Your media is your eyes and ears. They can manipulate your actions just manipulating what you people see.
When you travel around the world, this is the first thing you learn: all the people, in all countries are manipulated by the media, controlled by the power structures.
"If you prick us, do we not bleed? If you tickle us, do we not laugh? If you poison us, do we not die?"
The Merchant of Venice
There is an almost automatic response from an stimulus you perceive. Being real or artificially created does not matter for the brain.
In the supposedly "free countries", they just control the media that most people watch. Most people just does not care.
For example, most Americans have a SouthPark puppet idea of Saddam Hussein, but he was a very smart person. As this person spoke a different language, you could portray the idea that is convenient for helping the interest of the people in power, basically invading a foreign country for stealing their oil.
Most Americans believe that they invaded Iraq because extending democracy, weapons of mass destruction or whatever. But it only takes an hour of talking with real Iraqis(or traveling to Iraq) to know better.
Just one thing, how many films have you seen about Hitler and Nazism, and how many about Stalin that killed more than Hitler. It was not convenient to portray Stalin as he was when he was alive.
Have you seen the image of Putin in the Western media today. Again, just understanding Russian makes a huge difference in how they could manipulate you.
Putin also manipulates their people, but he is not the only one.
Im going through this now, having just returned to the UK after a number of years away. Last time I felt this way was when i left a village bubble for the bubble of London village.
That said - I'm amazed at how 'broken' everything is - schools, doctors, police, roads. And so much of London is still 'up and coming', i.e. a dump.
However, it can't have changed that much. Friends are still comfortably numb and tolerant of the entropy and propaganda.
As I was before - indeed, I maintained a rosy view of Blighty all my time outside and it served as my benchmark for other countries.
Im sure the change is more with me - I see this place with new eyes and feel like a foreigner tbh. It's an interesting position.
Travel (not tourism) perhaps doesn't broaden the mind as much as create a cognitive dissonance. We deal with it by either denial and retreating into our set patterns or adapting.
The former is a living death. Embrace change or be consumed by it.
wrt UK - gov here is stealthily setting up their own great wall. Given the well established corporate news filters, speech censorship and language planning, its no longer in anyones interest to speak openly in public. What a system we have created for ourselves!
Still as Kierkegaard reminded us: people lay so much store by freedom of expression, but not so much for freedom of thought.
They can't take that away from us (yet)
When you travel around the world, this is the first thing you learn: all the people, in all countries are manipulated by the media, controlled by the power structures.
"If you prick us, do we not bleed? If you tickle us, do we not laugh? If you poison us, do we not die?"
The Merchant of Venice
There is an almost automatic response from an stimulus you perceive. Being real or artificially created does not matter for the brain.
In the supposedly "free countries", they just control the media that most people watch. Most people just does not care.
For example, most Americans have a SouthPark puppet idea of Saddam Hussein, but he was a very smart person. As this person spoke a different language, you could portray the idea that is convenient for helping the interest of the people in power, basically invading a foreign country for stealing their oil.
Most Americans believe that they invaded Iraq because extending democracy, weapons of mass destruction or whatever. But it only takes an hour of talking with real Iraqis(or traveling to Iraq) to know better.
Just one thing, how many films have you seen about Hitler and Nazism, and how many about Stalin that killed more than Hitler. It was not convenient to portray Stalin as he was when he was alive.
Have you seen the image of Putin in the Western media today. Again, just understanding Russian makes a huge difference in how they could manipulate you.
Putin also manipulates their people, but he is not the only one.