“Authoritarian political ideologies have a vested interest in promoting fear, a sense of the imminence of takeover by aliens and real diseases are useful material.”
Susan Sontag
“Censorship is the living confession of the powerful that they can only trample on dumb slaves, but cannot govern free peoples. Censorship is something that stands far beneath the executioner, for the same ray of enlightenment that sixty years ago helped the executioner achieve honesty has recently branded censorship with the stigma of contempt.”
Johann Nepomuk Nestroy
“Stupidity is the strangest of all diseases. The sick person never suffers from it. Those who suffer painfully are the others.”
Paul Henri Spaak
“Cognitive warfare is waged on the battlefield of the human mind. Tactical or strategic objectives are achieved by pursuing warfare by other means. This method of warfare directly exploits advances in digital technology, applied both at individual and networked levels, to manipulate the psychological, social, and information environment. This shapes not only what people think individually and as social networks but also influences how they collectively act and interact.
Launched by a sophisticated adversary, cognitive warfare manipulates individual and group representations or beliefs with the desired effect of amplifying targeted behaviors and actions that favor the adversary. Pursued to the fullest, cognitive warfare has the potential to destabilize societies, military organizations, and fracture alliances.
Cognitive warfare is achieved by integrating cyber, information, psychological, and social engineering capabilities. Exploiting information technology, it seeks to create confusion, false representations, and uncertainty with a deluge of information over-abundance or misinformation. This is achieved by focusing attention on false targets, causing distraction, introducing false narratives, radicalizing individuals, and amplifying social polarization to muster the cognitive effects needed to achieve short-term and long-term objectives.”
NATO
“A public that can no longer distinguish between truth and fiction is left to interpret reality through illusion. Random facts or obscure bits of data and trivia are used either to bolster illusion and give it credibility, or discarded if they interfere with the message. The worse reality becomes—for example, as foreclosures and unemployment skyrocket—the more people seek refuge and comfort in illusions. When opinions cannot be distinguished from facts, when there is no universal standard to determine truth in law, in science, in scholarship, or in reporting the events of the day, when the most valued skill is the ability to entertain, the world becomes a place where lies become true, where people can believe what they want to believe. This is the real danger of pseudo-events and why pseudo-events are far more pernicious than stereotypes. They do not explain reality, as stereotypes attempt to, but replace reality. Pseudo-events redefine reality by the parameters set by their creators. These creators, who make massive profits selling illusions, have a vested interest in maintaining the power structures they control.”
Chris Hedges
“Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past”
George Orwell
“If you want to assert a truth, first make sure it’s not just an opinion that you desperately want to be true.”
Neil deGrasse Tyson
“The power of government rests on the ignorance of the people, and it knows this and therefore will always fight against enlightenment.”
Leo Tolstoi