The Indoctrinated Brain by Michael Nehls
"The sad truth of the matter is that most evil is done by people who never made up their minds to be or do either good or evil." — Hannah Arendt, The Life of the Mind
I begin this book recommendation with two things Michael Nehls mentions that in my view are related and responsible for the predicament that we find ourselves in at this unprecedented time in history. I still recommend the book, but do take issue with a couple of his underlying beliefs.
Is Progress is Inevitable?
Nehls never asserts this, but it appeared to me he does have an unwavering belief in evolution. I’m no scientist or biologist or anyone with the credentials to argue for or against evolution from those perspectives, so I want to approach it from a moral and practical perspective. Nehls writes:
Man, like any other living being, is a fantastic product of evolution.1
It is not a prominent theme in the book, but throughout evolution is simply a given, as if it is “settled science,” a lot like the people who consider climate change an undeniable truth that no sane person would ever question. As things stand now anytime the State or the powers that be assert something adamantly, my bullshit meter reaches high alert and evolution is one of the darlings of our feckless leaders, educational system and the scientific community.
Back in the day I read Pragmatism by William James and it helped guide my life for decades. In brief, James says that we can evaluate our beliefs by their outcomes, that we can decide the merits of what we believe if they cause us to live a contented, fulfilling and a morally responsible life. If a philosophy of life or belief system does not do that, then look for something else.
One of the outcomes that the acceptance of evolution can bring is an unquestioned belief in the progress of man for good: man is always getting physically better and this attitude spills over into other areas: advancing technology can only result in greater good, science always progresses, art always progresses, political systems always progress, literature always progresses, etc. The past is seen as inferior, adolescent and infantile.
Isn’t this essentially what the elites believe? Isn’t this Communism and Marxism at their cores? They destroy history, books, statues, art, architecture, God and ages of traditions that built Western Civilization not only to establish and/or maintain power, but also in an attempt to prove that their systems are far better than what they view as the decaying systems of the past.
They believe this so strongly at this moment in time that they are willing to steal an election, consider the U.S. Constitution as outdated, change the definition of men and women along with adding dozens of their own definitions of sex and gender and propagandize hundreds of millions with lies because they know best what we should believe. Their ends are so worthy, that any means can be justified. So we should listen to them, “the experts,” because, as we have been told over and over again, we are not “experts” like them. Just comply, slave.
Is Man Basically Good?
I don’t think a belief in evolution necessarily comes to the conclusion that man is basically good, though it apparently did for Nehls, but evolution’s natural outcome, without a belief in God, is that there is no good or evil. I know moral, atheistic evolutionists will argue against this, but logically, I don’t see how you can come to any other conclusion if you believe in evolution and don’t believe in God. Anything goes.
Nehls believes that one of the ways out of this overwhelming mess, possibly the most important way, is to see man as basically good.
…we should understand that human nature is basically good, and a society of the future should be based on this premise. This change of attitude would cost the powerful much of their power over us, and it would also make our lives much more pleasant. Our destiny and our values are in our own hands.2
He argues that we tend to view evil as the majority, trained as we are by the media. There is a lot of truth in this. There are lots of good people out there, however, when push came to shove, what happened around the world the last four years? Hannah Arendt’s “banality of evil” raised it’s scarred and bloody head in ways I never thought I’d ever see in my lifetime: our freedoms were trampled almost overnight and the unvaccinated became second class citizens, ridiculed by moronic elected officials, mainstream media babblers and soccer moms (Karens) on Facebook.
Nehls warns about the mistake of not being able to comprehend the evil that we are facing and that has become so open and brazen the last four years. But believing that humans are basically good contributes to this problem. Nehls calls it “mirroring.” We impose our own sensibilities and morals on to all people thinking that someone who has no trouble pushing for injections they know will kill and maim people, must feel incredibly guilty for doing so. They don’t. They don’t care. Common people are nothing to them and common evil people can have the same attitude, albeit with a lot less power.
As Naomi Wolf writes in her most recent book, Facing the Beast, evil people don’t have to have pointy ears and a tail. They can (and do) wear suits and dresses, can be charming, be caring parents and live next door with a white picket fence. At the end of the book Nehl’s has this quote by George Bernanos:
“Then it will not be cruelty that is responsible for our extinction, and of course even less the indignation that cruelty arouses, or the retaliations and acts of vengeance that will grow out of it … but weakness, the lack of responsibility of modern man, his false submissive acceptance of any order from above.” Bernanos continues: “The horrors that we have seen, the still greater horrors we shall presently see, are not signs that rebels, insubordinate, untamable men are increasing in number throughout the world, but rather that there is a constant increase in the number of obedient, docile men.”3
Being evil may be as simple as remaining silent when one should speak up.
What if God is Dead?
The outcome of Godless evolution and man as basically good is the death of God. And if God dies…then we’ll all die right along with Him whether we believe or not.
Back in my fundamentalist Christian days as a student at Liberty Baptist College (now Liberty University) there was joke that circulated:
God is dead. —Nietzsche
Nietzsche is dead. —God
I repeated that joke a lot until years later in the early 90s, while doing graduate work in literature at San Diego State University, I read Nietzsche’s famous passage on the death of God for myself. It seemed less like a statement of triumph and more like a lamentation, almost a warning:
The madman jumped into their midst and pierced them with his eyes. ‘Where is God?’ he cried; ‘I’ll tell you! We have killed him — you and I! We are all his murderers. But how did we do this? How were we able to drink up the sea? Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the entire horizon? What were we doing when we unchained this earth from its sun? Where is it moving to now? Where are we moving to? Away from all suns? Are we not continually falling? And backwards, sidewards, forwards, in all directions? Is there still an up and a down? Aren’t we straying as through an infinite nothing? Isn’t empty space breathing at us? Hasn’t it got colder? Isn’t night and more night coming again and again?’4
There has been such a push lately to accept the sexualization of children. I am dumbfounded to hear of parents happily taking their children to drag shows sponsored at local libraries or into the medical clinic to administer hormone blockers because they found Johnny playing with a Barbie. Does this qualify as evil? Are these the obedient and docile that will help bring down Western Civilization?
So what has slowly been dragging me away from my ardent agnosticism and bringing me back to a belief in God? Biblical studies? A great book? Discussions with friends and family? Answers to prayer? Miracles? No. None of that. It is the evil that I’ve seen the last four years. It is difficult to imagine or convince myself that this has been perpetrated by mere mortals. “For we wrestle not against flesh and blood…” The patience over decades, the plan itself infiltrating every area of our culture, the killing of healthy nationalism and of course the slow kill bioweapons and the worldwide identical propaganda that accompanied them lead me to believe there is something other than human ingenuity at work here. Evil is at work: “principalities,” “powers,” “rulers of the darkness,” “spiritual wickedness.”
I am not asserting this as a categorical fact, but as my own observation. Obviously, the unseen realm, if there is a such a thing, cannot be proven, but for much of human history this unseen realm, the supernatural was a given. Does God exist? Who can say for sure? But I hope he does and I hope he’s benevolent and loving, even if it’s difficult for us to fathom what that means in a world that appears to have more and more basically evil people.
When I think about human trafficking I always think how easily it could end. It wouldn’t take the government or a wall or anything like that. All it would take is for every customer that pays to abuse these women, men and children to stop. Just stop. Pipe dream, I know, but nonetheless.
Kids on Demand
Children bought and sold: it’s vile, perverse—
Everyone agrees, but kids are taken
In droves everyday, it’s getting much worse.
Who pays the fees? Who rents the forsaken?
Your neighbor? Your uncle? You by moonlight?
No demand? Children sleep soundly tonight.
If I ever start to think that people are basically good, all I have to do is remember how many people must be buying children caught in the web of prostitution. How many millions of paying customers does it take to make human trafficking one of the most lucrative evils in the world?
In 1983 Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn said this:
Since then I have spent well-nigh 50 years working on the history of our revolution; in the process I have read hundreds of books, collected hundreds of personal testimonies, and have already contributed eight volumes of my own toward the effort of clearing away the rubble left by that upheaval. But if I were asked today to formulate as concisely as possible the main cause of the ruinous revolution that swallowed up some 60 million of our people, I could not put it more accurately than to repeat: ‘Men have forgotten God; that’s why all this has happened.’5
Nehl’s Book
I still recommend the book by Nehls. The full title is, The Indoctrinated Brain: How to Successfully Fend Off the Global Attack on Your Mental Freedom. He does a great job of chronicling what has happened the last four years and calling out those who were and still are part of it.
He’s not telling us anything we don’t know, but he is giving the reader a scientific basis for what is happening in the brain of the millions and millions who succumbed and continue to succumb to the propaganda and fearmongering. He asserts that the powers that be know exactly what they are doing and also understand this scientific basis for their actions.
In short, if I’m understanding him correctly, the constant propaganda, particularly the propaganda of fear, overwhelms the hippocampus, the area of the brain that stores important memories throughout your life. Constant fear, and it must be constant different fears so the mind cannot get used to them, destroys this ability to store these necessary memories. This would explain why there is so much chaos and fearmongering being pushed on populations from every different direction. In the introduction Naomi Wolf gives a nice summary:
Dr. Nehls argues that the spike protein, along with other COVID measures, represents an intentional attack on the human hippocampus—where autobiographical memory and individuality itself originate—and that “fear porn” keeps us from holding on to the autobiographical memories that encompass our former selves.6
When this happens people become more malleable to propaganda and the acceptance of ideas, restrictions and policies that under normal circumstances they’d never give a second thought. Then, finally, the elites have a population they can easily and effortlessly control.
Welcome to a brave new world.
I will leave you with some of my favorite quotes from the book:
Undoubtedly, even without taking a closer look at contradictory facts, one can understand that the superrich have benefited to an extraordinary degree worldwide. They now have ample reason to maintain the state of emergency—especially because it seems to serve a larger goal: the Great Reset.7
Whether a perfidious master plan lurks behind all of this (which one might suspect) or all of this is happening more or less purely by chance is ultimately largely irrelevant.8
For example, the COVID-19 activities were clearly designed to benefit only the above-average wealthy stakeholders. For almost everyone else who was not so wealthy, the COVID-19 pandemic became the disaster of the century.9
Uniformity and conformity as a means of social stabilization is anything but a new principle—what is new are the sophisticated technological possibilities that make these goals easier to achieve.10
The realization that autobiographical memory can be successively erased and at the same time massively manipulated with stoked fear explains, in my opinion, the great interest of the protagonists of the Great Reset in propagating as many further anxiety scenarios as possible.11
Quoting Deitrich Bonhoeffer:
“While one can protest against evil and expose and prevent it by the use of force, we are defenseless against stupidity. Neither protests nor violence have any effect here; arguments fall on deaf ears. Facts that contradict a stupid person’s prejudice simply need not be believed. And if they are irrefutable, they are simply brushed aside as unimportant, incidental.”12
Quoting Idi Amin:
“There is freedom of speech, but I cannot guarantee freedom after speech.”13
Quoting Jean-Claude Juncker, former president of the European Union:
“We decide on something, leave it lying around, and wait and see what happens. If no one kicks up a fuss, because most people don’t understand what has been decided, we continue step by step until there is no turning back.”14
However, getting out of your comfort zone is essential for positive change. It requires some mental strength and also involves certain risks, which is why we need civil courage. But there is no other way than to take action if we want to escape the dystopia described.15
NOTES
Nehls, Michael. The Indoctrinated Brain: How to Successfully Fend Off the Global Attack on Your Mental Freedom (p. 379). Skyhorse. Kindle Edition.
p. 380.
p. 379
Nietzsche, Friedrich, The Gay Science, With a Prelude in German Rhymes and an Appendix of Songs, TRANSLATED BY JOSEFINE NAUCKHOFF Wake Forest University (https://yale.imodules.com/s/1667/images/gid6/editor_documents/nietzsche_-_the_gay_science.pdf?sessionid=9b80317e-022a-4289-aa4a-5e6a906647d3&cc=1) p. 119-120.
Solzhenitsyn, Aleksandr, "Acceptance Address by Mr. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn," Templeton Prize, May 10, 1983 https://www.templetonprize.org/laureate-sub/solzhenitsyn-acceptance-speech/
Nehls, Michael. The Indoctrinated Brain, p. 10.
p. 22.
p. 33.
p. 69.
p. 93.
p. 174.
p. 221.
p. 291.
p. 338.
pp. 377-378.
There is something about what we think of as an "evil" personality -- they tend to deny their own darkness. In Jungian terms humans becomes more whole and complete when we acknowledge our unconscious/subconscious desire and beliefs which regularly are dark and disturbing -- by bring the darkness into the light, by acknowledging and incorporating it, we ascend to another level of personal and spiritual development.
By denying their own darkness, though, these "evil" types tend to subconsciously project their own traits onto their hapless enemies. As Scott M. Peck states in People of the Lie, p.73-75, "A predominant characteristic, however, of the behavior of those I call evil is scapegoating. Because in their hearts they consider themselves above reproach, they must lash out at anyone who does reproach them. They sacrifice others to preserve their self-image of perfection....Scapegoating works through a mechanism psychiatrists call projection. Since the evil, deep down, feel themselves to be faultless, it is inevitable that when they are in conflict with the world they will invariably perceive the conflict as the world's fault. Since they must deny their own badness, they must perceive others as bad….In The Road Less Traveled I defined evil "as the exercise of political power - that is, the imposition of one's will upon others by overt or covert coercion - in order to avoid...spiritual growth". In other words, the evil attack others instead of facing their own failures. Spiritual growth requires the acknowledgment of one's need to grow. If we cannot make that acknowledgment, we have no option except to attempt to eradicate the evidence of our own imperfection....Utterly dedicated to preserving their self-image of perfection, they are unceasingly engaged in the effort to maintain the appearance of moral purity. They worry about this a great deal. They are acutely sensitive to social norms and what others might think of them....the words "image," "appearance," and "outwardly" are crucial to understanding the morality of the evil. While they seem to lack any motivation to be good, they intensely desire to appear good. Their "goodness" is all on a level of pretense. It is, in effect, a lie. This is why they are the ‘people of the lie.’”
Also, p. 119: “Evil [is] defined as the use of power to destroy the spiritual growth of others for the purpose of defending and preserving the integrity of our own sick selves. In short, it is scapegoating. [The evil] scapegoat not the strong but the weak. For the evil to misuse their power, they must have the power to use it in the first place. They must have some kind of dominion over their victims.”
Thanks! Michael Nehl's book will get added to my future reading list. All too often things are written that I never seem to find time to read, but this sounds like one that should rise above that.
On the broader topics you discussed, the banality of evil, and the description by Bonhoffer definitely hit home. So many minds these days are flooded with distraction, unsubstantiated fear manipulated so as to require more distraction ... a vicious circular addiction. It reminds me of the mother/wife character in Kurt Vonnegut's short story "Harrison Bergeron".
And lastly, the conflict between creation and evolution has been a challenge for many. You, and I, are not alone in that. For me the conflict between them has been to ponder that possibly the answer is both, and that the real conflict is being anchored to the premise that the human printed, and profusely translated "word of God", may not be the definitive answer to all questions. There are so many conflicting ideas, stories, histories and interpretations, that for me, the words of the bible are a guide to the truth, and not always "the truth". As to evolution, why is it impossible to believe that God did create the universe, and ultimately man, but not necessarily the current versions that we experience in our short lifetimes. Why can't the evolution of man, mankind, humanity, simply be the plan that He put into motion? For me it isn't a dichotomy, but two connected ideas, that have been made to be conflicting, by some.