PSYOP – Psychological Operation. An operation meant to manage the ideas, emotions, and behaviors of the opposition. (Taillard, Psychology and Modern Warfare)
People tend to develop a version of reality based on the daily information their brains take in. We use our senses to collect data; from that data, we develop ideas and beliefs about the world around us. For instance, very few people reading this would argue that conservatives and liberals view reality from the same perspective. Liberals, for example, believe that Donald Trump is a fascist and a bigoted womanizer who needs to be defeated at all costs. Conservatives, on the other hand, hold the perception that he is the only one in the country who can save us from the communist left. These views are formed, largely because of the information people expose themselves to. Both sides stay glued to media sources that feed them messages that reflect and reinforce these views, solidifying the impression that the data they are taking in represents reality. While many people on both sides are seemingly aware of the manipulative nature of the news media, few are willing to look at the possibility that they are just as susceptible to propaganda as anyone else. According to the book, Political Persuasion and Attitude Change, educated people are more likely to expose themselves to mass media while being more receptive to the message. People pride themselves on their intelligence; therefore, they believe they are “staying informed” by watching news media that reflects their beliefs. Unfortunately, this makes them more susceptible to manipulation. Decades of study have gone into understanding the effects of media messaging. According to the book, Psychology and Modern Warfare: Idea Management in Conflict and Competition, ideas and beliefs are easily manageable by controlling the environment. How do you control the environment? By controlling the messages people expose themselves to. This is the nature of psychological warfare.
“Through mere management of the environment in which people operate, one can acquire control over the ideas that those people have, changing the manner in which they act and react to various circumstances as a result of what they know that they know.” (Taillard, 1982)
Taillard writes on page 11, that every aspect of a person’s life can be controlled by manipulating the messages they receive every day. As noted earlier, our beliefs and attitudes are largely shaped by the information we expose ourselves to. Effective propaganda works by educating the intended audience with information the propagandists want that audience to believe (Taillard, 1982, p. 13). This usually aligns with some objective facts already accepted as truth by the targeted audience. Once a message source is viewed as credible, it becomes easier to alter and guide people’s beliefs by pushing that message in more extreme directions because it is already aligned with their preconceived ideas. Both conservatives and liberals, for example, are convinced that their views represent reality because the media they expose themselves to reflects their beliefs right back to them. For example, liberals believe that Trump is a fascist not because of any objective information that they have that proves it, but because the idea was planted in their head and it stuck. The liberal media keeps reinforcing this idea and as a result, it became an objective truth. The same could be said about conservatives’ belief that he is our nation’s only hope as well. This could be explained through a persuasion technique known as fear-then-relief. The thought of a Clinton presidency after eight years of Obama was a terrifying prospect. Trump’s victory, and the ensuing relief, ensured that people would follow along. The more the narrative reflects this perceived truth, that Trump’s victory saved the nation, the more he became an iconic figure, and anything he did was accepted without question. According to Taillard (p.13), this technique eventually blinds people to what he calls “the questionable logic and unproven assertions” behind it all. It is very easy to see this in action as the beliefs about Donald Trump on both sides of the aisle are quite ridiculous. He isn’t a fascist any more than he is a pro-gun patriot. The way the media frames the messages for their intended audience, however, the more these preconceived ideas become solidified as reality.
B.F Skinner also alluded to the effectiveness of propaganda in his book, Science and Human Behavior. Skinner was a pioneer in advancing behavioral science. He developed a working model for studying human behavior by removing the unknown variable known as free will. He stated that science cannot effectively be applied to any organism that is believed to act on its own accord because it would not allow for the accurate prediction of behavior. By controlling the environment, however, people’s behavior can be predicted and therefore, controlled. He states on page 22, that “A degree of effective control not so easily identified rests in the hands of entertainers, writers, advertisers, and propagandists.” He goes on to say that these controls are effective enough to assume that the laboratory results of their experimentation can be extended to these methods without worry of too much variation. What is it that he is saying? Essentially, they believe people are mindless in their behavior, and most of us are easily influenced by media messages and television programming. This is because people are viewed from the lens of evolutionary science, where we are little more than stimulus-response organisms that respond to the environment around us, as opposed to free-thinking beings that can problem-solve and make decisions with our own, cognitive abilities. For instance, Taillard writes on page 14 that people’s susceptibility to propaganda becomes very evident during presidential election campaigns when they fall for what he calls, “such blatant falsehoods.” He states that the masses have a tendency to refrain from doing any research on their own, and because they generally have nothing to compare the information they are receiving to, as a frame of reference, it is usually accepted without question. This is what happened with Covid. The messages came hard and often. Most people had no idea how to process the information because there was no frame to understand it. The masses had never faced something that was presented the way Covid was. They had no idea how to verify if any of it was true or not because as Taillard said (p. 14), most people refrain from making any attempt to research anything on their own.
Joost Meerloo wrote in his book, Rape of the Mind, one I reference often, “that at this very moment, in our country, an elaborate research project into motivation is going on, whose object is to find out why and what the buyer likes to buy. What makes him tick? The aim is to bypass the resistance barriers to the buying public.” What does this mean, exactly? It means that they have been studying our responses to propaganda for a very long time. When he says that the aim is to overcome the resistance barriers to the buying public, he means that they are looking for ways to get the public to accept what they otherwise would not. That is the nature of the new propaganda. To put it in the words of Edward Bernays, “The purpose of all propaganda is to mold the minds of the masses so that they will direct all of their efforts toward the desired ends of the shadow government, who use the powers of propaganda to gain approval from the people on issues they may have, at one time, disapproved of.” They have learned that all people are susceptible to how they frame the messages they intend for us to consume. The more they can align these messages with our preexisting cognitive biases, the more effectively they can march us along with their agenda, without the masses realizing it. A great example is a current article by the Washington Post entitled – ATF traced Trump rally shooter’s gun using records opposed by some in GOP. All of the elements of propaganda meant to sway opinions are present. Most conservatives oppose the idea of a gun registry as it is against current law. How many people will change their opinion now that the illegal registry the ATF has been maintaining has been used to trace the guns of Trump’s would-be assassin? I am going to end this article by saying that this cleverly framed headline will be used to study exactly that. How many people can be brought to accept the idea of a gun registry now that someone attempted to assassinate Trump?
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Without a Shot Indeed: Inducing Compliance to Tyranny Through Conditioning and Persuasion.
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