How You Have Been Programmed

Does a specific pattern repeat itself in your life over and over again? For example, do you regularly get involved in harmful relationships? Or do you regularly make poor financial decisions? Do you often suffer accidents or become ill?

These programs repeat themselves in our lives due to the unconscious programs we run. This article will discuss how you have been programmed to perceive the world in a way which leaves you powerless and poor.

As a person who has woken up to (some of) his personal programming, I assure you that our unconscious programs run the show of our lives. Until we become conscious enough to identify the patterns we repeatedly create for ourselves, we remain bound to them. We are destined to repeat them over and over again until we wake up and choose otherwise.

This article discusses advertising, and the new form of capitalism which our civilization has been gradually led into, surveillance capitalism. I talk about how we are being manipulated by private interests which seek to disempower us to preserve the status quo.

The status quo in which the rich get richer and the poor get poorer.

You have encountered this article for a reason, a part of you is hungry for the truth. I invite you to read the article through to the end with an open mind. You might not agree with what I have to write, but learning another point of view can enrich your experience nonetheless.

I also encourage you to do your own research.

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Listen To The Words Of Dr. Bruce Lipton

Please watch this 10-minute video of Dr. Bruce Lipton. This is an excerpt from his interview with Brian Rose during an episode of “London Real”:

Dr. Lipton is the bestselling author of “The Biology of Belief”. The book investigates how our beliefs shape our biology. Classic examples of this phenomenon are the placebo effect and the nocebo effect.

A placebo is a treatment (a pill or other substance) which has no documented therapeutic effect, yet is administered as if it did. They are used in clinical trials as controls to compare their effects to actual drugs.

The placebo effect occurs when a patient experiences therapeutic effects from taking a placebo.

The nocebo effect is the opposite of the placebo effect; a person can be given a sugar pill, be told it’s poison, and present a decline in health.

Don’t you find the placebo and nocebo effects fascinating? Without taking a drug we can experience therapeutic effects! What does that mean?

Both the placebo and the nocebo effects are the result of one thing: belief. What we believe determines how we respond to the events in our life, mentally and biologically.

Medical Science Wants Us To Be Powerless

Much of what Dr. Lipton says is not accepted by mainstream science. Dr. Lipton maintains that human beings are tremendously powerful beings. That we are capable of healing ourselves of any illness through the careful cultivation of our beliefs. Naturally, such a belief system is anathema to our current medical system, which profits massively from our illness.

Think about it; pharmaceutical companies, doctors, nurses and medical support staff have a vested interest in there being plenty of sick people in the world. Without sick people, how would they make a living? How would companies sell drugs and doctors and nurses sell their services?

They wouldn’t be able to. They’d go bankrupt.

“A patient cured is a customer lost.”

So we’ve been convinced that we are powerless in the face of our illnesses. This message of powerlessness is endlessly parroted by the media, doctors and pharmaceutical companies. Because it’s in our consumerist civilization’s best interest that we be kept powerless, so we continue making choices which preserve the status quo.

And this doesn’t apply solely to our health. It applies to every area of life, including our finances.

Money is a form of power. The rich-poor gap keeps increasing because people believe they are powerless to improve their financial situations. By surrendering their power they also surrender their wealth.

Why Are People’s Choices So Similar?

Please watch this provocative animation named “Happiness” by Steve Cutts:

What was your impression of the animation? Did it make you uncomfortable? Did you see yourself in it?

The first time I watched it, several years ago, I saw myself as the rat which wanders from one substance/job to the next. I was locked in an endless search for the elusive thing called “happiness.” And I didn’t even know it.

Have you ever questioned why so many of us make eerily similar choices?

We compete to attend the same schools, to work the same jobs and to live in the same crowded cities. Our lives revolve around the acquisition of goods and the conspicuous display of affluence.

How is it that so many of us have been convinced to enlist as competitors in the rat race?

Human beings are herd animals. We have evolved to conform. In the past, conformity enabled us to stick together and survive.

But what happens when the information that forms the foundation of our model of reality is controlled by a few individuals? This isn’t a conspiracy theory, this is documented reality.

In the book “Giants: The Global Power Elite” professor of political sociology Peter Phillips describes how in 2017 the top 17 investment-management firms controlled $41.1 trillion. The book lists 199 individuals who are the main decision makers in global capitalism.

These people use their unimaginable wealth to, among other things, control the message carried by the media; to perpetuate the materialist, consumerist culture which keeps us making the same choices, ignorant of what makes us happy and healthy. And keeps them in charge.

Everything we consume shapes our perspective. EVERYTHING. Please read this article for more on that.

And one of the most pervasive forces which shapes our values is advertising.

Advertising: The Force That Shapes Us

Advertising is a multi-billion dollar industry for a reason: it works.

Cleverly crafted advertising is fundamentally molds our values into the shape which best serves the multinational corporations which run our civilization. Multi-million dollar advertising budgets fund the creation of adverts precisely designed to target our subconscious mind. This is accomplished by showing us beautiful, smiling faces tied to emotional music and flashy, eye-catching graphics.

Since our choices are always in line with our values, advertising can also be called “behavior modification.”

A revealing study published in 2010 by researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the University of Michigan came to a stunning conclusion. Children from the ages of 3 to 5 are already able to recognize brands such as McDonald’s and Disney. Additionally, the more cognitively advanced the child, the more readily they associated brands with values. One of the children said that having a birthday party at McDonald’s meant that you had lots of friends because “McDonald’s has a playground and you can play there and everyone likes you.”

The more a child values McDonald’s the more likely he is to convince his parents to take him there.

Positive Brand Association?

That’s why household names such as Coke regularly include kid-friendly superheroes like the Hulk and Ant-Man in their commercials. This creates a “positive brand association” in the perceptions of consumers. Positive emotions experienced in the movies become linked to the advertised brand.

We will unconsciously gravitate to the product which our emotional subconscious prefers.

Does this means brands are evil and advertising is immoral? I don’t believe so. But it does mean that our values are molded by forces beyond our control from the moment we’re born. It’s up to us to take the time to reflect on our values to figure out what serves us and what doesn’t.

Beware the influence of unseen forces.

The New Player In The World Of Advertising

Today there is a new arrival to the field of advertising. This new player comes armed with highly sophisticated instruments for consumer data acquisition. They are our smartphones.

Our smartphones collect petabytes of behavioral data which are feed into supercomputers running machine learning algorithms which predict what our choices are before we even make them.

The new player is social media.

We are living in the age of surveillance capitalism, a term coined by Harvard Business School professor, Shoshanna Zuboff. This new form of capitalism takes human experience as its raw capital to be traded in a market of behavior modification.

What companies like Google and Facebook sell is no longer advertising, it is certain behavior modification on a mass scale.

A well-known mechanism of mass behavior modification is the virtual reality game, Pokémon Go. It was released in July 2016 by Niantic (a Google spin-off which received $30 million in funding from Google, Nintendo and the Pokémon Company). By June 2017, the game had been downloaded over 750 million times globally. In 2019, that number had ballooned to over one billion times.

The game combined augmented reality with local advertising to herd unsuspecting players to commercial venues where they spent their money on goods and services.

All done with minimal awareness on the part of the consumers.

Our civilization has reached a point of technological development where private interests can direct our behavior via the technology we carry and wear without us even being aware of it.

The question we’re now facing is, Where does our free will end and behavior modification begin?

Which of our choices are made for our benefit? And which are made for the benefit of the corporations which collect and mine our behavioral data?

The Consequences Of Being Herded

It’s easy to see what the consequences of being herded en masse are.

They’re not good.

We lose our individuality. We surrender our uniqueness and become part of the faceless, monochrome mass of herded humanity. We are directed to chasing shiny objects at the expense of real, valuable, character-building experiences.

Millennials are having less sex than any generation in the past 60 years. Sex is the soul of a relationship. It’s the most intimate act of union two or more people can engage in. It takes deep, primal comfort with oneself and one’s partner(s) to have healthy, rewarding sexual experiences.

If there’s one thing about human nature which doesn’t change over time it’s our desire for sex. If young people in the rich world are having less sex today, it’s not because they don’t want it. It’s because they are incapable of forming deep, trusting bonds with each other; the kind that flourish into healthy, joyful intimacy.

Our technology is herding us into becoming less human. We’re forgetting how to make choices which keep us happy and healthy. We’re ignorant of the prime importance of living in communities built on trust and cooperation.

We forget that we come from nature and thus we need to be in nature to be whole.

We’re losing our connection to our soul.

All for the benefit of those who profit from our soulless, faceless, sexless, boring existence. The ones who sell us the trinkets which keep us sedated in our mediocre comfort.

It’s time to wake up.

We Are Locked In A Struggle For Our Soul

We are in the midst of a struggle for the soul of humanity. If you think I’m exaggerating, I ask you to look around you. How many happy, healthy, relaxed, successful and adventurous people do you know?

How many people do you see excited about life, living each day to the fullest with a vibrant expectation of a brilliant future?

There is something deeply wrong with our civilization. It’s a rot which reaches to the core of our values. If we’re making so much progress, How come so many of us are so unhappy and unhealthy?

Many of the people I know are college schooled. They either work at jobs they find meaningless, experience a variety of health issues and addictions, are chronically overworked, stressed, lonely, unsatisfied, fearful or a combination of all these things.

I was one of them.

And I’m privileged! I am part of the college-schooled middle class. Most people aren’t as privileged as I am. Almost 40% of Americans cannot afford a surprise expense of $400. And this was before the economies were shut down for an entire year.

People are being driven to their wits end.

What Can We Do About It?

There is a system in place meant to keep us powerless. his system convinces us to surrender our power to others who want us to believe they know what’s best for us. We are programmed into submission.

The system pervades every aspect of our civilization, from our schools to our architecture.

It’s inescapable. The best we can do is learn to spot it so we can minimize its influence on our lives.

Educate yourself. Consume alternative sources of information. Stay away from the easy, superficial explanations offered by the establishment. Turn off your television. Meditate. Reconnect with nature; it’s the best deprogrammer. Read Marcus Aurelius, Viktor Frankl, Seneca and Nietzsche. Give yourself the education schools never did. Schools are not designed to educate us, they’re meant to make us conform.

Speak up. Say what’s on your mind. Ask the tough questions. If anyone judges you for it, remember that our judgments are a reflection of ourselves, they do not reflect reality as it is.

We allowed ourselves to be herded into this mess. We can choose to lead ourselves out of it. This process was part of our evolution as a species. We had to sink to these depths in order to learn about ourselves, the power we all hold and the terrible consequences of surrendering it.

We had to reach the bottom so we could open ourselves to change.

We are remaking our world. Our journey to be the best we can be has only just begun. A new, freer, happier, healthier world is in the making.

We are awakening from our sleepwalk into slavery.

How are you going to contribute?

To our wealth and success.