One way to induce people to do things that are actually NOT in their interest, is to convince them that SMART people do it.
Obviously the advertising industry leverages this dynamic continuously – doctors were used to encourage people to smoke Camel cigarettes, just as doctors today are used to sell people on neverending Covid boosters, daily amphetamines, and all manner of other lethal poisons. Since we are culturally trained through government-mandated education and 360 degree media to associate doctors with intelligence, the credulous masses perceive taking the advice of doctors (aka trusting the science) to be the ‘smart’ option.
“Smart people trust experts” is the subtext flowing underneath mainstream narratives across all mediums, along with the corollary: “stupid people think they know better than experts”. Unfortunately these ‘experts’ are in fact locked into obeying special interest groups through their educational debt and obligations to licensing bodies, living in constant fear of losing their job, prestige, and defaulting on their mortgage. Deciding to ‘trust’ someone who is contractually not allowed to tell you the truth is akin to trusting the answers coming from someone with a literal gun to their head. “Is everything okay?” (nods) “Okay cool…”
Back to our theme: you will notice that hypnotists routinely tell their audiences that SMART people are actually MORE easily HYPNOTISED than a person of average intelligence. Is that really true? Or is it perhaps the case that people are more COMPLIANT if they think that complying is a mark of sophistication and likely to earn them prestige and social credit?
Since people fear being considered stupid, they tend to gravitate towards options that they feel are rubber-stamped by authority, in the hope that they will not be set aside from the group and criticised for their stupidity. Ironically their attempt to not APPEAR stupid actually leads them to taking a stupid action: ie. trusting the people who are deliberately abusing this mechanism.
‘Smart’ people (supposedly) do the ‘responsible’ thing and pay exhorbitant monthly rates for health insurance plans, which coincidentally narrow their range of healthcare options to three choices: surgery, radiation and pharmaceutical drugs. You can cut, you can burn, or you can poison – which would you prefer?
We are now being told that the SMART thing to do, is to embrace AI – that the SMART people who will BENEFIT from AI are those who learn how to use and become experts in incorporating these tools into their work and businesses. The tech billionaires who tell us this – we are told – are extremely smart and extremely rich (they got rich because they are so smart, presumably).
The character Elon Musk has been slow-dripping the idea that AI is going to replace everything and the only people who will stand a chance of survival are those who deliberately MERGE with this AI – by putting a chip in their head and allowing this foreign influence to effectively ‘co-pilot’ our own thoughts.
Does this sound like a smart idea? Have you ever looked at your phone or kindle automatically updating and force-installing an undesirable new feature despite you telling it not to, and thought – wouldn’t it be great if this technology was INSIDE my head, dictating my thoughts?
The REAL smart guys – so we hear – are embracing AGENTIC AI.. ie. AI that you entrust to go off and do things for you autonomously and unsupervised. You will note that this is a similar dynamic to trusting a real estate agent or an accountant or lawyer – it’s not that it is inherently a bad idea, but it is entirely contingent on that party having YOUR best interests at heart. Surprise surprise, this is not usually the case – though most people are too brainwashed to even see or understand how that may be the case.
Lawyers – as a general rule – prioritise their own wallets over their clients’ interests, doctors prioritise their financial incentives over their patients’ health, and accountants prioritise their own regulatory obligations to the government (their real client) over the ‘tax-avoision’ priorities of the people who are mandated to pay for these accountancy services – ie. you.
For anyone even remotely paying attention, it is clear that the primary attributes of SMART cities – a compressed grid covered in 5G towers, cameras, AI, digital currency and automation – are coincidentally the same things that would be necessary for a full-spectrum digital prison.
In fact, you can pretty much draw a direct line between anything that advertises itself as ‘SMART’… and the resulting reduction of human competency, self-reliance and personal freedom. If any of these initiatives and devices actually WERE in our interest, they wouldn’t need to tell you that you were clever for using them.
