Are You a Victim of Menticide? Look for These 10 Signs!
by Margaret Anna Alice. Originally published on her Substack.
“Menticide is an old crime against the human mind and spirit but systematized anew. It is an organized system of psychological intervention and judicial perversion through which a powerful dictator can imprint his own opportunistic thoughts upon the minds of those he plans to use and destroy.”
* * *
“Ready made opinions can be distributed day by day through press, radio, and so on, again and again, till they reach the nerve cell and implant a fixed pattern of thought in the brain. Consequently, guided public opinion is the result, according to Pavlovian theoreticians, of good propaganda technique, and the polls a verification of the temporary successful action of the Pavlovian machinations on the mind.”
—Joost Meerloo, The Rape of the Mind (Kindle, paperback, hardcover, audiobook)
10 Signs You’re Suffering from Menticide
If you are a victim of menticide, you don’t know it. That’s the first sign.
Here are nine more signs you can use to identify whether you’re suffering from this reversible condition:
1) You watch television.
2) You read newspapers and magazines.
3) You listen to the radio.
4) You absorb social media immersion campaigns.
5) You follow popular culture.
6) You support the current thing.
“The sentiments and ideas of all the persons in the gathering take one and the same direction, and their conscious personality vanishes. A collective mind is formed, doubtless transitory, but presenting very clearly defined characteristics.”
—Gustave Le Bon, The Crowd: Study of the Popular Mind (Kindle, paperback, hardcover, audiobook)
“The specialists in the art of persuasion and the moulding of public sentiment may try to knead man’s mental dough with all the tools of communication available to them: pamphlets, speeches, posters, billboards, radio programs, and T.V. shows. They may water down the spontaneity and creativity of thoughts and ideas into sterile and streamlined clichés that direct our thoughts even although we still have the illusion of being original and individual.”
—Joost Meerloo, The Rape of the Mind (Kindle, paperback, hardcover, audiobook)
7) You know with dogmatic certainty you’re right about everything you believe—even though you’ve never examined those beliefs and didn’t come up with them through your own inquisitive research, critical thinking, and rigorous analysis.
8) You repeat thought-terminating clichés like Trust The Science™ to mollify your cognitive dissonance. As part of this kamikaze leap of faith, you trust everything you shouldn’t trust, including:
a) Governments with chronic histories of lying to, propagandizing, terrorizing, experimenting on, surveilling, censoring, torturing, interning, and murdering its own citizens.
b) Corporations continually found guilty of homicide, harm, fraud, corruption, unethical practices, bribery, coercion, intimidation, addiction-inflicting, and study-rigging.
c) Organizations, regulatory agencies, tyrants, politicians, self-aggrandizing “experts”, compromised scientists, behavioral psychologists, public-opinion engineers, smear merchants, ghostwriters, Big Tech gatekeepers, influencers, pushers, fact-chokers, and other colluders enlisted to control the narrative to protect the power and profits of (a) and (b).
9) You distrust everyone the liars tell you to distrust, namely those disproving their lies, such as:
a) Ethical scientists, physicians, whistleblowers, data analysts, and other truth-tellers exposing corruption, tyranny, human rights abuses, injury, and democide.
b) Primary sources and clear-eyed thinkers unpolluted by conflicts of interest such as independent journalists, on-the-ground reporters, dissident writers, dazzlingly keen-witted analysts, and real human beings who are documenting the objective reality being bowdlerized by legacy sources.
c) Family, friends, and other caring people who are trying to rescue you from the cult you’ve been inculcated into.
In Rape of the Mind, Joost Meerloo explains why all three of these groups must be vilified, censored, libeled, and silenced:
“Totalitaria is constantly on the alert for social sinners, the critics of the system, and accusation of dissent is equivalent to conviction in the public eye. Insinuation, calumny, and denunciation are staples of the totalitarian strategy. The entire nation is dedicated to the proposition that every man is a potential enemy of the regime.”
12-Step Recovery Program for Menticide
“Free men in a free society must learn not only to recognize this stealthy attack on mental integrity and fight it, but must learn also what there is inside man’s mind that makes him vulnerable to this attack, what it is that makes him, in many cases, actually long for a way out of the responsibilities that republican democracy and maturity place on him.”
***
“This means that the more familiar people are with the concepts of thought control and menticide, the more they understand the nature of the propaganda barrage directed against them, the more inner resistance they can put up.”
—Joost Meerloo, The Rape of the Mind (Kindle, paperback, hardcover, audiobook)
If you recognize any of the above signs in yourself, not to worry. Just follow this twelve-step recovery program, and you’ll be thinking clearly, logically, rationally, and independently in no time!
1) Acknowledge that you have been deceived.
There is absolutely no shame in this—indeed, it is a sign of wisdom, humility, and growth to recognize your bamboozlement and bravely choose to escape the anesthetizing ether of your neurological programming. Say out loud:
“My name is [name], and I am a victim of menticide. I am ready to reclaim my mind and take ownership of my own knowledge.”
Don’t browbeat yourself about having been duped. What’s stupider—doubling, tripling, and quadrupling down on your faith in the falsehoods you’ve been swindled into believing or having the strength of character to admit you were fooled and then opening your eyes to reality?
Dr. Mattias Desmet frequently stresses that the 30 percent who fall under mass formation are not stupid. Same goes for the middle 40 percent who simply go with the majority, depending on whether it is tipping toward the 30-percent asleep or 30-percent awake.
Many of you are well-educated and simply too busy with life’s obligations to seek out unbiased information for yourself, so you defer to people you’re told are experts instead of conducting your own investigations.
Unfortunately, this was a potentially lethal error, but realizing that and reversing course before you submit yourself to further rounds of experimentation could save your life and the lives of those you love.
Nothing is more consequential to your life than facing the fact that you have been deluded and seeking to understand the evidence your deceivers are hiding from you.
If you cannot take that crucial step, then you are stupid according to Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s Theory of Stupidity, and you might as well stop reading here.
Still with me? Bravo. Now take a moment to contemplate Bonhoeffer’s Theory of Stupidity so you don’t fall back into this habit again and can progress to the remaining eleven steps for recovering from menticide:
“Neither protests nor the use of force accomplish anything here; reasons fall on deaf ears; facts that contradict one’s prejudgment simply need not be believed—in such moments the stupid person even becomes critical—and when facts are irrefutable they are just pushed aside as inconsequential, as incidental.…
“There are human beings who are of remarkably agile intellect yet stupid, and others who are intellectually quite dull yet anything but stupid.…
“The impression one gains is not so much that stupidity is a congenital defect, but that, under certain circumstances, people are made stupid or that they allow this to happen to them.…
“It is a particular form of the impact of historical circumstances on human beings, a psychological concomitant of certain external conditions. Upon closer observation, it becomes apparent that every strong upsurge of power in the public sphere, be it of a political or of a religious nature, infects a large part of humankind with stupidity.…
“The process at work here is not that particular human capacities, for instance, the intellect, suddenly atrophy or fail. Instead, it seems that under the overwhelming impact of rising power, humans are deprived of their inner independence, and, more or less consciously, give up establishing an autonomous position toward the emerging circumstances.
“The fact that the stupid person is often stubborn must not blind us to the fact that he is not independent. In conversation with him, one virtually feels that one is dealing not at all with a person, but with slogans, catchwords and the like that have taken possession of him. He is under a spell, blinded, misused, and abused in his very being. Having thus become a mindless tool, the stupid person will also be capable of any evil and at the same time incapable of seeing that it is evil. This is where the danger of diabolical misuse lurks, for it is this that can once and for all destroy human beings.
“Yet at this very point it becomes quite clear that only an act of liberation, not instruction, can overcome stupidity.”
Only you can liberate yourself from willful stupidity. Continuing to read this article and being willing to implement these twelve steps proves you have the intelligence to do so.
All you have to lose are your manufactured delusions; misplaced pride; gullibility; fear; terror; anxiety; rage; and mental and physical enslavement.
In exchange, you gain an independent mind; critical-thinking abilities; research skills; fact-based knowledge; confidence in your understanding; internal peace; empowerment; mental and physical health; and maybe even your life.
2) Turn off the television.
Canceling cable will not only save you money in these inflationary times (oh, and that’s not a good thing, despite what the gaslighters say—unless you like wallpapering with or wheelbarrowing around your hyperinflated currency for exercise), but it will also cut the umbilical cord to your hypnosis machine. Get ready to wake up to the real world.
Describing television as a “stealer of time” whose habit-forming influence “cannot be stopped without active therapeutic interference,” Meerloo warns:
“What is the ultimate result of technical progress? Does it drive people more and more to the fear and despair brought on by a love-empty push-button world? Does it create a megalomaniac happiness won by remote control of other people? Does it deliver people to the unsatisfying emptiness of leisure hours filled with boredom? Is the ultimate result living by proxy, experiencing the world only from the movie or television screen, instead of living and labouring and creating one’s own?”
3) Stop reading newspapers and magazines.
The New York Times, Rolling Stone, the Washington Post—these aren’t the “trustworthy sources” they tell you they are. While there may have been a sliver of integrity in earlier generations of these institutions, they are now full-time corporate harlots and government disinformationists. If, on the rare occasion they contain a fact-based story, it is only because it serves the narrative or the reality has become too embarrassingly blatant to ignore.
Look instead for alternative, reader-supported platforms such as Substack, where writers are free to publish content that won’t be altered or censored for exposing the mendaciousness of the MSM and its corporate and political string-pullers.
You can also find high-quality articles by independent writers at outlets such as OffGuardian, Lew Rockwell, Brownstone Institute, The Burning Platform, ZeroHedge, Children’s Health Defense, American Digest, Nevermore Media, and Straight Line Logic.
4) Stop listening to NPR and other legacy radio stations.
Like all other mainstream sources, these entities have lost whatever credibility they once possessed and have become ideological indoctrination outlets. If you still want to listen to the radio, classical music is your safest bet, followed by vintage music or contemporary music without lyrics (unless they’re awakening lyrics like Lukas Lion’s “1984” or Five Times August’s “I Will Not Be Leaving Quietly”, but you won’t find anything like those on corporate-sponsored radio).
Speaking of Lukas Lion, his piercingly brilliant The Great Puppet Show is a master lesson in menticide, and the lyrics1 are worthy of daily meditation during your recovery process:
Orwell’s prescient admonition is magnified several millionfold today by the breadth, depth, and global reach of the hypnotizers:
“As far as the mass of the people go, the extraordinary swings of opinion which occur nowadays, the emotions which can be turned on and off like a tap, are the result of newspaper and radio hypnosis.”
—“Looking Back on the Spanish War,” Collected Essays (Kindle, paperback, hardcover, audiobook)
5) Eliminate or minimize the time you spend on social media.
Avoid all celebrities, news, and gossip. Once you get past the anxiety of living without your pacifier, you should begin to feel lighter, freer, and more alert to existence itself. If you must use social media, limit your time and focus on connecting with people you know, love, and respect.
6) Break out of the Big Tech bubble.
Realize Wikipedia and every other source of mainstream information have been corrupted. All of the major platforms filter, censor, shadowban, and pump out disinformation. Your perception of reality has been curated to conform to a specific narrative, and Big Tech, Big Brother, and Big Media are all colluding to project the same film reel on the wall.
What they don’t want you to do is to turn on the light, open the door, and walk outside the room to look behind the wall, let alone exit the building.
Do it anyway. Unshackle your mind.
Ditch Google for alternative search engines like Presearch, Qwant, Brave, or Swiss Cows. Use multiple search engines when looking up a topic to see how the findings and rankings differ.
Opt for free-speech–friendly video platforms like Rumble, Odysee, bitchute, Brighteon, and Brand New Tube over the muzzling YouTube.
Instead of listening to talking heads regurgitating press releases, do your own research. Seek out scientific papers on your topic of interest at PubMed and ResearchGate. When reviewing a paper, always look for a conflict of interest statement and funding sources first to assess how biased the results may be. Take the time to read through the content—not just the abstract and conclusion. Oftentimes, authors intentionally craft those parts to circumvent censorship, but the data itself tells a different story. Other times, studies are simply designed to fail.
7) Cultivate a Beginner’s Mind.
Reignite your curiosity. Shed your cognitive biases, ideological predilections, and preconceived notions. Strive to distinguish your own original thoughts from those that have been implanted.
Ask heaps of questions—especially “why.” Ask yourself why you believe something and on what evidence you are basing this belief. Drill down to your root premises and see if they withstand scrutiny.
When you encounter “news,” apply logic; reason; knowledge of history; and your memory of what life; general health advice; and your rights and liberties were BC (Before COVID). Imagine how your BC self would view the morally inverted, totalitarian world we’re living in today and the absurdities you’ve been trained to accept through operant conditioning and repetition.
Actively resist groupthink. If you study or work in an academic, corporate, or other organizational setting, step back and see if everyone tends to believe the same things. Play devil’s advocate. Take John Stuart Mill’s advice and argue your opponent’s side. Stretch your mind. Practice heterodox thinking. Shatter your Overton Window.
8) Watch interviews, lectures, panel discussions, and other educational content from the scientists and doctors of integrity the spin doctors told you to fear.
Steps 2–5 will free up enormous chunks of each day, and you can now enjoy high-quality, eye-opening content instead of mind-shuttering propaganda. You can play these videos in the background while accomplishing other tasks if it’s the only way you can work them into your schedule. Just start today because you have a couple years’ worth of catching up to do.
If you prefer to watch on your television instead of the computer, you can use a device like Roku, Fire TV, or a game console with apps for watching streaming services like YouTube and Rumble. You can also project videos from your computer onto the screen if you have a smart TV and your operating system allows for it. Find a geek to help you get everything configured if you’re tech-challenged.
Whatever excuses you give yourself not to embark on this educational journey, fend them off as if your life depends on it—because it does.
OVALmedia’s Planet Lockdown and Perspectives on the Pandemics interviews are an effective way to disabuse yourself of the lies you’ve been told and firehose in the truth you’ve been missing.
See this page for videos from OVALmedia’s other documentary, talk, investigative, and commentary series.
Reiner Fuellmich’s and Viviane Fischer’s Corona Investigative Committee Grand Jury hearings present evidence from the 150+ scientists, physicians, and other relevant experts amassed over their past two years’ worth of exploratory inquiries. New sessions are being added regularly. You can find the full set of interviews here.
The Corbett Report has an enormous archive of videos that will help inoculate you against propaganda, fear, and mass delusion.
Dr. Naomi Wolf’s Daily Clout videos are also illuminating, such as the following interview with former BlackRock portfolio manager Edward Dowd:
9) Choose your entertainment judiciously.
Virtually everything barfed out of Hollywood and major streaming services is engineered to emotionally manipulate you and mold your malleable mind, but the productions spewed out over the past decade are particularly carcinogenic.
Some films and series, however, can help you recuperate from thought control and learn to recognize the earmarks of psychological conditioning, such as:
- Network (see my first Recommendations Roundup for details on why this may be the most important film you can watch as part of your recovery from menticide)
- My Dinner with Andre (see my second essay to see why this oracular film is a mandatory component of your awakening curriculum)
- 1984
- The Matrix
- Truffaut’s Fahrenheit 451
- THX-1138
- Brazil
- Clockwork Orange
- His Girl Friday
- Mike Leigh’s Naked
- Todd Haynes’s Safe
- Wormwood
- Chernobyl
And here are some rollicking non-inculcating films if you’re in the mood for lighter fare:
- Martin Scorsese’s After Hours
- All About Eve
- Mike Leigh’s Nuts in May and High Hopes
- The Big Lebowski
- Little Miss Sunshine
- Big Night
- The Apartment
- Lost in America
- Hal Ashby’s Harold & Maude and Being There
- North by Northwest
- Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
- the films and shows listed in the Down Under edition of my Recommendations Roundup
- the K-dramas Mother, Signal, Stranger, and Solomon’s Perjury
You can enrich your mind and soul by absorbing the edifying videos produced by the superlative Academy of Ideas.
Although YouTube censors videos that threaten the narrative, you can still find valuable content there. Here are a few channels worth your time:
- Drbeen Medical Lectures
- Dr. John Campbell
- Neil Oliver on GB News
- Awaken with JP
- Bjørn Andreas Bull-Hansen
- John Bush
- Gad Saad
- Russell Brand
- Thomas SowellTV
- Pursuit of Wonder
Just going through my Archive and watching all of the videos I embed and link to throughout my articles should supply you with enough content to last several months.
10) Read! Read lots and lots of books!
You’d be astonished how many books you can consume just by playing audiobooks while you’re cooking, driving, doing chores, exercising, and falling asleep. You can even listen to them at a faster speed, as long as you can still absorb the meaning.
Here are a few to get you started:
- Rape of the Mind
- The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind
- The Real Anthony Fauci
- Slanted: How the News Media Taught Us to Love Censorship and Hate Journalism
- A State of Fear: How the UK Government Weaponised Fear During the COVID-19 Pandemic
- United States of Fear
- everything by Orwell, from Animal Farm to 1984 to Collected Essays
- The Psychology of Totalitarianism
- The Origins of Totalitarianism
- Psychological Warfare & Deception: What You Need to Know About Human Behavior, Dark Psychology, Propaganda, Negotiation, Manipulation, and Persuasion
- They Thought They Were Free: The Germans: 1933–45
- Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland
- Dissolving Illusions
- The Moth in the Iron Lung: A Biography of Polio
- everything by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, including and especially The Gulag Archipelago
- Dr. Zhivago and Lara: The Untold Love Story and the Inspiration for Doctor Zhivago
- Crime & Punishment and The Brothers Karamazov
- Brave New World
- We
- Lord of the Flies
- The Trial
- Albert Camus’s Speaking Out: Lectures and Speeches, 1937–1958
- On Liberty
- Man’s Search for Meaning
- Catch-22
- the books recommended in A Primer for the Propagandized: Fear Is the Mind-Killer, with special emphasis on The Politics of Obedience: The Discourse of Voluntary Servitude
Although not on audiobook, I fervently recommend everything by CJ Hopkins—most especially his brand-new book, The Rise of the New Normal Reich: Consent Factory Essays, Vol. III (2020–2021).
11) Build immunity to mind control.
Whether through psychotherapy, philosophy, meditation, faith, spiritual practice, yoga, exercise, diet, nutrition, supplements, or a combination of the above, address the four mental health issues that make you susceptible to mass formation:
- feeling isolated and alone
- thinking your life is meaningless
- suffering high levels of free-floating anxiety
- experiencing free-floating frustration and aggression
There will come a time when you will be equipped with the clarity of mind, knowledge of propaganda techniques, awareness of the truth, and perspicacious judgment to be able to observe mainstream agitprop analytically without falling under its spell.
You must detox completely for a lengthy period of time and fully educate yourself on the stratagems of deception before attempting such a feat, though, and you will probably only be able to tolerate exposure in small doses as it will be like returning to a pile of fetid Twinkie vomit compared with the flavorful, nutrient-dense nourishment you have become accustomed to savoring in the meantime.
12) Escape your Stockholm syndrome.
Recognize that you have been subjected to intensive emotional abuse for the past two years as the government has worked through all the stages of Biderman’s Chart of Coercion. Like many victims of cruelty and torture, you’ve bonded with your oppressor and vehemently defend him against those trying to emancipate you from your abuser.
Transition from victim to victor. Unclench your fist to release your fear, anxiety, and rage. Breathe deeply and allow love, liberty, and life to fill your open palm.
Flee the cult of safety for the freedom of mind, body, and soul.
Mary Oliver will show you the way out.
The Journey
by Mary Oliver
One day you finally knew
what you had to do, and began,
though the voices around you
kept shouting
their bad advice—
though the whole house
began to tremble
and you felt the old tug
at your ankles.
“Mend my life!”
each voice cried.
But you didn’t stop.
You knew what you had to do,
though the wind pried
with its stiff fingers
at the very foundations,
though their melancholy
was terrible.
It was already late
enough, and a wild night,
and the road full of fallen
branches and stones.
But little by little,
as you left their voices behind,
the stars began to burn
through the sheets of clouds,
and there was a new voice
which you slowly
recognized as your own,
that kept you company
as you strode deeper and deeper
into the world,
determined to do
the only thing you could do—
determined to save
the only life you could save.
Wild Geese
by Mary Oliver
You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting –
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.
© Margaret Anna Alice, LLC
Note: Purchasing any items using Amazon affiliate links included in my content will further support my efforts to unmask tyranny.
1. Gather round, gather round!
The Great Puppet Show is coming to your town right now.
Come with me, take a seat …
Our magical screens will make you believe anything that we please.
So gather round, yeah, gather round.
Come and listen to the sound.
Gather round. Gather round.
You only see what we allow.
Check it …
Welcome to the stage.
The place where we play our games that keep you enslaved.
We love playing tricks on your brain.
Fear is the aim so we keep you afraid.
Day after day … we mould you like clay.
Yes we can create anything any way.
We generate hate and then tell you who to blame
so you beg for your masters to keep you safe.
Come meet our puppets, they’re so well-trained.
We give them their pay and they do as we say.
They’ll do anything for their fortune and fame.
They’ve got no souls cuz they gave them away.
Yes we can cater for every taste,
from early till late we can keep you amazed
and entertained till you start to crave
this land of the fake so join us it’s great.
Gather round, gather round!
The Great Puppet Show is coming to your town right now.
Come with me, take a seat …
Our magical screens will make you believe anything that we please.
So gather round, yo, gather round.
Come and listen to the sound.
Gather round. Gather round.
You only see what we allow.
The puppets do our bidding. This is hypnotism.
Subliminal images we’re delivering
when you’re sitting and flicking,
filling your mind to the rim with the poison we’re giving
every single minute until you’re addicted now listen …
We got all of the influence over the incidents you’re witnessing.
Look at who owns us, is it a coincidence?
We got it all planned out, it’s a written script.
Ayy, we’re the puppet masters, spellcasters.
Gate keepers, the truth can’t get past us.
Light cameras action, time for distraction.
We play the tune and the puppets keep dancing.
Ask Hugh Jackman I bet you he knows
cuz this is the greatest show.
So sit back and behold.
Who do you think that remote in your hand controls?
Why do you think we call these shows programmes?
We’re in your mind delivering messages like a postman.
So you don’t even know what you’re letting in.
These channels are channelling energies.
So come and get tunes in.
If we can make Hollywood movies you think we can’t manipulate what the latest news is?
We’re the kings of illusion, we choose what the truth is.
Gather round, gather round!
The Great Puppet Show is coming to your town right now.
Come with me, take a seat …
Our magical screens will make you believe anything that we please.
So gather round, yeah, gather round.
Come and listen to the sound.
Gather round. Gather round.
You only see what we allow.