The 10 Mass Manipulation Strategies According To Noam Chomsky
Noam Chomsky is one of the most respected intellectuals in the world. This American thinker was considered the most important of the contemporary era by The New York Times . One of his main contributions is to have proposed and analyzed the mass manipulation strategies that exist in the world today.
Noam Chomsky was known as a linguist, but he is also a philosopher and political scientist. At the same time, he became one of the main activists of libertarian causes. His texts circulated around the world and never ceases to amaze readers.
Chomsky has produced a textbook in which he synthesizes mass manipulation strategies. Your reflections on this are deep and complex. However, for didactic purposes, he summarized everything in simple principles accessible to everyone.
1. Distraction, one of the mass manipulation strategies
According to Chomsky, the most recurrent of the mass manipulation strategies is distraction. It basically consists of directing the public’s attention to irrelevant or banal topics. In this way they keep people’s minds busy.
To distract people, they leave them full of information. Too much importance is attached, for example, to sporting events. Also to shows, TV shows, etc. This makes people lose sight of what their real problems are.
2. Problem-reaction-solution
Sometimes power deliberately fails to attend to or poorly attends to certain realities. They make citizens see this as a problem that requires an external solution. They themselves propose a solution.
This is one of the mass manipulation strategies to make decisions that are unpopular. For example, when they want to privatize a public company and intentionally lower their service level. In the end, this justifies the sale.
3. Graduality
This is another of the mass manipulation strategies to introduce measures that people would normally not accept. It consists in applying them little by little, so that they are practically imperceptible.
This is what happened, for example, with the reduction of labor rights. In different societies, measures, or forms of work, have been implemented, which end up causing the worker to have no guarantee of social security.
4. Defer
This strategy consists in making citizens think that a measure is taken that is temporarily harmful, but that in the future can bring great benefits to the whole society and, of course, to individuals.
The goal is for people to get used to the measure and not reject it, thinking about the supposed good that it will bring tomorrow. When the time comes, the effect of “normalization” has already worked and people do not protest because the promised benefits do not arrive.
5. Childen the public
Many of the messages on television, especially advertising, tend to speak to the public as if they were children. They use gestures, words and attitudes that are reconciled and imbued with a certain aura of ingenuity.
The objective is to overcome people’s resistance. It is one of the mass manipulation strategies that seeks to neutralize people’s critical thinking. Politicians also employ these tactics, sometimes portraying themselves as father figures.
6. Resort to emotions
Messages that are projected from power are not aimed at people’s reflective minds. What they mainly seek is to generate emotions and reach the unconscious of individuals. Therefore, many of these messages are full of emotion.
The purpose of this is to create a kind of “short circuit” with the most rational area of people. With emotions, the overall content of the message is captured, not its specific elements. In this way, the critical capacity is neutralized.
7. Create ignorant audiences
Keeping people in ignorance is one of the purposes of power. Ignorance means not giving people the tools to analyze reality for themselves. Tell them the anecdotal data, but not let them know the internal structures of the facts.
Maintaining ignorance is also not placing emphasis on education. Promote a wide gap between the quality of private education and public education. To put to sleep the curiosity for knowledge and give little value to the products of intelligence.
8. Promote compliant audiences
Most fashions and trends are not created spontaneously. They are almost always induced and promoted from a center of power that exerts its influence to create massive waves of tastes, interests, or opinions.
The media generally promote certain fads and trends, most of them around silly, superfluous or even ridiculous lifestyles. They convince people that behaving like this is “what’s in”.
9. Reinforcement of self-blame
Another mass manipulation strategy is to make people believe that they, and they alone, are to blame for their problems. Anything negative that happens to them is entirely up to them. In this way, they are led to believe that the environment around them is perfect and that, if a failure occurs, this is the individual’s responsibility.
Therefore, people end up trying to fit in and also feel guilty for not being very successful. They shift the outrage that the system could provoke into permanent guilt in themselves.
10. Deep knowledge of the human being
Over the past few decades, science has managed to gather an impressive amount of knowledge about the biology and psychology of human beings. However, all this information is not available to most people.
Only a minimal amount of information reaches the public. Meanwhile, elites have all this knowledge and use it at their convenience. Once again, it is clear that ignorance facilitates the action of power over society.
All of these mass manipulation strategies aim to keep the world as it befits the most powerful. Block the critical capacity and autonomy of most people. However, it also depends on whether we allow ourselves to be passively manipulated, or to offer resistance as far as possible.
