Dumbing down is not just about intelligence

There is a near constant fear amongst many people, feed regularly by the media, and interest groups that we are gradually being reduced in our capacity for intellectual thought, and more particularly our critical analysis functions and our ability to reason. Regularly we read in the press about exams being made easier, about students leaving school functionally illiterate and about employers having struggling to find candidates for jobs that require intellectual capacity. This is particularly prevalent amongst the poorest sections of society and there are a number of possible causes, both overt and covert some of which have been covered in previous articles, but there is another, perhaps more insidious form of dumbing down that gets far less coverage, but is non the less linked in certain key aspects. This second form of dumbing down is the ongoing suppression of our senses, and it could potentially be far more damaging in terms of the move to subjugate the vast majority of humanity.

It has long been known that human sensory awareness is fundamentally flawed and that the way in which we interpret sensory inputs through our minds is not accurate. What we thing that we touch, taste, smell, hear and see is not reality. On average we are consciously aware of approximately fifteen percent of the sensory inputs that we receive and it is relatively easy to confuse or trick the senses. What is interesting is to compare the sensory perception of someone who has constantly lived in an urban environment, a theoretical “normal” existence in the modern western World, and someone who lives and works in a rural environment, in something more closely approaching our hunter gatherer ancestry. It is incredibly difficult to find research into this phenomenon since no-one in the science community is looking into this officially, but conversations with anthropologists, and perhaps more instructively with a community of hunters in Northern Alaska has led to the conclusion that in normal society our senses are being deliberately dampened to decrease our awareness of the World around us and how it is changing.

As an example, on a walk through a heavily forested area in Alaska on a hunting trip my guide was consistently pointing out flora and fauna that I was completely unable to perceive until they were pointed out. Over the period of a week this occurred so often that I began to analyse what was happening and it appeared that my mind was filtering information considerably more rigorously than my guide. This struck me as strange because in my normal urban environment I feel that I have to be constantly aware of my environment, traffic, people, sights, sounds, smells and so on so I would expect my ability to spot movement or hear sounds to be reasonably good, but it was in reality very poor in comparison to my guide. It could be the case that familiarity of environment has an effect, but I would anticipate that being in an unfamiliar environment would trigger greater attention to the senses rather than lesser.

So, how could our senses be dumbed down in this way? There is a strong suggestion that we are constantly bombarded by high intensity sensory inputs from television, computer, radio, billboard advertising and even modern architecture. The whole fabric of the built environment appears geared towards fooling our eyes and our mind, and making us question our senses. This gives us a pretty good clue as to where this is coming from, because you have to ask, historically who has worked most closely with architects? Which group of people have a reverence for the “Great Architect”? This concerted effort to modify the way we perceive and therefore the way we think has all the hallmarks of one of the fundamental masonic conspiracies, and is one that I will look at in more detail in an upcoming article.