November (Part 1)
In the Story in 1 Samuel 8: 10-22 CEV , there was a prophet, Samuel, who served as Israel’s leader for over 40 years and the elders of Israel went to him to request a king for the nation because Samuel had gotten too old to lead and so he recently appointed his son’s as Israels new leaders; but, unlike their father they were corrupt leaders and not fit to rule and so the Israelites wanted someone else for the job. This request for a king hurt Samuel but God comforted Samuel by informing him that the people’s request for a king was not something he should take personally; by requesting a king the Israelites were not rejecting Samuel they were rejecting the kingship of God as they frequently did. God then told Samuel to listen to what the people had to say then warn them of the cost of trading in the rule of God for a human king. So Samuel went to listen to the people and to warn them. The Bible says:
10 Samuel told the people who were asking for a king what the Lord had said:
11 If you have a king, this is how he will treat you. He will force your sons to join his army. Some of them will ride in his chariots, some will serve in the cavalry, and others will run ahead of his own chariot. 12 Some of them will be officers in charge of 1,000 soldiers, and others will be in charge of 50. Still others will have to farm the king's land and harvest his crops, or make weapons and parts for his chariots. 13 Your daughters will have to make perfume or do his cooking and baking.
14 The king will take your best fields, as well as your vineyards, and olive orchards and give them to his own officials. 15 He will also take a tenth of your grain and grapes and give it to his officers and officials.
16 The king will take your slaves and your best young men and your donkeys and make them do his work. 17 He will also take a tenth of your sheep and goats. You will become the king's slaves, 18 and you will finally cry out for the Lord to save you from the king you wanted. But the Lord won't answer your prayers.
19-20 The people would not listen to Samuel. “No!” they said. “We want to be like other nations. We want a king to rule us and lead us in battle.”
21 Samuel listened to them and then told the Lord exactly what they had said. 22 “Do what they want,” the Lord answered. “Give them a king.”Samuel told the people to go back to their homes.
It is election season and since January, we the people, have been the target audience of various campaigns. Inundated with branding and messaging everywhere we look and listen. For both the candidates and the constituency it has been a long road. However, the finishline is in sight and candidates on the federal, state, and local levels will soon discover the outcome of their prospective races, come November.
Campaigning, like advertising, relies heavily on psychology — different psychological principles and practices are employed to influence and nudge peoples thoughts, and thusly people ,towards a specific aim, namely persuading them to vote for a specific candidate. Candidates utilize visual cues, social psychology (such as the phenomenon of groupthink), fallacies (such as the straw man fallacy), and the similarity-attraction effect to hook and lead the public where they wish to lead them, which ultimately, they hope, will be to victory.
So what are these psychological tools being used on you and those around you?
Visual cues are images and symbols that are placed in your environment to be triggers for you, a trigger is a thing that prompts some other thought or action from you. Since a larger portion of the brain is devoted to visual processing than language processing the brain is more adept with consuming, analyzing, storing, and retrieving visual information than it is with words and sounds. In fact, the human brain processes images 60,000 times faster than text (1), and 90 percent of the information transmitted to the brain is visual (2). Therefore things presented to you in a visual matter are capable of deeply impacting you and hence are very affective at producing some change in you.
Social psychology is how the behavior, of an individual or group, is influenced by the people around them. You see, social psychology is at work everywhere in both abstract and concrete environments: family units, classroom, offices, churches, social media, continents/countries/nations/regions, races/ethnicities, etc. Peer pressure is a well recognized form of social psychology. Other forms of social psychology are: changing your beliefs to match the beliefs of those around you, doing something because it was suggested to you, doing something because an authority or a person you trust told you to do it, using things like personal familiarity (exposure) and personally perceived degrees of difficulty (comprehension) to come to conclusions instead of using logic, behaving a certain way so that you do not make the people around you uncomfortable or so that they won’t make you feel uncomfortable, coercion, etc(3)
Fallacies are flaws in the way you think - faulty reasoning. Fallacies can be your own illogical thoughts or they can be tools used toward you for the sake of persuading, stirring up emotion, arguing a point, etc. We see fallacies used a lot in domestic disagreements, law, and in political rhetoric.
The similarity-attraction effect is the tendency for people to like and become attached to people that are like-minded and similar to them.
The brain is wired to take the path of least resistance as it pertains to both body and mind, why?, this behavior is tied to survival, the brain tries to conserve the body’s energy so that if disaster strikes it has enough energy to fight or flee so that it can live to see another day. What does this mean in simple terms? The brain is a very energy intensive organ so one of the best ways to conserve energy is to use the brain less. So, if it is possible to not have to think about things — to not have to think things through, then our brain would prefer to take that route. And what better ways not to think than: to be taught, to be fed, to be lead, and to be told precisely what to do. In life we see our brains preference to coast, played out in a variety of ways, some of which are: the ease with which the mind can be directed/guided by external stimuli like visual cues, the penchants for people to be followers instead of leaders, and germinators instead of sowers. It is much easier be driven than it is to drive, to go where you are lead than it is to be the one that must discover the route and to absorb what you are taught than it is to be a harvester and purveyor of understanding. This feature of the brain, it’s preference to take shortcuts to preserve energy, is the stuff campaigning is all about and the reason visual cues, social psychology, weaponized fallacies, and similarity-attraction effect are appropriate and highly affective tools for amassing supporters and votes. Give the constituent what you want them to know/believe and then the brain will not feel the need to go beyond that to do discovery on its own unless a significant enough question arises.
Moreover, when you hear politicians speaking about topics like: law, immigration, race, money, abortions, religion, and education it is natural and reasonable for you to assume they are simply speaking about pertinent matters over which their desired position has sway; however, these topics are intentional opportunities created to project like-mindedness with the voters they wish to attract so that they can exploit the similarity-attraction effect. These topics are calculated arousals harnessed to foster significant attachment between voter and candidate and thusly loyalty which renders guaranteed support. At the end of the day it is all business and not personal. Political campaigning, frankly, is a plan of action that focuses on making use of the voter’s human nature to obtain a personal career goal.
Everyone alive today has grown up under the concept of human rulership, government and politics; we have been under the influence of these things so long that we don’t know, nor do we dream about any other way of being. Because we have been apart of this world system for multiple millenia we are unable to see through it; we cannot recognize it…we have no true awareness of it…we cannot see what is at work. Some way, some how, we have been made to believe that the only power we have over ourselves, over our families, over our safety, over our businesses and over our finances is the “priviledge” of being governed and the power to vote for our governor — the power to select the person that will rule over us. And that, to have a good and prosperous future we must elect an official to fight and win for us the things that we desire...but that is 1 Samual Israelite thinking… that thinking is flawed, and weak, and so so far from the truth. It is God that gives you a future and a hope not mere men (Jeremiah 29:11-13 AMP)…
11 For I know the plans and thoughts that I have for you,’ says the Lord, ‘plans for peace and well-being and not for disaster, to give you a future and a hope. 12 Then you will call on Me and you will come and pray to Me, and I will hear [your voice] and I will listen to you. 13 Then [with a deep longing] you will seek Me and require Me [as a vital necessity] and [you will] find Me when you search for Me with all your heart.
In the beginning God was the ruler of all and he had no competition. God’s opponent Satan came along and entered the race , and knowing he needed subjects in order to be able to rule over them, he went out and began to campaign. Satan’s first campaign stop was the garden of Eden. There he did some demographic analysis and decided that his target demographic was someone who did not hear from God directly — and hence was someone he could more easily confuse with psychological tactics because they did not hear directly from the source. Satan then gave his first Campaign speech (in the physical realm) to Eve. He first confused Eve via gaslighting when he asked her did God really say you could not eat fruit from any tree in the garden. Then once she was confused he made her question God’s character when he told her that what God said wasn’t really going to happen and then made it seem as if God did not have her best interest at heart when he told her that God’s true intentions were to prevent her from being as great as he is. Eve then felt discontent and mistrust in her mind. She then looked at the forbidden fruit (visual cue) and decided that she would eat it. Then via word-of-mouth marketing she got Adam on board and he too ate the fruit. . Like Adam and Eve, you the voter have been selected to participate in a plan, designed to be undetectable to you but that relies heavily on your participation to be effective. Your compliance with a candidates campaign is predicated on confusion/misinformation [fallacies] (Eve), distrust of their opponent [fallacies] (Eve), deceit driven discontentment (Eve), eye-catching lure [visual cues] (Eve), and social psychology (Adam) . Unlike Eve however, now you have gained insight into the system at work around you and now you have the option of correcting your course of action before it has disastrous consequences.
To Be Continued >>>
References:
1. Vogel, D. R., Dickson, G. W. & Lehman, J. A. Persuasion and the Role of Visual Presentation Support: The UM/3M Study. Management Information Systems Research Center School of Management, University of Minnesota (1986).
2. Potter MC, Wyble B, Hagmann CE, McCourt ES. Detecting meaning in RSVP at 13 ms per picture. Atten Percept Psychophys. 2014;76:270. doi: 10.3758/s13414-013-0605-z. [PubMed] [CrossRef] [Google Scholar]
3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_psychology
