Slate: Why we believe propoganda

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RJN
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Slate: Why we believe propoganda

Post by RJN » Thu Sep 16, 2010 5:11 pm

http://www.slate.com/id/2267299/
Few people change their minds on hot-button issues, even when new information is provided to them.

This is why offering Obama's birth certificate carries so little weight with people predisposed to buy the theory that the president was not born in the United States: It's like setting a lion down on a polar icecap and expecting it to drive the polar bears into extinction. (Passionate Obama supporters similarly find convoluted ways to reject all criticism aimed at him. This isn't a Republican or Democratic thing; it's just the way our minds work.)

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Beyond
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Re: Slate: Why we believe propoganda

Post by Beyond » Thu Sep 16, 2010 5:53 pm

RJN wrote:http://www.slate.com/id/2267299/
Few people change their minds on hot-button issues, even when new information is provided to them.

This is why offering Obama's birth certificate carries so little weight with people predisposed to buy the theory that the president was not born in the United States: It's like setting a lion down on a polar icecap and expecting it to drive the polar bears into extinction. (Passionate Obama supporters similarly find convoluted ways to reject all criticism aimed at him. This isn't a Republican or Democratic thing; it's just the way our minds work.)
Hey RJN, our minds work like that because we can not use the whole brain as it was intended. The brain was not designed to be used as a single entity.
It was meant to be a "control" point that was connected to many things. Although many have managed to adapt to using it very well as a single self-contained unit for purpose's that fit into the way things now are on Earth, it was never really designed for useage in that way. The Human Brain has the capacity (even in the demented state it is now in) to far surpass all the "supercomputers" that are on the Earth. Not for storage capacity, but the ability to "see" beyond the limits of what we think it is capable of. There is a book that is found all over the Earth that gives us the why's and where-fore's of why we are so limited and how we can start seeing past all the limitations into what is really going on amongst all the going on's that we see. But then, that is a discussion for another place.
Oh, by the way, the Polar Bear would most likely have the Lion for lunch even if the Lion did not freeze to death.
To find the Truth, you must go Beyond.

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Ann
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Re: Slate: Why we believe propoganda

Post by Ann » Fri Sep 17, 2010 12:28 am

That is a hugely interesting article, RJN.

This is my personal opinion about it. I think that the most important thing for most human beings in the world is to belong to a group. And the most important "membership card" of any group is a declaration of loyalty to the basic beliefs of that group.

If you want to belong to a group, but you don't share their beliefs, then you have two options. The first option is to lie about your true beliefs. That is going to be hard in the long run. You are going to be surrounded by people whose basic beliefs you don't share, and you will have to make sure that they never get to suspect that you are not truly one of them. You must constantly be on your guard, and you must constantly lie about what you really think. This is going to be really difficult and exhausting as well as very scary. You are going to risk exposure and expulsion all the time.

The other option you have is to give up your original beliefs and embrace the beliefs of the group for real. If you can make yourself believe what the group believes, then you can be pretty sure that you really belong with them. You can let down your guard and relax. You can speak without resevation, because you are probably only going to say what your group wants to hear anyway. You can be yourself, at least as far as your opinons are concerned, because your opinions are going to be what your group wants them to be.

Belonging to a group is one thing. But the world is full of rivalling groups which, to some extent, fight over the same territory, and I think that human beings are always going to be interested in the other groups around them. For example, what group around you is the strongest? Is another group stronger than your own group, or is your group the strongest?

If your group is sufficiently strong, you will have access to media promoting the ideas of your group. And if your group is sufficiently strong it can make sure that its views are distributed and proclaimed even among the "infidels", that is, among members of other groups that don't share your beliefs.

But other groups will also try to proclaim their views among the members of the group that you yourself belong to.

Listening to the other groups is going to be dangerous. If you were to be intellectually swung by the arguments of another group, then it will be so much harder for you to belong to your original group. You will have to start lying and watching yourself all the time. You won't be able to relax. You will risk exposure and expulsion. Finally you may not be able to take the pressure any more, so that you will leave just because you can't stand the situation you are in, or your group may "catch you" and force you to confess that you are not one of them any more.

In any case you will be forced to leave. And when you have left you may have no friends left. The only way for you to belong is to try to become a member of another group. But any other group that you try to join won't know you, and they may not be very welcoming at all. And even if you share their beliefs, of think that you do, you may not understand the full picture of their convictions. And you may be "wrong" in other ways. You may speak with the wrong accent. You may live in the wrong neighbourhood, and you may lack the means to move into theirs. You may not know all the little signals or codes that the other group uses, and you may not be able to master those little signals even if you begin to grasp what they are.

Chances are that the other group won't want you. Chances are that they won't take you in. And then you will be completely alone.

Your only chance may be to try to return to your old group. But it could be that in order to make them trust you again, you will not only have to accept the beliefs that you didn't like or couldn't share the last time you were a member. No, you may have to embrace precisely those beliefs with a true fervor, if your group is to trust you again.

So believing in the things that your group believes in may be absolutely vital if you want to have friends and a family at all. And that, in my opinion, is reason enough to believe in almost anything, and to defend yourself, tooth and nail, against anyone who wants you to see the error of your ways. If you believe that your friends demand that you reject the idea that Barack Obama was born on American soil, then no birth certificate in the world may be sufficient to make you change your mind. What do you value higher, the testimony of a birth certificate or the friendship of your friends?

Only if one's friends signal that it has now become acceptable to believe in that birth certificate will it be okay to believe in the legitimacy of the Obama presidency.

And so effective is propaganda, this swaying of people's opinions by their friends, that as soon as public opinon has changed and the gospel of the group has been altered, the people who now believe in things that they used to reject may soon forget that they ever believed otherwise.

Ann
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RJN
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Re: Slate: Why we believe propoganda

Post by RJN » Fri Sep 17, 2010 1:35 pm

Very interesting thoughts, Ann. I wonder to what extent different groups are vulnerable to propaganda and invulnerable to valid criticism. I tend to think in terms of "groupthink", where nobody really thinks for themselves, versus "collective intelligence", where people are encouraged to think for themselves in a coherent and constructive manner. I believe that all groups suffer from "groupthink" but enjoy "collective intelligence" to some degree, but some groups are heavier on one than the other. Two different groups dominated by groupthink cannot come to a common agreement, whereas two different groups dominated by collective intelligence can.

One might think that science is a place where experiments are done that can definitively tell which of two groups is right, and which is wrong. One might think that the wrong science group would admit they were wrong, correct their thinking, and move forward. And that does happen sometimes, which is one thing I like about science. But that is not always the case. Planck once said that a new scientific paradigm really takes hold when the people who believe the old paradigm die off. Many notable scientists died never believing Einstein's special relativity. More recently, I myself have seen scientists on the losing side of a definitive measurement say that the winning side was just lucky because their interpretation of previous data was faulty. (And sometimes -- they are even right!)

- RJN

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