Psychology & Social Control
Definition: Dissecting cognitive manipulation techniques and human psychology. Understanding the true motives behind crowd behavior.
In 1535, Nguyễn Bỉnh Khiêm passed the highest imperial examination in the Mạc court at the age of forty-four. He had been born in 1491 in Trung Am, in what is now Vĩnh Bảo, Hải Phòng. He served for about eight years, then submitted a memorial asking the court to punish eighteen powerful officials. The king refused. Khiêm left office, returned home, opened the Bạch Vân school, and still received visitors from rival power blocs.
In 1960, American counterintelligence officers set three objectives for a secret hypnosis program: place a person under suggestion quickly without that person knowing, create a lasting gap in memory, and plant an instruction to be carried out after waking. Those objectives appear in a CIA paper on hypnosis in covert operations, not in a novel. The paper also assigns field testing to the counterintelligence side of the agency.
In King Ashurbanipal’s library at Nineveh, a clay fragment from the seventh century BCE records how to read signs on a sheep’s liver. The reader was not a street fortune-teller. He was trained to send an interpretation to the Assyrian king and state. Each sign had two parts: what had been seen and what it predicted for the king, the army, or a city. The British Museum also holds tablets recording Venus, eclipses, and omens connected to public affairs.
On February 10, 1891, the United States Patent Office granted US446054A to Elijah J. Bond in Baltimore. The patent called the object a game. The board had letters, numbers, Yes and No, and a small piece of wood with feet and a pointer. Players rested their hands on it. The piece slid across the characters and formed an answer.
Inside a chapel at Valencia Cathedral in Spain stands a brown-red stone cup. Its upper bowl is an old piece of quartz; its base, handles, and decorations were added at later times. The cathedral calls it the Santo Cáliz, the cup Jesus used at the Last Supper. Pilgrims kneel before it, popes have used it in Mass, and Valencia promotes a pilgrimage route that brings visitors to its chapel.
In 2021, news reports said that Jeff Bezos and Yuri Milner were behind a new biotechnology company called Altos Labs. The company recruited leading scientists to study how older cells might be returned to a younger state. At the same time, Alphabet’s Calico continued asking how people might live longer and healthier lives. This race has private funding, private laboratories, and data that ordinary people cannot access on their own.
In ancient Egypt, priests kept spell books, clay figures, and formulas meant to heal, protect the living, or curse an enemy. Across the centuries, the same kind of knowledge was renamed "witchcraft" whenever it sat outside the control of the authorities.
On 18 November 1978, U.S. Congressman Leo Ryan arrived at a small airstrip in Guyana to take people home from Jonestown. Families had told him that relatives were being held in an isolated religious settlement in the jungle. They described forced work, beatings, confinement, and rehearsals for a mass suicide. Ryan wanted to see the place for himself.
Wolf Grigoryevich Messing was born on 10 September 1899 in Góra Kalwaria, near Warsaw, to a devout Jewish family. His father wanted him to study theology. The boy had a powerful memory and could recite long passages of prayer, but he did not want to become a rabbi. A story repeated in later biographies says that he ran away, boarded a train to Berlin without a ticket, and handed the inspector a blank scrap of paper.
In 1743, a man arrived in England calling himself Count Saint-Germain. He openly said that Saint-Germain was not his real name, yet he refused to give his real one. Horace Walpole recorded that the man had money arriving from an unknown source, wore several jewels, understood mathematics, played the violin, and spoke French, Italian, Polish and some English. He dressed like a nobleman, but no one could find the famil
On the night of 25 January 1967, Betty Andreasson was in the kitchen of her home in South Ashburnham, Massachusetts, with her parents and seven children. The lights went out. A pulsing red-orange light appeared outside, followed by what Betty described as a silent vacuum over the house. Her memory then broke apart. She remembered moving the children into the living room, and then suddenly finding herself back in the
On the evening of 27 July 1890, Vincent van Gogh returned to the Auberge Ravoux in Auvers-sur-Oise, north of Paris, with a bullet in his chest. He covered more than a kilometre from the fields to the village with that wound, then lay for two days and died in the arms of his brother Theo on the morning of 29 July.
Why a piece of film retains traces of the whole scene, and how that led to the holographic-universe theory.
A two-outcome measurement becomes the starting point for many worlds, then a later story claims that experience always follows a surviving branch.
DMT stands for N,N-dimethyltryptamine. It is a psychedelic in the tryptamine group. In research settings, DMT can quickly change images, body sensations, and the sense of where a person is. In 1994, Rick Strassman’s team at the University of New Mexico gave intravenous DMT to people who had used hallucinogens before. The trial was randomized, double-blind, and saline-controlled. Psychological effects appeared almo...
On May 2, 1972, the Italian magazine La Domenica del Corriere published an article titled “A Machine That Photographs the Past Has Been Invented.” It interviewed a Benedictine monk named Pellegrino Ernetti. He said a group of scientists had created the Chronovisor, a screen-like device able to recover images and sounds from events that had already happened. The machine did not send anyone into the past. It let an ope
In 2009, Fiona Broome said she met many people who believed Nelson Mandela had died in prison in South Africa during the 1980s. They did not remember a single line of news. They remembered television coverage, a funeral, remarks from his wife, and the feeling that they had known the event for years. Yet Mandela was released in 1990, became South Africa’s president in 1994, and died in 2013. The gap between detailed memories held by many people and the record preserved in archives gave the phenomenon its name: the Mandela Effect.
At the eastern tip of Long Island, New York, Camp Hero is now a coastal state park. A massive radar tower still rises above the woods and old roads. Its AN/FPS-35 reflector is about 126 feet long, 38 feet high, and weighs roughly 40 tons. It is not a movie prop. The radar entered service in late 1960. Before the park existed, this land was a World War II coastal-defense base and later a United States Air Force radar station during the Cold War.
In 2003, Nick Bostrom showed that if a future civilisation runs vast numbers of conscious simulations, a person picked at random is more likely to live inside a simulation than in the original world. This article goes after the trace a computational system cannot hide forever: information, resolution and speed limits that can be measured, that repeat, and that carry the shape of a technical constraint.
In the double-slit experiment, an electron or photon passes through two slits and leaves behind an interference pattern that behaves like a wave. The moment a detector records which slit the particle used, the interference pattern disappears.
In late October 1943, a rumor began to circulate and never stopped: the U.S. Navy made USS Eldridge vanish from Philadelphia and sent it to Norfolk, Virginia, about 500 kilometres away. How did a real ship, a real piece of naval equipment, and an empty space in the records become a story about time travel?
Xiangxi's steep, narrow roads made it difficult to return the dead to their families. The corpse-escort legend may preserve a memory of carriers using springy bamboo poles to move bodies.
Göbekli Tepe, Rapa Nui, and Coral Castle sit thousands of years apart and ask one question: how did people move stone weighing dozens of tonnes before cranes existed? The answer hides in drums, calls, and vibration: a worksite control system turned into magic so power could change hands.
Confucius lived from 551 to 479 BCE in the state of Lu during the Spring and Autumn period, served in office, and travelled through many states looking for a ruler who would use his ideas. The popular image of a teacher who only taught ritual and morality hides something important: the elite education he belonged to included archery and chariot driving.
In 1999 the world was rebuilding its data for Y2K while narrowing what could be discussed in public. The rumor says that combination opened a way to bend collective memory without erasing anyone's mind directly.
In 1947, people found clay jars holding leather scrolls in caves at Qumran, beside the Dead Sea. The Aramaic fragments inside showed that an ancient Jewish community copied several works about Enoch, the ancestor who lived 365 years and then "walked with God".
Tui Bei Tu (推背圖) is a Chinese prophecy book usually divided into 60 figures, each with a picture, a few short prophetic lines, and a poem. Tradition credits it to Li Chunfeng (602-670) and Yuan Tiangang during the Tang period; the last figure shows two people pushing each other's backs, which gave the book its name.
In 1307, King Philip IV of France ordered the arrest of many Templar knights on the same day, and Pope Clement V dissolved the order in 1312. Almost five centuries later, the Bavarian Illuminati was also banned, but this article argues that the people, money, and secrets of both societies kept moving into other networks.
The passage does not say what the mark is, that Cain lives forever, or that he drinks blood. What it tells is very concrete: a murderer cast out, shielded by a sevenfold threat, and left alive.
Tesla, Ramanujan, the singers of the Epic of Gesar, and Leonardo da Vinci all left the same kind of trace. An idea reached them already complete, and they turned it into a formula, a machine, a drawing, or a story.
The Vatican Apostolic Archive sits inside Vatican City, a small country surrounded by Rome. Vatican City became a state in 1929; the archive holds papal letters, diplomatic files, trial records, clerical correspondence, maps, administrative registers, and documents from many centuries. Its old English name was commonly translated as the “Vatican Secret Archives.” In that name, “secret” meant something close to private or reserved for the pope, not that every box was a military secret. Qualified scholars may request access to parts of the collection, but they cannot walk through the stacks and open any box they choose.
The phrase "peach blossom spring" names an ideal refuge from war. Follow the fisherman's route step by step and it reads as a crossing into the world of the dead, from which he is released exactly once.
Cangjie is a legendary figure of ancient China, remembered as the record keeper of the Yellow Emperor. He watched the tracks of birds and animals, saw that each species left a different shape, and turned those shapes into writing.
Popular explanations say that Egyptians mummified the dead for religion and that the dry desert kept the bodies from decay, with a full process taking about 70 days. That explanation is only part of the answer, because it skips the harder question: why preserve the body, the heart, the name, the face, and the instructions that let the dead speak, see, and move?
A number can make a room go quiet. In 1901, in Haverhill, Massachusetts, physician Duncan MacDougall placed a dying patient on a bed attached to a sensitive beam scale. He was not weighing flour or a ball. He wanted to know whether what people called the soul left a physical trace.
On 23 September 2010, NIST announced that two aluminum atomic clocks separated by 33 centimetres did not tick at the same rate. The higher clock ran slightly faster. The experiment had nothing to do with Lunar New Year, but it destroys a convenient intuition: time is not a perfectly flat background that behaves identically everywhere and under every condition.
Hong Kong films often show a character seeing through a playing card, so viewers treat the idea as fiction. During the 1980s, millions of people in China practised qigong, breathing exercises and postures that the state promoted as physical training.
The word "vu" names the ritual healers, diviners and intermediaries with the gods in many old societies, and here the "vu clan" means a band of priest-healers holding knowledge ordinary people could not follow. The article follows one reading: that band may have acted directly on the brain to change consciousness and hidden what it knew about the inside of the head in the Eye of Horus.
On April 13, 1953, CIA Director Allen Dulles approved Project MKULTRA to fund research into drugs, interrogation, and behaviour change. Twenty years later, most of the program's files were destroyed, yet the dates 1953, 1963, and 1973 still carry its central charge: the CIA tested ways to interfere with people's minds and erased much of the trail.