The Great Awakener

Article #1: The Great Awakener by Dr. Herbert M. Shelton

Understanding has been defined as “the power to make experience more intelligible by analyzing it in the light of valid and appropriate general concepts.”

The man who analyzes and understands may accept or reject on a basis of intelligence. He carefully considers and weighs all the facts and principles involved in a proposition and arrives at a decision.

Snap judgments and emotional acceptances or rejections do not grow out of a process of this kind. When we accept or reject a new idea or a new practice only because it disagrees or agrees or appears to disagree or agree with our prepossessions and preconceptions, we are guided, not by intelligence, but by prejudice and emotion.

Analysis is the sole guide for intelligent selection of alternative courses of action. If we lack sufficient data to make a full analysis, we do not accept or reject, but suspend judgment until more data can be obtained.

Mass media, so popular today, not alone with advertisers, but also with propagandists and pseudo-educators, make use of a form of hypnotic technique in their efforts to sway the popular mind.

By the constantly reiterated slogan, by frequent repetition of words and gestures, by holding the same image always before the minds of their intended victims, they seek to create a state of semi-somnambulism in which the poor victims of the mass media processes do exactly as they are told.

The people are said to be “conditioned” by such processes. Not merely the obvious, but also the hidden,
persuaders are employed in this mass conditioning of the minds of the people.

Hitler’s use of the “big lie” was made effective by the same process. In advertising and in much of the propaganda of various groups in our culture, the same effective use of the “big lie” is seen. No better example of this can be offered than the constant stream of false medical propaganda that pours from the presses.

Among a people who have been conditioned to “think” in slogans and to follow the crowd in all things, truth has rough sledding. When a revolutionary new truth that seems likely to disturb the status quo is presented to the herd mind, the owner is likely to quote some popular slogan and swing off into the jitterbug line.

In our mass conditioned culture none of us are ourselves: We are faithful copies of what our masters want us to be.

Often arguing heatedly for or against this or that, we suffer a myopic inability to peer beneath the surface and discern the reality that lies below. We almost always miss tie fact that our acceptances and our rejections, as well as the receptors and rejectors, are all part of a very complex, persuasive cultural process.

It is disheartening to listen to the discussion of contemporary acceptances by the robot minds that constitute the product of our overworked mass media. But the case is not as hopeless as it seems.

Truth has a way of awakening sleepwalkers and clearing the conditioned cobwebs from their minds.

No man armed with the truth is ever welcome in any culture. He is spat upon and discredited by the masters of the culture and their robot underlings, in proportion to the extent that he is feared. But he never fails to dehypnotize many of the victims of the mass-cultural process.

Today we witness the gratifying sight of many sleepwalkers awakening from their fever-dream as a result of coming in contact with Hygienic truth.

We must bring this truth to more and more of the sleepers, that they also may awaken.