Alan Watt
"Cutting Through The Matrix" Live On RBN (#234)
Poem Copyright Alan Watt Jan. 14, 2009:
Emotion Over Reason, Akin to Treason:
"Who'd Have Thought
that What You Bought
Was Chosen by Manipulated Thought,
Items Around You, Chosen by Emotion,
You Care and Clean with Regular Devotion,
Until Fashion Declares They're Out of Vogue,
You Pull Out Your Credit Card Like a Rogue,
And to Cathedral of Goods Rush, Bowed,
To Buy All the Goodies of the Now-In Crowd,
Psychological Marketing is the New Saviour,
Their Techniques Proven to Alter Behaviour,
Such Techniques Used Within the School
Produce Conformity, New Golden Rule,
We Must All be One, No Independence,
Say Bernays et al Without Repentance"
© Alan Watt Jan. 14, 2009
Wednesday 14th January 2009
Poem & Dialogue Copyrighted Alan Watt - Jan. 14, 2009 (Exempting Music, Literary Quotes, and Callers' Comments)
www.cuttingthroughthematrix.com www.alanwattsentientsentinel.eu
"Code of Silence" by
Bruce Springsteen
There's a code of silence that we don't dare speak
There's a wall between us and a river so deep
And we keep pretending that there's nothing wrong
But there's a code of silence and it can't go on
I am Alan Watt and this is Cutting Through The Matrix on the 14th of January 2009.
For newcomers: look into www.cuttingthroughthematrix.com and you can go through as many of the talks I've given in the past, at your leisure, there's lots to choose from, lots of topics but mainly all dealing with the same big incredible net that's around the world, this big fishing net that's pulling us all together, in a specific direction, a pre-planned goal in fact, that was determined long ago; and, I try to show how it's done, by connecting the foundations and their relationships between the foundations that really suddenly appeared in the 1800s, although some of the members had associations, as they call them, prior to that, but all going in the same direction and how it's affected the whole of the 20th Century, with all of the planning, the treaties, that comes out of the war, various wars. Wars are very important to them, because there's a war on humanity, supposedly to, as they say, save humanity. That's your double-think.
You can also look into www.alanwattsentientsentinel.eu for written transcripts of these talks I've given; and, you can print them up, they're written in the various languages of Europe.
This incredible topic, as I say, is our whole reality, that's the hardest part to grasp, that it's everything that we take for granted really, we've grown up in a system and children will accept the system they grow up in, thinking it's quite natural and normal. All the studies that have been done on mammals show that the young of the mammals will look towards parents to show them signs of agitation or fear, towards other animals or creatures which they might be an enemy of, might be dangerous to them. If the mammal doesn't know to warn the youngster, the youngster will go right up to its main enemy and probably get eaten; and, that's what's happening to us.
Our parents were brainwashed, before we were born, of course; and, they, in turn, had incredible indoctrination put upon them, through the educational system. The educational system can be traced quite far back, in most countries. Gatto has a really good book out on it, on the history of education and what its main purpose initially was; and, it wasn't just to turn out good workers, it was also to create a peaceful society. If you go into the writings of other orators, especially of the US, like Webster for instance, a great orator / great speech writer. He wrote some incredible articles on the purpose of education and he said that it was to create a particular idealistic type of a citizen.
It didn't stop there; it doesn't just stop at helping us gain the skills we need to go out into employment. They also had a further intention for it: it was to eventually bring us into a controlled society, by using the sciences and, perhaps because of the sciences, because the scientists at the top, especially those in the fields of what became known as psychology and psychiatry were looking at humanity as a whole and when they first came together and became a more respectable profession. Before that, they were speculators really, it then became a profession from Freud onwards, they decided that humanity, and the individual within humanity, was a wild beast and had to be tamed, by scientific methods. They claimed that the individual caused the wars, which is absolutely crazy because, where in the past, monarchs ruled, certainly monarchs could take whole nations off to wars and people would obey, using tribal instincts but it went much further than that; and that's where I'm going to go in this talk and I'll be back, after this break.
=== BREAK ===
Hi folks, I am Alan Watt and this is Cutting Through The Matrix. Forgive my nasal sound tonight, but it was 40 degrees below Fahrenheit last night, that's what it hit, and it's plummeting that way tonight as well, so it's been a bit of up and down with the old nose and so on, but I've got the fire stoked well with firewood and it's quite cosy in here.
Getting back to the topic, of how we're manipulated really, and that's what it's about, long before Freud came along - and Freud himself has an interesting history, and his wife did too and those various relatives of his were all involved in the same area of mind control, in one way or another. Freud's attempts at psychoanalysis were more of a method to find out why people behaved in certain ways, what motivates them; where Bernays, his nephew, was more involved in applying what was known, to control and persuade the masses to behave in a certain way, or to buy products even, without their knowing why they were doing it. They were working together, but not just them, there were other relatives that they had and you can do searches on them, it's quite a fascinating study. You find various groups all coming out of Germany, in the same area, working on the mind; and, it was certainly applied in full, which makes me think that the technique itself was beyond Freud and was pre-Freud, because when Bernays started using these techniques on society, it was already a known art. He came at things from such a weird angle; you'd never have guessed how to do it. It had to have been debated, discussed and tested long-long before he was born; he must have been taught and trained this, so it pre-dates Freud, this particular type of science.
They brought into it other areas too, like mesmerism and self-hypnosis, which tend to go together and all these modern groups today that promise you wondrous things, if you take their courses, usually use the same techniques and so do some charismatic Christian organisations as well. As I say, like the ones have had the airports, they call it the Airport Convention at Toronto.
Then, you go even further back and you find, in the writings of John Dee, that he was doing the same with groups of people when he was calling down the spirits, that's the term they gave it, where you'd be full of the ‘Holy Ghost’, or a demon or whatever, depends how you look upon it. People would do the same fantastic things, they'd writhe about on the floor and they'd bash their feet up and down on the floor and so weird kind of gyrations. Same thing you'll see today, this problem of induced hysteria; and that can be done when you offer your mind over to someone who knows how to use techniques, but you have to give your mind to them, in order for them to do it. Therefore, you join these particular groups and they use you. What about the sciences that affect the whole of society, we're completely unaware of? That's the trick to it, that's the trick. Bernays himself said: if you understand the mechanism and motives of the group mind, the group mind. Now, he got a lot of his study from previous investigators, from the 1800s, who went into, they called it the crowd, the psychology of the crowd. He says:
…if you understand the mechanism and the motives of the group mind, is it not possible to control and regiment the masses
Regiment the masses.
according to our will without their knowing about it?
That's what Bernays said. He said it, because he knew it could be done; in fact, it already was being done, at the beginning of the 1900s; and, when you look at the techniques they were using, that were being used, in the Western capitalist countries, and, eventually, they were to be used in the Soviet countries, and they used the same techniques in a slightly different way. In the Soviet country, they appealed highly to the people's patriotism and they used massive propaganda. Remember too that Bernays himself also wrote a book called Propaganda and how it could be used to motivate millions of people, along the same direction. In the Soviet Union, it eventually fell apart, because there was no reward eventually given to the people. You can keep them going along for so long, working hard for the people; but, eventually they realise they're living in a poor condition, they're not getting the kind of food they really need to be strong and healthy; but, they also see that there's an elite above them, going around in the big limousines and chauffer-driven cars, in this great utopia where they're all supposed to be equal. They don't work so hard and it gradually trails off when they're not getting the rewards.
You find, just prior to World War II; this ties in with all of this, a group came over, from Germany, they were really Trotskyites, in their belief systems and Theodore Adorno was one of them. Sometimes they call themselves the Dispossessed, this particular group or club; and they came over to the West, mainly to America and Britain, and they worked to study the American culture and set-up, because they were so astonished to see a similar thing to the Soviet Union being established in the USA, without that kind of propaganda, because it was being used through people's purchasing abilities. If you alter the purchasing techniques and aim at the consumer, using consumer methods, you completely alter the culture; and, they realised that the power techniques were actually stronger in the West and they set up a foundation, to use and manipulate that whole culture.
If you study the Soviet system again: they had many wars and take-overs of countries, under the guise of peace, they always said it was to create world peace. If you went into many of their definitions of peace, they tend to come down to the same one and peace was defined as being the absence of all opposition; and, then they had the various peace movements. In the Western countries, we see our own governments occupying under the guise of peace, they're going to pacify them, to pacify the world. We see our own countries at the same time being turned into concentration camps, under the same world system that's going to give us such incredible peace. There are many ways to bring about, by using the same techniques, in a Soviet country, or in a Western capitalist country, you can bring them together along the same path, by using the same techniques, because they're based on sciences which control the masses, without the masses even being aware of it. They go for your emotions, primarily; not on logic or reasoning; and, in fact, what they said, at the World Psychiatric Association many years ago and reiterated by many psychiatrists since. Even Ewen Cameron, who did the MK-ULTRA experiments, he believed in this, and he stated the same thing, that the individual was a dangerous animal and therefore he had to be tamed and that psychiatrists and psychologists should be given the right to dictate what kind of society - being the only intelligent and rational beings - they were the only ones who should have the right to dictate what kind of society should come into being and also they wanted incredible power over the schools, over the minds of children and adults and government and politics themselves. They wanted psychiatrists on every parliament and congress.
When you look at what's happened, you always find thing out, after the fact, which is the astonishing thing for someone waking up, they start to think what on earth has happened today and then they find out, no, this has been going on for quite a long time and then they go even further back and then they realise they've lived through a whole phase of change that they themselves were unaware of, because it's been done so slickly, so scientifically that they had no clue, they themselves, and their behaviour, was being altered along a certain path. Even with the topics that filled their minds and they talked about with each other, were all given to them by specialists.
As I say, these are old sciences, there's not much being given out really into the public about the nuts and bolts techniques about how to use it, it's very hard to get those kind of books; but, those in top marketing companies do have access to them and they are proven sciences, they do work, they have worked on society. I grew through and grew up through an era of massive change, where people thought they were rebelling and then I realised they were all starting to wear the same kinds of clothes, like outfits, jeans, blue jeans and the older ones had fringes and jackets like this. Well, that was all made by the fashion industry and it was promoted to them, through advertising: 'be different, dress like this', until they all looked the same.
When you look at the Club of Rome - that also believes in this - this, what they say is a fact that the human being is too irrational to be left to himself. They must be controlled and directed and altered, if need be. They do have some truths contained in what they say; some truths. They did say, for instance, one of the truths being that when they looked around the world, in the 1970s, there were so many conflicting groups across the planet, all fighting with each other and arguing with each other, that it would be impossible to have peace at all. They also said the more powerful the various groups become, the more aggressive they would become. There's a truth in there, there definitely is a truth in there. However, you should always look in to see who starts up these groups as well and have them battling each other for the desired outcome of synthesis. Back with more; after the following break.
=== BREAK ===
Hi folks, I am Alan Watt, we're Cutting Through The Matrix, discussing the hidden persuaders; and, I'm trying to tell you how the sciences, the professions got together, those that deal with the mind. Judging themselves to be superior, obviously, because they were men of science and rationality, they claimed, which is kind of scary because, if you look at the history of Freud, you find that the man was a heavy drug user, he fudged a lot of his publications, he tried to make facts fit where they didn't and had some bogus testing and eventually a lot of his stuff was discredited; but, a lot of the techniques that came out of his enquiries into the subconscious or even the unconscious as he called it, the great sea where everything that is possible in a human dwells: all the good things about you, all the bad things about you, that come out in dreams. He was learning a lot about what motivates people really; and, also learning about what motivated their fears. If you know what motivates their fears, you can use those fears on the general public, to control them. Bernays, his nephew, was already making a great name for himself by using these techniques, in sales and in politics; he groomed many politicians, many politicians.
Bernays himself, and others, also worked with the Tavistock Institute, where they’d go over and work with on mental patients, people in other words with no rights whatsoever, and they were, at that time even, using electrodes implanted in the brain, to see if they could alter the behaviour of people. We find Aldous Huxley talking about the very same thing about Tavistock, because he worked there as well. These people were all involved in Tavistock, not because they were going to help people get better from illnesses, but, really, to find ways to control whole populations, if not the populous of the whole world. That was their goal, until they claimed that those who were irrational, meaning the general populations, were totally tamed and controlled, either through pharmacology or through electronic means, there would be no peace. Therefore, their goal and their aim, their mandate was to bring all this into being, to give themselves more power, get laws passed, until they had that power to bring about the kind of society they wished. Here's a statement made by Aldous Huxley at California Medical School in San Francisco in 1961:
"There will be, in the next generation or so, a pharmacological method of making people love their servitude, and producing dictatorship without tears, so to speak, producing a kind of painless concentration camp for entire societies, so that people will in fact have their liberties taken away from them, but will rather enjoy it, because they will be distracted from any desire to rebel by propaganda or brainwashing, or brainwashing enhanced by pharmacological methods. And this seems to be the final revolution."
He called it the final revolution. All the other revolutions had been won and there'd been many revolutions. Some bloodless, mainly through cultural changes and so on, other ones were very bloody indeed; but, the final one was to control and tame humans altogether. Now, you can only do that with predictability of people, of everyone; and, we're living through a phase now, under the guise of terrorism, to have everyone's data collected and it has been for years actually, all your communications. I've read the reports from mainstream newspapers and even from military sites where they have, literally, a sort of clone of you, a cyber clone of you, in cyber space, in a computer, with all your habits, they even have your friends that you talk to on your cell phones in the same simulations, to see if you are as predictable as they think you are, by knowing all your habits and likes / dislikes and so on. To have a world peace, peace in society, everyone must be 100% predictable by the authorities. This ties in again with the Hidden Persuaders by Vance Packard, who says on page 206:
Eventually—say by A.D. 2000—perhaps all this depth manipulation of the psychological variety will seem amusingly old-fashioned. By then perhaps the biophysicists will take over with "biocontrol," which is depth persuasion carried to its ultimate. Biocontrol is the new science of controlling mental processes, emotional reactions, and sense perceptions by bio-electrical signals.
Bio-electrical signals. Now, this was done in the '50s, this book, and then jump forward to the '70s, when Zbigniew Brzezinski brought out his book Between Two Ages, with the chapter the Technotronic Era in it where he said the same thing. Through technotronics, as he called it, you could control whole societies. To continue with Vance Packard's one, it says:
The National Electronics Conference meeting in Chicago in 1956 heard electrical engineer Curtiss R. Schafer, of the Norden- Ketay Corporation, explore the startling possibilities of biocontrol. As he envisioned it, electronics could take over the control of unruly humans. This could save the indoctrinators and thought controllers a lot of fuss and bother. He made it sound relatively simple.
Back with more, after these messages.
=== BREAK ===
Hi folks, I am Alan Watt and Cutting Through The Matrix. Just before the break, reading from Vance Packard’s book, The Hidden Persuaders, I was mentioning bio-control. It says:
Biocontrol is the new science of controlling mental processes, emotional reactions, and sense perceptions by bio-electrical signals. The National Electronics Conference meeting in Chicago in 1956 heard electrical engineer Curtiss R. Schafer, of the Norden-Ketay Corporation, explore the startling possibilities of biocontrol. As he envisioned it, electronics could take over the control of unruly humans. This could save the indoctrinators and thought controllers a lot of fuss and bother. He made it sound relatively simple.
This is in the '50s.
Planes, missiles, and machine tools already are guided by electronics, and, the human brain—being essentially a digital computer
digital computer
—can be, too. Already, through biocontrol, scientists have changed people's sense of balance. And they have made animals with full bellies feel hungry, and made them feel fearful when they have nothing to fear. Time magazine quoted him as explaining: The ultimate achievement of biocontrol may be the control of man himself. . . . The controlled subjects would never be permitted to think as individuals. A few months after birth, a surgeon would equip each child with a socket mounted under the scalp and electrodes reaching selected areas of brain tissue. . . . The child's sensory perceptions and muscular activity could be either modified or completely controlled by bioelectric signals radiating from state-controlled transmitters.
State-controlled transmitters. Just like The Matrix movies isn't it? This, in the '50s.
He added the reassuring thought that the electrodes "cause no discomfort."
You just won't know that you are you.
I am sure that the psycho-persuaders of today would be appalled at the prospect of such indignity being committed on man. They are mostly decent, likable people, products of our relentlessly progressive era. Most of them want to control us just a little bit, in order to sell us some product we may find useful or disseminate with us a viewpoint that may be entirely worthy. But when you are manipulating, where do you stop? Who is to fix the point at which manipulative attempts become socially undesirable?
That is the big problem, isn't it? That is the big problem. After 9/11, when they asked everyone to give up their security for peace, it came once again to the table how much freedom do you give the average person and still have safety for the State, for the system itself? That will always come up. Well the answer is: they can't trust man at all, when you read their other writings, they cannot trust man whatsoever, they made it quite categorically clear that they don't trust the average human being, we're too primitive, too unreasoning, we're unthinking; and, we live on emotion, rather than logic or reason. Many have studied all of the TV and TV, definitely, was a great tool, it still is a fantastic tool, to manipulate people with, but they also do studies on people who watch television, they have all along; and, they were fascinated by those who love soaps. Soaps are full of, what Freud would call the hidden dogmas of sex, all the different frustrations and so on, they're under the surface, so they let it go in the soaps, you play out the fantasy in the soap. However, they also wanted to see if they could make people actually portray it in real life, in other words: copy what they were seeing and bring it into their own existences and they had questionnaires about this too, to see how it was affecting them. So, we are affected by what we see. As Skinner said, if you want to modify behaviour you alter the environment of your target; you put in a television set. That's what you do; you alter the environment to alter the behaviour. You can do it with a radio, as Tavistock found out very early on too, when they used to try the serials, the continuous serials, where at the end of each hour, the person was left on cliff-hanger and you weren't sure if they were going come through this or they'd die and people would literally run home, to hear the next episode. Their behaviour was modified, they'd changed their daily behaviour; very simple stuff, in that respect.
The Hidden Persuaders goes on in the Care and Feeding of Positive Thinkers. On page 194, it says:
"Winning the public's collective mind over to confidence is a monumental task, yet industry leaders seem to be succeeding."
That was in Tide magazine.
Back in the twenties Americans across the land were chanting,
or chatting, or chanting, yeah they were chanting, not chatting,
ten times a day,
the light is bad in here,
"Every day in every way I am getting better and better."
Remember the old saying?
They were applying to their problems the formula for "Self-Mastery Through Conscious Autosuggestion" devised by the French druggist-psychologist Émile Coué.
Gradually this formula became pretty well discredited as a way of coping with our basic problems. By 1956 Couéism seemed to be enjoying a hearty revival, particularly in the highest circles of business and government. In almost every day's newspaper some tycoon was announcing vast expansion plans or unlimited faith in the future. Economists in the employment of industry were making reassuring pronouncements that our economy was rock-solid despite the mountainous growth of unpaid consumer debts. Business Week in March, 1956, was exulting over the fact that "confidence is high.
. . A new wave of confidence is sweeping the business community." A week later another journal widely read by businessmen was exclaiming happily over the fact that all the important indices were going up, up, up. Its subheads were "Enter Optimism" and "Exit Fear."
While such happy exclamations were filling the air in late 1955 and early 1956, Tide explained to any merchandisers who might still be in the dark what was behind it all. Much of this exuberant chest beating, it said, was "carefully calculated psychology" devised by professional persuaders. The journal even coined the phrase "psychological marketing" to describe "this new marketing technique," which it said was geared to meet the special needs of the "psychoanalytical age in which we live."
You see examples of it every day [it continued]. Just recently there were the announcements of huge jet plane orders, indicating confidence in the travel market in the next decade. There are other ones . . . like Harlow Curtice's Billion Dollar Bet. . . . Other leaders in business, industry, and finance speak out, week after week, expressing their faith in the economy. Auto men talk of the 10,000,000-car year just around the corner. Steel makers talk expansion and more expansion. . . . There are other less dramatic examples. . . the releases on expansion plans, the speeches to local groups, even the talk across luncheon tables. . . ."
Then it explained what all the talking was about, in these blunt words: "These men aren't talking just to hear their voices, nor do they enjoy venturing out on an economic limb." Their main aim is to beef up the confidence level of the nation by counteracting "pessimism" that sometimes gets voiced, so that dealers will keep on ordering goods and consumers will keep on buying goods, at a higher and higher rate, and if necessary go into debt to do it. "To maintain a pace of increasing consumption," it asserted, "a high level of credit buying must be maintained as well. There must be a continued willingness to expand. . . ." Such a willingness to expand, industrial thinkers had concluded, rested on confidence. "Confidence and spending are handmaidens of an expanding economy," Tide stated.
From a persuasion standpoint this matter of confidence transcended everything else. The minute a glow of confidence left the landscape all sorts of disagreeable things might happen. One thing that would surely happen would be that people might start watching their dollars and become more cerebral in their buying. That would make things difficult all over for depth merchandisers trying to tempt people into impulse buying, status-symbol buying, leisure buying, and many other kinds of self-indulgent buying. Dr. Dichter was most emphatic on the hazard involved if confidence was not kept at a high level.
Now listen to this, as I say, you can go through a lot of boring books, and it's here and there, you find the gem:
Dr. Dichter was most emphatic on the hazard involved if confidence was not kept at a high level. "Our prosperity is based on psychological foundations,"
Not on real foundations, psychological foundations.
he warned and added that economists and business leaders who predict any dip in business are "playing with fire and doing a disservice to the country."
Now, what did you think the economists were there for? What did I think they were there for? To do a science that was supposedly fairly exact; but, here's Dr. Dichter saying that prosperity's based on psychological foundations.
he warned and added that economists and business leaders who predict any dip
Any bad news, on other words
in business are "playing with fire and doing a disservice to the country."
What was the evidence that confidence was crucial? Merchandisers were strongly influenced by the findings of the Survey Research Center psychologists at the University of Michigan, who kept a running chart on the buying mood of the United States public for the Federal Reserve Board. These probers found there is such a thing as a national buying mood and were reported as being convinced that a generally cheerful atmosphere, more than any rational calculation, seems to make people feel like spending their money.
Now, what it's actually saying here, Dichter is, basically, saying that it's heresy to give the public bad news because they'll stop buying; but that's been known all along, in this field, economics; they're always trying to push the good news. Is that the reason they don't tell us the truth? Think about the opposite of it: when they brought the present crunch on, this financial crunch, which was on the go all along, basically, the stock market was full of Ponzi schemes, in fact, it's all a Ponzi scheme, it’s a pyramid scheme. It depends on new investors coming in all the time and older ones leaving their money in, that's how it's run. When this supposed financial crash came, it came from the top, the President himself scared the bejesus out of the general public, with his gloom and doom of crashing, we're crashing, it could be worse than the Great Depression, which tells you that this was another 'must-be'. And it's only when you go into the other books to find the whole question of money is to change, the whole purpose of money is to change into a new society, a new economic society. The first part being the Bretton Wood agreement, Part One, where the founder himself, the chairman, the guy who ran it, said this is only one part of a phase. Well, Mr. Bush was given the nod to start the next part of the phase; and, it's being carried out right now: we're to go into a new economic system. If they wanted to go along with the religion of always singing 'rah rah the economy's great', the people would be spending, spending, spending, regardless of reality; but, as I say, that was a must-be.
You should go into the writings put out by the foundations, they've studied this, like I say, especially the ones like the great foundation that was set up by the Trotskyites who came across to the US and Britain, because they were fascinated to realise that these social psychologists at the top, these business psychologists were running the country, through their ability to go right to the consumer and get the consumer to change their ways and their values and all the rest of it. Right down to, as I say, in a chapter in that particular book The Hidden Persuaders, the effeminisation of the male. Men, at one time, generally never bought their own clothes, they didn't care what they wore; fashion was an alien thing to them. They'd have one or two pair of shoes, or a pair of boots, a pair of baggy pants, a jacket and maybe a suit for a funeral and that was about it, that's about as far as they cared about. Because the women did the purchasing, they aimed the advertising mainly at the woman and it became very successful, because, then they could work on the women and say, through the advertising, does this look like your husband? And, you'd see this smartly-dressed guy, slim and probably younger, dressed in a flashy outfit, looking very trendy; and they'd say this is the new successful man and she'd look at her husband and realise that there was old Joe, wearing his old clothes, probably quite happy, and she would start to change him, because she was doing the purchasing. Now, they don't need that today, they have the men doing it themselves.
It's rather astonishing, as I say, to read articles going back so many years and, with this book and others, to do with the drugging of society, big Pharma coming in, gaining control over society and then so many thing suddenly make sense to you. When they decided to drug the children with Ritalin and all the other spin-offs of Ritalin, it all suddenly makes sense. They wanted to bring pharmacology right into the classroom, which they did. It won't be enough to stop there because they're going to go an awful lot further, an awful lot further. They generally bypass the older generations and go straight for the youth; and, it's true enough, anybody under 30, because you're still very programmable up to the age of 30, anybody above 30, they just forget, you'll die off. You're just working towards your pension in fact and you hope to be a good boy and get it and cause no ruffles.
This particular article here, it's called:
2020 and it’s from the TES, I guess it’s the Teachers Educational Supplement 8th June 2007, by Irena Barker. It says here:
2020: dawn of the 'intelligent' classroom
You know there's a whole bunch of programmes now called 2020, where they want to integrate even cybernetics with humans and chips and all the rest of it. It says here:
IT IS exam time in the year 2020 and pupils are feeling tense. Suddenly gentle music starts to play, the corridors fill with a soft blue light and a soothing breeze blows through the classrooms.
In another part of the school, a geography teacher creates a jungle in his classroom, complete with steam, heat and smells. Elsewhere, a history teacher recreates the freezing conditions of the siege of Leningrad.
"Intelligent" school buildings, which respond to pupils' moods, are just one of the predictions made in a report by Futurelab, the Bristol education research centre.
They predict that in 13 years' time,
13 years’ time.
pupils will have 24-hour access to a new kind of wireless network - incorporating the internet, television and telephone - through tiny devices in the fabric of their clothes.
They've already done that in some schools in Britain, which I've read in the past, on air.
Pupils will be able to look back at lessons at any time via special glasses, which will record their whole lives, creating a reliable "virtual memory".
Well you'll bet the authorities will be watching their whole lives and using this memory from their glasses. Ha-ha. It's going to be a chip I know. Back with more after this break.
=== BREAK ===
Hi folks, I am Alan Watt and this is Cutting Through The Matrix, going through the types of controls that are coming up and actually being installed right now in various schools in some countries. It says here:
Security in schools will change too. Advanced biometric full-body scanning systems, embedded in doorways, could allow pupils and staff access to different rooms without the need for keys, passwords or retinal scans. And the system would refuse access to criminals and excluded pupils.
Well, see they're training a young group to come into a world where they're always going to go these incredible types of security and scrutiny. There's no privacy whatsoever, that's the whole point of the training, to get you used to the fact of having, and not minding, not having privacy. This is what Huxley was talking about, how people will love their servitude.
Keri Facer, the research director at Futurelab, said technology would become so embedded in clothes, everyday objects and schools that it would become harder to see where the child ends and the technology begins.
That's complete interfacing with technology that they're taking us all through. She says:
"There is a huge ethical debate that we need to have now about the potential effects of this surveillance on personal privacy,"
Well, do we have, do the public have any input on this, are they asked? Are they even asked what they think? And of course, the answer's "No".
"Will we assume it is normal for pupils to be tracked and monitored throughout the day?"
Well, in some schools, they already are and I've read those articles before too.
High-tech changes in schools would also pose questions about what pupils should learn in the classroom and how they should be assessed
Assessed?
if information recall were to become redundant. The focus on the three Rs could shift, for example, if the written word lost prominence in favour of audio and voice-recognition technologies.
They're already using some of this audio and voice recognition technology, to get through into schools, through the gates. That's from '2020 and Beyond'. It says:
Several of Futurelab's predictions are already coming true: Intelligent buildings.
That's already in these articles out there on intelligent buildings.
Green End primary in Manchester became the first UK school to install computer-controlled "intelligent lighting" that responds to pupils' biorhythms. [There's] Classroom simulations. [There's also] A test-bed classroom at Greycourt school in Surrey allows teachers to vary environments using surround-sound and projection screens.
What it doesn't mention here is they're also putting cameras above the students, each student and they're also putting recorders in, so they can study the blinks even from your eyes, to see how you're responding to certain subjects and so on. Observation in psychology, we're all specimens in a great laboratory and we don't even know it. There’s articles that came out of Vance Packard's book, there's been documentaries done, showing you these tiny little fish-eye cameras that have been used all through supermarkets, which, for decades have studied the flickers and the size of the pupils of the people looking at the different items on the shelves and the people are utterly unconscious of them. And, here you are, being studied like a specimen, because you are the prey, of big business obviously. Getting back to this article here though, it says:
Lessons in virtual worlds.
They're going to have them in virtual worlds; that's already here to an extent. They want to add presence to it so you actually think you are in a room with people. It makes you wonder why you have a body at all eventually, maybe we won't.
Well, that's it for tonight, from a very-very cold Ontario, Canada, where it's getting down to 40 below Fahrenheit, from Hamish and myself, it's goodnight and may your god - or your gods - go with you.
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Transcribed by Bill Scott.
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Book: "The Hidden Persuaders" by Vance Packard.
Article: "2020: dawn of the 'intelligent' classroom" by Irena Barker (tes.co.uk) - June 8, 2007.)