Here is the opening of yet another excellent article by Stella Morabito over at The Federalist — this was the subtitle: “Here’s how to resist the Left’s culture control, one conversation at a time.”
Perception is everything. Wars are often won or lost based on how the actors perceive one another’s strengths and weaknesses, not so much how strong or weak they are in reality. So it goes with any agenda item.
When people sense a shift in public opinion on an issue, a fair number will shift right along with what they perceive. Thus, power elites can shape behaviors and attitudes by applying various techniques of crowd psychology, focused on propaganda and silencing dissent.
The end product is thought reform or “collective belief formation.” It’s all about molding your perception of a given issue so your perception will influence others’ perceptions, creating an “opinion cascade.” Effective propaganda also keeps you in the dark about the fact that you are being manipulated.
You Can’t Resist What You Don’t Understand
You can go a long way in fighting propaganda simply by helping people understand how it operates on us. If we can’t grasp how propaganda works, we become susceptible to it. Over time, we lose our ability to distinguish reality from illusion. Mass delusion can set in wherever large populations live in ignorance of how they are manipulated. (We can see this most clearly in a place like North Korea, where six decades of ironclad dictatorship has psychologically transformed the masses into a lemming-like state.)
So when Rush Limbaugh discussed my Federalist article “How to Escape the Age of Mass Delusion,” I was gratified to see this aspect of the discussion occur in such a large forum. This conversation must continue.
In case you haven’t noticed, there are a host of leftist agenda items that simply don’t hold up to the scrutiny of thorough debate. Their passage into law depends largely on propaganda techniques that induce smearing and silencing of dissenters. A few of these items include Obamacare, Common Core, global warming, immigration reform, transgenderism in K-12 and the military, and the Iran deal. The list goes on and on.
Read more: The Federalist
Image credit: www.thecommentator.com.
