From Humanoid Faults to Manipulated Consensus, 27
More generally, all things have a cause and our wobbles are caused by our weakness plus external factors, and the fact is that we yield under external pressure. And under pressure we yield unconsciously, too. This makes us controllable, and controlling us it’s just a matter of: how much pressure how long and in which direction to obtain from us how much shift for how long and in which direction?
Because our shifts may well be temporary, but as long as they do serve the goals of those exploiting them, that’s perfectly ok with them. Ever heard about “Shock and Awe Doctrine”? It means just that: applying enough pressure on a populace for long enough to induce them to approve suppressive totalitarian laws against themselves, and once they’re approved, who cares if they wobble back to a flicker of awareness of what they’ve done? Using against them the new suppressive laws just passed will be not only a pleasure for suppressives, but also the very reason and target they got those laws passed for in the first place. The pressure can be impulsive of continuous, there can be a casus belli or a strategy of tension: they can shock and awe us with frightening events concentrated in little time, by throwing down a handy couple of twin towers, just as an example, or with a stream of terrorist attacks for decades, by means of an equally handy couple of subversive groups, just as another example, but these are just technical details; the whole point is we are unwittingly prone to let our stances be pushed around by external suppressive pressure into far less sensible ones – and to eat our given words as if it were nothing in the process, too.
We're daunted and overawed, slow and distracted:
It has been said that the definition of ability is: observing, deciding, acting. It is my opinion that a key part of this definition is what is not in it: things like hesitating, waiting, postponing, etc. are not included nor contemplated. The time to get into action is solely the "technical" time to collect information, verify it and evaluate it. But we take aeons to go through elemental logical steps and reach elemental obvious conclusions. The more observable and clear something is, the faster one should grasp it but no, we're mysteriously slow.
