The manipulation of society - how people are made to believe
Our society is a complex system, people interconnected on multiple
levels of interaction. It has to be somehow dynamic in order to match, reflect
and contribute to progress. In fact, society evolves similar to how living species
do – under environmental pressure. Like a building lying on shifting
foundations, its walls moving along and adjusting their shape to remain intact,
society continuously changes. All of those steps answer internal or external
needs and opportunities. Looking at the West, how is the society evolving? What
its needs, what the opportunities?
The needs can easily be declined in terms of money, power, influence,
supremacy – progress costs, after all. New opportunities to fulfill those needs,
and how the may be exploited, depend on the context. For instance,
technological innovations can provide lots of surprises – like Internet has
been an horizon of the events in respect to communications. We could talk about
many different aspects – in part already have: the expansive market economy and
its misconcepts, democracy
and its limits, media
manipulation and bias, the
innate sense of moral superiority and the arrogance that comes from it. Here, more in general, I will
treat control.
Western society is democratic – people get to vote. Western society
holds personal freedom as a basic right. Does it mean that Western society is
really free? Is not it controlled by any means? Is not it manipulated? It is,
as always society has been – control over people can be a need, too. Panem et circenses is not a recent
invention. Then, how is control exerted over society? How can it be
manipulated?
Let us look at what is done when manipulating people on a smaller scale.
Psychologists studying human behavior in sectary contexts have extensively
described how this works1. Of course, sects use manipulation
techniques in pervasive ways to gain total control over their members’ lives.
However, those manipulations – and the mechanisms behind them – can be employed
effectively even without going to such extremes. We are going to look into some
detail of the four main types of manipulation: the control of behavior,
the control of emotions, the control of thought and the control
of information. We will see how cults use them and how they may be embedded
within our society.
The control of behavior imposes strict routines and
limits freedom of action
In cults. The
control of behavior is straightforward. Your time is not yours anymore, you are
going to be kept very busy, with various activities – some useful and others
not. You can't spend your money as you wish, you can't sleep when you want, spare
time (if any) is limited. Ultimately, you have to interrupt relationships with
relatives and friends who are not members of your cult – they could distract
you from your ‘duties’ or even talk you into leaving. While you are member of
the cult, you are surrounded by other members, you are constantly checked on
and peer pressure ensures that you are going to follow the way of the group. In
general, the goal is to enforce a new routine to destabilize you. This will
leave you with little time to doubt and less energies to resist.
In society. So many of our lives revolve around our jobs, stressful as they may
be. It is complemented by bureaucracy – which, intended to connect citizens to
services, has become frustrating and invasive. We are kept very busy, running
as fast as we can, and most of the time we are not going really anywhere – that
is just routine now, a frenetic one and yet embedded with time wastes.
The control of emotions plays on your feelings to
condition you
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2016/04/19/three-arguments-
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In cults. It
exploits your desires and fears, in particular those focused on acceptation or
rejection from the (cult) community. They prey on you when you are emotionally vulnerable
on your own. The approach is extremely friendly – you feel loved as you join
the cult. Your positive relationship with the group is thus established and
reinforced, and you alienate your other relationships. Then, when the threat of
being cast out of the cult is issued it is for you an emotional shock. It is
used to force compliance. Since only the cult members love you and accept you,
it is morally wrong to doubt the rules and act against them. You are
conditioned to feel ashamed whenever you do not follow the sect’s standards. You
are punished for irrelevant reasons and acknowledged only when you follow the
dogmas – and not always; destabilizing you is good. This builds up different
ways to make you feel sorry about something – you will learn to blame yourself
and it will be used as a weapon against you.
In society. Moral relativism, double standards, widespread political correctness
so vehement that is almost enforced. If we fail to conform to society in those
regards, how are we expected to feel? Right, sorry. We are shamed as racists, fascists, homophobic, sexists and so on. Peer pressure plays
an important part in that. Family, friends, colleagues, all concur to create a
stream that we are supposed to join. Speaking and acting differently from the
majority has its price, including social stigmas. In the end, it is easier to
let our dissonance subside and attune ourselves with the others around us.
The control of thought makes you to stop think
critically
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Slogans. So catchy that you may even
overlook how biased they can be.
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In cults. As sorry as you can be, you still
think those awful thoughts against the cult. They are objective truths, right?
No, wrong. Independent thoughts contrast the ones the sect wants you to have
and the dissonance between them feels uneasy. The stronger mindset will
eventually win – and the cult’s goal here is to build your cultist self to be
very determined and focused. You are conditioned to block ‘wrong’ thoughts by
yourself. Whenever starting to think ‘deviously’, you learn to automatically
switch your mind on something simple and repetitive to interrupt the flux of
your reasoning. You learn and stop to think critically, you just think what you
are taught to. And if you fail to control your thoughts? Then you will feel
very ashamed – you are also conditioned through the control of emotion. You
will be so sorry that you will need to confess your fault. And then you will
have to work even harder to make amend – going all the way up to the control of
behavior.
In society. We live in a world of specialized knowledge that we tend to simplify
on a day-to-day basis. On many complex matters we form opinions by accepting
slogans as true or by perpetuating prejudices. When we are convinced that
something is right, and others around us support that, we tend to reject
alternative – dissonant – ideas. We believe in artificial and over-simplified
half-truths, preferring to be reassured by them instead of raising doubts and
checking facts. In politic, this can lead to judge opponents by black-and-white
morality – shutting off other approaches, including the more practical ones.
By the control of information you can’t think about
what you do not know
In cults. Members are prevented free
access to information, of course. It could lead to critical thinking. So you
are limited in what you can read, which news you may look at, which media you
can use. Even then, information come from everywhere – down to talking with
random people in the streets. Cults will thus make you filter all information –
so that, by virtue of the control of thought, you will discredit by yourself
what is in disaccord with sectary dogmas. Once again, if you fail to reject
information as you are expected to, the control of emotions will kick in.
In society. When not distracting or entertaining you, media are the lenses through
which we perceive reality and receive information. Media are not necessarily
objective – they can be politically biased, for instance – and the information
can thus come distorted. Media can themselves be manipulated into becoming a
voice for the government or business interests instead of a voice for the
public opinion. Information not in line with the mainstream can easily be
labelled as ‘fake news’ and ignored or ridiculed. Independent journalists and keen
observers are still able to discern when this control is heavily enacted – in
fact, works have been redacted to explain how and why it works2,3,4,5.
Our society is manipulated through various means
acting in synergy
Each society is controlled on some levels. At the two extremes lie the
modicum of control to avoid complete anarchy or the obsessive and pervasive
control exerted in dictatorships. Our society, evolving over time, normally
falls somewhere in between. Even in democracy, power can corrupt its wielders –
gradually turning the political system into autocracy. That shift is cyclical
in history, counterbalanced by crisis, reforms or revolutions. When the stream
flows from democracy to autocracy, several issues become apparent: the various
declination of a ‘Deep State’; the influence of business on politic; the reality
of a system born to serve the citizens and now instead serves financial
markets.
The power tends to build on itself and acquire more power – if it
happens fast and unopposed, it leads to a dictatorship; if it is careful and
discreet it nonetheless results in an oligarchy that still presents itself as a
full democracy. In both cases the point is that who reached power will not give
it up easily – to take it was an opportunity,
after all. To defend that conquest, the control of society is the right
strategy as long as there are the time and the right conditions to set it up.
People have to trust the government, as cult members have to trust their leadership. It is not a perfect system, as mistakes can be made. When the four
components of the control do not properly work together, the cracks in the
façade become manifest and people eventually notice the presence of
manipulation. It is happening now: the divergence – the dissonance – between what we are supposed to believe and an
increasingly difficult reality is becoming too wide.
The control of society is not enough anymore – too many people feel that
they are actively manipulated by their own self-referential governments. The strategy is coming apart at the seams. What is next? Ruling through fear?
References
2: Marcello Foa, Gli
stregoni della notizia. Atto secondo. Come si fabbrica informazione al servizio
dei governi, 2018, Guerini e Associati, Milan, Italy.
5: Garland, R. Between mediatisation and politicization:
the changing role and position of Whitehall press officers in the age of
political spin. 2017, Public Relations Inquiry. ISSN 2046-147X. [http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/70667/]
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