If the statement “2014 was the hottest year on record” is untrue – and demonstrably untrue – then why are so many people who ought to know better continuing to claim otherwise? The answer, as often where outbreaks of mass hysteria are concerned, can be found in Gustave Le Bon’s 1895 masterpiece translated in English under the title The Crowd: A Study Of The Popular Mind. This brilliant study of how to influence the mob by engendering groupthink was admired by, among others, Freud, Hitler and Mussolini. Here is Le Bon on the most important weapon in the demagogue’s armoury: It was Napoleon, I believe, who said that there is only one figure in rhetoric of serious importance, repetition. The thing affirmed comes by repetition to fix itself in the mind in such a way that it is accepted as a demonstrated truth. The influence of repetition on crowds is comprehensible when the power is seen which it exercises on most enlightened minds. This power is due to the fact that the repeated statement is embedded in the long run in those profound regions of our unconscious selves in which the motives of our actions are forged. At the end of a certain time we have forgotten who is the author of the repeated assertion, and we finish by believing it. To this circumstance is due the astonishing power of advertisements. When we have read a hundred, a thousand, times that X’s chocolate is the best, we imagine we have heard it said in many quarters, and we end by acquiring the certitude that such is the fact. breitbart/london/2015/01/23/2014-was-not-the-hottest-year-on-record-so-why-did-nasa-claim-it-was/
Posted on: Sat, 24 Jan 2015 13:05:00 +0000
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