The culture and society of America are fading away. The power of visual communication is staggering. The secular world is constantly working to change your perception and beliefs. You saw the coverage by the liberal major news outlets of the rioting in many of the major cities in the United States in the summer of 2020. A reporter on one of the liberal networks would report that the riots were peaceful while in the background, buildings were burning, loiters were breaking into businesses, and people were fighting and throwing objects, yet they were described as peaceful. How can they get away with that? The major news organizations will push their agenda and know that if they tell you enough times what they want you to believe, eventually, you believe what they say and not your eyes. They can be that brazen and know that you will eventually forget or not even perceive the rioting in the background.
You may be unaware, but everything you do online is monitored. Google’s spiders and the government know every page you have looked at and how long you were on each page.
Every word that they use is analyzed for its effect on you. Every image or video is choreographed so you see what they want you to see. The media selects, takes things out of context, shapes and molds its presentation, and is designed for one purpose, press their liberal agenda, destroy the family, and remove God from society. They use many proven ways to influence you, such as Agenda-setting, framing, cultivation theory, decoy effect, scarcity theory, loss aversion theory, and anchoring theory are just a few of the techniques used to change or influence you. They know camera angles, lighting, and coloring alter your perception. They have studied and continue to study human reactions to their techniques.
Colossians 2:8 NLT
Don’t let anyone capture you with empty philosophies and high-sounding nonsense that comes from human thinking and from the spiritual powers of this world, rather than from Christ.
You might be thinking; I am too smart to fall for all their tactics. Intelligent people are not susceptible to having their beliefs changed that way, right? Sorry to say, but wrong! Research has shown that the most educated people, with the highest mathematic skills, have the strongest tendencies, and who are confident about their beliefs are more likely to resist true information about an issue different from their beliefs. You cannot change their beliefs with new facts. If you have been indoctrinated into false beliefs through America’s liberal education system, you believe in their false narrative. People keep repeating false statements because they cannot analyze any new information correctly. Their closed minds or paradigms have embedded their beliefs deeper and deeper into their brains. In most cases, you make the mistake of thinking that you can change or correct a person’s view on an issue by giving them facts. Young people do not believe in facts or absolute truths. Their feelings about a fact are more important than the truth of a fact.
The secular activist liberal world will use any and all methods to persuade you to believe in their way of life. The propaganda they use is a deliberate, systematic process to shape perceptions and beliefs, manipulate cognitions, and change behaviors to achieve their goal of changing culture and society. They use false statements, partial truths, statements out of context, selective information, and transmit only those ideas needed to accomplish their goals. They promote their agenda no matter the true facts. They are intolerant of being shown facts contrary to their beliefs. They can become hostile and belligerent. Our young people are being programmed and brainwashed to believe that facts and truth are unnecessary. It’s your feelings or your opinions that matter. You can be a different gender every day. Forget about truth and facts. It’s cool not to be shackled down by truth and facts. A great book about this by Abdu Murray is titled Saving Truth, with the subtitle Finding Meaning and Clarity in a Post-Truth World.
Young people have difficulty believing the absolute truth of the Gospel. Religion has too many rules and restricts their lifestyle. Young people have different views on gender identity, gay lifestyles, sex, and marriage.
Jim Morrison of the band The Doors said, “Whoever controls the media, controls the mind.”
In the 17th Century, Blaise Pascal made this statement which is now even truer today.
Truth is so obscure in these times, and falsehood so established, that, unless we love the truth, we cannot know it.
Another term for technology and flat-screen influence on changing culture and society is known as Technology Determinism. Technology Determinism is how technology determines a society’s structure and values. As technology advances and its influences are incorporated into society, it will immediately alter activities and behaviors. These changes have a ripple effect or long-term effect that defines culture and society. These effects also alter religious beliefs and practices.
Persuasive technology was developed by Stanford researcher B.J. Fogg. He referred to this field of study as captology. It is a system of using technology to change how you live your life and shape how you believe. Three criteria must be fulfilled for you to do what they want you to do. You must want to do it. You must be able to do it. You must be promoted to do it. An example of captology is Netflix. If you are watching one of their series on TV, at the end of the episode, they leave you in suspense about what is going to happen next, and the next episode starts to play automatically. You may be watching and suddenly realize you have watched five episodes in a row. You have actually to do something to stop the movie series. It is easier to sit and do nothing. The design is to make it easier to do what they want you to do.
National media and social media influence nearly everything you do or believe. These secular media outlets try to influence your vote, views, knowledge, beliefs, opinions, and actions. Every aspect of how you react to the information you watch or observe has been studied and is continually reviewed. These people are not kidding around. There are billions and trillions of dollars at stake – presidential campaigns, power, control of society and culture. The media, corporations, government, news organizations, marketing companies, left-wing organizations, Big Tech, and many others use the power of visual communication through flat screens.
Americans spend 250 billion hours a year watching TV. A child watches TV for over 1,500 minutes a week. By the time a child finishes 8th grade, they have watched 8,000 murders. On graduation from high school, a young person has witnessed 200,000 acts of violence.
Smartphones persuade you to repeatedly check your phone when you hear the signal for a new message, email, or numerous other notifications, causing a dopamine release in your brain. You look at your phone more than 100 times a day! Psychologists have identified that instant messaging and texting are addictive secondary to the dopamine release. Every morning nearly everyone’s first instinct is to reach for their smartphone or turn on the TV. You wake up scrolling through emails, notifications, tweets, Pinterest, Facebook, Snapchat, and others. Or you cannot go to bed without checking your flat screen one last time.
Social media has many positive benefits, but it has also robbed people of individual attributes. It has taken away from many people the ability to find trust and comfort with one another. We have replaced personal interaction with hollow virtual relationships with others. The younger generations have limited social and personal interactions with their peers.
A journal article by Jacob Amedie titled The Impact of social media on Society says, “Each step forward in social media has made it easier, just a little, to avoid the emotional work of being present, to convey information rather than humanity. He also says, that social media robs us of self-control and the ability to think independently and instead makes us gullible to join any group that posts perverse messages that tickle our ears and amuse our senses without evaluation of the consequences.
Social media’s short-term effects are priming, arousal, and mimicry from the dopamine release in the brain. Priming processes occur in the brain by being excited about participating in social media. There is increased arousal secondary to the stimulation from social media. Mimicry occurs as you mimic or copycat what is on social media.
The long-term effects are observational learning of thought and behaviors, activation, and desensitization of emotional centers in the limbic system. Your brain is being molded, and you are modifying your paradigm. Desensitization occurs after repeated exposure to emotionally stimulating social media or video games. In the past, what you would have believed to be shocking is now mundane.
Studies have shown a strong connection between extended social media use and the increased risk of anxiety, loneliness, and depression. The suicide rate in young people aged 10 to 24 has increased by 60% from 2007 to 2018.
There is some good news; you can learn to see better, perceive better, and understand the ultimate reality of life. That was the reason for the book’s first title or subtitle: pure vision, perfect perception, and ultimate reality.
Pure vision means trying to look at this world with spiritual eyes or through the eyes of Jesus. Perfect perception means to perceive the world we live in its true existence. Just because you see 20/20 doesn’t mean you see or perceive things correctly. Your paradigm determines what you perceive. You can learn to improve your perception with training. There is a chapter on training your vision and perception in the book.
Why do people make mistakes in their perception? In most cases, it is not that they have diminished vision. Many people go through life and do not pay much attention to the world around them. They are self-absorbed in their lives. Another reason is that it is impossible to be constantly aware of all things in your environment. You are only conscious of a small fraction of your sensory input. Your brain fills in the gaps of your attention with your paradigm. It does not always get it right. During an emotional event, your emotions can alter your perception markedly. Your emotions allow your paradigm to misinterpret the scene or episode.
Another way to describe vision and perception is called visual intelligence. Visual intelligence is the capacity for learning, reasoning, understanding, and similar forms of mental activity, aptitude in grasping truths, facts, and meanings. Visual intelligence refers to a person’s ability to perceive, analyze, and understand visual information in the world around them. Other terms are discernment, savvy, skill, knowledge, comprehension, and cleverness.
People tend to live their daily lives and do not pay too much attention to what they are looking at on any given day. They superficially accept what they see. They do not critically analyze things. At the same time, many of the things they are viewing are being manipulated for ulterior motives. There are skills needed for visual intelligence or perception. You need awareness of the logic, emotion, and attitudes suggested in the visual message and the ability to produce meaningful images for communication with others. You need to recognize attitudes, beliefs, and true meanings embedded within and between images on a flat screen and develop visual intelligence. Visual intelligence means observing differently, seeing what is behind the images, looking more abstractly, and looking into the images’ reasons. Visual intelligence is a system of looking at the world around us with a critical analyzing awareness that can be trained and developed to lead you towards perfect perception. You need to become a Sherlock Holmes. When evaluating something, you need to think about the 5 Ws – who, what, where, when, and why.
Critically evaluating art is an excellent way of training your perception. The FBI uses art as a way of training its people. Some medical schools are doing the same thing to train their students to make them better clinicians. You need to follow a logical observation method when evaluating a piece of art. It is good to start by observing the work of art in its entirety to get a general idea about its theme or purpose. Then divide the art into sections or quadrants, depending on how much detail is in the image. By focusing on a smaller area, you can discover intricate details.
Let’s look at the famous painting Whistler’s Mother. What do you think about this famous painting? There is a compelling stillness to it. It has a minimalist portrayal and geometric austerity. She is rigid and erect, wearing long black clothes that you might wear at a funeral. Her appearance is icy and is accentuated by the black and grey colors. She and the dark-colored chair face to the left and away from the artist. She is wearing a white lace cap or bonnet that drapes past her shoulders that could be tied. This type of head covering would be common in the era of the late 1800s. Her dress sleeves have lace cuffs. Her hands are folded in her lap, clutching a white handkerchief. There is a rectangular painting on the wall with a scene of buildings behind a field. At the right top corner is the black edge of, what appears to be, a picture frame. Her head is not quite an equal distance between the frames. Her head is slightly tilted down. She seems to be gazing slightly upward, staring at something somewhat higher than her eye level. On the left side of the painting is a black, vertically hanging drapery. There is a white, intricate, subtle pattern in the drapery. The back wall has a matte grey appearance with a large dark baseboard. The wood flooring runs vertically in the painting. Her feet are sitting on a footrest. Her shoes would be considered basic or plain and do not match the status of the rest of her attire. Are there any other observations you would make about this famous painting?
Another factor involved with the blinding of America is that the average person is putting five times the amount of information in their brains compared to just a few decades ago. As I said before, the average person is attached to their flat screens 10 to 12 hours a day. The lifestyle in America is fast-paced, with 24-hour access to nearly anything you want. Americans are constantly stimulating their limbic system in the brain, which is the center for all your emotions, such as anger, lust, rage, and your fight or flight response. People are stressing their nervous systems to the max. Look at all the mental diseases, alcohol, and drug addiction in America. There is a book by Richard A. Swenson, M.D. titled Margin: How to Create the Emotional, Physical, Financial, and Time Reserves You Need. Margin is the space that once existed between ourselves and our limits. People used to have a safety margin. When you reach past the limits of your resources, tolerances, and abilities, you are out of margin. Once you are out of your margin, bad things begin to happen.
America is outside of its margin. Look at road rage in America today. How easy is it to get people to riot, loot, and burn? A significant portion of these rioters were young women from prosperous families. The culture and society in America are crumbling from within. Culture, society, the family, and Christianity need to be intertwined to prosper and survive the attacks of Satan and the secular world. Once God is removed from society, it will begin to crumble and denigrate into chaos.
What is Ultimate Reality? For the past 2,500 years, famous philosophers have written and debated the various aspects of truth and reality. Aristotle, Plato, Socrates, Cicero, Hume, Descartes, Kuhn, and many others. They have proposed their beliefs about humankind’s origin, meaning, reality, and destiny. They tried to use science, logic, and their own opinions. While they did explain some things well. The final decrees of many of them led to paradoxes and confusion. Reality is the quality or state of being actual or true. From the beginning of humankind, with the first flickers of self-awareness and consciousness, we have searched and contemplated our origin, the meaning of life, destiny, and reality. What is the nature of our universe? What is our place in the universe? Why are we here? What is the reality of our existence? Most philosophers and scientists writing about reality fail to begin at the source of creation and reality- God. All reality and truth must be based on God. His laws of physics, science, and the information found in the Bible must be the foundation on which to base everything. I think that true reality should be called ultimate reality. Ultimate reality transcends the non-physical and physical dimensions of the universe. Ultimate reality is the most all-inclusive reality, the most authentic reality. It is the origin of all things in this world, simply stated, the creator of all things in the universe has created reality. God is the source of Ultimate Reality.
The eye is the window to your soul and spirit. Flat screens are powerful tools. The key is controlling what you are watching versus flat screens controlling you. There is a ferocious battle to control your mind with forces seen and unseen. The secular world is ruthlessly pressing its agenda forward 24/7. It is relentless and intense. If you are old enough, you will remember that there were 3 TV stations, and at 11:00 pm, the national anthem played, and the screen turned to snow. Flat screens were dormant until the next morning. Wow, what a difference compared to today.
Visual temptations are everywhere. You and I need to be careful, but it is vital for us to protect our children and grandchildren. You have got to control their flat-screen use.
The Blinding of America is one of the most important books that you will read. All parents and grandparents need to read this book. Unfortunately, it was written by an unknown author. America is in trouble. Today’s kids are raised by flat screens and a radical educational system. The images they are viewing are altering their minds. Many people believed that woke teaching was just at universities, but now we know it begins in grade school.
My daughter teaches at a school in Lee County. With the side effects of Covid and even more flat-screen use due to Covid by our young people, they are having many more problems. Every school now has 40 to 50 or more daily referrals for behavior problems. This book is warning you about the damage flat screens are doing and that there is something you can do about it. If we do not do something, our children and grandchildren will be lost. The book will guide and recommend to you to help your children and grandchildren recognize the propaganda on their flat screens. The schools need to change, and you must have control of their flat-screen use. The clearing of America’s vision needs to start now.
A cigarette or cigar might be harmful and kill you, but the worst that it can do if you are a Christian is it will get you to heaven sooner. You still have eternal life. That flat screen is much more deadly because it can cause you to lose your soul. You will be blind and lost. You will be unable to find your way to heaven. Do not let that flat screen and the secular world with its propaganda blind and indoctrinate you or your family. Today’s young people are addicted to their flat screens 24/7. The garbage and propaganda they are viewing are blinding them. America needs, you need, I need, but most importantly, your children and grandchildren need Pure Vision with Perfect Perception, which will open their eyes to see the true Ultimate reality of life, Jesus Christ.
