Welsh Countryside

One of the more pathologically interesting recent trends in journalism — it’s been going on for about the last 30 years — is creating new nominally ethical, but actually classic double-bind rules about what pictures, depicting people involved, that should be shown in stories. Pictures of any sort are very interesting from a neurogenic perspective, because they enter through one of most evolved pieces of hardware in the brain — the visual cortex. And because our evolutionary history is such that we “see” something, and then act on it, there are ingrained patterns in the visual cortex about risk evaluation to our persons that inherently happen there, or adjacent.

I can’t remember when it started exactly, but the shift seemed to occur with covering murders or school shootings. The ostensibly virtuous crowd said “we shouldn’t put the picture of the shooter up! We should honor the victims!” And while on the surface, that seems nice, it’s a diabolical hack on how the brain works. The brain WANTS to recognize threats. And when you put up a picture of slaughtered schoolchildren, all you do is provide traumatic pattern-matching for parents, while at the same time, avoiding any real information transmission to the larger body politic on where the problem actually is.

Certainly this is done with random murders. Like it or not, the vast majority of murders are committed by black males in their teens and twenties. But you can see how this might go against the agendas of those looking to cover up this chronic problem, which sadly affects individuals in the black community more than anyone.

Worse, you start shifting the larger meta-meaning of pictures in general. If the only pictures that are shown, over time, are victims, the brain can be trained to then believe anyone having their photo taken in a violent situation is a victim. Context is established merely through publication.

Recently, in the contested street violence in Minneapolis, MN, over Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), the media has been portraying various protestors, especially in static photo form, as victims. But if you watch any of the plethora of videos, you’ll not see peaceful protests, nor protestors. What you WILL see is a selection of people (primarily middle-aged white women) behaving like monkeys laced with methamphetamine, screaming at the top of their lungs, at ICE agents attempting to arrest illegal immigrants. This particular cadre of illegal immigrants is not law-abiding. There is a current amnesty policy for these immigrants that if they self-deport, they will be given a free plane ticket and $3000 for their troubles. That means you can expect the ones that refuse the deal to also be fugitives, and will run like hell when the noose closes.

And they do, which then interjects screaming meth monkey protestors in with the Running Man. The ICE agents are actually in the middle of the mess. And if you know much about any arrest scenario, it is never gentle. Chris Rock, the famous comedian, has said “if you run from the police, expect to get an ass-whooping.” The fact that the middle-aged female meth monkey contingent are surprised by any of this shows how insulated they are from reality.

Here’s where the psychopathy of the press comes in. The press is all down with Collapse Narratives — promoting stories that will generate societal collapse — so the recent inversion of photographic meaning suits their purposes to a T. The Minneapolis Star-Tribune ran this picture on their front page.

Now consider past programming. Your instantaneous reaction is this person must be a victim, and experiencing violence for no other reason than ICE is evil. That is the result of the endless conditioning discussed above. And here’s the ambiguity — I don’t know the exact environmental conditions at the time of this photo. But the fact that the photographer can get in so close to an arrest scenario guarantees that ICE is actually remarkably restrained. And if this guy ended up getting this treatment, I guarantee he was going full “meth monkey” before ICE tossed him to the ground and immobilized him.

Lots of psychopathic things are going on just in this scenario. Abuse of the definition of what a 1st Amendment right to protest is one of them. But the whole thing is not as emergent as it seems. Photographers AND movement activists manipulate circumstances to win public opinion. In his book David and Goliath, Malcolm Gladwell even discussed the history in the Civil Rights movement that had psychopathic staging generated by activist Wyatt Walker , which generated the famous photos of children being attacked by dogs in 1963 Birmingham.

The bottom line is the same, of course. Psychopathic manipulation using reversed core psychology is everywhere in our media markets. The goal of all of this is to make you believe that things are what you think you see, where your native instincts provide the context. But it’s that preying on your hardware that’s going on. And it’s almost always to get you to act against your interests. Like an anglerfish dangling its bait in front of your hapless face, the goal is to swallow you whole.