazarsfeld and Paul Stanton.
Stanton was then serving as department head of CBS radio and later served as a consultant to the US Department of War, while Lazarsfeld was renowned as a pioneer in social research.
Having studied the effects of radio in terms of audience size, reactions to various types of programming, as well an an array of social concerns not communication-oriented, Welles was informed the overall purpose of the ‘War of the Worlds’ program was to study the medium of radio in terms of its ability to influence public behavior, or what Lazarsfeld called the ‘magic keys’ to the true nature of communications on public attitude changes.
These Tavistock agents went on to explain they wanted Welles to aid them in discovering what expanded role radio could play in terms of public influence, using the concepts of cult of personality and the effects of alarming information delivered through trusted sources.
Of course, in exchange for Welles gracious cooperation, he was later promised massive funding for his ground breaking 1941 cinematic production ‘Citizen Kane’.
The abstract concepts studied by the Princeton Radio Project were later expanded, and with aggregate sophistication and complexity, became known to the modern world as the essence of ‘mass media’. Of course, anyone familiar with the outcome of Welles brilliant theatrical delivery of the ‘War of the Worlds’ program, performed on Halloween, can surely testify to its alarming and even hysterical effects upon the general public of the 1930’s. In truth, the ‘War of the Worlds program exceeded Tavistock Institute’s ostensible goals for the Princeton Radio Project:
1.) The ability of the medium of radio to manipulate, misinform, and propagandize the public. 2.) In studying the public’s susceptibility to the effects of radio programming, it was observed mass media, under controlled laboratory conditions, could create mass hysteria with the right combination of drama, music scores and sound frequencies.
To a larger extent, prior to the outbreak of the second world conflict, Tavistock, through the Princeton Radio Project, was primarily interested in the relationship between radio and various types of propaganda, for the purposes of psychological mass crowd control, and establishing radio as a meta-analysis of mass subjectivity, and a deliverer of bio-energetic psycho-acoustics.
At the conclusion of the war, the advent of television as a viable commercial delivery system added vision to the concepts of sound, drama and music, further blurring the ability of the mass public to accurately discern between fantasy and reality.
Well presented post. The short video was informative to us. We must be cognizant of this occurring more then we realize. We enjoyed Le Bon’s book “The Crowd”.
As always, thank you for your keen interest. The work of Gustav LeBon represents a seminal work. A more recent and key example of the concepts of crowd psychology was exhibited in the Occupy movement of a few years ago.