Don’t think about a hot pink basketball.

. . . .

Well?

You’ve played that game. You always lose. Unless you really really focus on something else. You can’t force your mind into a vacuum. You can’t force yourself to not think about something, because in the act of thinking about not thinking about it, you are thinking about it. The only thing you can do is to direct your mind elsewhere.

It’s worse when the thing you don’t want to think about is unusual.  Like a pink basketball.  Your brain gets hooked by the novelty.

Now imagine your job is to stop people thinking about pink basketballs.  You can lie; you can gaslight or flip the narrative; muddle makes whatever is muddled harder to think about.  You can make the existence of pink basketballs controversial; controversy tires people out so they avoid thinking about it.  You can attack people for thinking about it; people shy away from thinking about things that could get them in trouble.

But the most effective of all would be distraction.  Bury the person in images and discussions of brightly colored unusual objects of all kinds and never refer to pink basketballs except in the vaguest of terms.

In our global system, not all is as it seems to be.  Not all is well.  Every now and then, information comes out that seems to show the uglier reality behind the appearances.  The information seems important.

Would it not be convenient if there were some actors who continually hit us with important-sounding information from all over?  Murder, flood, wars and rumors of wars, scandal, now now now.  Mix it in with a little gaslighting, controversy, and mobbing, and you would be in business.  Wouldn’t it be convenient?

From here.

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