In Part 1 of this article I commented on another article a stumbled upon while perusing the web. It has to do with the conscious and deliberate use of language. Here is where you can find Part 1.
Oh language! We all use it to communicate but few really understand its power to manipulate our consciousness and transform our behaviors without our consent.
My first serious lesson in television news happened years ago – before I started studying NLP – when I stopped watching television for several months. When one evening I turned the TV back on, I realized that nothing has changed. To my shock, I discovered that, even by the conventional chance, there should have been something new, but wasn’t. The same clichés, the same sound-bites, same fear, same alerts, same brain numbing reality shows, even the same commercials. And several months have passed since I last watched the news.
And then I realized something else which started to concern me; my Unconscious Mind had recorded everything from the past. It came all back – all the old news with which I compared the “new news”. Something unbeknown to me was happening in my mind. Something over which obviously I had little or no control.
After I started my NLP career and I began to learn how to change these things that my Unconscious Mind recorded things made even more sense. But I also learned what can be done with language and initially I got really concerned.
If for example a common word – usually not a specific but rather an abstract word – is used in a sentence, the readers or listeners to that sentence will attach to that word their own inner experience of it. They will also attach to it the “information” given to them as to the meaning of that word. But what if the meaning of that word is different for certain people compared to the rest of us? A common term, separating two groups of people: the ones who think in one way about that word and the other who thinks in a different way about the same thing. Let’s take an example: the word “organic”. What we think when we read the word organic has no resemblance with what the word organic means according to the department of agriculture which attributes to the word organic a series of steps and procedures, including many pesticides. But we all eat organic and think that we eat what Mother Nature has always produced for us. Boy, are we wrong!
This is a very simple example, however there is more. Once you understand that the meaning attached to words for some people is not the same as for most other people, you also being to understand that there are further implications. Then you can create a process of societal engineering based on language. How?
In a few steps. (1) First you select words that are abstract enough and attach to them new meanings, new Complex Equivalents (this is a piece of jargon from NLP which I described in Part 1. Then (2) substitute new words for the same concept. For example the word “natural” is substituted for the word organic. People buy “natural” produce thinking they’re buying organic – but they’re not. And finally (3) you repeatedly use the new terms and concepts into conversations across the mass media. The result? Linguistic manipulation for social engineering. It is a deliberate linguistic manipulation of common words known to both the common wider society and some smaller groups but really understood by the smaller groups in a distinctive way.
There is a little more to say about this – in Part 3.