Tools of the Matrix GANGs: The Asch Conformity Trident
The Wars of the Matrix GANGs, Part 3
"Belief can be manipulated. Only knowledge is dangerous." -Frank Herbert
My oldest brother Andrew, now deceased, had world class reflexes. He barely played sports when he was young, but after a couple of years of soccer in high school, he won a college scholarship to play keeper for the UC Boulder soccer team. A terrible car accident during his drive from Alabama to Colorado kept him from playing. After recovery, he picked up juggling as a hobby-career and became a world record breaking juggler (club and torch passing). Later in life, while working as the web developer for the activity company that sells most of the Luaus, helicopter rides, and other activities on Maui, he moonlighted as a magician's assistant primarily just to learn the craft.
When I visited him in Maui in 2003, he got us into that magician's show for free. During the show, the magician toyed with us while performing a bit of sleight of hand. He had this large gold coin that he sat on the table and told us (the audience) to keep track of it. But he kept doing other things—fairly continuous, fluidly, rapidly—and it was hard not to watch the other chaos and remain focused on the coin.
The chatty illusionist repeatedly reminded us of our primary task. I kept trying to keep my eyes on the coin, but my eyes were drawn away briefly by some distraction (forcefully, almost like I didn't have a choice) and by the time I recovered my focus, the coin was gone. I don't know if he pocketed it, knocked it onto the floor, collapsed it, or pulled the trick off in some other way.
What's the emotion when you're half amused and half horrified at the same time? That's the one I felt. And I've thought through the power of that moment many times since. The clever show crafter caught me and I'm sure essentially every member of the audience. He must have used some sort of well-understood psychological principle like cutting off action potential. Perhaps he built up our need to re-focus our attention after teasing us for just the right amount of time.
Sometimes our attention is so drawn to the wrong thing that we miss the obvious.
Revisiting Asch: The Trident of Mental Control
When Solomon Asch performed his landmark experiments beginning in 1951, he found 37% of participants giving at least one wrong answer to a simple line segment length comparison survey while conforming to the answers of actors who spoke before them.
After the experiment, Asch's team surveyed participants about why they conformed. The respondents were categorized into three groups:
Distortion of Action: The respondents were fully aware that they were giving incorrect answers, but wanted either to avoid social punishment or receive social reward for going along with the crowd.
Distortion of Judgment: This low confidence crowd believed that they were misunderstanding either the task or the imagines, so conformed to the crowd as a mimetic reflex.
Distortion of Perception: These subjects were the rare few who got a majority of the answers incorrect. They truly believed they were giving correct answers, which is to say that their minds distorted the information and circumstances to "force a fit". Or perhaps a few of them were too reflexively narcissistic to admit to either the motivations of a social climber or a low confidence position.
Stop here and think through these categories and subcategories. One of the several reasonable questions to ponder is whether or not the sort of propagandists who run the nudge units can harvest data and profile populations well enough to target them with the right setup of confidants to coax them into believing (in some distorted sense) that new quasi-vaccine technology run through questionable trials was "safe and effective".
How Many Actors Does It Take?
The big players did their part.
https://roundingtheearth.substack.com/p/the-chloroquine-wars-part-xiii
From that article:
In variations on the Asch experiment, a number of interesting observations were made:
The greater the number of people present, the higher the conformity rate.
The more difficult the task, the higher the conformity rate.
The higher the social status of the actors, the higher the conformity rate.
When just one of the seven actors was replaced by another independent subject (a “confidant”), then the group adherence rate dropped to 5%, an 86% reduction in the conformity effect.
When people were allowed to respond privately, conformity rates lowered.
It is not hard to imagine further variations on the experiment. We might even brainstorm variations that result in the greatest conformity effects.
Would it make a difference if all the actors were attractive or all unattractive to the subject?
What if some of the actors wore lab coats? This might be similar to social status, but also relate to the difficulty of the task.
What would happen with you if one of the actors were a close friend? Your spouse? Your boss? Your chief??
If my theory on Dunbar slot hacking is correct, the chief matters the most. Trump and Fauci were the perfect rival chiefs, even if they never knew (but do you believe neither of them knew?).
https://roundingtheearth.substack.com/p/parasocial-dunbar-hacking
But that's probably not enough to persuade everybody to buy into a uniform flock, however. After all, we're talking about some pretty significant steps like getting people who hate Big Pharma to suddenly love and trust Big Pharma—and maybe even tolerate the torture of their neighbors' children. Some people need an additional nudge.
This is where that priestly class we call "The Experts" comes into play.
Expert Filling of the Primary Dunbar Slot
Or "Ericspert"? I keep thinking back to the interesting coincidence that Eric Topol and Eric Feigl-Ding won credibility for the same VIOXX pharmaceutical scandal. Is that Big Pharma doesn't assassinate you if you play ball for them forever after? Plus cash? The carrot and the stick?
Topol went on to become a famous…Experty Doctor Scientistician.
It has grown extremely hard for me to respect Eric Topol on an even basic level. At some point, somebody must have convinced him that if he writes books about futuristic medicine (speculative topics for which nobody has to answer an actual argument beyond, "This will happen in the future,") he'll become fabulously rich and famous, and influence people. Perhaps that experience led him to fool himself into believing that he understands things he does not---like basic math.
And despite being the author of the book Deep Medicine: How Artificial Intelligence Can Make Healthcare Human Again, Topol appeared entirely clueless when interviewed about the world's most obviously fraudulent machine-learning-generated (NEVER HAPPENED) medical research (the Surgisphere paper on hydroxychloroquine's effects on COVID-19 patients).
Now, here he is, declaring a myth debunked while overgeneralizing an incorrect interpretation of data that says exactly the opposite of what he seems to think it does. And his many thousands of followers have no sense of how little he understands statistics, much less statistical genetics.
Together, Topol and Fecal-Dingleberry combined to help propel what is now clearly one of the largest science scandals in history, the Surgisphere fraud, for which still nobody has been held accountable. Combined with a suspicious silence and then consensus panic by the media, that was all that much of the world needed to condemn the medicine that most researchers expected to stop coronaviruses, and certainly did.
But the Ericsperts were joined by an array of characters ready to tell you that you and your children were doing the right thing to submit to the world's largest and most dangerous mass genetic experiment.
https://roundingtheearth.substack.com/p/the-matrix-distortion-of-perception
Unless you are particularly resistant to propaganda, there is an archetype for medical or scientific leadership that you can relate to—and the Matrix operators found somebody to play that role. This may even include a handful of people who don't even exist, or whose identities have been borrowed for the operation.
https://roundingtheearth.substack.com/p/propaganda-by-foot-soldier?s=w
Beyond that, a lot of people were directed passively into participation in the Asch conformity exercise that was the first half of the Plandemonium. All the propagandists need sometimes is a picture or a video. As James Corbett reminds us, media can be artfully manipulated to steer its meaning. And since this guy looks like he might be somewhere at the dinner parties you attend, and…he doesn't look embarrassed to be acting like a good little serf, then living in a bubble must be perfectly normal.
Soak up what you've observed. It's one thing to catch a glimpse of a glitch in the Matrix.
It's another one to learn not to need to dodge bullets.
It is yet another to wake people up who may not want to be woken up from their comfortable condition of modern professional bioserfdom.
Has Substack nerfed internal article links?
Interesting, thank you. The compulsion to conform - at such a vast scale, to clearly irrational commands - remains for many of us, non-compliers - one of the greatest disappointments. But it's not just that conformity thing, it's also, imo, sophisticated advances in entrainment we don't know anything about.
Who knew that staying sane, asking questions and holding on to reason would be what the few would do? Exhibiting courage and integrity, even fewer. A big question going forward will be how many can honestly come to terms with themselves and how they behaved and hopefully learn from it.