Manifesto for Subliminal Manipulation

"Just as we ourselves are made up of billions of biological entities (mostly bacteria), it seems absurd to mistake our consciousness for 'ourselves', that is as separate individual entities. It is more plausible to conceive of the human race as a single entity with many consciousnesses that are unable to recognise each other as parts of themselves. Of course it is just as reasonable to extend this concept to everything that exists as being of a single entity that cannot be pulled apart and separated. For the sake of convenience lets just call everything 'god' but in doing so we must detach all the baggage that comes with such a word (I would rather not call it 'god' but any basic memeic unit is loaded in some meaning or another - by using the word 'god' I am following more the meaning of that which is unspeakable/inconceivable rather than a creator being). In this sense a conversation between two humans could be described as two points of 'god' having a conversation with each other not being conscious of the fact that they are in fact the same thing. The myth of separate individual beings is the greatest tragedy of the human animal." -Excerpt from "Blind manifestations of the material mind" By Rose Margahrita Magdalene

We are all asleep. This is a cliche, a banality. We all know this yet it is never us that sleeps, we would never admit this to ourselves. It is always everyone else who sleeps. An asleep animal especially one that thinks it is awake is the easiest to subliminally manipulate.

Rather than ask whether subliminal manipulation is desirable or not it would be more realistic to ask whether pure conscious communication is indeed possible. Our minds delude us into the belief that our consciousness is us and we are our consciousness after all this is where we experience the concept "I" or "me". However nothing could be further from the 'truth'. Consciousness performs but a small bodily function just as our kidneys filter our urine or our bowels process our shit. Julian Jaynes sums it up like this:

"Consciousness is a much smaller part of our mental life than we are conscious of. How simple that is to say; how difficult to appreciate! It is like asking a flashlight in a dark room to search around for something that does not have any light shining on upon it. The flashlight, since there is light in whatever direction it turns would have to conclude that there is light everywhere. And so consciousness can seem to pervade all mentality when actually it does not."

Our consciousness flickers like a flame until one day it is extinguished and evaporates in a puff of smoke. That is not to say that it disappears into nothing. It becomes something else just as the elements that construct our being are continually changing. Many of these cyclical changes occur much faster than one would imagine. For example, our pancreas replaces most of its cells every twenty-four hours, our stomach lining every three days; our white blood cells are renewed in ten days and ninety-eight percent of the protein in our brain is turned over in less than one month. Even more amazingly, our skin replaces its cells at the rate of 100,000 cells per minute. In fact, most of the dust in our homes consists of dead skin cells. Just as our physical body is continuously changing so too is our mental life being continually replenished. Although our consciousness may disappear into dust perhaps it is possible its memory is permanent. That however is not the topic under discussion.

Mention the word subliminal and the most common conception of it, is of some form of magic where messages are somehow secretly implanted in our brain. We do not understand the word 'subliminal' because we are barely conscious beings. Our subconscious are subconscious by the very fact that they are not conscious. Do we need a conscious mind to drive a car?, to ride a bike? NO! Do we need a conscious mind to learn something new? NO! Do we need a conscious mind to add 2+2? NO! Our ego's would like to think so, our many ego's but that is beside the point. When we add 2+2 the solution emerges from our subconscious. It is only in retrospect that the ego reconstructs the illusion that it is master. Because of this the mind creates many mistaken concepts such as; theses and anti-theses or dialectical materialism. These become cultural assumptions that have little to do with how our brains actually work.

Consciousness is merely where we become aware of ourselves, the analog "I". An awareness of our identity. This identity is by and large false, constructed in our minds by linear oral or written language. Generally it is mindless chatter in our heads that creates our identities. If it is possible to experience our "actual self" then it must be done on another level, free from language and imagination, on a direct experiential level.

An understanding of our analog "I" and our many competing egos makes it possible to understand how easy it is to subliminally manipulate. Make no doubt about it everyday media is saturated with subliminal data. It compliments us every minute to get us on side whilst simultaneously feeding our anxieties. All this makes it easier to communicate a deeper ideology or intention. We generally only see the surface layer, unable to decipher the many layers of mass advertising and mass media. Again subliminal is the norm not the exception as Wilson Key has said:

"Over a ten year period I was often involved with various techniques of testing for large, international ad agencies. From time to time, I performed consumer recall evaluations on ads, usually to placate a client who had become nervous about the effectiveness of a large promotional expenditure. As far as I know, recall analysis was never seriously applied in the development of new, creative ad themes. Banality, not memorable (consciously memorable) dramatic content was the basic building block for sales-effective advertising. The executives who employed me often commented that any ad consciously recalled was a loser, as far as sales were concerned. At the time, this logic puzzled me. Now, I realise the purpose of an advertisement is to motivate a purchase decision - days, weeks, or even months after it has been perceived for even an instant......The conscious memory system may actually be incompatible with media's marketing objectives."

Advertisers understand exactly what they are doing. This is for certain. One percent of the world's GDP is spent on advertising. That's a hell of a lot of money. Billions! Advertising works. The more we pretend it doesn't the more effective it is. For this reason advertiser scan spend a lot of time making the surface message banal. The sub text is what you need to look out for . Very often this is much more complex than it seems. Advertisers persuade and manipulate by what is not said more than by what is said. It is worth looking at some advertising methods in Vance Packard's book written in '57 as an example of the extent that advertisers go too:

"...First, they decided, you can't assume that people know what they want. A major ketchup maker kept getting complaints about its bottle, so it made a survey. Most of the people interviewed said they would prefer another type the company was considering. When the company went to the expense of bringing out this other bottle in test markets, it was overwhelmingly rejected in favour of the old bottle, even by people who had favoured it in interviews. In a survey of male beer drinkers the men expressed a strong preference for a 'nice dry beer'. When they were then asked how a beer could be dry they were stumped. Those who were able to offer any answers at all revealed widely different notions. Second, some marketeers concluded, you can't assume people will tell you the truth about their wants and dislikes even if they know them. What you are more likely to get they decided, are answers that will protect the informants in their steadfast endeavour to appear to the world as really sensible, intelligent, rational beings. One management consulting firm has concluded that accepting the word of a customer as to what he wants is 'the least reliable index the manufacturer can have on what he ought to do to win customers'."

Every moment of the day our body absorbs billions of sensations, we observe a feast of sights, hear a cacophony of delights, our taste buds continuously tasting, and the smells always wafting up our noses. Yet our consciousness grasps only the most microscopic fraction of this astronomic influx.

We aren't talking here of the Freudian or Jungian symbolic subconscious. That too is smaller than an atom compared to the totality of our unconscious mechanisms.

The periphery of our vision is not black or dark but rather disappears into nothingness, we simply are not conscious of it. Again to elaborate on this a little think about the process used to read. You are not conscious of the way you decipher words out of individual letters or gather meaning out of the strings of words that form sentences. This is all done in fractions of seconds but not in your conscious mind. Similarly whilst reading this your consciousness focuses on the images or meaning gathered from the words and becomes oblivious to all else. All the while your senses continue to take in your total environment but not consciously. Smells, sounds, taste, the sensation of gravity and feel of clothes on your skin (if your not naked), etc., continue to be taken in by your mind.

Our consciousness seems to be formed mostly by verbal and written language. A layer of verbal discourse flows continuously. Underneath a visual discourse takes place. It is a mistake to reinterpret this discourse in a verbal sense. This discourse has its own meaning, certainly a constructed meaning and not an actual meaning. Under this there are more layers like actual bodily sensations. We tend to absorb these sensations then interpret them verbally thus they get reduced to a verbal explanation and their direct meaning is lost.

Every day we are assaulted with a barrage of information. It is blaring at us from all directions. Mass media, billboards, radio, television. By the time the average child graduates from high school they will have watched some 350, 000 television commercials. It simply is not possible to process all this information on a conscious level. Advertising hits us from all angles. Most of it enters at the subconscious level, waiting like a time bomb for the right moment. The moment to consume. The moment to fill our lives with pseudo needs to give us pseudo comforts.

Visual information generally for most people holds much more 'authority' over an individual than the actual content contained in the words. The less aware the individual is of this reality the more likely it is true. A paper printed on a dot matrix computer holds less 'authority' than one printed on a laser printer. The more work gone into the graphic presentation the more 'authoritive' the information is considered. A good quality graphic presentation without sources holds more 'authority' than a poorly presented paper with all it's sources included. This is true precisely because the relevance of the graphics is not considered consciously by most individuals.

In relation to logos certain shapes and symbols hold much more 'authority' over other shapes and symbols. Exactly why this is no one really knows but it has something to do with our collective histories (and maybe universal habits). Circles for instance hold much more 'authority' than most shapes. Also our senses are interconnected so a symbol can actually affect the way we smell taste or feel an object (or organisation) it is relating to. This has been well tested in advertising circles. A logo can have an enormous effect on how some one perceives an organisation. This is why Coca Cola's corporate vision statement is "To create value for our shareowners on a long term basis by building a business that enhances the Coca Cola trade marks." The actual physical product is irrelevant. The actual product they are selling is the visual baggage contained subliminally in their advertising.

This is also why corporations pour such huge sums of money into advertising. At the end of the day the product is the advertisement more than the actual physical product. The physical product has subconscious values ascribed from the advertisements, perhaps in a similar way we ascribe values to the physical manifestations of money.

The first stage in selling all products is convincing the consumer that advertising doesn't have any effect on sensible individuals. Naturally vanity leads the consumer to consider themselves as a sensible individual.

This is a call to be aware of the existence of the enormous cavern of that which is not conscious. It is a call to be aware of this when producing propaganda and in all attempts at persuading others of a better vision of how we could live on this planet. Anyone who looks solidly at the facts can see our situation is desperate. Anyone who looks solidly at the facts can see we face extinction. This is for certain, irrefutable. It is time we realised this on an actual level and not just an intellectual level. On the level of bodily sensations. Maybe shed a few tears over it if necessary. It is time to end our fantasies of permanence.

It is time to cloud the distinction between work and leisure, to see they are part of the same continuous life. To gradually increase the participation in our own lives until passive entertainment becomes passe, becomes boredom as we already know it is.

This is a call to cause external confusion in order to take refuge in inner wisdom. To release upon the world a new level of discord. To speak not just on the surface level but to know and understand all other levels of communication. We are not rational beings. The more we pretend to be the less we are in actuality.

This is a call to blur the line between fact and fiction . Paradoxically there are many truths in fiction. Certainly there are many lies in facts.

This is a call to ASSUME YOUR OWN AUTHORITY. That is for sure. Do not trust even trust the authority of this writing. ASSUME YOUR OWN AUTHORITY but don't count on it's substance. There have been too many mistakes by many whom believed themselves right. The mind plays too many tricks, deluding itself in its righteousness. This is about as much as I can ascertain.

Monty Cantsin
Chief Advertising Executive
The Blind Authority Manipulation Corporation