Anna Brix Thomsen
- Jul 1, 2013
- 6 min read

Children of the Damned – The Propaganda of Paranoia in Education (Pt.1): DAY 33

“Far from failing in its intended task, our educational system is in fact succeeding magnificently, because its aim is to keep the (…) people thoughtless enough to go on supporting the system.” – Richard Mitchell

In and from this blog-post we are continuing to investigate the Paranoia of the Education System with a new series where we will be investigating and discussing how paranoia is taught in schools through propaganda. For context it is suggested to read the previous blog-posts in the series where we have discussed both paranoia and education in detail as it currently exist (See bottom of this post). So to investigate propaganda as a tool used in the education system to cultivate paranoia, let’s firstly define the word PROPAGANDA:

“The worst forms of tyranny, or certainly the most successful ones, are not those we rail against but those that so insinuate themselves into the imagery of our consciousness, and the fabric of our lives, as not to be perceived as tyranny.” – Michael Parenti

PROPAGANDA: ETYMOLOGICAL ORIGIN:

1718, “committee of cardinals in charge of Catholic missionary work,” short for Congregatio de Propaganda Fide “congregation for propagating the faith,” a committee of cardinals established 1622 by Gregory XV to supervise foreign missions. The word is properly the ablative fem. gerundive of Latin propagare (see propagation). Hence, “any movement to propagate some practice or ideology” (1790). Modern political sense dates from World War I, not originally pejorative. Meaning “material or information propagated to advance a cause, etc.” is from 1929.[i]

propagation (n.)

mid-15c., from Old French propagacion “offshoot, offspring” (13c.) and directly from Latin propagationem (nominative propagatio) “a propagation, extension, enlargement,” noun of action from past participle stem of propagare “set forward, extend, spread, increase; multiply plants by layers, breed,” from propago (genitive propaginis) “that which propagates, offspring,” from pro- “forth” (see pro-) + *pag-, root of pangere “to fasten” (see pact).[ii]

Based on this etymological origin we can define the word propaganda as the act of deliberately breeding and spreading a specific ideology through the repetition of specific knowledge and information – and where else is better to do that than in the education system? When looking at the word propaganda what can also be seen within the sounding of the word is the words ‘probe’ and ‘agenda’ and as such propaganda can be further specified as the ‘probing’ of a certain ‘agenda’ through education. In this series we will therefore be looking at the history of education – because it can be argued, as we shall see, that the entire purpose with education as it has existed up until now is to enlist specific knowledge and information in children to manufacture a certain world-system based on an ideology of paranoia. One of the points we will be discussing is therefore for example how history as a topic in schools is taught in direct context to what knowledge and information a country or regime wants children to be brainwashed into submitting to as ‘facts’. We will therefore also be discussing the point of ‘facts’ in general and how we tend to take the things we learn in school for granted.

“Since winners write the history, the false propaganda used from the beginning to the end is often accepted as the true history of the war. “-John Denson

Very little is taught in schools – no matter where in the world – that isn’t taking the perspective of one’s own culture or nation as either ‘winners’ or ‘victims’ of historical developments. Within this everyone also blames everyone else as perpetuating propaganda – while being blind to the propaganda they themselves inculcate and infuse. And this point can be traced directly back to who and how we’ve created ourselves as human beings within a mind-consciousness-system running on a program of paranoia as the fear of not surviving and the constant paranoid drive to survive at all costs. Within this we will manufacture knowledge and information to be suit our survival – and we do this within ourselves in how we will manufacture memories to make ourselves the ‘winner’ or the ‘victim’ exactly as parents do it to their children or entire countries curricular does it to the school children that innocently enter the system of education.

“Men, it has been well said, think in herds; it will be seen that they go mad in herds, while they only recover their senses slowly, and one by one.” —Charles Mackay, Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds, 1841

Another point we will be taking on in the context of the purpose of education with propaganda as a method to enlist a paranoid agenda is the paradigm of public education – not as a contrast to private education because in the end, the propaganda of paranoia is the same everywhere. But public education is a specific breeding ground for political agendas of paranoia masqueraded as ‘public service’ where private education at least often don’t hide a direct agenda to influence children in a certain direction, be it religious or economic incentives.

If schools are factories where the human is produced as an organic robot, propaganda is the machinery that ensures that we are infused with paranoia that makes us loyal to the agenda of the system: to survive at all cost – generation after generation, to the absolute detriment of actual life and living.

“As societies grow decadent, the language grows decadent, too. Words are used to disguise, not to illuminate, action: You liberate a city by destroying it. Words are used to confuse, so that at election time people will solemnly vote against their own interests.”—Gore Vidal

The equation is simplistic:

If propaganda is the deliberate breeding of specific knowledge and information with an ideological purpose and if school is the place where we are taught the values of our society – then it must be propaganda we are teaching in our schools. And there is nothing wrong with having a deliberate directive as a purpose with education because what would otherwise be the point? The problem comes when the values and ideologies we are probing our children with, are the same flawed values we were taught in school – and through which we are recreating the same flawed system generation after generation. We do this tacitly and innately because it is a form of automated brainwash created by the fact that we are not the directive principle of our own lives. Instead we live as organic robots existing only to serve the paranoia that we have subjected ourselves to, the ideology of fear of not surviving. And we do it directly and deliberately through the agenda of corporate capitalism and consumer democracy that glorifies paranoia as though it was the very substance that gives us life – when nothing could be further from the truth as we are seeing it every day as the world come crashing down before our eyes. And although the hands that brutally seek to consume the world from all substance seems to be invisible, make no mistake: it is our hands.

“Propaganda does not deceive people; it merely helps them to deceive themselves.” – Eric Hoffer

When looking at what the purpose of education should be – to teach us to become effective custodians of the earth who live in harmony and peaceful co-existence with each other and all other life forms – there is something fundamentally wrong with our current school systems, because they are clearly not producing an outcome that is best for all. The fact that we believe that what we are learning in school is what really matters thus goes to show that those who were supposed to stand as examples are contaminated with paranoia and cannot be trusted to teach, let alone construct educational curricular. As we’ve discussed in previous blog-posts: when the starting-point is flawed, the outcome will be so in equal measure. So what is imperative is to have a long and self-honest look at the world we are currently co-creating and look back at what it is we are teaching in our schools that produces such a world – and change it.

I will leave you with the following list of documentaries and blogs that I suggest listening to/watching/reading to place what we have discussed here into a practical and real life context and so as to assist with the de-zombification that is required for us as adults to become examples in this world that can assist the children of the future to stop recreating the same flawed world and instead make a decision to change what is here to a world that we would want to be born into:

Children of the Damned – The Propaganda of Paranoia in Education (Pt.1): DAY 33

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