Posted on 05/03/2022 11:54:40 PM PDT by CharlesOConnell
Our opinions and beliefs have been automatically manipulated by Madison Ave consumer psychology experts for well over a century, for sale wholesale to the highest bidder. The Pro-Life side can play the same game, but success in advertising for life takes away from the budgets of the pro-life establishment.
As soon as Biden lost too much popularity, it had to be announced that Hillary was back in the old villain tag-team matchup with Trump. Now that we have Ukraine, the Oligarch Kaleidoscope has a whole new set of images. But the propaganda fireworks of the fictional abortion battle have been loaded for years, ready for shooting off, just waiting for the opening "BOOM" announcing the imminent commencement of the bright light show in the sky dazzling the eyes of the American electorate. Everything needed to keep the intellectual classes happy and the sweating classes vilified.
P.R. got a start after John D. Rockefeller's private police killed striking Colorado copper miners' wives and children in the 1914 Ludlow Massacre. The atrocity was carried in the press, perhaps before World War I censorship. A character named Ivy Lee supposedly started the field of Public Relations, advising Rockefeller to give a nickel to everyone he met, rich or poor. Rockefeller got tired of the weight of nickels, switched to dimes to save weight. As the richest man who ever lived, he could afford the increase.
The field of opinion engineering got a head of steam up when a middleman, not a psychology brainwashing expert himself, but a fixer named Edward Bernays, started what eventually became Virginia Slims "You've Come a Long Way, Baby", during the 1929 Easter Parade, when he had his secretary light up on 5th Avenue, accompanied by his lawyer.
She get herself arrested, identifying the cause of Lucky Strikes with a fringe element of the Suffragettes movement in the "Torches of Freedom" astro-turf phony political movement. Bernays, a nephew of the author of "Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego", Sigmund Freud, would lose his own wife to smoking related illness.
Along the way, Bernays trumpeted in his manual "Propaganda" that mass manipulation was concerned with the mechanics of regulating people's behavior and beliefs, “concerned with the individual man as a member of a race, of a nation, of a caste, or a profession, of an institution, or as a component part of a crowd of people who have been organized into a group at some particular time for some definite purpose.”
"The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country. We are governed, our minds are molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of.…[I]n almost every act of our daily lives, whether in the sphere of politics [the House of Morgan ran both parties’ candidates in two Presidential elections] or business, in our social conduct or our ethical thinking, we are dominated by the relatively small number of persons…who understand the mental processes and social patterns of the masses. It is they who pull the wires which control the public mind, who harness old social forces and contrive new ways to bind and guide the world.” – Edward Bernays, "Propaganda"
This candid statement of the Madison Ave. peacetime application of wartime military psy ops-against domestic populations-was updated decades later for the modern manufacture of your opinions in Robert Cialdini's "Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion", with six principles of how you can ethically manipulate people for fun and profit. In an extension of what was known in computers a generation ago as "Darwinian Programming" in which computers fight it out for design dominance, now the manipulation of the opinions and belief of hundreds of millions, of billions of people, has been fully committed to algorithms, as Dr. Robert Epstein warned us how Silicon Valley Social Media would be rigging out electoral process.
But what the manipulators failed to realize is that two sides can play the same game. It was shown in the article "Abortion: A Failure to Communicate" by Paul F. Swope, First Things, April 1998 https://tinyurl.com/4kn2swwt that professional consumer psychological marketing research could be equally well applied to the interest of Mothers and babies in the abortion controversy. The result in the first tests in Kansas City were a 38% reduction in the abortion rate, once Mothers were affirmatively informed that their natural interest to take their pregnancies to term could be fulfilled--if meddling grandmothers and shirking fathers could be circumvented.
The pro-life establishment would be directing all their funding away from talking head-ism toward convincing ordinary women, a majority of whom are not in college, just to have their babies. That could result in budget shortfalls for professional establishment pro-life organization staffing, when the proven approach of the Vitae Caring Foundation does all the heavy lifting of convincing women to act in their own interests.
The toolbox of consumer-psychological marketing research is intrinsically value-neutral, able to be equally well be used by those in the light practicing ethical virtue. The Vitae Caring Foundation’s “Lifesaver” advertisement is an example of using emotionally persuasive means, not to deceive people, but to increase their comprehension of, and receptivity to, the Truth, using an integrated appeal to the Passions, the Will and the Intellect as God created them good in humans.
(Woman firefighter handing a child she just saved to the Mom.) “Being alive today has special meaning–for both of us. There have been times when I almost didn’t make it. But the one time I had the most to lose, was before I was even born. My Mom was young, single, no money. I’m sure it wasn’t easy for her to give me a chance. But today, I know she’d be very proud, that her decision saved more than one life.”—”Lifesaver”, Vitae Caring Foundation.
Wow! That was some article.
What a Roe decision would do is force Congress to write a law legalizing abortion. Hardly any liberal wants his name on such a law. They were hiding behind legislation from the bench, Roe, to do what they themselves won’t. The reason for the angst is they know America does not want totally legal abortion as it is practiced now.
I read Robert Cialdini, he doesn’t talk about manipulating for fun or profit.
It is getting harder and harder to see the truth thru all the muck and harder still to follow it.
Great article, pro-life application aside. These are the roots of the algorithms in the coming transhumanism.
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