The book examines the new means of influencing human consciousness and behavior that the information age, along with contemporary political and economic conditions, has placed at the disposal of the elites. Today, oligarchies possess a richer arsenal than ever before for undermining democracy and social values. Most alarming, however, is the fact that their goals now also include the programming of the individual himself—his perceptions, thoughts, desires, values, and emotions. The war against human consciousness, waged by the elites, aims at total control over humanity, achieved through the destruction of individuality, free will, and human essence itself.

This war did not begin yesterday. But today, alongside the political, economic, and coercive methods known from the past, modern tools have been added—tools made available to financial and political elites by the information revolution. These include global databases containing personal information about each of us, as well as computer programs and algorithms that process this data and profile us. Based on an individual’s psychological profile and various sociological patterns extracted from so-called “Big Data” (the vast repositories of information about people and social processes collected by IT giants), personalized information is delivered to individuals online—information capable of influencing their psyche, behavior, and lives. This personalized manipulation is further supported by modern psychology and sociology, which make such influences and suggestions more covert and more effective. These influences are carried out constantly and methodically. They confine human consciousness within a restrictive and degenerative framework of existence, rendering it weak, blurred, and fragmented, so that it remains underdeveloped and incapable of comprehending what is happening. Basic emotions, fears, instincts, and anxieties dominate it; it exists on the lower levels of Maslow’s Pyramid of Needs. People are trained to think, feel, and act according to standardized psychological and behavioral models that serve the goals of social engineering. And this means slavery.

Today, these psychological influences operate across all information channels. They are present on television and radio, on the internet, often in culture and in the social “climate” of the workplace—in short, everywhere there is communication and exchange of information. They may take the form of personalized advertisements and recommendations, internet search results, information sorting and filtering, spam, fake news, psychological techniques in live communication, chats and online forums, and much more.

For now—and likely for the foreseeable future—there is no one to protect the ordinary individual from these invisible psychological attacks. Therefore, the only available means at present remains the sharing of information and the familiarization of the public with the facts and the methods used against them. Because the first step toward solving a problem is recognizing it. Once this step is taken and the issue enters public discourse, both small and large solutions aimed at addressing it will begin to emerge from societal necessity.

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