Alan Watt: “First they change your behavior – behavior modification. Now remember what Skinner said, the behaviorist in psychology. He said, “to alter a person you must alter his surroundings,” and that also means your routine in those surroundings during the day. As early as World War I the BBC radio had found out they could change peoples behavior making even housewives dash home to hear their serials they have on daily radio and they always left you after the hour with a cliffhanger so you’d tune in the next day. That’s behavior modification. You’re changing your behavior in order to get downloaded with something that they wanted you to be downloaded with. Very, very simple stuff and you realize that’s how most people are. They all have their favorite radio television stations and their serials and their soaps and they tune in every day at the same time in case they missed something and some people get neurotic almost when they’re late to see their favorite soap or serial. They get hyper. They’ve already been conditioned and their behavior has been modified.
That goes with fiction and non-fiction. We live in a world today where fact is measured with fiction. It’s mixed with fiction and so most folk today really can’t tell the difference and if you look at your standard newspapers you can see the most horrific stories and the most ridiculous trivia down the sides of the pages. That puts you into a state where everything is surrealistic. Surrealistic so much that the horror that you’re reading, the main story, gets mixed with the fantasy and the trivia and the divorces and the affairs and all this kind of stuff. That’s intentional. That’s an intentional format and that was first brought out and pushed in Britain again with what they called tabloid newspapers, the shorter newspapers. That’s where they first used these techniques on the people and it worked very well.
Now even at that time you started to see big bookseller stores changing too, because books used to be labeled under fiction and non-fiction and the non-fiction was further subcategorized into romance and drama and so on. If you’ve noticed when you go into most bookstores today and you’ll find where the biggest religious section used to be you’ll find New Age and sometimes there’s more aisles of New Age. They’re not even labeled as New Age and you can get complete religion, which is New Age religion, without the title of religion on the book, so people swallow this stuff thinking it’s fact. This is all intentional as well. It’s all intentional because they didn’t want a society who could separate fact from fiction and unfortunately that’s been tremendously successful today when people will read the most outrageous stuff and be swayed by it and they’ll actually alter their lives again around something they truly believe is true.
I’ve even had people talk about history and they gleaned their history from historical romances where modern authors are making a big killing on this. Lots of money to be made in that where they blend period settings and use real peoples’ names and real events that happened and weave it into a story, generally around a hero and a heroine. That’s where their history comes from, and when they don’t get it from there they get it from Hollywood. Hollywood has rewritten history in all of its movies, so we’re under constant bombardment and today we live in an age where confusion exists because people have a hard time, very hard time. In fact most people don’t even think about it, separating the fact from the fiction. They swallow it all.
If you were to get a person around 1900, 1910 and showed them a modern television with the programs that come on and the ads that flash at you and the hype and screaming and the fact that they don’t ever tell you what the product is or the good points, they just sell you a dream — these people would go into shock, utter shock. I’ll be back with more of this after the following messages.”
The use of behaviour modification to alter people by altering their surroundings in a world where fact is measured with fiction
Alan Watt: “First they change your behavior – behavior modification. Now remember what Skinner said, the behaviorist in psychology. He said, “to alter a person you must alter his surroundings,” and that also means your routine in those surroundings during the day. As early as World War I the BBC radio had found out they could change peoples behavior making even housewives dash home to hear their serials they have on daily radio and they always left you after the hour with a cliffhanger so you’d tune in the next day. That’s behavior modification. You’re changing your behavior in order to get downloaded with something that they wanted you to be downloaded with. Very, very simple stuff and you realize that’s how most people are. They all have their favorite radio television stations and their serials and their soaps and they tune in every day at the same time in case they missed something and some people get neurotic almost when they’re late to see their favorite soap or serial. They get hyper. They’ve already been conditioned and their behavior has been modified.
That goes with fiction and non-fiction. We live in a world today where fact is measured with fiction. It’s mixed with fiction and so most folk today really can’t tell the difference and if you look at your standard newspapers you can see the most horrific stories and the most ridiculous trivia down the sides of the pages. That puts you into a state where everything is surrealistic. Surrealistic so much that the horror that you’re reading, the main story, gets mixed with the fantasy and the trivia and the divorces and the affairs and all this kind of stuff. That’s intentional. That’s an intentional format and that was first brought out and pushed in Britain again with what they called tabloid newspapers, the shorter newspapers. That’s where they first used these techniques on the people and it worked very well.
Now even at that time you started to see big bookseller stores changing too, because books used to be labeled under fiction and non-fiction and the non-fiction was further subcategorized into romance and drama and so on. If you’ve noticed when you go into most bookstores today and you’ll find where the biggest religious section used to be you’ll find New Age and sometimes there’s more aisles of New Age. They’re not even labeled as New Age and you can get complete religion, which is New Age religion, without the title of religion on the book, so people swallow this stuff thinking it’s fact. This is all intentional as well. It’s all intentional because they didn’t want a society who could separate fact from fiction and unfortunately that’s been tremendously successful today when people will read the most outrageous stuff and be swayed by it and they’ll actually alter their lives again around something they truly believe is true.
I’ve even had people talk about history and they gleaned their history from historical romances where modern authors are making a big killing on this. Lots of money to be made in that where they blend period settings and use real peoples’ names and real events that happened and weave it into a story, generally around a hero and a heroine. That’s where their history comes from, and when they don’t get it from there they get it from Hollywood. Hollywood has rewritten history in all of its movies, so we’re under constant bombardment and today we live in an age where confusion exists because people have a hard time, very hard time. In fact most people don’t even think about it, separating the fact from the fiction. They swallow it all.
If you were to get a person around 1900, 1910 and showed them a modern television with the programs that come on and the ads that flash at you and the hype and screaming and the fact that they don’t ever tell you what the product is or the good points, they just sell you a dream — these people would go into shock, utter shock. I’ll be back with more of this after the following messages.”
[Alan Watt, Cutting through the Matrix, 2007]
https://archive.org/stream/alan-watt-cttm-transcripts-51-75/Alan_Watt_CTTM_Transcripts_26-50_djvu.txt