Over the last few months I've been talking to friends and colleagues a lot about marketing, propaganda, manipulation, analytics, and a host of other ways in which our media and politicians are getting people to do what they want. A subject that has become even more important with the upcoming general election. Now psychological persuasion or manipulation is everywhere, from shops using tricks to make you buy more to governments and political parties manipulating you into supporting their policies and objectives. The techniques of manipulation are many and widespread, despite comments about banning them from the odd Troll they are too widespread, too useful, too powerful to ever be banned. After all what government is every going to ban their most effective tool for playing the population like puppets. Which is why my thinking is that the only defence is education. Don't be silly, I'm not talking about GCSE Maths, instead I'm talking about teaching people to spot manipulation, to understand what it is and why it is trying to do. Once you know someone is trying to manipulate you it becomes much harder for them to do so. I'm not talking about teaching people what to think, or how to pass exams, rather I'm talking about teaching people how to think and how to question and form their own opinions instead of getting them from the headlines of the Daily Mail. Now the biggest and possibly most well known manipulation is The Big Lie! If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. Attributed to Joseph Goebbels, you can find this quote on a million web sites and in dozens of books. So what is THE BIG LIE? Well to start with it's a lie, and a big one. Yes I know that's obvious, but beyond that it is something that is so big, something that has been repeated so often and by so many people, that it's very scope changes it from a lie to a truth. Something that everyone knows is true, because everyone else is saying it. Corbyn cannot win the election. It works like this. Firstly take something big, really big, so big that it interests of affects everyone. A national or international issue, something of great significance to the majority of the population, because if people aren't involved or interested they won't repeat it and the BIG LIE depends on being repeated. STRONG AND STABLE. Then you repeat it. A lot. Get your friends to repeat it, get your party to repeat it, get the media to repeat it. Make sure it is in the news two or three times a day on each TV channel. Drop it into every speech, use it as a sound bite, all the time. You need to make sure everyone is hearing it, because that's how THE BIG LIE works, everyone needs to be repeating it and everyone needs to be hearing it. You know it's working when someone hears it and refers to another time and place when they have also heard it. The Conservatives are the only hope for a STRONG AND STABLE GOVERNMENT! "Yea, that's right, Fred down the pub was saying that and I read it in the newspaper and heard it on the TV, so it must be true. The lie must be big, small or subtle doesn't work with THE BIG LIE, and in fact using this technique often backfires if you are dealing with a small or subtle thing, people don't care about the number 7 bus, or that 1% increase in vehicle tax for blue van drivers (unless they drive a blue van) and become annoyed and then quickly tune out the manipulation. But if it's something they care about then they remain interested and pay attention, because they are paying attention they hear it more often and begin to repeat it. Once people are hearing it enough, and repeating it enough, then it becomes self sustaining, and more than that. It becomes an established fact. IT BECOMES TRUE! ! ! People stop questioning it, because everyone knows it's true, everyone says so, facts and evidence cease to matter because all too often those facts are coming from the annoying bloke in the corner who sips half pints and talks statistics all the time. He must be wrong because everyone else says the same thing and what does he know, quoting the Office of National Statistics or something. It is recorded in so many places that whenever you search for it, there it is, on the internet, so it must be true. It appears at the top of Google searches and people refer to other people who refer to other people saying it. That's it, that's what it takes for THE BIG LIE to work, it is so big that it becomes TRUE, no one questions it, because everyone knows it's TRUE. The Tories are the party of sound economic management, despite all the evidence to the contrary, this is TRUE, becasue everyone says it's TRUE. Therefore it is TRUE. Say it often enough, have enough people repeat it, for long enough, and the most blatant lie becomes the most obvious truth. Of course you can also say it so often that people begin to joke about it, like repeating it a dozen times in a ten minute speech AND having it on every sign. |
Watch and listen to our media over the next few weeks. You can spot THE BIG LIEs if you are paying attention, they're the ones that are repeated endlessly, by every newspaper and TV channel, the ones repeated by so many politicians and reporters. Look for STRONG AND STABLE, look for COALITION OF CHAOS, look for anything else that is being repeated often by many people. Then take a look at what they are actually saying, is it a lie? General Election bingo, just don't do it as a drinking game unless you are suicidal. Interesting History detail. There is no recorded evidence that Goebbels actual said the quote attributed to him. In fact the reference by him I know of to THE BIG LIE was in 1941when he was referring to Churchill's Lie factory. What he actually said was: "The essential English leadership secret does not depend on particular intelligence. Rather, it depends on a remarkably stupid thick-headedness. The English follow the principle that when one lies, one should lie big, and stick to it. They keep up their lies, even at the risk of looking ridiculous." But that doesn't matter. The truth doesn't matter. What matters is what people are saying, if a dozen books and a hundred thousand web sites and millions of people say it's true, then it must be true. It's been said for years, so it must be True. Goebbels never said: If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. But everyone says he did. Everywhere you look. Ironically the phrase that is attributed as being the birth of the very concept of THE BIG LIE, actually is a BIG LIE. Also isn't it odd how something said in 1941 is still relevant to the English government today. |