Changing A World Through Colors

"Who's to say that's blue anyway?...I mean you wouldn't say that's DEFINITELY blue, would you?"

A little over 10 years ago, I stumbled across a guy on YouTube named Derren Brown who is a master magician, illusionist, and the best manipulator of reality I’ve ever seen. Please watch this short clip.

If you haven’t watched this video, the synopsis is Derren Brown walks into a Vegas casino, finds some girls, sits down with them and proceeds to convince one of them that colors on four cards are different from what they really are. He then takes the girl outside and asks her to look for her red car, which she now thinks is black.

In short, in a matter of minutes, Derren Brown rewires this woman’s brain to see the color red as black. It’s fascinating, scary, and yet fun to watch.

Or check out how he tells Simon Pegg exactly what he wants for his birthday.

I’ve thought a lot about this over the past two years. How could practically the entire westernized world, full of critical-thinkers and scientists and loud voices and rebels, fall so hard and fast into a mass hypnosis? How could the majority of the population, worldwide, be so deceived, when the truth was clear?

As a young graphic designer, I was in a Photoshop workshop one time early on in my career, and the instructor began to talk about his time in the advertising industry. He sounded like a guy that had been through a lot and seen some stuff. At one point he made the comment, “if you really want to see manipulation, check out what they’re doing on Madison Avenue.”

After realizing Madison Avenue was more than just a cool street in Monopoly, I started to research what happened on Madison Avenue. I started to get into the psychology and social science of top-level marketing and advertising, and it opened a world that completely blew my mind.

Every single day, it’s estimated that you, the consumer, is bombarded with up to 5,000 ads. These are just ads to sell someone’s goods or service. That’s a staggering amount of messaging that’s pummeling your brain. Advertisers and marketers understand this, so they’re always looking for an edge, a new trick, a method to get their message to “cut through the clutter” and lodge into your brain.

In order to do this, these experts segment and research and A/B test and do it all again and again, dissecting how you think, when you think, what you think and how you feel. They pour it into a calculator and calculate your data and come up with a plan, an algorithm, a message, a song that’s going right into the most fertile and tangible spots of your being, touching something that is longing to feel. And like Pavlov’s dogs, you eventually respond to that tone.

There’s a general rule that your message won’t get through until about the seventh “touch”, so these experts know the chances of getting you to do something on the first contact are usually pretty slim. Marketers may try for the “wham bam thank you ma’am” approach from time to time, but generally they know that it’s a longer courtship that’s going to win you over. They know they usually have to woo you.

But it’s good that these experts are only contained to advertising and marketing, right? Surely our governments don’t employ these tactics on their citizens. That would be somewhat - Orwellian - wouldn’t it? Questionable and borderline unethical, right?

The fact is, our governments and mega-corporations (that own many of the governments) employ or consult with more behavioral and social scientists, psychologists, A&M experts, and other master manipulators than any other organization or industry in the world. They have near unlimited resources, and they have control of the myriad channels with which to disseminate information.

Most importantly, as we the people have found out the hard way, the iron will to hammer their advertising messages home.

For instance, in 2021, members of the Scientific Pandemic Influenza Group on Behaviour out of Britain came out publicly to express regret about the role that they played during the early days of the pandemic in Britain to influence people to accept lockdowns and other Covid responses. They called the methods “totalitarian.”

Gavin Morgan, a psychologist on the team, said: “Clearly, using fear as a means of control is not ethical. Using fear smacks of totalitarianism. It’s not an ethical stance for any modern government. By nature I am an optimistic person, but all this has given me a more pessimistic view of people.”

Surely, when this story came out, it was a bombshell that woke the average citizen up. No? Don’t really remember this? Unfortunately it had its two minutes in the news cycle and then vanished, barely moving the needle.

For those of us that have been paying attention, however, it was one more confirmation to us of all the things that happened, that we instinctively knew were going on. These were the things we were telling our friends and family, only to be greeted with a shrug or dismissive, scornful “conspiracy theory” comments. Or worse.

Let’s never forget.

THEY ACTUALLY DID THIS.

THEY ARE STILL DOING IT.

There are two things that I feel have perpetuated the coming new world order more than anything else. These are powers that we had no idea of, the Pandora’s boxes that we should never have opened:

1. The 24 hour news cycle

2. Social media

Believe it or not, we once lived in a world where we weren’t being bombarded 24/7 with facts, figures, images, stats, and messaging. We tuned in to the six or eleven o’clock news or read the paper and threw it away. Then we went and connected with our family and friends in real life. We played board games and played music and walked through an airport with nary a TV or device to be seen.

These 24/7 news cycles have pushed us to the point where we can’t separate fact from fiction.

In this TED Talk, the speaker, Ray Marcano, says some profound things:

• News is objective, researched, and verified. It’s noteworthy information reported free of bias.

• Content, however, are words anyone can write. There’s a huge difference.

• These channels and this cycle completely blur the line between fact and opinion. One moment, and anchor is reporting what is intended to be taken as fact and objective news. The next minute, that anchor is sitting in an interview, giving an opinion.

• As he so concisely puts it, “quality needs down time.”

The 24 hour news cycle simply isn’t news, and there’s a massive danger when the ordinary person fails to understand this and accepts this stew of information as authoritative news.

Enter the Derren Browns of the world.

These experts know that your brain is stew. They know that your thoughts swirling in your head are very much not your own anymore. Between the ads for consumer goods, the messages in the print and visual media, the expectations of your boss, the demands of your family and friends, your FOMO and rage from your social media feed, your quest for truth and meaning in your life (or flight from it), the self-loathing and guilt for not being in shape, and the billion other things that are swirling around in that stewed brain of yours, they understand full well how much fertile ground your brain is. And they exploit it, ruthlessly and relentlessly.

The reality is, most citizens are exhausted by the demands of life. Vulnerable mentally. One of the most dangerous times for people is when they’re tired and unguarded. Think about the mistakes you make. When do you make them? Are you full of life, energy, enthusiasm, vitality and clarity? Or are you exhausted, distracted, anxious, and filled with tension?

To the weary, the mentally vulnerable, the physically exhausted, the desire to research and question much outside of the sphere of what is needed in the next moment to get by is secondary. They just want someone else to think about those things, because at the end of the day, they’re drowning in their own immediate realities. Fighting one more battle is just not in the cards. So they outsource their thoughts and beliefs.

Individual liberties? Ha, I can barely make it to bed because my boss is a monster. I don’t give a shit about liberty, because I literally don’t have any in my life anyway.

Early treatment for Covid? Don’t care, Fauci is the expert, the experts concur, now let me get back to salvaging my marriage please. The wife says the kids need to mask, so those little fuckers are going to have masks plastered on their ugly snouts.

Lockdowns? Whew!!!! Yes please, and the longer the better. I haven’t breathed in years, and this is a chance to tell the world to kiss off. Because Covid, right?

Into this stew comes the experts. Wait, it’s not REALLY blue, is it? Isn’t it sort of a bluish-yellow? Maybe it’s more of a warm yellowish orange?

Maybe a man isn’t ALWAYS a man, but COULD be a woman, even if he’s still got all of his bits and pieces.

Maybe our kids could take one for the team so us adults can feel safe as this plague that’s killing grandma washes over the earth.

Maybe it really is OK for the President to be bought and paid for by a foreign entity.

Maybe my individual right and our national sovereignty don’t matter.

They come with these messages that make no sense. Messages of death and evil, wrapped up in a tidy, repeatable mantra. They pump the message of the day into the news cycle and social media, and it relentlessly pummels the pulp, the stew, that most people have resigned themselves to live in mentally and spiritually. They push headline after headline, soundbite after soundbite, and the people believe because the authorities, the experts, the news, tell them they must.

And then, if they don’t, they’re selfish. Racist. Homophobic. Yellow is really blue, can’t they see that?

And something else happens that these experts understand completely well - social proof. Ingrained into the DNA of human beings is the desire to fit in. We are conditioned to try to fit in because for thousands of years, we lives in tribes. Barbarians were ALWAYS at the gates, and to stand out, to stray outside of the protection of the community usually meant death, injury, or being shunned.

So these experts, these social engineers, they start to “nudge” the herd in one direction. Since they control most every vital channel of communication, it’s easy for them to point that laser pointer in one direction. They get the big cats going first, and eventually all the other cats move in that direction, driven by that innate desire to fit in, to be safe, to feel accepted.

Once the cats attention is all focused, they just have to keep that laser pointed exactly where they want it.

They just have to keep repeating ad nauseum the message, the swill, over and over. If some of the herd starts to stray, they beat them, whip them, scream at them until they get back in the pen. It’s not until enough of the herd turns around and starts to claw at the faces of these herdsmen that change happens, that the spell becomes broken.

As we move forward as societies, we MUST break free from the spells. We must learn to “take every thought captive”. We HAVE to do the hard work as individuals to know what the messages are that are being poured into the stew of our brains and souls.

And THEN, we have to push back. When they try to tell us blue is yellow, we need to look them in the eye and call bullshit. When they try it again, we stand firm and repeat our stance. Eventually they’ll go find another mark.

Let’s get ahead of them. Let’s keep warning the other marks that these liars and manipulators and fiends (all due respect to Derren Brown) are coming for them, and they want nothing short of full control of their minds so that they can change the colors. If they can change the colors, they can change the world.

But so can we, as long as we don’t let them.