Apramāda

Buddhist perspectives on society and culture

Apramāda

Buddhist perspectives on
society and culture

The continual intrusion into our minds of the hammering noises of arguments and propaganda can lead to two kinds of reactions.

It may lead to apathy and indifference, the I-don’t-care reaction, or to a more intensified desire to study and to understand. Unfortunately, the first reaction is the more popular one. The flight from study and awareness is much too common in a world that throws too many confusing pictures to the individual. For the sake of our democracy, based on freedom and individualism, we have to bring ourselves back to study again and again. Otherwise, we can become easy victims of a well-planned verbal attack on our minds and consciences. We cannot be enough aware of the continual coercion of our senses and minds, the continual suggestive attacks which may pass through the intellectual barriers of insight. Repetition and Pavlovian conditioning exhaust the individual and may seduce him ultimately to accept a truth he himself initially defied and scorned. The totalitarians are very ingenious in arousing latent guilt in us by repeating over and over again how criminally the Western world has acted toward innocent and peaceful people.

Joost Abraham Maurits Meerloo The Rape of the Mind: The Psychology of Thought Control, Menticide, and Brainwashing
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