Cav's Place

I just finished watching a 4-part documentary (one hour each) about the techniques used by companies and politicians in the past century to manipulate people. What’s weird is that it was broadcasted by BBC (although it even aims a blow at BBC’s tactics in the last part), not Channel 4, who broadcast many documentaries that could be very disturbing for some (they’ll be the ones broadcasting The Lost Tomb of Jesus in the UK too). Anyway, extremely interesting. And all are things that you see happening, but they took it from the beginning, showing the methods used, the motives, the interests in play…

For those interested: Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4

I found a phrase from an interview towards the end to be interesting, I think it’s there to serve as a conclusion. I’ll change it a bit to be more generic. As long as politicians will tailor their campaigns according to the voters’ wishes they’ll never get anywhere. People’s desires are selfish and contradicting. What we need is a politician with the courage to say, without letting the voters influence him, “I guarantee that I will do this because this is what I consider to be right. You are free to either vote me or not.”.

Exactly, populistic measures lead nowhere. But here we have a problem. One with good ideas will not get elected, votes going towards the populistic ones. (And even if such a person will get elected, they’ll be “eaten alive” by the others afterwards.) As one guy from Clinton’s ’96 campaign staff, when Clinton had people polling those that psychological profiling established were likely to change their vote in order to find out what would they expect from the president and promising exactly what he was told to, says (in another interview), “I told him it’s madness. If he does this he’ll be elected, but he won’t be mandated to do anything. He replied ‘Agreed, but if I don’t say this I won’t be elected. Isn’t getting elected the whole point?'” (quote from memory). Also perfectly true. If he wouldn’t have been elected, could he have done more?

And we get to another point. The majority is at best uninformed and in the… usual scenario simply stupid. The stupid can be manipulated directly. And those of average intelligence can be manipulated by controlling the information they receive. And if these techniques of manipulation have been used for so long to preserve a certain structure and to keep various individuals in positions of authority, why couldn’t they also be used to do good? I mean fighting to save the planet, what’s left to save of it. Why couldn’t you use campaign lies in order to later be able to actually do some good, as opposed to just stuffing your pockets and stomach?

I wouldn’t mind that at all, it’s an “end justifies the means” scenario. Plus that in theory it should work better, because you also have the intelligent minority, whom you can trust to make the right choices by themselves if given accurate information. So far the majority has been manipulated despite this intelligent minority, so it should be easier with it’s help. The problem is that so far such manipulation techniques have not been used by the “good guys”, so the others had no competition. Now, if there will be an attempt to use them to do good, there will be competition, since the ones that have been using them all along will certainly not stop now.

Food for thought…