The Propaganda Model and the Five-Epoch Framework of the Human Journey – The Video
Structuralist frameworks to understand how our world works
The video of this post is here.
It was not until I made a recent video that I realized that my framework of Epochs of the human journey is a structural model that is similar to Ed Herman’s Propaganda Model. The Propaganda Model has five filters, and my Epochal framework has five Epochs. That similarity was unintentional, as I just realized that my Epochal framework is a structural model.
As soon as I realized that I had created a structural model, my mind began racing, thinking about its similarities to the Propaganda Model and structural models in general. I will be thinking about this for a long time, but some features jumped out at me, not only my framework’s similarities with the Propaganda Model, but how structural features work. Some of that will follow.
Even though the Propaganda Model was Ed’s invention, Noam Chomsky was the coauthor of the book in which the final model was introduced, and Noam was perhaps the most astute analyst of the Propaganda Model and how it operates. He noted that it was a special case of the constraints that all intellectuals in capitalist societies are subjected to. Noam has long discussed that few journalists understand how they have been brainwashed, and most of them think that they report the truth. Ed called it internalized values, as journalists and pundits unwittingly adopt the framework that serves elite interests. Ed wrote that such people are “incapable” of rational thought when encountering information that challenges their brainwashing, which brings up the question of whether humans are really a sentient species, as Brian O’Leary asked after watching the crazed reactions of denial and fear that scientists had to the idea of free energy.
I want to discuss a little in this post how those structural features operate. Noam has discussed that the process begins in kindergarten, of weeding out people who fail to acquiesce to the brainwashing. By the time that journalists graduate from Columbia’s School of Journalism, they are thoroughly brainwashed and will reliably promote and defend elite interests in their work. There are rare exceptions, such as when Matt Kennard tried to question Henry Kissinger about his imperial crimes, and Kennard then became a pariah at Columbia. Kennard was the rare exception, which shows that there can be exceptions to the rule, although they can pay a heavy price for it if they speak out, often with ruined careers.
The structural features of our societies present constraints on behavior. Laws and their enforcement comprise one such constraint, but elite brainwashing is a subtler process, so is having one’s career ruined for reporting outside of the imperial framework, such as the bloodbath framework that Ed and Noam invented in their first collaboration.
I have only been thinking about the similarities of Ed’s Propaganda Model in my Epochal framework for a few days, so I am sure that many more realizations are coming for me, but what follows is what I immediately noticed.
Ed’s Propaganda Model describes the current state of how the USA’s mainstream media operates, while my Epochal framework not only describes humanity’s current state but how it came to be. The human journey has always primarily rested on the energy issue, but I took it back through the journey of life on Earth and even to the beginning of our universe, which is nothing but energy in the current cosmology. The organisms that effectively acquired and managed energy survived and reproduced, which is a biological imperative. Evolution operated from the very first life on Earth, and the human body contains innovations that are billions of years old. Not only do those evolutionary innovations make our lives possible, if we act in opposition to them, our health will generally suffer and we will die early deaths. I first learned this when I was 12, when my family changed his diet from processed food to whole food. Processed food is addictive, partly by design, but it also provides patients for the medical racket. RFK, Jr., is waging war against this situation and the media is fighting him the entire way.
Social animals are social because sociality increases the survival and reproductive prospects of a society’s members. In simian societies, which include humans, their members constantly jockey for status, as high status enhances an individual’s survival and reproductive prospects. All simian societies engage in the often-delicate dance of vying for status while maintaining the social cohesion needed to hold the society together to prevail against its competitors. Many human behaviors are deeply baked into our biology and present features that powerfully influence us. I will call those features structural. Many are essential for our survival and wellbeing, but it can be highly counterproductive and even fatal to mindlessly adhere to them, especially when they are orchestrated by others for reasons of power and control.
In evolutionary theory, a key question is whether common features between species came from descent or convergence. Descent means that it came through an organism’s DNA from its ancestors, and convergence means that different species independently evolved similar features to solve the problems of survival and reproduction.
I have seen so-called mystical material that stated that the reason why humans invented agriculture and civilization in unrelated parts of Earth is that extraterrestrials taught people to do it. I doubt it. I think that the independent invention of agriculture in several places and the independent invention of civilization in four places are examples of convergence. Behaviorally modern humans are pretty smart. During the conquest of Earth, the human population increased by a factor of 1,000, and after the easy meat was driven to extinction and the brief warming interval that we live in today was conducive to plant growth, I think that it was natural that humans scattered across the planet would invent similar solutions. The same goes for civilization. Cities are energy-concentrating devices and collections of tools. The early ones were all built on shorelines, to take advantage of low-energy transportation lanes over water to supply the cities. Several thousand years later, Europe exploited the same concept to turn Earth’s ocean into a low-energy transportation lane and thereby conquer humanity.
Similarly, all industrial nations look similar, and they stand in stark contrast to agrarian nations. It is all about their level of energy capture. There are no hay-powered rockets to the Moon. These are structural features that few people are really conscious of as they go about their lives. As I mentioned in a recent video, not only did nobody ever imagine the coming Epochs, they have a hard time comprehending the previous Epochs.
Coming to understand these realities helped me become far more sympathetic to why people react to the idea of free energy with denial and fear. Time is short, and my approach seeks the very few people who have awakened from their brainwashing, care enough about where we are heading as a species, and dare to imagine the next Epoch as a way of helping it manifest. The technology for it is older than I am, but it is sequestered from public awareness and use by history’s greatest cover up, as global elites try to protect their game of power and control over the planet and humanity. I am somewhat sympathetic to their plight, as the arrival of the Fifth Epoch will mean the end of elites and they know it. They fail to understand that they will become a thousand times richer in the Fifth Epoch and that love is the power of creation. Global elites are in arrested spiritual development. But nearly all of humanity sleepwalks, so blaming elites for this situation is counterproductive, as we have all played our part. I think that the love and enlightenment approach will work, if the people can be found for it.
This will not be the last time that I write on this subject.