Discernment can save us from the psychological influence machine

From Chapter 3 of The Dao de Jing Laozi's Book of Life, Translated by J.H. Huang:

“Prize not the talented to make people not compete.

Treasure not rare valuables to make people not become thieves.

Expose not the desirable to make people not become unruly.

The governance of sages will therefore empty their hearts, fill their bellies, soften their wills, strengthen their bones – and will always lead to a dearth of shrewdness and desires in their people.

Make them understand restraint and to exert not, that is all.

No one will thereby be ungovernable.”

The current world event stream appears to be challenging humanity with an ever-accelerating cycle of geopolitical, domestic, state and local selections for humans to direct their attention. This mass distraction – a flood of things to pay attention to, can overwhelm humans’ ability to own our thoughts, feelings, and emotions. Therapists are seeing many more patients presenting as fraught with confusion, despair, fear, anxiety, depression, anger – the whole spectrum of human emotional range, endorsing a common concern as the cause. They openly state that stress from "world events" or "what <insert politician> is doing to the country," "what <insert entity> is doing in our neighborhoods," "what our world is becoming," or some version of one of these as a presenting concern in therapy sessions.

Part of the issue we are seeing in the event stream today is a phenomenon that social psychologists often label as a "flooding" of people's capacity to process what they are experiencing. Broadcast and social media feed this phenomenon by amplifying the most outrageous and shocking content, served up in one's hand or on their television, 24/7. Those same entities then systematically track what content is consumed, rank behavioral choices, and tune the algorithms behind their delivery to “improve engagement,” in effect delivering more stuff to the consumer. It is a vicious cycle that plays upon human emotion and spoon-feeds the consumer a steady cycle of outrage, emotional turmoil, and manipulation for impact.

This is not a new formula -- far from it. Since the beginning of the news business, publishers, editors, writers, reporters, producers, anchors, all have stalked audiences and molded news coverage to amplify audience engagement with content. The more eyeballs that engage with content, the more advertising money that came in to keep the media machine running. In the 2000s, ad targeting and social media algorithms gamified the information delivery experience into an interactive experience, turning everyone's smartphone-embedded hand into a dopamine manipulation platform.

As a young journalism student at the Iowa State University Greenlee School of Journalism, one of the tenets I learned about regarding broadcast news in particular was the mantra “if it bleeds it leads." This was in the days of fierce local TV news competition in every market in the country. The random isolated news incident became amplified by the coverage of it, in the name of the presenting station being "the news leader" of that news market. Newspapers had a similar dynamic, of course, but the volume of daily print contained a broader mix of subject matter, including news, weather, sports, community news, opinion, official notices, comics, etc., when compared to broadcast news. Magazines offered either deeper analysis than a newspaper article, or were fluffier with many more photos and lifestyle oriented content.

When interning at KCCI-TV8, the local Des Moines CBS/CNN affiliate, I ended up learning the cutthroat local TV news business the hard way. Rather than doing hard news reporting and getting paid for it, having my printed words read by half of the state of Iowa in The Des Moines Register; instead I was slogging video cable behind a microwave truck, setting up tripods at live shots, and getting bullied every day by that one up-and-coming, egotistical, downright mean news anchor whom I couldn't get away from no matter how hard I tried. I learned that the broadcast news business is driven by egos, ratings, advertising sales, and reporters climbing the next step on the ladder to a bigger market, rather than necessarily doing good journalism.

This is not to say there were not good journalists doing hard news. Quite the opposite. Iowa at the time was the epicenter of quality political coverage, as the home turf of the Iowa Caucuses, the official beginning point of U.S. Presidential contests. Iowa was where candidates and campaigns got their first critical retail politics shakedown, in barns, union halls, community centers, nursing homes, VFWs, anywhere a gathering of voters could assemble. Local news reporters were generally pretty politically savvy, regardless of whether they worked in print or broadcast. Plenty of Presidential candidates didn’t make it through the gauntlet of local reporter’s sharp questioning, even with the national press pool in tow.

When it came to local and statewide political chops, some of the better political analysts, pollsters, and strategists in the country came from Iowa or earned their stripes there. People like The Des Moines Register’s David Yepsen, the Associated Press’s Mike Glover, Radio Iowa’s O. Kay Henderson each held gatekeeper positions within the Iowa political news corps at the time, their reputations based on hard poltical news coverage, fair but tough questioning. In the case of Yepsen and Henderson, they each hosted the quintessentially-balanced Iowa Press program on Iowa Public Television, a show which has been on the air for 50 years – parallel to NBC’s Meet The Press. Iowa’s J. Anne Selzer, the legendary political pollster, has called Iowa political races since the mid 1980s; and is often referred to as the most accurate and influential pollster in America. David Ploeff and JoDee Winterhof, each among the most influential and successful strategists in the U.S. today, are Iowa natives, having run statewide campaigns in the state well before their rise to national prominence.

Despite this proximity, I didn't stay working in news for long, at least not that time. Instead I started working in the field for a political party, then in the stat legislature, then on a U.S. Senate campaign; all inside the political operating space instead of covering it. Those experiences led me to working in Washington, D.C., at the Democratic National Committee, which totally I hated. As lovely as a city DC can be, working at the DNC was just another shiny thing. I soon became distracted by the internet boom at the time, and took turns working in both the political space and the internet consulting space, each with moderate success, but short of the level that matched my ambition.

Not coincidentally this period also was the beginning of the commoditization of individual viewers, psychometric message testing, focus groups, customized advertising, and yes, the decompensation and recombination of news as we knew it at the time. As it turned out, my experiences in newsrooms and campaigns were about to come back and serve a purpose.

Fast forward a few years and I started writing again. This time, however, I had been schooled. The world had kicked me around a bit. I had experienced a lot of really hard things, and was continuing to experience hard things. I had done some hard partying and toyed with psychedelics as a gateway to experiencing a higher source energy that I wasn’t sure but “might be God or something.” I had long fallen out of the closet and started writing for some small regional gay community news outlets. I did some freelance writing for The Huffington Post’s Off The Bus citizen’s journalism project, and then went on some local radio shows to say what I thought was my truth. I even worked on other people’s platforms to try to help them get their messages out.

All the while I was quietly developing an emerging skill that I was deeply afraid to discuss openly with others. That skill was an instinctual awareness often referred to as “discernment.”

My understanding of discernment over the past decade has evolved massively compared to my understanding of it in my early 20s and 30s. Since 2016 my journey transitioned me from a fairly self-absorbed materially-oriented person involved in professional political work to a scorched-earth humbled person engaged in a full rebuild of my human identity. Going to addiction treatment and attending regular psychotherapy was just the first step in a long process of self-discovery. Along the way I discovered the power of structured trauma-oriented outpatient mental health therapy, mindfulness-based interventions, twelve-step recovery, and self-realization spirituality practices. Throughout the process I tried a lot of different ways of rediscovering the spiritual side of my being -- sitting, meditating, contemplating, chanting, breathing, doing yoga, more sitting, more meditating, more contemplating. Voraciously I consumed every possible spirituality and self-help book I could get my hands on to figure out how to grow this superpower that all of us have called discernment.

Discernment, as I experience it, is a higher awareness powered by the inner being’s channel to a spiritual source energy frequency. Often referred to by laypersons as the “sixth sense,” discernment is when instinct, awareness, and choice are informed by a higher source energy to power an ability to process material and non-material information at a level beyond mere informed understanding, crossing into deep feeling and filtering of that information. When fully developed, one may use the power of discernment to separate fact from fiction, truth from lies, authenticity from inauthenticity, material from immaterial, light from dark, revealing the full spectrum of shades of color, and all frequencies of energy. It is every human being’s internal “bullshit meter” and so much more.

Enlightened masters often characterize discernment as an ability to sense all things all at once without confusion, in full clarity, purely from the interpretation of energy signals gleaned from a being’s full awareness, without a cloud of pretense, bias, or ego involved. Obviously this is a very steep hill to climb for any human being, right? Well not exactly. Many beings are born into this reality with full discernment awareness intact, but may not have the language and experiences to communicate the interpretation of what they are experiencing. Children often express presentations of discernment in its most basic form—being able to see hidden entities, feel energy, and speak unbridled unfiltered truth. Recent neuropsychology research describes how some children are able to communicate telepathically, or cross between planes of reality using their minds. This is particularly evident in the brains of neurodivergent children. Over time, programmatic overlays of compulsory education, social construction, religion, class, race, and cultural brainwashing dull these senses. The systems of our modern world teach children to dull themselves down and hide their abilities, that it is not safe to develop or even display their gifts for fear of judgement and retribution from those who would seek to squelch them. The result of the halted development cycle means some children forget their inherent superpowers, only to have them reawaken later in adulthood.

The double-edged sword of the rapid expansion of technology across the surface of the Earth has meant people are more connected and able to share information more rapidly than ever using the Internet-enabled smartphone. Unfortunately that same technology has hijacked many peoples’ ability to practice discernment. The hypnotizing influence of a 5-inch slab of glass hijacks our limbic and dopamine reward systems, dulls our ability to continue working within a frame of practiced and well-developed discernment. With the advent of algorithmic social media influence layered upon it, many individuals have replaced discernment with whatever content the machine tells them to consume. Their brain gets switched off, their ability to choose suspended. This factor alone has caused billions of humans around the globe to virtually halt the development of their original internal bullshit meter, that of discernment.

What we see now in 2026 is a battle between beings who are working hard to reestablish, maintain and amplify the use of discernment to manage an experience playing on the giant chessboard we are inhabiting. If we zoom out to ask ourselves the question of what in fact is this game we are playing in so-called reality, many would answer that we are not quite sure. However, those whom have been continuously developing their skills for discernment might, in quiet spaces, with hushed voices, humbly admit that they feel something is very off with the version of reality that we all are experiencing right now.

One may peer through the looking glass of the current global event stream to identify areas where the population’s discernment may be permanently altered. Propaganda, once primarily a domain of authoritarian governments, intelligence agencies, and subversive influence campaigns, in the current reality is a continuous influence project aimed at every human being alive on the planet. Movies, television, radio, newspapers, magazines, social media, social communication, advertising, phones, texts, product placement, video games; each contain individualized, commoditized, algorithmically manipulated elements of larger influence campaigns to sway perception and trigger action. The rise of social media platforms in particular exacerbated the problem, acting like all-you-can-eat influence salad bars where the consumer’s brain is the aggregated main course serving a broad cadre of potential manipulators. Humans aren’t the customers. In this venue humans are the products.

The formula is no longer a single media impression causing a consumer to take an end action, like sipping a bottle of sugary soda or lathering up a bar of soap. Influence strategy today is psychological programming, directing a barrage of coordinated virtual touch points towards a serialized target, attaching digital identification markers to individual humans, driving psychological and physiological behavioral modification trigger actions to affect a possible desired scenario. The process is graduated, executed in phases, measured in stages, events, actions, and reactions. When executed correctly, the psychological influence process is infinite, with target engagement periods lasting from the human’s birth to their death. The manipulation never ends.

Governments, companies, brands, political movements, military and intelligence agencies, not-for-profits, religious movements; each of them leverage influence campaigns at some level in order to move the needle on agendas. Each considers the targeting of human beings as necessary in order to affect the actions they need to happen for their influence program to be successful, and in order for the influencing entity to survive through continued capitalization. There is an existentialist us vs. them bent to the targeting, with the human race being viewed as cattle being led to the slaughter on the altar of consumerism, tribalism, division, and colonial conquering. As long as an influencer can keep the human in play, they can charge someone money to pay for it.

The way it succeeds is through the disablement of human’s ability to discern when they are being manipulated. Ask yourself how many times you watched content on YouTube, Tiktok, Instagram, SnapChat, or another hosting platform, and then appears an ad or product placement seemingly related to an offline conversation you had with a friend about a particular subject? If you are like me, it has happened more often recently. Perhaps it now happens to you so often that you barely notice it is happening. So many perhaps that you begin to not even consciously realize it is occurring in real-time. Instead you realize it days later, after it rises from your subconscious. Maybe it never rises into your conscious thought, it stays buried in your subconscious thought, until you make a purchase.

You may or may not realize at first that that your mobile phone, tablet, computer, smart television, digitally connected radio, the stores you shop in, all track you continuously. They do this through IP address, RFID tag, advertising ID, username, GPS, facial recognition, biometric verification, financial instrument, license plate reader, traffic camera, network ID, across an infinite mesh of network traffic. They use artificial intelligence to collate this data and collect it into passive databases, which then are analyzed by another AI agent for patterns, markers, actions, reactions, transactions, behaviors. It happens 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year, forever.

The effect, then, on your perception of your environment is that something you were casually talking about with a friend—the basic elements of a personal 1:1 conversation, are dissected, commoditized, and simultaneously weaponized to alter your environmental presentation so subtly that you don’t even notice it. Through a series of coordinated behavioral influence actions and your subconscious reactions, your embedded psychological defenses against manipulation are switched off. Your brain becomes a sitting duck in an open pond. You are no longer the consumer choosing to take an action. Rather, you are converted to being simply a puppet playing a role that someone else has written a script for you to perform.

As sentient beings gifted with inherent psychological, physiological, and metaphysical factors enabling our overall presence, humans have built-in tools to defend ourselves against damaging and disabling our energy fields. For thousands of years, perhaps millennia, humans have practiced forms of systematic enhancement of these built-in tools, such that measurement of skill levels in particular use of these gifts is possible. These processes of enhancement include meditation, yoga, martial arts, sleep, nutrition, exercise, balancing of the chakras, reading texts of spiritual and metaphysical content, all geared towards amplification and enhancement of presence awareness and discernment. Connecting with higher source energy through presence and contemplative practice is a key method we can use to develop these skills and tools. Another is to develop the discernment skill by focusing awareness on attempted manipulation, recognizing it, and then choosing to dissect the manipulation to understand the attempted intrusion into the psyche. It is with this intention that this piece is offered. You have a choice to opt-out of the manipulation by going through a detox of content, engaging in a privatization process (i.e. self-erasure), and becoming essentially anonymous and without ego. This is a difficult endeavor.

The often-quoted 20th-century pop spirituality speaker, author, and teacher Alan Watts, discusses in thousands of hours of recorded lectures a process of “giving nothing meaning” as a way of combatting manipulation and developing deeper discernment. Radical at the time, Watts promoted dropping out and giving up attachments of meaning we as humans seemingly obsessively make in everyday life situations. Watts’ overall schema for releasing attachment involved turning toward meditation and making conscious and unconscious efforts at disconnecting emotion from the external actions and reactions we experience. Various forms of radical release and radical acceptance, practiced for thousands of years by spiritual students in Buddhist, Daoist, Stoic, Gnostic, Gaelic, and Indigenous traditions; encourage students to sit with discomfort, sit with pain, practice active and passive detachment, recognize universal source energy, engage in loving kindness meditations, and in parallel strive to remove all meaning from everything. For millennia, spiritual and philosophical scholars presented in texts and verbal teachings methods of practice for this form of detachment. Seemingly all of them involve removing attachments to meaning from what we experience in our environment as one of the keys to ascendance and enlightenment to a level above and beyond manipulation. If one chooses continuously to actively and passively decline to participate in the roles and processes that would enable influence over our perceptions, decisions, disabling reactions in favor of enabling measured presence responses – the one short-circuits the attempted influence.

When we look at the global event stream discussed herein through the lens of choosing not to participate in the outrage machine that is causing us to make bad decisions, it becomes obvious that we can, in fact, choose to disconnect its power over us. In the case of turmoil in the Middle East and Ukraine, exacerbated by events caused by dubious political actors here in the United States, a very simple way of short circuiting manipulation by those political actors and their enablers in the media, is to refuse to participate in the drama. For it is the drama that is causing us mass anxiety, mass depression, mass trauma. We can choose “turning inward to tend our internal gardens,” feed our own souls, refuse to engage in the externalized tribalism that is the hallmark of current influence manipulation campaigns.

Those who would criticize this suggestion of detachment from reacting to the global event stream perhaps may have a vested interest in keeping us engaged in it. Rather than allowing the universe to do its work and not participate, they encourage us to emotionally invest in the crisis, insisting that our future, our very existence, is at stake if we do not fight for our rights to change the external world. The sage would counter that suggestion of fighting, noting that in doing so we are actually handing our discernment over to the elitist powers pulling the strings to enslave us. These elitist powers use psychological action levers of the event stream to enslave us in emotional reactivity. If we don’t “hand the master the whip” there is nothing useful with which to manipulate us.

If we as a species are to survive the current period it is critical that we engage in a ground-level process of returning to source, developing our higher metaphysical senses and skills, and begin disengagement from the current system of mass psychosis. This requires we disconnect from the influence and manipulation campaign. Once we do so, we then must begin to recognize and analyze the myriad of ways that external actors subtly engage in mass manipulation tactics and strategies. Once we begin dissecting the influence and manipulation through meditative release of the psychosis’ grip on us we then are able to evolve above and beyond the current system. The collective impact of weakening the system’s influence on us one individual at a time, compounded through awareness of each other whom have detached, teaching others to do the same, sabotages the whole mass manipulation and control system that keeps us enslaved.

If we want to break out of the Matrix we have to stop believing in it, stop participating in it, stop giving it power. We can choose to attach zero meaning to it, choose to focus on training ourselves, choose preserving and nurturing our souls, reconnecting with other souls. The end result is a corruption of the influence system, and a collapse of that evil machine. The seed that emerges from that collapse will be a new existence where empathy, compassion, awareness, and loving kindness can grow, freed of the influence machine, free of monetary control, free of oppression. This is where true consciousness awareness expands and takes over as Earth’s primary operational framework.

** Scott Foval is the founder of IYKYK News, an independent news and commentary website. He practices as a pre-licensed psychotherapist, licensed alcohol and drug counselor, author, speaker, and life transformation coach. Inquiries may be sent to IYKYKNewsroom@proton.me.**

Copyright © 2026 Scott Foval / IYKYK News. All U.S. and international rights reserved. Content may not be redistributed without written permission from the author.