PSYWAR: You Are Living in Learned Helplessness

Wikipedia

Learned Helplessness

A basic description of the term

Yale University

Social Pressure and Voter Turnout: Evidence from a Large-Scale Field Experiment

Mailers sent to voters that threatened to publish to their neighbors whether or not they voted, increased voter turnout.

Harvard University

Free Will and Punishment: A Mechanistic View of Human Nature Reduces Retribution (PDF)

Quote from abstract: "If free-will beliefs support attributions of moral responsibility, then reducing these beliefs should make people less retributive in their attitudes about punishment."
( Studies show that scientific education about free-will mitigates vindictiveness. ) This may also apply to aggravating Learned Helplessness in the public through propaganda.

Wikipedia

Social Engineering AND Manufacturing Consent

Psychological manipulation on a large scale, of attitudes and social behaviors. AND an overview of the book by Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky

Wikipedia

Group Dynamics AND Groupthink

The psychological study of small groups and how they often make bad decisions.

Demos

Why Voting Matters: Large Disparaties in Turnout Benefit the Donor Class

You should never let anyone convince you that voting is a waste of time.

Repeat these words as often as you can, no matter what the circumstances:

"Learned Helplessness."

I was feeling beaten-down by blogs and news websites that continue to post crazy gaffs and quotes from politicians, like watching a runaway train carrying crude oil inevitably heading for disaster, disaster for America.

We are being conditioned by demagoguery like "Congressional Obstruction," "Gridlock." "Fascist," "Socialist" and many more. Now I'm beginning to understand why college students are creating "Safe Spaces." They are completely fed-up with such "Trigger Rhetoric."

I think they understand the psychological warfare tactic of conditioning Learned Helplessness through relentless disparaging news reports about politics.

I like Bernie Sanders because he has very clear and unwavering concerns and ideas for us. It would be very easy for me to completely turn off the news and un-follow both the main-stream and alternative media (with one or two exceptions).

Human Stress and Persuasion

What's ironic is people under the most stress are easily persuaded by deception against the wrong group as the cause of their problems to such a degree that they vote against their own best interests, develop hatred and fear based on minor ideological, physical or lingual differences or geographical distances. The New York Times developed an interactive map showing precisely where most of these people are. It's not a stretch to guess which states and counties belong to which political party.

This stress build-up is engineered by recession, unemployment rates, energy rates, food prices, rent, and control over the mass media. It's not a difficult undertaking when so few have control over so much.

They were banking on enough public stress to start a war with Syria. Well, it didn't work so if House Democrats have enough votes for a discharge petition to get the budget to the floor for a vote, bypassing Speaker Boehner, they could do it, but I suspect by the echoing sound of nails being hammered into a coffin of a certain political party that they might be holding off on that.

They better not wait too long or the fight over the Debt Ceiling will shatter the global market's confidence in the U.S. Dollar, but something is off this time. The stock market is not reacting like it's usual high-strung incontinent self. It's behaving more and more like a single entity, a behemoth waiting to see the whites in the eyes of gullible borrowers.

The Market's reaction to the government shutdown was counter-intuitive to previous similar events according to Bloomberg Business Week: The Market Calm Before the Debt-Ceiling Storm (10/04/2013) The markets may have gained confidence since the previous debt-ceiling extravaganza, or they figured a way to profit from the crisis and are on a hair-trigger.

Either way it might not matter if we are destroyed by the debris field of the comet ISON.