Propaganda works.

Posted by Pointman on November 16, 2020 · 7 Comments 

If I’d a penny for every time somebody told me they don’t watch advertising on TV or the net or anywhere else, so it has no influence on them, I’d be a rich man and able to afford a considerably more swanky website than this. The reality is that everybody is influenced by advertising in their purchasing choices, whether they think so or not. If you doubt that, ask yourself why the advertising business globally is worth about $600 Billion and projected to continue rising. It always does. Either that’s an obscene amount of money spent on something that doesn’t work, or it does work very well, thank you very much.

The other great misconception about advertising is how it actually works, and why it’s so successful selling any product. It’s not there to inform you, it’s there to persuade you. Ask yourself, when’s the last time you saw an advert for a car that listed important things like its fuel consumption, safety rating, insurance bracket, top speed, reliability or price compared to similar cars being offered by other manufacturers?  Every car sold from new is aimed directly at a certain profiled segment of the market and advertised accordingly. It doesn’t work on you objectively evaluating the relative merits of a particular car, hence barely any hard metrics about the car in the advertising.

Instead it works on your own self image at almost an unconscious level, and there’ll always be a message which’ll be repeated over and over via every outlet until something similar to a conditioned reflex is established between you buying that particular car and your rationalisations of that choice. It’s exactly the kind of car somebody like you should be driving. If pressed about why, you probably won’t know any of those figures about the car, but you’ll be sure you bought wisely. There’s an interesting and very readable book called The Hidden Persuaders by Vance Packard which goes into this area in more depth. Since it’s out of copyright, you can read or obtain a free soft copy of it on the net.

So, if you can persuade people to make the second most expensive purchase of their life without actually knowing much about it in any detail, you can do exactly the same with an idea or a political viewpoint, and that’s what’s been happening over the renaissance of nationalism and most particularly Donald Trump. The only difference is that hordes of people have been conditioned to hate both nationalism and Trump. Not to dislike, but to hate.

Ask them exactly why they hate him and they’ll tell you it’s obvious because he’s racist, bigoted, sexist, misogynist, stupid or whatever. If you ask for concrete evidence of why he’s all those things and more, the invariable reply is for God’s sake – everybody just knows he is. Persist with the question, and what’s called triggering will occur. They’ll get angry and frustrated because they don’t have a single evidential reason they can come up with for hating him so intensely because they’ve been programmed.

They have an extreme emotional viewpoint they simply can’t justify, but they absolutely know they’re right. Having any rational discussion about politics with a programmed person like that is futile, a total waste of your time. You might as well be explaining about daylight to a boulder in the back of a long and very dark cave.

They’re programmed people, beyond enlightenment. Don’t bother trying.

©Pointman

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Filed under Article · Tagged with Programmed people, Propaganda, Stop the Steal