You Have To Be In It To Win It!

This used to be the rallying cry for getting people to participate in The National Lottery.  There is a certain logic to it because, taken at face value, it is undeniably true.  However, the odds of you actually winning, plus the extremely disruptive effect it will have on your life, seldom influence anyone’s decision about whether to buy a ticket or not.  That one phrase: ‘You have to be in it to win it!’ instantly conjures up a narrative that imagines the winner will finally be without a care in the world and with no financial worries for the rest of their lives, striding said world like a colossus.

It also feeds into the group identity idea: 'all over the country, people just like me are also risking their money for the grand prize and we are all in it together.'  The lucky winner will be instantly elevated above the common herd and be given a free pass out of the garden of earthly woes.  What’s not to like?

Why am I talking about The National Lottery?  Because, having talked quite a lot about 'psyops' (psychological operations) in other articles, here, here , here and here, I have often been asked how to mitigate the effects.  It isn’t easy, but it is possible.  The Lottery example shows that the purpose of such phrases is to get the receiver to create the narrative that the sender wishes them to have; thus compelling them to act on that narrative without further enquiry.  In the above case, yearning to make happen what they have just imagined, compels them to buy a ticket.  After all, ‘You have to be in it to win it!’ I rest my case.

This kind of manipulation is based on the emotion triggered by the uncertainty principle:  what if I don’t buy the ticket, and the person who comes in after me buys it and wins?  How could I possibly bear it, having already invested so much of myself in my new life?  By investing emotionally in the imaginary narrative, it’s extremely difficult to walk away.  Yet, it was just an imaginary narrative wasn’t it?  Surely you don’t have to take it seriously.

Let’s look at something else: ‘climate warming’.  I have put this in quotes because it has undergone several changes since the 1980s, the most spectacular of which was going from 'global cooling' to 'global warming'.  Like Covid, the symptoms change to fit the specific narrative needed at the time.  Both these topics were, and still are, talked about in phrases deliberately constructed to get you to form a catastrophic narrative in your mind, which then results in a lot of people exercising rigid self-control within the limits suggested – or sometimes demanded – by those in actual control, in order to ward off an imaginary, internally constructed future disaster.

The uncertainty principle applies here too: what if I follow my instincts and ignore this and it turns out to be true?  There are 'rallying' phrases for this as well: with Covid it was 'granny-killer', or 'look him in the eye and say you won’t wear a mask'.  Will you really take the risk of being selfish at the expense of other people’s lives?  With climate change, the narrative conjured up is like something out of Hieronymus Bosch which is enough to terrify anyone.

All psyops are predicated on getting you to do it to yourself.  The phrases used to get you to conjure up the correct narrative are the ‘nudges’, of which ‘call-me-Dave’ Cameron was so enamoured. There is an exercise in Mindfulness CBT that is helpful here in deflecting nudges: make yourself aware of what is coming into your mind and then let it go, without paying further attention to it, and focus on something else. For those of you brave enough to have read my past ramblings, you might frame it as not attending to that aspect of the overall pattern, just because it is screaming for attention.

Taking back control of your thoughts and dampening down your immediate need to respond to the emotions of your imagined narrative is a very hard thing to do.  You have to make yourself responsible for what you allow your brain to process, trusting that it will always override your conscious musings if there is a real chance of danger.

Here's an experiment (which you are definitely not advised to try at home) that was conducted in that hotbed of craziness that was the 1960s.  Psychologists wanted to find out if all phobias were learnt, or if some were ingrained from birth.  One of their experiments investigated fear of heights. A happy relaxed three-month-old baby was placed on a sheet of glass over a six-foot drop.  The drop was covered in checkered squares so that depth perception was more difficult. As soon as the baby was let go, it started to scream and draw its legs up to its chest.  No amount of soothing calmed it, until it was taken off the glass.  Babies are not as daft as you think when it comes to survival.  System override will prevent most people from staying in a potentially dangerous situation: if you’ve got time to construct a narrative and worry about it, it’s probably not an immediate catastrophe. 

In these sad times of restricted speech, one can still have useful conversations in one’s head, even if there isn’t a trusted person available at the time.  I have just talked about Covid and climate change, but we have more up-to-date things to reflect on such as the recent bills on assisted dying and decriminalisation of late-term abortions that have just been passed.  In both cases, there is no uniting the two sides on these topics.  And why would that be?  Well, one of the key things in developing a narrative about anything is that the person imagining always puts themselves at the centre of the story, even if it is only as the observer recounting it.  So, with the assisted dying bill, for example, they either imagine themselves (or are watching another) being saved from a world of pain or conversely forced into death so that a relative can get the deposit for a mortgage and avoid having to pay for care with the money instead.

With abortion, the narrative conjured up is either of a child fatally damaged by its mother who sees this as a reasonable way of having unprotected sex, or of a sensible woman choosing to end a pregnancy because she does not wish to bring a child into the world born to suffer, thus proving her respect for the phrase, ‘every child a wanted child’.  As with assisted death, the nudge descriptors result in the formation of binary views, which then compete with each other for attention.

Most important topics are now presented to the public in this way and have been for some years.  If you then add in the uncertainty principle as described above, you have a recipe for war and not peace, in resolving these societal problems.  In reality, if you let these strong narratives pass through your awareness and don’t focus on them, you can look more independently at the complexity of each issue and come to a personal understanding of it that fits with your moral sense and conscience without disadvantaging anyone else.

So, I can imagine several scenarios where I would be in favour of both abortion and assisted dying, as well as several scenarios where I most definitely would not.  I do not reserve the right to judge others on these matters, but I also reject the right of others to force me to comply with what I disagree with, because somebody I don’t know had a bad experience. In other words, 'hard cases make bad law'.

When someone makes a statement or suggestion that triggers a narrative based on evoking strong emotions, try letting it pass through with as little attention as you can manage.  Then, when you are ready and can bring it to mind without a big emotional hit, think about the topic raised and how it would or wouldn’t fit into your own pattern matrix.  Your instincts, if you are in a legal frame of mind, will protect you from immediate damage if there is no actual threat.

This is only one of many ways of protecting yourself from psychological threat and damage in the ‘new world’.  Unfortunately, modern psychology itself has become a victim of psychological threat by accepting that the focus on patient empathy and experience should be the key driving force in its development. It seems to have morphed from a science to an offshoot of sociology with barely a murmur of protest. Yet, the psyops department itself is still very firmly rooted in the science of psychology and is driving psychologists to present a model of the human mind that fits in with 'the cabal’s' belief system of how humanity should be managed and what they should believe.

It has got to the stage now where people are starting to question some of the more extreme prognostications, but if psychologists are to regain the progress that was made until the late 1970s/early 1980s, getting to grips with training and the governing bodies is essential.