The easiest thing to do is to persuade people to accept something. Maybe they’ll turn a blind eye, or maybe they’ll nod and think “sure, okay”.
People accept things all the time, from sincerely-concerned environmentalists driving fume-spewing cars to fervent anti-socialists wondering when their next stimulus cheque is coming from the government.
Harder than that is persuading people to believe something.
Beliefs are rooted in the human need to externalise failings, justify inadequacies, comprehend the unknown and find hope where little realistically exists. The greater this need, the more irrational the belief that can be held.
Hardest of all is persuading believers, once you’ve got them, to act.
That’s the sort of trick that can lead to 918 cult members committing mass suicide as happened in Jonestown in 1978, or the followers of Aum Shinrikyo releasing Sarin gas on the Tokyo subway in 1996, killing 13 people.
Over the last four years, a tiny percentage of followers of US President Donald Trump have been climbing this very ladder. On January 6 they reached the top.
How the hell did they get there?
One of the driving forces behind the Capitol Hill riots has been followers of the far-right QAnon conspiracy theory. At the heart of it is the belief that the government is populated by Satan-worshiping elites who, with the support of the media and business leaders, run a cabal of child prostitution rings. Key players are supposed to include Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama and George Soros. Trump is supposedly a saviour waging a secret war against them, and his election as president meant that a day of reckoning called “the Storm” was on the way.
This narrative tied into existing bizarre claims like Pizzagate — a conspiracy theory suggesting that Democrats were using a DC area pizza restaurant called Comet Ping Pong as a front for human trafficking and paedophilia. One North Carolina resident grew so concerned that he took a gun into the store and fired three shots while searching for the children he was certain were imprisoned there.
Over the course of Trump’s time in power, he has repeatedly refused to distance himself from groups like QAnon. His claims of “fake news” have supported the idea that media stories can not be trusted and that what was really happening was kept secret, only to be revealed to anonymous internet posters and far-right conspiracy theorists like Alex Jones, host of the wildly popular Infowars.
Why the darkest of government secrets should have been accessible to a dodgy health supplement peddler is unclear, but perhaps that was all part of the plan.
Trump himself was asked repeatedly about QAnon in the media, with the frequency of such questions increasing in the run-up to the 2020 election. While he stopped short of endorsing followers’ beliefs, he did say that he knew they liked him, and that they were doing good things. For several years they had been claiming in their online enclaves that he was sending them coded messages in his public speeches.
Once the election had been lost, facts no longer mattered. An enraged Trump had nothing to lose and took to social media in a tweetstorm, claiming that the election was rigged. This openly encouraged the conspiracy theorists and in December they urged him to #crosstherubicon; or, in other words, take military action.
At his ill-fated “Save America” rally on January 6, Trump spun fantasies of fraud and media lies to the seething crowd, then told them to march. Rudy Giuliani, his long-time lawyer, told them it was time for “trial by combat.” There is no doubt that both men knew exactly what they were doing
This was the final push needed. The true believers had reached the top of the ladder of persuasion. The whole world knows what happened next: he was impeached.
Another morality tale – from the “advertising guru” that sold enough of us on “Honest John” Howard and his government, for 4 elections?
The Clickbait Twins – Toby Jughead & LuxuryEscaped Schwab.
So, do you disagree with this “morality tale”?
“Today on Hannibal Lecter’s Cannibal Canapés ……”
Why’s he peddling his ‘bleeding obvious’ barrow around Crikey? …. How about a spiel on the sort of damage he helped inflict on Oz by gulling enough rubes?
Another opinion piece from another conservative “Rent-a-Schiller” (to go with King).
I’d have loved to have seen him produce a piece on ‘How the ladder of persuasion works – from acceptance to Howard losing his seat. The damage to the country’s moral fibre inflicted by all but 12 years of Howard government and how Oz finally woke up’ – a reign that he played a major part in selling to the electorate.
Yeah, why Crikey runs this dog-eared Tory Marketing filler vaguely escapes me. Tobes is one of those lifelong advertising bull crap artists who just doesn’t get it yet: their time is over, the internet has educated us all way beyond their steam driven legacy advertising world. I’m sure he’s not an evil fellow but reading this tediously rote spam is like suffering the smug info-gurning of clever-wever Todd and Russ on an anachronism like Gruen. It’s as embarrassingly dated as thinking Woody Allen stand-up is edgy, it feels like getting a copy of The Magus from a sleazy Lit lecturer who’s trying to get into your undergrad pants. It’s just…1990’s information in a 2020 Information Age. Ralph needs to brush up on his Christopher Warren.
Incidentally, has anyone ever seen Tobes and Steve Bannon in the same room at the same time? No, thought not.
“Advertising : judging everybody else and their work. Telling them how to “improve” their “miserable little” lives by what they should otherwise be doing, what they should be thinking, what they should be saying – what they should be buying. With no responsibility when those things turn to l’merde. And all ‘For Rent’ – to the highest paying client/John”.
And their own ‘merit’ metrics – ratings, circulation numbers, take-up rates, focus groups – are utter contrived bullsh*t ones anyway. ‘Circulation’ boosted by tens of thousands of free copies dumped in airports; ‘viewer’ numbers = someone leaves the box or radio, on ignored in the corner, just waiting for the footy scores. Cable TV subscriptions consisting of mass deals to clubs, train stations, regional free-to-air. And who says advertising even works as ‘advertised’? That’s right: advertising people. No one else does.
The ‘Ladder of Persuasion’? Ha ha ha ha ha. I give you the Advertising Industry, Toby Ralph: a house of pure bullsh*t, built on a foundation of pure bullsh*t, held together by hot wet pure bullsh*t, furnished with pure bullsh*t, and owned, occupied and lovingly kept by exceptionally impure, endlessly bullsh*tting, pure bull sh*t artists.
You seem to have underplayed the b/s factor.
Very popular with some people, good for roses and worms.
Also broccoli.
Trump started the “rigged election” lie before the 2016 election, claiming that was the only way he could lose. Then it was the reason he lost the popular vote in that election. Then the only reason he could lose in 2020, then the reason he lost. Tell a lie often enough…
When you’re a deluded, divisive and dangerous demagogue the crowd is but your mob in waiting. He’s been titillating them with violent rhetoric from the very beginning. But, as with all crowds, they have to want what is on offer or they lose interest and move on. The Trump crowds wanted what was on offer. They lapped it up. Finally, they acted on his words. Now every single one of them bears a burden of guilt for the death of a police officer who tried to defend law makers and their staff. Every single one of them, because, without a crowd you don’t get a mob, and without everyone going along for the ride (even if they have second thoughts) a mob fails to gather its momentum.
I’m greatly disturbed by how easily people are accepting of the idea that they can effectively make their own reality (or at least buy into a communal one that matches their prejudices), and not have it shaped or even moderated by disconfirming facts. That a lie about election fraud can be embraced by so many makes me worry about how democracies can survive this. Even if beliefs and values differed, at least facts could (largely) be agreed on.
Agreed, Kel. Our greatest weakness as human beings is our gullibility, and that small percentage of clever and morally challenged individuals that use that gullibility to their own ends. It has always been thus, mostly through religion prior to our times, now through the internet.
This gullibility, the lack of scepticism has been super-charged by the internet, a vehicle for reaching anyone on the planet as long as the story has some hook. Having a large section of western populations downtrodden provides the fodder. Unending wage slavery is a miserable life, and leads to many dire consequences.
Perhaps the answer for the future is to embed scepticism in every classroom, in every lesson, in every curriculum. And then maybe bring in a living Universal Basic Income so that people don’t have to sell all of their available hours to the highest bidder.
I’m imagining an entirely different world to the one we have now. It’s entirely possible, this is certainly not the best of all worlds. We could do so much better.
Without the morally malleable, culpably gullible & egregiously suggestible multitudes a leader is a lone crazy shouting at clouds.
There is never a lack of answers for the credulous – questions worth asking are scarce to vanishing point.