Sunday, August 09, 2009

Population Control

For a while, now, I've been thinking about population control as its own subject.

Lately, the starting point for my musing about this subject has begun at the local level, whenever I wonder about the motivations behind various news stories that obviously omit key data. And they do it to emphasize some spin, some angle. But it is, nonetheless, much more an exercise in propagandizing than simply reporting news.

It's an apparent attempt to mold public opinion. Where a dispassionate presentation of all the facts would not produce the same inferences in readers, the spun up story will.

Why do they do this?

Well, in the short run, it's easy to say that they do it simply because they can. But I always suspect additional motives, either in the individual journalists or from their editorial direction. That it's done at all, of course, should be expected. Since we all have our individual likes, dislikes, beliefs, non-beliefs, preferences and alliances, it would be unrealistic to expect that any news reporting would be unbiased.

They did, after all, succeed in getting the "equal time" mandate cancelled...

Yet, this "fair and balanced" thing is often the claim by news organizations as well as individual journalists. They will protest loudly against any accusation that they aren't exercising journalistic ethics in the fair and balanced reporting of news to the public.

So, what does it gain them to deny the slant while constantly employing their talents for exactly that purpose? Well, I look at it simply as tradition.

In the history of Western Civilization, the manipulation and control of data has always derived power. Wherever data is hidden, altered, or otherwise controlled, you find power accruing. The Catholic Church set this standard for the modern west quite a long time ago.

This angle of population control, I would say, is probably not an intended result. Rather, it's probably the evolved path of other intentions. The Catholic Church was engaged for centuries in the consolidation of the faith. At the outset, I can imagine that the intentions were to spread the story, this incredibly overwhelming story that swirls around the Revelation of St John the Divine. And in the end, they saved that big punch for last after choosing what would and what would not be included in the officially authorized story.

I don't put much stock into the story, myself. I find it doesn't translate well into English, and it doesn't appear to me to either be a story of prediction or a relating of history. It seems much more likely to be an accurately enough relayed vision that pretty much sends people 'round the bend. I think the most common effect is a manic state. But it's also a story that, intended or not, can easily be usurped to effect a sort of control factor over adherents.

After a thousand years, the Universal Church got pretty heavy handed in their intentional actions to unify all of humanity under the one Church. How and why they did the things they did, however, isn't all that germane to this rambling text. What is germane is the production of a method of controlling populations through the manipulation of data.

And there are several ways to manipulate the data that gets through to the public. One way is to simply omit key facts. In news stories, from Journalism 101, you have Who, What, When, Where, How and Why. Those data comprise the whole story. Omit one or more elements, and you can then manipulate the entire meaning of the story. One comes to completely different conclusions, when presented with incomplete facts.

Reasoning individuals, when constantly presented with incomplete data, will come to long standing conclusions that are wildly incorrect.

But it's just a matter of history that when the hidden facts are finally brought into the light of day after long periods of being hidden, human beings behave in ways that can be compared to flowers opening up, to springtime bursting forth, and the greatest things can happen. One of the most notable moments in the history of western civilization along these lines was the Renaissance.

There is also undiscovered data, which for the history buff can be what was discovered to bring about the Renaissance, and which caused that wonderful flowering of western civilization. The purposefully hidden data, of course, produced the Protestant movement.

Ever since that great change at the end of the dark ages, the subsequent empires that western civilization has seen rise and fall can be viewed through this lens of population control via the manipulation of data. Not to present this as a single point analysis of history, though... I'd be remiss not to point out here that it's merely an element.

But I think that it's a very important element to be aware of, however formal or informal the subject of population control could be, or has ever been.

Another way to manipulate what people are exposed to is the presenting of disinformation or lies. And yet another way would be to change the facts in some slight way, but which completely alters the conclusions anyone would come to as a result of accepting those data as reliable.

Basically, all of these types of manipulation, overall, would have an intended result of enticing people into coming to certain conclusions. Thus, it is a control factor that can be employed to control how people think.

Anyone who casts a jaundiced eye toward the overuse of the Official Secrets Act by the United States government, for instance, will understand that I see the misuse and/or overuse of this hiding of data to be troubling. But I trust that it's not done to make our lives more dangerous. I tend to believe that it's done to keep things on an even keel, however outraged anyone might be if these things were to be revealed to the public.

At this point, also, I should say that I don't believe this subject of population control to be something one should consider either good or bad.

It just is what it is.

Under the broad heading of controlling populations, you would have to include a number of other methods as well. Some of the methods employed today by some governments include intolerance of any but a single religion, and other more brutish methods of instilling obedience. There is also the control of fiat currency, which can effectively lock a whole population into servitude, one way or another, although it's beginning to look like this particular method is running on a global basis at this point.

Over the long term, however, the manipulation of data has always struck me as, potentially, the most long-lasting and effective method of controlling populations. Where religions had been the method by which people were indoctrinated and controlled in the past, it's the much subtler method of constant control over what "everybody knows" is going on around them that would, in my view, effect the widest and most permanent control over people. At least, in this age of burgeoning media, that's the only route by which I can imagine it can ever be effected without direct force.

To round up the subject here, I need to get into the "why" of population control.

Governments, I would tend to believe, are things that cannot shrink of their own accord. Power over others is something that will probably not evolve out of human nature any time soon. Consequently, the constant accrual of power is pretty much axiomatic when it comes to governments. They will always go in that direction, and fall only by their own weight, or the stupidity of some bad actor. And the larger they grow, the more evident the need to control the population. It's just something that I think is self-evident, if you bother to look at it at all.

Finally, I'd be remiss not mention that there is no "conspiracy" I see going on in this. Rather, I tend to view this subject within the wider idea of a collection of competing factions, world-wide. Some would be transnational powers, and others would be the nations and their own internal powers competing for control. The United States has plenty of competing factions, along with the very large military-industrial complex. And even the latter has its competing factions.

They all have varying degrees of motivation to manipulate and control what the public knows... or thinks they know...

But no matter who might be in control or in power over anybody, it's difficult to imagine that their ideal scene wouldn't be a collection of people under them who are cheerfully obedient and unopposed to anything they might want to do. Whether it's a neighborhood gang or an entire nation's population, that would be the ultimately desired effect by anyone who really gets their rocks off by being "in charge"...