Science and Imperfect Memory, A Followup
The Wars of the Matrix GANGs: An Introduction
This is the followup to my last article, and the introduction to a new article series that might be seen as a merger of The Information Wars, The Kunlangeta, and…well, it connects to just about all of them, really.
I have a confession to make: I organized a group of confidants to help me run an experiment aimed at Rounding the Earth's 30,000 readers. But I'm letting you off the hook quickly, and I hope that when you read this article, you won't think worse of me.
There was never a Mavis Winehardt. I made that up.
My goal was to demonstrate an extremely important lesson—to pull back the curtain, and explain how the magic trick works. For many readers, the lesson is better absorbed immediately after the illusion is performed, and then explained. I will come back to all that down below.
However, Rounding the Earth Readers appear to be too self-selected because hardly anyone bit on the Mavis Winehardt memory even though I concocted her from an amalgam of events for which I had the vaguest of memories, hoping some people might latch onto them. The goal was to show how it is that distortions of reality can be induced. In another population, that might have worked. However, it seems that all or nearly every one of the people who said they remembered Winehardt were the confidants I selected from a pool of friends, Operation Uplift members, and paid subscribers to the RTE Locals community.
Do understand that the requisite ethical discussion took place, and many of the confidants participated after I explained that it would go on for only 24 hours, and that it would serve as the basis for an important and large scale educational lesson. And we are all delighted to find out how strong-willed the RTE community is.
What is This About?
One of my first articles here at RTE, published April 10, 2021 (but written in October 2020 and published to Facebook), is this article on how ex-president Donald Trump was used as part of an Asch conformity experiment.
But there is a particular aspect of the Asch experiment that is more concerning than mere conformity. Just from a single sitting with experiment confidants, a great many participants did not simply "go along to get along", but told Asch and his team that they really did believe they were selecting the correct line.
This effect was dubbed, "distortion of perception," and I see it as akin to hypnosis or brainwashing that can turn into a group-level experience. From my article,
The result of hearing your chief say that the line on the left is the same in length as A while hearing the other chief of the rival tribe say that the line on the left is the same in length as C could eventually reach something Asch saw in the responses of many of the participants who conformed. He called it “distortion of perception”. After the daily repetition of tribal pronouncements, the differences between the lengths of the lines (or the results of studies) really do begin to blur so that all that remains is the gut-wrenching courage to make an independent judgment askew from one’s tribe.
Could this effect be used to engineer a full-blown Matrix for a large portion of the population?
The answer seems to be, "Yes," but more importantly we need a model for understanding how the magic tricks work. This is where GANGs come in. The acronym GANG grew out of one of the private weekly Locals discussions (Wednesday nights), and stands for
Governance by Aggressive and Nonsensical Guruism
I call the organizations that employ this form of rule by overwhelming and deadpan propaganda GANGs. And we might as well have already called them mafia.
I'll go ahead and stop here for now, but I'll soon have an article out that explores the Mandela effect as a concocted amalgam of banal tricks of the mind, and engineered alterations of history.
You played the Mavis card really well- I was convinced you really believed there was such a person and, while I had literally no memory of her myself, I did try some various searches to find her, but only after answering your 3 questions last night. After about 5 minutes, I began to realize what your purpose might have been since I couldn't find any results at all, not even as a Mandela Effect, which strongly suggested you had fabricated the story itself.
This morning, I went through some lists of things people have called Mandela Effect stories- there were really none that tweaked my own memories. I had either never heard of the things mentioned, or I remembered them correctly.
I then thought for a while about memories I have had that were proveably wrong on further evidence, and I could only come up with a single instance. The Pet Shop Boys first US hit was "West End Girls", a song I was utterly convinced was a hit in the Spring of 1985 in the US- the song was intimately connected in my memory with my freshman year in college and a very specific event, and yet about 25 years later, I was scanning the Billboard Hot 100 for the Spring of 1985, and the song wasn't listed anywhere I looked in the months around that time. I eventually found it in the Spring of 1986, and the song hit #1 several weeks after that. This disturbed me a great deal- my memory for music and timelines involving them is almost at an idiot savant level- if it was a hit in the US between 1978 and 1987-88, I can tell you when it was on the charts to the year and season/s, and having this memory literally seared into my brain about hearing this song in the Spring of 1985 connected to an event I literally recorded in a diary freaked me out- I thought I had either slipped into a parallel universe, or I had a brain tumor screwing up my perceptions. However, I eventually figured out why my memory was screwed up- the song was released in an earlier version in 1984, and it was the recording I was remembering, not the one that became the hit a year later. I cancelled the CAT scan.
Ah, I thought it was very strange that after completing the poll I could find no mention of Mavis on any internet or video platforms. I thought damn, she must have done something really wrong, or be really important, to be so thoroughly scrubbed from the internet. My naive trust of the poll's honesty remained pure. 😄