You have already been worked in a subtle way. How? Although the title of this book is The Ten Commandments of Propaganda, you will actually find eleven commandments here, and much other information beside. The reference to the Ten Commandments accesses something already stored in your brain, waiting. The title calls and activates it with virtually no effort on your part. In an instant you already understand pretty much the whole drift of a fairly complicated concept that Im proposing. You know that you have encountered a set of precepts, *shalts* and *shalt-nots*, designed to guide thought and behavior. And by merely understanding all this, you are now well on the way of being persuaded of what I will have to say, for to understand is perhaps half way to being persuaded. My task would be much more difficult if I had to assemble this whole idea from basic elements. Simply put, for any propaganda to be effective as mass persuasion, it must somehow resonate with ideas that are already in peoples heads. To do otherwise is to attempt an entirely new installation of ideas and concepts, which requires far too much work on your part. So I have done the work for you, a sort of cognitive pre-packaging that takes advantage of the human propensity for efficiently avoiding work. (Brian Anse Patrick, The Ten Commandments of Propaganda)
Posted on: Sat, 05 Jul 2014 22:46:52 +0000