Mass Control and Manipulation: Parasites, Free Will, and Why We Love Cats

Czech Scientist Blames Microscopic Mind Control For Social Ineptitude

Jaroslav Flegr is no kook. And yet, for years, he suspected his mind had been taken over by parasites that had invaded his brain. So the prolific biologist took his science-fiction hunch into the lab. What he’s now discovering will startle you. Could tiny organisms carried by house cats be creeping into our brains, causing everything from car wrecks to schizophrenia?

Laughably unlikely, all this micro control, right? Right?!

No one would accuse Jaroslav Flegr of being a conformist. A self-described “sloppy dresser,” the 53-year-old Czech scientist has the contemplative air of someone habitually lost in thought, and his still-youthful, square-jawed face is framed by frizzy red hair that encircles his head like a ring of fire.

Certainly Flegr’s thinking is jarringly unconventional. Starting in the early 1990s, he began to suspect that a single-celled parasite in the protozoan family was subtly manipulating his personality, causing him to behave in strange, often self-destructive ways. And if it was messing with his mind, he reasoned, it was probably doing the same to others.

The Tiny Face of Mind Control

The parasite, which is excreted by cats in their feces, is called Toxoplasma gondii (T. gondii or Toxo for short) and is the microbe that causes toxoplasmosis—the reason pregnant women are told to avoid cats’ litter boxes. Since the 1920s, doctors have recognized that a woman who becomes infected during pregnancy can transmit the disease to the fetus, in some cases resulting in severe brain damage or death. T. gondii is also a major threat to people with weakened immunity: in the early days of the AIDS epidemic, before good antiretroviral drugs were developed, it was to blame for the dementia that afflicted many patients at the disease’s end stage. Healthy children and adults, however, usually experience nothing worse than brief flu-like symptoms before quickly fighting off the protozoan, which thereafter lies dormant inside brain cells—or at least that’s the standard medical wisdom.

But if Flegr is right, the “latent” parasite may be quietly tweaking the connections between our neurons, changing our response to frightening situations, our trust in others, how outgoing we are, and even our preference for certain scents. And that’s not all. He also believes that the organism contributes to car crashes, suicides, and mental disorders such as schizophrenia. When you add up all the different ways it can harm us, says Flegr, “Toxoplasma might even kill as many people as malaria, or at least a million people a year.”

An evolutionary biologist at Charles University in Prague, Flegr has pursued this theory for decades in relative obscurity. Because he struggles with English and is not much of a conversationalist even in his native tongue, he rarely travels to scientific conferences. That “may be one of the reasons my theory is not better known,” he says. And, he believes, his views may invite deep-seated opposition. “There is strong psychological resistance to the possibility that human behavior can be influenced by some stupid parasite,” he says. “Nobody likes to feel like a puppet. Reviewers [of my scientific papers] may have been offended.” Another more obvious reason for resistance, of course, is that Flegr’s notions sound an awful lot like fringe science, right up there with UFO sightings and claims of dolphins telepathically communicating with humans.

Frighteningly, Microscopic Mass Control Not As Crazy As It Sounds

But after years of being ignored or discounted, Flegr is starting to gain respectability. Psychedelic as his claims may sound, many researchers, including such big names in neuroscience as Stanford’s Robert Sapolsky, think he could well be onto something. Flegr’s “studies are well conducted, and I can see no reason to doubt them,” Sapolsky tells me. Indeed, recent findings from Sapolsky’s lab and British groups suggest that the parasite is capable of extraordinary shenanigans. T. gondii, reports Sapolsky, can turn a rat’s strong innate aversion to cats into an attraction, luring it into the jaws of its No. 1 predator. Even more amazing is how it does this: the organism rewires circuits in parts of the brain that deal with such primal emotions as fear, anxiety, and sexual arousal. “Overall,” says Sapolsky, “this is wild, bizarre neurobiology.” Another academic heavyweight who takes Flegr seriously is the schizophrenia expert E. Fuller Torrey, director of the Stanley Medical Research Institute, in Maryland. “I admire Jaroslav for doing [this research],” he says. “It’s obviously not politically correct, in the sense that not many labs are doing it. He’s done it mostly on his own, with very little support. I think it bears looking at. I find it completely credible.”

Confirmed: Mini Mind Control Not As Cray As It Sounds – and That’s Just For Openers

What’s more, many experts think T. gondii may be far from the only microscopic puppeteer capable of pulling our strings. “My guess is that there are scads more examples of this going on in mammals, with parasites we’ve never even heard of,” says Sapolsky.

Other Minute Manipulators

Familiar to most of us, of course, is the rabies virus. On the verge of killing a dog, bat, or other warm-blooded host, it stirs the animal into a rage while simultaneously migrating from the nervous system to the creature’s saliva, ensuring that when the host bites, the virus will live on in a new carrier. But aside from rabies, stories of parasites commandeering the behavior of large-brained mammals are rare. The far more common victims of parasitic mind control—at least the ones we know about—are fish, crustaceans, and legions of insects, according to Janice Moore, a behavioral biologist at Colorado State University. “Flies, ants, caterpillars, wasps, you name it—there are truckloads of them behaving weirdly as a result of parasites,” she says.

Consider Polysphincta gutfreundi, a parasitic wasp that grabs hold of an orb spider and attaches a tiny egg to its belly. A wormlike larva emerges from the egg, and then releases chemicals that prompt the spider to abandon weaving its familiar spiral web and instead spin its silk thread into a special pattern that will hold the cocoon in which the larva matures. The “possessed” spider even crochets a specific geometric design in the net, camouflaging the cocoon from the wasp’s predators.

How Did He Get This Mad Mass Control idea?

Flegr himself traces his life’s work to another master of mind control. Almost 30 years ago, as he was reading a book by the British evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins, Flegr was captivated by a passage describing how a flatworm turns an ant into its slave by invading the ant’s nervous system. A drop in temperature normally causes ants to head underground, but the infected insect instead climbs to the top of a blade of grass and clamps down on it, becoming easy prey for a grazing sheep. “Its mandibles actually become locked in that position, so there’s nothing the ant can do except hang there in the air,” says Flegr. The sheep grazes on the grass and eats the ant; the worm gains entrance into the ungulate’s gut, which is exactly where it needs to be in order to complete its circle of life. “It was the first I learned about this kind of manipulation, so it made a big impression on me,” Flegr says.

After he read the book, Flegr began to make a connection that, he readily admits, others might find crazy: his behavior, he noticed, shared similarities with that of the reckless ant. For example, he says, he thought nothing of crossing the street in the middle of dense traffic, “and if cars honked at me, I didn’t jump out of the way.” He also made no effort to hide his scorn for the Communists who ruled Czechoslovakia for most of his early adulthood. “It was very risky to openly speak your mind at that time,” he says. “I was lucky I wasn’t imprisoned.” And during a research stint in eastern Turkey, when the strife-torn region frequently erupted in gunfire, he recalls being “very calm.” In contrast, he says, “my colleagues were terrified. I wondered what was wrong with myself.”

Stay tuned for part 2 of Brain Bugs – Mass Control and Manipulation: Parasites, Free Will, and Why We Love Cats

A Plague of the Modern World

Mass Control: Divide and Conquer

Mass Control, Media, Marketing, and the World At Large

The Long awaited second part of our exploration of mainstream media’s mass control techniques, and what we can learn from them. Welcome. Check it out if you missed part one of media manipulation. You’ll love it.

If you did catch it, and are back to learn more about what the big boys get up to, smashing. So, as we were saying before, Noam Chomsky, linguist and philosopher at MIT, has identified ten basic strategies employed by mainstream media in bed with government to deeply influence public opinion and public behaviour. Heavy stuff, but wherever you stand on conspiracy theories and all that, it is unavoidable that mainstream media – print, tv, radio, film and even internet – has vast influence over how people feel, what they think, and how they behave. And we can use the same strategies to make a wee bit of cash.

Advertising is the art of manipulation. You can dress it up in any old outfit, make it look like grandma and cookies, a bag swinging’ streetwalker, or wholesome on a horse, but it’s still manipulation. It can also be an exercise in self improvement – and more about that anon, but essentially it is flattery, psychological massage, and dash of deception. Manipulation, to put it succinctly.

While I’m been bending your eyes money is slipping through our fingers, so let’s move on the the main event. The rest of Mr. Chomsky’s observations:

5 More Key Points of Media Mass Control:

Swing On the Heartstrings

Every child grows up knowing how to manipulate its parents by looking cute or sad, or pretending to be upset.  How many screaming distraught looking toddlers forget to cry when distracted momentarily?

Once you activate the emotional aspect of the mind – the subconscious in effect – you circumvent the rational.  No analysis takes place, and you have much deeper access to the viewer; ideas, images, thoughts, compulsions, feelings, fears, anxieties, desires, and even the urge to engage in certain behaviors can easily be implanted into the subject.  This is how propaganda works.  Disarm the viewer with big emotional hits, and while the door to the subconscious is open stick in a load of other self-serving information: communism is good, communism is bad, the [insert nationality/ethnicity/religion here] are trying to get us, get the [insert nationality/ethnicity/religion here].  It’s basic stuff.

A quick look at the advertising slot during any prime time programming will show the same thing.  Drink this and you’ll be happy and thin.  Take these pills and you’ll be free from care.  This beer will make you sexy.  So will this cola.  If you feed your family our frozen food you will be the perfect parent.  As marketers, we can look to these successful ads for ideas on how to sell our own products by finding the emotional hook that we are in the best position to exploit.

Keep ‘Em In Their Place

This principle and the next are ones of governmental and media complicity.

To exercise mass control and keep the laboring and consuming classes laboring and consuming without asking too many pesky questions or realizing the power of overwhelming numbers, it it important from a governmental position to make sure that the standard of education available to the vast majority is mediocre at best, and preferably just plain poor.  The public is then incapable of understanding the technologies and other methods used for their control.  The resultant uneducated classes are simply unable to overcome the gap of ignorance between them and the Princeton/Harvard/Oxford/etc. set, and the rich boy’s club stays well intact.  It works staggeringly well, maintaining power and personal or corporate economic stability by keeping the masses ignorant.  It’s an age old trick, and as good as ever it was.

As a marketer, this lesson has less utility than the follow up, but the notions of not giving away too much, and of maintaining the appearance that you know more than your customers, are worth taking away.  People respond to authority, and if you appear to be an authority – someone who knows more than they do – they will listen to you, and buy your stuff.  Because people will buy anything.  Anything.

Keep ‘Em In Their Place AND Make ‘Em Love It

This is a gem, and it goes with the previous point: promote the idea that it is fashionable to be stupid, vulgar and uneducated.  It really is total genius.  Make sure that educational standards are abysmal, and then tell people it’s cool to be ign’nt, that they should aspire to something that takes no effort, something they have already achieved.

In our field of internet marketing, we can exploit the fact that it is cool to be stupid and vulgar – as evidenced by the endless spew of massively successful Hollywood comedies – and funny to be uneducated.  People expect it, and they expect to be spoken and written to in broad and vulgar terms.  It makes our jobs easier.  We have to write 8th grade copy, thrown in a few expletives for emphasis, and bada boom bada bing, people buy our shit.  And because we are trying to sell to people conditioned to buy from a certain type of advertisement or sales pitch, it is in our best interest not to rock the boat.  Give the people what they want. It also means that we can establish a positive sales relationship with our customers by congratulating them on having achieved essentially very little.  It’s a cheap line, but it works.  People love to be told they have done well, even when they’ve done sweet fuck all.  Cheap, but effective.  Flattery will get you everywhere.

Self-Esteem Must Die

Part and parcel of getting people to swallow empty praise, is by making them desperate for it.  It’s important, then, to have people blaming themselves for their misfortunes, blaming the failure of their intelligence, of their abilities, or of their efforts. From a governmental and media standpoint, they must believe that they themselves are to blame for low wages, poor services, and a crumbling economy.  It’s your fault!  You’re stupid/lazy/ugly/fat/brunette/short/etc.  Individuals devaluate themselves, guilt and an abiding sense of failure takes hold, insecurity sets in, and the individual takes no action to remedy the situation.  A familiar name for this condition is depression. And speaking of mass control, depression is one of the biggest money makers in medicine: in the US anti-depressants are the most prescribed class of drugs, and a tenth of the UK population is currently on them.  But that is by the by.  Having gotten the individual to this sorry place, he or she will clutch at a few kind words, even empty ones with obvious motives.  Sound far fetched?  Watch some TV ads and see how they make you feel.

Like ravens on a battlefield, the savvy marketer can use the deeply seeded self-doubt of the modern human to great advantage.  People will believe most negative things you tell them about themselves, whether they are true or not.  If you tell people they are fat but your pills will make them thin and gorgeous – which obviously they aren’t now – they will buy.  Tell them they are stupid but your ebook will make them smart, they’ll buy.   Tell them they hideous but your clothes will makes them irresistible and they will buy.   It’s tediously predicable, but oh so effective.

When First You Try to Mass Control – Beware of Big Bro

In the last fifty years or so, accelerating advances in science have generated an ever increasing gap between public knowledge and governmental/corporate knowledge.  Advances in biology, neurobiology and applied psychology, have provided the upper echelon with a very sophisticated understanding of human psychology and physiology.  Manipulation has progressed from art and philosophy to science.  “The System” has a better knowledge of people, of persons, of us, then we do ourselves.  It’s a bit scary, the thought that other entities potentially have more control over ourselves than we do.

But, time is money, and there is always money to be made.  So, we might as well control ourselves into some dough.  While there isn’t much we can glean from this point on a large scale, it is worthwhile observing the various methods of manipulation and control in advertising – internet, print, audio, and visual media – that we see every day.  Not many of us will ever have access to military profiling software, advanced brainwashing techniques, or intimate knowledge of neuro-biological feedback loops, but we can take notes on some of what others do with their knowledge, and benefit from that.  And hopefully make a killing with it.

Plenty of marketers before us, even in the short history of internet marketing and online money, have found ways to make millions using these techniques, their own takes on these techniques, and other methods too.  We are gaining mass control.
Mass control is within everyone’s grasp, and there’s no reason why we can’t make some money doing it.

We hope this little article has been informative, and that you can walk away with the raw materials for world marketing domination. We’ll see you out there.

The Mass Control Team xx

Mass Control In Marketing, Media & Beyond

Mass control: it’s all about money, really.  Well, money and power, but we’re here for money.  So let’s talk money, how you make it, how you keep, and how you keep other people from wising up.

We’ll start with a basic lesson in two parts on mass control and manipulation, from some of the best in world: mainstream corporate media.  The ten basic principles outlined are as enumerated  by Noam Chomsky, professor of linguistics and philosophy at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He’s a bright light in this area.

Putting claims of a New World Order, depopulation, and a scary Brave New World scenario aside, we know that the media (TV, papers and magazines, and the internet) can keep the public whipped to a furor over the Oscars, the most recent dead celebrity, and the doings of Brad and Angelina.  Mass civilian slaughter in the various wars around the world?  Escalating poverty, unemployment, substance abuse, and violence in the so-called first world?  Schtum.  Mind-blowing breakthroughs in genetics, medicine, and physics?  Equally quiet.

The mainstream media have been brainwashing the public with daily propaganda since the first newspaper rolled off the press, and they’ve been getting better at it for somewhere in the area of 350 years.  They are – or were until the rise of the internet – nigh wholly successful at diverting  attention from the truth, keeping the public blind to what is really happening in the world.  What skill!  So much we have to learn.  With lessons from the best, we can get our little slices of the financial pie.

So without further ado:

5 Key Points of Media Mass Control:

Distraction

The primary element of mass control is distraction.  Distraction is simply  diverting public attention way from truly important issues and social changes with a continuous flood of insignificant information.  Because the control of corporate mass media is in the hands of the political and economic elite, it is their agenda that the public is distracted from.  You can look up who owns what, and who went to Yale with who, and see that a small group of good buddies pretty much has government, BIG business, and information sewn up. The public can’t possibly worry about massive cuts in social spending when Whitney Houston is dead.  It’s simple – absurdly simple, and embarrassingly effective.

In our smaller scale world of money and marketing, this principle can be as effective and easy to apply as in any newsroom, and you don’t have to hire hack writers; you can be your own hack writer.  Ever bought something online?  Not a DVD or a kitchen appliance, but say a piece of software or an ebook or a “product” like a make money online package, or something like it.  You didn’t know what you were buying.  The seller probably told you what you could do with the product, maybe what you couldn’t do with it, why it was the best, why it was the cheapest (or the most expensive) but not WHAT it actually was.  Chances are that like millions of other people every day, you didn’t notice the fact.  Maybe you were happy, maybe not, it doesn’t matter.  The point is that you bought a pig in a poke.  We all do it.  It’s magician’s patter, look at the right hand while the left sets up the trick, etc.  Distraction.  Mass control trick number one.

Problem – Reaction – Solution or  “Right Here in River City”

Ah, the fine art of creating a problem and then offering a handy solution.  With this little game you create a problem – say an economic crisis, just to keep it timely.  As a media outlet, you bang on and on about a credit crunch or a burst housing bubble, or a recession.  Watch the stock market and you know that it reacts to things like a stable full of skittish horses.  Mention the word “downturn” and boom! there it is.  People react to the perceived problem, and then, when you want to deal with the problem  by cutting state pensions, for example, you can because it’s a special situation, and with a heavy heart etc. etc. Easy.

For our online money making purposes, we can perhaps learn from that musical conman Prof. Harold Hill, as he worked the same game.  He’s got a product to sell – he was selling boys’ marching bands – and so he creates a problem to which his product is the solution.  The wild feckless youth of River City need the discipline of a marching band to straighten them out.  And it just so happens…you can probably guess the rest. We can easily reproduce his results, because any product is the solution to some problem.  Identify your problem, find your afflicted, and sell the hell out of your solution.  Mass control will soon be yours.

Gradual Acceptance

This item is worth mentioning for its long-view genius.  To gain acceptance to an unacceptable degree, apply it gradually, preferably over the course of years.  This is the way governments radically alter socioeconomic policies.  For example, the changes of the twenty years between 1980 and 2000: minimal state, privatization, precariousness, huge unemployment, wages that do not guarantee a livable income, etc.  Changes that, had they been made at a stroke, would have brought about a revolution.  Do it over twenty years, and it’s business as usual.

Gradual acceptance has less to offer the online entrepreneur, but it is worth keeping in mind for when the business takes off and you’ve got a big company to run.  Don’t cut the employee benefits all at once, do it slowly.  They’ll grumble, they’ll mumble, but they won’t walk out on you.  Especially in this economy.

Deferment

This is another governmental trick for pushing through a change or decision that is wildly unpopular.  Tell the public it will happen, but not now.  In a year, or ten years, just not now.  Present it as painful but necessary, gaining public acceptance for future application.  Future sacrifice is easier to accept than immediate hardship because the effort does not have to be expended now and people will avoid pain and effort is possible, and maybe tomorrow will be better.  Optimism and hope are all too easy to play on: maybe tomorrow will be better, maybe the sacrifice won’t be necessary and we can avoid it altogether.    At worst, people will get used to the idea, and when you throw in some distraction and little River City action, they may forget all about it and by the time the hardship is due, they wont’ even notice.

Marketers use this kind of technique all the time. It’s the essence of credit, and it is illustrated particularly well with repeat billing products like memberships.  In the first case, if the subject can’t afford the purchase now, they can put on plastic and maybe tomorrow will be better.  Maybe that promotion will come through, or they will forgo that one extra meal out, or whatever and have your money next month.  In the second case, the subject can join X site and defer payment for a month, billing is automatic, and with any luck the user will forget all about it.  Either way, it’s gold dust.

The Idiot Child – Mass Control and Candy From Babies

You’ve probably noticed this: most of the advertising to the general public uses the speech patterns, arguments, imagery, and intonation of a child (8th grade or so).  The viewer is addressed as a child, or shall we say a dim bulb.  The more deceiving the ad or program, the more infantilizing the tone of  communication. Why, you ask?  Because people tend to respond to the way they are addressed.  So, if you address the viewer with the same manner as you would a twelve year old, he or she will probably respond at the same level.  In the same way as you can gain control of a conversation by mirroring a person’s mannerisms, speed, and tone of speech – therapists and counselors do it all the time – you can influence the relative sophistication of your viewer.  Humans are so suggestible.

The implications of the idiot child technique should be obvious.  There is more than one reason mainstream media and its advertising is pitched at barely literate level.  As online marketers, then, we can be fairly certain that the level at which we pitch our sales is the same level at which most people will respond.  This method has been shown time and again to switch off critical thinking and analysis, leaving the subject open to objectively ridiculous suggestions.  It’s particularity handy for the advertisers of the world when the product is of questionable quality or dubious merit.  The guy who made a fortune punting pet rocks didn’t do it in Shakespearean sonnets, capisce?

Enjoying our little master class on mass control, straight from the foaming mouths of mainstream media?  We hope so.  Stay tuned and catch five more techniques perfected by media, identified by the best and brightest, and adapted for the internet entrepreneur.

See you back soon.

The Mass Control Team

Getting Mass Control

We are gaining Mass Control. It will take some time and some effort, but control of mass is within our grasp.  We can taste it, and we can smell it.  It’s fruity and funky, kind of like the Valerian capsules our pagan college girlfriends used to take.

The Mass Control Time Elapse Estimator

Maximum control of the mass should be gained shortly, with much juggling and some fast-and-loose, so to be frank kern nels of truth may be hard to come by until the project is finally completed.  But the triple shot espresso is kicking in, so look out world.  Large scale subjugation is about to take place. Also large scale weight loss. When this project kicks off, stocks in almond croissants are going to take a dip. Our advice: sell your croissant stocks before we get our mass control up and running.

We hope to have obtained some reasonable influence over that unruly inverse of volume within the week.  We sense you waiting with bated breath.  If you bate your breath for too long, who knows what might happen, so maybe try and find something to do while you’re waiting.

There must be some wet paint around that needs watching.  Maybe the new season of America’s Next Top Model is on.  April is on its way, maybe there’s some time to get a head start on your tax return.  And once you’ve done that, you will certainly be needing a little of our mass control, ‘cuz Uncle Sam’s pockets gonna be a-jinglin’ with your money.  And nobody wants that.

What To Do While We Gain Mass Control

While we are getting our control on, please stand by and check back frequently, because when we get our mass control underway, it will be AWESOME to behold.  Really.  We promise.

Loves to see you soon,

The Mass Control Team  xxx