Friday, March 4, 2016

The most common methods of manipulation of the masses

Sometimes described as the "father of modern linguistics", Noam Chomsky is also a major figure in analytic philosophy. He has spent most of his career at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), where he is currently Professor Emeritus, and has authored over 100 books. He has been described as a prominent cultural figure and was voted the "world's top public intellectual" in a 2005 poll.
Born to a middle-class Ashkenazi Jewish family in Philadelphia, Chomsky developed an early interest in anarchism from relatives in New York City. He later undertook studies in linguistics at the University of Pennsylvania, where he obtained his BA, MA, and Ph.D., while from 1951 to 1955 he was appointed to Harvard University's Society of Fellows. In 1955 he began work at MIT, soon becoming a significant figure in the field of linguistics for his publications and lectures on the subject. He is credited as the creator or co-creator of the Chomsky hierarchy, the universal grammar theory, and the Chomsky–Schützenberger theorem. Chomsky also played a major role in the decline of behaviorism and was especially critical of the work of B.F. Skinner. In 1967, he gained public attention for his vocal opposition to U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War, in part through his essay The Responsibility of Intellectuals, and came to be associated with the New Left while being arrested on multiple occasions for his anti-war activism. While expanding his work in linguistics over subsequent decades, he also developed the propaganda model of media criticism with Edward S. Herman. Following his retirement from active teaching, he has continued his vocal public activism, for instance supporting the anti-Iraq Warand Occupy movements.
Renowned critic and always MIT linguist Noam Chomsky, one of the classic voices of  intellectual dissent in the last decade, has compiled a list of the ten most common and effective strategies resorted to by the
agendas “hidden” to establish a manipulation of the population through the media. Historically the media have proven highly efficient to mold public opinion. Thanks to the media paraphernalia and propaganda, have been created or destroyed social movements, justified wars, tempered financial crisis, spurred on some other ideological currents, and even given the phenomenon of media as producers of reality within the collective psyche. But how to detect the most common strategies for understanding these psychosocial tools which, surely, we participate? Fortunately, Chomsky has been given the task of synthesizing and expose these practices, some more obvious and more sophisticated, but apparently all equally effective and, from a certain point of view, demeaning. Encourage stupidity, promote a sense of guilt, promote distraction, or construct artificial problems and then magically, solve them, are just some of these tactics.
The strategies are so well-elaborated that even the countries with the best educational systems, succumb to the power and terror of those mafias. Many things are reported in the news but few are explained.
The journalistic tendency to balance stories with two opposing views leads to a tendency to build stories around a confrontation between protagonists and antagonists. Issues such as garbage and sewage sludge only get coverage, despite their importance, when there is a fight over the siting of a landfill or incinerator and the coverage is then on the anger and anguish of affected citizens, or the conflicting claims of corporate spokesmen, government regulators and environmental activists rather than the issues and technical background to them.
The job of media is not to inform, but to misinform: Divert public attention from important issues and changes decided by the political and economic elites, by the technique of flood or a continuous flood of distractions and insignificant information.
Journalists who have access to highly placed government and corporate sources have to keep them on their side by not reporting anything adverse about them or their organizations. Otherwise, they risk losing them as sources of information. In return for this loyalty, their sources occasionally give them good stories, leaks and access to special interviews. Unofficial information, or leaks, give the impression of investigative journalism but are often strategic tactics on the part of those with position or power. ‘It is a bitter irony of source journalism … that the most esteemed journalists are precisely the most servile. For it is by making themselves useful to the powerful that they gain access to the “best” sources’.

CHOMSKY DECALOGUE FOR MASSES MANIPULATION:

1 - A STRATEGY OF DISTRACTION. 

The key element of social control is the strategy of distraction that is to divert public attention from important issues and changes decided by political and economic elites, through the technique of flood or flooding continuous distractions and insignificant information. The strategy of distraction is also essential to keep the public interested in the essential knowledge in science, economics, psychology, neurobiology, and cybernetics. "Keep the public's attention distracted away from the real social problems, captivated by issues of no importance. Keep the public busy, busy, busy, no time to think, back to the farm and other animals (citing text 'silent weapons for quiet wars). " 

2 - CREATE PROBLEMS AFTER OFFERING SOLUTIONS. 
This method is also called "problem-reaction-solution." This creates a problem, a "situation" due to cause some reaction in public so that it is the principal measures that want to accept. For example: let develops or intensifies the urban violence, or arrange for bloody attacks, so that the public is the principal of safety laws and policies to the detriment of freedom. Or also: create an economic crisis to accept as a necessary evil recession of social rights and the dismantling of public services.

3 - STRATEGY GRADATION.
To make it accept an unacceptable extent, simply apply it gradually, a dropper, for consecutive years. This is how radically new socioeconomic conditions (neoliberalism) were imposed during the 1980s and 1990s: the minimal state, privatization, precariousness, flexibility, mass unemployment, which is insufficient to pay decent tickets, so many changes that caused a revolution would be had been implemented at once.

4 - THE STRATEGY OF DEFER.
Another way to make an unpopular decision to accept is to present it as "painful and necessary" in obtaining public acceptance for the moment for a future application. It is easier to accept that a future sacrifice of an immediate sacrifice. First, because the effort is not used immediately. Then, because the public, the mass, always has the tendency to expect naively that "everything will improve tomorrow," and that the sacrifice required may be avoided. This gives the public more time to get used to the idea of change and accept it with resignation when the time comes.

5 - ADDRESSING THE PUBLIC AS YOUNGER CHILDREN.
Most of the advertising directed at the general public uses discourse, arguments, characters, and particularly children's intonation, often close to the weakness as if the viewer were a very young child or a mentally impaired. The more you get bringing mislead the viewer, the more it tends to adopt an infantile tone. Why? "If you address a person as if she had the age of 12 years or less, then, due to suggestibility, it will tend, with some probability, a response or reaction also lacks a critical sense as of a person 12 years or younger (see "Silent Weapons for quiet Wars"). "

6 - USING THE EMOTIONAL ASPECT MUCH MORE THAN A REFLECTION.
Make use of the emotional aspect is a classic technique to cause a short circuit on rational analysis, and finally to the critical sense of individuals. Moreover, the use of emotional register allows you to open the door to the unconscious to deploy graft or ideas, desires, fears and fears, compulsions, or induce behaviors...

7 - KEEP THE PUBLIC IN IGNORANCE AND MEDIOCRITY.
Making the public is incapable of understanding the technologies and methods for their control and their bondage. "The quality of education given the lower social classes should be as poor and mediocre as possible so that the gap of ignorance that lies between the lower classes to upper social classes is and remains impossible to reach the lower classes (see 'Arms silent for quiet wars)."

8 – STIMULATES THE PUBLIC TO BE COMPLACENT MEDIOCRITY. 
Promoting the public to think that fashion is the fact of being stupid, vulgar and uneducated ...

9 - STRENGTHENING THE REVOLT BY SELF-BLAME. 
Make the individual believe that he alone is to blame for their own misfortune, because of the failure of their intelligence, their abilities, or their efforts. Thus, instead of rebelling against the economic system, the individual themselves helpless and blame themselves, which leads to a depressive state which one of its effects is to inhibit its action. And without action, there's revolution!

10 - THE BEST GUYS KNOW WHAT THEY KNOW IF SAME. 

Over the past 50 years, the advance of accelerated science has generated a growing gap between public knowledge and those owned and operated by dominant elites. Thanks to biology, neurobiology, and applied psychology, the “system” has enjoyed a sophisticated understanding of human beings, both physically and psychologically. The system has gotten better acquainted with the common man more than he knows himself. This means that, in most cases, the system exerts greater control and great power over individuals, greater than that of individuals about themselves.


photo credit: google.com

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