I was driving down the road the other day, on my way to work, or to the gym, when I saw a bumper sticker that made me laugh. The more I thought about it, the more I realized it was a symptom of a society beaten down by constant propaganda, and the opinion reflected in the bumper sticker was likely the product of a groupthink mentality. An engineered idea produced by mass media messaging meant to keep the thinking of Americans trapped in the confines of acceptable thought and controlled opinions. What made it even more significant is that we saw the same bumper sticker just a few years ago, only from the other side of the political spectrum. What was it? A picture of Trump behind bars with one sentence that loudly shouted, “Lock him up!” If you remember, Trump had everyone convinced that Hillary Clinton was going to be arrested the moment he took office. They had the goods concerning her email scandal, and soon as Trump stepped into the White House, the swamp was going to be drained. Only, that didn’t happen. Instead, Trump thanked her for her service when he was inaugurated, and later stated that he “didn’t want to hurt the Clintons.”
Republican voters, after eight years of Obama, were willing to put all of their faith in Donald Trump as the one man who could save us. Just like Democrat voters were willing to put all of theirs into Joe Biden for the same reason. They are convinced that Republicans are fascists, the same way that we are convinced the Democrats are socialists. The sad truth is that our entire government is working against us, no matter what perceptions they may create to convince us of the contrary. Think about it for a moment. For the past several years, perhaps decades, we have been inundated with constant crises, terror attacks, mass shootings, inflation, and attacks against the very nature of biological reality. Despite the little show that Republicans put on to convince us they are working to preserve liberty, we are on the verge of the Great Reset and a total collapse of the dollar. I don’t see any Republicans calling Klause Schwab into a congressional hearing, or taking any meaningful action against Joe Biden and his pay-to-play scheme. Nope, instead, we get Kevin McCarthy making debt ceiling deals with a guy who is allegedly in bed with the Chinese Communist Party. Whether he is or not is of little consequence, the point I am making is that the public is presented with constant propaganda meant to shape the way we perceive reality. This propaganda is meant to keep our thinking trapped in a place that Joost Meerloo, author of The Rape of the Mind, suggests is meant to keep our worldviews confined to a narrow, totalitarian concept of the world (p. 22). What does that mean? It means that no matter what opinion, or perspective you cling to, propaganda is used to guide your thoughts in a manner that still serves the tyrant’s purpose.
What most Americans fail to realize is that the study of propaganda, and its effectiveness in controlling public thought, has been under the microscope for nearly one hundred years. Furthermore, propaganda, as an academic study, is considered an offshoot of persuasion. The aim of both is to convince a targeted population to accept a point of view it may generally reject. This is important to understand because there are many methods of persuasion that range from simple marketing techniques to public relations campaigns meant to influence the opinions and beliefs of entire political parties or the population of entire countries as a whole. Looking at the state of the nation, and the fact that both Republicans and Democrats continue to cling to their respective parties no matter how corrupted or ineffective they really are, it is safe to say that fear and uncertainty are the primary tools of political persuasion. We have become convinced that we must vote for whatever candidate wins the party nomination because that is the only way we can save our country from the damage wrought by the opposition, or the direction they wish to take us in. It works the same on both sides. Democrats are trapped in their thinking, and Republicans are trapped in theirs.
One thing that researchers know for sure, and have for many years, is the effects that fear and stress have on the human psyche. This goes all the way back to the days of Pavlov. Through his experiments, he was able to determine that men can be reduced to simplistic, reactionary behaviors when placed under a great deal of stress. According to Meerloo, Stalin dictated that all behavioral sciences at the time, be dictated by Pavlov’s findings that man’s behaviors are simplistic and reflexive as opposed to being under his own control. B.F. Skinner, years later, said the same thing in his book on operant conditioning entitled, Beyond Freedom and Dignity. Skinner was instrumental in developing a science of behavior and believed that any study into human beings must be done from the same perspective. That our behavior is not under our control, and that we can be programmed into reflexive behavior patterns.
This belief is echoed In a book entitled Media, Persuasion, and Propaganda, as the authors state what scientists know about cognitive overload. It depletes self-control and makes us easier to manipulate. Contrast this with what Meerloo says on page 19 of The Rape of the Mind. “The human response to fear and crisis is well documented, and it has been proven the mind can be subjected to enslavement and submission through the creation of chaos and uncertainty,” and on page 30 – “keeping people in a state of fear and hopelessness is essential in developing the conditions necessary for people to abandon their own sense of reason, and demonstrate a willingness to comply with tyranny.” Why would this be the case? It has been determined that it isn’t necessarily the fear itself that induces compliance, but the removal of that fear. This is a persuasion technique called fear-then-relief and can be found in the book The Dynamics of Persuasion, on page 464.
“This is somewhat different from other techniques in that the persuader deliberately places the recipient in a state of fear. Suddenly and abruptly, the persuader eliminates the threat, replaces fear with kind words, and asks the recipient to comply with a request. The ensuing relief pushes the persuade to acquiesce.” (Perloff)
This technique is effective because the relief is associated with the following request for compliance. There is a state of mindlessness that exists for a brief moment where people are more susceptible to suggestions after experiencing a great deal of fear and anxiety. Meerloo states that people are more willing to comply when doing so relieves them of this discomfort. If this is indeed a known, predictable trait of human behavior, then America must consider the likelihood that it is the strategy used to keep us going along with a game that seems to go nowhere. The media is definitely overloading our senses with one crisis after the other. As noted earlier, this makes us all easier to manipulate. Despite the fact that no one has yet been able to set this country on the right course, we continue to vote for whatever candidate tells us what we want to hear. Despite all of Trump’s rhetoric of draining the swamp and locking up Clinton, (and I am not picking on the man here, only using the example because my audience is assumed to be Republican) the Democrats did a pretty good job of turning his supporters into terrorists and dragging him into court for charges that his voters would assume, are bogus. Are they? I don’t know. What about Biden’s? I don’t know that either. What I do know is that there have been decades of study into the susceptibility of the human mind to media messaging. I know that every four years Americans on the right and left rally behind their favorite candidates while giving them unquestioning support despite the fact that they never turn out to be who they say they are. To go back to an earlier example, Trump had everyone convinced he was going to arrest Hillary Clinton. He said it right to her face on the debate stage. After winning he thanked her for her service to the country. The truth is that it doesn’t matter who we vote for. The Republican-Democrat dialectic is a perfect example of what Meerloo meant when he said that the purpose of propaganda is to keep our worldviews confined to a narrow, totalitarian concept of the world. The fear-then-relief technique, theoretically speaking, is being used to keep both sides clinging to the hopes that our phony election system is going to save us from the other side’s boogeyman. The perception of catastrophic damage and total chaos is useful in getting the other side to accept changes they may have otherwise rejected, no matter how incremental. This is something they know about us, and our behavior. Sadly, America’s illiteracy rate is so high from dumbed-down, government-controlled education, and misplaced faith in the media, there is little chance of the masses turning off their televisions and studying any of this for themselves.
