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One fundamental fact is that psyops can be benevolent. Psyops are made by elites to affect the masses' beliefs and behavior; they reflect the interests of which

One fundamental fact is that psyops can be benevolent. Psyops are made by elites to affect the masses' beliefs and behavior; they reflect the interests of whichever segment of the elite has manufactured them, but sometimes these interests overlap with our interests. For example, "the War on Terror is necessary to protect America, democracy, and our freedoms" was a psyop driven by dubious foreign policy interest. "Kindness, dignity, empathy and tolerance are good, racism is bad" was a very benevolent psyop which you can recognize throughout elite cultural products (12 Angry Men, Mr. Rogers are just two examples), where the elite tried to cure the masses of their bigotry through psychological means (identity, social pressure, morality), with relative success. "Russia's invasion is morally wrong and must be defeated" is both aligned with US geopolitical interests, and aligned with defeating international anti-democratic anti-liberal forces, which is in our interest. There are obviously Russian/Chinese/Iranian psyops deployed against us, and some of our elites' psyops are just designed to counteract that. I doubt the masses will ever have the ability to fight back against psyops, because in a battle between psychology PhDs and confused laymen, the PhDs will always win. We might learn the truth about specific psyops 30 years after the fact if we're lucky, and the well is highly poisoned by paranoid conspiracists. So a more realistic goal is to select trustworthy elites that are more likely to engage in benevolent psyops.

concinds 3y ago
Another key concept is that there's no "elite", there are elites, plural, which may cooperate or engage in intramural conflict. The military-industrial complex, Republican elites, media elites, and to some degree Hollywood elites cooperated to our detriment during the Bush years. But any analysis which sees them as a single blob will miss the conflicts and realities, hence the inane schizoposting ("Soros = CIA = military-industrial complex = mainstream media = Chinese Communist Party" as an all-powerful colluding elite, which prevents any useful analysis). Yet another problem is that once people realize psyops exist, they tend to go off the deep end (if they already distrust any elite interest group) and reflexively disagree with all goals they attribute to those elites ("they say Russia bad = I'll support Russia"). Essentially the psyops are backfiring and creating a populace so distrustful that some people will reject domestic psyops only to replace them with foreign psyops, because they have a strong need for a narrative, and a great number of narratives are elite-created.

concinds 3y ago

Another key concept is that there's no "elite", there are elites, plural, which may cooperate or engage in intramural conflict. The military-industrial complex, Republican elites, media elites, and to some degree Hollywood elites cooperated to our detriment during the Bush years. But any analysis which sees them as a single blob will miss the conflicts and realities, hence the inane schizoposting ("Soros = CIA = military-industrial complex = mainstream media = Chinese Communist Party" as an all-powerful colluding elite, which prevents any useful analysis). Yet another problem is that once people realize psyops exist, they tend to go off the deep end (if they already distrust any elite interest group) and reflexively disagree with all goals they attribute to those elites ("they say Russia bad = I'll support Russia"). Essentially the psyops are backfiring and creating a populace so distrustful that some people will reject domestic psyops only to replace them with foreign psyops, because they have a strong need for a narrative, and a great number of narratives are elite-created.