Reprinted from Meridian Magazine (19 Apr 2007).
©2007 by John P. Pratt. All rights Reserved.
| 1. Rejection of Truth |
| 2. Blindness Conditioning |
| 2.1 Desensitize by Inundation |
| 2.2 Gradualism |
| 2.3 Deceptive Definitions |
| 2.4 Falsify History |
| 2.5 Stifle All Opposition |
| 2.6 False Peer Pressure |
| 3. Examples |
| 3.1 Socialism |
| 3.2 Evolution |
| 3.3 Marketing Evil |
| 4. Conclusion |
| Notes |
The previous article in this column discussed "How Can We Know Truth?" It concluded that we should not depend too much on any one method, but rather would have the best chance of being right when our inspired feelings and our detailed mental analysis agreed.[1] But we all know cases where the truth is right in front of people and yet they are blind to it. And someone else might have looked at us and wondered why we could not see the obvious. Let us now consider the question of just why people cannot see plain truth when it should be as unmistakable as the noonday sun.
Reader discretion is advised: this article implies that nearly all of us have believed at least some lies and fallen into traps set by wicked, deceitful men. Hence, to the extent that you too have been deceived, this article might be upsetting to your world view. All of the views expressed herein are strictly those of the author and do not represent the official position of this magazine nor of any church.
|
The Lord said, "My spirit shall not always strive with man" (Gen. 6:3). We are all born with a conscience which tells us right from wrong, and which can reveal truth to us, as discussed in the last article. When we continually ignore it, that still, small voice gets even softer until finally we cannot hear it at all.
 |
Why is it that knowing the truth can make one free? What is the relationship between truth and freedom? This is a deep subject which could be a book, but there is one scripture which throws much light on the subject:
And he became Satan, yea, even the devil, the father of all lies, to deceive and to blind men, and to lead them captive at his will, even as many as would not hearken unto my voice. (Moses 4:4)
Thus, Satan's purpose is to deceive and to blind men so that he can lead them captive, and he is successful with those who do not hearken unto the voice of God. This explains why knowing the truth can make one free. The truth is that we have been blinded by Satan, and we cannot see that he is leading us around captive. We are captive without even knowing it, just as were those whom the Savior taught. And once blinded, it is difficult indeed for us again to awaken and open our eyes and see the truth.
 |
There are several methods of mind control which vary both in method and severity. One technique is hypnosis, which has both light and deep varieties. Another technique is conditioning, which can vary in degree from simple training of a dog or child to full blown brainwashing. These methods can be used for good or evil: a dog can be trained to be a seeing eye dog or a killer even as a child can be conditioned to love and become a good citizen or to hate and become a suicide bomber.
Let us consider some degrees of mind conditioning. Brainwashing, the most severe form, is defined as "a forcible indoctrination to induce someone to give up basic political, social, or religious beliefs and attitudes and to accept contrasting regimented ideas." The definition for "marketing" is similar but less severe: "the process or technique of promoting, selling, and distributing a product or service."[3] If what is being sold is "beliefs and attitudes," then marketing techniques can be similar to brainwashing techniques. Note that neither definition says anything about whether the beliefs being promoted are true or false, the purpose of both is simply to convert to a new belief system. At the least severe end of the scale we might find simple appeals to emotion or reason.
There are many articles on the internet about brainwashing techniques. Many methods have been used, but it is hard to find two authors who agree on exactly what constitutes brainwashing. Often the victim is in a controlled environment that includes abrupt changes, being deprived of sleep and of family and friends or any support system, and is prevented from getting information from any other source. The victim usually doesn't know what happened, but gradually accepts ideas that he previously might have fought to the death to resist. The brain is "washed" clean of what it used to think, leaving it open to accept a whole new belief system. Afterward, the victim usually will defend his new slave master as having "enlightened" him.
In this article let us focus on a form of mind conditioning which is less severe than brainwashing but more than marketing. Moreover, it is always dedicated to converting to lies and to evil. It may be best to coin a new term to describe it, so let us refer to it as "blindness conditioning." It is a process used to train someone to become blind to the truth.
I have chosen six methods to define "blindness conditioning." All of them are found among the many techniques used in both brainwashing and marketing. These seem to be both especially effective and also commonly used by crafty men who are in the business of deception. Once we learn these techniques, we can recognize the pattern and realize when we are purposely being manipulated to accept some belief against our will. Then when we see it in advertising, in politics, in religion, or (perish the thought) even in science, it can be recognized. Once we can "see" again, we can recognize the truth and the truth can make us free.
The purpose of inundating is to desensitize the person to any existing negative connotations. If the individual is smothered with so much of it that his early warning system to detect falsehood is blaring constantly, then he may choose to ignore the warnings. In other words, he stops listening to his conscience because it becomes annoying. He is conditioned not to follow the light within. He then becomes comfortable with the higher levels of evil. Clothing that was once shockingly immodest no longer offends.
 |
The redefining of old words is done blatantly, with no thought of honesty. Consider an example from politics. A political "party" in the United States is supposed to be a group of people sharing similar views of how to govern, but always in the context of swearing to uphold the U.S. Constitution. But we see candidates listed on the ballot as representing the "Communist Party." Communists cannot be a legitimate "party" at all in the U.S. because they are openly working to destroy the constitution and freedom. Simply renaming "treasonous conspirators" to be a "political party" gives acceptance. Did you complain to the proper authorities the last time you saw communists on the ballot? Simply renaming evil has incredibly powerful results.
Let's see. My dictionary says that socialism is "a political and economic theory which advocates that the community as a whole should own and control the means of production and distribution, and exchange." We need to decode this definition. What is the "community as a whole" (sounds like the neighbors). It is the government. Who is the government? It is a few people at the top who enforce their laws with armed police and soldiers if necessary. They control and distribute all of the goods in the country. The citizens work for the state. The workers may own nothing at all, or perhaps just what the state feels might be acceptable for them.
 |
Socialism enslaves slowly, like cooking frogs, conditioning the future slaves into accepting their new bondage as being "progressive." In contrast, the more primitive communism accomplishes the same thing by force and revolution. That seems less desirable for the slave masters because many of the slaves are killed in the takeover and it is too obvious that they have become slaves.
Note that in conditioning people to be slaves, it is extremely important to have all their primary allegiance be to the state. That means that religion, family, and education must all be suppressed because they can lead to people to have loyalty to God, to family members, or to principles. Slaves must be kept in ignorance, with their family members separated, with prayer and any mention of God being strictly forbidden.
Now let us review how the six blindness conditioning techniques are used in spreading socialism in general and also with specific programs.
 |
Atheism. The state religion of socialism is atheism. Atheism is nothing more than an apparently rational excuse to ignore one's conscience, which testifies of God, and to hope to escape responsibility for sin by claiming ignorance. Note that atheism is a relatively recent phenomena, only attracting many followers after the advent of Darwin. Before that, the existence of some kind of Creator was obvious to anyone who examined a flower. They could see the truth right in front of them.
We are now inundated with atheism, which has gradually become accepted to be a rational belief. History was rewritten claiming that the Founding Fathers were deists, meaning that they believed in a God who might as well not exist because all he did was create everything and then leave. That is false; they were mostly Christians. And the A.C.L.U. fights for the rights of atheists above all, forcing their religion to be the state religion contrary to the First Amendment.
Anti-Family Persecution. The family is another source of allegiance which must be destroyed in order to have properly behaving slaves. Did you know that one of the first things Lenin did in the newly created communist Russia was to institute "Postcard Divorce"?[7] If a married couple had a spat, either spouse could be instantly dissolve the family by simply mailing a postcard. The other did not even need to be aware of it. Now we have followed that example with our "no-fault divorce." So much for marriage being a legal "contract" that needs to be kept.
Lenin also attacked the family by forcing women out of the home into the workforce, promoting infidelity in marriage, and legalizing abortion. Does any of this sound familiar?
Moreover, the government can make a mockery of marriage by defining it to be between any two people, or between people and animals, or between animals. In Germany, children who are obedient to parents are now being diagnosed as having a mental disease because "normal" teenagers rebel against their parents. They are being forcefully removed from their parents and incarcerated in mental institutions.[8]
Dumbing Down Schools. It is also important to keep slaves ignorant of the truths which could make them free. Mandatory free government schools can control indoctrination of youth. Some education benefits the socialist state, namely the production of workers. But all real truth, such as could make them free, must be avoided. Such truths are not only taught in the scriptures, but also in all great literature, true art, true history and even classical music. Hence these must all be corrupted with trash posing as writing, garbage as art, and indoctrination as history. Actually, it is best if the slaves cannot read at all, so teaching to read phonetically was replaced with the mind-confusing "look-see" method. Teaching might best be done in the socialist state with television, graduating students who cannot read, and giving tests which require only the rote memorization of the state's "correct answers."
 |
Of course we all want clean air, pristine forests for our children to appreciate, and responsible environmental policies. The radical extreme enters when balance is lost. We are told God did not give man dominion over the earth but rather that all use by man of plants, animals and minerals is wrong. We are told we should stop eating animals because it is wrong to kill. If so, should we also stop eating plants for the same reason? Is it wrong even to build a hut in the jungle? Any good idea when pushed to the extreme becomes evil.[9]
 |
When such manipulation techniques are employed we can be sure that there is more to the agenda than pure science alone would dictate.
 |
Let us summarize Darwin's entire theory of evolution in one paragraph. Given the initial form of life, there is really only one principal difference between Darwin's theory and the former theory of inheritance. The former theory, based on the results of all breeding experiments ever done, was that there is a limit to the variation possible in each species. Darwin proposed that there is no limit to the variation, and that nature selects the fittest variations to survive. If so, then new species could be formed, and all life, including man, might have descended from a primitive organism. He knew that such a proposal flew in the face of all that had ever been observed, including the fossil record, so all of his books were plausibility arguments to explain how it might have happened. To me, all of the so-called evidence for evolution discovered since Darwin is also nothing more than an extension of those plausibility arguments.
Evolution is a theory that offers a plausible explanation of life for atheists. If you believe in God, then creation is a far simpler explanation,[13] rather than having to believe the absurdity that zapping a single cell with mutation-causing radiation will cause its descendants to develop well-designed eyes, lungs, heart and brain. On the other hand, many devout Christians believe that evolution is the process that God used in the Creation. This belief is based on what they think is evidence supporting the theory, and the seeming compatibility of the theory with their fluid interpretation of the scriptures. An excellent new book promoting this point of view is The Language of God, written by Francis Collins, the former head of the Human Genome Project.[14] I recommend reading it, but to me it only shows the depth of the blindness conditioning which has been done.
In 1848, about a decade before Darwin's first book, Karl Marx's The Communist Manifesto had been published. As noted above, socialism works best in an atheist atmosphere. Many of the forces in nature had already been explained without God by using "natural laws" (without asking where those laws came from). The last area where God had been needed in science was in explaining life. So the communists (and socialists) jumped on the Darwin bandwagon and proclaimed that Darwin had removed the last prop for God and had proved that He did not exist. Of course that was nonsense, because Darwin had proved nothing at all. Besides, those first cells came from somewhere. A single cell can grow into a man in only twenty years, but that doesn't prove there is no God. So Darwin's theory was extended to say that all life could have originated from some primordial chemical mixture. That was declared to be fact, and then God was commanded to disappear. Darwin's proposal, originally just a purely scientific hypothesis about the origin of species, was snatched from the realm of science, declared to be already proven, and used as the foundation of many political schemes, including socialism, communism and fascism.
The entire method of marketing evolution is a textbook case of blindness conditioning. Let us consider some examples and then ask ourselves why such manipulation is used.
 |
2. Gradualism. Evolution was not forced rapidly down our throats. It gradually became accepted. In science, this step alone is not necessarily a red flag. It nearly always takes time for a new theory to be accepted.
3. Deceptive Definitions. Many words are redefined to make evolution sound true. For example, when the science of genetics appeared, with its ability to predict results of real scientific experiments, evolutionists realized their speculative theory was in crisis. Genetics showed that the variations in descendants were limited to a fixed set of possible variations, whereas evolutionists proposed that unlimited variation should be possible. So it was decided to rename "genetics" to be "micro-evolution." Then "macro-evolution" was defined to mean Darwin's proposed unlimited variation, as if it existed, and were indeed just an extension of the "micro" version. The proof of what was to be shown was accomplished by simply coining a new word. Then, for simplicity, the "micro" and "macro" are often omitted, and the transformation is complete: the science of genetics was transformed into the speculation of evolution.[16]
To show how powerful this one definition is, Collins concluded a chapter that summarized the genetics of DNA with the statement: "Evolution, as a mechanism, can be and must be true."[17] That unwarranted conclusion came as a complete non sequitur because no evidence of unlimited variation had been presented at all. A better summary would have been, "The science of genetics has clearly shown that DNA contains the code of instructions used to define the precise form of a living being."
 |
4. Stifling. It is the stifling of all opposition to evolution which is most disconcerting. It has been made illegal even to hint in school that there are other options to consider. Moreover, it is only the godless version of evolution which is allowed, usually with the teaching that evolution must be godless and even proves there is no God (which it does not). Teachers cannot point out that there are many reputable scientists who believe the entire theory is unfounded speculation which has been forced upon us so that atheists would not look like idiots. But this charade has gone too far. It is now not only acceptable to teach this speculation as truth, but it is illegal even to suggest that there are alternate scientific views.[18] The study of Intelligent Design is branded as "religion in disguise" even though in its pure form it has no more to do with religion than does a police detective trying to determine whether a fire was an accident or arson. The bottom line is that alternative scientific theories at not allowed to be taught, but speculation masquerading as science is approved. Even if you believe in evolution, doesn't that bother you just a little bit that it is illegal to teach any other viewpoint? This is stifling at its best.
 |
6. False Peer pressure. To go against the crowd on evolution is scientific suicide. In addition to stifling, there is the peer pressure that everyone accepts evolution as true. Anyone not believing in evolution is discounted as just not being educated. Again we have the appeal to scientific consensus. The claim is made that "No serious biologist today doubts the theory of evolution".[19] Perhaps a better statement would have been, "No biologist who questions evolution is considered competent to teach at a university or even high school."
To me it is tragic that science gets so abused. The theory of evolution could have been stated as a testable scientific theory. It might have died a natural death as a false theory, weeded out by falsifying experiments. Instead, what happens is that negative experimental results are ignored and positive indications hailed as victory in the political environment which funds science and determines the "results" in spite of what the evidence might show.
 |
In conclusion, we have to ask, why is evolution promoted with deceptive mind conditioning techniques?
But not only has formerly banned behavior become acceptable, and even deemed "good," it also is promoted with mind conditioning techniques. Let us consider three examples.
1. Enslaving Drugs. Drugs such as nicotine and alcohol are legal to use and have been highly promoted by cunning, deceitful, conspiring men (D&C 89:4). There has been a great push to legalize other drugs such as marijuana. But even so, most people are not totally brainwashed and can recognize that the use of such drugs is wrong, even if legal. That is, most smokers recognize that they have a "bad habit" and are trying to quit.
The more successful blindness conditioning is on the side of legalized medicine where one is forced by law to treat certain "diseases" with certain drugs. Parents who do not comply are said to be abusing their children, unless they are put on the required medical treatment (such as Prozac or chemotherapy). Huge efforts are made by the pharmaceutical industry to get the entire nation using drugs for the rest of their lives. In this case, victims are not "trying to quit" because they think they have no choice. Often the information of alternative natural cures is withheld or such treatments declared illegal.[20]
2. Sexual Promiscuity and Perversion. There has been a huge blindness conditioning campaign concerning all manner of sexual perversion. False scientific studies were published promoting "free sex" and immorality hailed as a great liberation movement.[21] Homosexuality, lesbianism, and bestiality were then introduced as the next steps toward so-called freedom from "ancient taboos."
Notice the steps of blindness conditioning. First, we are inundated with abnormal sexual behavior on every side, especially on television. We are gradually desensitized to immodesty and taught to tolerate totally unnatural, weird sexual behavior. The medical industry aided in 1973 by declaring that sexual deviants no longer have a psychiatric disorder.[22] Instead, they have an "alternate lifestyle." Deceptive definitions are employed, such as redefining "gay" to mean "homosexual" rather than "joyful." Then all opposition is stifled, so that if a basketball player gives his opinion (in this land of free speech) that he does not like to associate with homosexuals, then an apology is demanded and appearances are made on talk shows to explain such a politically incorrect "homophobic" position. The sinful practice is then required by law to be taught from kindergarten onward as was done in ancient Rome before it fell. History is rewritten, claiming that many of our national heroes were homosexuals, which claims can be totally fabricated lies. Then we are lied to about how common homosexuality is, claiming to represent some 10% of U.S. males, when 1% was more accurate.[23] Thus, all six of the blindness conditioning techniques listed in this article have been employed.
3. Hired Killers. What is the greatest sin? Many would say homicide, and indeed murderers are still sometimes sentenced to death. We could perhaps be more precise: "a hired murderer of the innocent, with complete knowledge and denying the light of truth, or in the case of true Christians, denying the Holy Ghost" (Mat. 12:31). And the more that are murdered, the greater the crime. Thus, names like Hitler and Stalin with their murder of millions to get gain puts them at the top of some lists.
 |
Again, we can clearly see blindness conditioning techniques. First, we were inundated with abortion as a topic of discussion when it had been unspeakable previously. Then terms were changed, renaming the formerly heinous crime to be the "Right to Choose." Americans fight for rights and freedom of choice, so what good American could be against the right to choose? Then most opposition is stifled by making it legal. History was rewritten by claiming that over 10,000 women had died annually from illegal abortions when it was really about 250.[24] And finally, we were told that everyone was doing it, until that became much more true. The result is hailed as a great victory for women and crowds cheer as speeches are given celebrating this victory of freedom over the slavery of motherhood.
Not everyone is sinning with knowledge. Many children are taught to have illicit sex before they have any idea how serious a sin it is and that it can destroy their lives. And it is clear that many mothers were deceived by being told that it was not a baby at all, but rather just some tissue that needed to be removed, like a growing cancer. When these women later discovered that it really was their baby they had killed, they became depressed for years. We weep for these deceived children and women.
But what about the doctors and nurses? They crush the babies' skulls, suck out their brains, and rip off their arms and legs. They use instruments of torture, and place all the dismembered pieces of the body on the table right in front of them to make sure the body is complete. We would be horrified to see on the news that the murder of an adult had been done that way. These doctors are mature and intelligent, and appear to be decent citizens as they chat with us at church. How could someone be staring the truth right in the face (literally) and reject it?
It turns out that blindness conditioning methods have also been used on the doctors themselves. After being inundated with it as a normal practice, opposition is stifled as they are often required to do abortions in their residency or be denied a medical license. So they "practice" until their conscience is silenced, whereupon they can face the world with a smile. And so the peer pressure is felt that all the other doctors are doing it, so it must be okay.
But there is always hope for repentance. Dr. Bernard Nathanson, who was the most instrumental in starting abortion in the United States one day had an "awakening" that these really were babies he was killing. He has worked tirelessly ever since to fight this great evil. He has helped produce two movies showing that the unborn are alive: The Silent Scream and Eclipse of Reason.[25]
The Lord has made it clear that He will return to judge the wickedness of the world and cleanse the earth in preparation for His millennial reign. When He destroyed the wicked before in the Great Deluge, only eight souls on earth were preserved. There is a another great tribulation and time of trouble coming "such as was not since the beginning of the world to this time, no, nor ever shall be" (meaning worse than the Deluge), and "except those days should be shortened, there should no flesh be saved: but for the elect's sake those days shall be shortened" (Mat. 24:21-22). We might all ask ourselves if there is any chance we might be in the group that will survive and have the great blessing of personally seeing the Savior come to reign over the righteous in the Millennium.
And he became Satan, yea, even the devil, the father of all lies, to deceive and to blind men, and to lead them captive at his will, even as many as would not hearken unto my voice. (Moses 4:4)