Sometimes it seems like bad people do terrible things, and because of that, all the problems. But in reality, there are not so many people who are really bad, few among us are those who deliberately do something immoral and enjoy it. Rarely will you meet a person who smiles at the thought that he is bad.
Oftentimes, evil is done by other people. Nice people capable of wonderful things. They are loving parents, honest rivals, kind colleagues, these are people capable of the highest manifestation of ethics and dedication.
Now you see a photo from the recreation center, a couple of kilometers from Auschwitz. Here German soldiers and their families spent their weekends. It is not difficult to notice that these are almost certainly mentally healthy people, they laugh, hug, dance, eat blueberries and sunbathe, and a couple of kilometers away from them the smoke of stoves rises, in which people are burned.
The amazing power of ideas lies in the fact that they can create this kind of consciousness. Someone may look at what happened and say that this is just a very large number of extremely crazy, evil people. That's what I thought, too, until I read Ordinary People by Christopher Browning. It describes the horrific transformation of ordinary workers, electricians, doctors, and cooks into cold-blooded killers who shoot people in the back. In it, the author tells step by step how a person can turn into a beast if you convince him that he is right.
But how to make, for example, you, dear viewer, to do something bad? Exactly in the same way as the rulers did in relation to the people throughout the history of mankind. Using propaganda. Propaganda in itself is not bad, because common sense, honor, science and self-development can be promoted. However, this is not profitable. War, social upheavals, crises and instability bring profit. And since people are reluctant to kill other people, it takes a truly titanic effort to get the accountant to put down the calculator and take up a deadly weapon.
Noam Chomsky is an American philosopher, linguist and public intellectual who has compiled in his books a list of manipulations that are used in modern propaganda.
First, for a herd to move on command, it must be an order of magnitude more stupid than its shepherd, therefore, the first principle. Encourage the crowd to love mediocrity. Since a person by nature strives for wisdom and knowledge, it is not enough just to deprive him of a quality education, it is not a fact that he will stop thinking with his own head. Sooner or later, he himself will come to the right conclusions, understand what is good and bad, begin to follow the principles and acquire well-grounded life values. To prevent this from happening, you need to make sure that instead of philosophers, he will read popularized news, instead of lectures, he will listen to the popular lady gaga, and instead of documentaries, he will go to watch sensational cartoons. It is necessary to create such an information environment in which people want to be stupid, you should instill in them an aversion to thought and promote only thosewho thinks least of all.
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Secondly, in order for the herd to move quickly, you need to scare it well. Therefore, the second principle. Press on emotions. It is difficult to manipulate a person who is used to thinking about the question for a long time and carefully before doing something, therefore, he must always live in emotional elation - cheerful or irritated - it does not matter. The main thing is to knock him out of the state of thoughtfulness. Emotions are useful in situations of momentary stress when an urgent need to make a quick decision. Hit or run. But if you are planning a long-term survival strategy, if your task is to map life values, emotions are your main enemy. And the more emotions you have, the easier it is to control you.
Third, in order for the flock to move in the right direction, you need to create a problem for it, and then propose a solution. For example, to organize an economic crisis, and then, in order to supposedly avoid this in the future, deprive the people of some kind of economic freedom or raise taxes. Also arrange a rally with a couple of deaths to show how bad practice this is, and then ban all rallies in general. Or organize a terrorist movement, and then send your citizens to invade another country.
And finally, fourthly, so that the flock never comes to the truth, it should be constantly distracted from important issues. How to do it? Create a crazy amount of noise around meaningless things, while pretending to be discussing something very important.
Propaganda is not necessarily false information. Many are glad that they can discern disinformation, but the main task of propaganda is that you just listen to it. Its goal is to prevent you from recognizing a dangerous idea at the crucial moment. A terrible ideology can take over consciousness only in one case: if instead of really thinking it over, you did something else.