Privatised public opinion

There’s a piece on the substack of the commentator known as Eugyppius, most of which is behind a paywall, but whose introduction alone gives food for thought.

Beginning with the remarkable re-writing of history, and the US political narrative in general, following the assassination attempt on Donald Trump and the coup against Joe Biden, he has revised his opinion that the press simply tries to convince us of a false version of reality. The truth is more subtle:

They shape not so much our views of the world, as they do our views of how other people see the world, and in this way they exercise wide-ranging control over the kinds of arguments and opinions it is even possible to articulate.

This is certainly consistent with what I wrote about propaganda and so-called “public opinion” in Seeing through Smoke, in which I explored how public opinion is actually nobody’s opinion, but the result of mass-manipulation, which ironically then becomes the thing that moulds the policies of those who started the manipulation. Yes, the Blob actually believes that their incestuous worldview is shared by all right-thinking people across the country.

Consider how COVID proved how susceptible we all are to the pressure of those around us, even when we are quite convinced that they are wrong, and even when we are blessed with a degree of the disagreeability trait. One video I saw recently demonstrated the power of this phenomenon in the case of the Trump shooting. Many have commented how remarkable it was that the crowd did not stampede (as some of those near the shooter’s position appear to have done). But the speaker cited research that shows how, in an acute emergency, people invariably look to others for cues as to how to react. In fact they look to another, a single individual who may well just happen to be the tallest, or in the case of a fomented riot, the Ray Epps figure shouting loudest (it still seems likely that Epps was trained to do that, but was not expecting the response, “Fed! Fed!”).

In the Trump case, the obvious focus of attention was Trump himself, and on the video footage it is indeed remarkable how, as soon as he throws himself to the ground, the crowd behind him instantly follows suit, almost to a man. And needless to say, the defiance of his demeanor also spreads to the crowd, which not only does not stampede, but many of which stand trying to point out where they think the shooter is to the authorities.

I can’t remember if this particular video went on to mention the classic research studies in which experimental subjects almost invariably complied with the obviously false judgements of fellow-subjects who were, actually, paid stooges, or the infamous Milgram shock experiments where peer-pressure induced ordinary people to administer what they had to believe were lethal electric shocks.

These latter experiments actually make Eugyppius’s point well, for it’s easy to forget that both experiments tested compliance not with majority opinion, but with fictional majority opinion. The stooges were there to give the illusion of what “most” people would rationally do, and they succeeded. They succeeded only because the subjects were denied access to real people. This, of course, has well understood from ancient times to stirrers of crowds, who know that throwing a brick at a policeman in a confused situation will reliably turn a protest into a riot. The gospels don’t record it, but it’s a fair bet that the elites who coached false witnesses against Jesus also put someone in the crowd to start the chant, “Crucify him!” Mass formation did the rest – sheep without a true shepherd readily follow a false one.

A controlled press, too, has this power. A rabble-rousing revolutionary tract may well be able to incite discontent into violence, but will have to compete with counter-revolutionary tracts. The competition of ideas is more obvious, and well-understood, in a healthy free press. You read a sensationalised version of some scandal or tragedy, but you’re aware that the editorials even of your Mirror and your mate’s Sun are likely to give different spins, and cause you to weigh what is the truth. That’s even before you graduate to the reflective and nuanced disagreements of the editorials in the Times and the Telegraph.

In our own situation of an entirely captured press (and before enough of the population has latched on to free citizen journalism), the agreement of MSM on all significant matters plays the part not so much of the rabble-rouser in the crowd, but of the crowd itself. If all the media are talking about Kamala Harris’s newly-discovered virtues, and have forgotten about a recent assassination attempt, then effectively it is as if everyone is talking, or not talking, about those things – and in fact the net result is to make that so. My conversations show how many people will think that the press blowing up Harry and Meghan’s doings, or Johny Depp’s relationship problems, is a waste of time, but they’ll still share their opinions on it). Very few understand that what they should be doing is scouring the back pages (or better still, the alternative press) for the truly important stuff that is is not being puffed in the news.

Media controllers know that you are unlikely to have personal access to Donald Trump, or Julian Assange, or Tommy Robinson, or the host of lesser players whose virtue or villainy are fed to you through the filter of their preferred narrative. You may doubt that crowds of 50-100,000 gathered in London were truly “Far Right,” but unless you were there that is the only descriptor the press will give you to attach to them. In many cases, of course, you won’t even have that because the events were not reported to you.

How, you wonder, can people so quickly memory-hole facts and opinions that, only yesterday, were thought of as uncontested? That, too, is a psychological commonplace. I well remember as an elder in a previous church (who kept notes and looked back at them), how I had to remind people that their memory of previous decisions, whilst convenient to the current situation, were not actually true. And these were good people trying to do things right, rather than manipulative ideologues seeking to control the masses. It takes a certain mindset to remember, when the media are trumpeting, that what a politician is saying now is the opposite of what they said a few years ago, or that the blasphemous tableau presented at the Olympic Opening was, indeed, based on da Vinci’s Last Supper rather than little-known paintings of Bacchinalia. After all everybody knows different, because everybody follows the same news.

Like the conjurer, the press succeeds in deception less by telling lies (though it certainly does that in spades) than by directing our attention away from what is important to what serves its narrative, which is the narrative of corrupt government and other vested interests political, financial and ideological.

The stage magician, like the political polemicist, works in the world of suspended disbelief – we know both are probably deceiving us, but we’re impressed with the skill and take it all with a pinch of salt. More dangerous is the Uri Geller, or perhaps more accurately the Kenneth Copeland, whose deceptive tricks are linked to a narrative we are intended to internalise – in Geller’s case simply that he has special powers, related to childhood encounters with extra-terrestrials, worthy of paying him to witness, or in Copeland’s that he is an apostle of Jesus Christ rather than at best a shyster.

It seems to me that if you don’t want to be deceived, don’t frequent magic shows or Word of Faith churches – and perhaps, keep away from social psychology experiments and the main stream media.