So, here we are in Labour territory once again with the remains of the Tories showing how much they haven’t learned from their near wipe out in the general election, by the content of their new cabinet.
I suppose that you could say that this is proof that the result was the correct response to fourteen years of pseudo-left rule, and that it is the first step on the road to giving people a true choice come election time. Nigel has got his five years and it will be interesting to see what he does with it over that period. A lot is riding on this as we are going to have to put up with some pretty strange bedfellows doing things that hardly anyone agrees with, so the strength of any opposition party will be absolutely key to the direction the country goes in. Because of this, I say to my fellow citizens, now is the time to stand on your own two feet and take responsibility for holding the government to account by thinking independently of the various groups competing for your attention, and letting your MP know what you think. 
It means thinking about what kind of country you really want to live in and sticking with it. But you might say, we already know that but the government is not giving it to us, which is why we are in the mess we are in! Why would that be I wonder? I would posit that it is because it is so easy to emotionally manipulate us out of our beliefs and accept what we don’t really want to.
Even the most erudite of us can be swayed by emotional manipulation and boy is the media and airwaves full of it.
I have spent the last few days reading just about everything I can get hold of about the results and apart from a few exceptions there is a strong emotional content to information, which in my opinion not only encourages infantilised responses and the wrong questions being asked, but also places the government in the position of a powerful parent over recalcitrant children.
This is insulting. However, it may be a useful exercise to try and work out how it happened and how we as citizens need to change how we think and respond to counteract it.
When emotion is expressed spontaneously for the first time, it is reasonable to say that it is a true emotion in real time, to something that has just happened. When princess Diana died the media and the elites had not realised how much of a vicarious connection she had made to a lot of the general public. Therefore, when people poured onto the streets in tears, there was an equal amount of shock and scorn used to describe the situation by our so-called movers and shakers in the media. Contrast that with when the Queen Mother died. Everyone thought she was a nice old lady who had lived a long and privileged life and that was about that. No one poured onto the streets in distress and as a result, we all got told off by the daily papers for being disrespectful.
To use that awful phrase, “lessons were learnt”, by those who would rule us. It began to occur to them that if you could generate the required type and level of emotions in each situation, you can easily get people to do what you want: psyops was born.
More than that, an understanding of the general national psyche was needed to know which emotions to focus on, apart from those common to all peoples such as anxiety about the future and disappointment of the state of your individual life. However, these must be carefully measured so that they do not become so great as to cause inertia, but strong enough to spark change in the required way.
It is becoming more difficult every day for an individual to distinguish externally generated emotional responses from real ones. People who practice emotional manipulation know that and like any human animal, give someone an inch and they will always take a yard, as my Granny would say. The temptation to apply this trick to anything and everything is so strong it was not long before monitoring your feelings became the one important thing and, therefore, adjusting them when needed.
So, we return yet again to the State getting its citizens to do the hard work for them, by being encouraged to monitor their emotional health as well as the health of their friends, relatives and anyone else we may encounter in order to align it with what the elite would term healthy human values. Terms like narcissist, sociopath, psychopath, bipolar and autism etc are scattered through the general population like confetti, we are all experts now and masters of nothing, being able to be made emotionally incontinent at the drop of a hat.
But enough of this doom and gloom; what to do? Well, there is no point in looking to schools and universities as most of them have become quite toxic about certain theories of how to be. Language is very important here and you can use this to your advantage. There are several key phrases that tend to pop up when you are being manipulated in a discussion and they are worth looking out for. One is “reaching out”, which has always sounded to me like a plea from someone drowning. We reach out to the trans community or whatever community you are focussed on to let them know they are “heard and respected”. Reaching out in this sense is to give you the illusion of power that your gesture has to make other people’s lives worth living.
“The ……community” is another one. This removes a person’s individuality and makes them part of an imagined homogenous group that all think and feel the same. Fortunately, many seem to be getting fed up with being pigeon-holed like this, which is encouraging.
“The science is settled”, so don’t waste your time thinking about it is one of my favourites, I’m sure you can add your own.
But by far the worse twisting of the emotions is what has been done to empathy (lack of); which is now a byword to punish the culture and beliefs of native people in this country and so eradicate it to “reach” out to people around the world and make them feel welcome.
Psyops has saved the best for last by learning to capitalise on the innate British sense of support for the underdog to drive people in the direction they want them to go, whether it is an opinion about a war, or if men should be allowed in women’s toilets. The permutations are endless and so is the emotional disruption. A lot of people no longer know what they really think nowadays and exhausted, consider that it is the governments job to do all that on their behalf.
Like anyone bombarded with information designed to provoke an instant emotional response, they just want to be approved of and left alone because life is too complicated. Nevertheless, sometimes uncomfortable thoughts and feelings come to the surface at the time and cause guilt and shame, helpfully backed up by social media among other outlets.
Like any other emotions, if these feelings do not arise from your own sense of self, but from outside yourself, you do have a choice as to whether to go along with it or not. The results of making that choice are that you can simplify and control your emotions in given situations and when being fed information, simply by staying calm, asking the right questions and evaluating the answers for yourself. It is often hard to do, but well worth worthwhile.
One of the most important questions of the day is who defines meaning in terms of good and evil behaviour. In this country, we have an almost two-thousand-year old system that suited the makeup of the population, based on Judeo/Christian values, after much fussing and fighting.
Now, how we express those values is being redefined to suit the current globalist view. This is not to say nothing should ever change, but it is to say that some ways of living feel more comfortable to some people than to others, so changes should be evolutionary arising from our shared history, rather than revolutionary.
I would like to finish these thoughts with an example and I’m sure you can think of many more for yourselves concerning other topics that are hot in society.
A person from another culture comes to live and work in this country. They quite naturally feel disorientated and out of their depth. Some of the customs and the way society works is alien to them and makes them feel that their sense of self is being challenged.
Do you: show empathy by letting the person know that this is a mega-adjustment for them, and you are happy to help explain things and support them in learning what they need to fit in, including maybe learning the language and how the civic part of society works; including things like customs and tradition so that they can join in. This may also include learning about how they operated in their birth country and helping them to understand that things are done differently here and why.
Or
- Do you: show empathy by completely ignoring the settled culture that the person has come to, in order to help them replicate the place they have just left, so that all uncomfortable feelings can be eradicated as fast as possible.
Which of these approaches to defining empathy do you think would make for a stable society? If like me you prefer option one, then we need to start speaking up for it. If you prefer option two, then there is no problem for you until your group becomes an inconvenience to a new majority that will surely rise. There is no point in supporting someone’s right to publicly fight for the rise of a culture that you do not believe in but makes them feel good just to “be kind”
We all have a stake in this, which is as it should be, so we all need to take back control of our emotions and start asking awkward questions.
Xandra H