The Turn of the Screw

Remember when you were a kid and saw “thumbscrew torture” for the first time in some late-night horror film? It was the coolest. To inflict so much pain with so little effort—just a tiny turn of the screw and intense wailing would ensue. How cool was that?—horrifying as well.

Although using thumbscrews in the fine art of torture is an effective way to create excruciating pain quickly and effortlessly, turning a screw slowly to avoid notice is also an effective way to make a point. This idea is similar to the slow boil of a certain amphibian we are often reminded of.

There is a difference though. Boiling frogs is a preferred practice used when you expect the frog to be totally oblivious to your efforts to cook him until death. The turn of the screw is effective in slowly educating your subject to complete compliance by slowly taking away freedoms, ease, comfort, and expectation in such a way that the subject notices, but is not struck with exceptional concern.

It would be like buying a cheeseburger from your favourite fast-food restaurant and having the price go up 5¢ every week, and the burger getting 5% smaller with each purchase until you realize after many weeks you are paying 10 times the price for something 1/10 the size from when you started. The turn of the screw. Of course, I am not suggesting anyone has the lack of good sense to eat a cheeseburger from a fast-food joint, oh no, but am just using a possibly familiar scenario to make a point.

We hear people, particularly people of the sheep persuasion, complaining about restaurant meals becoming more and more expensive (or eggs, or hamburger, or toilet paper). Yet no one really considers the real reason why (climate change, of course). We hear similar perplexity coming from the same folks regarding the number of friends who are unexpectedly dying left and right. “Oh, they were a bit old” (59) or “Cancer has always been a horrible disease filled with surprises,” or “Climate change is getting really bad, isn’t it?!” These slight changes in the world (or quite often more than slight) are other examples of the turn of the screw. These turns do add up, but they don’t happen fast enough, or extreme enough, to do much more than make people ask stupid questions—well, at least they are asking questions, eh?

As I have mentioned before in other articles, oftentimes (most of the time, actually) these head-scratcher topics are spirited away with pat “reasons” such as the aforementioned “climate change.” Another good one is “long covid,” which is the catch-all for any of the major side effects we are seeing from the actual jab. No one notices that people not vaxxed are not experiencing “long covid” even if they had at one time or another contracted the “disease.”

One of the most common “reasons” is not really a reason at all, but a denial that anything is amiss. If dead children on school soccer fields are mentioned, often the response is, “Oh, that has always happened.” Or if unconscionable atrocities are occurring in the Middle East or Europe, this news is often met with “There have always been wars.” There have always been children kidnapped, there has always been pedophilia amongst world leaders, children have always had strokes, there has always been rampant drug use, there have always been teen suicides, there have always been excess deaths (that’s a good one, the word “excess” kind of gives it away that it is something unusual).

There is a margin of intensity that the agenda closely monitors to be certain that if the screw is turned, it is only turned enough that people don’t question it too deeply. That is what “the turn of the screw” in this context means. The turn is slow enough that it doesn’t cause shrieks of terror, but fast enough that it creates its intention in as little time as possible.

The agenda is good at testing this rate of turn. They gave a big turn with Covid and the resulting poison vaccine. And look, no one gave it much thought once it was “over.” “Ah, we can turn the screw much faster than we had originally thought!” Of course, I am incorrect in saying “No one gave it much thought.” A lot of us did. Maybe more than they expected, and maybe they will back off a bit on the rate of speed with the next turn. Already people are saying they will not expect social distancing, school and business closures, or even masks on the next pandemic rollout. But who knows?

There are a lot more screw-turnings than just the health stuff. We see it just about anywhere. How about with the gay and trans movements? (I hate to include “gay” in this comment because I think most gay folks would rather just move along—they have made such strides over the past decades, and they are now poised to lose it all thanks to the agenda’s efforts to turn this particular screw). Here we see a lot of screw-turning pushing certain agendas in schools and businesses and in situations like mine (psychotherapy). Most people go right along with it all, and before we know it the screw will be so tightly anchored, there will be no easy way to extract it.

I don’t have the space here to go into other examples, but you don’t have to look very hard for them. DEI is a good place to start, as well as digital currencies, digital IDs, and smart cities, all rife with screw-turnings. If they push that screw in slow enough most people won’t even notice its lethal penetration. At least they won’t notice enough to do anything about it.

2+2 will soon equal 5, and no one, unless they have been asleep for a few decades and have not been slowly acclimated to the turning, will notice anything is askew. Turning screws slowly is a brilliant way to bring about radical change. The folks with this nefarious plan (are they really “folks”?) are doing a superb job. Let’s give them a pat on the back. Well played, agenda, well played. Ugh.

Todd Hayen PhD is a registered psychotherapist practicing in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. He holds a PhD in depth psychotherapy and an MA in Consciousness Studies. He specializes in Jungian, archetypal, psychology. Todd also writes for his own substack, which you can read here

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