The sources for human manipulation through propaganda and advertising

The sources for human manipulation through propaganda and advertising

(This is one of the texts American party strategists did not want you to read.)

The campaigning of Donald Trump of 2015 until this day is an excellent example of how and why manipulation of people works. What is said here could be said for the Brexit campaign and any campaign including the famous Mitterrand campaign of 1981, La Force Tranquille, but Trump is more visible.

How come Trump could win?
The personality of Donald Trump is explained in the eBook Predicting Donald Trump, Understanding a Stable Genius. It is mandatory reading for anyone that is affected by Trump or has to deal with him, which is almost everybody in the West, these days.
Persuasion know-how for mass communication campaigns (propaganda, public relations, advertising) is a different subject altogether that stands on its own but it is obvious that one needs a certain type of personal identity that is immediately recognisable for a persuasive propaganda campaign to work.
Look at the picture with the airplanes. (You can click it for more detail.) On top, we see an airplane in the background with the text "United States of America". Apparently, this is Airforce One, the private jet of the President of the USA. In the front, we see a crowd listening to, ostensibly, the President of the USA. Note the size of the president in the picture in relation to the airplane, his location and his posture.
Below that we see Donald Trump, posing as a presidential candidate. His airplane is half the size of Airforce One but because he is standing close to it, it looks bigger than Airforce One on the picture. And he is also clearly visible whereas the president was a bit difficult to find.
The next thing to note is the posture. The president, Obama, is using the posture of a lecturer, or a father who reprimands his children. This is good for his image with readers of The New Yorker and other intellectuals but is not going down well, on a subconscious level, with people who are in attendance. They look bored.
Now look at the posture of Donald Trump.  His arms are wide, all-inclusive. It is the well-known universal pose of a father who is inviting his children to come to him for a hug or protection. This
image is so strong that AKZO-Nobel, the giant chemical corporation, had adopted it as its logo. See below. After some years, they got a new advertising agency and then of course every thing had to go and now it is a logo that shows an upward curve. That is a logo for stockholders and speculators on the stock exchanges as it subconsciously tells the viewer that the company's stock will go up. See? It all depends on whom your target audience is.

Back to Trump.
At least 90% of the American population does not consist of intellectuals who recognise and appreciate the lecturing pose. So whom do you think the ordinary citizens prefer? Whom do you think they trust on a subconscious level, say instinctively?
And look at his audience. It is like they are moving or doing something. Enthousiastic?
The use of this kind of imagery and accompanying knowhow of propaganda techniques is why Donald Trump won and nothing else. His opponents in the Republican Party were too wealthy or too corporate or too stupid to understand what they were dealing with. His opponent from the Democratic Party was too arrogant to understand what she was dealing with, quite aside from the fact that she was the most hated woman of the American population at the time, which is quite a feat in itself.

The rise of Donald Trump cannot be understood without knowledge of propaganda techniques. Propaganda as a word became impopular after the Nazi's came to power and so the techniques got split up and got different names: public relations, public affairs, advertising, marketing.

(Addition of March 17, 2019) Recently, a book came out that very precisely examines how the propaganda techniques work out in practice. It is called "How to be right in a world gone wrong" and is by a famous radio presenter with a call-in show called James O'Brien (click). It is entertaining and very illustrative of the information I give you in this blog.)


Below follow the very sources of know-how of propaganda and persuasion techniques that politicians and corporations like Big Pharma and governments use to fool the people into believing they mean well when they don't. Abraham Lincoln observed : "You can fool some of the people all of the time. You can fool all of the people some of the time. But you cannot fool all of the people all of the time." But he did not mention how to fool people. That knowledge has been culled from science and it all started with Sigmund Freud. And it has ended with Robert Cialdini. Buy and read this and you will never be the same and MUCH less susceptible to the b.s. that politicians, Big Pharma and scientists are pouring out over you and your friends. Sorry, for being misemotional about that but it is their b.s. that is causing so much trouble in the world.

There has been a quest since 1910 for knowledge on how to influence people and become or remain popular at the same time. The quest for knowhow on persuasion has now come to an end. Robert Cialdini ended it in 2016 with his book, Pre-suasion, which includes the techniques of his 1986 breakthrough book "Persuasion". Anyone who has not read Pre-suasion will fall victim to the tricks of the trade of any politician or corporation. So, I advise you to go and buy and study it if your life depended on it.

More details
Let us take a look at the most improbable leader of modern times and how he came to power, Adolf Hitler. How could a talentless, ugly, half crazy simpleton from a foreign country become the absolute dictator and leader (Führer) of the then former economic superpower Germany in a time that Germany was at the pinnacle of its intellectual and creative powers (with Berlin as the epicentre)? For us, who know how it ended, it is hard to fathom the depth of popularity of the Nazi regime in its hayday, around 1936. When Adolf Hitler was driven through the streets in Bavaria ('Bayern') in an open motor car, women on the sidewalks screamed "I want a child by you!" (Ich will ein Kind von Ihnen). Now, how could that have happened? Not even John Kennedy had managed to get that far even though he was a sex symbol and Hitler definitely was not. Have you ever heard any woman hail something like that to a politician? A popstar or moviestar, yes, but not to a politician.

The source of the sources of propaganda knowhow

The answer to this enigma can be found in the books of Edward Bernays, Propaganda (1928) and Crystallizing Public Opinion (1923).

Bernays experiments were a consequence of the discovery by Sigmund Freud that words in the mind have a commanding influence on the opinions and behavior of people.
Edward L.J. Bernays (1891-1995), born in Vienna and raised in New York City, happened to be a nephew of Sigmund Freud twice over. During the First World War (1914-1918) Bernays was asked by the American federal government to work for the Committee of Public Information. His assignment was to find ways to to recruit American young men for the army and get their consent to be sent over to Europe in 1916-1918 in order to have themselves be ground into muddy mincemeat by German cannon fire.
And that is the source of the propaganda knowhow that is being used on populations today.
Bernays has been so kind to write up his findings and experiences in two books, called Propaganda (1928) and Crystallizing Public Opinion (1923). See illustrations. These books are still in print and you can buy them anywhere. They are that important.

At the time, before and during World War I, there was an independent strain of knowledge being built up in advertising. This started with a simple idea by a sales wizard, Claude C. Hopkins. He had the idea to test different advertisements parallel to one another and learn from the ones that worked best. It took him over ten years before he got to the same results as Bernays was getting. In 1923, Hopkins wrote it all down in a book called Scientific Advertising. Because the amount of money involved in advertising is immense, Hopkins won over Bernays.
Hopkins caused the birth of mail order advertising on a professional level because all of a sudden, with his precepts, mail order became a science that made money. At a certain point in time, one could even predict to the dollar how much money one would earn with a particular mail order campaign.
An immense body of knowledge has been accumulated on mail order sales since, but everything changed with the advent of internet. You can read it all in the book Successful Direct Marketing Methods by Bob Stone.

E-commerce does not work according to mail-order know-how or propaganda know-how nor any sales know-how. So people started to look for scientific publications that would fit the requirements. It appeared that in 1986, Robert Cialdini, had published about the conditions for persuasion to work. He had found six of them, then. In his 2016 book he added a seventh. His book is mandatory reading today for all influencers and leaders, it is called "Pre-Suasion". See illustration of its cover above. Buy it, read it, and be astounded.

An interesting analysis of how Donald Trump's campaign managers applied the above techniques can be fond in the book Win Bigly by the cynical Scott Adams, you know, of Dilbert fame. Scott Adams has done some research of his own because he needed to sell his cartoons. He found some stunning data. It is a pleasant read and well worth your time.
It is a must-read for any Democrat in the USA, and possibly any politician who wants to win a LOT of votes out of nothing. Like Mitterand, like Macron.

Epilogue

You may ask, what the heck has all this to do with culture?
Well, all of the know-how above only applies to the Western cultures, to wit, European cultures and North American cultures and possibly the other America's as well, the latter is unknown.
If you want to sell in China or Japan, you got your work cut out for you. It is highly doubtful that the proven knowhow that brought Hitler and Trump to power against all odds, would also work in the Far East or Arabian cultures. Perhaps it would, perhaps not. Let me know when you tried.

The Philosopher of Culture, Amsterdam, August, 2018, reviewed December 5th, 2018