We’ll I’m a bit drunk, so here goes…

In light of postmodernist and anti-realist critiques of well….just about everything under the sun, it would appear that populists have learned how to exploit these ideas and slowly use them to sow deep seated distrust of all types of authority.

Eric Hoffer once wrote that

The truth seems to be that propaganda on its own cannot force its way into unwilling minds; neither can it inculcate something wholly new; nor can it keep people persuaded once they have ceased to believe. It penetrates only into minds already open, and rather than instill opinion it articulates and justifies opinions already present in the minds of its recipients. The gifted propagandist brings to a boil ideas and passions already simmering in the minds of his hearers. he echoes their innermost feelings. Where opinion is not coerced, people can be made to believe only in what they already “know.”

Something however, for me at least, seems to have changed and I’ve felt this way for a while. There seems to be so much information overload within the modern media, that populists like Farage have learnt not only how to play the classical populist, but also create their own versions of reality. Ideology now creates reality, memes if you will, instead of reality creating ideology (eg communist insurgencies etc).

My question is, if I recognized this before the Brexit referendum – why on earth did no one in whitehall recognize what they were up against. You can’t win with reasoned logic if the people you are trying to win over are living and creating their own versions of reality that go against objective truth.

And how do we as a country counter this phenomena, as I do not see it as being good in any way for democracy. The issue with it, is that postmodern machiavellianism can be used to critique just about every political standpoint under the sun but cannot be used to create any concrete public policy. The leave campaign highlighting this perfectly.

Good grief, what do you sound like? How do you think the man-in-the-street would vote after reading that?
The only “objective truth” here is that 52 is greater than 48.
There was a first past the post referendum and one option was just that, first.

It’s been going on for years/decades/centuries

Summed up by the great philosopher

“Fear is the path to the dark side. Fear leads to anger. Anger leads to hate. Hate leads to suffering.”
– Yoda

All you need to do is scare people, make they afraid, find them something to hate. When you do that their anger will manifest and you can use that to get what you want.
The reason for using fear is it’s much easier to generate fear in the absence of fact.

You can’t win with reasoned logic if the people you are trying to win over are living and creating their own versions of reality that go against objective truth.

do we not all do that though? If we didn’t we would stop buying overpriced bikes in the belief that they perform better for us. Its why it is better to vote for a party with a set of principles (theoretically) than a single complex issue

Excellent drunkpost 🙂
Think you’re right. A majority of folk have limited aptitude for critical-thinking at the best of times. Couple that with info overload and deliberate blurring of fact or proper analysis against lists of fluff and sidebar-of-shame type bollix. Add the endless check-and-re-check cycle of asinine social media copypastas and folk basically construct their own fairytale bubbles of ‘news’.
A shite haircut or a man with a pint of ale in hand seems to have the power to stick in the minds of more people than objective truth.
I fear for the future of journalism and serious politics.

You’re very articulate for someone who claims to be drunk!

I kind of agree though, Farage is a ****.

It seems that ‘critical thinking’ for a lot of the Welsh and the Cornish voters just means having a moan.

How do you think the man-in-the-street would vote after reading that?

He wouldn’t read it. It’s too long and complicated. Propaganda needs to be short and punchy. “£350 to spend on hospitals”, “too many immigrants!”, “45mins to WMDs”, “must support the troops”, “loose lips sink ships”

“A majority of folk have limited aptitude for critical-thinking at the best of times.”

The standard of education in this country is absolutely disgraceful. So many people in the UK seem to lack the ability to grasp basic facts, or to work things out for themselves. In a nation which boasts so much wealth, this is simply criminal that so many have been so neglected. Of course, this has been engineered by the right; make access to education increasingly difficult for all but the wealthy elites, keep the proles in ignorance.

But then again, we live in a time of unprecedented access to information. Many, it seems, would rather sit and watch Celebrity Love Island or read scaremongering bullshit in the right wing press, than bother going out and finding out things for themselves. Preferring an intellectual ready-meal over some proper food.

What it means to be British

2 World Wars and 1 World Cup….

Something to be proud of, that and our EMPIRE – we were in control of that!! We told em. Why can’t we run the world again

May I remind you that Blair introduced university fees in his first day in office. linky

It strikes me that the only way to deal with the issue is to start championing old enlightenment ideals at both secondary and higher education levels.

I had a straight up argument and a falling out with an old friend of mine, who works for the NHS in a language therapy capacity. She studied English at University and voted leave. She and some of the paediatricians believe that there is a link between autism and MMR still, because “science is carried out through the biased minds of human beings”. She dislikes EBM and just about all science and gives no authority to either, as she doesn’t think you can truly know the outside world. She riffs off long lists of when science has got it wrong, eg global cooling. This is why she also ignored the opinion of expert commentary on the economy.

How do you counter such willful idiocy?

“May I remind you that Blair introduced university fees in his first day in office.”

Like I said; a situation engineered by the right.

“we were in control of that!! We told em. Why can’t we run the world again”

Who’s ‘We’?

There is a lot of academic thinking questioning the principle that individuals act as self serving and rational agents. One of the underpinning principles of neo classical economic theory and the overuse of game theory analysis. The counter argument is that individual irrationality will go both ways and even out over a population but increasing evidence from behavioral economics suggests otherwise. Actually I think personally the issue is the definition of rational in this context, an economist or political scientist analysis may be based on analysis of hypothesis, data, trends but ignores impact of emotion and psychology. Whereas the Farage type politicians instinctly understand this to manipulate opinion.

Edukator – Reformed Troll
May I remind you that Blair introduced university fees in his first day in office. linky

You should be able to leave school equipped to deal with this sort of things. That and count…

Double post..

“Actually I think personally the issue is the definition of rational in this context, an economist or political scientist analysis may be based on analysis of hypothesis, data, trends but ignores impact of emotion and psychology. Whereas the Farage type politicians instinctly understand this to manipulate opinion.”

I think you’re spot on there.

PARKLIFE!

Edukator – Reformed Troll
May I remind you that Blair introduced university fees in his first day in office. linky

…and yet more people than ever are going to university in the UK. And greater than 70% of degree educated people voted to remain, with the vast majority (74%) of those degree educated people that chose to leave being over 55.

Universities embrace and foster multiculturalism, teach critical thinking and encourage people to think globally, rather than provincially.

Democracy cannot succeed unless those who express their choice are prepared to choose wisely. The real safeguard of democracy, therefore, is education.

FDR

decisions made from consuming information from soundbites and vox pop statements designed to appease the man in the street.
plus a lot of them are suffering form the Dunning-Kruger effect* so think they are able to judge on such important issues as they are able to view ‘FACTS’ objectively.

*The Dunning–Kruger effect is a cognitive bias in which relatively unskilled persons suffer illusory superiority, mistakenly assessing their ability to be much higher than it really is. Dunning and Kruger attributed this bias to a metacognitive inability of the unskilled to recognize their own ineptitude and evaluate their own ability accurately. Their research also suggests corollaries: highly skilled individuals may underestimate their relative competence and may erroneously assume that tasks which are easy for them are also easy for others.[1]

The bias was first experimentally observed by David Dunning and Justin Kruger of Cornell University in 1999. They postulated that the effect is the result of internal illusion in the unskilled, and external misperception in the skilled: “The miscalibration of the incompetent stems from an error about the self, whereas the miscalibration of the highly competent stems from an error about others.”[1]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning–Kruger_effect

Democracy cannot succeed unless those who express their choice are prepared to choose wisely. The real safeguard of democracy, therefore, is education.
FDR

I got slagged off for saying that earlier.

Didn’t know both FDR AND Churchill agreed with me.

😀 @Flashy

“£350 to spend on hospitals”

Ah, now the truth comes out! 🙂

This is why (I’ve been saying this for years and know it will never happen in reality) Media Studies should be a core subject in school alongside English, Maths and Science.

I think I covered propaganda very well in History – though most found it dull a good dose of the 30/40’s is an educatiom for most.

I don’t think classical lessons on 1930’s and 1940’s propaganda can help though. I think the best example of what I’m talking about is the Ukrainian war which I believe has been described by Mr Surkov himself as a postmodern non-invasion invasion. The new reality isn’t to sow seeds of discontent but instead confusion.

http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2014/11/hidden-author-putinism-russia-vladislav-surkov/382489/

Surkov likes to invoke the new postmodern texts just translated into Russian, the breakdown of grand narratives, the impossibility of truth, how everything is only “simulacrum” and “simulacra” … and then in the next moment he says how he despises relativism and loves conservatism, before quoting Allen Ginsberg’s “Sunflower Sutra,” in English and by heart. If the West once undermined and helped to ultimately defeat the U.S.S.R. by uniting free-market economics, cool culture, and democratic politics into one package (parliaments, investment banks, and abstract expressionism fused to defeat the Politburo, planned economics, and social realism), Surkov’s genius has been to tear those associations apart, to marry authoritarianism and modern art, to use the language of rights and representation to validate tyranny, to recut and paste democratic capitalism until it means the reverse of its original purpose.

The Kremlin switches messages at will to its advantage, climbing inside everything: European right-wing nationalists are seduced with an anti-EU message; the Far Left is co-opted with tales of fighting U.S. hegemony; U.S. religious conservatives are convinced by the Kremlin’s fight against homosexuality. And the result is an array of voices, working away at global audiences from different angles, producing a cumulative echo chamber of Kremlin support, all broadcast on RT.

I thought this article was a little bit “over-analysing and disappearing up your own analysis”, but after last Thursday it seems quite prescient….

Guardian – the politics of disgust

I don’t think classical lessons on 1930’s and 1940’s propaganda can help though. I think the best example of what I’m talking about is the Ukrainian war which I believe has been described by Mr Surkov himself as a postmodern non-invasion invasion. The new reality isn’t to sow seeds of discontent but instead confusion.

The principles remain the same.
Look at what is being said, look at who said it, check the facts (despite what people claim it was very easy) and work out if it’s not true or exaggerated why they said it.
I’ll go back to my Yoda quote from the first page. Fear is the best thing, scare people are you have them.
There are places that kids can’t get into schools cause of immigrants
They work for less money
They are bunging up our health service…

PARKLIFE!

ffs sake warning needed, I guffawed, nearly choked and surely woke the neighbours.

I was going to ignore Flashhearts post – but, yes, laughing because of your own ignorance in relation to how people like Serkov, Mandleson, Farage, Goebells 😆 (obligatory Godwin) operate is funny as you are admitting you ignore an important part of history.

Remember this little exerpt from screenwipe back in 2014, although I’m not sure I agree with the latter third of the video. Although it would be interesting to look at whether the rhetoric from Camerons cabinet helped to undermine him later on.

[video]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wcy8uLjRHPM[/video]