Regular readers know that from time to time Dredd Blog posts are revisited.
This helps us to remember that some things didn't just start happening yesterday.
On September 18, 2009 Dredd Blog began a series about dementia, but since that time the subject has not died and gone away, no, it is even more relevant today, because dementia has seriously increased along with suicide.
The ideas expressed in that post in that series are just as true today as they were then.
No doubt dementia is known in our society.
Some of that dementia has unknown causes.
In general, then, some of them come to us with no known cures.
We live in a sophisticated society that faces some diseases that have unknown causes and no known cures.
One of the more well known mental diseases of that particular group can even be deadly:
Some researchers are convinced that, whatever its cause, Alzheimer's disease is essentially an inflammatory condition, similar to rheumatoid arthritis ... there is no cure ... According to a report released in June 2001 by the Center for Disease Control and Prevention, Alzheimer's disease was the 8th main cause of death in the USA in 1999, rising from 12th position in 1998.(Dementia). A realm of medicine called Etiology looks for the root cause or origin of such diseases.
Alzheimer's is a personal disease, an individual disease that infects on a person by person basis.
But there are obviously times when entire nations "go crazy", and do strange things. Things like attacking other nations for no sound reason, or becoming inexplicably belligerent, or the like.
Take for examples, 1930's Germany that invaded various nations of Europe and started World War II, or North Korea today which threatens to do the same for the same invalid "reasons".
These are extremes that reach the border of sanity or proper social behavior, so social scientists do a sort of social etiology in an attempt to fathom how the madness originates and spreads so disastrously.
Currently in the U.S. we have symptoms of a national dementia, not unlike that of 1930's Germany, which has been around at least since General and later President Eisenhower warned against it.
The U.S. is spending more than all the rest of the world combined on weapons of mass destruction and tactical weapons, as well as having built military bases in 120 or more countries, evidently intent on maintaining them indefinitely.
Since this comes at the cost of human health and wealth, it is naturally seen by many as a sign of a national dementia.
Some observers see this dementia originating in the early 20th century when government or those behind government perceived a need to control the people, but realized that they could not do it by physical means.
Thus they took to propaganda in an effort to control the minds rather than use physical control.
Eventually this led to a mega-industry of businesses whose function was to deceive the people into believing something other than the truth of events occurring around them.
One tell tale sign of dementia is an inability to articulate or speak clearly.
Our language itself has enough holes in it to drive a truckload of propaganda through.
Check out this simple test that gives an indication of what is being said with our tricky language and what is not.
This national speech impairment has not gone unnoticed by the scientific community. One professor calls this doublespeak, and has written a book "Why No One Knows What Anyone Is Saying Anymore". He points out:
With doublespeak, banks don't have "bad loans" or "bad debts"; they have "nonperforming assets" or "nonperforming credits" which are "rolled over" or "rescheduled." Corporations never lose money; they just experience "negative cash flow," "deficit enhancement," "net profit revenue deficiencies," or "negative contributions to profits."(William Lutz, Rutgers University). What is forgotten is that this propaganda is not harmless but is toxic, and those who use it are doomed to eventually become deceived by it.
Thus, it is possible that we are beginning to see the national manifestations of our massive practice of deceit in our nation, because deceit removes reality from the target to be deceived, and not being aware of reality is otherwise known as dementia.
In essence then, when governments, businesses, and those behind them decide to deceive the people "for their own good", they are actually injecting dementia into the populace.
With the massive technologies we have for spreading deceit "through the air waves", we can even say that the disease has become airborne, which usually strikes terror into the hearts of the Center For Disease Control, because that brings on pandemics of the untreatable kind.
The movie "Outbreak" released in 1995, before the words "WMD', "9/11", or "neoCon" hit the airwaves of the masses, starring: Dustin Hoffman, Rene Russo, Morgan Freeman, Kevin Spacey, Cuba Gooding Jr., Donald Sutherland, Patrick Dempsey, etc., is a good study on the subject of this post. (Hat tip to Christie)
It shows that the military will take out civilians and spread propaganda when it suits their purposes, which always come first; and it shows the proper citizen response.
The next post in this series is here.
Thanks for stopping by Dredd Blog today.
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