If I told my work-mates that I haven’t watched TV for eight years, they’d look at me like I was a little peculiar.
So, I don’t. One thing I find about trying to better myself is that it becomes really hard for the average person to relate to me. I guess that’s why I prefer to hang around other people with some ambition. People who don’t want to be a sheep like everyone else.
But how do people get like this? How do they become ‘normal’ and how are they kept in a state of quiescence?
Always the same way. They are conditioned over a long period of time.
So, what is conditioning? Wikipedia says it is, “is a process of behaviour modification”.
Therefore, when you are conditioned, your behaviour is modified. Modified how, to what, by whom and to what purpose you may ask.
The main methods of modification are advertisements and marketing, media (TV, newspapers, internet news, magazines, films, radio, etc), our parents, the education system and our peers.
Hypnotised
With the exception of Football (Match of the Day) and Formula One racing, I watch no TV at all. I sold my TV and have never looked back. It all started when I broke up with my girlfriend and discovered self-development books.
I noticed that after I came back from band practice or work, or whatever I’d been doing, she’d always be sitting on the sofa watching some TV programme.
I’d visit my parents and they’d be sitting in front of the TV. They live in Spain, so I Skype them every couple of weeks. The last time I did so, my own mother left the conversation halfway through so she could watch a TV programme that was about to start.
Before I dumped all of them and got new ones, I would visit friends at their houses and the TV would be on. I would be talking to them and their gaze would not shift from whatever was on the screen as they replied to me.
They looked like zombies. They looked like they were hypnotised, with their eyes wide and glazed over, minds wide open, ready to accept their programming. And this is exactly what is happening. TV is the ideal medium for conditioning because when we are watching it, we are in a highly suggestible, hypnotic state.
You’re not a Person, You are a Consumer
In our consumer society, the main manipulators are the corporations. They tell you what to buy. In the UK, we have a couple of TV channels run by the BBC which do not feature advertisements during and between programmes. This is not the case anywhere else in the world, to my knowledge. Every fifteen minutes, whatever you’re viewing is interrupted by ‘special announcements’, devised to make you want to buy whatever products are currently being peddled.
The same applies to billboard posters you see everywhere and advertisements in magazines. Some magazines are 80% or more advertisements and no actual news. One thing you will notice when you look at advertisements targeted at men is it will always be:
- Attractive girl
- Whatever it is they want you to buy
- Some humour (as emotion is what triggers the hypnotic response)
- Promise that buying said products will get you the attractive girl
Just look at this Lynx advert or this Guinness advert, or just about any advert targeted at men. Advertisers are cunning. They figure out what it is a guy wants (hot women, prestige, success) and link their product to it. They do the same for women. What do women want? A hot guy, comfort and security, approval from their peers, etc: Gucci advert (hot guy, emotion), L’oreal advert (approval, emotion), etc.
With enough repeat exposure to this, we are conditioned to want to buy it.
Consumerism is not the only thing that is trying to influence the way we think. If you live in a nation (as pretty much everybody does), you will have a class or wealth system (usually these two are heinously intertwined). The rich elite, who unsurprisingly own the large corporations we just talked about need a large group of people to fuel the economy and buy stuff.
Your Entire Life is Planned to Maximise the Profit of your Country and its Major Corporations
If this large group of people (sheep) had an abundant degree of independence and autonomy, they could do whatever they wanted and would probably just leave the country and move somewhere nice and warm, content to sit by the beach and drink cocktails all day. They’d be bored and would spend their time fucking or socialising. All stuff that costs nothing. All stuff that produces nothing.
But what we actually have is conditioning from birth telling you how to live your life.
Here is a table to help translate the views help by the sheep.
| Find a wife or girlfriend | Spend a lot of money on gifts to impress girls, buy flash cars, gadgets, clothes and other stuff to make you ‘more attractive’ so you can get hotter girls. Also, girlfriend is gateway to wife. Wife is gateway to kids, house, holidays, etc. |
| Drink alcohol | It will make you more attractive to the opposite sex. |
| Get married | So you can have kids, buy a house, go on holidays. |
| Have kids | You are enslaved for the rest of your life. Average cost of a child is £225,000, meaning that you are tied to a job to support your kids and no longer have freedom. You are a slave. |
| Buy a house | You are enslaved for at least 25 years. You have to keep a regular job to pay your mortgage every month or the owners of the house (the bank) take it away from you, leaving yourself and your family homeless. |
| Go on holidays | Take a break from your mind-numbingly tedious job as a wage slave to ensure that you don’t have a nervous break down, which would render you useless to society. Support the economy. Buy more stuff. |
I can go on, but you get the idea. All of this stuff is ‘normal’. It’s so ingrained in our brains from birth by our parents, in films, everywhere that this is the way to live. If you start to think differently, you’re damaged goods because you no longer ‘contribute to society’.
Well society isn’t there to help me. It’s to help the people in power stay in power and to help the rich get richer.
Now don’t get me wrong, I have nothing against power and riches. In fact I love it. I intend to get rich myself. Why?
Because money buys freedom.
No wonder the rich work so hard to gain it. But where does the money come from?
The conditioned masses.
How to Gain your Freedom
The solution is to recognise the conditioning and limit the amount of it that you are exposed to.
- Stop watching TV.
- Stop reading or watching the news.
- Stop reading magazines.
Be vigilant when exposed to any media, as you can be sure that nine times out of ten, what you are experiencing is designed to manipulate the way you think. And not in a way which is beneficial to you as an individual.
As a man in the process of development and betterment, whether it be in terms of game, business or anything, your main tool is your mind. The majority of the work you do will be on your mind. Shaping it to have positive belief systems, to take positive action, to think creatively, to be brave, to be individual.
The media wants to stop that. They want you to be scared and confused. They want you to be part of the herd. They want you to look to others for guidance. They want you to do what they tell you to do.
If you want to achieve anything in your life, limit the influence of the mainstream media. Break the habit of a lifetime and be selective in your exposure.
Just by doing that, you will free up extra hours in your week which you can devote to a creative pursuit. One which will enhance your life, not the lives of the rich elite. Eventually you’ll be sitting on a beach somewhere or fucking hot girls or whatever you want.