Governments have been in the brainwashing business for decades. The majority of parents send their children to government schools. What do they think their children are going to learn besides reading, writing, and arithmetic (if they even learn these)? They’re going to learn how to learn to love the State.

It reminds me of the film Dr. Strangelove, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964). In terms of government education, it’s How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the State.

In 1995, Eric Holder said the following to theWomen’s National Democratic Club:

“One thing that I think is clear with young people and with adults as well, is that we just have to be repetitive about this. It’s not enough to simply have a catchy ad on a Monday and then only do it every Monday.  We need to do this every day of the week and just really brainwash people into thinking about guns in a vastly different way.”

Brainwashing is designed to teach falsehoods, to get someone to throw away logic, experience, and observable facts and to adopt an irrational worldview. The facts are on the side of private gun ownership. There are two ways to change this: (1) brainwash people in re-education centers (government schools) to get them to believe otherwise and (2) use force when brainwashing doesn’t work. It doesn’t hurt to have a government-supporting media on your side to propagate the State-sponsored brainwashing.

Cults have become experts in brainwashing techniques. The goal “involves the systematic breakdown of a person’s sense of self.” The new self is found in the collective – the State-defined group. Think of Jonestown. Nearly 1000 people willingly laid down their lives because they had been brainwashed by Jim Jones.

In nearly every government school across the nation students are fed a steady diet of group-think, anti-free market propaganda, and pro-government messages. Government education is said to be “free.” When high school graduates go off to college, they are told that the government will make low-interest loans available to them, keep them subsidized on their parents’ healthcare insurance policy until they’re 26-years old, and possibly forgive their loans if they can’t pay. Who made all this possible? The Government.

The goal is to promote dependency so that it’s hard to say no to the Cult of the State:

“Cults demand absolute, unquestioning devotion, loyalty and submission. A cult member’s sense of self is systematically destroyed. Ultimately, feelings of worthlessness and ‘evil’ become associated with independence and critical thinking, and feelings of warmth and love become associated with unquestioning submission.”

This is exactly what our government wants – complete and unquestioning devotion to the State. The State becomes the substitute parent.

The philosophy of Georg F. W. Hegel (1770-1831), followed by Marxists, Fascists, Nazis, and the modern State in America expresses this view “with chilling consistency: ‘The Universal is to be found in the State. . . . The State is the Divine Idea as it exists on earth. . . . We must therefore worship the State as the manifestation of the Divine on earth. . . . [T]he State is the march of God through the world.’”

After compiling these statements from Hegel’s works, Karl Popper comments that Hegel’s views mandate the “absolute moral authority of the state, which overrules all personal morality, all conscience.”1

1. Karl R. Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies: The High Tide of Prophecy: Hegel, Marx, and the Aftermath, 2 vols. 5th rev. ed. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, [1966] 1971), 2:31. [↩]