Understanding the'propaganda machine'
Just before the Christmas break we began to explore a little the world of the Media and Advertising industries.
However what soon becomes obvious is that to study such a subject means that we must understand what these powerful and influential forces are bringing their pressures to bear down upon. We need to understand something of the psychology of human nature in fact to be more accurate we need to understand the psychology of FALLEN human nature.
I think what we need to walk away with from these studies is a healthy sense of our own vulnerability. When we are young we come at life with a certain sense of invincibility, we have energy and a certain amount of confidence in our own savvy, of course there is nothing wrong with some aspects of this, you do need energy and your wits about you as you move into a fast moving highly competitive world, trying to find your place in it all.
But human nature is such that confidence,and knowledge can soon become arrogance and presumption. Energy and motivation can soon become recklessness and obsession. To some extent it's the peer pressures that play with these forces that lead to the mental health crisis that is raging amongst the young; depression, eating disorders,and an alarming increase in teen suicide, young males are especially effected.
The Prophet Jeremiah's words cut right across the popularized myth that 'people are basically good'..."The heart is more deceitful than all else and desperately sick; who can understand it? (Jeremiah 17v9) The paraphrase The Message puts it as "The heart is hopelessly dark and deceitful, a puzzle that no one can figure out" How true, dark, deceitful a puzzle. Our social and psychiatric sciences invest vast money and manpower into denying the first and trying to work out the second!Sadly to no avail, you only need to walk around with your eyes open and your brain switched on to see that society is dying and that human sin is the disease!
Where does this leave us though in the light of our subject material.
As I say we may have feelings of self confidence and being astute but the reality is that the fallen mind is gullible and easily led astray, and while much of the mind is indeed an unfathomable mystery as Jeremiah declares, there are however those who are have sufficient knowledge of certain areas, of human thinking who are able to push 'certain buttons' inside our heads and get us to think certain things and to do certain actions. That's the case in the world of advertising and also at the more extreme end of the spectrum with more sinister forces such as those from history like the Nazis, however we need to be aware that such sinister manipulative powers are still very much at work in the world today and perhaps surprisingly enough to many of us they are working even in this country, shaping and influencing the thinking of the masses, trying to engineer huge moral shifts in society's thinking and thus produce a society that conforms to their own twisted values.
We may look a little more at the means used to engineer such changes in another session.
For our session today (15th April 2007) I want us to look at a programme which was broadcast over a year ago and repeated this past Christmas Derren Brown's' The Heist'. Derren Brown is a Psychological Illusionist, he is an atheist and highly sceptical of paranormal phenomena, which is what in part has fuelled him to develop a career debunking so much of today's 'paranormal industry', he is amazing to watch and what will become clear and the aim of showing it to you is to give you an amazing demonstration of how gullible we are and how the buttons inside our minds can be pushed without us even realising it's being done.
Watch and enjoy by all means but also be alarmed as to what's going on here and what it's implications are in other areas as well.
