The Weaponization of Words and Minds - Humans become the latest Contested Space
We have now entered astrological 2023, which began with the Equinox on March 20th –and the New Moon occurs less than 24 hours later, still at 0 degrees of Aries. This is a degree that astrologers regard as a ‘world point’ - events that occur now are likely to have a global impact. Saturn has just changed signs into Pisces – a sign where he loses his control and where structures that do not have strong enough foundations get washed away. Mars (Aries’ ruler) is currently in Gemini but after a long run finally changes signs later on this month into Cancer (an emotional water sign where he is very uncomfortable - his fire evaporates into steam), at the same time that Pluto changes signs to spend 20 years in Aquarius echoing the start of the Jupiter/Saturn Air cycle. This is big – bigger than big!
As the Saturn Uranus square closes now, we are likely to see changes happening in a ‘fast and furious’ manner. Mars has been in Gemini since August 2022 – bear in mind that he normally rockets through signs in less than a couple of months. This new year ‘world point’ activity is, I feel, going to prove to be volatile with four planets plus Chiron currently in Aries. This theme of volatility is further backed up by the fact that Aries will host two new moons; they will bookend the sign. The first that I am looking at now is at 0 Aries and the second at the very end of the sign at 29 Aries, which I might add is also a solar eclipse. So, within this Martian volatility I am factoring in powerful eclipse energy. Volatility is apparent in France where Macron is acting less than ethically (Saturn in Pisces) to dictatorially impose a higher retirement age. This has been met by huge protests (Mars in Gemini). Putin has been charged by the International Criminal Courts for war crimes and in the USA Trump could be arrested over an alleged hush money scheme. Meanwhile three banks in America failed, including Silicon Valley Bank, whilst Credit Suisse has received CPR and more or less sold as junk.
Gemini is all about communication, brainpower and the media. Mars’ warrior mode in Gemini’s Air manifests through words – words become Mars’ weapons. Mars’ long spell in Gemini has enabled us to see just how much words and the brain have been weaponised and harnessed both for war and within war. With Pluto’s imminent entry into the air sign of Aquarius, we will likely see more focus upon the mind and mental issues and how technology could change us. Pluto’s recent 15 year stay in Capricorn has been focused on more tangible issues such as money and what money can buy, together with top-down hierarchical structures such as governments, banks and corporates.
What has come to light for me is the amount of attention that has been directed towards influencing people’s behaviour. This may just come from those who wish to market their products via behavioural marketing, a study that has now developed into a very slick tool since the days that Freud and Jung brought the understanding of psychology and how the brain works to the forefront. Behavioural marketing allows product placement and product advertising to be targeted based on human behaviour, even down to the colours used according to their appeal to the brain. But governments around the world also use extremely sophisticated applied behavioural psychology techniques to ‘nudge’ their subjects into more desirable ways of behaving. In 2010 the UK government and Cabinet Office produced a paper called Mindspace (Messenger - Incentives - Norms - Defaults - Salience - Priming - Affect - Commitment - Ego).[1] In this document they state that ‘influencing behaviour is central to public policy’. ‘Behavioural approaches’, they say ‘offer a powerful new set of tools. Applying these tools can lead to low-cost, low-pain ways of ‘nudging’ citizens’. MINDSPACE, they say, represents the tools for changing behaviour and ‘government will always be shaping choices’. Well that’s nice to know!
I watched a video where James Giordano, a neuroscientist who works with the American Government and with DARPA (Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency) training the American military, was speaking about such influencing.[2] He spoke with a chilling and disassociated sense of detachment from human suffering as he described the latest warfare methods in ‘the Battlespace on the Brain’. Interestingly DARPA was formed at the same time that the Mindspace document was produced – 2010. Giordano, however, goes much further, almost psychopathically describing how combat operations against humanity would include ‘in-close pharmaceuticals, organic neurotoxins, gene edited neuro microbials with high neuro psychiatric symptom clusters for public panic/public health dis-integrative effects and novel morbidity mortality profiles, nano neuroparticulate agents including neurovascular hemorrhagic agents’. I’m not pretending I understand all this stuff, but I know it’s not nice.
We also see the US led NATO spinning out their own new kind of ‘cognitive warfare’ combat.[3] NATO describes this as the ‘weaponisation of brain sciences’ all done in a bid to win the battle for the brain. This new method, they say, involves ‘hacking the individual’ by exploiting ‘the vulnerabilities of the human brain in order to implement more sophisticated social engineering’. Now where have we heard something like that before? Oh yes, from the mouth of that creepy individual who works with Klaus Schwab at the WEF, Yuval Noah Harari.
A 2020 NATO sponsored description of this new form of warfare clearly explains that cognitive warfare’s objective is to make everyone a weapon. “The brain will be the battlefield of the 21st century,” the report stressed. “Humans are the contested domain,” and “future conflicts will likely occur amongst the people digitally first and physically thereafter in proximity to hubs of political and economic power.” While the NATO-backed study insisted that much of its research on cognitive warfare is designed for defensive purposes, it also conceded that the military alliance is developing offensive tactics, stating, in a chilling disclosure, that “the objective of Cognitive Warfare is to harm societies.” The report emphasized that Western militaries must work more closely with academia to weaponise social and human sciences to help the alliance develop its cognitive warfare capacities. The study described this phenomenon as “the militarization of brain science.” psychology, from the most intimate of social relationships to the mind itself.
Alongside this we also see something called neurosecurity, which in principle is an antivirus and firewall for the mind[4]. It is a concept to enforce a set of neuroethical principles for a neural device because like anything digital it has the potential to be hacked, just as Harari has boasted about. Does this mean that we are not as far away as we think from singularity and transhumanism?
As I write my blogs I resonate to the energies that surround me. And, on March 15th as I write this section, there is very aptly a four-planet line up in Pisces; three of them – Sun Mercury and Neptune – in an exact square to Mars in Gemini. At its best this would be a day of high intuitive energy, a period for meditation and connection with what is spiritual and divine. At the other end of the spectrum, it is a time when nothing can be trusted to be true. Pisces is the domain of the mainstream media, of maximum manipulation, confusion and deception. This day is also the Ides of March - a day to beware – it was the day that Julius Caesar was murdered.
How can we defend against these subtle and sophisticated methods of the weaponization of our minds without our knowledge? Awareness helps. These methods are weaponised to influence our perceptions, which certainly explains why individuals have reacted in an extremely illogical fashion over the last two to three years, without questioning why they have come to particular conclusions. Much of the persuasion has surrounded ‘doing the right thing for the greater good’. This to me involves feelings of shame and guilt should one not be doing right by others. We must assume that mind manipulations have required some means of testing. Once initial testing had been carried out on small scales, then surely it follows that they would need to go for ‘the big one’? So I ask the unaskable question - were the last few years that humanity has endured that ‘big one’ – the big test? How far could Joe Public be pushed? What worked? What didn’t work?
Certainly at the beginning of the lockdown and the health crisis reaction the Government had more behavioural insights experts in situ than they did experts in the field of virology. What does that tell us? Indeed, the infamous Mr. Whitty did a complete about turn from his reassuring statements at the beginning to more of a message of scare tactics, but that was glossed over and forgotten. I haven’t had a lot of interest in the leaking of WhatsApp messages sent by Matt Hancock, but as a general message they back up the fact that the intention was to provoke extreme fear within the population – the Messenger, the Incentive, the Affect and the Priming parts of the Mindspace document. Once you have been primed the fear sends the individual into survival mode – but the goal has been achieved. You have believed the lie and now your actions are based on how you will survive this rather than logic.
Mars in Gemini symbolises propaganda. Propaganda is designed to support a particular narrative which may not be true, but with Mars exactly square Neptune we know that there is unlikely to be very little truth about. We must assume that the type of psychological persuasion I have been talking about has been used to cover not just a health crisis but also current fear driven issues - war in Ukraine and climate change – as well as issues such as gender fluidity all designed to divide, obfuscate and drill away at traditional family life. In Orwell’s 1984 there was always fear of war – an endless war which enabled the ruling class to remain in power because the war had to be fought, whilst the lower classes felt powerless and afraid. More recently claims of economic and socio-political dangers, which would result from a particular political status quo, fuelled the usage of the phrase ‘Project Fear’. This appeared during the 2014 Scottish Independence Referendum and the 2016 Brexit exercise and would in turn lead to descriptions of scaremongering and misinformation. Fear is a great way to keep a population in check. In 1933 when Hitler ascended to power Goebbels set up a whole propaganda machine taking over radio, press and cinema. Keep a population in fear and they will be much more easily controlled. Nothing much seems to have changed and the information that we access is only what we are required to see; anything else is just wrongspeak, disinformation and the work of conspiracy theorists! Why were the likes of Huxley and Orwell so accurate in their works of fiction? Because they moved within the same social circles as the technocrats and the eugenicists who had these visions for the society of the future. They were writing about what was familiar.
I had intended to cover Pluto’s entry into Aquarius in this blog, but I have run out of time and space. Suffice to say that it will have an impact on the manipulation of our minds and how AI will be used in the future. That does not have to be the technocrats’ vision – that will be up to society. However, as I said, for the UK, Pluto’s entry will impact the ruler of the UK’s second house – our finances and our assets. And what have we seen? The aftershocks of the collapse of Silicone Valley Bank continue to reverberate, although in the UK many will feel it doesn’t concern us. However, it does. What it shows is the precarious position of financial institutions after a prolonged period of low/zero interest rates, unending money printing and the resulting high inflation. Many of these financial institutions are on life support already – some more than others and some indeed will be the ones you think are too big to fail. You may think a too big to fail foreign bank such as Credit Suisse doesn’t concern you either. But it does. It may well have been sold to UBS but that does not mean its troubles are over. A lack of confidence could still affect the bond market which in turn would affect pensions as well as derivatives and probably a lot lot more. We must remember the too big to fail Lehmann Brothers which had such a big impact in the 2008 recession. Both Joe Biden in the US and Jeremy Hunt here in the UK have told the public their money is safe, with Hunt adding confidently that the UK will categorially ‘not enter a technical recession this year’. My ears homed in on the word technical there! And if they say we are safe then it’s unlikely we are. Not with Mars in Gemini square Neptune.
Do we believe them? I don’t for sure. All this propaganda and obfuscation means that we have no idea who to trust any more. And this brings about the kind of spiritual crisis that has been playing out within humanity; we see it in the amount of mental anguish. Why do I say we have a choice as AI develops? Because all the institutional attention is on our brains – the brains in our heads. However, we think and feel with our hearts and our guts as well. That is the contested human domain. Our souls are being tested and likely about to be tested even more. That is the Ego part of the Mindspace document. Destroy the individual ego. If there is an annihilation of all that we have believed in, we may be about to enter a dark night of the soul[5]. We have to experience that dark night to attain a rebirth. Only ‘when everything is lost, and all seems darkness, then comes the new life and all that is needed’.[6] Only then can there be a ‘radiant dawn’ and the true meeting with the divine. We may have to go through more in order for our guts and hearts to realise and understand. Then we can meet the radiant dawn and awaken.
[1] https://www.instituteforgovernment.org.uk/sites/default/files/publications/MINDSPACE.pdf
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iJur92I5dBk
[3] https://www.nato.int/docu/review/articles/2021/05/20/countering-cognitive-warfare-awareness-and-resilience/index.html
[4] http://www.synesisjournal.com/vol2_no2_t1/Forsythe_Giordano_2011_2_1.pdf
[5] Khan, Hazrat Inayat. Thinking Like The Universe: The Sufi Path Of Awakening.
[6] Campbell, Joseph. Reflections on the Art of Living: A Joseph Campbell Companion.