6 Brainwashing Techniques They're Using On You Right Now
#3.
Keeping You In Line With Shame
I won several formal debates in college using my patented technique of simply repeating my opponent's argument in a high-pitched, mocking tone while wiggling my fingers in the air. There really is no defense.
They call this the appeal to rididcule fallacy. To which I would simply rebut, "Oooooh, appeal to ridicule fallacy! Well I've got a 'phallus' you can 'see' right here, college boy."Professionals have more sophisticated methods, but it boils down to the same technique. "They" know that if they can paint an idea as ridiculous, the listener usually won't bother examining it any closer to find out if the ridicule is justified.
After all, why even consider something that's ridiculous? That's only something a ridiculous person would do! And you're not ridiculous ... are you?
You are if you use something other than Alltel Wireless!
Look at these assholes! Is this you?
Sounds like:
"So now they're telling us that--get this, folks--global warming is caused by cows farting! Priceless!"
"And then he said we could save gas by inflating our tires! I couldn't make this stuff up, folks!"
Why It Works:
It's no secret you can short-circuit somebody's brain with shame. How many of us were shamed into doing something stupid in high school? Hell, I still have that huge Dokken tattoo on my back.
But why does it work? Well, there are these primitive, lower parts of your brain called amygdalae that controls those base, emotional reactions. That's where things like contempt and shame come from, and stimulating it can completely shut down the analytical part of your brain. The gang calls you a coward and the next thing you know, you're wedging a roman candle between your buttcheeks. You'll show them!
You can thank evolution for that. Way back when humans started forming groups and tribes, social status was everything. It's what guaranteed you food, protection and ladies (that is, a chance to pass on your genes). Mockery developed as a "conformity enforcer" to keep people in line.
Making a person, idea or behavior the target of mockery gave it a lower social position, and made it clear that anybody who associated with it would share that lower position, leaving them out of the hunting/eating/fucking that made life in the tribe worthwhile. Thousands of years later, a good dose of mockery can shut down critical thinking and make us fall right in line, no questions asked.
Recently Seen:
We again come back to our 2008 presidential campaign, and again we find both sides guilty.
The speakers at the Republican National Convention had a great time mocking Barack Obama as a "community organizer," drawing laughter from the crowd and skipping smoothly over the part where they explained what a community organizer is and why it's ridiculous.
And of course the other side does it with McCain's age...
From here
...as if there is something inherently silly about having lived a really long time.
#2.
Black and White Choices
Listen to an argument between your friends. Any argument. Listen to one guy say John McCain is a Fascist, while his opponent says Barack Obama is a Communist. Watch as even fans of the same football team bitterly divide themselves over whether the new quarterback is going to be "awesome" or "garbage."
Never anything in between. Everyone is a friend or enemy, every band either rules or sucks, black and white, nothing in the middle. They (capital T) love this, because They can convince you that you must choose either their way, or the most utterly retarded option on the opposite extreme.
Sounds like:
"Will we fight? Or run away as cowards?!?"
"You're not in favor of the death penalty? So you want murderers to just roam free then!"
"Are you going to the strip club with us, or are you a fag?"
Why It Works:
Because we evolved from creatures who were always in danger of being eaten, our brains were built on a very simple foundation: the "fight or flight" mechanism. This let us make lightning-fast decisions by boiling every situation into two options. Anyone who preferred to stop and mull over the subtleties of the scenario wound up in the digestive system of a saber-tooth tiger.
Fast forward thousands of years and you find a humanity with much fancier brains but that still prefers all-or-nothing choices when we're put under stress.
So if somebody wants to bypass your critical thinking circuitry, all they need to do is make you scared or anxious, often with a time limit or urgent threat ("We need to act now, or lose our way of life!").
Instead of pondering the situation with the analytical neocortex, you're using the primitive limbic system, scanning the landscape for the "Right" and "Wrong" move. You'll have no patience for wishy-washy talk about "a spectrum of options."
Recently Seen:
After the trauma of 9/11, the whole country dragged subtlety into the alley and shot it in the head.
But you can't blame us. After all, our entire fucking mythology and popular culture are based on the idea. There's a dark side of the force and a light side. Choose your path! Now! Ain't a fucking gray side, Luke!
Now, as bad as this one is, and you could make the case that 80% of the stupid choices humans make is because of this, there's one even more powerful. It's a spin-off of this one, and it's by far the best way to get thinking humans to respond like trained dogs.
#1.
Titties
No, other than that.
I'm talking about...
#1.
"Us vs. Them"
Holy shit. Here we go.
Sure, we know about the obvious examples, they're written across the history books in blood and bullet holes. Racism, genocide, horrifying caricatures on propaganda posters.
But They have figured out that the same technique that works so well for getting people whipped into a murderous apocalyptic frenzy, can be used sell you cars, or hamburgers, or computers.
Sounds like:
"The heart of America ain't in Hollywood! It's right here in [insert name of small town]!"
"You can listen to what I have to say, or bury you head in the sand with the rest of the sheeple!"
"You have a Nintendo Wii? Are you a toddler or just a retard?"
Why It Works:
Basically, we're hard-wired by evolution to form tribes. The more stress we feel, the more we feel love and attachment to those who look and sound the same as us, and the more we feel hatred to those who don't. It's just an old survival mechanism, since the ancient guys who didn't show that kind of blind loyalty were killed off by the fierce tribes formed by the ones who did.
So today we get that petty dehumanization of everybody outside of our group ("hippies," "rednecks," "fundies," "geeks," "douchebags," "libs", "cons," "fags," "breeders," "infidels," "towel-heads," "honkies," "darkies," "players", "haters").
WEST SIDE SUCKA
They can play on those old, primal urges for even the most retarded of results, such as fierce brand loyalty (the PS3 vs. 360 vs. Wii flame wars will make you claw your eyes out).
But to really make this one work, They can't just define your group, but have to define your group as the elite group, a shining beacon in a world full of weak-minded walking turds. The items on this list work best in combination, and you'll see in that the element of mockery and insulation from opposing viewpoints we talked about earlier (why listen to the viewpoints of those lesser sheeple?). Often this is combined with siege terminology ("The whole country has gone to hell, but we've got to stand up for common sense, folks! It's us against the world!")
Recently Seen:
Watch five seconds of an election stump speech. Every side does it.
In Sarah Palin's convention speech she talked about how people from small towns are totally the best ("We grow good people in our small towns, with honesty, sincerity, and dignity"). Earlier in the primaries the Clinton campaign did the same thing, talking about small towns as being the backbone of America where real, honest people are found. Always there is the unspoken reminder that these honest rural folk are under siege from those scary, phony freaks in the city.
When speaking to those city folk, on the other hand, Barack Obama made the infamous reference to those same small town types clinging to guns and religion, talking about them like they were savages to be studied through binoculars from a tower, with some peasant disease that needs cured by the enlightened.
Not only is "Us vs Them" the first and most important one on the list, it's the culmination and end goal of all the others. Drawing you into the right tribe is what They want most, because they can accomplish nothing without tribesmen.
If we don't find a way to resist it, this is what could leave the entire planet a charred radioactive ruin. And you know what else we lose if that happens?
The titties.
If you liked this, the author of this article has written a horror novel called John Dies at the End, available now in softcover. For more fascinating ways that your brain doesn't quite work, read Dave's answer to the question What is the Monkeysphere? or his look at the 7 Reasons The 21st Century Is Making You Miserable. Or just go to his profile and read everything he's written.
Due to the author adding in two #1's, I have perceived the article as such:
Reply#6: Chanting Slogans
#5: Slipping Bullshit Into Your Subconscious
#4: Controlling What You Watch and Read
#3: Keeping You in Line With Shame
#2: Black and White Choices
#1.5: "Us vs. Them"
#1: Titties
#0: Titties
Anyone else who says otherwise is a conformist.
on the big three game systems i prefer ps3 but i love and play all three. so yeah.
Reply"I won several formal debates in college using my patented technique of simply repeating my opponent's argument in a high-pitched, mocking tone while wiggling my fingers in the air. There really is no defense."
Replymy friend does this to me and i f*****g hate him for doing it. such an asshole.
Go Salma.
ReplyExcellent article. People use these techniques every day, whether they realise it or not, and think that just because it sounds convincing it must be true.
ReplyIt amuses me that the "small town types clinging to guns and religion" picture is a screenshot from Monty Python and the Holy Grail... specifically the scene where they're persecuting and attempting to burn a "witch".
Replythose are some mighty fine tittays (*)(*)
ReplyDavid Wong is so funny!
ReplyI love how cracked assumes 99.9% of its readers are men.
Reply Hide All See All 7 RepliesI'm not a man, but I do like titties.
With you there, Mr. Prostitute.
Perhaps that has something to do with the fact that most of the cracked writers ARE men? And the only regular female columnist writes s**t articles that mention cats way more than they should and make me realise where people get stupid stereotypes about women from.
I love how male Cracked writers mock themselves and other men being sexist and boob-driven. No sarcasm from my part, it's funny, they're not being serious. This is a comedy site.
And there's what Rickie said above, too.
Not a man, still afraid of losing the titties.
Either that, or they think every girl here is a lesbian.
...and no, fellow gentlemen, they DO NOT want you! Stop oogling.
I'm a primarily gay man and I still love tits.
Hmmm... Interesting article, but unless I missed something most of the conclusions are based on a particular brand of non sequiturs that have been active in the exciting field of evolutionary psychology for the last decade or so. And by exciting, I mean that a handful of human biologists, presumably bored with the whole idea of supporting claims with actual evidence ('damn, I had to do this through my whole dissertation, screw this shit, I got tenure now') came up with sociobiology 2.0, probably because it sold a lot of books and made them look like hotshots at faculty meetings.
Reply Hide All See All 4 RepliesThe whole thing basically goes something like: the human brain is the product of evolution. Therefore, its modern form(s) must have provided specific evolutionary advantages to our ancestors, while our non ancestors were left tittiless and blueballed. So, if we run some statistical analysis on certain types of behaviours, and certain reactions seem more prevalent than others, it must have been the result of a particular set of evolutionary conditions. Q.E.D. How you ask? I dunno, make up some nonsense about how Timmy's claustrophobic because his ancestors had to live in s****y caves all the time. Sounds reasonable.
Problem is, what we know of the modern human brain is based on some fairly complicated medical procedures and (very recent) research in neurobiology. What we don't have is any surviving examples of Lucy's brain to stick in an MRI. All we can do is extrapolate based on some fairly loose guesses about how human biology and social structure 'used to be'. But even then, there's nothing connecting the 'evolution' of a trait to its actual recurrence in behavioural patterns. This is unsurprising, because we haven't yet demonstrated convincing links between gene patterns and behaviours. We have shown, in some limited cases, a correlation between a specific gene and the occurrence of a basic behavioural model, but this sadly does not amount to causation.
Basically, our own assumptions about human behaviour get swapped out in the absence of actual evidence (e.g. a precise biochemical mechanism through which genetic code is transmitted to complex behaviour such as 'tribe forming'), and while it seems reasonable to conclude that human beings are social animals, and we may be 'hard wired' to form groups, we don't have a clue as to where to look in all the GGAUCGUCCA to find said information, nor a firm enough grasp of our own biological history to pinpoint its source.
But these sorts of arguments are immensely popular, and often unexamined, because a) it appeals to evolution, which has passed all other sorts of logical litmus tests (as well as being an observed fact of biology), and b) it seems to cleverly explain the things we see all around us. So sure, a shitload of people we know form groups. This may even be some (as yet unidentified) genetic prerogative, but the ways in which this happens don't necessarily lead us to black vs. white. It just happens that that's how a lot of people think in North America (and to be fair, a good chunk of the rest of the world too). But a lot of people in North America (and to be fair, a good chunk of the rest of the world too) belong to a particular cultural tradition based in a rather identifiable set of monotheistic practices (not to mention the legal and economic systems those people construct), a main tenant of which is a dichotomy between good and evil. Even the colours black and white are often used to represent this idea. But, too often, we take ourselves to be the sample for 'humanity' and then assume an (undiscovered) neuroevolutionary process to account for what we claim to see, in the process often disregarding simpler or more insightful possibilities (sure! it's the...uh...scientific method?).
So what's more likely, that humans, everywhere, are preprogrammed to handle only two choices, because we totally know what kickin it in a tribe back then must have been like, or that Western psychologists just aren't very good at using actual multicultural research methodology? (protip: Hondurans are mostly Catholic too).
See what I did there? I just appealed to your neurologically programmed desire for hard and fast dualism. Or was I appealing to your cultural sensibilities? Or neither?
Truth is, I'm sick writing my goddamn thesis so I'm venting on a cracked article. f**k grad school.
Cracked is an entertainment site. Anyone who takes it as an information source is a lost cause.
Oh wait, there's that source amnesia thing. Crap, we're screwed.
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I'm not one to say this, generally, but: TFL; DDR god almighty save the essay for school
Yep, that sure is a wall of text.
If you wanna see just how much those flight or fight instincts in your brain can affect you? Holy shit.
ReplyEver had a panic attack? Thats it. Your brain has just convinced you to run away from something. Trouble being theres nothing there..But, wait, you're panicking...There has to be SOMETHING. Right?!
You invariable answer "Yes" several thousand times before you realise that while technicly correct, its probably stupid to be panicking because you're terrified of being panicked.
Then go through that processes every single day. Certianly passes the time. But its a great example of how our head works. it will do absolutely anything to get you to respond without thinking, to the point where it doesnt let you recognize that the symptoms of the panic are itself being generted from the panic not, from an external event.
And thats why people with panic attacks don't believe in a benevolent deity. Cause if this is benevolent he can go to hell.
Or maybe its just me. Its just me isnt it? I knew that existential anxiety test was trying to say something when it scored me as "Holy f**k how have you not killed yourself yet?"
"Us vs. Them". Ya know, a cheeseburger does sound good.
ReplyThis article is in no way biased against republicans!
ReplyHonestly, if you look for examples of this, Republicans are easier to find. They're just so much less subtle.
I hope it is biased; if this article IS biased towards the GOP, then in reality they ARE better than how they're portrayed! And if that's the case, then Republicans are actually kinda epic people...
...Thanks, CNN and MSNBC!
Insightful and accurate, with one exception. "Douchebags" are not people outside our social sphere, they are, in fact, douchebags. I give you Guy Fieri and those orange fags from Jersey Shore.
ReplyHey! Don't malign us fags by lumping those asshat twatwaffles in with us!
In #3, I loved those Alltel commercials! I thought Chad (the blond one) was really hot, lol.
ReplyIs that caricature of America wearing a sash that says "JITTERBUG"? And, um, why would the Nazis take issue with the KKK of all things?
ReplyThe KKK thing was just propoganda. It doesn't matter that the Nazi's were into eugenics.
In fact, in the same image, you see racist caricatures of black people.
It was just pure propaganda
post deleted due to potential flame war.
ReplyNice try, faggots, but I have no "brain". I am invincible, I am pure.
Reply"They used to sacrifice a goat at the end, but PETA put a stop to it."
ReplyDamn you PETA. Damn you to hell. (Falls on knees weeping)
Back during the 2008 elections, a couple days before voting day, my dad and I sat down with my grandmother to convince her that Obama wasn't a Muslim, and that he wouldn't side with the terrorists, etc. All because of that friggin' picture.
Reply Hide All See All 3 RepliesBecause voting for a muslim is actually supporting terrorism. Congratz on completely missing the point.
"It's cool, you can vote for that guy. He's not a midget, that picture is just photoshoped."
I think all three of you should have stayed home.
Well to be fair I prefer not to vote for Muslims OR Christians. Or anyone else who tells me they have an invisible authority whose rules supersede the laws of the office to which they want me to elect them.
Well, I don't think that they thought he was muslim OR terrorist. I think he meant that the grandmom thought he was a terrorist because she thought he was muslim.