Mastering the Mind. Command given with authority is the key
Mastering the Mind. There are not many people who have the courage to think for themselves…
There are not many people who have the courage to think for themselves : the majority prefer to accept the thoughts of others and welcome them into their own minds, finding them as pleasant and shareable as if they were their own.
People do not want to struggle to build personal beliefs, so the mental structures and related logical abilities are very rudimentary, and most people’s opinions are constructed under the influence of emotions and irrational sentimentality.
The latter, which is a degraded form of sentimentality, is based on momentary emotionality toward things and people, on the illusion of true feeling.
It is also shallow, very unstable, fickle, and changeable, because it lacks a personal soul : in short, it is an artifice.
It has nothing to do with true emotion, which is sincere, deep, constant and lasting, because it is a precious combination of depth of feeling and delicacy of soul.
Emotions belong to the deepest instinctive sphere of our brain: those who want to make us react like modern cavemen prefer to make us develop only this ancestral part, the part connected to the atavistic fears that drive us to side with the strongest.
Mass society likes to act on primary instincts because they make the masses governable by fear, if not by seduction.
The seductions offered today are produced by the noisy and boorish hedonism of the postmodern age and are far removed from the search for durable and non-transitory goods that should alleviate the sense of insecurity and restlessness that makes human life painful.
In order to reduce the mind to slavery, it is necessary to imprint ideas in the mind so that the subject is unable to resist and is forced to submit to the cultural, political, economic, religious, or social authority imposed.
In this way, the masses blindly submit, without daring to object or criticize, relying on cunning and resourceful people to rule them, without rebelling and accepting every decision of power.
False authorities based on authoritarianism speak in peremptory tones and want the masses to be obedient and submissive to every whim of power.
The quality sought is the gregariousness of the ancestral man, who suffers from exclusion from the group to which he belongs and therefore recognizes a natural, dominant leader by virtue of his strength and will.
This would not be a bad thing if governments were exercised by enlightened individuals of higher moral standing, but unfortunately the people who enjoy these methods are often overbearing and coarse people, full of ignorance and arrogance, who want to prevent the freedom offered by knowledge.
These are false leaders who pretend to be the guardians of all wisdom and knowledge, but who are in fact nothing more than sleazy puppets, good actors who know how to pull the wool over your eyes and love to be applauded by the dull-witted characters with whom they surround themselves.
The key to this fascination is the command given with authority, which appeals to the gregarious mind of the enslaved.
People who succumb to this fascination are used to always obeying and have not learned to use their own resources to get through life, being succubic and passive.
They are people who always need someone to think for them and are very suggestible, thus uncritical and unthinking.
Those with a strong and independent personality are unlikely to fall victim to this suggestion.
Mastering the Mind. The use of words, speeches, and ethical behaviors that have a definite abstract mental value, but whose original meaning is altered…
Then there is a form of enslavement based on suggestion through imitation, the most common form of social human joining a herd.
In this context, the sheep are stimulated to seek out fashionable and trendy objects or lifestyles, touted as styles that are chosen not for their intrinsic value, but only because “that’s the way everyone does it.
The education of the dull mind is reinforced by working on the essential rational concepts and moral principles ; using words, speeches, and ethical behaviors that have a certain abstract mental value, but whose original meaning is altered, exalted, and replaced with a new meaning that is more coherent and functional for the prevailing ideology.
In this way, new values are established in the popular imagination by instrumentalizing old, well-established patterns of behavior associated with certain emotional charges, both positive and negative, widely disseminated and touted as “close to the people”.
This proposal is cynical and mocking because it mocks the common meaning of a concept or ideology, falsifying and subverting it to its own advantage.
Interestingly, this mechanism is used extensively in the rhetoric of political speeches, where the use of cold and abstract expressions is carefully avoided and passionate words are used to arouse the deep feelings and emotions of the listeners.
Many people know and use the art of inflaming with words, so it would be wise to reflect before responding when we are suggestible by a very fiery speech.
Instead, we should think long and hard in order to analyze the other person’s arguments well and dissociate ourselves from the fiery tone of our interlocutor.
As in a good fight, it is never appropriate to respond with haste and irrationality, but it is necessary to know how to retreat to reflect, especially when the opposing arguments are peppered with ego-pleasing concepts or, on the contrary, when we feel tired and depressed and therefore unbalanced in our judgments.
Mastering the Mind. There are persuasive forms that use this effective technique…
In any case, we are always wary of those who want to lead us into territories where the heart and the brain must march separately, because they are inseparable companions who, when separated, become blind.
In all of us there are ideas and opinions that have been created only by the force of habit and the obsessive repetition of concepts: society, family, religion, politics, all human systems have always used this technique to achieve surrender through exhaustion.
We know that the drop digs the rock, that is why there are forms of persuasion that use this effective technique, and they do so by beginning by proclaiming that a lie is instead a truth, and continuing to repeat the falsehood until it becomes true.
The secret is that all resistance is weakened when it is continuously attacked, and therefore it is easy to succumb when we are exhausted by continuous attacks ; therefore it is essential to cultivate deep and valuable personal opinions that are the bulwark of our being.
We must learn to create an organism of ideas that are truly our own and reflect our deepest being.
They will become the dearest daughters of our hearts and minds : any attack would be futile because we would always defend them with superhuman energy.
So let us learn to look with great suspicion at all those ways of thinking that start from unquestionable “facts” and “ipse dixit”, that demand blind faith, because they are the fathers of the dogmatism of ideas, the enemy of all knowledge and freedom.
