Past warnings about the evils of media and technology that led to bullying and torture today
“Stop the intimidation, incarceration, torture, and murder of justice fighters. Join the fight against The Bully!”
This year (2024), June 26 is the International Day in Support of Victims of Torture. November 2 is the International Day to End Impunity for Crimes Against Journalists, and November 4 is the International Day Against School Violence and Bullying. In Britain, November 13-17 is Anti-Bullying Week.
In observance of the above important dates, the Solace Team empathizes with all innocent torture and bullying victims around the world, especially those persecuted simply because they are doing their job, standing up for their beliefs, or reporting on the truth, including:
advocates against injustice
journalists
human rights lawyers
social workers
activists
political prisoners
dissidents opposing authoritarianism
freedom fighters
the clergy, missionaries, and laypeople subjected to religious oppression
members of the LGBTQI+ community ostracized for their status and lifestyle
the people of Afghanistan, Ukraine, Syria, Lebanon, Iran, Somalia, and innocent residents of other war-torn countries and regions enduring political upheaval
In solidarity with them, we are printing, with the author’s permission, a commentary based on the prophetic writings of science fiction authors Aldous Huxley [1] and George Orwell [2]. This op-ed is a chapter in the book, The Invisible Cyber Bully: What it’s like to be watched 24/7, by Expat Scribe. It spotlights the warnings from both Huxley and Orwell about the consequences of allowing media platforms to gain control of society that could lead to violations against human rights, including:
unsanctioned surveillance of ordinary citizens
illegal collection of DNA from persons of interest
psychological and physical torture of individuals opposed to the ruling party
the arrest of dissidents and even innocent residents upon mere suspicion and without due process (similar to the policy in Tom Cruise’s movie based on Philip K. Dick’s novella, The Minority Report)
mass manipulation through subliminal projection and mind control
An example of the last item is the surreptitious maneuvering of national elections favoring the entity doing the controlling, which could lead to the incarceration and torture of members of the losing party and oppositionists to the new regime.
What tools are used in the covert manipulation of the masses? In the 1950s, they had advertising, radio, print publications, movies, and TV. In the 21st century, we have social media… and now, AI—artificial intelligence. Take heed, my friends!
Nota bene: The bully the author talked about in her book was the organizational and authoritarian kind, eg, democratic-governmental, law enforcement, totalitarian regimes, cyber criminals, etc. This is why she capitalized that word. Whenever she referred to “the Enemy, Bully, and Torturer,” she used the pronoun “it” because she defined it as “both an invisible entity and an organization consisting of an indeterminate and ever-changing number of members.”
She said she used the masculine pronoun to describe the Bully “only for economy of language” and “not a dismissal of other genders.”
In reality, bullies (and torturers) she said, “come in many shapes and sizes: male, female, non-binary, separatist groups, insurrectionists, religious or political factions, tyrants, SMEs, corporations, friends, family, neighbors, colleagues, bosses, mentors… and governing bodies.”
Following is the book excerpt…
Aldous Huxley [1] and George Orwell [2] are two of my favorite authors.
They’re awe-inspiring because, in their most important (albeit controversial) works, they foretold events happening in this century despite writing them in the 1930s through the 1950s. These books are significant to my ordeal with the Bully because the incidents in them have an eerie correlation to its torture tactics. Both writers forecast what would happen in terms of totalitarianism; mass subjugation and manipulation; mind control; and authorities’ blanket surveillance of ordinary citizens.
The Dark Side of Technology
In his 1955 interview with Mike Wallace [3] on the TV show, 60 Minutes, Huxley said, “A number of impersonal forces” and devices, especially television, were “accelerating the process” of imposing control or impinging on freedom. He said the telly was “harmless at the moment but being used too much to distract everybody all the time”—the way the internet and social media are influencing most of us today.
In an ominous prediction, Huxley said we must not be caught by surprise by our own advancing technology because it changes the social condition. Otherwise, “We will one day find ourselves in a situation we didn’t foresee, doing all sorts of things we don’t want to do.”
He told Wallace’s audience to guard against the misuse of TV because, in communist countries, it was an immensely powerful propaganda instrument used to create “a one-pointed drumming in of a single idea all the time, not creating a wide front of distraction.” Hitler, for instance, used brainwashing, extreme fear, savage force, and radio to foist his will on an entire populace. Imagine if TV had been widely available then!
1984
Another science fiction writer who prognosticated the consequences of TV’s dark side was George Orwell. In his book (also made into a movie), 1984, he spoke of a dystopian society where each household had monitors called “telescreens” that periodically broadcast party propaganda. The visual display units also doubled as security cameras by which the government monitored and communicated directly with its citizens, like admonishing those who failed to take part in the mandatory daily morning exercises.
Reiterating his warning about technology use, Huxley added, “All technology is in itself morally neutral—power that can either be used well or ill.” He aligned it to atomic/nuclear energy, which we could use to either exterminate our neighbors or as an alternative to our dwindling oil and gas reserves.
Despite significant progress in the space race, humans still have a long way to go in harnessing and applying sustainable energy in daily life on earth. Current developments aren’t sufficient to permanently switch to it from fossil fuels. This is why Russian President Vladimir Putin can hold Europe hostage. His nation supplies most of their fuel. Regrettably, the entity that controls the energy reserves of our planet will be the one to ultimately rule it.
Mind Control Drugs
In his 1932 book, A Brave New World, Huxley tackled using drugs for mind control. He himself experimented with psychedelic drugs in 1953 and wrote about it in The Doors of Perception the next year. The fictional drug ‘SOMA’ in his first book could make one happy with small doses, hallucinate with medium ones, and doze off with large quantities. He “didn’t think such a drug exists nor will it ever exist.”
But today, they do. Drugs that profoundly alter our mental states have existed since before the global wars, used by the authorities (and non-authorities) against enemies, suspects, criminals, POWs, insurgents, anarchists, and even their own nationals.
Huxley acknowledged that (US pharmacology in the 1950s) was in the midst of a revolution, with the potential to produce powerful mind-altering drugs but which were not as “physiologically and morally” deleterious as cocaine or opium. Nevertheless, there’s enough evidence to foresee the potential pernicious applications of pharmacological technology. That’s why it’s necessary to preempt and thwart these and other methods of propaganda. “The price of freedom is perpetual vigilance,” he concluded.
Dictatorship of the Future
George Orwell wrote 1984 at the peak of (Josef) Stalin’s regime. In the book, he seemed to have foreseen an autocracy using propaganda, violence, and intimidation, but he was essentially describing the sociopolitical setting in the former USSR (Union of Soviet Socialist Republics) at that time. Regardless of geographical location, if a tyrant intends to preserve his power indefinitely, he has to secure his constituents’ consent. This is what Putin desperately wants from the Ukrainians—which they refuse to surrender.
During their tenure, Stalin and Hitler were unable to totally break their people’s free will, so they seized it using nefarious means like drugs and propaganda. However, unlike them, Putin had a thorn poking him: social media, which he couldn’t control. So he slammed all its platforms and concentrated on the more manipulable TV medium to spread misinformation and reinforce his rule.
In Huxley’s prediction, future autocrats will seize control of the masses by “bypassing the rational side of man and appealing to his subconscious, deeper emotion, and even physiology, making him love his slavery.” This method is treacherous because residents are led to believe they’re content under the new regime “but may also be happy in situations where they ought not be.”
In his dystopian sphere, Orwell also unpropitiously referred to a similar technique employed by Big Brother to subjugate the masses. Residents were forced unawares to accept and eventually be gratified with their situation, however dire. Incredibly, such is the current situation in today’s Russia, where pockets of the populace, particularly the older generations, believe that Putin is liberating their Ukrainian brothers and sisters from the neo-Nazis and not subjugating them.
Subliminal Projection
Wallace asked Huxley in that 1955 interview if a totalitarian system could take place in the USA in the next 25 years. Huxley replied, “I think it could. It’s extremely important to start thinking about these problems.”
His supposition wasn’t tentative but was based on new devices that were being developed then, like those deploying subliminal projection. He knew professionals who did psychological experiments. He said that like TV, advances in medical technology were not a danger at that time, but once (scientists) established that something worked, they would surely use it to some extent. The potential to control and manipulate wasn’t limited to drugs. It went as far as publicity and mass marketing.
The Evils of Advertising
Huxley was a vehement critic of Madison Avenue (the domain of American advertising at that time) for their methods of underhanded persuasion. He foresaw ad experts using them to machinate US politics. Autocratic propagandists allegedly applied them in the 1960 and 1964 election campaigns, undermining democracy’s dependence on the individual making an intelligent, enlightened, and rational choice.
Huxley explained that if subliminal projection was applied in an election, “People will be persuaded below the level of choice and reason to vote for a candidate they don’t know.” For example, if spin doctors coached the right money-backed candidate to look amiable and sincere, victory would be imminent. Political principles would fall to the wayside in favor of that contender’s personality and how his advertisers “packaged” him. Trouble is, not everyone who looks and sounds good on screen can be trusted with the governance of a nation.
I’m equating the type of persuasion used by the advertising industry to what the Bully is doing to me. It’s manipulating my decisions as well as those of people close to me in the hope that their actions will affect me negatively. I’ve enumerated many instances of this kind of interference.
Starting Them Early
In an essay, Huxley discussed the link between political TV commercials and the perils of a dictatorship. Authoritarians’ manipulative use of media persuasion can start as early as childhood because children are much more open to suggestion than grown-ups. More importantly, they will become voting adults one day.
During World War II, advertising pundits called European children “cannon fodder”—pawns to be expended in war—while their American counterparts were viewed as “television and radio fodder.” With World War III imminent, today’s youth, regardless of where they live, are their internet and social media equivalents.
That information might be shocking, but trade journals at the height of the advertising boom actually extolled the benefits of targeting children because they would be loyal brand buyers when they grew up. Concomitantly, dictators around the globe indoctrinated followers in their childhood. By the time their charges became adults, their tyrannical ideologies would have been permanently ensconced into the psyche of their new underlings, thereby creating formidable armies they could command at will.
An example of this juvenile indoctrination that instilled the need to conform from childhood was “Hitler Youth,” [4] a systematic and organized form of mind control masquerading as mass education.
Brainwashing
Huxley claimed that in China and Russia (during his time), oppressors applied violent propaganda to brainwash captives. They used atrocious methods on political prisoners as well as to the training of young communists, managers, and preachers. The incredibly stringent indoctrination allegedly caused a fourth of one group to break down or kill themselves. Yet, despite the brutality (or because of it), the rest turned out to be single-minded fanatics.
In contrast, advertising doesn’t have a specific target. Rather, it aims to reach the broadest possible audience. But the objective is the same: it dismantles an individual’s physiology and psychology until he breaks down, enabling the brainwasher to implant a new idea in his head.
When Huxley expounded on the danger of the manipulative use of TV and advertising, he was merely warning the audience about the threat. Little did he know that decades later, it would become a reality. Certain groups and individuals are now using these instruments, in addition to extremely efficient new ones (social media) to impose their power over the masses.
Predicting Totalitarianism in the 21st Century
Orwell’s 1984, the grandaddy of all dystopias, systematized certain ideas, principles, and terminologies that later gave rise to contemporary dystopian themes and tropes:
total control of mass communications
hegemony—absolute dominance over an entire populace
silencing/incarcerating/murdering freedom fighters, oppositionists, dissenters, and anarchists
jargon such as Big Brother [5], thoughtcrime [6], Newspeak [7], and doublethink [8]
In 1984’s imaginary world, totalitarianism killed individualism and mangled history to suit itself. The ruling party tried to control the speech, actions, and thoughts of its citizens. This is eerily like the current climate in a certain nation that illegally occupied another. I also believe this is what the Enemy is trying to do to me and its other test subjects on a personal level—but only in preparation for something much bigger: supremacy and control over multitudes.
Even if I didn’t bring up Orwell’s and Huxley’s most controversial novels, they’ve already had a resurgence in pop culture, anyway. That’s because the events the authors depicted in their fictional realms evoked parallelism in what’s currently happening in our society and century.
Orwell’s 1984 alone foreshadowed government mass surveillance over citizens despite the author not having lived to see the development of the internet, social media, sophisticated espionage equipment, and policies that predominate, suppress, and tyrannize the masses.
In his piece, Inside the Whale, he warned, “We are moving into an age of totalitarian dictatorships in which freedom of thought will be at first a deadly sin and later on, a meaningless abstraction. The autonomous individual is going to be stamped out of existence.”
Gaslighting
To gaslight is to psychologically manipulate a person into questioning his sanity.
The concept originated from the 1944 movie, Gaslight, where the antagonist influenced his wife into believing she was going insane.
Although Orwell didn’t assign a specific term to that method of persuasion, he presented a form of it in 1984. After the protagonist was physically tortured when caught disobeying the law, his party leader subjected him to “rehabilitation.” This involved “curing” his “faulty” memory that made him remember events the government said never happened.
The party leader accused the protagonist of not properly managing his perceptions of reality, so that he thought the things he saw were real. So the torturer systematically deconstructed all his memories that weren’t “acceptable.” That resulted in the victim asking himself if the events he remembered really happened or if he simply imagined them. His abuser pushed this logic on him: “If your only access to reality is through your own perceptions, couldn’t your perceptions be wrong?” The point of all that was to bring about an existential crisis in the tormented.
In the same vein, the Bully gaslighted me with similar tactics, asking that very same question. Its purpose was to make me doubt incidents I had experienced and remembered even if they were real.
A variant of gaslighting is spreading misinformation—the equivalent of fake news—to the individual consumer. To this day, the Bully also continuously feeds me convincing information (often contradictory to what I believe in) via traditional media, the internet, and social media to change my current perception. Thankfully, God helped me resist, through logic and independent thought, the detrimental ramifications of gaslighting.
Room 101
In 1984, Room 101 was the most horrific torture chamber of all. This was where the “rehabilitation” of dissidents took place. It was the final step in the total molding of the “former” individual into a pliable and compliant automaton. But first, they were “broken” physically, mentally, and spiritually, then subsequently “re-educated” to be fully compliant.
Incidentally, Iran’s theocratic regime is currently subjecting young protesters defying strict religious rules—particularly regarding the hijab (headscarf)—to a similar treatment. In its report, the Education Ministry called it “re-education in learning institutions,” but Reza Aslan, author of An American Martyr in Persia, called them “psychological camps.” The government implemented that initiative after the morality police conducted mass arrests [9] in schools on October 10, 2022. The detained kids were participants in the nationwide uprising in reaction to the death of Mahsa Amini while in custody for violating the dress code.
I think the same “breaking and molding” agenda is slowly and systematically being implemented on me and other test subjects in secret experiments. The Enemy is testing its technology on individuals in preparation for a large-scale application.
It designed its Room 101 to be intangible, whereas Orwell’s was literal. The punishment chamber in 1984 was an actual room where the torturer recreated its occupants’ worst nightmares. The party leader who tortured the protagonist capitalized on his phobia of rats. In the same way, the Bully focused on my fear of cockroaches.
The objective of Room 101 was to break down the last vestige of the enslaved’s sanity—the singular component that still clung to genuine reality and one’s original personality and beliefs. The dismantling of that remaining element signaled the conclusion of the torture and the subject’s complete re-assimilation into the ruling party.
Everyday is Room 101 for me. The Enemy placed it in my consciousness as a venue from which it could launch its torture. After I revisited Orwell’s book (I read it when I was a teen) and finished the section that discussed said torture chamber, the priest at mass that Sunday referred to the number 101 in his sermon. He talked about an unrelated matter, as in Plumbing 101, but his mentioning it was an allusion to what I had been reading at that time. It was the Enemy’s way of taunting me that it monitors everything I do.
Absolutism: the Final Goal
An ongoing theme in most dystopian stories is totalitarianism manifested in an evil, all-powerful empire subjugating its denizens. The authors of these tomes meant them to be fictional, yet decades later, many of the events they had written about had come to fruition. I focused on Huxley and Orwell because I read their work, but other writers had written about similar topics.
Authoritarianism has many components, but the following come to mind because they hold a parallelism to my real-life experiences with enemy torture:
Helplessness and hopelessness—human states every despot desires his subjects will assume, putting them at his complete mercy
Strict obedience to authority—at the expense of personal and national freedom
Elimination of individuality—Rulers deprive their citizens of their identity, rendering them unable to question anything fed to them.
State of confusion—Joost Meerlo, in his opus, Rape of the Mind, revealed that people under totalitarian rule reported the loss of logic as their most disconcerting experience. They felt that nothing was valid anymore, so they couldn’t determine which was true or not.
Instilling fear as a strategy—Meerlo added that autocrats, whether left-wing or right-wing, used fear via mass hysteria to perplex their subjects and create chaos in their environment. [Editor: This has already happened in our time with regard to global events surrounding the COVID pandemic.]
Nurturing hypocrisy and lies—Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, in his book, The Gulag Archipelago, talked about the “safety net” of lies. They were essential for survival in an oppressive environment where everyone was monitored. The persecutor made available to the public a collection of readymade phrases and labels that did not contradict already established lies. In today’s political environment, if you find yourself trapped—I mean, “living” in a country where the elected victor isn’t your choice, it will be necessary to keep up appearances or pretend to believe in the ruling governance just to survive. In other words, like it or not, you’ll also learn to nurture hypocrisy and lies the way the inmates at Gulag [10] did, many years ago.
Transformation into automatons—It’s highly desirable for tyrants to turn their constituents into robots incapable of independent thought, creative endeavor, resistance, and rebellion. I can see this now in the younger generations of Pandorymia and Cirqonia.
Nationalized memory—In Totalitarianism & the Lie, Leszek Kolakowski said this is the objective of autocratic regimes. They want the personal or collective memories of their people to be nationalized, so they can be easily controlled.
Brainwashing and the alteration of history—One cataclysmic effect of mass brainwashing through social media was exposed when several foreign broadcast networks reported on the opinions of millennials and Generation Zs in Pandorymia after their national elections. The reporters asked their interviewees what they thought of the martial law imposed in the 1970s. Most of them said it was “a good thing” that led to their country’s prosperity.
It is infuriatingly scandalous to note that these kids aren’t aware of the multitudes of oppositionists to the (then) prime minister who were tortured, jailed, or executed without due process. My family was living in Iarqat during the martial law era, but I knew what happened then because I read—something many youngsters these days are loathe to do. And because Linystra’s father, a prominent politician and lawyer, was one of the dissidents unjustly incarcerated.
Lamentably, Pandorymia’s youth have been shielded from comprehending the mass curtailment of freedom and democracy during that period.
That’s because that blight in the nation’s character had been scrubbed clean. All the execrable events were conveniently stamped out of the nation’s online history (and the personalities responsible for them were either exonerated, hidden, or exiled) to suit the winner of the election—who just happened to be a direct relation of said ruler.
The unmitigated success of the fraudulent, unscrupulous, and underhanded mutilation of history could be attributed to the reality that most of Pandorymia’s younger generations do not read the printed word and instead depend on online data for their daily needs. They don’t research questionable information and accept it as presented to them, as long as it’s through their beloved platforms like Facebook.
Again, this is a direct, real-life manifestation of Orwell’s prophesy. It’s a parallel exemplification of the ruling party’s deceptive manipulation of history in his fictional realm.
It is possible for all the above elements coming to fruition on a global scale in the coming months or years if the Enemy is allowed to complete its experiments on individuals like me. If successful, it will certainly move on to implementing the results on the world’s unsuspecting populations.
—From the chapter titled “Aldous & George: Parallelism & Analogy—Part 2,” reproduced by the Solace Team with permission from the author
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Expat Scribe is the author of the psychological techno-thriller, “The Invisible Cyber Bully: What it’s like to be watched 24/7.”
The novel tackles the surreptitious bullying and illegal surveillance, DNA-extraction, psychological torture of, and experimentation on ordinary citizens by law enforcers, scientific laboratories, various “hidden” associations, and global authorities. Some chapters discuss the garden-variety bully from schools and neighborhoods. The book also features a primer on how to fight cyber bullying.
“The Invisible Cyber Bully“ is available on Amazon worldwide in ebook and print edition. For a list of bookstores in other countries that stock this book, click here.
Footnotes:
[1] UK novelist, essay writer, and social critic Aldous Leonard Huxley (1894–1963) was most popular for Antic Hay (1923), A Brave New World (1932), The Doors of Perception (1954), and Enemies of Freedom, a series of essays. Mike Wallace of CBS News called him the “prophet of decentralization.”
[2] George Orwell is the pseudonym of Eric Arthur Blair (1903–1950), an Indian-born British novelist and essayist who specialized in writing about social injustice. His most famous books were Animal Farm (1945) and 1984 (1949).
[3] Myron “Mike” Leon Wallace (1918–2012) was a CBS News correspondent and host of the TV news program, 60 Minutes.
[4] Dawson, Jeffery. “Mind Control: Manipulation, Deception and Persuasion Exposed”. 2014.
[5] The personification and public manifestation of a nation’s governing body or ruling party
[6] The illegal act of harboring unexpressed beliefs questioning or opposing one’s rulers
[7] Newspeak (as opposed to Oldspeak or standard English) is a made-up but simplistic official language exclusive to party members that limits ideas, diminishes one’s vocabulary, and discourages independent thought.
[8] The practice of simultaneously accepting two contrasting beliefs as correct without being aware of the contradiction
[9] From Amnesty International’s reports and the October 13, 2022 episode of Democracy Now!
[10] A Soviet complex of forced-labor camps (1930 to 1955) where many perished
Photo and Video Credits:
statue wearing red kerchief: Ahmed S
bully video: Dante T
Aldous Huxley: Henri Manuel; Wikimedia Commons
big screen: Adrien Olichon
George Orwell: Cassowary Colorizations, CC by 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons
medicine ampule: Artem Podrez
man in chains: efes
microscope: Chokniti Khongchum
children’s feet: Ben Wicks
old man’s brain: Pramit Marattha
woman with a blurred mouth: Ivan Pretorius
torture device: Peggy and Marco Lachmann-Anke
masked doctor and globe: Anna Shvets
prisoners of war: mailme6
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