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Monday, October 24, 2005

And a Catholic accountant shall lead them...

Ben Mack, kicking all kinds of lucidity and insight...

Propaganda Is The Opiate Of The Masses:
"...Marketing affects behavior or it’s not good marketing. Behaviors are changed by altering perceptions. When we see things differently we act differently. Beliefs, attitudes and constructions of categories are the primary levers of shifting perception. Marketing manipulates the meaning of symbols, images and associations. Marketing is applied semantics.

...Propaganda is marketing. Many Americans are waking up from a propaganda induced coma yelling, “They lied!” Great. Many of these same folks then rant about the evils of propaganda. I respect their anger. But, bashing propaganda strengthens the control of the world’s greatest oppressor, our present form of world government, Corporatocracy.

My comments on this subject are regularly dismissed as “merely semantic.” This perspective is blind. In business semantic analysis is often called consumer research, a $100,000,000,000/year business. That figure does not include the trillions of dollars required to leverage the insights garnered through consumer research.

Distinguishing propaganda from marketing is like holding a distinction between drugs and alcohol, it’s a semantic distinction. There are billions of dollars to be lost if alcohol is lumped in with drugs, and there are trillions of dollars to be lost if Corporatocracy is held accountable for crimes against humanity.

Semantics is the heart of marketing. While semantics is the analyses of change in meaning, marketing is about controlling the change.

Meaning is not limited to words, but words are a common way we discuss meaning. Wittgenstein asserts he can only know things for which he has a word:

“The limits of my language are the limits of my mind. All I know is what I have words for.” Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosopher (1889 – 1951)

But, it works the other way, too. Having two words can blind people from seeing that separate labels represent the same idea. Distinguishing drugs and alcohol is an obvious example...

“The basic tool for the manipulation of reality is the manipulation of words. If you can control the meaning of words, you can control the people who must use the words.” Philip K. Dick, Novelist (1928-1982)

This is a war for reality. Consensus reality is held in place by the masses. The commonly used words and their common meanings have great impact. Monitoring these meanings and affect changing is the key to Lippman’s phrase, “manufacturing consent.”

Words change. A trunk is now a place on my car where I store stuff. The word trunk came from wooden box. There is some similarity in meaning, but the word trunk has a very different meaning today. The trunk word evolved. It does help us to understand its origins to see the distinction while using the same sound, the same word, but the two different meanings suggest we currently have two distinct memes.

Words evolving on their own is very different from engineering the misuse of a word. I’m not talking about the misues of the word incredible which no longer means not-credible, but extraordinary. I’m talking, or writing, about words like dividend. Ever get a dividend from your insurance company when you weren’t an owner of their stock? I’ve met scores of people that have and they were thrilled that their company would profit-share. Dividend can mean profits to share holders, but in insurance it means it also means a refund because the insurance company charged a customer more than they were legally allowed. I was paid to interview these consumers. I’m a professional consumer researcher.

...The Catholic Church coined the word ‘propaganda’ so I don’t think limiting propaganda to governments is correct. Even if we granted The Church as a form of government, this was a term created as a means of saving money. In 1622, Pope Gregory XV commissioned the Sacra Congregatio de Propaganda Fide. One of Pope Gregory’s accountants came to the conclusion that it was more cost effective to teach Catholicism than to invade and force conversion. The accountant had the insight to recognize that a territory could be acquired by converting people’s minds. If you convert the minds, the bodies will follow. And, converting minds is less expensive than physically enforcing new sovereignty.

...The nature of propaganda is magic. Magic is the act of facilitating an immersive experience, perhaps best encapsulated by the word phantasmagorical. Something is phantasmagorical when an audience transcends their skepticism and accepts a world where the laws of nature don’t have such a firm grasp on reality. In advertising, copy can become phantasmagorical when it is stoking the passions of a diehard fan, helping them envision driving a golf ball 300 yards or bringing them into a moment of sports history that they can recollect with vivid details.

Magic can be a scary word. Last week, I was moderating a focus group among nurses of a children’s hospital and the word “magic” came up and a participant asked that we not use the word magic because it made her uncomfortable. To many, the word magic evokes a threat of eternal damnation. To these people, a magician is a spiritual terrorist, striking out to infect the unsuspecting.

I paid my way through college as a magician. There are many people who hold magic as evil. Occasionally, some audience member would want to talk to me and get me to repent and save my soul. I can’t quantify how many of these folks there are, what the incidence is, but the October 11, 2005 USA Today reported that 53% of Americans believe “God created human beings in their present form exactly as described in the Bible”. If you figure half of these folks see the word magic as demonic, that’s approximately ¼ of all Americans. So the word magic should be used with discretion. Shakespeare reminds us: the better half of valor is discretion.

So why discuss magic? There is real power in magic. Moreover, magic was the terrorism of the 17th Century. Early scholars of magic and perception were persecuted and killed. If I had used the word executed there, it would have depicted a government sanctioned killing. If I had used the word murder, there would be an illicit connotation. Word choice effects how we process information.

Word choice is a form of magic. Words create our immersive realities.

...Projection is a powerful force. We not only see what we expect to see, but often our expectations create our reality. The doctor mentioned earlier was explaining this dynamic, that a doctor’s expectation of results had a higher correlation to a patient’s success than any other element tested. I would tell your readers what Grant Morrison recommended, Fake it till you make it.

...Marketing has emerged as a legitimate face of perception study and the study of effectiveness, a socially acceptable way to understand magic theory. These techniques and discussions would have had us all murdered 200 years ago. The Puritans who founded America didn’t suffer well the presence of alternative perceptions and realities. Their righteous perceptions forbade them from considering what they didn’t already know to be true.

Righteousness induces prides which facilitates denial. The more righteous a person, the more they will unreasonable defend their perspective. Saying propaganda is inherently wrong is a damned perspective, a perspective that things are inherently good or evil. This perspective reinforces the nature of propaganda. Propaganda was created as a cost-effective tool to spread righteousness.

Propaganda is a weapon in the war for reality.

Propaganda is a tool. Holding propaganda as inherently evil is like saying that TNT is evil. They are both strong forces. They can be used constructive or destructively. The good/evil perspective is more static than how I see the universe. And, I’m also not sure that dangerous things are always bad. I’m glad propaganda was employed to defeat Hitler. Marketing has emerged as a legitimate face of perception study and the study of effectiveness, a socially acceptable way to understand magic theory. These techniques and discussions would have had us all murdered 200 years ago. The Puritans who founded America didn’t suffer well the presence of alternative perceptions and realities..."

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