(May 12, 2016 at 6:16 pm)KevinM1 Wrote: Drumpf really shows how unsavvy many Americans are when it comes to understanding how PR works. It's not just an overall educational deficiency (although that plays into it), but a complete lack of understanding about what sales pitches are, how to see through them, etc.
I'm confident I could sell most Drumpf supporters a bridge.
I don't think so because most supporters are sick of all the bull shit from politicians and the establishment. That's what makes him rogue, and anti establishment although the left likes to promote him as a billionaire elitist insider. Many people don't really know how public relations control the thoughts and thus the actions of the masses. Have you ever researched Edward Bernays, the nephew of Sigmund Freud, who was the psychoanalyst of his time who coined the term public relations? He has a great book titled Propaganda:
Full book:
http://www.whale.to/b/bernays.pdf
First several paragraphs:
THE conscious and intelligent manipulation of the
organized habits and opinions of the masses is an
important element in democratic society. Those who
manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute
an invisible government which is the true ruling
power of our country.
We are governed, our minds are molded, our
tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men
we have never heard of. This is a logical result of
the way in which our democratic society is organized.
Vast numbers of human beings must cooperate in
this manner if they are to live together as a smoothly
functioning society.
Our invisible governors are, in many cases, unaware
of the identity of their fellow members in the
inner cabinet.
They govern us by their qualities of natural leadership,
their ability to supply needed ideas and by their
key position in the social structure. Whatever attitude
one chooses to take toward this condition, it
remains a fact that in almost every act of our daily
lives, whether in the sphere of politics or business,
in our social conduct or our ethical thinking, we are
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Propaganda
dominated by the relatively small number of persons—a
trifling fraction of our hundred and twenty
million—who understand the mental processes and
social patterns of the masses. It is they who pull the
wires which control the public mind, who harness old
social forces and contrive new ways to bind and guide
the world.
It is not usually realized how necessary these invisible
governors are to the orderly functioning of
our group life. In theory, every citizen may vote
for whom he pleases. Our Constitution does not
envisage political parties as part of the mechanism
of government, and its framers seem not to have
pictured to themselves the existence in our national
politics of anything like the modern political machine.
But the American voters soon found that
without organization and direction their individual
votes, cast, perhaps, for dozens or hundreds of candidates,
would produce nothing but confusion. Invisible
government, in the shape of rudimentary
political parties, arose almost overnight. Ever since
then we have agreed, for the sake of simplicity and
practicality, that party machines should narrow down
the field of choice to two candidates, or at most three
or four.
In theory, every citizen makes up his mind on
public questions and matters of private conduct. In
practice, if all men had to study for themselves the
abstruse economic, political, and ethical data involved
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Organizing Chaos
in every question, they would find it impossible to
come to a conclusion about anything. We have
voluntarily agreed to let an invisible government
sift the data and high-spot the outstanding issues so
that our field of choice shall be narrowed to practical
proportions. From our leaders and the media they
use to reach the public, we accept the evidence and
the demarcation of issues bearing upon public questions;
from some ethical teacher, be it a minister, a
favorite essayist, or merely prevailing opinion, we
accept a standardized code of social conduct to which
we conform most of the time.
In theory, everybody buys the best and cheapest
commodities offered him on the market. In practice,
if every one went around pricing, and chemically
testing before purchasing, the dozens of soaps or
fabrics or brands of bread which are for sale, economic
life would become hopelessly jammed. To
avoid such confusion, society consents to have its
choice narrowed to ideas and objects brought to its
attention through propaganda of all kinds. There
is consequently a vast and continuous effort going on
to capture our minds in the interest of some policy or
commodity or idea.
It might be better to have, instead of propaganda
and special pleading, committees of wise men who
would choose our rulers, dictate our conduct, private
and public, and decide upon the best types of clothes
for us to wear and the best kinds of food for us to
eat. But we have chosen the opposite method, that
of open competition. We must find a way to make
free competition function with reasonable smoothness.
To achieve this society has consented to permit
free competition to be organized by leadership and
propaganda.
Some of the phenomena of this process are criticized—the
manipulation of news, the inflation of
personality, and the general ballyhoo by which politicians
and commercial products and social ideas are
brought to the consciousness of the masses. The instruments
by which public opinion is organized and
focused may be misused. But such organization and
focusing are necessary to orderly life.
As civilization has become more complex, and as
the need for invisible government has been increasingly
demonstrated, the technical means have been
invented and developed by which opinion may be
regimented.
With the printing press and the newspaper, the
railroad, the telephone, telegraph, radio and airplanes,
ideas can be spread rapidly and even instantaneously
over the whole of America.
H. G. Wells senses the vast potentialities of these
inventions when he writes in the New York Times:
"Modern means of communication—the power
afforded by print, telephone, wireless and so forth,
of rapidly putting through directive strategic or technical
conceptions to a great number of cooperating
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Organizing Chaos
centers, of getting quick replies and effective discussion—have
opened up a new world of political processes.
Ideas and phrases can now be given an
effectiveness greater than the effectiveness of any
personality and stronger than any sectional interest.
The common design can be documented and sustained
against perversion and betrayal. It can be elaborated
and developed steadily and widely without personal,
local and sectional misunderstanding."
What Mr. Wells says of political processes is
equally true of commercial and social processes and
all manifestations of mass activity. The groupings
and affiliations of society to-day are no longer subject
to "local and sectional" limitations. When the Constitution
was adopted, the unit of organization was
the village community, which produced the greater
part of its own necessary commodities and generated
its group ideas and opinions by personal contact and
discussion directly among its citizens. But to-day,
because ideas can be instantaneously transmitted to
any distance and to any number of people, this geographical
integration has been supplemented by many
other kinds of grouping, so that persons having the
same ideas and interests may be associated and regimented
for common action even though they live
thousands of miles apart.