When "Protecting National Security" Harms National Security
Because national security is whatever I say it is
Our governments lie all the time, about everything. I would bet that the only truths they tell are inconsequential ones, and even then, they still lie about the small stuff, even when they have nothing significant to hide. By this time it’s completely habitual. The following is an audiovisual synecdoche of our situation:
Similarly, the astronauts currently enjoying an extended stay within the International Space Station are not now, nor have they ever been, “stranded.” The Boeing Starliner capsule is simply “troubled.”
It wasn’t always this bad. I personally think the main reason it has become so was probably the adoption of psychopathic psychological warfare tactics in the years after World War II. And what started in the intelligence community has branched out into every facet of modern political and corporate life.
In my article on worldview warfare I made the following point: when your institution adopts the psychological methods of psychopathy, you open it to institutional capture by actual psychopaths. And they’re better at using those methods than you are.
Press conferences these days are simply exercises in reading prepared talking points designed to evade giving actual answers and to present the most palatable representation of reality possible. It’s transparently disingenuous—fake. And it seems like 99% of our leaders do this, which is probably why they’re all so unpopular. Even if we can’t always explain why, regular people pick up on this fakeness.
In my article on UAP disclosure I made another point: “swamp-gassing” the public keeps them within an artificially truncated worldview—a manufactured Overton window. It just so happens that swamp-gassing (or gaslighting) is one of the above-mentioned psychopathic manipulation tactics.
Here’s another point I’ve made repeatedly. Lobaczewski constantly refers to the perils of the “common psychological worldview.” Without objective psychological knowledge, you will not be able to navigate interactions that involve psychopathology effectively because it is so far outside of most people’s ordinary frame of reference. Phrased more generally, you can’t accurately navigate reality when your map is fundamentally flawed or missing key features—like islands, coastlines, or entire continents. You are dooming yourself to failure.
Whether it is UAP or politics in general, the magic words “national security” often enter the conversation. UAP data is almost entirely classified at a very high level for “national security” reasons. Video footage taken with various advanced sensors, for instance, remains classified because declassifying them can reveal key capabilities of those sensors to political adversaries. That’s the fake PR reason, at least. Similar footage from those same platforms is routinely and immediately made public when they get harassed by Russian jet fighters, for instance. Key details relating to events of national or international importance are also so classified, like the photographs of Bin Laden’s dead body.1
I’ve read that many documents are classified simply in order to get people to read them. It’s part of a trend. Government employees feel that unclassified information isn’t as important and so might not take the time to read it. “Top secret” implies important and worth reading. Needless to say, that is not the purpose of classification.
Too much information is currently classified, and too much of that information is classified too highly. When scientific information is classified on a need-to-know basis, to the extent that you’re not allowed to talk about your work with the scientist in the cubicle next to yours, you’re not going to get very far. Science requires the free sharing of information in order to advance. So at least in this example you run up against a seemingly insoluble problem. Free sharing = no security. No sharing = bad science.2 If such advances happen to be “necessary to national security,” it’s a case of national security shooting itself in the foot.
The definition of national security, however, is not strictly defined, as far as I can tell. Perhaps it is a bit like pornography—“you know it when you see it.” But its vagueness makes it rife for abuse.
All aspects of national security (military, economic, infrastructure, cyber, environmental, technological, nuclear, etc.) may come into conflict with each other, for instance when military spending weakens other parts of the economy, or military action undermines political stability or international relations, or new technologies threaten cornerstones of the national economy. Since national security is a multifactorial problem—with each factor potentially in conflict with the others—it is impossible to come up with a set of hard and fast rules for what is and isn’t in its interests. At any given moment one factor may trump others in terms of importance, so every national security issue, even if universally agreed upon as important, is inherently relative and subject to the value judgments of those with the final say and to changing geopolitical contexts.
Naturally the easiest way out of this mess is to ignore it and simply classify as much as possible—which is the current practice. Even parts of the classification guidelines are classified.
“Classify it all and let God sort it out.”
Officially, the U.S. government is not supposed to classify things because of the embarrassment that public disclosure might produce. But is it really reasonable to expect them not to do so? There are “embarrassments” so big that they would surely endanger national security. Maybe you are spying on your allies and using that intelligence to gain an advantage in negotiating contracts or for the purposes of blackmail. Maybe JFK really was murdered by the CIA. Maybe this also extends to avoiding the embarrassment of allies, when not doing so could threaten key strategic and economic relationships. Let’s say we know that country X, our political ally, performed “embarrassing” act A, perhaps against our own citizens, and we know they did it. Disclose or cover up?
Taken even further, maybe there are limits to what we will even expose about our “enemies.” Perhaps act B performed by enemy Y was so outrageous that exposing it would be perceived by them as a serious breach of their own national security, perhaps threatening a nuclear confrontation or the potential that they would expose us for our involvement in act C, which we keep secret for similar reasons.
Looked at in this way, every major SNAFU or criminal enterprise in the national security state, even if performed by those ever-present “bad apples,” as well as those of all other nations, is a national security concern. At the extreme it becomes a global game of blackmail. (<cough> Epstein! </cough>)
In this framework, even relatively small disclosures can have the ability to threaten national security if they threaten to open the door to more questions and deeper disclosures. And when practically everything related threatens the national security, even if only potentially, it becomes imperative to lie about practically everything even only tangentially related. And when you’re already lying so much already, it’s not a far stretch simply to lie about everything else.
But here’s the rub. By conceiving of the national security in this way, you end up engaging in behaviors that arguably also threaten the national security. For one, you make people distrust or even hate you. They see you hiding information from them and lying to them and they become distrustful and resentful. Is a massive loss of public trust a national security concern? If so, it may necessitate even more PR “reframing” doublespeak and psychological “nudging” in order to elicit the appropriate response.
Such nudging is ubiquitous now. Here’s Dr. Gary Sidley:
State-sponsored nudging is ubiquitous in the U.K., seeping into almost every aspect of day-to-day life. Whether responding to a health challenge, using public transport, watching a TV drama or interacting with the tax office, our minds are being psychologically manipulated by state-funded technocrats.
The rapid expansion of U.K. behavioural science has not occurred by chance; it has been a strategic goal. For example, a 2018 document by Public Health England (the forerunner to the U.K. Health Security Agency) announced that “The behavioural and social sciences are the future of public health”, and one of its priority goals was to make the skills of these disciplines “mainstream in all our organisations”.
Throughout Covid, U.K. Government communications – as guided by its behavioural science advisers – routinely resorted to fear inflation, shaming and scapegoating (‘affect,’ ‘ego,’ and ‘normative pressure’ nudges) to lever compliance with restrictions and the subsequent vaccine rollout.
The U.K. Government’s bar for legitimising the terrorising of its own people has been set incredibly low. For instance, one official justification for inflicting further fear inflation onto an already scared population was that, in January 2021, the populace was not as frightened as at the start of Covid in March 2020: “Fearful but much less panic this time around.”
All of this just creates a vicious circle feeding back on itself. Official secrecy, over-classification, a climate of casual and routine lying, psychological “nudge” warfare, “embarrassments” and crimes. All of these feed each other. The more you cover up, the more you have to cover up the cover-up. The longer you do this, the bigger the potential fallout. It’s hubris to think this can be maintained.
This kind of climate of secrecy, lies, and impression management facilitates the rise of liars and otherwise incompetent yes-men. A wolf in sheep’s clothing is bad enough, but what if everyone is wearing wolf’s clothing, and many of them don’t even realize it?
The government’s argument was that releasing the “gruesome” images would “incite violence, … aid al-Qaeda in recruitment, and … lead to attack[s] on U.S. military, U.S. citizens, and attacks against our allies.”
This is reportedly the problem in UAP reverse-engineering SAPs.
"By conceiving of the national security in this way, you end up engaging in behaviors that arguably also threaten the national security. For one, you make people distrust or even hate you."
What if that’s the point? Not to get them to hate "you", exactly (for you yourself are shrouded in secrecy). But to hate and mistrust what you mistakenlyj see as the power structure of your nation, and maybe of nations in general.
I have also been interested in how all this came to be.
According to my Wikipedia-level understanding of the subject of "state secrets," this did not really become a national issue until a little before World War 1 in the UK and a little after that in the U.S. And document classification did not become a big thing in the U.S. until 1951.
That puts us squarely after the Roswell incident in the U.S. However, the government was very successful at keeping the Manhattan Project a secret between 1942 and when the bombs were dropped on Japan.
Some think that Roswell and various related contacts with "ET" were triggered by our use of atomic weapons. In any case, when ET became a real thing for our government, a need to have a formal structure to keep it a secret seemed obvious at the time.
I don't have a lot more data from that time period. But I think it is clear that if the reality of ET were to be revealed, a large amount of government and corporate blab and posturing would be widely seen as deceitful. There was no one there pushing for a more mature and honest approach to the whole problem. If Kennedy knew about it and wanted to do something in that direction, that would have been a good excuse to have him killed. But I don't know the facts in that regard.
I know that by 1952, Hubbard's research had made it clear to him that ET was real. And at about that time, he began to be pounded for being a madman. Up to then he had been a reputable and popular story writer and adventurer.
To the extent that this ties in with "secret power groups" is unclear to me. But Courtney Brown has found evidence that ET directly monitors and influences many world leaders. What are the full and exact results of this influence?
I suppose that the development of a "psychopathic" form of Public Relations was inevitable. But to what extent was this pushed along by the shocking reality of ET? Public Relations as a subject has always existed, but not really written about until the early 1900s. The corporate world was slowly but surely gaining a prominence and dominance in the lives and economies of the people of Earth, and they needed PR to assist them in this project.
Hubbard himself wrote extensively about the importance of PR. He however warned that dishonesty in PR would ultimately lead to its failure. Once a compulsive liar is exposed, he is never trusted again.
Or is he? It doesn't help that society seems to have a short memory for most transgressions, except for the ones that someone constantly reminds us of. Thus, for example, we have one group - being constantly reminded of Income Tax, the JFK assassination and various other deceptions - that is convinced that the federal government is a "swamp" that must be "drained." While another group, constantly reminded of the racial and class transgressions of various local power groups - including police - that is totally convinced that we need a strong federal government to protect our civil rights by reining in corrupt local officials.
I just tonight saw a program on PBS about the "Divided We Fall" project which seems to have been put together by some marketing / public opinion people interested in "group psychology." It was cute and entertaining in many ways, but basically pablum. In this concept of human psychology, one's "truth" is totally defined by "lived experience." And that does NOT seem to include scholarly activities or serious study of subjects.
While I agree that most people "feel" their way through life because they don't really have the resources to take a more intellectual approach, this cannot be our ultimate fate or we are doomed. If I did not study, not only would I know nothing about physics, electronics, biology or the theory of evolution, but I would also know nothing about Spirit, actual human psychology and the full range of potential human abilities, or the theory of Intelligent Design.
We are given the impression that all we have time for is watching TV, and our information resources do not extend much beyond entertainment, news and maybe YouTube. I can tell you that if a person stopped watching TV and YouTube and started reading real books, or their online or audio equivalents, and bothered to actually look up their misunderstood words, that they would become a "genius" by comparison to most of their zombie friends in a month or two. There is SO MUCH out there to study, and most people are totally unaware of it.
Thus we have the broadcast media. Before the Internet, we had TV. And before TV we had radio. And again we are back to the early 1900s. These were methods for both Corporate and other organized groups to consolidate their power and influence by creating an entertainment environment that was so captivating and - you could say, flattering - to the audience that it would capture the attention of the majority of the population, which would then fall under its control. The pesky problems of Democracy are thus sidestepped. Though psychopaths certainly played a role in all of this, I believe the responsibility for it must be accepted by a wider group. Psychopaths, after all, are incapable of being responsible.