Dec 20, 2017

Shadow Economy, Democracy and the Manipulation of Public Opinion

by Denis Churilov

Let’s talk about drugs, pop-music, public opinion manipulation and shadow economy.
There’s a sociological concept known as the Overton window (also known as the Window of Discourse). Simply put, it’s a system of various political, cultural and media techniques that can be used to make forbidden topics acceptable, popular, and even policy changing. The classical model deals with ideas in six distinct phases: 1) unthinkable, 2) radical, 3) acceptable, 4) sensible, 5) popular and, finally, 6) policy-shifting. Pulling an idea from “unthinkable” to “policy” stage may take a couple of decades, or just a couple of years, depending on how much media resources do people who are interested in shaping society in a certain way have.
Consider the following imaginary example. If the elites wanted to, say, make people engage in coprophagy and to eat their own excrement for breakfast (which is simply unthinkable at this stage), they would first finance the media to make a report, or a documentary, about some mentally unstable persons consuming their own faeces. It would initially cause shock and aversion, but, nevertheless, people would start talking about it. Then the media would dig up some radical contemporary artists who perform by defecating on their plates and eating it all on camera.
This kind of topic would begin receiving more and more attention from the media, there would be Internet memes on that. And that would eventually result in more and more deviant and attention seeking people attempting to eat their own poo and coming out as coprophages. This disturbing trend would then naturally begin to attract even more attention. There would be debates on TV, with various “experts” on biology and zoology telling that it may not be that unnatural after all, since there are multiple examples from nature where animals do eat excrement. The representatives of the side that opposes such disgusting practices would be chosen from unpopular marginals, overly conservative oldies and various unpleasant personalities, so that the public would associate all the anti-coprophagic arguments with them.
There would be a serious public debate on this issue.
Then, perhaps, there would be stories about some kid being bullied at school for his habit of eating poo, with people condemning the bullies, saying how wrong it is to bully people who make their own choices of what to ingest. And then there would be another wave of similar stories of newly emerged coprophages suffering because of social stigma, and how we all should be open-minded and condemn discrimination. In a couple of years’ time, it would not be considered that crazy to eat your own faeces anymore, and those who strongly oppose it would be demonised.
Then it may actually turn into a popular trend (post-industrial crowds are extremely impressionable), with everyone, including pop-stars and big media figures jumping on the poo-eating bandwagon. Then, quite naturally, business companies would start coming up with ways to make money out of it, so it would turn into an industry. And then, finally, it might pressure the government(s) to change the policy (e. g. to create certain public spots where people in need could safely defecate and then consume their own faecal matter). The Overton window process would then be complete.
The above example is probably absurd, but it illustrates the mechanics of changing cultural norms by those who own concentrated wealth and control large media resources.
Now, think of the illicit substances legalisation.
When you read old interviews with DJs and electronic dance music producers from the 1980s and the early 1990s, you see that most of them avoided talking about drugs within rave culture (or they simply lied about it, denying the rumours). Then, closer towards the 2000s, many began to admit that, yes, illicit drugs used to be a big part of the rave culture “back in the days”, and how there’s no point in denying it anymore (even though it was still as if they were feeling ashamed because of it). A couple of years ago, during the Ultra Music Festival, Madonna addressed the audience by asking “How many people in this crowd have seen Molly?” (she was referring to MDMA). It caused quite an uproar back then. Various artists, producers and DJs were condemning her on social media for bringing this up and making a bad name for the dance music industry. Everyone was outraged by what she did, as if she had breached some kind of a taboo.
Just a few years later, in 2016, songs like “I Took A Pill In Ibiza” by Mike Posner and “Cold Water” (which opened with lines “Everybody gets high sometimes, you know / What else can we do we’re feeling low?”) by Major Lazer, MǾ and Justin Bieber were already topping world charts. Such songs could be heard in all public places and at every corner…
That escalated quickly, didn’t it?
Drugs have been becoming increasingly topical, with legislative powers worldwide generally moving into the direction of drug decriminalisation and legalisation. Earlier in December this year, the Norwegian Parliament voted in favour of decriminalising all drug use and focusing on the medical aspect of the issue instead. Australia legalised medicinal marijuana production in October 2016. Recreational cannabis use has been legalised in 9 US states since 2012.
If we assume that it is not just a natural flow of events, but, rather, a strategically controlled long-term process whereby society is being gradually prepared for new legislations through pop-cuture psy-ops, what could be the reasons behind it? Why would the elites want people to accept illicit drug use? Well, the answer might lie in the worsening crisis the global economy has been going through.
One of the proposed ways to postpone the recession is to take certain segments of the “unofficial economy” out of the shadow and start regulating them. According to the estimates provided by the Association of Chartered Certified Accountants in their 2017 “Emerging from the shadows: the shadow economy to 2025” report, the unregulated sectors of the economy (e. g. illicit drugs sale, prostitution, unregistered weapons market, etc) was accounting for as much as 23% of the global GDP in 2011. Almost a quarter of the global GDP is obviously too large to avoid coordinated attempts to decriminalise and legalise some of its segments. Unsurprisingly, some of the most prominent members of the Global Commission on Drug Policy, including the former UN Secretary Kofi Anon and the former president of Brazil Fernando Henrique Cardoso (who is also a professor of political science and sociology), have been advocating the drug decriminalisation for years.
So, it is quite possible that the drug decriminalisation and legalisation trend we have been observing worldwide is a part of a larger plot to bring “unofficial” economy out of the shadow in order to improve the official global economy statistic. And given that society is quite inert, the Overton window techniques have been employed by the financial and media elites to gradually normalise the drug use and prepare the ground for the subsequent legislative changes.
And, no, it doesn’t mean that some illuminati just sat down with Mike Posner and made him record that nauseating “I Took A Pill In Ibiza” song. When you employ the Overton window strategy, everything you need to do is to create the right informational environment for the “right ”ideas to flow, so that the desired discourse could then rise and roll through naturally by itself, like a snowball.
Just a thought.
Either way, with all these advanced sociological theories and public opinion manipulation techniques, the idea of Democracy can go to trash, because it’s the banksters and the affiliated media magnates who manipulate the discourse and shape society in whatever way they want, giving people the ideas that they would perceive as their own.