The little "Red book" and the Rasputin Syndrome

As a kid I often heard my dad talk about people who's views  leaned away from mainstream.

He would say that he had clearly been "reading from the Red Book".
We actually imagined that there was an actual Red Book that could corrupt the reader with views, so off side that it would end up scrambling what little brain we had left.

I don't actually know what he meant by the 'Red Book' reference, and can only assume that it was some kind of urban myth that was handed down, encompassing the works of Marx, Mao and possibly a controversial Islamic scholar or two.  

I must sit with him someday and ask what precisely  he meant, to get his end of the story.

The point is that we were raised with the idea that there are some books, who's ideas are so potent and damaging that one is best advised to leave them alone.

Really?

That would imply that there are people that I can speak to that could and would influence and undermine my entire belief system, all without my knowledge!
If this was possible then the converse would have to be true.

There would therefore be  people, who could make one believe, just by the power of their voice.

And If this were true, and this powerful magic was available, why have we not found the most powerful of these gifted people and recorded their works, and played it over the public address systems of the world.

Clearly we could take over the world.

The notion that there are these Rasputin types walking amongst us, with black deep set  eyes that can completely change our views, if we simply listened to their voice is terrifying and quite obsurd.

Worse still is the implication that its not just their voice, but the words; because the written word carried the same power.  In fact the longevity of the written form of this magic would  maje it far, far worse than the living voice.  It could continue to destroy the free will of man long after the death of our beloved Rasputin.

Only if every last copy of the book were burnt, would the free will of the people be restored. These are indeed weapons of mass destruction on such a scale that one wonders why the super powers bother trying to blow up each other with nukes when this method of getting people to blow up their own minds seems like a much elegant  solution.

I can't help think about the  Propaganda of war, when it comes to the influential, seductive power of the "Rasputin Syndrome".

Are we saying that the only reason Vietnam and Korean  wars were not won using Propaganda was that the enemy got wise and stuffed his ears with rice?

There is however a more subtle approach that clearly is successful. The marketing world has used below the threshold of awareness, subconscious messages that reach out to our primitive lizard brain.
These soft touch messages could attempt to sell a brand of soap powder, or convince a people to go to war with another. This kind of eroding of popular opinion, over time is a perfectly successful method of moulding public perceptions and opinions, in the same way that one boils a frog to death.

If you drop a frog into boiling water, it gets burned and jumps out. If you put it in luke warm water and gradually turn up the heat, it just sits there and cooks to death.

I personally haven't tried this experiment and don't know if it would actually work with frogs, but the message is clear. If one is being nudged in a particular direction, ever so gently, one could end up being manipulated without ones knowledge.

So it's not the little red book of mind control that we should be fearing, but those we trust. The custodians of our morality who might, if they wanted to, manipulate our minds into writing blogs about boiled frogs.

M Parak
Durban 2015