THERE are over 100 years of research in psychology that demonstrate that it is possible to control the human mind with information designed to achieve a specific objective. It is quite possible to erase the past, create a false present and manufacture a future.

Presently, in Guyana, a similar circumstance obtains. Guyanese are being inundated with the sound bites, headlines and talking points such as ‘constitutional crisis’, ‘illegal government’, ‘crisis looms after March 21’ and ‘Turmoil after March 21st’. Make no mistake, it is all designed to capture the minds of the populace and dictate perceptions which are cemented from information received. Fake information or fake news being aided by the social media sphere, is currently playing a major role in the process of ginning up non-existent turmoil being used as a ticket for political one-upmanship. It is for this reason there is a disconnect between the cries of the fabricators and the status quo of the society, there is absolutely no congruence with the idea of a crisis and the peaceful ambience that obtains in the country. This is a classic attempt at manufacturing a crisis.

Revolutions and crises are most distasteful when they are fake and engineered. These phenomena are at their cataclysmic best when they are organic and come from the groundswell of genuinely justified dissatisfaction and pure internal contradictions. When the state becomes abusive, when it persecutes its citizens, when basic rights are denied, when dissidents are executed and jailed on trumped up charges, when the secret and rogue police, under the command of the police directorate, commit extrajudicial killings, these circumstances produce organic revolutions.

It is based on these developments, the people forget their fear and march through the streets and real civil society organizations, in an unsolicited manner, are marshalled to effect change. These manifestations represent the presence of a sincere revolutionary circumstance. The sad thing about this is that its fake version can be created or manufactured.

At the opposite end of the spectrum, the fervor of uprisings and upheavals is less or nil in its effect when those outside the halls of power with a desperate wish to control the state apparatus, attempt to engineer or create fake revolutions or fake crises. These grandiose schemes are conspicuous when the following appears: fake news, manufactured crises, screams of doom and gloom, soliciting plastic civil society organizations to issue statements and to protest, passionate appeals to the international community on the basis of non-issues, mustering politically-concocted demonstrations, a glaring disconnect between their rhetoric and the peaceful status quo of the society and making shouting speeches that render the throat to be not at its sonorous best.

This is the process of attempting to stir the population to mobilization where there is absolutely no basis but the pursuit of political power. A crisis is also manufactured through the bullhorn of a political leader who then directs his media influences to do selective reporting, suppress opposing accounts, exaggerate the truth, denial of facts, emotional heart-tugging, visceral appeals to race, whipping up of mass hysteria, fear mongering, guilt-baiting and the creation of a grand false narrative.

In conclusion, what is currently occurring in Sudan, Algeria and Venezuela cannot be faked, it is real as it gets. Disaffection on a grand scale, civic organizations at all level in those societies in one chorus against the incumbent, demonstrations, sporadic violence, diplomats expelled, basic services non-existent, heavy-handed government responses, state televisions on a desperate everyday battle to deny reality and widespread turmoil that cannot be missed. Publicity is the foundation of politics and war and if forces within a society create a grand false narrative that receives maximum attention, it can produce a manufactured crisis. This is an art and some editors and those who control information are extremely versed at it, it can be done.