©Signs of the Times

In the previous article in this series, we introduced the concept of the hysteroidal cycle and saw that good times contain the seeds of bad times, while bad times invite people to return to analysis and critical thinking necessary to pull themselves out of the crisis. However, the insiders are also aware of the hysteroidal cycle. They are aware that certain shocks can serve to awaken people from their slumber, can provoke individuals onto the path for answers. To counter the positive aspect of bad times or periods of shocks, they have done vast research into how, when, and for how long shocks need to be administered in order to keep people submissive.

Naomi Klein documents how many countries in Latin America were subdued and then radically transformed through the application of disaster capitalism or The Shock Doctrine, as the title of her new book puts it, from Brazil under military dictatorship in the sixties, through the military coup that overthrew Allende in Chile on September 11, 1973, onto Argentina, Uruguay... you get the picture. The "free" market and military dictatorship go hand in hand because the only way that these countries' economies could be completely changed was through the application of continual and massive shocks to the population, including the wholesale murder of activists, union leaders, and health and welfare workers, rendering the people stunned and unable to protest and resist.

Furthermore, Klein draws parallels between the application of Friedman's free market ideas and experiments carried out by Dr Ewen Cameron at the Allen Institute in Montreal during the fifties and early sixties, experiments that became the basis for the 1963 CIA manual on torture and served as the handbook for the tyrants in Latin America. The two go hand-in-hand because people will not willingly accept such a radical transformation of their lives for the worse without a fight. So the fight must be kicked out of them.

And so a science of torture and human reprogramming was developed.

But the studies into shock and its use to mold the minds of men does not start in Montreal in the fifties. Cameron was building on the work of Ivan Pavlov, the Russian psychologist known for his experiments with dogs.

Pavlov spent years looking into the question of stimulus and response and formulated a model that has frightening implications for us today. Pavlov studied how an organism reacted to stimuli, including, but not limited to, pain. He discovered that an organism's level of tolerance to various stimuli varied significantly depending on fundamental differences in temperament and defined four personality types. Each type reacts differently to stimuli and so the shocks need to be applied in different ways for each type. He commented "that the most basic inherited difference among people was how soon they reached this shutdown point and that the quick-to-shut-down have a fundamentally different type of nervous system."

Pavlov was interested in this shutdown point because it was only then, after the nervous system passed the ultraboundary, that people could be conditioned with new behaviors.

In other words, his research dealt with finding the ways and means, in scientific terms, of how to push organisms beyond their threshold of tolerance. This "ultraboundary" response that he called Transmarginal Inhibition was the brain's protective mechanism. When it occurred, it meant that the brain had no other means of avoiding physical damage due to fatigue and nervous stress. It could then be reprogrammed.

Pavlov was able to bring about what he called a "rupture in higher nervous activity" by utilizing four main types of imposed stresses.

1. The first type of stress was simply an increase in the intensity of the signal to which the dog was initially conditioned. If this was gradually increased, at a certain point, when the signal was too strong for its system, the dog would begin to break down.


2. The second way of achieving the ultraboundary event was to increase the time between the giving of the signal and the arrival of food. If a dog was conditioned to receive food five seconds after the warning signal, and this period was then prolonged, signs of restlessness and abnormal behavior would become evident in the less stable dogs. Pavlov discovered that the dog's brains revolted against any abnormally long waiting period while under stress. Breakdown would occur when the dog had to either exert very strong, or very prolonged, inhibition. (Human beings also find protracted waiting while under stress to be debilitating: worse than the event that produces the anxiety.)


3. The third way of inducing a breakdown was to confuse the dogs by anomalies in the conditioning signal. If positive and negative signals were given one after the other, (yes, no, yes, no, etc), the hungry dog would become uncertain as to what would happen next and this disrupted the normal nerve stability. This is also true with human beings.


4. The fourth way of inducing a breakdown in a dog was to destabilize the dog's physical condition in some way, either by subjecting it to long periods of work, inducing gastro-intestinal disorders, fever, disturbing the glandular balance, surgery, etc.

If, in any case, the first three methods would fail to induce a breakdown in a particular dog, it could be achieved by utilizing the same stresses that had failed after initiating the fourth protocol: physical destabilization. Pavlov also discovered that, after physical destabilization, a breakdown might occur even in temperamentally stable dogs and also that any new behavior pattern occurring afterward might become a fixed element of the dog's personality even long after recovery from the debilitating experience.

I mentioned in the previous article that most people have other concerns than a quest for the truth. In many cases, it is a simple struggle for putting food on the table. US workers are forced to work longer and longer hours. Whatever rights and benefits they have won in the past through strong unions are being taken from them. People are forced to drive longer distances to work, live in a constant climate of fear with "downsizing" and "offshoring" and the frenetic take overs that mean the elimination of whole departments in one fell swoop.

Think about this environment with the work of Pavlov in mind. It keeps people constantly in fear, continually on guard, constantly subject to stress, Pavlov's first form noted above. The population as a whole is being pushed beyond the ultraboundary, a mass case of transmarginal inhibition. And where does this lead? What is the result?

Mass brainwashing, or as it is termed in the Pavlovian literature, mass reconditioning.

The permanent state of stress is the softening up. The events of 9/11 were the massive shock. In the instant it took the two towers to fall, Americans were reprogrammed to view Arabs and Muslims as untrustworthy, devious, bloodthirsty, and potential terrorists. The neocon policy of the dismemberment of Iraq could never have been carried out without the shock of 9/11. With it, it was a piece of cake. People were demanding revenge and retribution.

The attack was followed by a long period of Pavlov's third type of shock: the rapid switching between yes and no as the infamous "terror alert" went up and down. People were being programmed to ask themselves, "When will the next attack come?", "Will it be me or my children?". That constant waiting with no actual follow-up attack can be likened to Pavlov's second type of stress. But lest the population tire of the constant pushing and pulling with never a bomb a bomb in sight and become oblivious to the stimuli, the bombings in Madrid and then London provided the necessary substitute shocks. Not only were people in the US potential targets of these madmen, but the Brits and the Spanish, and by extension, others in Europe, were also at risk.

Now let us bring this discussion back to the hysteroidal cycle, which, as we mentioned in the last article, gets its name from the psychological term of hysteria.

Pavlov demonstrated that when Transmarginal Inhibition began to take over a dog, a condition similar to hysteria in a human manifested. The applications of these findings to human psychology suggest that for a "conversion" to be effective, it is necessary to work on the subject's emotions until s/he reaches an abnormal condition of fear, anger or exaltation. If such a state is maintained or intensified by any of various means, hysteria is the result. In a state of hysteria, a human being is abnormally suggestible and influences in the environment can cause one set of behavior patterns to be replaced by another without any need for persuasive indoctrination. In states of fear and excitement, normally sensible human beings will accept the most wildly improbable suggestions, such as:

"They hate us for our freedoms."

"We are bringing democracy to Iraq."

Or the idea that it is tyranny when Hugo Chavez seeks the possibility to be freely elected president of Venezuela for a third term, while it is the flourishing of democracy when the Bush and Clinton families install a rotating presidency.

I suggest that we are in a situation where a battle for the American mind is being fought. The insiders, the pathological deviants in power, are using Pavlovian methods, which amount to a form of torture, on the American people. Although they deny that they use torture, only forceful interrogation techniques to make the "terrorists" talk, the widespread dissemination of the photos from Abu Ghraib and the continued discussion on its use implants in your minds the knowledge that it is being used and that you might be the next victim... if you are "unpatriotic" and do not "support the president". The fight is being stepped up because the insiders are aware that "bad" times also create the potential for people to wake up and begin to ask questions. Their goal is to put us in a state of transmarginal inhibition in order to reprogramme us before that can happen.

Our goal is to wake people up before it is too late.