Knowing how outside forces work on people

Outside forces can mould not only, say, people's musical or cinematic tastes or their political opinions, but also all those practical consumer choices that define people — something that marketing experts know very well. When you answer questions like these — you aren't really dealing with practical matters at all. Rather, you are responding to other people and trying to project a particular image of yourself:

• What kind of car do you think you need? Does it really need room satnav, seats for six children and kangaroo bars on the front?
• What kind of restaurants would you eat at? They all do food, but some you would probably rather starve first than go in.
• And clothes. Most people (yes, even me) wear the same sort of things all the time — almost a uniform. When Auntie buys me a jumper with a loud checkerboard design, I can't imagine wearing it! I'm a fashion victim — but so are you, and our ideas about the kind of shoes, socks and shirts we think are ‘smart’ or ‘cool’ to wear are not quite as free as we usually imagine.

Yet isn't it odd that a forgotten photo of me a few years back shows me wearing exactly one of those ghastly checkerboard jumpers! How could my tastes have been so bad then! For more on advertising, see the later section ‘Understanding how advertising works’.

Influencing people's opinions

If you think I'm exaggerating about the power of social forces in this context, reflect for a moment on how your own views and tastes keep changing! Maybe you used to have a favourite pair of yellow, crimplene ‘slacks’, enjoy watching Terminator films and eat lots of popcorn. Now you think such and such is really unfashionable, and you say popcorn has long ago lost any appeal, just like the films it used to go with.

Far from tastes and opinions being things that people carefully arrive at after due consideration, they seem to be more like fashionable (or not) clothes that people change regularly. Sometimes people change entire preference sets almost overnight, particularly if their circumstances change — for example, when they go from being a radical student studying international economics to landing a lucrative job as a trader in a bank.

One journalist I know went from being the features editor on a right-wing tabloid to being deputy editor on a ‘hard-left’ magazine. Within a few weeks, this person's trademark trouser suit and coiffured hair-do became jean jackets and a crew cut. Circumstances alter values, even for the most independently minded person.

‘Here's what you think, comrade’: Russia and China

In Russia, the brief flowering of different viewpoints that President Gorbachev encouraged in the 1980s (called glasnost or ‘opening up’) was soon replaced by ruthless suppression of independent voices, in favour of a centralised system.

These days, this revolves around the official Russian state news agency, led (at the time of writing) by Dmitry Kiselev (a former talk show host notorious for his charming suggestion such as that gays’ hearts should be incinerated in ovens). Under such centralised government guidance, the Russian media majors in one subject — praise of the Russian president.

No wonder the current president, Vladimir Putin, has achieved ever higher popularity ratings at home, busy waging mini wars to ‘protect’ ethnic Russians and creating laws such as one against ‘homosexual propaganda’, which opponents say has caused an upturn in homophobic violence and threats. Not a new idea, of course: Hitler also increased his popularity when he targeted gays, making them wear a special pink triangle. (Later on, many homosexuals died in the concentration camps.)

Countries such as China stress a different kind of news management. Printed stories are carefully checked to be ‘safe and suitable’ for public consumption and thousands of people are paid to monitor Internet chat sites and discussion boards for signs of ‘undesirable’ political comment. The government pays teams of watchers to note the names and IP addresses (electronic details that identify the geographical location of computer users) of anyone posting ‘dangerous’ views or ‘misinformation’ and many an anonymous (that's what they thought!) surfer later receives a sinister ‘knock at the door’.

Mr Hitler appealing to the Man in the Street

If you want to know about how governments can manipulate their citizens’ minds, you have to know about Hitler. Hitler and his henchman, Goebbles, made propaganda into a science — and since they were very proud of what they were doing, they leave Critical Thinkers lots of insider information on just how it all works. Both knowledge and analysis of Hitler's techniques is invaluable for Critical Thinkers for spotting similar things that go on today.

Adolf Hitler was originally a not-very good watercolour artist and a very disgruntled demobbed soldier. However, his speciality was propaganda and mass-suggestion. In his autobiography, Mein Kampf (1923, which translates as ‘My Struggle’) he writes:

The art of propaganda lies in understanding the emotional ideas of the great masses and finding, through a psychologically correct form, the way to the attention and thence to the heart of the broad masses. . . . The receptivity of the great masses is very limited, their intelligence is small, but their power of forgetting is enormous. In consequence of these facts, all effective propaganda must be limited to a very few points and must harp on these in slogans until the last member of the public understands what you want him to understand by your slogan.

For more on how Hitler manipulates with emotion and what he thought of the public, check out the later sections ‘Appealing to Feelings: The Psychology of Argument’ and ‘Manipulating Minds and Persuading People’, respectively.

Mein Kampf is surprisingly readable. It opens with an engaging, even amusing, account of his arrival in Vienna from the provinces, aged 15. This technique is used to create the image of the personable, charming Mr Hitler who so impressed some Western statesmen. It also connects to the style of personal narrative that modern-day politicians often substitute for discussion of political programs — like Hitler, to win over voters by appealing to their emotions rather than their intellects (see Figure 3-1).

You often read about the almost hypnotic effect Hitler had on his audiences and of his extraordinary skills as a speaker, but I think the truth is rather more prosaic than that. (Look at one of the old clips showing him speak if you don't believe me!) Using the age-old technique of saying one thing in public and doing quite another in private, Hitler based his political messages on a shrewd and realistic assessment of popular opinion and the views of ‘the man in the street’.

Hardly anyone today can be found who says that they like his message, but that only makes it more worrying that in a few years under Hitler's marketing, the Nazis went from being a handful of disaffected ex-soldiers meeting in a pub every week, to a mass movement of millions, capable, in due course, of seizing control of one of the world's most intellectually sophisticated nations.

Even though the death camps came only at the end of Hitler's period in government, the Nazi doctrine (which always and unambiguously anticipated them) was initially embraced by many in the Western democracies as a fine thing. (See the nearby sidebar ‘What the papers said about Nazism’.)

Being neutral . . . up to a point: The BBC

All BBC staff carry an identity card proclaiming the BBC's first mission, to be independent, impartial and honest. Yet, as a 2007 BBC report, gnomically entitled ‘From Seesaw to Wagon Wheel’ (subtitled more helpfully: ‘Safeguarding Impartiality in the 21st Century’), acknowledges, impartiality is easier to talk about than achieve.

As the BBC report says, recent history is littered with instances of mainstream opinion moving away from the prevailing consensus. Examples include the change of monetarism from being advocated by a few right-wing economists to a central feature of every European government's economic policy. Or the increasingly widespread Euro-sceptic views towards the European Union or the apparent drop in support for multiculturalism among the UK's politicians. What's a neutral BBC reporter to do when covering such subjects?

Things are hotting up: The BBC and climate change

The BBC report notes that climate change is a particular subject where dissenters can be unpopular:

There may be now a broad scientific consensus that climate change is definitely happening, and that it is at least predominantly man-made. But the second part of that consensus still has some intelligent and articulate opponents, even if a small minority.

In fact, using the term climate change is a prejudicial way to frame the debate, because everyone agrees that climate changes — all the time. In fact, the subject is manmade global warming! Specifically, the government's view that it's happening and is caused by over-consumption of fossil fuels — such as coal.

The debate about how to approach many issues concerning the human impact on the environment has often been vexed and highly politicised. This issue has a huge impact on everyone — not so much because of the higher temperatures but because of all the new taxes on energy, the changes in the way energy is being generated and in the way food is grown (this last directly affecting some of the world's poorest countries most).

The BBC's report says that its policy on the issue should be that dissenters’ voices can still be heard, because the BBC's role isn't to close down this debate: impartiality ‘always requires a breadth of view’ and ‘bias by elimination is as dangerous today as it ever was’. It even adds that the BBC has many public purposes — ‘but joining campaigns to save the planet isn't one of them’. Instead, programme-makers should reflect the full range of debate that such topics offer, scientifically, politically and ethically.

Struggling to find a consensus

All Critical Thinkers need to take note of the BBC's message for its programme-makers: areas of consensus need to be treated with ‘proper scepticism and rigour’, to avoid rushing around trying to keep up with ever-changing public opinion.

However, the alternative to reflecting a range of views is to try to find the ‘consensus’ view and that's the direction the organisation went. Alas, finding the consensus view is by no means as easy as many people imagine. Just think, how would you obtain a ‘balanced view’ on complicated not to say highly political, matters?

The BBC started off, by holding, it said, a high-level seminar in Exeter, ‘with some of the best scientific experts’. After this, it came ‘to the view that the weight of evidence no longer justifies equal space being given to the opponents of the consensus’. Thus, whereas previously news reports and documentaries may have said that many scientists believe that burning coal and oil is causing the ice caps to disappear (cue, pictures of drowning polar bears in the Daily Mail) and even the towering Himalayas to melt, now the BBC simply stated such things as fact.

Researching the experts’ views sounds a good way to approach many matters. But a Critical Thinker has to look sceptically at this sort of ‘appeal to authority’. In this case, when you do look closer, you find a little bit of ‘spin’ seems to have been added to the message. For a start, the BBC report doesn't mention that the seminar was partly funded by the UK government and organised in conjunction with a lobby group called the International Broadcasting Trust, both of which had a particular policy aim of increasing coverage about human environmental damage.

Likewise Exeter is a nice town, but it's an awfully long way from Broadcasting House in London. However it is the base of the UK government's research unit whose job is to produce evidence of the effects of human-made global warming.

That's some of the background set-up, the funding and the organising in question. But more importantly, who were the invited experts? When people asked how they were selected, the BBC went to court to prevent this information ever becoming public, to keep their ‘sources’ secret. This action perhaps reveals that the BBC knew it was on very weak ground. But the court granted the request.

Unfortunately for the BBC, an Italian climate sceptic found all the names of the people at the expert conference on a long-forgotten web-page. The list showed that far from a representative sample of scientific opinion, the meeting consisted of: scientists whose jobs revolved around proving the theory of human-made climate change; plenty of campaigners whose commitment to the cause of fighting global warming was in inverse proportion to their expert knowledge; and groups with financial interests such as British Petroleum. Oil companies, despite what you may have read many times, are one of the big winners of the ‘coal is bad for you’ policy, because for example they own most of the world's gas reserves — and very few coal mines!

These experts’ evidence, however well intentioned, was almost certain to come to only one conclusion. Consensus was obtained at the expense of genuine debate. Critical thinkers don't do that sort of stuff.

Using emotions to powerful effect

One of Hitler's all-too-influential ideas is that slogans are a much better way to influence mass opinion than arguments, and debate is always best avoided. (That's right, what you are studying in this book, which is all about the importance of real debates and well-founded arguments has almost nothing to do with influencing popular opinion.)

Instead of facts, much of Mein Kampf comprises pages upon irrelevant pages of Hitler's early years, views on clothing, descriptions of the appearance of Jews and so on. This is because Mein Kampf is a new kind of political philosophy — it's not a work of rational argument but of irrational or emotive appeals.

It was the first of a new kind of political manifesto that used the kinds of methods and pulled the kinds of levers that marketing experts use, rather than plodding through formal arguments backed by boring old evidence!

The reality that voters are persuaded less by arguments than by feelings is illustrated quite unambiguously by Jutta Rüdiger, in this account of her feelings after she heard Adolf Hitler speak in Düsseldorf in 1932.

I must say it was an electrifying atmosphere. . . . Even before 1933 everybody was waiting for him as if he was a saviour. Then he went to the podium. I remember it all went quiet, and he started to speak in his serious voice. Calm, slow, and then he got more and more enthusiastic. I must admit, I can't remember exactly what he actually said. But my impression afterwards was: this is a man who does not want anything for himself, but only thinks about how he can help the German people.

Grabbing the attention of the gullible

Hitler writes that the politician (and equally campaigners, journalists and advertisers) aiming to influence opinion should aim to attract attention, and should definitely not be in the business of trying to educate people. The initial approach, the attempt to get people's attention, should be ‘aimed at the emotions and only to a very limited degree at the so-called intellect’. After all, as he says with great cynicism:

All propaganda must be popular and its intellectual level must be adjusted to the most limited intelligence among those it is addressed to . . . . Consequently, the greater the mass it is intended to reach, the lower its purely intellectual level will have to be.

Hitler, now truly into his role of a pioneer ‘spin doctor’, analyses in some detail the audience for propaganda, which divides into three groups:

• Those who believe everything they read: Naturally, this group of the gullible is the largest, which has social and you may say practical advantages. It's also obviously at the heart of most of the tragedies of human history. As a reader of this book, you don't fit in this category.

• Those who have ceased to believe anything: This group is smaller, composed of people who previously belonged to the gullible, but who've been upset by events and have shifted to the opposite extreme where they no longer believe anything and instead suspect everything. Hitler writes that

  They hate every newspaper; either they don't read it at all, or without exception fly into a rage over the contents, since in their opinion they consist only of lies and falsehoods. These people are very hard to handle, since they are suspicious even in the face of the truth. Consequently, they are lost for all positive, political work.

  Are you a total denier? Or do you belong instead in this last group?

• Those who examine critically what they read and judge accordingly: In other words, a subtle critical thinker.

Here's what Hitler has to say about these people:

Most of them in the course of their lives have learned to regard every journalist as a rascal on principle, who tells the truth only once in a blue moon. Unfortunately, however, the importance of these splendid people lies only in their intelligence and not in their number — a misfortune at a time when wisdom is nothing and the majority is everything! Today, when the ballot of the masses decides, the chief weight lies with the most numerous group, and this is the first: the mob of the simple or credulous.

The Critical Thinkers group is always bound to be the smallest in Hitler's assessment. It consists of

the minds with real mental subtlety, whom natural gifts and education have taught to think independently, who try to form their own judgment on all things, and who subject everything they read to a thorough examination and further development of their own. They will not look at a newspaper without always collaborating in their minds, and the writer has no easy time of it.

The masses are gullible and easily led, and so Hitler says that through education and control of the press, the State has to ‘prevent these people from falling into the hands of bad, ignorant, or even vicious educators’. Well, he'd know!

Spotting prejudice dressed as science

I've said quite a lot about how propaganda avoids formal arguments and tries to go behind the scenes, as it were, to appeal to the emotions, but many campaigns do use at least the appearance of factual, maybe even scientific, claims to compel people to accept their conclusions. In this section you can find out about one of the most influential ‘bad arguments’ in history, and one of the nastiest — and have a go at trying to counter it.

Nazism is a philosophy with only one plank — prejudice. It was successful because prejudice, against other races or religions, or against old people (or young people!) or sick people, whatever it is, however outrageous, however irrational, is never deeply buried in the human psyche.

Hitler launched his early tirades, as he would his later wars, against all sorts of imagined categories of ‘inferior humans’, such as the Slavs, the ‘negroes’ and even his later allies the Japanese and Italians. Hitler explains the significance of his theories on pure blood to the German public with a crude pastiche of Darwin's evolutionary theory:

Any crossing of two beings not at exactly the same level produces a medium between the level of the two parents. This means: the offspring will probably stand higher than the racially lower parent, but not as high as the higher one. Consequently, it will later succumb in the struggle against the higher level. Such mating is contrary to the will of Nature for a higher breeding of all life. The precondition for this does not lie in associating superior and inferior, but in the total victory of the former. The stronger must dominate and not blend with the weaker, thus sacrificing his own greatness.

How would you push back again this argument? It's not a new view, that much-respected historical figure Plato used a very similar line in one of his books, and nor is it a view that disappeared with Hitler after the war, but instead has been used (in a different form), for example, in the US against Native Americans and in European countries against disabled people.

The tragic fact is that the Nazi political platform did attract mass support. Particularly, you may be surprised to know, among women. Although the Nazis official programme insisted that women should have no say in matters outside the organisation of household life and the bringing up of children, Hitler himself noted that women's votes got him into power (though plenty of men helped too!).

Understanding how persuasion in society works

The goal of most media messages is to persuade the audience to believe or do something. Hollywood movies use expensive special effects to make viewers believe that what they're seeing is real. TV and newspapers use images — which may not be quite what they appear — as well as several techniques — such as carefully selected short quotations from identified sources — to make readers believe that the story is accurate. Every time one word is used instead of another, and every small twist of grammar, subtly affects the way you interpret and receive information and messages.

Language defines and shapes the world, and language is far from neutral. The experts in the ‘language of persuasion’ are the people who work in advertising, public relations and campaigning:

• Advertisers: The most straightforward group — they seek to persuade people to buy a product or service. They usually present their message in plain sight — as an advert! — making it much easier to keep a certain critical distance from the message.
• Public relations: These experts ‘sell’ positive images – maybe of a political organisation, or of a commercial brand on behalf of a corporation, government or other organisation, and they like to do this selling covertly. A certain brand of computer may be used by the hero in a film, an ambitious politician appears in a TV documentary talking about their love of nature.
• Campaigning (or ‘advocacy’) groups: Also want people to ‘buy’ into particular beliefs or policies, and although they use up-front and straightforward advertisements for their views, they also try to skew debates in their favour, so that by the time representatives are actually interviewed on the show, or in the press, their views have already been presented to the reader or viewer as ‘facts’.

The one constant between all these groups is that they all use the ‘language of persuasion’.

Recognising the language of persuasion

The trick with the language of persuasion in advertising or campaigning more generally is to link a product or idea with something else that the audience is known to already like or desire, something full of positive associations. A breakfast cereal is linked to a beautiful young woman walking through a field of flowers, for example.

On the other hand, political and advocacy campaigns often link to things the audience is known to dislike or fear. Think about how many times you've seen the following images used:

• To sell ‘protectionist’ policies on trade: Unappealing images of foreigners, or scary images of shuttered factories and sad-looking citizens queuing for food handouts.
• To sell the idea that taxes on energy should rise: Official reports warning that the Amazon is drying out, that many coastal cities will disappear under the waves and tropical diseases invade your home town.
• To sell organic alternatives: Health-food companies have used tales of children dying from pesticides.

These horror scenarios are irrelevant to most people's lives today. But the persuaders know that messages are more powerful when they're stated indirectly — when the association is implied. Psychologists refer to the process as emotional transfer. I include several of the most common persuasion techniques in the next section.

Spotting the techniques being used on you!

Here are some sneaky techniques that you may well be exposed to every day. Keep an eye open and see who's trying to persuade you of their views, using these kinds of methods. Think of this list as beautiful people being warm and fuzzy!:

• Everyone else is doing it: The so-called bandwagon effect. People do like to follow the crowd! Which book is best — see the one that's selling most. Which restaurant has the best food — this one has the most clients in it! So when an advertisement shows a lot of fun-looking, happy people doing something, everyone wants to ‘be part of it’ too. Politicians use the same technique when they claim to speak for ‘everyday people’, and of course ‘hard-working families’.
• Be like your hero: The views of beautiful people, famous people, successful people and role models of various kinds are much more interesting than just anyone's views, and campaigners of all stripes know this. The exception, of course, is when the message is about ‘everyone thinks such and such’, when a celebrity is a less suitable advocate and dull Mr and Mrs Brown seem very convincing. Naturally, in an advert Mr and Mrs Brown are actually actors – not plain at all!

• Trust me: Often people want an expert view. How many boxes of detergent have been sold because the actor recommending it put on a white coat and black-rimmed specs? Just as in a hospital, uniforms reassure, and the appearance of being part of an expert group is all that matters.

  Many areas of current public controversy, such as ‘are fossil fuels causing the planet to overheat’ or ‘can alternative health techniques ever work’ are regularly supposed to be settled merely by producing evidence of a large majority of experts on one side of the issue. (Don't forget: sometimes, ‘plain folks’ can also be experts, as when a housewife endorses a brand of washing powder.)

• Weasel words: Remarkably little can be said if you know how to slip in the odd weasel word! Lawyers, politicians and scientists have all great skill in using these. Unproven, exaggerated and outrageous claims can be made, as long as they're accompanied by words such as may, can, could, some or many. Watch for those giveaway words that render the claim in the passage more or less meaningless.
• Flattery: That nice method of polishing egos. People selling you something are the nicest people in town. They admire your taste and judgement: ‘You know a good thing when you see one!’, ‘You demand quality’, ‘You deserve the top of the range!’
• Warm and fuzzy: Ah! Looking at images of families on holiday, kids playing with pet animals can be relied on to produce those ‘warm and fuzzy’ feelings in the viewer, especially if aided by great music, pleasant voices and maybe some visual special effects too — cue ‘pink sunset’ over ocean!

Hitler on eugenics or breeding people

In style, this argument is a ‘scientific’ one, though not a very good one. Suppose that Hitler is right — that when two people, ah, breed, and the result is offspring not as good as the best parent but better than the worst. Hitler's idea was to take all the best specimens in Germany and get them to breed, while forcibly stopping all the rest. Go for a moment with that. But then what would happen? Clearly the best specimens would still be breeding with the not-quite-as-good, and so the quality would still drop.

So the logic of the argument is to allow only a handful of people to breed, and to build up a new ‘super gene pool’ from this handful. This would require ‘in-breeding’ — relatives marrying near relatives. This practice is pretty universally discouraged, because the gene pool degrades and children are born with illnesses.

This way of looking at Hitler's argument is taking it as it stands and extending it. The extension isn't ridiculous, but merely logical. It leads to what looks like a contradiction ‘on his own terms’.

Another possible objection is to ask how come any ‘high quality’ specimens are even left at the time Hitler was writing? If random mixing of genes drives out excellence in favour of mediocrity, this process must have ruined the Aryan stock long before Hitler arrived to save the nation!

But the best way to look at arguments like this is to challenge the underlying assumptions. Here, Hitler is really advancing his view that ‘The right of personal freedom recedes before the duty to preserve the race’. This is a general principle that continues to be actively debated in modern societies and whose implications continue to be controversial. You can refuse to accept this kind of starting assumption.