HOW WE GET PROGRAMMED

by **UNEEK** Fri Jun 01, 2012 12:15 pm

How We Get Programmed

This article / Chapter is very informative but may NOT be of interest to everyone -- It may be a little out of the box and a little over some heads as far as understanding -- may not be for folks here I of course do not know -- I hope that it will at least be read and contemplated and considered at the very least a means of broadening and enlarging your knowledge base -- A person who does NOT read has no advantage over the person who cannot read -- UNEEK

The following excerpt is taken from the book Virus of the Mind: The New Science of the Meme by Richard Brodie. It is published by Hay House (April 2009) and is available at all bookstores or online at: www.hayhouse.com

Chapter Eight

How We Get Programmed
“There are two kinds of people in this world: those that enter a
room and turn the television set on, and those that enter a room and
turn the television set off.”

- Raymond Shaw, the protagonist in the movie The Manchurian Candidate

Here’s the chapter you’ve all been waiting for. It’s all about how to
manipulate people, using memes and genetic buttons, into doing exactly
what you want them to do. Heh-heh.
You know what a meme is-a thought, belief, or attitude in your mind
that can spread to and from other people’s minds. You know that we human
beings are the medium for the evolution of memes. You understand how
evolution works by natural selection-survival of the fittest. And you’ve
seen how our own genetic evolution gives us buttons:
tendencies to pay special attention to certain things-especially danger,
food, and sex-which helped us survive and reproduce in prehistoric
times.

Now comes the scary, upsetting part.
In this chapter, I’ll show how we get programmed by new memes and
start to discuss what we can do to prevent being infected by unwanted
programming.

Meme Infection

We get infected by new memes in three ways. I’ll introduce each of the ways now, then discuss each in more detail later.

- The first way
we get infected is through conditioning,
or repetition. If we hear something repeated often enough, it becomes
part of our programming. Advertisers and salespeople know this well. Any
good book on sales will tell you that most customers don’t buy until
they have been asked five to seven times. It takes that many repetitions
to implant the Buy me meme in the customer.

- The second way
is through a mechanism known as cognitive dissonance. When things don’t make sense, our minds struggles to make them make sense.

Imagine, for example, that a friend is upset with you, but you don’t
know why. You have two memes that conflict-that are inconsistent: friend and upset with me.
You resolve the conflict, or dissonance, by creating new memes, by
rearranging your memetic programming so that things make sense again. Ah, Bill’s upset because he’s paid for lunch the last three times, you might conclude.

Right or wrong, you now have a new meme about Bill and lunch that will influence your future behavior.
I’ve heard it said that geniuses develop their most brilliant original
thoughts through self-imposed cognitive dissonance.
As you might guess,
then, as a programming method it is particularly effective with
intelligent people, because you actually believe that the new meme is
your own idea.

- The third way new memes enter our minds is by taking advantage of our genetic buttons in the manner of the Trojan horse.
As we have seen, because of our nature there are certain things we tend
to pay special attention to, such as warnings of danger, cries of
children, and sexual attractiveness. We are susceptible to bundles of
memes that push our buttons to get our attention and then sneak in some
other memes along with them.

Simply getting programmed by new memes isn’t the same as catching a
full-blown mind virus, but viruses of the mind take advantage of one or
all of these methods to make their initial inroads into our minds. At
the end of this chapter, I’ll put it all together and show how these
various ingredients combine to make viruses of the mind.

Conditioning

Conditioning
-programming by repetition-is the easiest way to
acquire memes that don’t push any of your buttons effectively. For
instance, if you want to learn French, you listen to people speaking
that language as you study the lexicon. At first it just sounds like
people clearing their throats and moaning, but after many repetitions,
you begin to be programmed with distinction-memes. Soon you can begin to
distinguish French words and sentences where there was meaninglessness
before.

Remember elementary school? Learning to read and write? Memorizing
the multiplication table? I have two memories from first grade. One is
being incredibly bored by doing arithmetic problems over and over and
over again. The other is being incredibly frustrated by the teacher’s
reading of the same page of “See Spot run” over and over and over again.
Frustrated or bored, it didn’t matter: conditioning by repetition
works

Elementary-school programming by conditioning was not limited to
reading, writing, and arithmetic. We pledged allegiance to the flag of
the United States of America every morning. Repetition. Conditioning.
And there’s one thing all native-born Americans know for sure: the
United States is one nation, indivisible, with liberty and justice for
all. Right?

That patriotism didn’t spontaneously arise in each of us out of our
spiritual nature: we were programmed! And it wasn’t presented to us as a
reasoned, logical argument: we just said it and heard it enough times
and-poof!-it became one of our beliefs, our values, our memes. Long-term
prisoners can become “institutionalized”-they become so conditioned to
the culture inside prison that they no longer want to live outside. They
try to get back in once they’re released. There’s no reason to think
that the long-term conditioning of a bad job or a bad marriage doesn’t
have the same effect.

Children typically get programmed with religious beliefs through
conditioning by repetition. Whatever the religion, children go from zero
beliefs to full-fledged faith, or as “fledged” as they get, by being
told about the divinity of God or Jesus or David Koresh over and over
again until it becomes real-those memes become programmed.

If you listen repeatedly to religious speech, after enough
repetitions you will actually begin to notice God and His works where
there was just chaotic life going on before. What was formerly chance
becomes a miracle. What was pain is now karma. What was human nature is
now sin. And regardless of whether these religious memes are presented
as Truth or as allegorical mythology, you’re conditioned just the same.

In psychology, the word conditioning often refers to implanting association-memes. Pavlov’s dog was conditioned
to associate the ringing bell with yummy food. When the Coca-Cola
Company pays millions of dollars to show you young people in bathing
suits having a good time drinking their products, they are conditioning
you to associate good feelings with their brands. The repetition of
that commercial creates association-memes in your mind so that when you
push your shopping cart down the soft-drink aisle, you get an irrational
urge to buy Coke. It’s possible to override that urge through conscious
intention or the fact that other memes are stronger, but the urge makes
a difference in their bottom line* or they wouldn’t be spending the
money.
_____________________________
*At least they think it makes a difference. They may be fooled by their own memetic programming! More on this in Chapter 9.

There’s also a term for the use of repetition to create strategy-memes: operant conditioning.
Viewing commercials or listening to bells ring is passive; it involves
no activity or strategy. When you behave in some way and that behavior
gets rewarded, that is operant conditioning. The reward creates and
reinforces strategy-memes.

The classic example of operant conditioning is teaching a rat to run a
maze. At first, the rat just wanders around. But soon he discovers
there is a yummy piece of cheese tucked away in one corner-a reward.
Quickly, the rat learns to run directly to the cheese rather than just
wandering.
We use operant conditioning on our children constantly: grading their
schoolwork, praising them when they do things we like.

The repetition
of these rewards conditions the children to behave in a certain way. It
creates and reinforces strategy-memes that, if we are good parents and
teachers, will serve them as adults in their pursuit of happiness.

However, operant conditioning can be used for many other purposes
besides training you to pursue happiness. Whenever you’re in a repeated
situation in which a reward is available for certain behavior, you are
being conditioned.

Cognitive Dissonance

Another programming technique is creating mental pressure and resolving it-cognitive dissonance.
Why do high-pressure sales tactics exist even though people universally
despise them? As with any “why” question in the world of memetics, the
answer is: because the meme for it is good at spreading. Salespeople get infected with the high-pressure sales meme
and go about acting on it, regardless of whether it’s the most
effective means at their disposal. There’s no question, however, that it
does work on some people some of the time.

High-pressure sales work by making you mentally uncomfortable-by
creating cognitive dissonance. You enter the situation with some
strategy-memes that make you resist buying: perhaps they are something
like Look before you leap or Shop around before you buy. The salesperson programs you with a meme making it attractive to buy immediately: If I don’t buy now, I’ll miss a window of opportunity or even simply If I buy now, the salesperson will like me.

There are two ways to release the pressure caused by cognitive
dissonance: buy in or bail out. If you bail out, it’s likely to be
because you’ve resolved the dissonance by creating a meme such as The salesperson is a jerk. But some people buy, creating instead a meme like I really want to buy this.
Once you create that meme, it’s yours, and a smart salesperson will
reinforce it by telling you what a smart decision you’ve made and even
calling a few days later and congratulating you on your purchase.

Cognitive dissonance can be used to create a meme of submission and
loyalty to whatever authority is causing the dissonance. Fraternity
hazings, boot camp, and some religious or spiritual disciplines put
people through difficult tests and may demand demonstrations of loyalty
before releasing the pressure. That creates an association-meme between
the demonstration of loyalty and the good feeling caused by the release
of pressure.

Prisoners of war have been programmed to submit and be loyal to their captors through this method.

One interesting result of research in operant conditioning on people
is that it works better-creates stronger memes-to give the reward only
occasionally than it does to give it all the time. That could be because
withholding the reward adds cognitive dissonance to the operant
conditioning. So a truly manipulative meme programmer will withhold the
reward most of the time even if the subject performs flawlessly, knowing
this will create stronger programming.

The ramifications of this research are interesting. People often say
that the teachers who made the most difference in their education were
the tough graders-the ones who withheld the A’s much of the time. The
occasional A reinforces the Work hard meme more than
the constant A because it adds cognitive dissonance. Talk shows are
filled with people who stay involved in relationships they say are awful
most of the time-perhaps the conditioning and dissonance of the
occasional reward in a cruddy relationship reinforces the strategy-meme Stay together more than it does in a relationship that’s good most of the time!

Trojan Horses

The Trojan horse method of programming works by getting you
to pay attention to one meme, then sneaking in a whole bundle of others
along with it. If you’re an intelligent, educated person, you may be
thinking, Wow! You must have to be pretty gullible to fall for that! Tell that to the Trojans.
There are any number of mechanisms for doing the meme bundling. For
one, a Trojan horse can take advantage of your instinctive buttons,
pushing them to get your attention and then sneaking in another agenda.

The simplest example of a button-pushing Trojan horse is the advertising
truism “Sex sells.” Why does sex sell? Because the sex pushes your
button, draws your attention, and acts as a Trojan horse for other memes
bundled into the advertisement. Of course, danger, food, crisis, helping children, and the other buttons all sell, too, if not quite as well as sex. Much more on this in Chapter 9.

A Trojan horse can also take advantage of the strategy-memes you’re
currently programmed with having to do with learning or believing. For
example, people who have the strategy-meme If I trust someone, believe what they say are susceptible to new memetic programming coming from people they trust.

People who have the strategy-meme Believe things consistent with what I know; be skeptical of all else are susceptible to new memetic programming that seems consistent with what they already know. If you’re programmed to believe what X says because it is the voice of God-where
X is a person, a book, or even a practice such as meditation-you’re
easily programmed with any additional memes that come from X.

The simplest bundling technique, one used frequently by politicians
and trial lawyers, is simply saying the memes one after the other, in
decreasing order of believability. The credibility of the first
statements seem to carry over to the unsupported ones.

For example:

We all want freedom!We all want democracy
to work for everyone!We all want every American to have the opportunity
to pursue the American Dream!And we all want a national health-care
system that makes that possible.

Now it’s a bit of a stretch to conclude that federal management of
health care has anything to do with freedom, democracy, or the American
Dream, but juxtaposing the statements like that seems to turn off
people’s natural skepticism.

Bundling the statements together like that is one form of a Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP) technique known as embedding, or packaging memes to make people more susceptible to them.
A related NLP technique is anchoring: taking some image,
sound, or sensation and linking it to an unrelated idea.

For example, a
political candidate who gestures at himself when talking about a rosy
future and at his opponent when preaching doom and gloom is actually
anchoring good feelings to himself and bad feelings to his opponent. The
repeated bundling of the gestures with the good and bad feelings
creates association-memes in your mind, which will later influence the
way you vote.

You can use anchoring on yourself to quickly put yourself in a good
or enthusiastic mood! Close your eyes and imagine a time when you were
excited and motivated. Create a vivid mental picture. Now, when you are
immersed in that motivated feeling, lightly scratch the pad of your
index finger with your thumbnail. You’re anchoring that state of mind to
that sensation.

Open your eyes and come back to the present. Repeat this a few times
over a period of days or weeks, and you’ll find that next time you want
to motivate yourself quickly, a gentle scratch of the pad of your index
finger with your thumbnail will get you in the right mood.

As with many of the techniques in this chapter, embedding and
anchoring are used a lot by sophisticated salespeople. The whole point
of sales is to influence people’s beliefs-infect them with certain
memes-for direct economic gain. It’s natural that we’d see many
effective meme-spreading techniques used by salespeople; for that
reason, many of the examples in this chapter have to do with selling.

http://evolutionezine.com/how-we-get-programmed/

by **Horizon** Fri Jun 01, 2012 12:47 pm

Very Interesting!!!! Thanks!

HOW WE GET PROGRAMMED

HOW WE GET PROGRAMMED

Re: HOW WE GET PROGRAMMED