➡ The text discusses the concept of ‘Authoritarian Sociopathy’ and how questioning the legitimacy of authority can lead to self-doubt in those in power. It also highlights the importance of laughing at tyrants as a way to undermine their perceived legitimacy. The text further explores the psychological manipulation technique of ‘gaslighting’, where someone is made to question their own reality. It suggests that understanding and addressing one’s own insecurities can help protect against such manipulation.

➡ Be careful about sharing personal information online as it can attract harmful individuals who manipulate others for their own gain, a process known as gaslighting. If you suspect you’re being manipulated, listen to third-party interventions and cut off contact with the manipulator. It’s also important to understand that everyone is susceptible to smartphone addiction, and it’s crucial to take control of our use of technology. We should use technology as a tool, not let it control us, and taking regular breaks from technology can help achieve this balance.

➡ Dr. Larry Rosen suggests a method to control device usage: set an alarm for 15 minutes, turn off all notifications, and only check them when the alarm rings. Gradually increase this time as you get comfortable. Inform others about this practice to avoid misunderstandings. The article also discusses the Bystander Effect and the power of following, emphasizing that movements start when the first person follows a leader, encouraging others to do the same.

➡ OpenSourceducation Online offers a free, flexible curriculum covering various subjects like psychology, history, literature, economics, and politics. The psychology course explores how psychology has been used for manipulation and control, but also how it can be used to improve our lives and help others. The course includes lessons on psychological experiments, resisting illegitimate authority, the impact of technology on the brain, and more. You can also support the platform by purchasing downloadable versions of the courses.

➡ This text encourages you to learn about the world and not be afraid of it. It suggests that through learning, you can understand and resist manipulation, and even help others do the same. The text ends with an invitation to join a class on these topics.

Welcome back, friends. Welcome back to another edition of the Corbett Report. I’m your host, James Corbett of CorbettReport.com coming to you as always from the sunny climes of Western Japan here in September of 2025 with another edition of Solutions Watch. And this week on the D program, we are going to be talking about escaping the madhouse. And hopefully you understand what I am referencing there. If not, well, it sounds like you need to see my latest documentary. It is called Descent into Madness. It is available right now completely for free in audio, video and hyperlinked transcript form@corbettreport.com madness and I hope you will go there and familiarize yourself with that material.

I am gratified to note that the feedback on that documentary has been overwhelmingly positive. And I hope that people can appreciate how much work goes into a documentary like that. In fact, that one was too years in the making. No joke. It took two years from, from conception to completion. And a lot of that has to do with the incredible video editing that video editor extraordinaire Brock west did on that production. So I hope people will give their hats off and their thanks to Brock for his incredible video editing on that and also to the man literally behind the scenes, my assistant Sean, who helped with the production of the music.

At least most of the music in that documentary is original music and Sean was helping with that. So those are some of the technical things that went into it. But I’m particularly gratified that one of the things that people seemingly picked up on with regards to that documentary and the feedback that I’m receiving on it is that people appreciated the fact that it was ultimately solutions oriented. And that ultimately leaves on something of a positive and a realistically positive note that there are things that we can do. Rather than simply being manipulated by the psychopathic manipulators who are attempting to use psychological insights to manipulate society, we can actually do things on our side to fight back against that or better yet, to create the world we want to live in.

And I’m glad that people picked up on that and that that did land in the mark that I was intending it to because obviously I’d like to think that all of my work is ultimately solutions focused rather than dwelling on the oh no, poor us, they them, those are manipulating us. The real question is what we can do about it. And here is something that you can do about it. If you’re interested in arming yourself against the pathocrats who seek to manipulate society, you can arm yourself with knowledge, psychological knowledge about how we are manipulated by and how we can defend ourselves against such manipulations.

How we can even use psychological insights to improve our own life. Are you interested in that knowledge? Good, then I have some knowledge to dispense to you. And if you did watch Descent into Madness all the way to the end you and past the credits you will notice that of course I was talking at the very end about Open SourceEducation Online, which has been around for a couple years now, but I don’t talk about it enough. It is a website that has taken a lot of my work and contextualized it in the form of an educational curriculum in history, literature, economics, etc.

And I have just added a new course on psychology. So if you go to OpenSourceEducation online right now, you can scroll down and click through all of the courses in the open source education curriculum, but the default one at the moment is the psychology course. And there you will see not only the introduction video that I that I will be playing for you later, but also you will see the links to all of the lessons in this course. And of course the lessons are just various pieces that I have done over the years, podcasts and articles etc.

On the subject of psychology. And I would like to think that this course is oriented towards the solution sides of things. Yes, of course it does talk about the manipulations of the manipulators, but I like to think that more importantly it talks about various things that we can do, insights that we can use in order to improve our own lives, make a better world, make a non psychopathic world for real humans to live in. Wouldn’t that be good? So having said that, I would like to give you a taste today of some of the insights from some of those lessons that are in the course.

Let me state once again up front, I hope everyone understands this. The open source education online curriculum is 100%, 100% totally, completely free. And you can freely click through and look at all of those lessons to your heart’s content. And you don’t have to pay anything or sign up for anything or give any information whatsoever. It is all just there as an educational resource. I hope you will use it as such and if you find it useful, perhaps you can spread the word to other people who you think might benefit from that information. Having said that, if you want all of those lessons in a download that you can then take offline and take with you in the event of the online apocalypse or whatever it is coming, then you can go to newworldnextweek.com and purchase the download.

And of course that does help support the work. So I appreciate if you would do that. Having said that, I want to take a look at some of the specific insights that you can garner from these lessons today because I think there are a lot of solutions contained in this curriculum. And we’re going to start by taking a look at a conversation that I conducted many years ago with Davy Barker, who is, amongst other things, an author and specifically the author of a book called Authoritarian Sociopathy. And this book that he has written is not only a compendium, sort of an overview of various psychological studies that have been conducted about authoritarianism and people’s obedience to authority, etc.

Not just the ones that we’ve all heard of or the ones that I covered in Descent into Madness, the Milgram experiment, etc. But other experiments besides ones that are, you may not not be familiar with, but you probably should be because they reveal interesting things about the people’s psyche and how they can be manipulated. Well, we discussed a number of those in this conversation and I think they’re all interesting and insightful. But in one particular experiment that we discuss in that conversation that is covered in Davy Barker’s book, there is an experiment that reveals even more something very fundamental about the way that obedience to authority functions and the incredibly simple but incredibly powerful insight for how to break the spell of the authoritarians.

It’s actually much easier than you might think. All you have to do is think it. And that might be the rub. So what on earth am I talking about? Let’s listen to a bit of that conversation with where Davy Barker is explaining about this experiment and what it shows. But the result is staggering for me. When I read this, I was amazed because what they did in their final experiment was they separated the power group into two categories. And these are self, these are people self identifying, I’m in the power group, people self identifying, I’m in the subordinate group.

And then they said to the people that self identified as powerful people, tell me an example of a time in your life you were in a position of power and it was legitimate. And then tell, then another group says, tell me a story about a time in your life when you were in a position of power that you felt was illegitimate. Right. So these are people self selected as the power group, but talking about a time that their power was illegitimate. And they have the opposite reaction of the rest of the power group. They become self critical and tolerant of others, while the legitimate power group is tolerant of themselves and Takes leniency and breaks rules, but is draconian toward others.

And so to me, that’s like the first scientific study I’ve ever seen that confirms the hypothesis. It’s all about the sense of legitimacy. Right, Elaborate on that. Why is that important? Because it’s in their head too. It’s their sense of legitimacy is a social phenomenon. It’s based on the people they interact with in their lives and whether they confirm that sense of legitimacy by social means. Right. We do this all the time with each other, where we confirm each other’s behaviors and attitudes and Amen or whatever the expression is like truth, brother. And if you undermine a person in power sense of legitimacy, then they become self critical.

And these social phenomenon, like, it’s almost like a silver bullet. It’s like, it’s like if you could expand on this and, and I don’t know how to effectively. I think one of the, the interesting phrases that comes out of this, the researchers dubbed it hypercracy, hypocrisy. So hypocrisy is when you are more critical because you believe your power to be illegitimate. So you’re actually more critical of yourself, which is you’re watching yourself. It’s the delegitimization of the supposed legitimate authority is the, in a sense, the silver bullet that we’re looking for here. Because it actually makes the people who are in those positions question themselves even harder than the average person would.

And if you look at the world that way, then the entire election process becomes this dance. It’s like a rain dance for legitimacy to rain down from the ballot box. That’s literally what it is. It’s this ritual that this particular crop of primates has come up with to invest authority and whatever crown or throne they’ve come up with, the people have spoken. It’s the will of the people that I’m here. And because of that, people are mentally enslaved in their minds. This is the most dangerous superstition that Larkin Rose talks about. This is what it boils down to and it’s there it is in an experiment form.

And again, you know, whatever people make of the self reporting aspects and of all of this, at any rate, there is something there. And this goes back to what I’ve talked about many times with laughing at tyrants and other things like this, just laughing at the stupidity of it is actually something productive, is something positive that we can do that actually dismantles their perceived legitimacy. So I think it’s an important aspect. The other thing I’m saying is if this is one study where this had these dramatically significant results, wouldn’t you want to go and repeat all of the other studies and see, does illegitimate power have a reversing effect on lying? Does it have a reversing effect on empathy? There was an element of that to the Milgram experiment because they conducted that experiment as people might know, they conducted many times in many different iterations.

And some of them were conducted on campus with the, you know, the white lab coats and everything, you know, and others were conducted in kind of seedy office buildings downtown in a detached from the academic setting. And people were more likely just to say no when it was in that setting rather than in the prestigious hallowed halls of academia. So again, it’s the idea, is this legitimate power that’s giving me these instructions or is it illegitimate? And that’s so much of what this comes back down to. Yeah. That is the author, Davy Barker, talking about his book Authoritarian Sociopathy in the lesson on Authoritarian Sociopathy in the Open Source Education Curriculum on psychology.

Would you like to know more about that specific experiment that we were discussing and its conclusions? Would you like to know more about the context of that conversation and including Davy Barker’s own proposal for an experiment which will more, more thoroughly and more to the point, get to the underlying point of these types of studies and really examine the extent to which people’s compliance with authority is based on their belief in the legitimacy of that authority. If you are interested, I will wholeheartedly suggest that you follow the link, go again to OpenSourceducation online and, and you will find that lesson in the psychology curriculum.

And you will again, you can watch it and listen to it and even read the transcript for that interview completely for free@corbettreport.com I hope you will do so. I think there’s a lot of very interesting insights in there. And as. As we go on to talk about in that conversation, it’s an insight that I’ve made before. Laughing at tyrants. It sounds like a simple thing. It sounds like a trivial way of combating this societal manipulation that we’re under. But actually it’s profoundly important to delegitimize and to make silly these buffoons in the minds of the public.

That truly does have an effect. And you can find out more about that in that lesson. But I’ll leave that there for now. Let’s move on to another one of the lessons in the psychology curriculum at OpenSourceducation Online, specifically the lesson on Gaslight, as in the 1940 film version of Gaslight, which was also a play. It was also developed into a Hollywood movie later on, but we’re talking about the 1940 UK film version, which is available for free online if you’re interested. And back several years ago, I talked to author and researcher Thomas Sheridan about that movie and the very profound psychological insights that it gives us into a one of the key and core manipulation tactics and techniques of the psychopath gaslighting.

Now, at the time that we had this conversation over a decade ago, that word had not quite entered the popular lexicon. Over the past several years it has certainly entered the lexicon and more people talk about gaslighting, but it is obviously a method of psychological manipulation and it obviously applies to the societal manipulation that we are under by a media that tells you, for example, that you are absolutely crazy for believing your own lying eyes instead of what the media is telling you. Etc. Etc. Those are examples of gaslighting that take place every day to pretty much everyone in the public who is exposed to the media, to politicians, to the pronouncements of various authority figures.

And for those who don’t know, gaslighting at its base is simply a manipulation tactic, but whereby somebody tries to convince somebody else that they are going crazy by telling them that they are misremembering something, they misplaced something you. Oh, you didn’t do that. You did this. Oh, you. I think you’re. I think you’re going a bit crazy. You don’t. You’re losing grip with reality. You need me to tell you what reality is. That is the gaslighting technique. And as I say, I think its applications to the societal context of manipulation should be obvious to those in my audience.

But this lesson on gaslighting with Thomas Sheridan goes into a lot of very specific detail about the. About the film and the insights that it provides, but also more specifically on the technique of gaslighting itself, how it is employed and most importantly, how it can be defended against. And so let’s take just a short listen to a clip from that extended lesson in which I ask Thomas Sheridan, is there a defense against gaslighting? Well, defence does exist. It absolutely does. Now this is really interesting stuff, so let’s get back to the film. Again, the film is not only a well told and well acted story, I think it’s a masterpiece of film War British 1940s filmoire.

You see, people watch this film, I hope they will spend time to actually look at how it’s lit. It’s very telling. Whenever the woman in question is about to Be gaslighted. There’s very intense, strong shadows projected on the wall behind her through the studio lighting. This is to indicate it may be on a Jungian term. It may be actually archetypal or could even be synchronistic. This is a very telling aspect of why she’s being gaslighted. She is not dealing with her shadow. I’m talking about the shadow in the Jungian sense. She has obviously issues in her life which she has not worked on, which has allowed the psychopath to get in.

In her case, she’s probably too dependent. Again, I don’t want to give too much the story away. This is key, and this is crucial to help defend yourself from psychopathic attacks. In fact, I recently picked up a book written by Dion Fortune, who was an occultist, that was around the same time that movie was made. And she wrote a book called Psychic self defense. And it’s so funny that the prescription that she gives for defending herself against psychic attack is exactly the same as what I say when dealing with psychopaths. No contact ever again. Now, it’s important that you understand that you can’t always do this because usually you’re already in the clutches of the psychopath.

Before you realize you’re being gaslighted. However, you can take preliminary precautionary steps to make sure that a psychopathic individual doesn’t gaslight you. And one of these things is to develop a relationship with your own shadow. I’m talking about the repressed and negative aspects of one’s own psyche so the psychopath doesn’t actually find them. For instance, if you have any insecurities, the psychopath will dive on them and play on them. If you’re sexually insecure, the psychopath will play on that and make it sound like. Make you feel like you’re some kind of a sex God or sex goddess.

If you’re insecure about your looks, the same thing. They’ll tell you how beautiful you are. If you’re insecure about your intellect, you, exact same thing. You must deal with your shadows, your insecurities, and your repressed aspects of your psyche. It’s so important because the psychopath. In my second book, Defeat the demons, I have a phenomenal quote by a psychopath who I interviewed at the beginning of the book. And he said to me, I can tell somebody who hasn’t been loved as a child walking down the street, they give off a certain body language. These people will actually.

These psychopathic individuals will spot that the same way a shark can smell the blood of a Bleeding victim, a seal or a fish a mile away. They have this incredible predatory sense. If they see there’s a missing aspect in your psyche which you haven’t worked on, they will jump in there. And it can also be very superficial things as well. If you need validation for something in terms of you may think you’re some kind of light worker, you’re some kind of angel or something like that, they will validate that enough to get you under their psychological entrapment.

That’s the first thing. We live in an age, thanks to Big Brother, Facebook and all this other social media and all this other people putting their heart out on TV shows like Jerry Springer, Oprah and even these X Factor shows, that people are too quick to pour their personalities out there. There’s no self restraint. Psychopaths in the media deliberately done this because they want to know what makes society as a whole tick. Just like what makes an individual who’s about to be targeted by a psychopath tick. So the first thing is to be very guarded of your own behavior.

Do not put your heart on your sleeve. Do not go on social networks and talk about your insecurities and failings. You will only be setting off little target signs for these psychopaths to move in on. Only develop intense understandings of people you’ve known for a very long time. You must do the shadow work. This is why people in the New age movement, sorry folks, if you’re listening, but all you light workers, you are going to be savaged because you’re not dealing with the shadow that’s an integral part of every single human being. Now if you are in contact with a psychopathic individual and they’re in your life on the gaslighting, you probably won’t realize it until you’re in the psychiatric clinic.

It’s usually just like in the movie Gaslighting, an intervention by a third party who’s noticing that your behavior is being manipulated in a pathological way by another party, usually the person you’re in a relationship with. Or it could be your mother, it could be a bully at work. And they will intervene on this. And often the person who’s been gaslighted will say things like, hold on a second, that’s not being done to me. It’s really, that’s how, that’s how terrifying it is. You won’t know until it’s too far down the chain. They’re literally rewiring your neurology.

They really are. That’s what’s actually happening. And they’re making what you’ll notice even in the film Gas Line, there’s a sense of relief every so often where she’s given a sense of relief. This is a dopamine rush which happens in the prefrontal cortex. And the target constantly seeks that dopamine fix. So they will do anything the psychopath tells them. So that’s. You must, first of all, do not make yourself a target by putting all your insecurities out there for the world to see, because a psychopath will dive in on them. And secondly, if you have been targeted and someone intervenes, listen to what that third party is saying to you.

The psychopath will try to turn around and say the other side is actually gaslighting you. This is what cults do. Cult leaders, when somebody comes in, like a family member or friend tries to explain to the cult members, look, this is what’s being done to you. The cult leader turns that around and tries to make out that the cult or the group, the family, is being attacked by this person who’s actually trying to help. So listen to what other people say. And finally, if he does dawn on you that you are being gaslighted, do what Dionne Fortune says in her book Psychic Self Defense.

She says the most common forms of psychic attack is that in which proceeds from the ignorant and malignant mind of a fellow human being. In other words, when you, when you see it in a normal person, understand that this is a malignant human being. This is not a normal human being. You must have no contact ever again. Completely cut all contact off with them. And then your neurology, your psychology, and even your neurochemical responses will start to return back to normal. And more importantly, do not be ashamed that this was done to you. Once again, that is author and researcher Thomas Sheridan dispensing some interesting and informative insights into the phenomenon of gaslighting and how people can protect themselves against would be gaslighters, or completely detach themselves from the would be gaslighters, if possible.

Again, some interesting insights and only just scratching the surface of that detailed conversation, in which, of course, we do start addressing the political effects of gaslighting on the societal scale and the things that people can do to mitigate those effects as well. So I would commend that lesson to your attention. But let’s move on. There’s still plenty more and we’re only going to scratch the surface of these lessons today. But I, I think it’s important to take a look. We’ve looked at some very big and broad phenomenon. Let’s look at A very specific problem that I know.

Nobody in the Corbett report audience has this problem, or at least according to the the type of feedback that generally gets left in the comment section. This doesn’t affect anyone in the corporate report comments, of course, but it absolutely affects people that, you know, I’m talking about smartphone addiction, of course. You know, when you go outside, everyone is buried in their phone at all times to the point where some people are walking around, walking into objects, they are so preoccupied with what is on their screen. We all know about this phenomenon and although no one will admit to it, it does affect everyone.

Everyone who is watching this on a screen right now, you are. You are buried in a screen, in case you hadn’t noticed. So it is an important problem and it is event genuinely real concern, a growing concern, obviously, how do we control our devices so that they do not control us? And that was the subject of a conversation that I had with a clinical researcher as psychological researcher slash professor emeritus Dr. Larry Rosen, several years ago, actually, in the wake of the Pokemon Go phenomenon, when that was first coming to light and first starting its craze, and you started to see these zombified people running around chasing pokeballs or whatever it is that people do in that game.

I don’t know. But it was in the wake of that phenomenon that Larry Rosen wrote an article about smartphone addiction and the way it was playing out in society. And I had a conversation with him about that. So this lesson explores that question of smartphone addiction in particular, or device addiction in general. And I asked, in the course of that Lesson, I asked Dr. Rosen to talk about whether it is possible and if so, how do we take control back of our devices so that they do not control us? Well, that’s, I think, the important thing right now.

I think the technology is controlling us and I think we have to look at ourselves and admit that. And once you’ve admitted technology’s taking control of your life, then the issue is how do you then take back control? And I do want to say that we didn’t get here quickly. This is not something that happened overnight. This is something that happens slowly over a period of years, maybe even decades. I mean, if you think about communication, for example, when in the old days, and I mean old days when I was growing up, you got a phone call and the phone rang and rang and rang and meant nobody was home.

So you called back. Then maybe people got an answer machine and you left an answer. But the assumption was, is that if you left a message that they would answer it. Maybe when they got home at night, or maybe the next morning or the next afternoon or whatever, all of a sudden now you could call in for your messages on the phone, and people had expectations that you should answer it a little more quickly. And then you got email and ding, you got mail. And now the expectation was you were going to answer very quickly. And then you got text messages, and then you got.

And what we’ve seen is it’s spiraled out of control such that we literally now feel that we must respond immediately to any message on any modality. And I can tell you how difficult it is to not do that. And I can give you an exercise to try. Put your phone to the side, and the next time your phone beeps, don’t look at it, don’t touch it, don’t go near it, and wait for five minutes. That five minutes will seem like a decade, because we don’t know how to do that anymore. So one of the solutions is, since we didn’t get here quickly, let’s not expect to bow out quickly, let’s expect to back out slowly.

And I don’t want you to back out from technology completely because quite honestly, I love technology. It’s wonderful, has great things to offer. I just don’t want you driven by the technology. I want you to drive it yourself. So one of the ways is something that’s very simple. I call it a technology break or a tech break. And what you do is imagine the typical person who has. I’m sitting in front of my laptop and my phone’s right next to me. So I’m a typical person. What I would do is say, okay, I have one minute to check any websites on my screen, any websites on my phone, then shut down the websites on my screen.

Which means I would have to shut down my email, I’d have to shut down my Facebook, any website that would give you notifications. So I’d have to shut them all down, basically, because I have web, I have Twitter, I have Facebook, I have email, I have all these that constantly ping me during the day. So shut them all down. Don’t minimize them. Because if you minimize them, they’re sitting there looking at you and reminding you and alerting you without alerting you. Take your phone, turn it on silent, set an alarm for 15 minutes, turn it upside down, but put it right in front of your face.

The reason you put it in front of your face is it acts as a stimulus to your brain that. That says, don’t worry, you’ll get to me in however Many minutes I set it for. I recommend that since our research shows that people check in about every 15 minutes, that you start by setting it for 15 minutes. Let’s make it simple. When the alarm goes off, you give yourself one minute, you check everything again, close everything down again. Fifteen minutes on, off, on, off. Once you get to the point where 15 minutes is easy, and you know, by the way, it’s easy because the alarm will go off and you’ll go, wait, I’m still in the middle of something.

I need to keep writing or I need to keep reading or I need to keep doing this email before I check. Once you get to that point, 20 minutes, maybe 25, maybe 30. I think if most people can get to 30 and have a minute to check in at the beginning, 30 minutes of focus, attention time, a minute to check in, 30 minutes of focus. But you’re doing great and it works. And what it does is it basically eases you back off slowly. The one caveat is you have to tell everybody else in your universe that you’re doing this because if you don’t, you’re going to start getting very angry texts.

Are you mad at me? I texted you two minutes ago and you didn’t respond. I liked your thing on Facebook and you didn’t comment. What’s wrong? Are you okay? So you get these comments because people have gotten used to you being Pavlov’s dog. And so you have to back off and you have to let everybody know you’re backing off. Once Again, that was Dr. Larry Rosen talking about practical advice for controlling your devices so they do not control you. There was more information in that lesson generally, so I will once again commend the lesson to your attention.

Let’s continue to roll on. There is more. There are more insights into psychology to be gained from these lessons at the open source education curriculum on psychology, including a very important, I think, presentation from Solutions Watch called the Bystander Effect. I recently reposted that to my recently revivified gootube channel. So you may have seen it in the recent past, but if not, I strongly suggest that you take a look at that presentation. It is highly relevant to the subject of psychological manipulation and more importantly, solutions to those manipulations. Specifically in the context of the Bystander Effect, as in the ways that people respond specifically in emergency situations, is, I think, where this ultimately comes from, this insight, but I think more generally to situations generally, people will follow other people’s leads in various ways.

And it’s shown time and time again as I stressed in Descent into Madness. One of the key insights about the Milgram experiments, not the Milgram experiment, the Milgram experiments is that when it was run in such a way that people could see a model of disobedience, they were more likely to disobey themselves, disobey the authority figures themselves. Similarly, as I talk about in this Bystander Effect episode of Solutions Watch, that also holds true, for example, in the Asch conformity experiment where you can see people who, when every other person in the room is saying that, oh, the, you know, line B is shorter than line A or whatever flagrant unreality they are expected to say, then that person too, even though they know it to be wrong, will be more likely to say that answer.

But if there is another, even one other person in the group who admits the blatant reality that line B is shorter than line A or whatever it is, then that person, that real person in the experiment, will be more likely to stick to the truth as well. So again, people follow models, and especially in crisis and emergency situations, they will follow what other people are doing. If everyone else is ignoring something, they will ignore it, and if somebody else responds, they will be more likely to respond. How can we use that insight in various ways? Well, I present several ideas and examples and specific things that you can do in that episode, and I’ve already received some feedback from someone who saw that recent repost of that Solutions Watch and said that it affected a specific incident that he was involved in the very next day, and he consciously was thinking about that edition of Solutions Watch and ultimately ended up helping to form a group to actually respond to an emergency incident.

I will have more to say about that specific feedback in my Solutions Watch year in review at the end of the year that I do every year. But anyway, it is, it is an important thing that that people pay attention to this information. So I, I really do suggest the entire lesson. I think it is an important lesson. But let’s just take a look at the very, very end of the lesson where I play the leadership lesson from Dancing man video, which you may have seen before, but I think it is a perfect and wonderful, totally immediately, visually intuitively understandable presentation of this phenomenon and how with a little bit of thinking, we could apply this in our everyday lives to form greater movements of people doing things, hopefully more productive than simply dancing.

But this is an example that you can see happening in real time. I think it’s a wonderful example. So keep this in your info arsenal to show to other people. But here, let’s take a look at this clip from the Bystander effect lesson from the psychology curriculum. If you’ve learned a lot about leadership and making a movement, then let’s watch a movement happen. Start to Finish in under 3 minutes and dissect some lessons first. Of course, a leader needs the guts to stand alone and look ridiculous. But what he’s doing is so simple, it’s almost instructional.

This is key. You must be easy to follow. Now here comes the first follower with a crucial role. He publicly shows everyone else how to follow. Notice how the leader embraces him as an equal. So it’s not about the leader anymore. It’s about them. Plural. Notice how he’s calling to his friends to join in. See, it takes guts to be a first follower. You stand out and you brave ridicule yourself. Being a first follower is underappreciated form of leadership. The first follower transforms a lone nut into a leader. If the leader is the flint, the first follower is the spark that really makes the fire.

Now here’s the second follower. This is a turning point. It’s proof the first has done well. Now it’s not a lone nut and it’s not two nuts. Three is a crowd. And a crowd is news. A movement must be public. Make sure outside see more than just the leader. Everyone needs to see the followers, because new followers emulate followers, not the leader. Now here come two more people. Then three more immediately. Now we’ve got momentum. This is the tipping point. And now we have a movement. As more people jump in, it’s no longer risky. If they were on the fence before, there’s no reason not to join in now.

They won’t stand out, they won’t be ridiculed, and they will be part of the in crowd. If they hurry. And over the next minute, you’ll see the rest who prefer to stay part of the crowd because eventually they’d be ridiculed for not joining. And ladies and gentlemen, that is how a movement is made. So let’s recap what we’ve learned. If you are a version of the shirtless dancing guy all alone, remember the importance of nurturing your first few followers as equals. Making everything clearly about the movement. Not you. Be public. Be easy to follow. But the biggest lesson here.

Did you catch it? Leadership is over. Glorified. Yes, it started with the shirtless guy, and he’ll get all the credit. But you saw what really happened. It was the first following that transformed a lone nut into a leader. There’s no movement without the first follower. See, we’re told that we all need to be leaders, but that would be really ineffective. The best way to make a movement, if you really care, is to courageously follow and show others how to follow. When you find a lone nut doing something great, have the guts to be the first person to stand up and join in.

Once again, that was a clip from the lesson on the Bystander effect that is included as part of the open Source education online curriculum on psychology. And I could go on and on and on, but I think we’ll leave it there for today. I just wanted to bring this to your attention. If you are interested in psychological manipulation, but more importantly what you can do to defend yourself against such manipulation, or how you can employ psychological tactics to actually start your own movement or etc. Etc. To actually create a better world, then I think you will be interested in and benefit from this curriculum.

And as I say, it is 100% totally freely available at open sourceducation online. No sign up. You don’t have to give an email address or anything. You can just start clicking through the various lessons in the psychology curriculum in particular or of course in any of the other curricula there, the history, the literature, economics, politics, etc. There is a lot of information there and hopefully contextualized in a way that will make it handy for you. And as part of that I have recorded an introduction to each course just to run through the various lessons that are in the course so that you know what this is.

Now as I will stress once again for those who don’t know, OpenSourceducation Online is an online open source education, but it is not a it is not an accredited institution certainly and it is not a set course of study where you have to study this lesson and this lesson and this lesson. There will be a test at the end. Nothing of that sort. It is completely a free dip in and dip out as you wish sort of course. So please take it in that spirit and anything that you are interested in that you want to know more about, well I hope you will dive deeper into it there at Open sourceducation Online and if and when you are interested in supporting this work, but also receiving that download so that you can actually download the entire curriculum, all of the courses in whatever format they come in.

Some of these are video lessons, some of them are audio, some of them are articles. You can get purchase such a download@newworldnextweek.com where you can purchase of course the psychology curriculum, but you can also once you add that to the cart you can add another one, the history one, or the literature one, or the. And if you add all of the open source education curricula to the cart@newworldnextweek.com you will automatically get a discount. You get the sixth course for free after when you purchase all six. The sixth one is free, so use that discount. If you are at all interested in getting this entire education course, download all of the courses.

Having said that, please explore this at your own leisure, in your own manner. It is a resource. I hope that it is useful not only to you but but hopefully to other people. People who may be put off by some weird conspiracy journalist, whatever. Who’s this guy? In the context of hey, this is an education curriculum and you can learn more from real professors and researchers and authors. And this James Corbett guy, what does he know? And there’s hyperlinked transcripts from much of this material and you can really deep dive into it and genuinely learn more about the world.

I think it’s a win win and I think it’s a good tool for helping to unlock the minds of others. Having said that, I will leave you today just with the introduction to the open source education curriculum on psychology so that you know more about the other lessons that are in this course. That’s right. We only touched on a few of them here today, but there are several more lessons that are included in this curriculum so you can find out more about them in this introductory video. That’s going to do it for today. But I. I hope that this is a valuable resource for those of you out there who are interested in learning more about how we can actively use psychological insights to create a better world.

I hope you’re on board for that task and if so, I invite you to join me@open sourceducation online. That’s going to do it for today. Thank you for your time and your attention. Welcome to the open source education course on psychology. I’m James Corbett of OpenSourceducation Online. So what exactly is sanity and who gets to decide who is sane and who is insane? What if being happy and well adjusted to a sick world is itself a form of sickness? Are there ways to hack the human brain and if so, who would be interested in doing that? And are there ways to turn the tricks and mind hacks of the would be controllers of society around and use them to free people’s minds instead of.

These aren’t rhetorical questions, they’re real questions with real answers. And it’s my sincere hope that by the end of this course, you will have answers to those questions and many more. In the following set of lessons, we’re going to examine how psychology and psychiatry have been used as weapons of oppression in the hands of authoritarians. But we’re also going to examine the ways we can use the insights gained from psychological experiments to enrich our lives, improve our conditions and help those around us. If you are ready for that exploration, you’re invited to jump right in the deep end with Descent into Madness.

The first lesson in this course. In this extensive feature length documentary presentation, you’ll learn how psychology has been wielded as a bludgeon to pathologize political dissent and how the political psychopaths who run our society have constructed a pathocracy as the ultimate projection of their own twisted mentality. But more importantly, you’ll learn how we can use certain key psychological insights to begin dismantling these systems of control. Next, researcher, author and artist Thomas Sheridan will join us for an exploration of Gaslight, the 20th century stage play turned movie that gave a name to one of the most important techniques of psychological manipulation of our era.

In this lesson, you’ll learn what gaslighting is, how it is used by politicians and propagandists to manipulate public opinion, and how to protect yourself against it. After that, we’ll hear from author Davy Barker about his book on authoritarian sociopathy. We’ll study the key psychological experiments of the last century and discover what they can teach us about the human psyche. Learn how these insights have been weaponized by those seeking to exploit our weaknesses, and see how we can use these insights to spread the message of freedom. In our next lesson, we’ll receive a lesson from dissident clinical psychologist Dr.

Bruce Levine on resisting illegitimate authority. In this lesson, we’ll hear from Dr. Levine about the nature of authority, why anti authoritarianism has historically been pathologized by psychologists, and learn tips and tricks for how to effectively resist illegitimate authority. Next, we’ll dive into a two part deep dive on the most important battleground in the brain. In the first article in this lesson, your brain is the next battle space. You will learn how researchers have ruthlessly targeted their experimental victims, often in wildly unethical ways, to learn more about the brain and how the insights gained from that research have been used by military experts to begin their information war in the premier battle space of the 21st century, the cognitive domain.

And the second article of this lesson, the battle for your brain is already underway. Will teach us the cutting edge technologies, from neural dust to neuromicrobial agents to neurograin skin patches that are already being developed to win this literal war for your brain. And we will study the organizations and researchers who who are working on these creepy devices. In our next lesson, you are being gamed. You will learn how the research of B.F. skinner was deployed by video game designers to create ever more addictive Skinner boxes. And you’ll discover how the would be social engineers are using these techniques to gamify society and manipulate the behavior of the masses.

In our penultimate lesson, we’ll hear from a practicing research psychologist on a problem of growing smartphone addiction. In Larry Rosen gives practical advice on controlling your smartphone. We’ll learn how to take back control of our lives from the devices that increasingly distract us. Finally, in the bystander effect, we’ll study a well known but underappreciated psychological phenomenon that causes people to become passive and disengaged during crises. And how we can use some simple but effective techniques to rouse those around us from their stupor, activate and empower the crowd, and get more of our friends and neighbors motivated to take action and engage in problem solving.

Make no mistake, the subject of psychology, and more specifically how psychology can be weaponized against the masses, is a dark one. There are many uncomfortable facts about humanity that that must be confronted squarely if we want to gain a greater understanding of the world around us. But I hope you’ll find that once you’ve worked your way through these lessons, you will not be left in a position of fear, but equipped with the insight to see through the techniques of psychological manipulation wielded by the tyrants and empowered with the knowledge to begin freeing the minds of those around you who have yet to learn about these subjects.

Are you ready? Great. See you in class.
[tr:tra].

See more of The Corbett Report on their Public Channel and the MPN The Corbett Report channel.