Tension between government and citizenship

Contributions that can help to understand the ‘lockdown’and the authoritative deployment of the state pretending to defend public health.

In this article we would like to start with information from Wikipedia about the retired Professor Rainer Mausfeld (Iserlohn, 22. December 1949), Professor of Psychology at the University of Kiel. His scientific specialties are the psychology of perception and cognitive science as well as the history of psychology. Since 2015 he has been publishing on manipulation techniques in the media and in politics, and on the transformation, as perceived by him, from representative democracy to a neoliberal elite democracy.

In his 2015 publication in German (3rd ed. 2018) Why are the lambs silent? He studies how elitist democracy and neoliberalism destroy our society and our foundations of life. Mausfeld argues that the conceptual content of democracy and freedom have been distorted in a way reminiscent of George Orwell. In its present form, representative democracy is simply an “electoral oligarchy” and political freedom in Mausfeld’s view is rather the power of the economically strong.18

In his critical analysis of democracy, he draws, among other things, on the work of Ingeborg Maus and Alex Carey. The power of the new elite, which is primarily the financial elite, is produced by new forms of power transformation and by the manipulation of consciousness, to “make power invisible”.19 In his view, the media play a decisive role in this manipulation.20 Neoliberalism, according to Mausfeld, is a rational ideology that has managed to surreptitiously establish itself as a narrative framework and assert itself as a seemingly “no alternative” interpretation of reality.21

The three main factors of this strategy are propaganda (opinion management), which produces information overload, fragmentation and decontextualization/recontextualization of messages. The result of these factors is that real events become invisible.22

Phenomena of a “deep state” as manifestations of authoritarian capitalism (2017)[edit].

The Mausfeld essay in his anthology “Facade of Democracy and the Deep State. On the Road to an Authoritarian Era “,23 edited by Ulrich Mies and Jens Wernicke, argues the thesis that representative democracy was invented for the express purpose “of denying people the capacity for self-legislation as well as the right to be an independent political actor.” “The current centers of power are largely invisible to the people and democratically unelectable, are not subject to accountability for their actions, and are organized in an extremely authoritarian manner.”

According to Mausfeld, the question of how domination is organized can be answered empirically: the actual centers of political power, according to known research24 lies far beyond any democratic control and at the same time these centers of power will determine practically all fundamental political decisions. With the judgment of the German Federal Agency for Civic Education on the question of whether a form of government should be described as a democracy, Mausfeld sees in current empirical analyses evidence that “Western capitalist democracies are in fact a novel form of totalitarian government.”

However, he rejects the conception of a “deep state,” as presented by Mike Lofgren, as too simplistic, since this term “too concretely attributes causes to personal categories,” leading to the mystification of the real and more subtle mechanisms of inner social control.

Mechanisms of manipulation in the media[edit].

– States facts as if they were opinions.

– Fragments the representation of related facts in their background, so that their meaningful relationship or context is lost.

– Decontextualizes facts by separating them from their natural context, so that isolated singular cases appear.

– Recontextualizes facts in another context in such a way that they lose their original meaning.

C o m m e n t a r y s

The paradigm shift

Prof. Mausfeld’s academic opinions are based on a materialistic inclination, which gives rise to an excessively pessimistic view of the relationship between political authority and the human masses, in which fear predominates.

However, it must be recognized that human behavior is inclined to immorality, as we have mentioned in our three articles on moral good and evil on this site. At the political level, this evil is extremely visible and manifest, which explains why the aforementioned pessimism tends to be cultivated.

The appearance of weapons of mass destruction in both world wars has unfortunately placed in the hands of the State the possibility of increasing its power. To achieve this, Russia and Germany have inoculated their peoples with Marxist and Nazi ideologies respectively, which have led to the greatest slaughter in history: 120 million deaths, including the victims of communism worldwide. This event has such a factual vehemence, that it is logical to be interested in what Prof. Mausfeld tells us about today’s unprecedented state and supra-state power, thanks to digital technology. Artificial intelligence is in the hands of companies and the state a means of surveillance, control and manipulation without precedent in history.

Democracy as a curtain of concealment

Mausfeld says that attempts at democracy in history have always degenerated into tricks and traps of the rulers, implemented under the beautiful cloak of democracy. He tells us, that at bottom, every democracy is in fact an oligarchic government. Especially the Nazi propaganda has developed precisely manipulative systems, based on science, to make the people believe lies or situations adapted to their political interests.

Prof. Mausfeld says that today, the people or the masses are treated as a flock of lambs, making everyone believe that they are free. This is thanks to the propaganda of the State or of the large social networks, which inculcate in citizens a materialistic conception of themselves, as lambs that only seek pleasures and the satisfaction of their material needs. This control also comes to change the content of the concepts themselves, as we see now in genderism, where words such as man, woman, freedom, justice, etc. have undergone a change of content.

Why the lambs are silent

Mausfeld thinks that the lambs allow themselves to be managed and directed out of fear of losing their own niche in the welfare provided by the open economy. Admittedly, never in history has man lived as well as he has in the last fifty years, thanks to the rule of law, technology and the digitalization of production processes. But man is, as it were, obnubilated by the images that continually affect him from TV and social networks, determining his growing alienation, which seeks globalist equalization at all levels.

At the last Davos Economic Forum, we have all seen the programmatic statements of its founder, Dr. Schwab. He has said that the world needs to be subjected to a ‘re-set’ or a new world order, in which people will ‘have nothing and be happy’. What is interesting is that Schwab and his people spoke with a certain air of representativeness on behalf of the world, without anyone having given them any legitimacy to do so.

The manipulative process

Today we see that there is an enormous accumulation of power, which consists of the alliance of common interests of the great world capital, which controls 40% of the world economy – this we have presented in our article ´The economic manipulation at world level´ ( La manipulación económica a nivel mundial).  This power, managed by the 20 richest men in the world, has managed to penetrate over time in the control of the FED, the International Monetary Fund, the UN and its dependent bodies and the European Union. They also have many followers in the governments of large nations. Mausfeld says that the deep state, so often attacked by President Trump, is something rather systemic, the genesis of which is the result of the possibilities of influence that digital technology allows.

Everything we have seen, for more than a year, around the coronavirus, indeed gives the impression of a global management, with homogeneous methods and ways of acting. Protests and scientific criticisms – as in the case of the Barrington Declaration – have been silenced by the mainstream media or have been denigrated or ridiculed. To see this, just google, for example, ‘doctors for truth’, the Barrington Declaration itself, or Jordan Peterson.

Incubation of ideologies

The Nazis, in order to persecute the Jews, have previously had to tell the people that they are subhuman, that they are evil and responsible for almost all the evils of the world. Before, the Bolshevik revolution of 1917 made its own the nefarious ideology of Karl Marx, formulated in his book Das Kapital.

Then, almost fifty years ago, the Club of Rome began to spread the ideology of the great scarcity of natural resources for the survival of the human race. As soon as it became clear that this lie could not be sustained in the face of the facts, the ecological ideology was introduced in its various versions (C02, warming, endangered biosphere, etc.). This narrative has recently been reinforced with the story of genderism, with the equating of gay unions with the traditional family and with the support of abortions and sex education of children in schools. These strategies are deeply Orwellian and are intended to enslave citizens and to stifle their rights and freedoms guaranteed by the constitutions.

Seeing all this it may be useful to read Prof. Mausfeld, above, in the Wikipedia presentation, because it offers many links that may be useful.