Keep an eyeof Pinnochio’s nose. Cartoon by Christine Barie
Good news! In their New York Times bestseller, Spy the lie, former CIA agents Philip Houston, Michael Floyd, and Susan Carnicero have provided a blueprint for how to detect deception.
Better news! Over the next few weeks, we at Engaging Peace will distill their main guidelines for you, helping you become better prepared for the 2020 election campaigns. Tax payers paid for their work. Now let’s put their tools to use in pursuit of democratic rather than autocratic principles.
Floyd and his co-agents begin Chapter 1 with a pause-for-reflection quote: “People do not believe lies because they have to, but because they want to.” (Malcolm Muggeridge) (What claims from what politicians do you want to accept as the truth, whether there’s any support for them or not?)
Houston and his fellow spy-detectors warn us: becoming good deception detectors means surmounting major obstacles, including: 1) the common belief that people (at least some people) won’t lie to you; and 2) inescapable biases affecting whether or not you’ll believe a particular person or not.
In a little over a year, many of us will be voting particular people in and out of major political offices. Our votes (or unwillingness to vote) will determine whether those candidates will gain, or hold onto, or lose considerable power over the lives of countless human beings and the environments in which we strive to survive. Many candidates will tell you the truth about who they are, and what they’ll try to do if elected—and many will lie. How can you tell who’s who (if you really want to know)?
Spy the lie has guidelines for lie detection that we’re going to share with you. You’ll be able to start trying out the guidelines before the first primaries and caucuses of 2020. Videos of Congressional hearings, televised segments of press conferences, the upcoming debates among the Democratic Presidential candidates all can provide material on which to test your mastery of their principles.
Any forums in which individuals are answering questions about themselves, their achievements, their beliefs, and their goals provide information you can learn to analyze for truth or falsehood.
Knowing how to spy the lie is another tool, like recognizing a mind game when you see one, and confronting efforts to morally disengage you on behalf of the power mongers. Stay tuned and we’ll show you how to do all three before you go to the voting booth.
Pegean says, Don’t for one minute think they’re going to put anything over on me. I know a lie when I see one.
Sign at Occupy Portland, November 9, 2011; This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license. Author: Another Believer.
by Kathie MM
Republican President Theodore Roosevelt , the “trust buster” president who successfully opposed powerful monopolies, said what the country needed was “a real democracy” and “of all forms of tyranny the least attractive and the most vulgar is the tyranny of mere wealth, the tyranny of a plutocracy.”
A plutocracy is a “society…ruled or controlled by people of great wealth or income….“[T]hroughout history, political thinkers such as Winston Churchill…and Noam Chomsky have condemned plutocrats for ignoring their social responsibilities, using their power to serve their own purposes and thereby increasing poverty and nurturing class conflict, corrupting societies with greed and hedonism” (Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plutocracy ).
Plutocrats overlap with the group Eidelson calls one percenters, but not every multi-millionaire or billionaire is motivated solely by greed and lust for power.
Currently, the United States (and other countries) are being wrenched steadily back into the tyranny of plutocracy. Where is the Theodore Roosevelt to stop them?
What
you need to understand about plutocrats:
Many are morally disengaged, able to convince themselves that behaviors causing enormous damage to people and the planet are all for the good.
Many want to get you morally disengaged too, and exploit groups already morally disengaged (more on fascists and chaos seekers later).
Many are political extremists who feed racism, ethnocentrism, and sexism, and use mind games (manipulating feelings of fear, anger, resentment, distrust, pride, and despair) to spread moral disengagement to vulnerable audiences. For example, they create scapegoats and dehumanize them. They propagate increasingly severe levels of poverty, and blame the poor for their misery. They generate policies designed only to help themselves, but claim the policies will benefit all.
Whistleblower Nick Hanauer never uses the terms mind games or moral disengagement, but provides compelling examples of both; moreover, his effort in this video and elsewhere (e.g., here and here ) suggest that even a one percenter can become morally engaged.
As the next election year approaches, let’s all work together to sustain and promote moral engagement.
You Call It Torture; We Call It Upholding the US Constitution
[continued from 9-16-19] So how did the four states [the US, the UK, Sweden and Ecuador ] respond to this historic test [i.e., to step forward and protect Julian Asssange from further persecution or hold back and allow the attacks against him to continue]? How did they answer the charges that their governments, judiciaries and media have joined forces to psychologically torture a publisher for journalism? How did they square this with their stated commitment to human rights? What about democracy and rule of law?
They thumbed their noses.
Ecuador and the UK didn’t even bother to reply to the UN Rapporteur.
Human rights? What human rights?Talk to the hand.
The US and Sweden issued what appeared to be stock-standard perception-management sound-bytes, cut-and-pasted into document form.
As refutation to Nils Melzer’s concerns, both Sweden and the US opted to simply prime and exploit the same psychological vulnerabilities that have been primed and exploited throughout the long smear campaign against Julian Assange, and against victims of war crimes such as Namir and Saeed. Ultimately, their responses sought to turn reality on its head such that war crimes are virtuous, reporting war crimes is reprobate, truth is dangerous, censorship will set you free, and persecuting a publisher for journalism is “free speech”.
But what perception-management sound-bytes? What psychological vulnerabilities? Exploited how?
Paradoxically, when populations are confronted with ugly realities about their social and political worlds, such as corrupt elites rigging primaries, vainglorious celebrities who threaten and vilify minorities becoming president of the United States, civilian slaughter in illegal wars, and so-called democratic states torturing a publisher for journalism, it is the perfect time, psychologically, to glorify the status quo.
A robust program of psychological research indicates that many people are motivated to perceive the systems on which they depend as being right, good, fair and just, even in the face of powerful reasons not to, and even when suffering at the system’s hands. Psychologists call this tendency system justification.
A counterintuitive finding of system justification research is that flaws in a person’s social and political worlds typically exacerbate rather than quell system-justifying reactions. When presented with systemic failures such as corruption, injustice or abuse, many people are inclined to double down on the status quo and defend the system’s legitimacy, so as restore their sense of stability, security and wellbeing.
System-justifying reactions can include just-world beliefs, which entail victim-blaming and otherwise subconsciously distorting reality-perception to preserve the illusion that life is fair, along with all manner of other self-deceptive biases and blind spots that serve to rationalise the status quo.
Examples are double standards, moral justification, dogged patriotism and exceptionalism, or just plain mouthing empty, self-aggrandising platitudes.
All of which pervaded the replies to Professor Melzer from Sweden and the United States.
“firm commitment to freedom of expression, including for members of the media, consistent with the U.S. Constitution and the United States’ obligations under international human rights law”.
Without irony, this statement was issued in the same breath as defending the arbitrary detention and Espionage Act charges against Julian Assange for exercising his freedom of speech, in violation of international human rights law, two UN Working Group rulings, and the first amendment of the U.S. Constitution.
The letter continued,
“U.S. law protects individuals in the U.S. justice system from torture and cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment, including through protections under the Fifth, Eighth, and Fourteenth Amendments to the U.S. Constitution.”
Tell that to Chelsea Manning and the scores of innocent people detained indefinitely without trial by US authorities, while being tortured, horrifically and mercilessly, as detailed here.
“Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.”
In short, at this crossroads, our leaders have signalled their intention to ignore the warnings of the world’s designated authority on torture, operating under the mandate of the world’s designated authority on human rights. The states named as persecutors of Julian Assange have similarly made it clear that they intend to continue down the path of censorship-by-torture, with all the anti-democratic tyranny that that entails.
Which is to be expected, given that governments can only be relied upon to uphold human rights when their citizens demand it of them, as Human Rights 101, from the Science of Human Rights Coalition, cautions.
The question going forward from Nils Melzer’s final report, then, is not whether our governments will respond by upholding the principles of democracy, human rights and rule of law. The question is whether we, as citizens, will demand it of them.
Which is why the psychology profession teaches that atrocity and collective violence, like human rights, live and die on bystanders. Just as human rights depend on active citizenship, so collective violence, such as torturing a publisher for journalism, depends on citizens standing quietly and idly by.
Accordingly, it is crucially important for perpetrators of atrocity, such as the UK, the US, Sweden and Ecuador, to ensure that publics are psychologically primed for compliant, passive bystanding to torture of publishers and war crimes.
But how is that achieved? How can populations be subdued?
Bystanding, Moral Disengagement and the Media
When states seek to get away with murder and other forms of state-sanctioned abuse, in addition to issuing empty system-justifying platitudes, perpetrators must incite what psychologists call moral disengagement.
Moral disengagement is a psychological process by which a specific event, such as torturing a publisher for journalism, is placed outside the boundaries of one’s usual morality. Most people, for instance, would find the notion of torturing a publisher for journalism wrong. Yet many are morally unperturbed as that very thing unfolds in real time.
Similarly, most people deem murder to be morally repugnant, yet are capable of placing the murder of a tender-eyed Iraqi photo-journalist outside that moral frame, letting not only the killers off the hook, but letting themselves off the moral hook to care.
But what causes people to morally disengage? How can otherwise good people, and kind people, look away?
Fortunately for state-sanctioned abusers, psychological literatures offer well-researched insights on how to incite people to morally disengage. Those literatures, of course, are intended as preventative offerings, by way of self-awareness and insight. They can, however, equally serve as instruction manuals.
According to psychological research, moral disengagement is stoked by dehumanising and demonising targets among other things. Which is where the establishment media comes in.
Along with perpetrators and bystanders, psychological understandings of atrocity and collective violence point to instigators as playing a critical role. Instigators are those who control the flow of information. In other words, those who control the media.
The ABC’s studios in Southbank, Brisbane. (IMAGE: Ash Kyd, Flickr)
Controlling the flow of information gives instigators the power not only to cover perpetrators’ tracks, but to dehumanise and blame the victims, thereby bringing bystanders passively into line. Controlling the flow of information in corporate-states, moreover, such as the US and the UK, means exerting state-corporate control of media. Which is precisely what has been taking place for decades.
Under the guise of a “free press” throughout the Western world, legacy media is now not only owned by a small handful of corporate interests, it relies on corporate advertising dollars, including from arms manufacturers, along with government money, and a military-intelligence-corporate-PR machine that funnels press releases through just three gatekeepers, to journalists who are too overworked and underpaid to investigate what they are fed.
In other words, a military-industrial-media empire feeds newsrooms their narratives, such that most news is “managed by governments, corporations, and PRP (public relations and propaganda) firms” writes Professor of Sociology and former director of Project Censored, Peter Phillips. Cut and paste-journalism, in which reporters recycle one another’s material, takes care of the rest.
There are, of course, exceptions. However, according to scholarly analyses, upwards of 80 per cent of mainstream news now fits this model.
In such an environment, persecuting states, such as those named by the UN Rapporteur on Torture, are perfectly poised to incite what psychologists call an atrocity generating situation. All that is required is to feed newsrooms narratives that normalise, sanitise, trivialise and rationalise atrocity, while dehumanising victims, thereby inciting publics to morally disengage. In this equation, what is omitted is just as important as what is woven in.
The Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) Four Corners program, for instance, recently showcased a range of such tactics in its two-part ‘investigation’ of Julian Assange. From overt and covert dehumanisation and demonising, to narratives woven from omitted facts, along with baseless and discredited claims asserted as gospel, it was a case study in inciting moral disengagement from collective violence. The program deployed all the psychological tricks in the book to recycle the very vilifying, manufactured media narratives that Nils Melzer has denounced as abusive, while posing as a balanced report.
But how did the program reconcile this with Professor Melzer’s damning findings, which had been available in summary form for 60 days at the time of broadcast? How did it fend off the obvious charge that the program embodied the very “fabrication and manipulation” Melzer described, in which “many media outlets and individual journalists have shown a remarkable lack of critical independence and have contributed significantly to spreading abusive and deliberately distorted narratives about Mr Assange”?
Simple. It didn’t. It didn’t even try.
Instead, the Four Corners program buried Nils Melzer’s report. Over an hour and a half of discussion of Julian Assange, not one mention was made of the fact that the world’s designated authority on torture has found the states at the centre of the Four Corners program responsible for mobbing, judicially harassing, defaming and psychologically torturing Julian Assange.
Not only is this complicit in the torture that Nils Melzer describes, both by inciting passive bystanding and perpetrating the psychologically abusive smears, it is complicit in the suppression of dissent, by suppressing the UN Rapporteur’s report. Suppressing dissent and political opposition, moreover, is the whole totalitarian point of persecuting Julian Assange.
If nothing else, the Four Corners program illustrates the establishment media’s contentment to follow their leaders down the anti-democratic path of censorship-by-torture, while taking us all along for the ride.
At this democratic crossroads, although establishment media have signalled their reluctance to support Espionage Act charges, in the knowledge they could be next, many nevertheless appear willing to act as instigators of torture, inciting publics to morally disengage, so that states can continue persecuting Julian Asssange.
Every act of ‘journalism’ that buries crucial information, and every utterance that vilifies or dehumanises Julian Assange, or sanitises his abuse, is complicit.
“As you watch [Julian Assange] pay for the audacity of exposing corruption and crime, please ponder what this means for you, your country, and your family. Ponder deep and ponder hard, and then use your democratic rights to hold your Government to account. For once telling the truth has become a crime, while the powerful enjoy impunity, then your own rights may well be next in line.”
Dr Lissa Johnson is a clinical psychologist in private practice. Prior to becoming a psychologist she qualified in Media Studies, with a major in Sociology. She has a longstanding interest in the psychology of social issues and the impact of social issues on psychology, and is a former member of the Australian Psychological Society Public Interest Advisory Group.
The “Mouth of Truth”.* This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license. Author: Roughneck.
In the upcoming
election campaign season, you will see some candidates from both major
political parties using mind games to get you to vote for them, even if you
have to hold your nose to do it.
In speeches reeking of
mind games, they will try to manipulate your feelings of fear, anger and
resentment, distrust, pride, and despair to secure your vote, even when their past
behavior or proposed agendas involve great harm to other human beings, to the
environment, and/or to the future of democracy.
Among the most insidious methods for playing games with your mind are techniques for promoting moral disengagement. As described in earlier posts, moral disengagement involves the mechanisms whereby people set aside basic humanitarian moral principles while convincing themselves they are good people doing the right thing by going along with or engaging in inhumane behavior—often at the urging of people they identify as their leaders. [Click here for a summary of the basic types of moral disengagement as well as their counterparts in moral engagement.]
.Let’s consider how various moral disengagement tactics might be used in mind games regarding immigration. Separating babies and children from their parents and locking them in cages with inadequate food, clothing, hygiene, beds, etc., is clearly inhumane as well as a violation of fundamental human rights. But those moral issues can get completely “disappeared” through common moral disengagement tactics such as:
Pseudo-moral justification, e.g., reframing harmful behaviors (like creating virtual concentration camps for children) so they seem morally justified and better than hpothetical outcomes such as letting “hoodlums and terrorists” enter into and grow up in this country;
Minimizing negative consequences–e.g., disregarding the effects of anti-immigration/pro-separation policies on the mental health and well-being of both the victims and the victimizers, and downplaying critical international judgments concerning the declining moral character of citizens of the U.S.;
Displacing or obscuring responsibility–e,g., blaming the victims for their inhumane treatment by arguing they should know better than try to sneak into the U.S. with their dark skins and dangerous babies; and
Dehumanizing, i.e., devaluing the victims of the anti-immigration/pro-separation policies (e.g., characterizing them as a totally different class of human beings, or not worthy of being considered human at all).
So, be warned. Watch out for the mind games and moral disengagement tactics designed to get you to hold your nose and join obediently in campaigns wrapping inhumanities in false flags.
*”The Mouth of Truth is a renowned image, carved from Pavonazzetto marble, of a man-like face and located in the portico of the church of Santa Maria in Cosmedin in Rome, Italy. The most famous characteristic of the Mouth is its role as a lie detector; since the Middle Ages, folklore has asserted that if one told a lie with his hand in the mouth of the sculpture, it would be bitten off.” From Wikimedia Commons.
