MITOP and the Double Bind
March 15, 2008
I want to elaborate somewhat on the idea of transparent conspiracy,34 lest
the idea seem too big to chew. It is chewable, but it takes a little work. Even
though I have been chewing on it for some time, I am only now arriving at the
conclusion, as I pointed out in "Back to Ground Zero," that the theory is
correct.
First of all, let's give it a name that will itself be more transparent: MITOP.
We are familiar with LIHOP (Let It Happen On Purpose) and MIHOP (Made
It Happen On Purpose). Now we have "Made It Transparent On Purpose."
What do so many people now think 9/11 was an inside job? Because there
are so many reasons to think so? Yes – for all of those reasons, and for one
more that not so many people may have thought of: we are supposed to think
so. The perpetrators, the people on the inside (Orwell's "Inner Party") want us
to think so.
This is not as much of a leap from MIHOP as one might think, just as the
leap from LIHOP to MIHOP is not as big as it used to be. In fact, as has been
often pointed out, there is no dichotomy or any real difference between
LIHOP and MIHOP. There is just a logical extension of degree of guilt, the
difference in degree being completely negligible when we are talking about the
highest authorities in the land, the most powerful military and intelligence
forces in the world. When these most powerful forces allow a crime to be
committed, they are not criminally negligent; they are perpetrators.
The distance from MIHOP to MITOP is even less distinct. Once MIHOP
has penetrated our red-blooded American minds, MITOP cannot be far
behind, if reason and common sense are our guides. The question that must
keep coming to mind as we are confronted with fact after astounding fact, lie
after lie, contradiction after contradiction, is "How can they have been so
stupid?" I mean, really. Could they really have thought that we would be so
stupid as to believe the 571-page lie35 the 9/11 Commission foisted on us?
Could they have been stupid enough to think that we would be so stupid, at
least for very long? They must have known the 9/11 "truth movement" would
be inevitable. How could they possibly have been clever enough to do what
they did, and yet be so stupid as to think they could keep all the gaping holes
in the official story from being exposed?
The simplest and most logical answer to this is that they were not that
stupid. On the contrary, they wanted us to know. They have always wanted us
– at least those of us who are not yet fully lobotomized by the mainstream
propaganda – to know that they can do whatever they want to with us, which
34 See "Transparency Theory," in this volume.
35 See
http://www.911truth.org/article.php?stor...3112738404.
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40
includes not only 9/11 but also jamming a ridiculous and totally incredible
fairy tale down our throats. They want us to know, very clearly but without
having to come out and say it explicitly (this may come if martial law is
imposed), as I have put it more bluntly earlier, that they've got us by the balls
(short hairs for the politically correct).
I have discussed "Stupidity Theory" in an earlier essay. This keeps floating
to the surface, it seems, as the catch-all explanation for all troubling questions.
Thus we have rejection of the "inside job" thesis on the grounds that the
government (and in particular the current president) is too stupid to have
pulled it off. This is not very different, if at all, from the official theory of what
actually happened, namely that the government is too stupid to have
prevented it or stopped it while it was in progress, 19 Arabs with box cutters
being just too much for the most sophisticated air defense system in the
history of the universe. They just couldn't "connect the dots." Was too stupid, I
mean, of course, since now Homeland Security and the perpetual War on
Terror have made everyone much smarter.
This pattern of Stupidity continues as we progress from LIHOP to
MIHOP. We must assume, given either of these scenarios, that the Insiders
were just too stupid to have pulled off 9/11 any better than they did. Yeah,
they were able to bring down those buildings, maybe with secret high-tech
weaponry, but they just couldn't get old Ted Olson to get his story straight,
Cheney to get his story straight, the military to get their story straight, couldn't
get the names of the hijackers on the flight manifests, couldn't get enough
debris at the crash sites to look realistic, couldn't make holes in the Pentagon
walls that would look realistic, couldn't keep the BBC from announcing that
WTC 7 had fallen 26 minutes before the fact, couldn't produce a whitewashed
Commission Report that would fool a ten-year-old, etc., etc. – in short,
couldn't do anything right but instead produced a mountain of evidence
pointing directly to an inside job.
Is this credible? Are we going to fall for Stupidity Theory once again? Are
we going to be even more stupid than the 9/11 Commission (although
stupidity cannot explain their failure either)? Are we going to say that we, too,
cannot connect the dots? Are we going to ignore the obvious logical
conclusion that people diabolically smart enough to pull off 9/11 would
certainly have been smart enough to cover their tracks better than they did,
smart enough not to leave so many screaming questions unanswered, if they
had wanted to?
Common sense tells us that this degree of bungling is unlikely, and that
they wanted us to know that they could do it and get away with it. Is this not
precisely what has happened? Tens of millions of people do "know," despite
the official story and the mainstream cover-up, that 9/11 was an inside job.
And has there been a real investigation as a result? Have any of the Bush gang
been impeached or indicted, or even subpoened, much less punished? Have
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41
the docile lapdogs in Congress or the mainstream press showed any sign of
life, any sign that they are willing to do what they are supposed to do? No.
And let's be honest. Is this situation likely to change? Once Bush and Co. are
out of office and we have a Clinton or Obama or McCain as president, who
can claim, credibly enough, that they had nothing to do with it, will the truth
be any more likely to emerge "officially"?
From the point of view of the perpetrators, 9/11 has been a success.
MITOP has been successful. We have a "non-consensus reality" that Lev
Grossman36 (Time, Sept. 3, 2006 ) correctly depicts as World No. 1 and World
No. 2: Official Conspiracy Theory (OCT) and MITOP exist side by side.
What this really means is that we are farther down the road to doublethink
than we have ever been as a nation. Preemptive and perpetual war is peace.
Torture is humane. Fear is security. Constraint is freedom. Tyranny is
democracy. Occupation is liberation. Violations of the Constitution are legal.
This is the world we live in now.
Let us analyze more closely the mind-control operations that have brought
us to this point of insanity. OCT is the Big Lie, a well-known technique known
as such at least since Hitler wrote in Mein Kampf 37
In this they ["the Jews"] proceeded on the sound principle that the
magnitude of a lie always contains a certain factor of credibility, since the
great masses of the people in the very bottom of their hearts tend to be
corrupted rather than consciously and purposely evil, and that, therefore,
in view of the primitive simplicity of their minds they more easily fall a
victim to a big lie than to a little one, since they themselves lie in little
things, but would be ashamed of lies that were too big. Such a falsehood
will never enter their heads and they will not be able to believe in the
possibility of such monstrous effrontery and infamous misrepresentation
in others; yes, even when enlightened on the subject, they will long doubt
and waver, and continue to accept at least one of these causes as true.
Therefore, something of even the most insolent lie will always remain and
stick – a fact which all the great lie-virtuosi and lying-clubs in this world
know only too well and also make the most treacherous use of.
The same Wikipedia article I have taken this quote from notes how Walter C.
Langer of the OSS (precursor of the CIA), in his psychological profile of
Hitler, correctly understood the technique:
…people will believe a big lie sooner than a little one; and if you repeat it
frequently enough people will sooner or later believe it.
36 See "A Reply to Time."
37 See
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Lie.
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It can readily be seen how the tale of Osama bin Laden and his 19 box-cuttercarrying
hijackers making fools out of the U.S. Air Force qualifies as a Big Lie.
MITOP is essentially the same technique, reversed. The mirror image of
Big Lie is the Big Truth. This is an even better-established principle of
psychological warfare. In more general terms, in sports, for example, it is
known as demoralizing one's opponent. We know it from the 2003 invasion of
Iraq as Shock and Awe. The goal of this strategy is to convince the enemy of
this indelible point: "We are so much more powerful and ruthless than you are
that you might as well surrender." The formal term is "rapid dominance,"
introduced in 1996 at the National Defense University by Harlan Ullman and
James Wade,38 who say the purpose of this doctrine is to
impose this overwhelming level of Shock and Awe against an adversary on
an immediate or sufficiently timely basis to paralyze its will to carry on"[to]
seize control of the environment and paralyze or so overload an
adversary's perceptions and understanding of events that the enemy would
be incapable of resistance at the tactical and strategic levels.
The Wikipedia author continues:
Shock and awe is most consistently used by Ullman and Wade as the effect
which rapid dominance seeks to impose upon an adversary. It is the
desired state of helplessness and lack of will. It can be induced, they write,
by direct force applied to command and control centers, selective denial of
information and dissemination of disinformation, overwhelming combat
force, and rapidity of action.
Thus we have two well-known propaganda techniques which are mirror
images of each other – the Big Lie based on a lie which is so big it must be
believed, and the Big Truth (Shock and Awe) based on a truth that is so big it
must believed, either one of which would be effective on its own.
Of course our leaders don't admit to using the Big Lie at all, because we're
the good guys (except in the case of the attack on the U.S.S Maine, Pearl
Harbor, the Gulf of Tonkin, etc.). The Big Truth, however, as we've seen, is
perfectly acceptable. When both techniques are used together, the result could
be described as a binary weapon, whose combined effect is even more
devastating than either weapon used alone.
The battleground, we must remember, is our own heads. The Big Lie, the
Official Conspiracy Theory expounded by the 9/11 Commission Report, raises
the general level of anxiety and insecurity by conjuring an ever-present but
unidentified "Terrorist" threat, but has no serious pathological effect. It's Us
against Them (whoever and wherever they are).
38 See
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shock_and_awe.
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MITOP is the real wolf at the door, because this threat is not outside but
inside with us. Rather, he is both inside and outside, since both OCT and
MITOP (Grossman's two worlds) co-exist.
MITOP is particularly threatening to Americans, because our mass culture
inculcates so strongly in us that our government is "good." People in many
other countries are much less convinced of the inherent goodness of their
governments, and therefore more easily accept the idea that their leaders are,
or can be, their enemies. Italians, to take a western example, while remaining
"proud Italians," would not necessarily fall apart or even be surprised to learn
that their government is full of lying, murderous scoundrels. We Americans,
however, are conditioned to identify with our government, and since MITOP
identifies the government as the Enemy, it is tantamount to the fully
schizophrenic view of Ourselves as the Enemy, the inimical Other. As long as
we actually believe the government is democratic – which it most certainly is
not – we will have this problem.
From the perpetrators' viewpoint, the illusion of democracy works
perfectly to maintain the schizophrenia that results from the co-existence of
the two contradictory worlds of OCT and MITOP. Why is this good – for
them? Orwell defined doublethink39 in his novel 1984 as
The power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one's mind
simultaneously, and accepting both of them". To tell deliberate lies while
genuinely believing in them, to forget any fact that has become
inconvenient, and then, when it becomes necessary again, to draw it back
from oblivion for just so long as it is needed, to deny the existence of
objective reality and all the while to take account of the reality which one
denies.
In more clinical terms, this is what is called a double bind:
The double bind is often misunderstood to be a simple Catch-22
situation, where the victim is trapped by two conflicting demands. While it
is true that at the core of the double bind are two conflicting demands, the
difference lies in how they are imposed upon the victim, what the victim's
understanding of the situation is, and who imposes these demands upon
the victim. Unlike the usual no-win situation, the victim is largely unaware
of the exact nature of the paradoxical situation he or she is in. This is
because a demand is imposed upon them by someone they regard with
respect, and the demand itself is inherently impossible to fulfill.40
39 See
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doublethink.
40 See
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double_bind.
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Doublethink can be thought of as the end point of the double bind, the point
of no return, of complete insanity. One is not just schizoid but stark raving
mad.
The double bind is created by the conflicting demands imposed on us by
OCT and MITOP. Both theories emanate from people we respect. The anti-
OCT people have much more trouble establishing their respectability than the
OCT supporters, of course, but I think it is fair to say by now that this has
happened. There are scholars for 9/11 truth, pilots for 9/11 truth, architects
and engineers for 9/11 truth, veterans for 9/11 truth, students for 9/11 truth,
"patriots" for 9/11 truth, movie stars for 9/11 truth, etc. We have respectable
sources on both sides. Yet we know that both sides can not be correct.
Lev Grossman treats this as a lack of "consensus reality," as if it were a
disagreement over a truly insoluble question, thus granting a degree of
legitimacy to both "worlds," as he puts it, even though he obviously favors
World No. 1. If he actually believes this, he is deeply schizophrenic. He is
caught in a double bind, and since he does not know how to get out of it, he is
helpless and completely disempowered.
This is precisley the goal of these mind-control strategies – to make all of
us feel helpless. In order for the few to control the many, they (the few) must
either use physical force or psychological force. The latter, historically, has
proven more effective. Noam Chomsky has often pointed out how concepts
like "manufacturing consent" and the "philosophy of futility" have originated
in the constant struggle of the "political class" (in Orwell's terms, the "Inner
Party") to control the "rabble" (us):
When you have a formal democratic system, when people have won
rights after years of struggle, like the right to vote and participate in
elections, you have to take the risk out of democracy by ensuring that there
is very little substance to their democratic choices.
This is done by organising the world so that the major decisions are
not in the public arena. And by imposing on the people - I am now
quoting from manuals of the public relations industry - a "philosophy of
futility". This is done so that the attention of the people is focussed on the
superficial things of life like fashionable consumption.
From infancy children have drilled into them, from television,
advertising and in every possible way, that they have to have a "philosophy
of futility" as far as serious decisions are concerned and that they have to
perceive themselves as passive consumers. It does not really matter what
you know about the world. The less you know, the better.
That is the model. It does not work, but that is the model. The rabble
never accepts this. It continually resists and struggles against this. That also
requires the use of other techniques to try and control people. The elite
media are mostly directed to the small decision-making sector - people
who make choices in decisions that run society. They have to be properly
indoctrinated by not just the media but by the education system and
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everything else. The true mass media that go to the general audience, they
mostly distract, making people pay attention to something else – popular
music, purchasing.41
Paul Nystrom42 was talking in 1928 about keeping people feeling helpless so
they would be good consumers:
One's outlook on life and its purposes may greatly modify one's attitude
toward goods in which fashion is prominent. At the present time, not a
few people in western nations have departed from old-time standards of
religion and philosophy, and having failed to develop forceful views to
take their places, hold to something that may be called, for want of a better
name, a philosophy of futility. This view of life (or lack of a view of life)
involves a question as to the value of motives and purposes of the main
human activities. There is ever a tendency to challenge the purpose of life
itself. This lack of purpose in life has an effect on consumption similar to
that of having a narrow life interest, that is, in concentrating human
attention on the more superficial things that comprise much of fashionable
consumption.
But the same idea applies, as Chomsky says, to making and keeping
people "good citizens," i.e., people who will accept the choices offered to
them and not demand more.
What better way to make us feel helpless than to put us in the double
bind of OCT and MITOP?
I am not a psychiatrist, but it is clear that the first thing we have to do
– and I am talking now about regaining our sanity, not necessarily putting
the 9/11 murderers in jail – is recognize the problem. The double bind is
essentially a communication problem. 9/11 truth must out. There is only
room for one reality, one world. If that leaves us with MITOP, we can
deal with it, because the truth is that we are not helpless. We are only
helpless if we believe we are helpless, and that is what must change.
41 Frontline, November, 2001:
http://www.flonnet.com/fl1824/18241170.htm.
42 See
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophy_of_futility.
"Let me issue and control a nation's money and I care not who writes the laws. - Mayer Rothschild
"Civil disobedience is not our problem. Our problem is civil obedience! People are obedient in the face of poverty, starvation, stupidity, war, and cruelty. Our problem is that grand thieves are running the country. That's our problem!" - Howard Zinn
"If there is no struggle there is no progress. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and never will" - Frederick Douglass
