This article obviously reflects the level of brainwashing and political suppression and not "happiness." Note that the US is 23 and UK 41 and we KNOW that ain't so! Meanwhile, France - which has a lot of citizen activity in the affairs of government is 62!
The article says that "alienated people are more likely to think that ET will be hostile." By the same logic, of course, anyone who thinks that ET will be hostile is "alienated!" The article then goes on to tell us that "When someone is confronted with ambiguous information, what he or she makes of the information can sometimes say a lot about the person." He then suggests that this connection demonstrates that people who hold a dim view of extraterrestrials have negative feelings about how meaningful life is.
Right at this point, there is a problem. It seems that it has been arbitrarily decided that seeing life as meaningful can only be possible if an individual believes in the idea that "everything is beautiful and God is in his heaven and all is right with the world."
Just transfer this to the Right-wing Fascist control system and what kinds of plans THEY might have for such "psychological profiling."
The article tells us:
"We tested the hypothesis that if people feel like the world is cold and cruel, they're more likely than other people to imagine extraterrestrials as being cold and cruel as well. Thus, we set up the survey so we could measure two things. First, to what extent do people feel "alienated," and second, how hostile do these people imagine extraterrestrials would be?"
Now, notice one very important thing: neither of these criteria have anything to do with the conclusion drawn as to the "meaningfulness" of the world. In fact, it is very likely that the exact opposite is true. But we are witnessing the establishing of an "authority" base from which to attack anyone who has the idea that the world, as it is, is not just peachy keen and strawberry bright. For example, let us have a look at the statements that establish whether a person is "alienated" or not. This little "test," we are told, was described by Robert Travis in the journal "Social Indicators Research", and is called the "Margins of Society Alienation Scale."
I feel all alone these days.
My whole world feels like it's falling apart.
I wish I were somebody important.
It's hard for me to tell just what is right and wrong these days.
I don't like to live by society's rules.
I often feel discriminated against.
I'll never find the right person to care enough about me.
What a loaded test! Notice how slyly the statements are mixed. Nearly everybody on the planet who is sitting up and taking nourishment will answer "yes" to all except statements 3 and 5, and possibly the last one. But those two are inserted in there to justify the definition of the test as something that establishes an alienated person as an antisocial one as well! Based upon how strongly the participant agreed or disagreed with each statement, they were identified as people who were feeling very alienated, those who didn't feel alienated at all, and those who fell somewhere between those extremes. And based on their identification as "alienated," they were judged as viewing life as more or less meaningful.
Another way of putting it is: if you notice the things that are wrong with our reality, that means you view the world around you as "cold, cruel and hostile," which then means that you just aren't seeing objectively! You are not giving proper value to this marvelous world in which we live! You aren't fully appreciating the wars and plagues and disasters and man's inhumanity to man properly! You are not giving the proper spin on cosmic catastrophes, military onslaughts, social injustice, personal and familial misfortunes, and a host of assaults too numerous to list.
In short, if you are not living in the warm and fuzzy illusion that the Control System wants you to erect as your "personal myth," or at least pretending that you do, then you are clearly deficient and incapable of perceiving meaning to life. Because, note that most important assumption in the study cited above: those who are "alienated" are being judged about their feelings as to "how meaningful life is." In other words, "how meaningful" is a quantitative judgment that is replacing the qualitative value of WHAT the meaning of life might be.
As the great Historian of Religion, Mircea Eliade pointed out, the study of history, through its various disciplines, offers a view of mankind that is almost insupportable. The rapacious movements of hungry tribes, invading and conquering and destroying in the darkness of prehistory; the barbarian invaders of the civilized world during medieval times; the bloodbaths of the crusades of Catholic Europe against the "infidels" of the Middle East; the stalking "noonday terror" of the Inquisition where martyrs quenched the flames with their blood; and the raging holocaust of modern genocide. Wars, famine, pestilence; all produce an intolerable sense of indefensibility against what Mircea Eliade calls the Terror of History.
When man contemplates history, AS IT IS, he is forced to realize that he is in the iron grip of an existence that seems to have no real care or concern for his pain and suffering. Over and over again, the same sufferings fall upon mankind multiplied millions upon millions of times over millennia. The totality of human suffering is a dreadful thing. I could write until the end of the world using oceans of ink and forests of paper, and never fully convey this terrible condition in which mankind finds his existence.
The beast of arbitrary calamity has always been with us. For as long as human hearts have pumped hot blood through their too-fragile bodies and glowed with the inexpressible sweetness of life and yearning for all that is good and right and loving, the sneering, stalking, drooling and scheming beast of "real life" has licked its lips in anticipation of its next feast of terror and suffering. Since the beginning of time, this mystery of the estate of man, this Curse of Cain has existed. And, since the Ancient of Days, the cry has been: "My punishment is greater than I can bear!"
But if you find yourself saying this, you are "alienated," antisocial, and incapable of finding any meaning in life. You are just simply not "with the program," according to the SETI study cited above.
With that idea in mind, let's look at the questions that were asked of the participants in the SETI study as to how we ought to respond to the receiving of a signal from an extraterrestrial civilization.
ETs are probably looking for planets they can take over for themselves.
We should not reply to the message from ETs because they might be hostile.
ETs would probably look at humans like we are nothing more than animals that belong in their zoos.
Humans would probably not be able to understand the message from ETs because humans and ETs are just too different.
If we reply to the message from ETs, they might come to Earth and take over our world.
We should not believe what the message says, because the ETs may be lying.
ETs would probably want to make humans their slaves.
The message from ETs may contain a hidden message that could be harmful to humans.
Aside from the fact that nearly all of the above statements are redundancies, most of them are based on the idea of suspecting that ETs might be liars. For some reason, that strikes me as peculiar. It's almost as though the issue that is really being tested is a person's gullibility index. Nevertheless, if a person has thought long and hard about History - AS IT IS - and has made some assessment about it based on the objective facts, then he may, indeed, extrapolate those facts into considerations of ET civilizations that may contact us. This then will lead him to the objective speculation that any ET civilization that goes out looking for "New Worlds to Conquer" does not have our best interests at heart!
The SETI study has told us: "The pattern is clear: people who feel alienated are much more likely to be concerned that ET has evil intentions."
Yer durn skippy!
But the SETI study has attempted to establish that such an objective assessment of reality is pathological. The SETI folks are suggesting that the relationship between "alienation" and the perception that "powerful others" (like the government, perhaps), might not be friendly is evidence of a "personal prejudice," as opposed to an objective perception of the world! The study suggests that alienation is a "personal bias," that is not "in synch" with reality. Reciprocally, this means that they are suggesting that our world is just hunky dory; that two billion people meeting their deaths in a century of wars and famines is just "the cost of doing business" in this reality.
Most of our problems as a species come from an inability to agree on our conclusions which is generally based on a misinterpretation of the basic events of life. For this reason we are always fighting over symbolism and definitions, the very things that are supposed to help us understand each other better. It seems that the ability to see reality without any illusions is a very difficult perspective to acquire. It consists of viewing the world without the denial that plagues our understanding of basic events, as opposed to the illusory values imposed on it by society.
As we might suspect from the cited work of Robert Travis in the journal Social Indicators Research, entitled the Margins of Society Alienation Scale, society has a very dim view of alienation. The fact is, however, that where alienation occurs, feedback loops exist between the individual resistance to a system and the system's response. Overall this resistance is very costly for the system.
A good example of this are the varying persecutions which have been instituted to chase down relatively harmless people chosen as scapegoats for the cause. Any time one or another group is being labeled as "alienated," you can be sure that it is a smokescreen for other activities. And when there is smoke, there is usually a war; if there's a war, someone is making money churning out weapons or medical care or news or insurance against fear in another form.
The questions "what is an alienated person?" and "what is the philosophical significance of alienation" are two entirely different orders of questions, and a failure to recognize this fact breeds confusion. What is this thing that SETI is calling "alienation?" How does it come about? What is its constitution, origin and history? What is the importance of alienation?
First of all, we want to exclude what may be truly "pathological alienation," which expresses itself as destructive acts undertaken against the shortcomings of our culture. These destructive acts can include felonious behavior as well as self-destructive processes, including self- medicated escape into drugs and alcohol, magical thinking, etc.
Do we view reality as a Cartoon World where all the characters suffer all kinds of dreadful experiences which are instantly erased from view and memory in the next frame, or, have we acquired a more spiritually adult perception of the realities of life that tell us that when a huge boulder is dropped on the character, he will be crushed and will not reappear in the next frame without a wrinkle or a bruise. Are we living our lives as Comic Book Characters, or as Response-Able perceivers of a broader reality?
The answer to the first question: what is an alienated person amounts to an existential judgment. How a person becomes "alienated" can simply be a matter of historical fact. We can learn the facts of that person's life, and we can learn what that person thinks from what they say or write. Based on this information, we may decide that they are alienated because they have suffered trauma.
The answer to "what is the philosophical significance?" is a proposition of VALUE; in other words, a spiritual judgment. What alienation ultimately means in this sense can only be deduced in terms of the record of the inner experiences of the soul wrestling with the crises of fate.
Neither judgment can be deduced from the other! They proceed from different perspectives, and it is entirely arbitrary to add them together as the cited SETI study has done.
It may be that people who are NOT alienated in the terms in which we are discussing the word, might very well be viewing reality in a dissociated state: dissociated from what IS, the objective world. Whether they are promoting the government as good guys with our best interests at heart, or any other reality that does not take into account the broadest range of observable facts, such individuals may be operating in pathological states of dissociation. In this sense, the idea that "God is in heaven and all is right with the world" is as much a fantasy as the Easter Bunny.
A very simple way of looking at it is in terms of what is popularly called Stockholm Syndrome. A person who is NOT alienated from a world run amok, a system that is clearly operating based on manipulation and terror tactics has dissociated and identified with the oppressor; he or she has "sold out" in order to survive.
The term, Stockholm Syndrome, was coined in the early 70's to describe the puzzling reactions of four bank employees to their captors. On August 23, 1973, three women and one man were taken hostage in one of the largest banks in Stockholm. They were held for six days by two ex-convicts who threatened their lives but also showed them kindness. To the world's surprise, all of the hostages strongly resisted the government's efforts to rescue them and were quite eager to defend their captors. Indeed, several months after the hostages were saved by the police, they still had warm feelings for the men who threatened their lives. Two of the women eventually got engaged to the captors.
Psychologist Dee Graham has theorized that Stockholm Syndrome occurs on a societal level. Since our culture is patriarchal, she believes that all women suffer from it - to widely varying degrees, of course. She has expanded on her theories in "Loving to Survive: Sexual Terror, Men's Violence, and Women's Lives," which is well worth reading.
The dynamics of Stockholm Syndrome directly address the issue of those who view life as "meaningful" in the terms described in the SETI study as "desirable." Victims have to concentrate on survival, requiring avoidance of direct, honest reaction to destructive treatment.
When there is a socially imposed mandate to "think nice thoughts" and view the world in a positive light, even in the face of evidence to the contrary, people find it necessary to become highly attuned to the approval or disapproval of the "social norms." As a result, they are motivated to learn how to think in social norms, and do not examine their own, honest experiences.
As victims of Societal Stockholm Syndrome, we are encouraged to develop psychological characteristics pleasing to the system. These include: dependency, lack of initiative, inability to act, decide, think; strategies for staying alive, including denial, attentiveness to the system's demands, wants, and expressions of approval of the system itself.
We are taught to develop fondness for the system accompanied by fear of interference by anyone who challenges the system's perspective.Most of all, we are conditioned to be overwhelmingly grateful to the system for giving us life. We focus on the system's kindnesses, not its acts of brutality. Denial of terror and anger, and the perception of the system as omnipotent keep us psychologically attached to the Control System. High anxiety functions to keep us from seeing available options. Psychophysical stress responses develop.
But the "alienated person" is one who does not succumb to the system, the terrorists, the Matrix. To be alienated, in the terms of the SETI study, is to be FREE of Stockholm Syndrome. And this, of course, poses its own set of problems.
There can be no doubt that the alienated person, when they actively pursue the "lights" of alienation, do become exceptional and even eccentric. Most people follow rules that are made for them by others, communicated to them by traditions, shaped into fixed forms by imitation, and continued by force of habit. The alienated person does nothing of the kind.
For the alienated person, the perception of the world is not according to the rules of the Control System. And there is indeed something singularly "feverish" about such individuals that can be perceived as "nervous instability." They are generally geniuses and are often commemorated - posthumously, I should add - even though they generally have led discordant lives; and most likely they have suffered melancholy at some point in their career.
As a result of their struggles against the "system," driven by their inner light of resistance against external controls that they assess - most often objectively - as hostile, alienated people often suffer a great deal and in many ways. This suffering, instead of breaking them, builds in them a single pointed focus that would be viewed by the people who have sold out as obsessions and fixed ideas. This suffering may induce chemical changes in their physiology; they can fall into trances, hear voices, see visions, and manifest all kinds of peculiarities that are commonly classed as "pathological."
We cannot ignore these so-called pathological aspects. We must describe and name them. Even if the psyche recoils from such a laying bare of the causes from which a thing originates, we must still consider our passions and their properties.
Here, let us consider "memes."
A meme is a self-propagating idea, a unit of cultural imitation that, much like a biological or computer virus, effectively programs its own retransmission. They spread through motivating their "hosts" to create novel presentations of old ideas, and to proselytize. In this way it is suggested that ideas and beliefs are created by a specific combination of physical and psychological factors, and spread like contagions - cognitive viruses. For more information about "memes," see Thought Contagion: How Belief Spreads Through Society, by Aaron Lynch, The Meme Machine by Susan J. Blackmore, The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins, and Virus of the Mind: The New Science of the Meme, by Richard Brodie.
So-called "alienated" people are those who begin to view the world as it is, defying the memes - including this bogus study - that are generated and released on society like a form of bio-semiotic warfare.
A Mr. Doug Vakoch of the SETI Institute wrote an article about "alienated" people. It was focused on how people might view "ET life forms" - as hostile or friendly - but the terms can be quite easily substituted to refer to "the government" as to "aliens." So, let's have a look at how our reality is being twisted:
The article says that "alienated people are more likely to think that ET will be hostile." By the same logic, of course, anyone who thinks that ET will be hostile is "alienated!" The article then goes on to tell us that "When someone is confronted with ambiguous information, what he or she makes of the information can sometimes say a lot about the person." He then suggests that this connection demonstrates that people who hold a dim view of extraterrestrials have negative feelings about how meaningful life is.
Right at this point, there is a problem. It seems that it has been arbitrarily decided that seeing life as meaningful can only be possible if an individual believes in the idea that "everything is beautiful and God is in his heaven and all is right with the world."
Just transfer this to the Right-wing Fascist control system and what kinds of plans THEY might have for such "psychological profiling."
The article tells us:
"We tested the hypothesis that if people feel like the world is cold and cruel, they're more likely than other people to imagine extraterrestrials as being cold and cruel as well. Thus, we set up the survey so we could measure two things. First, to what extent do people feel "alienated," and second, how hostile do these people imagine extraterrestrials would be?"
Now, notice one very important thing: neither of these criteria have anything to do with the conclusion drawn as to the "meaningfulness" of the world. In fact, it is very likely that the exact opposite is true. But we are witnessing the establishing of an "authority" base from which to attack anyone who has the idea that the world, as it is, is not just peachy keen and strawberry bright. For example, let us have a look at the statements that establish whether a person is "alienated" or not. This little "test," we are told, was described by Robert Travis in the journal "Social Indicators Research", and is called the "Margins of Society Alienation Scale."
I feel all alone these days.
My whole world feels like it's falling apart.
I wish I were somebody important.
It's hard for me to tell just what is right and wrong these days.
I don't like to live by society's rules.
I often feel discriminated against.
I'll never find the right person to care enough about me.
What a loaded test! Notice how slyly the statements are mixed. Nearly everybody on the planet who is sitting up and taking nourishment will answer "yes" to all except statements 3 and 5, and possibly the last one. But those two are inserted in there to justify the definition of the test as something that establishes an alienated person as an antisocial one as well! Based upon how strongly the participant agreed or disagreed with each statement, they were identified as people who were feeling very alienated, those who didn't feel alienated at all, and those who fell somewhere between those extremes. And based on their identification as "alienated," they were judged as viewing life as more or less meaningful.
Another way of putting it is: if you notice the things that are wrong with our reality, that means you view the world around you as "cold, cruel and hostile," which then means that you just aren't seeing objectively! You are not giving proper value to this marvelous world in which we live! You aren't fully appreciating the wars and plagues and disasters and man's inhumanity to man properly! You are not giving the proper spin on cosmic catastrophes, military onslaughts, social injustice, personal and familial misfortunes, and a host of assaults too numerous to list.
In short, if you are not living in the warm and fuzzy illusion that the Control System wants you to erect as your "personal myth," or at least pretending that you do, then you are clearly deficient and incapable of perceiving meaning to life. Because, note that most important assumption in the study cited above: those who are "alienated" are being judged about their feelings as to "how meaningful life is." In other words, "how meaningful" is a quantitative judgment that is replacing the qualitative value of WHAT the meaning of life might be.
As the great Historian of Religion, Mircea Eliade pointed out, the study of history, through its various disciplines, offers a view of mankind that is almost insupportable. The rapacious movements of hungry tribes, invading and conquering and destroying in the darkness of prehistory; the barbarian invaders of the civilized world during medieval times; the bloodbaths of the crusades of Catholic Europe against the "infidels" of the Middle East; the stalking "noonday terror" of the Inquisition where martyrs quenched the flames with their blood; and the raging holocaust of modern genocide. Wars, famine, pestilence; all produce an intolerable sense of indefensibility against what Mircea Eliade calls the Terror of History.
When man contemplates history, AS IT IS, he is forced to realize that he is in the iron grip of an existence that seems to have no real care or concern for his pain and suffering. Over and over again, the same sufferings fall upon mankind multiplied millions upon millions of times over millennia. The totality of human suffering is a dreadful thing. I could write until the end of the world using oceans of ink and forests of paper, and never fully convey this terrible condition in which mankind finds his existence.
The beast of arbitrary calamity has always been with us. For as long as human hearts have pumped hot blood through their too-fragile bodies and glowed with the inexpressible sweetness of life and yearning for all that is good and right and loving, the sneering, stalking, drooling and scheming beast of "real life" has licked its lips in anticipation of its next feast of terror and suffering. Since the beginning of time, this mystery of the estate of man, this Curse of Cain has existed. And, since the Ancient of Days, the cry has been: "My punishment is greater than I can bear!"
But if you find yourself saying this, you are "alienated," antisocial, and incapable of finding any meaning in life. You are just simply not "with the program," according to the SETI study cited above.
With that idea in mind, let's look at the questions that were asked of the participants in the SETI study as to how we ought to respond to the receiving of a signal from an extraterrestrial civilization.
ETs are probably looking for planets they can take over for themselves.
We should not reply to the message from ETs because they might be hostile.
ETs would probably look at humans like we are nothing more than animals that belong in their zoos.
Humans would probably not be able to understand the message from ETs because humans and ETs are just too different.
If we reply to the message from ETs, they might come to Earth and take over our world.
We should not believe what the message says, because the ETs may be lying.
ETs would probably want to make humans their slaves.
The message from ETs may contain a hidden message that could be harmful to humans.
Aside from the fact that nearly all of the above statements are redundancies, most of them are based on the idea of suspecting that ETs might be liars. For some reason, that strikes me as peculiar. It's almost as though the issue that is really being tested is a person's gullibility index. Nevertheless, if a person has thought long and hard about History - AS IT IS - and has made some assessment about it based on the objective facts, then he may, indeed, extrapolate those facts into considerations of ET civilizations that may contact us. This then will lead him to the objective speculation that any ET civilization that goes out looking for "New Worlds to Conquer" does not have our best interests at heart!
The SETI study has told us: "The pattern is clear: people who feel alienated are much more likely to be concerned that ET has evil intentions."
Yer durn skippy!
But the SETI study has attempted to establish that such an objective assessment of reality is pathological. The SETI folks are suggesting that the relationship between "alienation" and the perception that "powerful others" (like the government, perhaps), might not be friendly is evidence of a "personal prejudice," as opposed to an objective perception of the world! The study suggests that alienation is a "personal bias," that is not "in synch" with reality. Reciprocally, this means that they are suggesting that our world is just hunky dory; that two billion people meeting their deaths in a century of wars and famines is just "the cost of doing business" in this reality.
Most of our problems as a species come from an inability to agree on our conclusions which is generally based on a misinterpretation of the basic events of life. For this reason we are always fighting over symbolism and definitions, the very things that are supposed to help us understand each other better. It seems that the ability to see reality without any illusions is a very difficult perspective to acquire. It consists of viewing the world without the denial that plagues our understanding of basic events, as opposed to the illusory values imposed on it by society.
As we might suspect from the cited work of Robert Travis in the journal Social Indicators Research, entitled the Margins of Society Alienation Scale, society has a very dim view of alienation. The fact is, however, that where alienation occurs, feedback loops exist between the individual resistance to a system and the system's response. Overall this resistance is very costly for the system.
A good example of this are the varying persecutions which have been instituted to chase down relatively harmless people chosen as scapegoats for the cause. Any time one or another group is being labeled as "alienated," you can be sure that it is a smokescreen for other activities. And when there is smoke, there is usually a war; if there's a war, someone is making money churning out weapons or medical care or news or insurance against fear in another form.
The questions "what is an alienated person?" and "what is the philosophical significance of alienation" are two entirely different orders of questions, and a failure to recognize this fact breeds confusion. What is this thing that SETI is calling "alienation?" How does it come about? What is its constitution, origin and history? What is the importance of alienation?
First of all, we want to exclude what may be truly "pathological alienation," which expresses itself as destructive acts undertaken against the shortcomings of our culture. These destructive acts can include felonious behavior as well as self-destructive processes, including self- medicated escape into drugs and alcohol, magical thinking, etc.
Do we view reality as a Cartoon World where all the characters suffer all kinds of dreadful experiences which are instantly erased from view and memory in the next frame, or, have we acquired a more spiritually adult perception of the realities of life that tell us that when a huge boulder is dropped on the character, he will be crushed and will not reappear in the next frame without a wrinkle or a bruise. Are we living our lives as Comic Book Characters, or as Response-Able perceivers of a broader reality?
The answer to the first question: what is an alienated person amounts to an existential judgment. How a person becomes "alienated" can simply be a matter of historical fact. We can learn the facts of that person's life, and we can learn what that person thinks from what they say or write. Based on this information, we may decide that they are alienated because they have suffered trauma.
The answer to "what is the philosophical significance?" is a proposition of VALUE; in other words, a spiritual judgment. What alienation ultimately means in this sense can only be deduced in terms of the record of the inner experiences of the soul wrestling with the crises of fate.
Neither judgment can be deduced from the other! They proceed from different perspectives, and it is entirely arbitrary to add them together as the cited SETI study has done.
It may be that people who are NOT alienated in the terms in which we are discussing the word, might very well be viewing reality in a dissociated state: dissociated from what IS, the objective world. Whether they are promoting the government as good guys with our best interests at heart, or any other reality that does not take into account the broadest range of observable facts, such individuals may be operating in pathological states of dissociation. In this sense, the idea that "God is in heaven and all is right with the world" is as much a fantasy as the Easter Bunny.
A very simple way of looking at it is in terms of what is popularly called Stockholm Syndrome. A person who is NOT alienated from a world run amok, a system that is clearly operating based on manipulation and terror tactics has dissociated and identified with the oppressor; he or she has "sold out" in order to survive.
The term, Stockholm Syndrome, was coined in the early 70's to describe the puzzling reactions of four bank employees to their captors. On August 23, 1973, three women and one man were taken hostage in one of the largest banks in Stockholm. They were held for six days by two ex-convicts who threatened their lives but also showed them kindness. To the world's surprise, all of the hostages strongly resisted the government's efforts to rescue them and were quite eager to defend their captors. Indeed, several months after the hostages were saved by the police, they still had warm feelings for the men who threatened their lives. Two of the women eventually got engaged to the captors.
Psychologist Dee Graham has theorized that Stockholm Syndrome occurs on a societal level. Since our culture is patriarchal, she believes that all women suffer from it - to widely varying degrees, of course. She has expanded on her theories in "Loving to Survive: Sexual Terror, Men's Violence, and Women's Lives," which is well worth reading.
The dynamics of Stockholm Syndrome directly address the issue of those who view life as "meaningful" in the terms described in the SETI study as "desirable." Victims have to concentrate on survival, requiring avoidance of direct, honest reaction to destructive treatment.
When there is a socially imposed mandate to "think nice thoughts" and view the world in a positive light, even in the face of evidence to the contrary, people find it necessary to become highly attuned to the approval or disapproval of the "social norms." As a result, they are motivated to learn how to think in social norms, and do not examine their own, honest experiences.
As victims of Societal Stockholm Syndrome, we are encouraged to develop psychological characteristics pleasing to the system. These include: dependency, lack of initiative, inability to act, decide, think; strategies for staying alive, including denial, attentiveness to the system's demands, wants, and expressions of approval of the system itself.
We are taught to develop fondness for the system accompanied by fear of interference by anyone who challenges the system's perspective.Most of all, we are conditioned to be overwhelmingly grateful to the system for giving us life. We focus on the system's kindnesses, not its acts of brutality. Denial of terror and anger, and the perception of the system as omnipotent keep us psychologically attached to the Control System. High anxiety functions to keep us from seeing available options. Psychophysical stress responses develop.
But the "alienated person" is one who does not succumb to the system, the terrorists, the Matrix. To be alienated, in the terms of the SETI study, is to be FREE of Stockholm Syndrome. And this, of course, poses its own set of problems.
There can be no doubt that the alienated person, when they actively pursue the "lights" of alienation, do become exceptional and even eccentric. Most people follow rules that are made for them by others, communicated to them by traditions, shaped into fixed forms by imitation, and continued by force of habit. The alienated person does nothing of the kind.
For the alienated person, the perception of the world is not according to the rules of the Control System. And there is indeed something singularly "feverish" about such individuals that can be perceived as "nervous instability." They are generally geniuses and are often commemorated - posthumously, I should add - even though they generally have led discordant lives; and most likely they have suffered melancholy at some point in their career.
As a result of their struggles against the "system," driven by their inner light of resistance against external controls that they assess - most often objectively - as hostile, alienated people often suffer a great deal and in many ways. This suffering, instead of breaking them, builds in them a single pointed focus that would be viewed by the people who have sold out as obsessions and fixed ideas. This suffering may induce chemical changes in their physiology; they can fall into trances, hear voices, see visions, and manifest all kinds of peculiarities that are commonly classed as "pathological."
We cannot ignore these so-called pathological aspects. We must describe and name them. Even if the psyche recoils from such a laying bare of the causes from which a thing originates, we must still consider our passions and their properties.
Here, let us consider "memes."
A meme is a self-propagating idea, a unit of cultural imitation that, much like a biological or computer virus, effectively programs its own retransmission. They spread through motivating their "hosts" to create novel presentations of old ideas, and to proselytize. In this way it is suggested that ideas and beliefs are created by a specific combination of physical and psychological factors, and spread like contagions - cognitive viruses. For more information about "memes," see Thought Contagion: How Belief Spreads Through Society, by Aaron Lynch, The Meme Machine by Susan J. Blackmore, The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins, and Virus of the Mind: The New Science of the Meme, by Richard Brodie.
So-called "alienated" people are those who begin to view the world as it is, defying the memes - including this bogus study - that are generated and released on society like a form of bio-semiotic warfare.
