Resist Fear Mongering Propaganda - Brother André Marie - Part 2 of 2

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"And then comes a special mention of the passion that is our subject, fear:

Bernays also used fear to sell products. For Dixie cups, Bernays launched a campaign to scare people into thinking that only disposable cups were sanitary. As part of this campaign, he founded the Committee for the Study and Promotion of the Sanitary Dispensing of Food and Drink.

Sound familiar? Other drinking vessels were not sanitary — crawling, no doubt, with microbial “invisible enemies” that will kill you and your family after a few unsuspecting sips of your favorite fluid. Dixie cups to the rescue! That was then. Now we are rescued by masks, social distancing, ruined family businesses from unnecessary lockdowns, and other nonsense — but especially, the benevolent Bill Gates’ vaccine that we are all supposed to be begging for. Note, too, that Bernays fabricated a fake bureaucracy as part of the sell, with the pompous name, “the Committee for the Study and Promotion of the Sanitary Dispensing of Food and Drink.” We Americans are often suckers for bureaucracies, like the inflated and polyvalent ones currently cramming corona-mania down our throats.

Fear sells. Some of my readers may well be old enough to recall the famous 1964 attack ad that helped get Lyndon Johnson elected, beating Barry Goldwater whom he had framed as a war hawk. At the height of the Cold War, with people frightened of “the Bomb,” this was very effective political marketing. You don’t have to be quite as old as that to recall Karl Malden’s fear-based American Express Traveler’s Checks ads, of which there were many, like this one. Politicians, insurance companies, home appliances, even beauty products are all sold using fear. I’ll never forget the true confession I heard from a Rainbow salesman on how fear was a major part of his pitch for that product.

During the Cold War, the CIA and other parts of the American deep-state, with their friends in Henry Luce’s media empire, used fear of the “Red Menace” to build up a very unwholesome American Imperium in part by dismantling Catholic social teaching both at home and abroad as David Wemhoff has amply documented in his book, John Courtney Murray, Time/Life, and the American Proposition. (See “Doctrinal Warfare, the CIA, and the Colonizing of the Catholic Mind.”)

Similarly, the “War on Terror” got Americans to go for all sorts of infringements of our liberties, from the Patriot Act to the intrusive TSA body cavity searches, and the like. These and similar Big State maneuvers are the Orwellian manipulation that turns Big Brother into a benevolent protector who will save the feckless inhabitants of Oceania from the likes of Emmanuel Goldstein, whom they are taught to fear and execrate in the daily Two Minutes Hate. (Please pardon my lapse into the world of 1984, but it is all too timely.)

As far as COVID-19 goes, we get more than two minutes of hate, fear, and hysteria every day. It’s nonstop PSYOP.

Anyone who has been reading what I’ve published the last several weeks knows that I’m not a true believer in the coronavirus party line. If you are still skeptical of my skepticism, I recommend this discussion between Steve Cunningham and James Corbett, along with the myriad links Steve provided to supporting information. Virologists, immunologists, doctors, nurses, and other professionals are lining up against the official party line being hyped from the Malthusians at the WHO, the CDC, and the interlocking directorate of foundations, NGOs, Big Tech, Big Pharma, mainstream media, and other profiteering paladins of panic. We need to unshackle ourselves from the chains of their fear.

I would like to close these considerations by looking at the insights contained in the closing three paragraph’s of Sofo Archon’s article, “Fear-Based Manipulation: How Politicians, Marketers and the Media Create Panic to Control the Masses”:

The first and most important thing is to identify fear when it arises within you and try to see it for what it is, without shying away from it or pretending that it’s not there. By bringing fear into your conscious awareness, you’ll be able to examine where it’s coming from and what message it’s trying to convey to you, which will help you to better understand it and hence deal with it. In fact, research has suggested that just acknowledging an emotion and explicitly identifying fear can help manage its subsequent effects on our behavior.

The technique these researchers recommend is called “affect labeling,” which essentially amounts to putting a name on the emotion one is experiencing — “grabbing” the feeling with the intellect, if you will: “I am now experiencing fear.” This alone helps to calm us. As in an exorcism wherein the demon is forced to reveal itself by name, once the identity of the emotion is established, we now have a “handle” with with to grasp and subdue it. This same technique can be used in all our temptations. A good confessor once advised me that, when tempted, I should “name the demon” tempting me. When we call the temptation by its name — generally one of the seven deadly sins — we control it, and not it us. At least this practice is a helpful beginning in getting control of it.

Archon’s subsequent pieces of advice — “remember to associate feelings of fear with the need to slow down and regain mental and emotional clarity” and don’t trust purported “authority figures” and experts manipulating your fears, but scrutinize their claims — are along the same logical lines.

I am aware that Archon is a self-described “freethinker.” Too bad for him. But his insights here are well said and comport with both philosophia perennis and Catholic morals. His suggestions all amount to applications of one general principle: the will asserting the authority of reason over emotion and the intellect judging whether our emotional reactions are reasonable or not. This is good. It is a methodology that asserts the proper hierarchy existing within each one of us, and holds our emotions accountable. Then we can hold accountable those who are manipulating our emotions.

Once you realize how your fear is being manipulated, you will not be “afraid of their fear” any longer. Then the regnant emotion may well become anger, but even that can and must be subject to reason so that it becomes disciplined and directed into truly righteous indignation and rational, salutary action."

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