Mind Control in the Free Market
The relationship between your ideas and the people who create them:
London, England - A group of successful advertising consultants meets with a man who asks them to design an ad campaign in only 30 minutes, consisting of a brand name, a slogan, and an image for a fictitious company. The man hands them an envelope which he asks them not to open until the project is completed. The product is unveiled and the man leaves them alone to brainstorm for 30 minutes. When the man returns, the ad campaign is unveiled and the man commends them on their good work. He asks them to open the envelope and inside they are surprised to find a nearly identical ad campaign to the one they thought they'd come up with on their own.
Take a minute before reading what follows to watch.
We all accept that people can be manipulated by product placement and subtly suggestive language - and that most of us are at least somewhat aware that why we crave what we crave is to a large extent determined by people and companies who stand to gain from fostering these cravings in us. But the idea that an original creative impulse can also be manufactured and fed to us is truly surprising and scary. It follows that even the opinions we hold most dear, concerning politics, religion, family, or personal aesthetics, could be similarly programmed - and it certainly isn’t difficult to imagine why forces would want to control those thoughts, any more than wanting to influence say, our choice of soft drink.
Keeping this in mind, consider that for the very first time in history, the “news” can be customized by consumer. As nice as that sounds (after all, who doesn’t like something made just for them?), what “customized” really means is “unapologetically skewed”. Now liberals, conservatives, communists, anarchists, vegetarians and just about every other interest group can have their own version of the news and the popularity of this kind of media is quickly sinking the old, sturdy battleship of network news. This can be viewed as a steady deregulation of the mind control industry, a free market approach to an old idea. In one sense it’s amazing, almost the complete antithesis of Orwell’s nightmare. Free access to all points of view offers, in theory, immunization against a single totalitarian ideology. But in another sense it is the propagandist’s fantasy - a warm, wet surface for ideas to spawn and spread. Maybe the best example of this is the ironically named 9/11 “truth-ers” who have managed, with great help from internet “news” sources, to convince an amazing number of people to accept a hypothesis for which they can present no evidence. The lesson here is that if we’re going to embrace the medium of customized news, it has to be tempered with skepticism not just for what we see, hear and read, but also by our own thoughts.
You may have noticed that part and parcel with the YOUNEWS generation is an ever growing emphasis on polls and pollsters.
The paradox of polling is that while it purports to be asking what “you” think about the pressing issues of today, it is, in fact, telling you what to think. As we see from the Frank Luntz video (linked above), pollsters often carefully frame an issue and use suggestive wording to get the results they are looking for. This is not unlike how the magician planted his ideas in the minds of the advertisers before asking them to design an ad campaign. With the help of assholes like Luntz, news agencies large and small are increasingly using this technique to manipulate the discussion of issues while at the same time sycophantically appealing to the public’s desire for more news about them. Not long ago, the lead story on the front page of the New York Times was an opinion poll (sponsored and carried out by the Times itself) which asked, "Do you think the country is headed in the right direction?". Notice how the issue is framed. An extremely complicated question has been reduced to a false dichotomy. A "yes" can only be interpreted as full support and a "no" can only be interpreted as complete disapproval, neither of which describes any person's actual opinion. Since no one can answer the question without contradicting themselves, the results are meaningless and yet the achievement of the poll is to get the public to agree that these are the terms of the discussion: right direction or wrong direction? My answer: fuck you, New York Times!
As we’ve seen, mind control can work by planting ideas and setting false parameters, but it can also work by appealing directly to one’s identity. Consider the following scene from my favorite movie, The Big Lebowski.
The Dude: Will you come off it, Walter? You're not even fucking Jewish, man.
Walter Sobchak: What the fuck are you talkin' about?
The Dude: Man, you're fucking Polish Catholic...
Walter Sobchak: What the fuck are you talking about? I converted when I married Cynthia! Come on, Dude!
The Dude: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah...
Walter Sobchak: And you know this!
The Dude: Yeah, and five fucking years ago you were divorced.
Walter Sobchak: So what are you saying? When you get divorced you turn in your library card? You get a new license? You stop being Jewish?
The power of religion is that it embeds itself within your sense of identity. This point is supported by the fact that the most powerful lobby groups in the U.S. tend to be religious. Pat Robertson’s Christian Broadcast News station was a pioneer of the custom news industry we’ve been discussing, not to mention one of its scariest examples. What religious lobby groups and religio-centric media utilize is the fact that if you’re raised in a religious family, you are taught from birth that who you are is "Catholic" or "Jewish" or "Hindu" or whatever (as if you could be born already equipped with specific knowledge about the creation of the universe and an invisible overseeing magical force who perhaps watches scornfully every time you masturbate). So as you grow up, you identify with that particular faith and you feel a certain allegiance to its creeds even if they change. Although I don’t understand how a baby could be any more "Christian" than a puppy, it is nonetheless a widely used label with lasting implications for that baby’s identity and thus its future political opinions.
Not surprisingly, most people stick with the faith in which they’ve been raised. It’s simply brand loyalty. Kids who drink Coke and smoke Camel lights grow up to be adults who drink Coke and smoke Camel lights. And as anyone who’s ever engaged in a heated religious argument can attest to, it’s almost impossible to change someone’s mind about religion, but despite the strength of religious identity, it now seems as if the competing propagandas we’ve been talking about may actually be weakening the grips of individual religions. A recent Pew Research study suggests that rates of religious conversion are higher than they’ve ever been and that the fastest growing religious group is actually those who identify with no faith at all. Now I think this is a reason to be optimistic.
No matter how skeezy certain ideologies and interests may be, I’d still prefer a hundred of them competing to only one succeeding. I can even live with groups of wackos shouting their beliefs about President Bush being a member of a secret ruling class of bloodsucking evil alien reptiles so long as there is another group out there making fun of them. And even as we laugh, we should also remember that even the most skeptical of us are bound to be duped on occasion. It’s no surprise that some of the world’s best skeptics have tended to be magicians. Once you know how a trick works it’s that much harder to be impressed.
