In my groundbreaking study on human gullibility entitled Mind-Slave (which was, predictably enough, ignored both by the mainstream media and the world of academia) I argued that the fate of humankind, far from being an epic story of adventure amongst the stars, was already almost inevitably predetermined to be a miserable tale of the most terrible ignominy and that this is an outcome assured by our childishly naïve embracing of whatever ridiculous mind-enslaving gadgets our capitalist masters throw at us. The naivety of childhood is a marvellous thing it is true but the naïveté of adult human beings is not – I’m afraid – thing of beauty. Very far from being a thing of beauty, it is a thing of horror. The naïveté of fully-grown adults is the harbinger of our collective doom, as I need hardly point out. In my book I ask the reader to consider the following question: if human gullibility reaches the point at which we believe anything we are told via the official channels (and also in the state run alternative media channels) then where does this take us? What is the logical endpoint of this insidious process? If we have reached that highly significant ‘tipping point’ at which we really and truly will believe absolutely anything that we are told (and there is a substantial body of evidence to suggest that this tipping point has already been reached) then what happens next? We always like to imagine, of course, that there is some kind of inherent difficulty in manipulating human masses – that there is another words some possibility of the more intelligent or observant type of human being spotting the deception and blowing the lid on it in some way or other. We always assume a certain degree of shrewdness in the human psyche that will eventually emerge and save the day. The collective human psyche is very ancient after all and it is surely not too unreasonable to assume that it has learned something in the last 30,000 years or so. Possibly it has learned a lot. I believe Eckhart Tolle says something similar. What I am asking the reader to do however is to embark upon the ‘thought experiment’ of assuming that this is not in fact the case and that human beings are, at this point in time, infinitely gullible and will swallow any nonsense whatsoever, no matter how preposterous. The key factor – as always – being that other people swallow it too. That makes everything OK. In this case we can see that the situation for humanity becomes very dire indeed; how can we hope to overcome any serious adversary that might rise up against us when – collectively speaking – we are as gullible as the biggest village idiot there ever was? Even more gullible as it happens since collective idiocy is always the more formidable force. The individual idiot is always smarter. There will of course always be isolated individuals here and there who are not taken in by all the nonsense, but what can they do once the ‘critical point’ has been passed? There’s nothing anyone can do when that happens and that’s the crux of my argument. Psychological manipulation is of course inherent in capitalism as we all know and everyone understands the logic here – people aren’t going to rush to buy meaningless stupid products unless their minds have been tampered with to make them think that they are obtaining significant personal advantage thereby. Neither are they going to spend their entire lives working at meaningless and unfulfilling jobs in order to obtain the money to buy these stupid products. The manipulation has gone way beyond that now however. Capitalism isn’t the final stage of mankind’s ignominious devolution but only a means to an end. That’s how we get our minds softened up. My question is this therefore: what happens next? What is ‘the next phase in the programme’?