Mind Control: It’s Happening to You Right Now | How Influence Works When No One Is Forcing You

Your mind is being controlled by distant strangers who don’t have your best interests at heart. If that sounds like a paranoid fantasy, brace yourself and read on. These are the findings of a series of scientific studies that show how a few dominant institutions have the power to affect how you feel, how you act, and even how you vote – without you ever knowing about it.

Deliberate mind manipulation of the masses is, by itself, nothing new. Nearly a hundred years ago, our global mania for consumption was unleashed by the malevolent brilliance of Edward Bernays, known as the “father of public relations.” Bernays was Sigmund Freud’s nephew and used his uncle’s insights into the subconscious to develop his new methods of mind control, designed to create the modern American consumer.

Edward Bernays: the father of modern consumer culture – © Waking Times

“We must shift America from a needs to a desires culture,” declared Bernays’ business partner, Paul Mazur. “People must be trained to desire, to want new things, even before the old have been entirely consumed. We must shape a new mentality. Man’s desires must overshadow his needs.” In 1928, Bernays proudly described how his techniques for mental manipulation had permitted a small elite to control the minds of the American population:

The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government that is the true ruling power of this country. We are governed, our minds molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of… In almost every act of our daily lives… we are dominated by the relatively small number of persons … who pull the wires which control the public mind.

Bernays set in motion what we have all come to know as an essential part of our capitalist ecosystem: the use of mass media to promote roles, desires and status symbols that rake in profits for corporations. The chilling words of Wayne Chilicki, chief executive of General Mills, show how faithfully Bernays’ vision has been followed: “When it comes to targeting kid consumers, we at General Mills follow the Procter & Gamble model of ‘cradle to grave.’ We believe in getting them early and having them for life.”

What’s changed is that a new generation of mind controllers are using the burgeoning technologies of data mining and social media to inject their power even deeper into our minds than their forebears could have dreamed possible. A modern-day Bernays named B.J. Fogg has founded a field called “captology,” derived from the acronym CAPT or “Computers As Persuasive Technology.” At the ominously named Stanford Persuasive Tech Lab, he teaches freshly minted graduate students how to use technology to “change people’s attitudes or behaviors.”

His teachings have spawned the interfaces of our new daily routines: the chimes from our smartphones diverting our attention, the thumbs-up icon on our news feeds, and the Like statistics telling us how popular we are today. These are known as “hot triggers” which kick off behavioral loops in our subconscious. Successful apps, they teach, are those that trigger a momentary need, and then provide us with an instant solution. The solution sparks a microdose of endorphins in our brains. That feels good. So, like rats on a wheel, we find ourselves getting addicted, going back for more.

What Is The Subconscious Mind?

The subconscious mind is a fascinating and complex aspect of our mental processes that influences our thoughts, emotions, and behavior. Despite its importance in shaping our experiences, it remains largely unknown to our conscious awareness. Before we continue, it’s important to understand what the subconscious mind is. Once you do, the entire article will become clearer.

The subconscious mind is the part of your mind that works quietly in the background. You don’t actively think with it, but it shapes how you feel, react, and make decisions. It stores memories, habits, fears, beliefs, and patterns you’ve picked up since childhood. While your conscious mind is logical and questioning, your subconscious mind is emotional and accepting. It doesn’t argue. It absorbs.

This is why the subconscious mind is so powerful and so easy to influence. When an idea is repeated again and again, especially through emotion, authority, fear, or comfort, the subconscious begins to accept it as normal. Not necessarily true, just familiar. Over time, repetition turns into belief. Belief turns into behavior. Eventually, people defend ideas they never consciously chose, simply because those ideas feel “normal” to them.

This is how control often works. Media, education systems, advertising, and social pressure don’t need to force people anymore. They just repeat messages until resistance fades. When you hear the same narrative every day on screens, in headlines, in conversations, your subconscious stops questioning it. It starts to feel safe. Anything that challenges it then feels wrong, dangerous, or extreme, even if it’s factual.

The most effective influence doesn’t look like control. It looks like routine. It looks like “this is just how things are.” Once something is embedded in the subconscious, people self-police. They mock opposing views. They feel emotional discomfort when confronted with new information. That’s not logic reacting, it’s conditioning.

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Facebook has built its global empire of 3.1 billion monthly active users on this addictive routine. According to one of Fogg’s students, Nir Eyal, Facebook’s key trigger is FOMO: fear of missing out. Humans evolved in hunter-gatherer bands, where survival meant being part of the community. The social anxiety of missing what our friends are doing arises from deep within our hormonal system. Meanwhile, as psychologist Sherry Turkle has pointed out in her book Alone Together, we sacrifice our daily physical intimacy with those around us by focusing our attention on the screen in our hands. This has been brilliantly captured by artist Eric Pickerskill in his photography series, “Removed,” which documents the feeling of everyday social situations – after removing people’s smartphones from the picture.

Facebook has been researching the extent of its power over our behavior, manipulating its own users as guinea pigs. On election day in 2010, it sent “Go out and vote” reminders to more than 60 million users, causing an estimated 340,000 to vote who otherwise wouldn’t have. If it chose to send these reminders to supporters of a particular party or candidate, it could easily flip an election without anyone knowing about it. Under current law, it wouldn’t have to tell anyone what it was doing. In another experiment, which caused a public outcry, Facebook successfully manipulated the emotional state of 689,000 users by sending them either an excess of positive or negative terms in their news feeds.

The mind control doesn’t stop at social media. Do you believe in your autonomy when you’re carefully conducting research on a topic and use Google to search for something? Think again.

The new mind control

The soothing music we all hear overhead in supermarkets causes us to walk more slowly and buy more food, whether we need it or not. Most of the vacuous thoughts and intense feelings our teenagers experience from morning till night are carefully orchestrated by highly skilled marketing professionals working in our fashion and entertainment industries. Politicians work with a wide range of consultants who test every aspect of what the politicians do in order to sway voters: clothing, intonations, facial expressions, makeup, hairstyles and speeches are all optimised, just like the packaging of a breakfast cereal.

Fortunately, all of these sources of influence operate competitively. Some of the persuaders want us to buy or believe one thing, others to buy or believe something else. It is the competitive nature of our society that keeps us, on balance, relatively free.

But what would happen if new sources of control began to emerge that had little or no competition? And what if new means of control were developed that were far more powerful – and far more invisible – than any that have existed in the past? And what if new types of control allowed a handful of people to exert enormous influence not just over the citizens of the US but over most of the people on Earth?

It might surprise you to hear this, but these things have already happened.

Google decides which web pages to include in search results, and how to rank them.

To understand how the new forms of mind control work, we need to start by looking at the search engine – one in particular: the biggest and best of them all, namely Google. The Google search engine is so good and so popular that the company’s name is now a commonly used verb in languages around the world. To ‘Google’ something is to look it up on the Google search engine, and that, in fact, is how most computer users worldwide get most of their information about just about everything these days. They Google it. Google has become the main gateway to virtually all knowledge, mainly because the search engine is so good at giving us exactly the information we are looking for, almost instantly and almost always in the first position of the list it shows us after we launch our search – the list of ‘search results’.

That ordered list is so good, in fact, that about 50 per cent of our clicks go to the top two items, and more than 90 per cent of our clicks go to the 10 items listed on the first page of results; few people look at other results pages, even though they often number in the thousands, which means they probably contain lots of good information. Google decides which of the billions of web pages it is going to include in our search results, and it also decides how to rank them.

Psychologist Robert Epstein has unearthed the massive subliminal power of what he’s called the Search Engine Manipulation Effect, or SEME.

Epstein and his associate Ronald Robertson wanted to test whether SEME could impact how people decided to vote in an election. They asked a sample of Americans to research candidates for an Australian election (to minimize preconceived notions about the candidates) using their own mock search engine, “Kadoodle.” They randomly divided the sample “voters” into three groups, and served up the same results to each group. The only difference was the ordering of the results: one group’s results favored one candidate; another group’s results favored the opposing candidate, and the third group saw results that favored neither candidate.

The results were staggering. The proportion of people favoring Kadoodle’s “favored” candidate increased by 48%. Disturbingly, three quarters of the people in the manipulated groups were completely unaware of any bias in their search results. In the “neutral” control group, there was no significant shift of opinion.

Since then, they’ve replicated these findings in larger tests conducted across the U.S. They’ve discovered that using simple techniques, they can mask the manipulation so that virtually no-one is aware they’re seeing biased rankings. In 2014, they took their testing to India during the election for prime minister, where people were already very familiar with the candidates. Even so, they were able to shift the proportion of people favoring a chosen candidate by 20%, with 99.5% of people showing no awareness they were being manipulated.

In many countries of the world, including the U.S., Google has a near monopoly over internet searches. The search-ranking business is entirely unregulated, and courts have ruled that Google’s right to rank search results however it pleases is protected as a form of free speech. If Google chose to swing the U.S. election, they could probably do so without anyone knowing about it.

Five Modern Methods of Mind Control

Modern mind control is both technological and psychological. Tests show that simply by exposing the methods of mind control, the effects can be reduced or eliminated, at least for mind control advertising and propaganda.

1. Education — This is the most obvious, yet still remains the most insidious. It has always been a would-be dictator’s ultimate fantasy to “educate” naturally impressionable children.

2. Advertising and Propaganda — Edward Bernays has been cited as the inventor of the consumerist culture that was designed primarily to target people’s self-image (or lack thereof) in order to turn a want into a need. This was initially envisioned for products such as cigarettes, for example. However, Bernays also noted in his 1928 book, Propaganda, that “propaganda is the executive arm of the invisible government.” This can be seen most clearly in the modern police state and the growing citizen snitch culture, wrapped up in the pseudo-patriotic War on Terror. The increasing consolidation of media has enabled the entire corporate structure to merge with government, which now utilizes the concept of propaganda placement. Media; print, movies, television, and cable news can now work seamlessly to integrate an overall message which seems to have the ring of truth because it comes from so many sources, simultaneously. When one becomes attuned to identifying the main “message,” one will see this imprinting everywhere. And this is not even to mention subliminal messaging.

3. Predictive Programming — Many still deny that predictive programming is real. I would invite anyone to examine the range of documentation put together by Alan Watt and come to any other conclusion. Predictive programming has its origins in predominately elitist Hollywood, where the big screen can offer a big vision of where society is headed. Just look back at the books and movies which you thought were far-fetched, or “science fiction” and take a close look around at society today.

4. Sports & Politics — Some might take offense at seeing politics put alongside sports as a method of mind control. The central theme is the same throughout: divide and conquer. The techniques are quite simple: short circuit the natural tendency of people to cooperate for their survival, and teach them to form teams bent on domination and winning. Sports has always had a role as a key distraction that corrals tribal tendencies into a non-important event, which in modern America has reached ridiculous proportions where protests will break out over a sport celebrity leaving their city, but essential human issues such as liberty are giggled away as inconsequential. Political discourse is strictly in a left-right paradigm of easily controlled opposition.

5. Food, Water, and Air — Additives, toxins, and other food poisons literally alter brain chemistry to create docility and apathy. Fluoride in drinking water has been proven to lower IQ; Aspartame and MSG are excitotoxins which excite brain cells until they die; and easy access to the fast food that contains these poisons generally has created a population that lacks focus and motivation for any type of active lifestyle. Most of the modern world is perfectly groomed for passive receptiveness — and acceptance — of the dictatorial elite. And if you choose to diligently watch your diet, they are fully prepared to spray the population from above.

This page provides a table list of 23 key Mind Control Related Devices that have been issued patents from the U.S. Patent Office between 1956 and 2003. The links go to pdf's of the patents. This is not a list of all patented mind control technology and devices in the United States - this is only some of them.

When most people hear about government mind control experiments, they think of MKUltra — the CIA’s notorious program that dosed unwitting citizens with LSD in the 1950s and 60s. But MKUltra was merely the tip of an iceberg, the most publicized program in a vast, interconnected web of psychological warfare research that spanned decades and crossed international borders.

Intelligence agencies on both sides of the Cold War believed that whoever could crack the code of human consciousness would possess the ultimate weapon.

The Cold War wasn’t just fought with missiles and spies — it was a battle for the human mind itself. This belief drove governments to commit some of the most unethical experiments in modern history, involving prestigious universities, respected psychiatrists, and cutting-edge scientists. The subjects were prisoners, mental patients, soldiers, drug addicts, prostitutes, and ordinary citizens who never consented and often never knew what was done to them.

Most disturbingly, these programs were only exposed by accident. When the Watergate scandal broke in the 1970s, it triggered investigations that unearthed a small fraction of the evidence — much had already been systematically destroyed. The Church Committee hearings of 1975–76 pulled back the curtain just enough to reveal the horrifying scope of these operations, but countless details remain classified or lost forever.

Manipulation Techniques

“Publicity is the deliberate attempt to manage the public’s perception of a subject. The subjects of publicity include people (for example, politicians and performing artists), goods and services, organizations of all kinds, and works of art or entertainment.”

The drive to sell products and ideas to the masses has to lead to an unprecedented amount of research on human behavior and on the human psyche. Cognitive sciences, psychology, sociology, semiotics, linguistics and other related fields were and still are extensively researched through well-funded studies.

“No group of sociologists can approximate the ad teams in the gathering and processing of exploitable social data. The ad teams have billions to spend annually on research and testing of reactions, and their products are magnificent accumulations of material about the shared experience and feelings of the entire community.”
– Marshall McLuhan, The Extensions of Man

The results of those studies are applied to advertisements, movies, music videos and other media in order to make them as influential as possible. The art of marketing is highly calculated and scientific because it must reach both the individual and the collective consciousness. In high-budget cultural products, a video is never “just a video,” Images, symbols, and meanings are strategically placed in order to generate a desired effect.

“It is with knowledge of the human being, his tendencies, his desires, his needs, his psychic mechanisms, his automatisms as well as knowledge of social psychology and analytical psychology that propaganda refines its techniques.”

Today’s propaganda almost never uses rational or logical arguments. It directly taps into a human’s most primal needs and instincts in order to generate an emotional and irrational response. If we always thought rationally, we probably wouldn’t buy 50% of what we own. Babies and children are constantly found in advertisements targeting women for a specific reason: studies have shown that images of children trigger in women an instinctual need to nurture, to care and to protect, ultimately leading to a sympathetic bias towards the advertisement.

Strange old 7up ad using the cuteness of babies

Sex is ubiquitous in mass media, as it draws and keeps the viewer’s attention. It directly connects to our animal need to breed and to reproduce, and, when triggered, this instinct can instantly overshadow any other rational thoughts in our brain.

Subliminal Perception

What if the messages described above were able to reach directly the viewers’ subconscious mind, without the viewers even realizing what is happening? That is the goal of subliminal perception. The phrase subliminal advertising was coined in 1957 by the US market researcher James Vicary, who said he could get moviegoers to “drink Coca-Cola” and “eat popcorn” by flashing those messages onscreen for such a short time that viewers were unaware.

“Subliminal perception is a deliberate process created by communications technicians, by which you receive and respond to information and instructions without being consciously aware of the instructions”
– Steve Jacobson, Mind Control in the United States

This technique is often used in marketing and we all know that sex sells.

Although some sources claim that subliminal advertising is ineffective or even an urban myth, the documented usage of this technique in mass media proves that creators believe in its powers. Recent studies have also proven its effectiveness, especially when the message is negative.

” A team from University College London, funded by the Wellcome Trust, found that it [subliminal perception] was particularly good at instilling negative thoughts. There has been much speculation about whether people can process emotional information unconsciously, for example pictures, faces and words,” said Professor Nilli Lavie, who led the research. We have shown that people can perceive the emotional value of subliminal messages and have demonstrated conclusively that people are much more attuned to negative words.”
– Source

A famous example of subliminal messaging in political communications is in George Bush’s advertisement against Al Gore in 2000. Right after the name of Gore is mentioned, the ending of the word “bureaucrats” – “rats” – flashes on the screen for a split second.

The discovery of this trickery caused quite a stir and, even if there are no laws against subliminal messaging in the U.S., the advertisement was taken off the air.

When Does it Become Mind Control?

By now you’re probably used to how predictive advertising has become, but it probably felt intrusive at first. Advertisers have always used subtle tactics to convince you to buy things, but now the privacy boundary is increasingly blurred. While it’s somewhat known that advertising finds its roots in propaganda, are developments in technology and neuroscience changing the fundamental nature of marketing into something that borders on mind control or manipulation?

The foundational elements of public relations and advertising were developed by a man named Edward L. Bernays, who happened to be the nephew of none other than Sigmund Freud. Freud gave a copy of his General Introductory Lectures, his seminal work on psychoanalysis, to Bernays as a gift in the nascent phase of his career.

Bernays was intrigued by Freud’s research, notably the idea that irrational forces drive human behavior. He took the idea and parlayed it into what he referred to as “engineering consent,” a concept that instead of bowing to consumer demands, cultivated them.

Bernays was first hired for a Lucky Strike campaign in which he created social trends to convince more people, particularly women, to smoke. He realized cigarettes exemplified male power, so he staged a campaign to empower women to smoke cigarettes by inviting a group of young female Vogue employees to light up on New York’s 5^th avenue in a show of protest.

He referred to the campaign and the cigarettes involved as “Torches of Freedom.” Later, when the ladies expressed distaste for the green color of the packaging, he staged a number of events to make the color green fashionable.

This type of consent engineering was manipulative. And there’s evidence that Bernays likely knew of the dangers of smoking in those days as he would destroy his wife’s cigarettes whenever he found them at home. Despite this knowledge, and later becoming a public opponent of tobacco, he pitched Lucky Strikes as having a slimming effect and claimed they were soothing on the throat. He even wrote a book on his tactics blatantly titled, Propaganda, that would later inspire the Nazis.

Bernays used fear tactics, false or deceptive advertising, and what can only be referred to as social mind control tactics to sell products, even if they were dangerous or disingenuous.

This set the framework for the modern tactics that continue to perpetuate this trend, and while false or misleading advertising is pretty well-regulated by the FTC, the idea of engineering consent still persists. So is it possible consent may be engineered against our own will?

The World Economic Forum Talks About “Mind Control Using Sound Waves”

The World Economic Forum (WEF) is one of the most influential elite organizations, alongside the Council on Foreign Relations, the Bilderberg group, and the Trilateral Commision. Every year, the forum brings together some 2500 top business leaders, international political leaders, economists, celebrities and journalists to discuss world issues.

Not unlike other powerful organizations that claim to “help the world”, the WEF is accused of actually promoting the interests of the world elite.

Remote Mind Control

The WEF’s Annual Meeting of the Global Future Councils took place on November 11-12 in the United Arab Emirates. One of the topics discussed was “mind control using sound waves”. University of Oxford Professor Antoine Jérusalem describes the technology and the issues related to it.

Controlling the brain with sound waves: how does it work?

Well, to get straight to the science, the principle of non-invasive neuromodulation is to focus ultrasound waves into a region in the brain so that they all gather in a small spot. Then hopefully, given the right set of parameters, this can change the activity of the neurons.

If you want to get rid of neurons that have gone wild, for example in epilepsy, then you might want to crank up the energy to essentially kill them. But if you want to selectively promote or block the neuronal activity, you need to fine-tune your ultrasound waves carefully.

In other words, there’s a difference between ultrasound stimulation used for removing tissue, and ultrasound neuromodulation, which is aimed at controlling neuronal activity without damaging the tissue.

Ultrasound neuromodulation is something that definitely works, but that we still don’t understand.

What social good can come of it?

The current buzzwords are Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s disease, as well as traumatic brain injuries. But scientists are also looking at the spinal cord and peripheral nervous systems. As far as I am concerned, since the brain is the de facto centre of decision for so many processes, any of them could be targeted.

Is it safe?

When attempting to ‘control’ neuronal activity by providing minute mechanical vibrations to a region of the brain, it’s important that the focus of the ultrasound, frequency and amplitude are properly tuned, or the brain can potentially be damaged. The point is that we still don’t know how to tune all of this; and if I were to exaggerate a bit, I could say that our current approach is not that far off from fiddling around with the settings on a radio until we hear the right station.

One of the many difficulties is to know for sure that we are indeed controllingneurons with these sound waves, as opposed to damaging them. The truth is that we still don’t know how the process works. And if you don’t know how it works, you don’t know how much is “too much”.

What are the biggest ethical challenges?

The potential of this technique is huge – by that I mean the sheer number of applications, as well as the ethical use.

From a biological perspective, it’s similar to drugs. It can cure you, it can get you addicted, and it can kill you. It’s all about staying within a given set of rules. From an ethical perspective, the world is changing so fast that it’s difficult to assess what will be acceptable tomorrow that is not today.

I am also convinced that human nature is such that if something can be done, it will be done. The question is by whom. I would rather have a fair society leading the dance than some rogue state without any respect for human or animal life. If we want to lead that dance 10 years from now, we need to start researching today.

How dystopian could it get?

I can see the day coming where a scientist will be able to control what a person sees in their mind’s eye, by sending the right waves to the right place in their brain. My guess is that most objections will be similar to those we hear today about subliminal messages in advertisements, only much more vehement.

This technology is not without its risks of misuse. It could be a revolutionary healthcare technology for the sick, or a perfect controlling tool with which the ruthless control the weak. This time though, the control would be literal.

What can we do to safeguard its potential?

I am not going to argue that scientists are all wise and knowledgeable when it comes to what should and should not be done. Some of us will go as far as we can get away with. But that’s human nature, and not unique to scientists.

Either way, our job is to find something that is beneficial to humanity. And if you find a way to make somebody better, then you most likely also know how to do the contrary. The goal is to make sure that regulation prevents the latter, without impeding the former. I believe that this is the role of regulators. And I think that the European Union, where I work, is quite good at this.

Another role of politicians should be to provide a communication platform to explain the long vision of any given area of research. And it can be too early, or not a good idea, and the final decision might very well be to stop it. But in the long term, the public should have the potential benefits of a new technology explained to them in plain words, which is something that scientists are not necessarily good at.

Politicians should remember that if we don’t do it, then somebody somewhere will do it anyway…potentially unregulated.

In short, Antoine Jérusalem says that remote mind control is an incredibly powerful technology that has the power to possibly cure illnesses. However, in the wrong hands, the technology can completely take control of one’s brain. In his words, it can be the “perfect controlling tool with which the ruthless control the weak”.

That being said, remote mind control is nothing new and the elite had access to this kind of technology for years.

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