Noam Chomsky, one of the most important intellectuals in life today, has drawn up the list of the 10 strategies of manipulation through the mass media.
Take 5 minutes and you will not regret it.
If only to broaden your knowledge.
1-The strategy of distraction
The primordial element of social control is the strategy of distraction which consists in diverting the attention of the public from the important problems and changes decided by the political and economic elites, through the technique of the deluge or flooding of continuous distractions and insignificant information.
The distraction strategy is also essential to prevent the public from taking an interest in essential knowledge, in the area of science, economics, psychology, neurobiology and cybernetics. Keep the attention of the public diverted from real social problems, imprisoned by issues of no real importance.
Keep the public busy, busy, busy, with no time to think, back to the farm like other animals (quoted in the text “Silent weapons for quiet wars”).
2- Create problems and then offer solutions.
This method is also called “problem-reaction-solution”. A problem is created, a “situation” expected to cause a certain reaction from the public, with the aim that this is the instigator of the measures that you want to accept. For example: letting urban violence spread or escalate, or organizing bloody attacks, with the aim that the public is the one who demands security laws and policies at the expense of freedom. Or also: create an economic crisis to make the demotion of social rights and the dismantling of public services accepted as a necessary evil.
3- The strategy of gradualness.
To get an unacceptable measure accepted, just apply it gradually, by dropper, for consecutive years. It is in this way that radically new socio-economic conditions (neoliberalism) were imposed during the decades of the 1980s and 1990s: minimal state, privatization, precariousness, flexibility, mass unemployment, wages that no longer guaranteed decent incomes, so many changes that they would have provoked a revolution if they had been applied at once.
4- The strategy of deferring.
Another way to get an unpopular decision accepted is to present it as “painful and necessary”, gaining public acceptance, in the moment, for future application. It is easier to accept a future sacrifice than an immediate one. First, because the effort is not the one employed immediately. Second, because the public, the mass, always has a tendency to naively hope that “everything will be better tomorrow” and that the sacrifice required could be avoided. This gives the public more time to get used to the idea of change and to accept it with resignation when the time comes.
5- Address the public as children.
Most of the advertising directed to the general public uses speeches, arguments, characters and a particularly childish intonation, many times close to weakness, as if the viewer were a creature of a few years or a mentally deficient. The more you try to deceive the viewer, the more you tend to use a childish tone. Why? “If someone addresses a person as if they were 12 years old or younger, then, based on suggestibility, they will, with a certain probability, tend to a response or reaction even without a critical sense such as that of a person of 12 years or less ” (See “Silent Weapons for Peaceful Wars”).
6- Use the emotional aspect much more than reflection.
Exploiting emotion is a classic technique to cause a short circuit on a rational analysis and ultimately the critical sense of the individual. In addition, the use of the emotional register allows you to open the door to the unconscious to implant or inject ideas, desires, fears and fears, compulsions, or induce behaviors.
7- Keep the public in ignorance and mediocrity.
Make the public unable to understand the technologies and methods used for its control and enslavement.
“The quality of education given to the lower social classes must be as poor and mediocre as possible, so that the distance of ignorance that he plans between the lower and upper classes is and remains impossible to fill by the lower classes”.
8- Encourage the public to be complacent with mediocrity.
To make the public believe that it is fashionable to be stupid, vulgar and ignorant …
9- Strengthen self-guilt.
Make the individual believe that he alone is the culprit of his misfortune, due to his insufficient intelligence, his abilities or his efforts. Thus, instead of rebelling against the economic system, the individual devalues himself and blames himself, which in turn creates a depressed state.
10- Knowing individuals better than they know themselves.Over the past 50 years, science’s rapid progress has generated a growing gap between public knowledge and those possessed and used by dominant elites. Thanks to biology, neurobiology, and applied psychology, the “system” has enjoyed advanced knowledge of the human being, both in its physical and psychological form. The system has managed to learn better about the common individual than he knows himself. This means that, in most cases, the system exercises greater control and greater power over individuals, greater than that which the same individual exercises over himself.