‘It’s propaganda Jim, but not as we know it.

In 2021, McAfee was found dead in his cell in Barcelona, Spain. His wife is still pressing authorities for the return of his body, almost two years after his alleged suicide.

He founded McAfee Associates in 1987, developing antivirus software. In 1994, McAfee sold the company to Intel for $7.5 billion. He continued to work on a variety of projects involving software but was highly critical of the industry. 

We may find out what happened to him in due course. But in the meantime, what are we to make of this and other videos where he issued warnings about the mainstream media? And what is this neurolinguistic programming (NLP) he refers to?

Some claim NLP is a positive and potentially life-changing technique which can enhance quality of life, bring business success, transform interpersonal relationships, increase self-awareness and empathy and so on. Others dismiss it as pseudoscientific claptrap. 

It is easy to be cynical about NLP, along with other psychology-centred fields such as Applied Behaviour Analysis and Cognitive Behaviour Therapy. We have no expertise in these areas and make no claims for their effectiveness or usefulness. We are more concerned, here, with the claim that any of these psychological techniques are used at all in mainstream media.

McAfee quoted Arthur C. Clarke, but we happened across a quote from another great science-fiction writer, the late Carl Sagan:

‘I have a foreboding of America in my children’s or grandchildren’s time–when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all of the manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; with our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what’s true, we slide almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness.

And when the dumbing down of America is most evident in the slow decay of substantive content in the enormously influential media, the 30-second sound bites now down to 10 seconds or less, lowest-common-denominator programming, credulous presentations on pseudoscience and superstition, but especially a kind of celebration of ignorance.’

― Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark

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Here’s an example of a ten-second soundbite from mainstream ‘news’ in Scotland, yesterday, on Radio Scotland, referring to the destruction of the Nova Kakhovka Dam:  

‘Russia has denied any involvement in the destruction of the dam.’  

This simple unattributed statement manages to put Russia in the frame for the incident whilst avoiding the suggestion that it might possibly have been caused by anyone else. Any listener who then feels sufficiently curious to go online and check for more information finds conflicting statements, the majority of which blame Russia. The Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, unsurprisingly, blames Ukraine. Tucker Carlson, who has just launched a new show hosted on Twitter, also blames Ukraine. An American reporter asks Whitehouse spokesman John Kirby, ‘Does it seem plausible to you that the Russian Federation destroyed the dam, flooding places where Russians live and also cutting off the water supply to Crimea? ….It seems about as logical as blowing up one’s own pipeline, doesn’t it?’ Kirby dismisses the query and claims it’s all being investigated. 

So, the curious listener, searching for a single verifiable source, is plunged into a maelstrom of claims and counterclaims and is forced eventually into retreat, bamboozled, none the wiser. The only verifiable fact appears to be that a big important dam was destroyed and many thousands of ordinary citizens are suffering as a result. 

But does that soundbite on Radio Scotland represent an example of ‘neurolinguistic programming’? Isn’t it just straightforward propaganda? In this instance, is there any difference? 

If it is so difficult for citizens to ascertain solid facts pertaining to a catastrophic event during a war in which the United Kingdom is heavily involved, how much harder is it to be aware of the ways in which abstract nouns such as ‘democracy’ and ‘independence’ are manipulated by those with an awareness of just how powerful language-manipulation can be? 

This is not to say that the language in question originates in the speaker - no-one expects politicians, the most senior of them at any rate, to have perfect knowledge of all policies at all times as well as complete command of all salient facts. They are very busy people who don’t have the time to compose lengthy speeches and statements. Diplomacy demands that important announcements be scripted for them and even when they are meeting one another their ‘discussions’ may be planned in detail: bullet points are carefully chosen; particular words and phrases are repeated according to how appealing they are known to be to the audience. Expert analysts, pollsters and marketing people devise and ‘sell’ policies just as they would any product for a mass market. It is when politicians stray from their scripts that they get into trouble, so that’s why they prefer to stick to them.

‘A Democratic Outrage.’

Lorna Slater and Humza Yousaf are currently using a basic psychological technique called ‘gaslighting’ to avoid taking responsibility for the sudden death of the DRS scheme, the roll-out of which was (just yesterday) postponed until Oct 2025 at the earliest. This has been a leading topic on the news for weeks but has been generating sporadic controversy for the past five years. According to Yousaf and Slater, the collapse of the scheme and loss of an estimated £500 million in private/public investment is the fault of the WM government because it launched ‘an 11th hour attack’ in an act of deliberate sabotage. Yousaf went so far as to call it ‘a democratic outrage’. No doubt then about who was the aggressor in this conflict, if the Scottish Government is to be believed and the mainstream coverage of it has been accurate.

Again, the use of language here is worth noting - if the First Minister’s advisors are confident enough to sanction the deployment of such an inflammatory term then they must be assured that the Scottish electorate will accept it as fair reflection of how they feel about the whole sorry mess. And they may be right. Many citizens (business owners in particular) are very unhappy, not only about the waste of money and the incompetence of individual ministers, but also the reminder that Westminster has the whip hand on all the most important issues. But many of them also object to the use of the term because it is so selectively applied in what appears to be a clear-cut case of political expediency.

It could be argued that more of a ‘democratic outrage’ than insisting upon a unified UK approach to DRS (as is WM’s right under the terms of devolution, like it or not) is the fact that both Yousaf and Slater occupy their current powerful positions as the result of processes which were considered by many to be unsatisfactory - we have ‘representative’ democracy in the UK and Scottish parliaments and neither Slater nor Yousaf was voted into their current position by citizens. It is widely perceived that Yousaf was ‘appointed’ as Sturgeon’s successor and the internal election process was much-criticised, even by the other candidates. Slater’s position is even starker - appointed to her ministerial role as reward for propping up the minority SNP government along with Green Party co-leader Patrick Harvie, she has never won a public vote, in Scotland or anywhere else. 

So the cards we’re presented with this week are: sabotage; democratic outrage; resignation calls; blame; responsibility; wasted millions.

They will change, next week, next month, and there are endless possible combinations of whatever is presented to us. But if we don’t accept that we are being played - constantly - and make at least some effort to work out how it’s being done, by whom, and why? Then no matter how often we scan the selection or call for another shot, the card that we picked, concentrated on and watched like a hawk during the shuffle, will always be the one that is missing.