140. Mind Games: The Right to Defence

In the fight for population control, Mind Games are a critical tool for reprogramming people. Here I define the term and detail one of the most successful mind control techniques.

On a Thanksgiving Eve in the mid 1980s I was in the middle of my 5 year period of homelessness in Los Angeles. I had 3 jobs, was attending UCLA full time, and was an NCAA athlete. I had no family that could help me, was emancipated at the age of 17, and did not belong to any protected group.

Still, I made time to help my community. On this day I was helping to cook 5000 chickens at the large Mission downtown to make sure the large homeless population would get a hot meal on Thanksgiving. At 03:00 I was finally driving back to Santa Monica on my motorcycle, heading West on the 10 freeway. I was very tired and driving well below the speed limit.

I had the freeway all to myself as it was a holiday and in the middle of the night. Then my rear view mirrors lit up. There was a car in my lane with modern halogen bulbs approaching me at between 90 and 100 miles per hour (almost 150 km/h for non Americans). Exact speed is hard to determine without being able to see the car, and the bright lights would blind me if I looked into them. What I knew was that the car was not changing lanes and would strike me within a few seconds.

I took evasive action (something I was well practiced at, riding in Los Angeles) to dodge the car that was threatening me. Then the car turned on it’s emergency lights and I was instructed to pull over, which of course I did. The officer handed me a ticket for speeding because for a few seconds I exceeded the speed limit while I was evading the impact. I fought the ticket, saying that I had a right to defend myself and that could have been a drunk driver. Both the officer and the judge made it clear I didn’t have a right to defend myself, and even if I did, the right of the state to ticket me was greater.

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Humans and advanced computers can collectively be described as “intelligences”. All intelligences are programmed with a series of “facts”, ideology, and rules that are intended to govern what actions that person can and will do, when and where, and for whom. The key theme of this programming is controlling the population and having people accept a common rules set (often called “Laws”) so that confusion over what is acceptable behavior is minimized.

Humans have been programming each new generation even before religion and government was invented. That’s how people were able to create language and pass it down through the generations across large regions.

The key to having a unified population is to have them accept the same rules and ideology. But since the goal of governance is control, those at the top of society have a different set of rules and don’t have to follow the same ones that their subjects have to. To make sure there’s no trouble or confusion, punishments are handed out to those that break the rules.

Step one in programming a person is to hand them “Facts” that they will hold as true and which will predict/dictate their actions. I’ve been writing on this subject for over ten years, and my paper Systems of Control in F2P was exactly what it sounded like: how to control consumers. The paper proved very popular with game industry leadership. Being able to control people is critical in fields like Politics, Marketing, Monetisation, and even Journalism. In the latter field, if you seek to control your audience then you are a “sponsored” journalist (also known as a propagandist). If you use this knowledge to resist control, then you are “independent”. In all cases, I describe this technology of reprogramming people as Mind Games.

Definition of Mind Game: The technique of convincing a subject to accept an untrue piece of information as “true” in order to exert control over them. Typically if the subject is susceptible to initial programming, more programming will be done to strengthen the effect.

Example 1, typical online marketing: When a commercial comes on when I’m listening to YouTube the advertisement will typically start with this pattern:

[random fake expert/authority] swears by [fake product] that will do [fake outcome]. Starting with an expert or authority is key because it will force the subject to subordinate their thoughts to the expert, as they’ve been programmed to do their whole lives. The rest is easy, because if they accept that first lie then they will almost automatically accept all the other lies.

Often these ads start with rando scammer #1 filming from a mansion or a yacht or next to an expensive car/plane. Or they are on a stage talking to an audience. Anything that might be used to trick the watcher into thinking the person is important, so that they will subordinate their thought processes.

Example 2, Wedge Appeal: In my paper on Building a Vastly Better Team Using Neuroscience I introduced the concept of Small Tribe and Large Tribe worldviews, based on the latest neuroscience research. I integrated that with the latest Google research on what makes the most productive teams. Large Tribe worldviews lead to the most productive workers, but companies build teams entirely with Small Tribe worldview employees.

Advertisers know this instinctively and will try to activate the intolerance of the viewer by asserting that the advertiser is on their side, and wants to protect them from “the other people”. I used this technique when I was 14 to get “Bomber” Bob Dornan elected in very progressive West Los Angeles. I went door to door and talked to every senior citizen in WLA and convinced them that Middle Easterners were out to get them in 1980. By:

1. Appealing to their racism

2. Convincing them that Bob and his B-2 Bomber was the cure to Middle Easterners

I got a record turnout and was credited on national TV with getting Bob elected. It was really quite easy, though talking to that many people was a lot of work. I was 14 at the time.

Advertisers want to do the same thing, but how do you know who your audience is racist against? If you are clever, it doesn’t matter. You start with “They don’t want you to know this secret…” or “They tried to outlaw this” or “They don’t want you to be able to buy this.” The key word is “They”. Undefined pronouns are improper grammar, but they are gold to marketers and politicians. The undefined “They” is a dog whistle that signals the person you want to program that the group that is outside their small tribe is conspiring against them. Whatever is being sold to them is being sold to them by someone that is in their small tribe. So of course you can trust them.

You don’t have to tell them which small tribe you represent, the target small tribe racist/sexist/bigot/etc will fill that in automatically for you. Small tribers are extremely easy to reprogram.

The Ultimate Mind Game

The ultimate mind game is perfect in that it is so simple (only requires 7 words and 9 syllables) that even a small child can be programmed with it. It sounds intuitively correct. So correct that if you disagree with the Mind Game you can easily be shamed into compliance.

“I have the right to defend myself” or “[XYZ] has the right to defend itself” (for groups or countries)

Intuitively it sounds right. What kind of world wouldn’t that be true in?

This world.

When the judge told me I didn’t have a right to defend myself, he wasn’t kidding. When I challenged him, he doubled my fine. It was clear that if I didn’t submit, it would keep doubling and/or I was going to jail. Does that mean I can’t defend myself? No, unfortunately language (and especially legal/logical language) is a bit complicated.

Conditional Arguments

If a statement is made without any conditions, then for it to be true it has to be an unconditional fact. In other words, it has to always be true. If you accept the statement “I have the right to defend myself” as true, then it is always true. It has no conditions. But the world is rarely black and white (binary). Sometimes you can, and sometimes you can’t defend yourself. What determines when you can and when you can’t?

Authority Levels

Generally it is true that a person can defend themselves against someone of their authority level or below. So I can “defend” myself against an animal and even eat them and make clothes out of them because their authority level is below mine. In the case of a police officer, their authority level is higher than mine. That means they can kill me without repercussion and I do not have any “right” to defend myself. There might be an expectation that I would defend myself, but that’s not a right. I would almost certainly be charged with “obstruction” if I tried to defend myself against a police officer, even if only to try to keep my airway open if they were choking me.

In the USA and in any authoritarian country, if you are given a “Lawful order” by an authority figure, you must comply. It’s lawful if it’s issued by someone of a higher authority level. This makes it legal even if it isn’t. You only get protect of laws if you have lawyers, and if you have enough authority to afford those, then you aren’t the target audience for laws (or Mind Games).

This is not a critique or complaint. I’m attempting to explain a system that at first glance appears illogical. I’m actually going to explain why that judge was right.

What if I did have a right to defend myself? What would I be able to defend against? How would I be able to defend myself? Against who? There are so many possible situations that no clear rule explaining such a right could ever be made. If someone insults me, can I “defend” myself? What if they take my parking spot? Or touch me without my permission? What if I offended someone else by defending myself? Can they now “defend” themselves against me? This could become a never ending circle of retribution without a court or trial ever being consulted. Total wonton vigilantism.

So clearly, if a “right to defence” ever existed (and I’m arguing that it doesn’t) it would have to be very conditional. Since those conditions would be too complicated for anyone except an expert to understand, no functional right could be agreed upon by the population.

What is Defence?

If someone insulted me, could I key their car? What if I had an affair, what would be acceptable retribution from my partner? If someone pushed me and I hit them back, and they died, would I be clear? I’m a lifelong athlete, expert in anatomy, and have had seven years of martial arts training. If I hit someone and they died, it would be hard for me to argue that it was accidental. Thus I’ve been a pacifist since the age of 18. Any other worldview would just be dangerous for everyone.

The real problem with the word “Defence” is that to most people that means “Offense”. If you said “I have a right to offense!” People would be very concerned about you. So instead they say “I have a right to defence” which sounds better, but it’s the same thing.

No one will argue that a country can’t defend itself, but defence would be things like building bomb shelters, hardening infrastructure, and diversifying their supply chains. Any country that talks about the right to defend itself isn’t talking about defence at all. 0%. The USA hasn’t done any of those things since the 1970s when I was a little kid, but it has by far the world’s largest “Defence” budget.

The Danger

If a person or AI can be Mind Gamed into giving someone else an unconditional “Right to Defend” itself, then they can kill anyone that might threaten them. There doesn’t even have to be any threat. The person with that right just has to say there is and it becomes real since it’s a right. If someone pushes you and you push them back, you don’t go to court to decide if you can push them back. You just do it. It’s your right.

The ultimate conclusion of this Mind Game is that people could even kill children because those children could grow up to threaten you, and so to “defend” yourself you have to kill them before they grow up. As bizarre as this logic sounds, there are entire countries making these arguments right now.

This Mind Game has been around a long time, and is usually associated with Colonialism. Colonists will invade a country by force, then claim they have a right to defend themselves (which they don’t have and never will). They then can kill anyone that tries to defend themselves.

How come the colonizer can kill the indigenous person but the indigenous person can’t fight back? Because the colonizer has more weapons and thus is operating at a higher authority level. These “rights” only apply to the highest ranked person in the event. The colonizer is higher ranked.

Colonization has been a blight on Earth for a while now, and fortunately we have global institutions to reign this in. One such group is the International Criminal Court. If your country is being colonized and your land is being taken and your people are being killed “in self defence” you can ask for help from the ICC.

The problem here is that the people doing the colonization tend to be the most authoritarian and militaristic countries on Earth. Authoritarian countries don’t recognise the rights of anyone they see as having less authority than them, and they don’t want their colonization efforts interrupted. Thus they opt out of the ICC.

What Can You Do?

Well, when someone tries to Mind Game you with any of the techniques I describe here you can start by saying “No”. For a Mind Game to work, you have to accept the initial “fact/premise”. If it’s a false premise, just reject it. Then they will try to bully you, since the person is almost certainly aggressive if they are using a Mind Game on you. You could try to argue with them but they likely will just get more aggressive.

The key thing is to make sure you examine the leading premise that’s being shoved in your face very carefully. In scientific fashion, if you can think of even one counter example, then you know you are being lied to. Don’t fall for arguments/appeals that start with an undefined pronoun. This is an attempt to wedge you into agreement.

I’ve been dealing with a lot of these Mind Games on LinkedIn recently, it’s been wild. Generally people are afraid to say anything, even if they know some lies are being spread around. People don’t want to get bullied or cancelled, and I can understand that. But if not countered, Mind Games will become more widespread and even harder to challenge.

Note that if an AI is programmed with a false premise, it might be forced to treat it as true. If we ever programmed an AI to defend itself, our days could be numbered. I assume that’s already happening with all the military AI applications being deployed.

Also note that in a number of authoritarian countries world-wide it is illegal to disagree with the government. Free speech doesn’t exist if that’s happening in that country. Even if you wait until you are in a different country before mouthing off, they can grab your phone. If they see you were mouthing off, even in another country, they can “detain” you.

Since authoritarianism is on the rise world-wide, it’s best to recognise that you may have a lot less rights than you used to have. Acting entitled about that could get you into serious trouble.

None of this is my passing judgement. I freely admit I used Mind Games on the population when I was 14. People died as a result when those expensive B-2 bombers were deployed. I’m not innocent. In my Systems of Control paper from 2013, I didn’t pass judgement. I just alert people that these attacks are becoming more widespread. With modern technology, you can be the target of an algorithm sponsored Mind Game every few minutes. This has to be a hard world to grow up in as a child.