Chapter 3
In This Chapter
Shaping views through social forces
Controlling people through propaganda
Using emotions to persuade
Recognising the language of persuasion
Faced with the choice between changing one's mind and proving that there is no need to do so, almost everybody gets busy on the proof.
—JK Galbraith (Economics, Peace and Laughter, 1971)
Most people offering their views on something think that they're presenting ‘just the facts, Sir’, helping others to avoid errors and ‘see the light’, so to speak. But plenty of others — such as experts in public relations (PR), marketing and political campaigning — see their jobs as — planting new ideas in the public mind.
Now, of course, some ideas are good and socially beneficial (for example, that we need to keep rivers unpolluted and help sick children get the necessary treatment) and many others are harmless, but certain ideas are dangerous and harmful. Unfortunately, history indicates fairly convincingly that the nastiest ideas seem to be the easiest to plant! They spread like brambles while the more delicate blooms of human culture wilt and fade, if they're not actually strangled. As a Critical Thinker you need to know how to spot these pernicious ideas so that you can investigate and challenge them.
In this chapter on the social dimensions and consequences of how people think and argue, I invite you to jump into my time machine, return to the first half of the 20th century and consider the sociological insights of one Mr Hitler — and how the Nazis used propaganda to win mass support.
You may not be surprised to see that I include that master manipulator here, but I wonder about your reaction on discovering that even in the freedom-lovin’ West, censorship and control of the news ‘in the public interest’ is never far away? Therefore, as well as discussing how politicians and advertisers influence you, I also look at how the BBC tries, and sometimes fails, to be ‘balanced’, and why Critical Thinking skills are vital to the wellbeing of society.
Many people say that even if they don't know much about many things, at least they know what they like. But no, sorry sucker, hard luck! What they like, indeed what anyone likes, is often not their decision or choice at all. On the contrary, what people like is one of the things most susceptible to outside influence.
This section is about how social forces shape people's views, for example in the economic and marketing spheres.
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’.
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.
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.
So what sort of people are these influencers? Well, consider the business networking site LinkedIn. It's grown to be one of the web's biggest and regularly sends out emails presenting the views of a what it calls ‘top influencers’, usually sorted into categories such as ‘Green Business’ or ‘Fortune Women’ (the latter means women who run big companies, by the way, not women offering to read people's fortunes in their palms — pity!).
Anyway, these influencers have thousands of followers on the social networks and blogs. (I have, by comparison, three, and one of them is me under a pseudonym.) Thousands, you say? Sometimes hundreds of thousands — millions occasionally! Therefore, the ‘logical’ conclusion must be that their views are important.
I'm not saying that, for example, when Richard Branson states that ‘polo neck jumpers are cool’, millions of people immediately pop out to the shops to buy one. Influence is more subtle. As Galbraith explains, what really influences people is much more difficult to be aware of, but involves two key social forces: emulation and advertising. These forces shape all our views, even when we write essays, so a Critical Thinker needs to always be aware of them.
But adults are no better! They have to have the family cars with satnav and the 5-minute Italian ravioli meals in the low-energy freezer compartment ready for when they get home. Even Critical Thinkers have their hidden weaknesses: for things like watching documentaries and for old bicycles and dried fruit. But maybe I'm wrong about the typical Critical Thinker — after all, I'm not a marketing expert. Nonetheless, if you buy a book on Critical Thinking skills on the Internet these days, a computer algorithm will soon link you to other ‘products you may be interested in’ — and put ads for them under your nose to tempt you. What kinds of things have been popping up recently on web pages to tempt you?
The second key force Galbraith identifies is advertising. This is at its most effective when it talks about things that you already have some sense you may want — when it persuades you to buy this brand rather than any other.
But in terms of economics, its significance is its role in creating new wants, new desires. (I talk much more on how advertising works in the later section ‘Manipulating Minds’.)
This section is all about the Three Ps — Prejudice, Propaganda, and Public Relations. The gold standard for Critical Thinking is usually said to be balance, depth of understanding, and accuracy — and certainly the 3Ps sit uncomfortably with that. Even so, of course, the issues are not black and white —publicity for a good cause we salute, and when is a strong conviction a prejudice and when is it a courageously held view?
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.)
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.
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.
The earlier section ‘Asking Whether You're Thinking What You Think You're Thinking’ shows that many apparently ‘free’ choices have been subjected to outside influences. A natural conclusion to draw from this social power is how difficult people can find being neutral, that is, to avoid ‘taking sides’, on any issue.
In this section I tell the story of how the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) threw out its charter, which stipulates balance and impartiality, and turned reporting about climate issues into propaganda for a particular cause. It campaigned against human burning of fossil fuels, such as oil and coal.
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?
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.
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.
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.
Do you think what you think you think? Not likely! And nor do any of us. It turns out instead that we mostly think what we feel. You bet that 20th-century master of all the dark arts of propaganda, Adolf Hitler, knew this very clearly and so in this section I look first at how propagandists use emotional responses to bypass the reasoning part of the brain — for good or evil or just to sell washing powder. Foregrounding this technique is a crucial first step for Critical Thinkers in getting back to rational argumentation, which is where the marks, if not the votes are.
In the second section, Grabbing the attention of the gullible, I explain how one reason for Hitler's popularity was that he understood his audience, or to be more precise, that he recognized the different elements of it. Unfortunately, his comments on the public mind then are as true today as ever, and thus are essential for anyone seeking to persuade others of a certain point of view to bear in mind.
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.
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.
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 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?
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.
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.
In this section I look at another ‘nasty but true’ lesson from Hitler, and then in ‘Understanding how persuasion in society works’ I plunge into current thinking in marketing and consumer advertising, and show how the ‘persuaders’ can be split into three main varieties, each with their own particular technique. The section Recognising the language of persuasion takes this a bit further and explains how psychological factors such as the technique known as emotional transfer can be used to make sure you don't actually think what you think you think.
The final section Spotting the techniques being used on you! contains some really useful techniques that you may like to try to spot.
Ever wondered why politicians are so dogmatic, and just repeat one point all the time? Hitler was sure he knew the answer: ‘As soon as you sacrifice this slogan and try to be many-sided, the effect will piddle away, for the crowd can neither digest nor retain the material offered. In this way the result is weakened and in the end entirely cancelled out.’
Hitler saw the general public as being so slow to pick up on ideas that speakers had to repeat and repeat them. He also realised that the best propaganda appears not to be political at all. He advocates the ‘cleansing of culture’ in all fields, from theatre to the press, so that everything served to perpetuate only ‘healthy’ ideas — and he of course decided what was healthy.
Here, in the area of manipulating public opinion, Mein Kampf makes its most distinctive, if poisonous, contribution to political theory.
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:
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:
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!:
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.)
Check out some of my thoughts on this chapter's Try This exercise.
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.
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