This text is part of the text “Rebooting Humanity”
(The German Version can be found HERE)
Author No. 1 (Gerd Doeben-Henisch)
Contact: info@uffmm.org
(Start: July 14, 2024, Last change: July 14, 2024)
Starting Point
We are still here on this planet. However, the fact that our ‘human system’ largely programs itself without our ‘voluntary participation’ can become our downfall within the framework of a democracy and in the age of the internet; not necessarily, but highly likely…
Self-programming
Unlike today’s machines, all living beings — including humans — are designed to ‘self-program’: whatever we perceive of ourselves, others, and the environment, is automatically transported into our interior and there it is also largely automatically structured, arranged, evaluated, and much more. No one can resist it. One can only control this ‘self-programming’ by shaping one’s environment in such a way that certain perceptions are less likely to occur, while others occur more. Educational processes assume this capacity for self-programming and they also decide what should happen during the education.
Dictatorship of the ‘Is There’
What has arrived within us is there for the time being. It forms our primary reality. When we want to act, we first rely on what is there. What is there is somehow ‘true’ for us, shaping our further perception and understanding. Something ‘around us’ that is ‘different’ is indeed ‘different’ and ‘does not fit’ with our inner truth.
Which points of comparison?
Suppose the majority of what is ‘inside us’, what we initially assume to be ‘true’, were ‘false’, ‘inappropriate’, ‘inaccurate’, etc., in the real world outside, we would have little chance of recognizing our own ‘untruth’ as long as most people around us share the same ‘untruth’.[1] Recognizing ‘untruth’ presupposes that one somehow has ‘examples of truth’ that are suitable for being ‘compared’ with the prevailing untruth. However, the presence of examples of truth does not guarantee the recognition of untruth, but only increases the likelihood that it might happen.[2]
[1] Throughout the known history of humanity, we can observe how certain ‘untruths’ were able to dominate entire peoples, not only in autocratic systems.
[2] Systems with state-promoted untruth can be identified, among other things, by the suppression of diversity, examples of truth, and the allowance of only certain forms of opinions.
Modern Untruths
Unlike autocratic systems, democratic systems officially have ‘freedom of speech’, which allows for great diversity. In democratic systems of the Democracy 1.0 format, it is assumed that this guaranteed freedom is not abused.[1]
With the advent of modern media, especially media in conjunction with the internet, it is possible to make money on a large scale with the distribution of media. The temptation is near to spread media over the internet in such a way that one can earn the maximum amount of money. A popular method is ‘advertising’: the longer and more often a user stays in front of content, the more advertising revenue flows. The temptation is great enough to offer the user only what automatically arouses his ‘automatic interest’. The fact that ‘automatic interest’ is a very strong motive and specifically correlates with content that does not require much thought is confirmed daily. It is now known and increasingly described that large parts of a population can be ‘specially programmed’ in this way.
In the ‘struggle of power-driven systems’, this possibility of external programming of people using the internet is massively exploited in the so-called ‘hybrid warfare’. While autocratic systems are ‘massively closed’, the modern democracies in the 1.0 format are almost an Eldorado for the application of hybrid warfare methods. Similar to the money-obsessed media industry, hybrid warfare also uses ‘light content’, mixing fragments of ‘true’ with fragments of ‘false’, particularly those that easily excite, and in a short time, the ‘flock of believers’ in these messages grows.[2] The ‘congregation of these propaganda believers’ cannot usually be influenced by ‘arguments’. These convictions are programmed in such a way that all sources that could represent critical alternatives are ‘outlawed’ from the start.[3]
And unfortunately, it is true that Democracies in the 1.0 format appear ‘weak’ and ‘helpless’ so far for this type of freedom use, although slowly the recognition is increasing that there is something like an abuse through ‘false programming of people’.
[1] Preventing systematic abuse of freedom in Democracies 1.0 is difficult to impossible without changing freedom of speech itself.
[2] The broad coverage of this propaganda can be easily recognized when one talks to people in different places in Germany (and abroad!) who do not know each other, but who tell more or less the same stories in a tone of conviction during the course of the conversation. Many (most of them?) even have higher education. This raises the question of how little an academic education apparently promotes a ‘critical spirit’.
[3] A popular term is ‘lying press’. Anything that could become ‘dangerous’ is ‘a lie’, although those who talk about lying press do not seriously engage with this press at all.
What is the probability of survival of truth?
Anyone who has ever delved deeply into the question of ‘truth’ in their life, and who knows that it takes various research, investigations, considerations, and even experiments to ‘look behind the apparent phenomena’, along with much communication with other people, sometimes in other languages, knows that truth is not automatic; truth does not just happen; truth cannot be obtained for ‘free’. The use of truth for beneficial technologies, new forms of agriculture, new transportation systems, etc., appears desirable in retrospect, at the end of a long journey, when it somehow becomes ‘obvious’ what all this is good for, but at the beginning of the path, this is almost unrecognizable to everyone. The pitiable state of the education system in many countries is a telling testament to the low regard for education as a training process for truth.
Given the rapid spread of unscrupulous internet media businesses accompanied by a worldwide surge in hybrid warfare, the survival probability of truth seems to be decreasing. Democracies, as the actual ‘bastions of truth’, are experiencing themselves as a place of accelerated ‘evaporation of truth’.