Cybernetics and Dissent by Servando Gonzalez Copyright © 2011. All rights reserved. MIT mathematician Norbert Wiener defined cybernetics as the science of control and communication in the animal and the machine.[1] He coined the word cybernetics after the Greek term kybernetes, the steering mechanism used to control ships. According to Wiener, communication systems can be either open-ended or closed. In an open ended communication system the sender of the information has no way to know how the intended target is receiving the message, or if it is receiving it at all. Given the fact that information tends to get distorted on its way from sender to receiver, open ended communication systems are highly unreliable. Communication theory shows that one of the ways to minimize distortion in the transmission of a message through an open-ended communication system is by using redundancy. A typical example of this is the announcer of a radio ad repeating two or three times a phone number the listener needs to call to in order to order a product. A extreme, and pedestrian, form of message redundancy is a new fad of ads appearing in the web where the message consists in an animation of text and a voice repeating exactly the same words. Apparently, these annoying ads are designed for the blind or the illiterate. But, despite all efforts, redundancy is not the best tool to avoid the loss of accuracy in the message on its way from sender to receiver. That is why, instead of open-ended, we favor using closed communication systems, which include a communication loop in which the receiver feeds back information to the sender in order to verify that the information he had received is correct. Cybernetics is the science that studies closed communication systems. Though the discovery of the existence of close communication cybernetic systems is relatively new, their existence is very old. Actually, the human body itself is a cybernetic system whose very existence is based on multple systems of close communication loops. A common example of this happens when you drive a car. When you drive, the most important sense feeding back information to you is your vision. If you see the car slightly drifting to right of the lane you are following, then you slightly move the steering wheel in the opposite direction. In other words, through the steering wheel you feed back into the system (composed of you and the car) information that opposes the direction the car is drifting to. This type of feedback that keeps the car right where it is supposed to be, is called negative feedback. On the contrary, applying positive feedback, that is, moving he steering wheel in the direction the car is drifting will send you farther out of your lane and most likely will cause an accident. Wiener called this type of self-correcting systems based on the principle of negative feed back cybernetic mechanisms. Cybernetic mechanisms are much more reliable than open ended ones — think about the thermostat controlling your air conditioner and the valve that replenishes the water in your toilet tank. Traditional mass media have always been considered open-ended communication systems. Though some feed-back from the receivers of the information is accepted — letters to the editor, callers to talk-radio shows, opinion polls — this is very limited and is carefully filtered by the senders of the information in order to keep the discussion under the limits they think are advisable. In the same fashion, democratic political systems, where citizens can freely express their critical opinions (negative feedback) about their government are more reliable (sustainable?) than autocratic, dictatorial or totalitarian ones that only allow the people to praise the government and its leaders (positive feedback). We have a common name for these citizens who provide negative feedback for their governments: we call them dissidents. It was only after I had lived more than twenty years in the United States that I realized a fact about American politics I totally ignored: most Americans love, help and promote dissidents ... abroad,[2] but they don’t like American dissidents. Through government agencies such as the State Department, the U.S. Information Agency,[3] the CIA and others, the U.S. government devotes and inordinate amount of time and resources promoting dissidence abroad. This effort is mostly focused on countries whose politics the Wall Street bankers who control the U.S. government don’t like. Of course, being a much more perfect dictatorship than the Soviet Union, North Korea or Cuba,[4] some measure of pseudo negative feedback is tolerated: to some extent you can openly criticize the Republican or Democratic administration the CFR conspirators have placed in Washington D.C. But dissident views of key historical events such as the Pearl Harbor attack, the assassination of President Kennedy, the killing of the Branch Davidians in Waco, or the 9/11 events — just to mention a few of the most notorious ones — are not welcomed. Moreover, criticism directed to the true source of power and evil — the Council of Foreign Relations, the Trilateral Commission, the UN, the Bilderbergers — is a no-no. Both anti-dissidents of the Right and the Left have coined a term to discredit this type of dissidents: they call them “conspiracy theorists.” Every four years American citizens are allowed to provide pseudo negative feedback in the form of selecting, through highly controlled or outright fraudulent elections, the puppets the CFR conspirators have already selected — it seems that Obama’s substitute was already tapped at one of the Bilderberg conciliabula. However, when a true dissenting candidate appears, who threatens to overturn the conspirators’ rotten apple cart, all the censorship and disinformation machinery is put into action against him. This is why Ron Paul has been given the same invisible-man treatment as Solzhenitsyn. The widespread use of the Internet has provided American dissidents with the right tool to provide negative feedback. As such, the Internet has become the most powerful tool to maintain America in its right course as a democratic Republic, no wonder the enemies of freedom, on both the Right and the Left, fear and hate the Internet. As some dissident blogger has observed, “The global plutocracy is terrified with dissent.”[5] Negative feedback in the form of dissenting opinions is an important way to keep a democratic republic alive, and the Founding Fathers, many years before Norbert Wiener, intuitively knew it. That is why freedom of speech is an inalienable right recognized in the First Amendment to the Constitution. Unfortunately, the enemies of freedom are legion, and they are working tirelessly in the shadows to eliminate this human right. How can we fight the enemies of freedom? A sure way is by using our right to freedom of speech and accepting the freedom of speech of others, particularly the ones whose ideas we don’t agree with. Providing negative feedback in the form of views and opinions that strongly dissent from the official or accepted views and opinions is not only our right, but also our duty as citizens of this Republic. ------------------- Notes: [1] Norbert Wiener, Cybernetics: or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine. 2nd ed. (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1961). [2] After many years of promoting Soviet Nobel Prize writer and dissident Alexandr Solzhenitsyn, in 1975 the U.S. government allowed him emigrate to the U.S. Once in the Land of the Free, he was invited to speak to the Congress (which is not the House of the Brave). Solzhenitzyn, a man not interested in politics, but in ethics and moral principles, made the mistake of criticizing the CFR-controlled U.S. foreign policy. Big mistake. You can be a dissident in Soviet Russia, but not in America. After that faux pas, Solzhenitzyn became an invisible man to the American media. [3] RT (Russia Today), an incisive critic of the U.S. foreign policies, has become a thorn in the CFR’s side, to the point that some American politicians have passed from strongly criticizing it to mentioning the possibility of curtailing RT’s use of freedom of the press in America. Apparently it has never crossed the minds of RT’s critics that RT is the Russian version of the Voice of America and Radio Free Europe. It seems that the conspirators and their puppets in power don’t like the taste of their own medicine. See. , “controversies and Criticisms of RT,” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Controversies_and_criticisms_of_RT. [4] In an upcoming article I’ll explain my thesis that America is fastly becoming a totalitarian dictatorship. [5] "The Global Plutocracy Is Terrified of Dissent. In Some Places, The War On Dissent Is Being Fought With Bullets. In Others, The War On Dissent Targets Social Media And Mobile Communications", Washington’s Blog, August 16, 2011 http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2011/08/global-plutocracy-is-terrified-of.html. --------------- Servando Gonzalez is a Cuban-born American writer, semiologist and intelligence analyst. He has written books, essays and articles on Latin American history, intelligence, espionage, and semiotics. Servando is the author of Historia herética de la revolución fidelista, The Secret Fidel Castro, The Nuclear Deception and La madre de todas las conspiraciones, all available at Amazon.com. He also hosted the documentaries Treason in America: The Council on Foreign Relations and Partners in Treason: The CFR-CIA-Castro Connection, produced by Xzault Media Group of San Leandro, California, both available at the author's site at http://www.servandogonzalez.org. His latest book, Psychological Warfare and the New World Order: The Secret War Against the American People just appeared and is available at Amazon.com. Or download a .pdf copy of the book you can read on your computer or i-Pad. Servando's new book, OBAMANIA: The New Puppet and His Masters, is already available at Amazon.com.