April 8, 2015 • 47 mins
Mind control is a pervasive fear in dystopian science fiction. What is there to say about the real-life science of manipulating people's thoughts, emotions, opinions and behavior? The podcast crew focuses on propaganda and advertising in part one of this two-part episode.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Brought to you by Toyota. Let's go places. Welcome to
Forward Thinking, Taylor, and welcome to Forward Thinking, a podcast
that looks at the future and says it's a long
way to Tipperary. I'm Lauren Bocaba and I'm Joe McCormick,
(00:22):
and today we're going to be starting the first part
of a two part episode. Yeah, this is a topic
so big it could not be contained within a single show.
And really we just kept finding notes, Like right before
we came in here and sat down, we were like,
oh no, there's more, There's so much more. Well, it
is a somewhat mind bending topic, quite quite epic and
(00:46):
scope it turns out. But so to set the scene
for what we're going to talk about today, I want
to have a little, a little mind experiment. All right, Okay,
think of yourself easy. I know it's easy for you
on that, but who I mean, think about what you
think When you think of yourself. There's sort of like
(01:06):
a thing you have in your mind. It's your personality,
your traits, the things that the ways you would describe
yourself in your Okay Cupid profile. If you're being honest,
I guess and if I'm no longer afraid of my wife.
Okay um, But there's sort of a problem with playing
this game because we like to think of ourselves as
(01:29):
sort of dependable and unchanging, like we are who we are,
and we think each of our personalities is sort of
one fixed, eternal feature of the universe. There's there's Jonathan,
and he's who Jonathan is. But deep down we sort
of all know it's not really like that, right, I mean,
human thought and behavior is sometimes disturbingly malleable. Yeah, So
(01:56):
to some extent, we can change what kinds of people
we are. You can form new habits and break old ones,
and experiences you know, can change the way you would
react in any given situation. We can take steps to
change ourselves, and it's easy to see how since we
can change ourselves, we could probably also take steps to
(02:18):
change other people or have other people change us. Exactly right,
And so, like most other measurable phenomena in the world,
deliberate methods of changing human thought and behavior are things
that can be studied scientifically, and right now we might
not know a whole lot about this field, but we
(02:39):
will probably know more and more as time goes on.
So that brings me to today's topic, mind control. Yeah,
will it be a thing in the future? Is now
how reliable will the science of controlling human thought and
behavior become? Is this a thing that's good or bad
(03:00):
for humanity? I mean, obviously the sort of implication is
that it's bad. But what what are all the ways
we could look at it? Um? And how's it going
to play out? Yeah? And this is something that I
really enjoy reading about in science fiction because obviously, you know,
(03:21):
so many novels that warn us against this kind of stuff, right,
and a lot of them are that really good dystopian
sort of novel that's just so much fun to read. Yeah. Well, right,
because that's the ultimate type of oppression that's imagined in
in these dystopian futures. Right, It's not just that you
are sort of physically constrained and imprisoned and threatened. It's
(03:42):
that your very sense of self is through. Yeah, it's
the state. The state changes who you are, right, Right,
It's it's that you're physically constrained and you're happy about it. Yeah,
And you don't know not to be happy about it,
or why you would ever be unhappy about it. Yeah,
So says some examples as obviously anyone who has delved
(04:03):
into science fiction would be aware of these, but Orwell's
is a great example. Oh yeah, yeah, And this is
said in a society that is so steeped in propaganda
that that its citizens are trained in the art of
double things, holding two contradictory thoughts at the same time,
also double belie and believing them both. And double think
(04:25):
actually has a couple of different um um uses in
the book. But for example, you might be told, uh that,
let's say that war means peace. Let's that's a simple example.
And in the classic sense of double thing, not only
would you think that war means peace, but that eventually
(04:45):
the concept of war would completely change, so that when
you think the word war, you're thinking what of the
concept piece that that takes on the brand new meaning,
and that it becomes the reality from that point for word.
So really it's about how this uh, this this despotic
(05:06):
government really is defining reality and enforcing that reality among citizens.
And if you don't play along, you get in trouble.
And most people play along because you know, that's that's
what they're told to do. They're they're kind of you know,
they're kind of just just cogs and a wheel at
that point. And in fact there's also a UM and
(05:27):
a manufactured disparity between the highest of the highs and
the lowest of the lows, where they're very small percentage
of people are very very small percentage of people in
the upper class, a slightly larger but still pretty small
percentage of people in the middle class, and then everyone
else and the main characters in UM sort of the
the the upper class in a sense like kind of
(05:50):
the in the middle class slash upper class area UM.
And things do not go well for him. But then
we also have Anthony Burgess's clockwork R. Right, So there
you've got this kind of sense of at least seemingly
benevolent mind control. Right. It's implemented as a crime reduction initiative. Essentially,
(06:13):
they take a young man who is by all accounts
not a nice guy, so he is truly reprehensible. Yeah,
but they do some techniques on him. I think it's
a combination of of drugs and then behavioral conditioning. It's
a version therapy to force him to have a very
visceral negative reaction to any form of violence. Yeah, Essentially,
(06:35):
all the things that he absolutely adored when he was
on his own, uh, and could be the free, willing
sociopath that he was have now turned into triggers to
make him feel feel violently ill, even so, going so
far as the music that he used to love, which
is actually that's kind of the breaking point for him
(06:55):
is not so much the violence as his inability to
choose to be violent, but the music has been taken
from him as well. And Uh, what's interesting to me
about this book is that the American version, for the
longest time, left off the final chapter um chapter one,
so it into a chapter twenty where the main character,
(07:17):
Alex regains his ability to make choices to be a terrible,
terrible person. And so it's kind of left up to
the reader to one wonder whether or not it was
better to remove his ability to choose to be evil, thus,
you know, kind of removing part of his humanity. Uh.
And no, or and that way he could not commit wrong,
(07:40):
Or was it better to allow him the ability to
commit wrong, knowing that that was a potential outcome. Uh? Yeah,
that that old question of whether without the capacity to
to do evil, anyone can ever truly be good? Yeah,
And so chapter one negates that question. Chapter twenty one,
Alex grow was up and essentially Burgess at this point
(08:02):
was kind of like, you know, people grow out of it.
You know, you can be a sociopathic teenager, but eventually
you mature and then you realize, oh, I was kind
of a jerk, and so I don't know if you
grow out of just driving around murdering people. That's what
that's what chapter one says. Well, that's that's why I
kind of prefer chapter the one that does not have
(08:24):
chapter twenty one in it um And because of that reason,
and uh so then we've got Altis Huxley's Brave New World.
And the reason I group these three togethers all three
deal with a world in which the government is trying
to impose a particular order in the world. And in
this case, you've got a government that I'm actually an
(08:45):
entire society that's evolved to the point where everything is
predetermined for everybody. So as soon as as you have
a fertilized egg, then genetic test determined where that fertilized
egg is going to end up within that society, whether
it will be a uh in their cast system, whether
(09:07):
it will be in the upper casts or lower casts.
Lower casts are actually genetically and chemically altered so that
they have a limit to the amount of intelligence that
they can have. Their their physical capabilities are limited as well,
and so it's a very restrictive world. And uh and
again we the the character's journey is one of discovery
(09:29):
about how the world that they didn't know was oppressive,
how oppressive it actually was. Yeah. So yeah, the main
characters in Brave New World that they might live a
very sort of like placid and comfortable existence in a way,
but that it could be seen as without having the
true vitality of life. And they sort of discover the
(09:49):
romantic worldview, right right, the passion of being able to
completely mess yourself up. Yeah. Yeah, but of course we
don't have systems like this in the real world. I mean,
you might get some people out there saying, like, no, man,
we're living in nineteen eight four. Come on, open your eyes, people. Well,
we don't really have like like full mind control methods
(10:14):
bearing down on us, especially not ones that are deliberately
controlled and studied. We we have culture, and one could
in fact look at culture as an elaborate mind control method,
but it's something that arose naturally out of you know,
just human behavior over hundreds of years, not not a
(10:35):
deliberate and scientifically informed attempt to control how people in
various regions of the world would think. That's what our
vampire overlords want you to think. Well, there's also, of course,
the the the attempts to manipulate that culture, to actually
leverage elements of that culture in order to get public
(10:57):
opinion thinking one thing or an other. So it's it's
while it's true that the uh, the cultural element is
is certainly more prevalent than any kind of science fiction
attempt to control people on individual basis, that cultural element
is something that not only are we aware of, but
we try to exploit and by we I mean various
(11:19):
various humans, not just not not just me. Now, there
are whole fields of study outside of Jonathan Strickland that
are devoted to figuring out, you know, how to influence
actions and decisions, either to to make the stuff that
we have more efficient for us to use, or to
(11:41):
you know, profit businesses that want to sell us stuff yep,
or profit governments that want to sell us ideas well.
Exactly right. I think that's one of the reasons that
if you're looking at the most old fashioned forms of
mind control and sort of the science of influencing behavior
and thought and emotion and opinion, one of the first
places to look is advertising and propaganda. And really the
(12:05):
two are so hand in hand related, I mean in
many many ways. So propaganda will will start with that,
and that's defined as usually biased or misleading information used
to sway public opinion on a matter. It's not necessarily misleading,
like could it be propaganda if it if it doesn't
say any facts that aren't true, it could certainly be
(12:28):
propaganda by presenting true facts but not presenting all the facts,
I mean propaganda misleading It can't You could argue it's misleading, yes,
And you could argue also that biased doesn't necessarily mean nefarious,
but it does mean that there is. You don't use
propaganda for an unbiased reason. That the bias is why
the propaganda exists in the first place. Right, you're selling
(12:50):
an idea, and in order to do that, that means
that you have a side already. Right, You're not like
war might or might not be good. You decide that's
not propaganda or least not effective propaganda. Wouldn't that be
great if that was like how all the campaign commercials
worked as it was, like, you know, here are some candidates,
I don't know, make up your own mind now I
want apparently beautiful. It could be great to have a
(13:11):
parallel universe where everything, like everything when it comes to
public relations and and propaganda and all that sort of
stuff is just incredibly unbiased and mediocre. Just see how
far that world gets along at any rate. Uh, this,
this idea has been around for a while, guys. It's
not the word propaganda really got got going in the
(13:33):
early twentieth century, but the concept of using this means
of communicating to a people that have a common base
of knowledge and a common set of interests dates back
to ancient times. Yeah. Well, I mean, look at any
ancient Mesopotamian carving or something you know, like or depicting
(13:54):
like one of the rulers of ancient Egypt or something
like that. It's propaganda. It's there to show you how
powerful and glorious this leader is, sure and not necessarily
there to give you an accurate recounting of the facts
of history. Well, and to be fair, also, you know
you're not going to find this on a lot of
civilizations that didn't have that common set of knowledge. If
(14:16):
the peoples were scattered so much, then it just the
communication to the people was something that was necessary for
propaganda to work. Right, Well, you don't need propaganda if
you don't have a centralized body of government. That's that's true.
But you also don't need propaganda if I mean, you
can't have propaganda if you can't directly, in some way
communicate with your people. So ancient Greece is a great example.
(14:39):
The Athenians were subjected to propaganda and things like theatrical
productions or religious festivities. Also even just athletic games, the
things like the Olympics could become propaganda for Greece. But
beyond the ancient world, you know, we get into kind
of a more oh, I don't know, deliberate a aproach
(15:00):
to propaganda then simply hey, we're great, and those other
guys over the hill over there, they're not so great.
You get to the time of Philip the second of
Spain and Queen Elizabeth of England. They had a little
propaganda war about thing called the Spanish Armada. Spain was like,
look how awesome our armada is, and never actually said
by the way, we were completely defeated in that totally,
(15:25):
you know they were. They never acknowledged it in Spain
at the time anyway, whereas in England, in fact, I
think it was Sir Walter Raleigh who later on wrote
that he was disgusted by how Spain had presented the
Spanish Armada to the Spanish population as if the defeat
and had never happened. Whereas I'm thinking, like, you know,
(15:46):
come on, Queen Elizabeth, she was pretty savvy on the
ways of communicating to the English public as well, so
gone the other way, I'm pretty sure the England would
be like, oh, we totally whatever, he has a little tiff,
would you? Would you argue that at some point like
like Shakespeare was a propagandist, you know, he certainly was
(16:06):
in a way because the reason he wrote the Scottish
play was we're not in theater you can you can say,
all right, all right? When he wrote the Thane of
Cawdor's play, um, when he wrote Macbeth, he he made
sure to do a couple of things. First of all,
that's when James the First was now King of England.
(16:30):
He wanted to make his line look good. Yeah, So
in the line of King's presentation in Macbeth. The Last
King was thought, at least in scholarship, to have held
up a mirror and pointed it toward King James, to
suggest that James himself is the descendant on this line
that ends up taking over for Macbeth. Also, the play
(16:50):
was very short compared to most of Shakespeare's plays, partly,
at least according to scholarship, due to the fact Shakespeare
had heard that James the First had a short attention span,
and also it had which isn't it which James the
First was really interested in? So in many ways it
was probably or I can't tell if you're kidding, Is
this a known thing? James the First was into witches.
(17:11):
He was into which is probably the wrong way of
putting it. He was very much against them, fascinated by them.
Perhaps you could say terrified. Perhaps it's another way. I mean,
of course, this is a very early part of James
the First reign. And he wasn't into witches like I'm into,
which now he was. He wasn't watching the craft at
(17:32):
two am every night. Okay, it's not like you, Joe, Okay, sorry, man,
I almost thought that James and I had something going there. Yeah. Well,
so when we think of propaganda these days, obviously our
our opinions are very much influenced by what that meant
in the first half of the twentieth century. World War
one and two in Europe. Yeah, great in Britain in particular,
(17:53):
forged to the modern idea of propaganda during the early
months of the Great War as it was called then,
or World War One as we know, the war to
end all wars accepted totally didn't accept it, did not
at all. Yeah. The Uh, the British government first cut
off Germany's oceanic communication cables, meaning that they would lag
behind in in getting news and and to press and
(18:14):
supporters over in the United States, which was huge. Um.
And then in September of nineteen fourteen, remember that war
had only broken out in July of that year. Uh,
the British government set up Wellington House, which was the
secret organization that called upon journalists to write things that
were sympathetic to the British cause and also published its
own newspapers, eventually in eleven different languages, with a circulation
(18:37):
of like five hundred thousand copies per issue. Crazy amounts
of stuff being put out there. The Chinese language version
is credited by some historians as influencing public thought enough
that that China was able to declare war against Germany
and not have a revolt on its hands. And the
general idea of Wellington House was was to create publications
(18:59):
that seemed like they were grassroots not governmental, um Like
they were published by local commercial publishers instead of government
owned presses, and and the materials were circulated not by
government officials but by like local opinion makers. Yeah, we
see this come up again and again, not just in
in government propaganda, but in other means of trying to
(19:22):
sway public opinion. And one of the big ones is
let's try and make sure it looks like it's coming
from quote unquote real people and not not a voice
of authority. That way, it doesn't seem authoritarian. It seems
like a genuine ups you know, upwelling support for whatever
idea it happens to be. It's like, why, you know,
an advertiser might want to give some of their stuff
(19:44):
to a celebrity to where instead of like having a
spokesperson say you should wear our product, Yeah, if you give,
if you give Michael Jordan's your shoes. Then suddenly kids
like the shoes. Well, it looks like he's just authentically
enjoying these shoes, which maybe he is. Maybe he's holding
the shoes up to his face and going, I really
enjoy these. Yeah, you know, but that certainly is exploiting
(20:06):
something that they perceived about the way we form opinions
like that, that they picked up on the fact that
people are less likely to have their mind influenced by
something that they recognize as coming from a government source. Right,
And and you would still get information from government sources
as well, and like posters, things and songs, all this
(20:26):
kind of stuff that would be either uh sponsored by
the government or promoted through the government. And that wasn't
just in the u. K. Over in the United States.
On we had our own version of the Wellington House.
On April thirteen, nineteen seventeen, President Woodrow Wilson formed the
Committee on Public Information. That sounds so innocuous and boring.
Its to be like it sounds like it it almost
(20:49):
is like two steps away from one of the departments
in Yeah, it really does. The Committee on Public Information
that would be called like the Committee for Public Truth. Yeah,
which I said two steps away right. Uh. So he
put George Creel in charge. And Creel was a journalist.
Some called him a muckreaker. Um, he was also a
(21:09):
proponent of free speech. He said, you know, free speech
was really important, and obviously censorship from public uh sources
like government sources was completely wrong, and he did he
disagreed with it. However, since he was then put in
charge of this department, it became kind of his job
to at least filter stuff, if not outright censor it.
(21:31):
In effect, there were quite a few times where they
would tell people like, you should really not publish this story.
It would look bad, and they were trying to drum
up the government was trying to drum up support from
the American public to get involved in World War One,
which was not a popular idea at the time, to
send people overseas to fight someone else's war, which would
become another issue went during World War Two. So part
(21:55):
of it was this idea of let's publish the stories
that are going to help support public opinion to get
involved and downplay the ones that would not support it.
And one of the things that came out about this
is kind of the idea that we see over and
over again with propaganda, which is, if you can control
the flow of information to a people so that they
(22:16):
only get one side of the story, then obviously it's
going to be easier for you to sway a public
opinion in support of that. If they're not, if not
getting the full story, then any decision they make is
going to be based upon a limited set of information. Sure,
that's ostensibly why countries like like China don't allow full
access to the Internet, or North Korea, which is probably
(22:39):
I would say North Korea has got this down pat
with with as far as propaganda goes. Yeah, But one
thing we can say about propaganda in this period, and
even a lot of propaganda today, is that a lot
of it is still not what I would call necessarily
scientifically informed. It's in a lot of cases, I don't
(22:59):
think that they researched, like what would be the most
effective way to get people to think the way I
want them to think that they just kind of intuitively sense,
like you don't want people hearing bad things about the leadership.
What's funny is that a lot of research actually has
gone into this, although from sources that would seem unusual.
(23:20):
For example, one of the people who was working at
the cp I was a guy by the name of
Edward Burnet's. Yeah he was. He was really good people
thinking what he wanted them to think. Well, I guess
we should transition then to talking a little bit about
Edward Burnet's and maybe the the overlap between propaganda and advertising,
(23:42):
how how that creates this mass mind control effect. Yeah,
so he was not just someone who worked in propaganda.
He worked in public relations. You could argue that it's advertising,
but really it was pr He his job. He saw
it as he would be hired by companies to help
them do whatever they did more effectively by convincing the
(24:03):
public that whatever that company did was awesome. Sure. Sure,
he was born, let us say, in Vienna, in although
his family did move to the United States when he
was just a baby. I think he was like one
year old. And his uncle, interestingly enough, was one Sigmund Freud. Yeah,
it's not that interesting an uncle. I saw where you
(24:28):
were going a mile away and I approved, sir. Yes.
So Freud obviously very influential to to Berne's. Bernice's was
Depending upon whom you read, Some people say, well, he
was a genius because he was able to study psychology
and sociology and then incorporate those ideas directly into a
practical approach. When it came to pr other people said, no,
(24:50):
he was more of a guy who could just cut
and paste cool ideas that a lot of other people
would come up with and just put them together in
a new format that was really effective. So again, in
my mind, that's still genius either way. He was real effective. Yeah.
So here's some stories about ways he was able to
change public opinion. And the first one is probably the
(25:11):
most famous that he's associated with, which was getting women
to smoke uh in public, specifically Lucky Strike Cigarettes. So
Lucky Strike Cigarettes had hired him saying, we want to
sell more cigarettes, and he was looking around at the
potential markets, and one large untapped market was females. And
it's because well, a couple of reasons. One the biggest
(25:34):
one is the social stigma that was against women smoking
in public. It was considered vulgar. Sure, sure, And and
this I we should put in was in the nineteen twenties. Yeah, yeah,
And uh. There's also, by the way, a series of
stuff they don't want you to Know videos that explains
all of the things that Bernet's got up to, which
I highly recommend you check out. But the the the
(25:57):
other issue, slightly more um frivolous, I would say, is
that the color green, which is what the Lucky Strikes
packaging was, it was the dark green color that it
was not seen as fashionable, and therefore women were less
likely to purchase them even if they did. I'll see
that smoking in public Wasn't this this stigmatized activity. I
(26:21):
don't quite get that there was a time when just
green was out. Yeah, he just was not. It was
not a thing. So he did, he did. His His
attack was multi pronged. One of those was to get
people to change their opinion about the color green, and
so he started to He started to uh chat with
some of his buddies who were fashion designers, people like
(26:43):
people who were designing fashions in France and convincing them
to add green into the fashion lines for the following season.
So the Parisian fashions that were coming out were incorporating
this color of green. So suddenly green was seen as
a very fashionable color. But that still doesn't he still
doesn't still doesn't address the other problem right about women's sing.
(27:06):
But luckily there was this whole women's suffragate movement. There
was the whole women's live thing you know that needed
to that was picking up steam, and he thought, Hey,
I'm going to leverage this, this movement to work to
my benefit. He ended up convincing several women who were
(27:27):
involved in the women's liberation movement to organize a march
while smoking lucky Strikes cigarettes as a way of saying
they were they were. Um, there was like kind of
an empowerment uh symbol, right, the idea that the women
were the equals to men, that they could do the
same things men could do, including smoking in public. Yes,
(27:49):
do what you want to get cancer, whatever you want.
And they were even calling them torches for freedom, that's
what the cigarettes were being referred to as. And this
domination really helped swing things so that women were buying
cigarettes and smoking in public. And you could argue that
in part it helped change some public perception of women.
(28:11):
But and it got him smoking. So it's not like
it's it's not like it's a win win all around. Um.
But that's not the only thing he's responsible for. Like
there are other big, big things, like big cultural level things.
Are you saying Berne's is the reason that bacon isn't
a sometimes food. Berne's is the reason that He's I'm
(28:34):
not saying he's the reason that bacon has now become
an all the time's food. That really has to do
with Brooklyn, New York. No, it has to do with
bumper stickers and stupidity. It started with hipsters and ended
up kind of boiling out from there, So I'm going
to the source there. But yeah, no, Bernie's. Bernie's was
he was hired by a company that, among other things,
(28:55):
produced bacon, and they wanted to be able to sell
more bacon, so he ended up writing as as the
stuff they don't want you to know, episode says a
carefully worded letter to about five thousand doctors asking what
would be more healthy for people, a hearty breakfast or
a light breakfast. As far as I know, he didn't
(29:17):
actually use the word bacon in either of those. Then
then he said, um where he launched a public relations
campaigns in four thousand five posicians agree that a breakfast
hearty breakfast of bacon and eggs is best for you,
and ended up and creating this market for bacon to
become a breakfast food in the United States. The reason
(29:37):
that we eat bacon for breakfast here in the US
is Edward Berney's. That's it. So the things he was
that he started to do have become essentially the the
like to do list for PR firms these days. So
he actually sort of had a something approaching a more
scientific methodology for figuring out how to change people's minds
(29:59):
about I don't know what you eat for breakfast or
when you should smoke cigarette. He was he was looking
at things that tended that would tend to influence people
and then try to leverage those so for things like
an expert opinion that would be something that could end
up influencing someone. So he would look for experts or
spokespeople who would end up lending legitimates legitimacy to whatever
(30:22):
claims he was making. Right, I'm sure you've seen those
old commercials that some of them are on YouTube now
with more doctors smoke camels Healthier for your Love. It
just makes me think that that Burnet's would have like
run circles around Don Draper. I mean, it's just like
there was there would be no hope for Draper against Burns. Yeah, yeah,
and it was. It was really so brilliant because he
(30:43):
wasn't really marketing particular branded products or even particular brands.
He was marketing opinions and feelings and urges and concepts. Yeah,
and he was creating word of mouth campaigns, which again
goes back to what we were saying before with governments
about the legitimacy seems to come from the fact that
it's it's a grassroots approach as opposed to something that's
(31:05):
top down. If it looks like it's bottom up, people
tend to think, oh, well this, uh, this, this is
something that people really do care about, something I should
care about one way or the other. It's I think
the same reason you see so many companies today trying
to get like hashtags going on Twitter like get people
to participate, and why that's so often is just a miserable,
(31:26):
embarrassing failure. Yeah, it's so crude. Uh if if you're
lifting it up next to next to what Bernese was doing,
because if you say to someone, hey, be interested in
our product with this keyword, then you're you're ruining the
entire experiment. Yeah, yeah, you're showing your hands. It's it's
very rare when a brand can go out there and
(31:47):
and start using a hashtag effectively, it does happen, but
it's far more common that we see these things rise
up because maybe there are a couple of notable personalities
who use it and then it spreads from there. Occasionally,
it's an event that happens and then something that is
uh directly tied to that event becomes like the zeitgeist
(32:08):
for whatever that is. Um. Anyway, getting back to Burne's
he actually wrote a book about his methodology. He called
it Crystallizing Public Opinion, and um, it was reprinted back
in I think, but he comes across as a little
uh condescending, essentially saying that the public are dumb and
they need to be led. I mean, really, it is
(32:30):
very much in that are pretty dumb. What do we
need to? Yeah, And I feel like if I were
standing next to Edward Burnet's I would be like, man,
I'm a more on crap. I don't know that i'd
feel dumb, but I would certainly be like, I'm not
I'm not even baking anymore. I haven't even baken in
a long time anyway, But that's not the point. So uh,
(32:52):
Apart from that one day. But that was a slip.
So then there was also the the another book he
wrote called Propaganda, in which he made the case for
the manipulation of public opinion as a necessary component of democracy.
Of democracy, but you can't have democracy unless you first
tell the people what they need to vote on and
why they need to vote that way, I'm oversimplifying. No, no no, no,
(33:15):
but I mean, but I totally believe that that's okay,
that's a thing. Well, you can look at it in
a certain kind of way by saying, uh, a democracy,
if it is working properly, is only as good as
its people. And if you have people in a properly
functioning democracy who widely hold very bad opinions, then you're
(33:37):
going to end up with very bad government. Yeah, it's
it's definitely a tricksy subject. Yes, but Bernet's was not
the only person who is working in in this kind
of sticky ideological matter around those times. Um, I wanted
(33:58):
to talk for a moment about Diamond. I know, because
you love talking about I do. I do. If you
have either watched brain stuff or listened to stuff they
don't want you to Nose podcast, then you may have
heard me talk about diamonds before. But but basically so
diamonds are the engagement ring stone of choice because of
a marketing campaign created by de Beers, which is that cartel.
(34:22):
If you so choose, you could say vertical diamond mining,
slash accrediting slash distribution corporation. You can say monopoly, you
could say monopoly. Any of those words are probably valid. Uh.
Around around the nineteen thirties, the demand for diamonds was falling.
They were seen as a luxury that the average person
didn't need, and they were no longer a true rarity
(34:44):
since the discovery of really huge deposits of them in
South Africa. UH. Only about ten percent of engagement rings
around that time. Moore Diamonds and so Beers, which had
all of these diamonds, was like, hey, n w A
or ad agency, can you launch us a multimedia campaign
that will push diamonds onto the fingers of some of
(35:05):
brides in the United States By the two thousand's, that's
actually probably not what they said, but that's what ended
up happening. Um the uh uh. And we are not
the only country where that occurred. You know. Back in
the early days, there were fashion columns that were written
by an agency representative that we're not reported as being
(35:26):
written by an agency representative, that we're pushing diamonds. They
had these these loner programs to get jewelry onto the
rich and the famous for big socialite events where these
photographs would be published in newspapers or uh, you know,
whenever Marilyn and Row was wearing diamonds in a movie,
they were probably loaned to her from de Beers. M Simultaneously,
(35:49):
they started educating the public to increase the demand for
more expensive diamonds. Those four cs are completely a de
Beers and w Air collaboration. Um. Simultaneously, they were also
propagating the idea that diamonds should never be resold. Thus
they were maintaining the demand for new diamonds. Um. It's
(36:10):
completely insidious. And if you would like to hear a
very long history on that, well done, very long. I
mean it's long enough, it's long enough to cover the territory.
It's you can check out stuff they don't want you
to to nose. A podcast episode from February seventeen of
this year being it's a good podcast, uh looking ahead
(36:35):
because now we've you know, obviously World War two propaganda
was huge. And obviously we live in an era of
advertising today where we are constantly surrounded by ads, whether
it's in billboards or in video or an audio, or
on our clothing or yeah, there's it's it's everywhere, to
the point where actually their entire people whose whose jobs
(36:57):
depend upon How can we get over advertising blindness where
people have developed an immunity to certain types of advertising
They just don't even it doesn't even register with them anymore. Uh,
Looking ahead, like what's the future of propaganda? I found
an interesting interview with a guy named Sean Gorley who
did a TED talk back in two thousand nine, and
(37:19):
his sense talked about this couple of times. Um, he's
a data analysis expert, and it was talking about in
the future, we'll see governments participate in propaganda through social
media conversations, which makes perfect sense. We're just talking about
how the approach of you know, making this a grassroots
kind of approach benefits the adoption of certain ideas and
(37:41):
whether you're trying to sell, you know, a line of
clothing or sell the idea of a big political policy.
Oh well, it totally makes sense. I mean you will
see politicians that, for example, have a Twitter account or
a Facebook account. I mean pretty much all of them
do now, at least in the United States that I'm
whereof it. It's rare that you encounter a politician who
(38:02):
doesn't have those things, um. And then they have followers,
of course, who are people who they can count on
to be ideologically and perhaps even just culturally or socially
uh in line with them, and then they can selectively
report the things they want to report on their feed
on Facebook and say like, hey, here's a news item
(38:24):
that's flattering to me and the things I support, and
then they know that their followers will share that with
their friends and comment on it positively. It's a very uh,
it's a very productive venue, we might say, right. And
it gets even creepier than that, because gord Lee's point
was that we can use data analysis to identify trends
(38:45):
before they really take off. So let's say, for example
that Lauren, you're a politician, and let's say that the
data analysis has shown that there is an uh a
growing but not huge public opinion that is counter to
your strategies, it's counter to your philosophy. What am I
going to do about it? And through it that analysis
(39:06):
you discover the best ways to create counter stories, to
insert them into the conversation and thus head this off
before it becomes a big trend. So it's the same
idea as creating counterintelligence or counterpropaganda that has dated back
ever since we started talking about propaganda, but doing so
on a on a scale that's much more um precise
(39:30):
in the sense that you are you're detecting these things
before they even become noticeable on a wide scale basis.
So you're actually talking about using big data to examine
things like public opinion and be able to try and
influence it before it becomes like a conscious part of
the public conversation. Yeah, and because so much of our
(39:54):
activity takes place on platforms that are largely public, not
all of us do obviously, but if you happen to
have a publicly readable Twitter feed or a publicly readable
Facebook page or some other social platform, then that information
can be gleaned by a device that really like a
(40:17):
web crawler that's looking for keywords to start doing things
like data analysis to see what kind of opinions are
coming up and how best to either either encourage those
opinions or suppress them. You know, another thing, I can
see very much is personalized propaganda like so like personalized
advertising exactly. Yeah, I mean yeah, much the same way
(40:41):
that the ads you get on Facebook or determined by
what some kind of algorithm has figured out you might
be interested in. Boy, are they way off too. They
can probably also figure I've gotten some really I've gotten
some bizarre ones that I've gotten some very sharp ones
as well. Yeah, but I'm sure that they will be
(41:02):
able to also figure out, Hey, you know, we can
do some tests and figure out that people who have
these same seven interests that you do are much more
strongly affected by X type of propaganda than by Y approach. Sure, yeah,
it can be, you know, especially like they look at activity.
Let's take Facebook, for example, the things that you've hit
(41:22):
like versus the things that you you know, you might
have looked at but you didn't really Then that could
end up giving more information. I mean, there's a lot
of data there. I mean, just assuming that someone Let's
just take Facebook itself for example. Let's say that Facebook
actually looks at how long things typically stay in your
(41:44):
view when you are active on Facebook, which they do
They know which which stories you are looking at versus
which ones you're just scrolling past. They know how to
serve that stuff up to you, and they know how
long you're looking at your ex's profile they do. They
know what there you've clicked through news articles, clicked through
to news articles, I should say, And so this kind
(42:05):
of stuff can shape how they present information to you.
Everything from just making Facebook more effective, which you could
argue is, oh, well, that's okay, because we want whatever
we're using to be the best experience possible to presenting
the kinds of stuff you are most likely to act
upon in an advertising capacity. So the ways that Facebook
would make money, you know, the the fact that you
(42:26):
would be more likely to click on this stuff that, which,
depending on your point of view, either benefits everyone or
is super creepy, right, because it either means that you
are going to not waste your time on stuff that
doesn't matter to you and maybe you'll discover things that
actually do matter to you. But on the other hand,
it's like, well, Facebook's telling me what I should like. Now. Ideally,
(42:50):
I know that I'm always going to be encountering propaganda, advertising, etcetera.
I'm never going to avoid that, and it's not like
that's going to go away. I don't think we're going
to have a future where magically everyone says, you know what,
I'm not going to try to get people to do
the things I would like them to do. That's just
that's not going to happen. So not unless you go,
you know, totally off the grid, right yeah, yeah, if
(43:11):
I end up getting a log cabin someplace and just
cut ties with everybody, which I don't think I could do.
I'm not good at chopping wood. So the the key
here is that you want to get as much access
to as many different sources of information as possible, knowing
that everyone has their agenda, even if it's something like
(43:32):
their agenda is to try and create an unbiased objective approach.
We're humans, so sometimes that just doesn't happen, and not
even on a conscious basis, But our ability to access
as many different sources of information as possible at least
gives us the opportunity to have as close to an
objective view as possible. So that that's something that some
(43:54):
of us have the luxury of because we live in
a place where we can have understricted access to formation,
and we furthermore have the type of lifestyle that allows
us to spend time perusing that sort of information exactly.
So we're doubly privileged in that sense. But then you
also have to take into account that human beings can
be really lazy, and since we're lazy, then it means
(44:15):
that we also have a responsibility to overcome that laziness
and seek this stuff out because it's it's it's just
as possible to have a society a culture that has
free access to all this stuff at least on you know,
on one level, like a hypothetical level, but through practice,
no one bothers to do it, and so you end
(44:37):
up you don't have to worry about them accessing multiple
sources of information. You can send out whatever messages you want. So, um,
just something to keep in mind. I think I think
most of our listeners are probably the type who goes
seeking information from as many sources as possible just to
you know, get a really good view of what's happening.
It doesn't mean that you agree with all of them
or any of them. Even I would be disturbed if
(45:00):
you agreed with information from all of your sources. Yeah,
that would be back to double think again. Yeah, but
I think we're we're pretty much wrapping it up for
this first part here, but you should definitely tune in
next time because next time we're going to get into
the crazy territory of persuasive technology, moral enhancement. When is
(45:20):
it maybe right to use mind control? What color makes
you do things? Yes, all of that and more in
our next episode. And yeah, it's some really interesting stuff
that I did not know before I started researching for
for these episodes about what specifically people are doing to
use these are modern technologies to propagate propaganda. Yeah, and
(45:44):
to just in some cases just try to make the
world a better place, but that kind of that kind
of approaches. Who's idea of better? Yeah? Yeah, you know
not all not all pigs are equal? Wait what I
guess all pigs are cool, but some are more equal
than others. Which there you know, different orwell same idea? Sure? Yeah,
(46:07):
why that wasn't What about bacon? Okay I'm getting confused?
Or well, if you want to get in touch with this,
you can s where I was gonna go. Yeah, you
can let us know. You can say us an email.
Our address is fw thinking at how Stuff Works dot com,
or drop us a line on Facebook, on Twitter, or
on Google Plus. A Twitter and Google Plus. We are
(46:27):
f w Thinking. Just search fw thinking on Facebook we'll
pop up. Do you have any suggestions for future episodes?
You've got comments, you get questions, send those to us.
We look forward to hearing from you, and you'll hear
from us again. For more on this topic in the
future of technology, visit forward thinking dot Com, brought to
(46:59):
you by Toyota. Let's Go Places,
Brought to you by Toyota. Let's go places. Welcome to
Forward Thinking, Taylor, and welcome to Forward Thinking, a podcast
that looks at the future and says it's a long
way to Tipperary. I'm Lauren Bocaba and I'm Joe McCormick,
(00:22):
and today we're going to be starting the first part
of a two part episode. Yeah, this is a topic
so big it could not be contained within a single show.
And really we just kept finding notes, Like right before
we came in here and sat down, we were like,
oh no, there's more, There's so much more. Well, it
is a somewhat mind bending topic, quite quite epic and
(00:46):
scope it turns out. But so to set the scene
for what we're going to talk about today, I want
to have a little, a little mind experiment. All right, Okay,
think of yourself easy. I know it's easy for you
on that, but who I mean, think about what you
think When you think of yourself. There's sort of like
(01:06):
a thing you have in your mind. It's your personality,
your traits, the things that the ways you would describe
yourself in your Okay Cupid profile. If you're being honest,
I guess and if I'm no longer afraid of my wife.
Okay um, But there's sort of a problem with playing
this game because we like to think of ourselves as
(01:29):
sort of dependable and unchanging, like we are who we are,
and we think each of our personalities is sort of
one fixed, eternal feature of the universe. There's there's Jonathan,
and he's who Jonathan is. But deep down we sort
of all know it's not really like that, right, I mean,
human thought and behavior is sometimes disturbingly malleable. Yeah, So
(01:56):
to some extent, we can change what kinds of people
we are. You can form new habits and break old ones,
and experiences you know, can change the way you would
react in any given situation. We can take steps to
change ourselves, and it's easy to see how since we
can change ourselves, we could probably also take steps to
(02:18):
change other people or have other people change us. Exactly right,
And so, like most other measurable phenomena in the world,
deliberate methods of changing human thought and behavior are things
that can be studied scientifically, and right now we might
not know a whole lot about this field, but we
(02:39):
will probably know more and more as time goes on.
So that brings me to today's topic, mind control. Yeah,
will it be a thing in the future? Is now
how reliable will the science of controlling human thought and
behavior become? Is this a thing that's good or bad
(03:00):
for humanity? I mean, obviously the sort of implication is
that it's bad. But what what are all the ways
we could look at it? Um? And how's it going
to play out? Yeah? And this is something that I
really enjoy reading about in science fiction because obviously, you know,
(03:21):
so many novels that warn us against this kind of stuff, right,
and a lot of them are that really good dystopian
sort of novel that's just so much fun to read. Yeah. Well, right,
because that's the ultimate type of oppression that's imagined in
in these dystopian futures. Right, It's not just that you
are sort of physically constrained and imprisoned and threatened. It's
(03:42):
that your very sense of self is through. Yeah, it's
the state. The state changes who you are, right, Right,
It's it's that you're physically constrained and you're happy about it. Yeah,
And you don't know not to be happy about it,
or why you would ever be unhappy about it. Yeah,
So says some examples as obviously anyone who has delved
(04:03):
into science fiction would be aware of these, but Orwell's
is a great example. Oh yeah, yeah, And this is
said in a society that is so steeped in propaganda
that that its citizens are trained in the art of
double things, holding two contradictory thoughts at the same time,
also double belie and believing them both. And double think
(04:25):
actually has a couple of different um um uses in
the book. But for example, you might be told, uh that,
let's say that war means peace. Let's that's a simple example.
And in the classic sense of double thing, not only
would you think that war means peace, but that eventually
(04:45):
the concept of war would completely change, so that when
you think the word war, you're thinking what of the
concept piece that that takes on the brand new meaning,
and that it becomes the reality from that point for word.
So really it's about how this uh, this this despotic
(05:06):
government really is defining reality and enforcing that reality among citizens.
And if you don't play along, you get in trouble.
And most people play along because you know, that's that's
what they're told to do. They're they're kind of you know,
they're kind of just just cogs and a wheel at
that point. And in fact there's also a UM and
(05:27):
a manufactured disparity between the highest of the highs and
the lowest of the lows, where they're very small percentage
of people are very very small percentage of people in
the upper class, a slightly larger but still pretty small
percentage of people in the middle class, and then everyone
else and the main characters in UM sort of the
the the upper class in a sense like kind of
(05:50):
the in the middle class slash upper class area UM.
And things do not go well for him. But then
we also have Anthony Burgess's clockwork R. Right, So there
you've got this kind of sense of at least seemingly
benevolent mind control. Right. It's implemented as a crime reduction initiative. Essentially,
(06:13):
they take a young man who is by all accounts
not a nice guy, so he is truly reprehensible. Yeah,
but they do some techniques on him. I think it's
a combination of of drugs and then behavioral conditioning. It's
a version therapy to force him to have a very
visceral negative reaction to any form of violence. Yeah, Essentially,
(06:35):
all the things that he absolutely adored when he was
on his own, uh, and could be the free, willing
sociopath that he was have now turned into triggers to
make him feel feel violently ill, even so, going so
far as the music that he used to love, which
is actually that's kind of the breaking point for him
(06:55):
is not so much the violence as his inability to
choose to be violent, but the music has been taken
from him as well. And Uh, what's interesting to me
about this book is that the American version, for the
longest time, left off the final chapter um chapter one,
so it into a chapter twenty where the main character,
(07:17):
Alex regains his ability to make choices to be a terrible,
terrible person. And so it's kind of left up to
the reader to one wonder whether or not it was
better to remove his ability to choose to be evil, thus,
you know, kind of removing part of his humanity. Uh.
And no, or and that way he could not commit wrong,
(07:40):
Or was it better to allow him the ability to
commit wrong, knowing that that was a potential outcome. Uh? Yeah,
that that old question of whether without the capacity to
to do evil, anyone can ever truly be good? Yeah,
And so chapter one negates that question. Chapter twenty one,
Alex grow was up and essentially Burgess at this point
(08:02):
was kind of like, you know, people grow out of it.
You know, you can be a sociopathic teenager, but eventually
you mature and then you realize, oh, I was kind
of a jerk, and so I don't know if you
grow out of just driving around murdering people. That's what
that's what chapter one says. Well, that's that's why I
kind of prefer chapter the one that does not have
(08:24):
chapter twenty one in it um And because of that reason,
and uh so then we've got Altis Huxley's Brave New World.
And the reason I group these three togethers all three
deal with a world in which the government is trying
to impose a particular order in the world. And in
this case, you've got a government that I'm actually an
(08:45):
entire society that's evolved to the point where everything is
predetermined for everybody. So as soon as as you have
a fertilized egg, then genetic test determined where that fertilized
egg is going to end up within that society, whether
it will be a uh in their cast system, whether
(09:07):
it will be in the upper casts or lower casts.
Lower casts are actually genetically and chemically altered so that
they have a limit to the amount of intelligence that
they can have. Their their physical capabilities are limited as well,
and so it's a very restrictive world. And uh and
again we the the character's journey is one of discovery
(09:29):
about how the world that they didn't know was oppressive,
how oppressive it actually was. Yeah. So yeah, the main
characters in Brave New World that they might live a
very sort of like placid and comfortable existence in a way,
but that it could be seen as without having the
true vitality of life. And they sort of discover the
(09:49):
romantic worldview, right right, the passion of being able to
completely mess yourself up. Yeah. Yeah, but of course we
don't have systems like this in the real world. I mean,
you might get some people out there saying, like, no, man,
we're living in nineteen eight four. Come on, open your eyes, people. Well,
we don't really have like like full mind control methods
(10:14):
bearing down on us, especially not ones that are deliberately
controlled and studied. We we have culture, and one could
in fact look at culture as an elaborate mind control method,
but it's something that arose naturally out of you know,
just human behavior over hundreds of years, not not a
(10:35):
deliberate and scientifically informed attempt to control how people in
various regions of the world would think. That's what our
vampire overlords want you to think. Well, there's also, of course,
the the the attempts to manipulate that culture, to actually
leverage elements of that culture in order to get public
(10:57):
opinion thinking one thing or an other. So it's it's
while it's true that the uh, the cultural element is
is certainly more prevalent than any kind of science fiction
attempt to control people on individual basis, that cultural element
is something that not only are we aware of, but
we try to exploit and by we I mean various
(11:19):
various humans, not just not not just me. Now, there
are whole fields of study outside of Jonathan Strickland that
are devoted to figuring out, you know, how to influence
actions and decisions, either to to make the stuff that
we have more efficient for us to use, or to
(11:41):
you know, profit businesses that want to sell us stuff yep,
or profit governments that want to sell us ideas well.
Exactly right. I think that's one of the reasons that
if you're looking at the most old fashioned forms of
mind control and sort of the science of influencing behavior
and thought and emotion and opinion, one of the first
places to look is advertising and propaganda. And really the
(12:05):
two are so hand in hand related, I mean in
many many ways. So propaganda will will start with that,
and that's defined as usually biased or misleading information used
to sway public opinion on a matter. It's not necessarily misleading,
like could it be propaganda if it if it doesn't
say any facts that aren't true, it could certainly be
(12:28):
propaganda by presenting true facts but not presenting all the facts,
I mean propaganda misleading It can't You could argue it's misleading, yes,
And you could argue also that biased doesn't necessarily mean nefarious,
but it does mean that there is. You don't use
propaganda for an unbiased reason. That the bias is why
the propaganda exists in the first place. Right, you're selling
(12:50):
an idea, and in order to do that, that means
that you have a side already. Right, You're not like
war might or might not be good. You decide that's
not propaganda or least not effective propaganda. Wouldn't that be
great if that was like how all the campaign commercials
worked as it was, like, you know, here are some candidates,
I don't know, make up your own mind now I
want apparently beautiful. It could be great to have a
(13:11):
parallel universe where everything, like everything when it comes to
public relations and and propaganda and all that sort of
stuff is just incredibly unbiased and mediocre. Just see how
far that world gets along at any rate. Uh, this,
this idea has been around for a while, guys. It's
not the word propaganda really got got going in the
(13:33):
early twentieth century, but the concept of using this means
of communicating to a people that have a common base
of knowledge and a common set of interests dates back
to ancient times. Yeah. Well, I mean, look at any
ancient Mesopotamian carving or something you know, like or depicting
(13:54):
like one of the rulers of ancient Egypt or something
like that. It's propaganda. It's there to show you how
powerful and glorious this leader is, sure and not necessarily
there to give you an accurate recounting of the facts
of history. Well, and to be fair, also, you know
you're not going to find this on a lot of
civilizations that didn't have that common set of knowledge. If
(14:16):
the peoples were scattered so much, then it just the
communication to the people was something that was necessary for
propaganda to work. Right, Well, you don't need propaganda if
you don't have a centralized body of government. That's that's true.
But you also don't need propaganda if I mean, you
can't have propaganda if you can't directly, in some way
communicate with your people. So ancient Greece is a great example.
(14:39):
The Athenians were subjected to propaganda and things like theatrical
productions or religious festivities. Also even just athletic games, the
things like the Olympics could become propaganda for Greece. But
beyond the ancient world, you know, we get into kind
of a more oh, I don't know, deliberate a aproach
(15:00):
to propaganda then simply hey, we're great, and those other
guys over the hill over there, they're not so great.
You get to the time of Philip the second of
Spain and Queen Elizabeth of England. They had a little
propaganda war about thing called the Spanish Armada. Spain was like,
look how awesome our armada is, and never actually said
by the way, we were completely defeated in that totally,
(15:25):
you know they were. They never acknowledged it in Spain
at the time anyway, whereas in England, in fact, I
think it was Sir Walter Raleigh who later on wrote
that he was disgusted by how Spain had presented the
Spanish Armada to the Spanish population as if the defeat
and had never happened. Whereas I'm thinking, like, you know,
(15:46):
come on, Queen Elizabeth, she was pretty savvy on the
ways of communicating to the English public as well, so
gone the other way, I'm pretty sure the England would
be like, oh, we totally whatever, he has a little tiff,
would you? Would you argue that at some point like
like Shakespeare was a propagandist, you know, he certainly was
(16:06):
in a way because the reason he wrote the Scottish
play was we're not in theater you can you can say,
all right, all right? When he wrote the Thane of
Cawdor's play, um, when he wrote Macbeth, he he made
sure to do a couple of things. First of all,
that's when James the First was now King of England.
(16:30):
He wanted to make his line look good. Yeah, So
in the line of King's presentation in Macbeth. The Last
King was thought, at least in scholarship, to have held
up a mirror and pointed it toward King James, to
suggest that James himself is the descendant on this line
that ends up taking over for Macbeth. Also, the play
(16:50):
was very short compared to most of Shakespeare's plays, partly,
at least according to scholarship, due to the fact Shakespeare
had heard that James the First had a short attention span,
and also it had which isn't it which James the
First was really interested in? So in many ways it
was probably or I can't tell if you're kidding, Is
this a known thing? James the First was into witches.
(17:11):
He was into which is probably the wrong way of
putting it. He was very much against them, fascinated by them.
Perhaps you could say terrified. Perhaps it's another way. I mean,
of course, this is a very early part of James
the First reign. And he wasn't into witches like I'm into,
which now he was. He wasn't watching the craft at
(17:32):
two am every night. Okay, it's not like you, Joe, Okay, sorry, man,
I almost thought that James and I had something going there. Yeah. Well,
so when we think of propaganda these days, obviously our
our opinions are very much influenced by what that meant
in the first half of the twentieth century. World War
one and two in Europe. Yeah, great in Britain in particular,
(17:53):
forged to the modern idea of propaganda during the early
months of the Great War as it was called then,
or World War One as we know, the war to
end all wars accepted totally didn't accept it, did not
at all. Yeah. The Uh, the British government first cut
off Germany's oceanic communication cables, meaning that they would lag
behind in in getting news and and to press and
(18:14):
supporters over in the United States, which was huge. Um.
And then in September of nineteen fourteen, remember that war
had only broken out in July of that year. Uh,
the British government set up Wellington House, which was the
secret organization that called upon journalists to write things that
were sympathetic to the British cause and also published its
own newspapers, eventually in eleven different languages, with a circulation
(18:37):
of like five hundred thousand copies per issue. Crazy amounts
of stuff being put out there. The Chinese language version
is credited by some historians as influencing public thought enough
that that China was able to declare war against Germany
and not have a revolt on its hands. And the
general idea of Wellington House was was to create publications
(18:59):
that seemed like they were grassroots not governmental, um Like
they were published by local commercial publishers instead of government
owned presses, and and the materials were circulated not by
government officials but by like local opinion makers. Yeah, we
see this come up again and again, not just in
in government propaganda, but in other means of trying to
(19:22):
sway public opinion. And one of the big ones is
let's try and make sure it looks like it's coming
from quote unquote real people and not not a voice
of authority. That way, it doesn't seem authoritarian. It seems
like a genuine ups you know, upwelling support for whatever
idea it happens to be. It's like, why, you know,
an advertiser might want to give some of their stuff
(19:44):
to a celebrity to where instead of like having a
spokesperson say you should wear our product, Yeah, if you give,
if you give Michael Jordan's your shoes. Then suddenly kids
like the shoes. Well, it looks like he's just authentically
enjoying these shoes, which maybe he is. Maybe he's holding
the shoes up to his face and going, I really
enjoy these. Yeah, you know, but that certainly is exploiting
(20:06):
something that they perceived about the way we form opinions
like that, that they picked up on the fact that
people are less likely to have their mind influenced by
something that they recognize as coming from a government source. Right,
And and you would still get information from government sources
as well, and like posters, things and songs, all this
(20:26):
kind of stuff that would be either uh sponsored by
the government or promoted through the government. And that wasn't
just in the u. K. Over in the United States.
On we had our own version of the Wellington House.
On April thirteen, nineteen seventeen, President Woodrow Wilson formed the
Committee on Public Information. That sounds so innocuous and boring.
Its to be like it sounds like it it almost
(20:49):
is like two steps away from one of the departments
in Yeah, it really does. The Committee on Public Information
that would be called like the Committee for Public Truth. Yeah,
which I said two steps away right. Uh. So he
put George Creel in charge. And Creel was a journalist.
Some called him a muckreaker. Um, he was also a
(21:09):
proponent of free speech. He said, you know, free speech
was really important, and obviously censorship from public uh sources
like government sources was completely wrong, and he did he
disagreed with it. However, since he was then put in
charge of this department, it became kind of his job
to at least filter stuff, if not outright censor it.
(21:31):
In effect, there were quite a few times where they
would tell people like, you should really not publish this story.
It would look bad, and they were trying to drum
up the government was trying to drum up support from
the American public to get involved in World War One,
which was not a popular idea at the time, to
send people overseas to fight someone else's war, which would
become another issue went during World War Two. So part
(21:55):
of it was this idea of let's publish the stories
that are going to help support public opinion to get
involved and downplay the ones that would not support it.
And one of the things that came out about this
is kind of the idea that we see over and
over again with propaganda, which is, if you can control
the flow of information to a people so that they
(22:16):
only get one side of the story, then obviously it's
going to be easier for you to sway a public
opinion in support of that. If they're not, if not
getting the full story, then any decision they make is
going to be based upon a limited set of information. Sure,
that's ostensibly why countries like like China don't allow full
access to the Internet, or North Korea, which is probably
(22:39):
I would say North Korea has got this down pat
with with as far as propaganda goes. Yeah, But one
thing we can say about propaganda in this period, and
even a lot of propaganda today, is that a lot
of it is still not what I would call necessarily
scientifically informed. It's in a lot of cases, I don't
(22:59):
think that they researched, like what would be the most
effective way to get people to think the way I
want them to think that they just kind of intuitively sense,
like you don't want people hearing bad things about the leadership.
What's funny is that a lot of research actually has
gone into this, although from sources that would seem unusual.
(23:20):
For example, one of the people who was working at
the cp I was a guy by the name of
Edward Burnet's. Yeah he was. He was really good people
thinking what he wanted them to think. Well, I guess
we should transition then to talking a little bit about
Edward Burnet's and maybe the the overlap between propaganda and advertising,
(23:42):
how how that creates this mass mind control effect. Yeah,
so he was not just someone who worked in propaganda.
He worked in public relations. You could argue that it's advertising,
but really it was pr He his job. He saw
it as he would be hired by companies to help
them do whatever they did more effectively by convincing the
(24:03):
public that whatever that company did was awesome. Sure. Sure,
he was born, let us say, in Vienna, in although
his family did move to the United States when he
was just a baby. I think he was like one
year old. And his uncle, interestingly enough, was one Sigmund Freud. Yeah,
it's not that interesting an uncle. I saw where you
(24:28):
were going a mile away and I approved, sir. Yes.
So Freud obviously very influential to to Berne's. Bernice's was
Depending upon whom you read, Some people say, well, he
was a genius because he was able to study psychology
and sociology and then incorporate those ideas directly into a
practical approach. When it came to pr other people said, no,
(24:50):
he was more of a guy who could just cut
and paste cool ideas that a lot of other people
would come up with and just put them together in
a new format that was really effective. So again, in
my mind, that's still genius either way. He was real effective. Yeah.
So here's some stories about ways he was able to
change public opinion. And the first one is probably the
(25:11):
most famous that he's associated with, which was getting women
to smoke uh in public, specifically Lucky Strike Cigarettes. So
Lucky Strike Cigarettes had hired him saying, we want to
sell more cigarettes, and he was looking around at the
potential markets, and one large untapped market was females. And
it's because well, a couple of reasons. One the biggest
(25:34):
one is the social stigma that was against women smoking
in public. It was considered vulgar. Sure, sure, And and
this I we should put in was in the nineteen twenties. Yeah, yeah,
And uh. There's also, by the way, a series of
stuff they don't want you to Know videos that explains
all of the things that Bernet's got up to, which
I highly recommend you check out. But the the the
(25:57):
other issue, slightly more um frivolous, I would say, is
that the color green, which is what the Lucky Strikes
packaging was, it was the dark green color that it
was not seen as fashionable, and therefore women were less
likely to purchase them even if they did. I'll see
that smoking in public Wasn't this this stigmatized activity. I
(26:21):
don't quite get that there was a time when just
green was out. Yeah, he just was not. It was
not a thing. So he did, he did. His His
attack was multi pronged. One of those was to get
people to change their opinion about the color green, and
so he started to He started to uh chat with
some of his buddies who were fashion designers, people like
(26:43):
people who were designing fashions in France and convincing them
to add green into the fashion lines for the following season.
So the Parisian fashions that were coming out were incorporating
this color of green. So suddenly green was seen as
a very fashionable color. But that still doesn't he still
doesn't still doesn't address the other problem right about women's sing.
(27:06):
But luckily there was this whole women's suffragate movement. There
was the whole women's live thing you know that needed
to that was picking up steam, and he thought, Hey,
I'm going to leverage this, this movement to work to
my benefit. He ended up convincing several women who were
(27:27):
involved in the women's liberation movement to organize a march
while smoking lucky Strikes cigarettes as a way of saying
they were they were. Um, there was like kind of
an empowerment uh symbol, right, the idea that the women
were the equals to men, that they could do the
same things men could do, including smoking in public. Yes,
(27:49):
do what you want to get cancer, whatever you want.
And they were even calling them torches for freedom, that's
what the cigarettes were being referred to as. And this
domination really helped swing things so that women were buying
cigarettes and smoking in public. And you could argue that
in part it helped change some public perception of women.
(28:11):
But and it got him smoking. So it's not like
it's it's not like it's a win win all around. Um.
But that's not the only thing he's responsible for. Like
there are other big, big things, like big cultural level things.
Are you saying Berne's is the reason that bacon isn't
a sometimes food. Berne's is the reason that He's I'm
(28:34):
not saying he's the reason that bacon has now become
an all the time's food. That really has to do
with Brooklyn, New York. No, it has to do with
bumper stickers and stupidity. It started with hipsters and ended
up kind of boiling out from there, So I'm going
to the source there. But yeah, no, Bernie's. Bernie's was
he was hired by a company that, among other things,
(28:55):
produced bacon, and they wanted to be able to sell
more bacon, so he ended up writing as as the
stuff they don't want you to know, episode says a
carefully worded letter to about five thousand doctors asking what
would be more healthy for people, a hearty breakfast or
a light breakfast. As far as I know, he didn't
(29:17):
actually use the word bacon in either of those. Then
then he said, um where he launched a public relations
campaigns in four thousand five posicians agree that a breakfast
hearty breakfast of bacon and eggs is best for you,
and ended up and creating this market for bacon to
become a breakfast food in the United States. The reason
(29:37):
that we eat bacon for breakfast here in the US
is Edward Berney's. That's it. So the things he was
that he started to do have become essentially the the
like to do list for PR firms these days. So
he actually sort of had a something approaching a more
scientific methodology for figuring out how to change people's minds
(29:59):
about I don't know what you eat for breakfast or
when you should smoke cigarette. He was he was looking
at things that tended that would tend to influence people
and then try to leverage those so for things like
an expert opinion that would be something that could end
up influencing someone. So he would look for experts or
spokespeople who would end up lending legitimates legitimacy to whatever
(30:22):
claims he was making. Right, I'm sure you've seen those
old commercials that some of them are on YouTube now
with more doctors smoke camels Healthier for your Love. It
just makes me think that that Burnet's would have like
run circles around Don Draper. I mean, it's just like
there was there would be no hope for Draper against Burns. Yeah, yeah,
and it was. It was really so brilliant because he
(30:43):
wasn't really marketing particular branded products or even particular brands.
He was marketing opinions and feelings and urges and concepts. Yeah,
and he was creating word of mouth campaigns, which again
goes back to what we were saying before with governments
about the legitimacy seems to come from the fact that
it's it's a grassroots approach as opposed to something that's
(31:05):
top down. If it looks like it's bottom up, people
tend to think, oh, well this, uh, this, this is
something that people really do care about, something I should
care about one way or the other. It's I think
the same reason you see so many companies today trying
to get like hashtags going on Twitter like get people
to participate, and why that's so often is just a miserable,
(31:26):
embarrassing failure. Yeah, it's so crude. Uh if if you're
lifting it up next to next to what Bernese was doing,
because if you say to someone, hey, be interested in
our product with this keyword, then you're you're ruining the
entire experiment. Yeah, yeah, you're showing your hands. It's it's
very rare when a brand can go out there and
(31:47):
and start using a hashtag effectively, it does happen, but
it's far more common that we see these things rise
up because maybe there are a couple of notable personalities
who use it and then it spreads from there. Occasionally,
it's an event that happens and then something that is
uh directly tied to that event becomes like the zeitgeist
(32:08):
for whatever that is. Um. Anyway, getting back to Burne's
he actually wrote a book about his methodology. He called
it Crystallizing Public Opinion, and um, it was reprinted back
in I think, but he comes across as a little
uh condescending, essentially saying that the public are dumb and
they need to be led. I mean, really, it is
(32:30):
very much in that are pretty dumb. What do we
need to? Yeah, And I feel like if I were
standing next to Edward Burnet's I would be like, man,
I'm a more on crap. I don't know that i'd
feel dumb, but I would certainly be like, I'm not
I'm not even baking anymore. I haven't even baken in
a long time anyway, But that's not the point. So uh,
(32:52):
Apart from that one day. But that was a slip.
So then there was also the the another book he
wrote called Propaganda, in which he made the case for
the manipulation of public opinion as a necessary component of democracy.
Of democracy, but you can't have democracy unless you first
tell the people what they need to vote on and
why they need to vote that way, I'm oversimplifying. No, no no, no,
(33:15):
but I mean, but I totally believe that that's okay,
that's a thing. Well, you can look at it in
a certain kind of way by saying, uh, a democracy,
if it is working properly, is only as good as
its people. And if you have people in a properly
functioning democracy who widely hold very bad opinions, then you're
(33:37):
going to end up with very bad government. Yeah, it's
it's definitely a tricksy subject. Yes, but Bernet's was not
the only person who is working in in this kind
of sticky ideological matter around those times. Um, I wanted
(33:58):
to talk for a moment about Diamond. I know, because
you love talking about I do. I do. If you
have either watched brain stuff or listened to stuff they
don't want you to Nose podcast, then you may have
heard me talk about diamonds before. But but basically so
diamonds are the engagement ring stone of choice because of
a marketing campaign created by de Beers, which is that cartel.
(34:22):
If you so choose, you could say vertical diamond mining,
slash accrediting slash distribution corporation. You can say monopoly, you
could say monopoly. Any of those words are probably valid. Uh.
Around around the nineteen thirties, the demand for diamonds was falling.
They were seen as a luxury that the average person
didn't need, and they were no longer a true rarity
(34:44):
since the discovery of really huge deposits of them in
South Africa. UH. Only about ten percent of engagement rings
around that time. Moore Diamonds and so Beers, which had
all of these diamonds, was like, hey, n w A
or ad agency, can you launch us a multimedia campaign
that will push diamonds onto the fingers of some of
(35:05):
brides in the United States By the two thousand's, that's
actually probably not what they said, but that's what ended
up happening. Um the uh uh. And we are not
the only country where that occurred. You know. Back in
the early days, there were fashion columns that were written
by an agency representative that we're not reported as being
(35:26):
written by an agency representative, that we're pushing diamonds. They
had these these loner programs to get jewelry onto the
rich and the famous for big socialite events where these
photographs would be published in newspapers or uh, you know,
whenever Marilyn and Row was wearing diamonds in a movie,
they were probably loaned to her from de Beers. M Simultaneously,
(35:49):
they started educating the public to increase the demand for
more expensive diamonds. Those four cs are completely a de
Beers and w Air collaboration. Um. Simultaneously, they were also
propagating the idea that diamonds should never be resold. Thus
they were maintaining the demand for new diamonds. Um. It's
(36:10):
completely insidious. And if you would like to hear a
very long history on that, well done, very long. I
mean it's long enough, it's long enough to cover the territory.
It's you can check out stuff they don't want you
to to nose. A podcast episode from February seventeen of
this year being it's a good podcast, uh looking ahead
(36:35):
because now we've you know, obviously World War two propaganda
was huge. And obviously we live in an era of
advertising today where we are constantly surrounded by ads, whether
it's in billboards or in video or an audio, or
on our clothing or yeah, there's it's it's everywhere, to
the point where actually their entire people whose whose jobs
(36:57):
depend upon How can we get over advertising blindness where
people have developed an immunity to certain types of advertising
They just don't even it doesn't even register with them anymore. Uh,
Looking ahead, like what's the future of propaganda? I found
an interesting interview with a guy named Sean Gorley who
did a TED talk back in two thousand nine, and
(37:19):
his sense talked about this couple of times. Um, he's
a data analysis expert, and it was talking about in
the future, we'll see governments participate in propaganda through social
media conversations, which makes perfect sense. We're just talking about
how the approach of you know, making this a grassroots
kind of approach benefits the adoption of certain ideas and
(37:41):
whether you're trying to sell, you know, a line of
clothing or sell the idea of a big political policy.
Oh well, it totally makes sense. I mean you will
see politicians that, for example, have a Twitter account or
a Facebook account. I mean pretty much all of them
do now, at least in the United States that I'm
whereof it. It's rare that you encounter a politician who
(38:02):
doesn't have those things, um. And then they have followers,
of course, who are people who they can count on
to be ideologically and perhaps even just culturally or socially
uh in line with them, and then they can selectively
report the things they want to report on their feed
on Facebook and say like, hey, here's a news item
(38:24):
that's flattering to me and the things I support, and
then they know that their followers will share that with
their friends and comment on it positively. It's a very uh,
it's a very productive venue, we might say, right. And
it gets even creepier than that, because gord Lee's point
was that we can use data analysis to identify trends
(38:45):
before they really take off. So let's say, for example
that Lauren, you're a politician, and let's say that the
data analysis has shown that there is an uh a
growing but not huge public opinion that is counter to
your strategies, it's counter to your philosophy. What am I
going to do about it? And through it that analysis
(39:06):
you discover the best ways to create counter stories, to
insert them into the conversation and thus head this off
before it becomes a big trend. So it's the same
idea as creating counterintelligence or counterpropaganda that has dated back
ever since we started talking about propaganda, but doing so
on a on a scale that's much more um precise
(39:30):
in the sense that you are you're detecting these things
before they even become noticeable on a wide scale basis.
So you're actually talking about using big data to examine
things like public opinion and be able to try and
influence it before it becomes like a conscious part of
the public conversation. Yeah, and because so much of our
(39:54):
activity takes place on platforms that are largely public, not
all of us do obviously, but if you happen to
have a publicly readable Twitter feed or a publicly readable
Facebook page or some other social platform, then that information
can be gleaned by a device that really like a
(40:17):
web crawler that's looking for keywords to start doing things
like data analysis to see what kind of opinions are
coming up and how best to either either encourage those
opinions or suppress them. You know, another thing, I can
see very much is personalized propaganda like so like personalized
advertising exactly. Yeah, I mean yeah, much the same way
(40:41):
that the ads you get on Facebook or determined by
what some kind of algorithm has figured out you might
be interested in. Boy, are they way off too. They
can probably also figure I've gotten some really I've gotten
some bizarre ones that I've gotten some very sharp ones
as well. Yeah, but I'm sure that they will be
(41:02):
able to also figure out, Hey, you know, we can
do some tests and figure out that people who have
these same seven interests that you do are much more
strongly affected by X type of propaganda than by Y approach. Sure, yeah,
it can be, you know, especially like they look at activity.
Let's take Facebook, for example, the things that you've hit
(41:22):
like versus the things that you you know, you might
have looked at but you didn't really Then that could
end up giving more information. I mean, there's a lot
of data there. I mean, just assuming that someone Let's
just take Facebook itself for example. Let's say that Facebook
actually looks at how long things typically stay in your
(41:44):
view when you are active on Facebook, which they do
They know which which stories you are looking at versus
which ones you're just scrolling past. They know how to
serve that stuff up to you, and they know how
long you're looking at your ex's profile they do. They
know what there you've clicked through news articles, clicked through
to news articles, I should say, And so this kind
(42:05):
of stuff can shape how they present information to you.
Everything from just making Facebook more effective, which you could
argue is, oh, well, that's okay, because we want whatever
we're using to be the best experience possible to presenting
the kinds of stuff you are most likely to act
upon in an advertising capacity. So the ways that Facebook
would make money, you know, the the fact that you
(42:26):
would be more likely to click on this stuff that, which,
depending on your point of view, either benefits everyone or
is super creepy, right, because it either means that you
are going to not waste your time on stuff that
doesn't matter to you and maybe you'll discover things that
actually do matter to you. But on the other hand,
it's like, well, Facebook's telling me what I should like. Now. Ideally,
(42:50):
I know that I'm always going to be encountering propaganda, advertising, etcetera.
I'm never going to avoid that, and it's not like
that's going to go away. I don't think we're going
to have a future where magically everyone says, you know what,
I'm not going to try to get people to do
the things I would like them to do. That's just
that's not going to happen. So not unless you go,
you know, totally off the grid, right yeah, yeah, if
(43:11):
I end up getting a log cabin someplace and just
cut ties with everybody, which I don't think I could do.
I'm not good at chopping wood. So the the key
here is that you want to get as much access
to as many different sources of information as possible, knowing
that everyone has their agenda, even if it's something like
(43:32):
their agenda is to try and create an unbiased objective approach.
We're humans, so sometimes that just doesn't happen, and not
even on a conscious basis, But our ability to access
as many different sources of information as possible at least
gives us the opportunity to have as close to an
objective view as possible. So that that's something that some
(43:54):
of us have the luxury of because we live in
a place where we can have understricted access to formation,
and we furthermore have the type of lifestyle that allows
us to spend time perusing that sort of information exactly.
So we're doubly privileged in that sense. But then you
also have to take into account that human beings can
be really lazy, and since we're lazy, then it means
(44:15):
that we also have a responsibility to overcome that laziness
and seek this stuff out because it's it's it's just
as possible to have a society a culture that has
free access to all this stuff at least on you know,
on one level, like a hypothetical level, but through practice,
no one bothers to do it, and so you end
(44:37):
up you don't have to worry about them accessing multiple
sources of information. You can send out whatever messages you want. So, um,
just something to keep in mind. I think I think
most of our listeners are probably the type who goes
seeking information from as many sources as possible just to
you know, get a really good view of what's happening.
It doesn't mean that you agree with all of them
or any of them. Even I would be disturbed if
(45:00):
you agreed with information from all of your sources. Yeah,
that would be back to double think again. Yeah, but
I think we're we're pretty much wrapping it up for
this first part here, but you should definitely tune in
next time because next time we're going to get into
the crazy territory of persuasive technology, moral enhancement. When is
(45:20):
it maybe right to use mind control? What color makes
you do things? Yes, all of that and more in
our next episode. And yeah, it's some really interesting stuff
that I did not know before I started researching for
for these episodes about what specifically people are doing to
use these are modern technologies to propagate propaganda. Yeah, and
(45:44):
to just in some cases just try to make the
world a better place, but that kind of that kind
of approaches. Who's idea of better? Yeah? Yeah, you know
not all not all pigs are equal? Wait what I
guess all pigs are cool, but some are more equal
than others. Which there you know, different orwell same idea? Sure? Yeah,
(46:07):
why that wasn't What about bacon? Okay I'm getting confused?
Or well, if you want to get in touch with this,
you can s where I was gonna go. Yeah, you
can let us know. You can say us an email.
Our address is fw thinking at how Stuff Works dot com,
or drop us a line on Facebook, on Twitter, or
on Google Plus. A Twitter and Google Plus. We are
(46:27):
f w Thinking. Just search fw thinking on Facebook we'll
pop up. Do you have any suggestions for future episodes?
You've got comments, you get questions, send those to us.
We look forward to hearing from you, and you'll hear
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future of technology, visit forward thinking dot Com, brought to
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Crime Junkie
Does hearing about a true crime case always leave you scouring the internet for the truth behind the story? Dive into your next mystery with Crime Junkie. Every Monday, join your host Ashley Flowers as she unravels all the details of infamous and underreported true crime cases with her best friend Brit Prawat. From cold cases to missing persons and heroes in our community who seek justice, Crime Junkie is your destination for theories and stories you won’t hear anywhere else. Whether you're a seasoned true crime enthusiast or new to the genre, you'll find yourself on the edge of your seat awaiting a new episode every Monday. If you can never get enough true crime... Congratulations, you’ve found your people. Follow to join a community of Crime Junkies! Crime Junkie is presented by audiochuck Media Company.