Imlisanen Jamir
A lesson that jumps out of the pages of history is that leaders, political or otherwise, can and will manipulate the masses.
Leaders can strategically manipulate emotion and appeal to shared identities to create cohesive political identities among followers which allow them to overcome recruitment, coordination and collective action challenges to maximize prospects for group survival.
Social identity and emotion serve as proximate mechanisms by which leaders can develop and sustain cohesive cooperation among followers that can then be deployed at will.
In this way, the most effective leaders can leverage extant psychological mechanisms to cultivate a devoted group of followers whose affective attachment to a particular political identity can be activated for a wide variety of purposes independent of actual political content or issue area.
For instance, the repetition of an inaccurate statement can become accepted as true. This explains the process by which propaganda is accepted, but not the motivation to use the initial lie. The motivation to lie is power: power to control and power, both economic and social, obtained from winning people over. This gives credence to a standard of ethics where sadly winning is everything.
There seems to have been a rise in individualism over the last five decades, and anger and antagonism go along with these. Are we entering a new phase where we’ve lost civic engagement and community bonding (especially as we’re spending more time online), and now we’re left with more of the antagonistic emotion – or is this just a phase that we’ll pass through?
That’s not to say there aren’t differences between leaders, because there certainly are. Big ones. Important ones. Consequential ones. But one common practice for them is to push what we call “hot buttons.” Politicians know if they push those, they can provoke a Pavlovian response from certain voters. This has the inexplicable effect on us to follow them, even when it’s not in our economic or other interests.
Why do we let them?
For instance, when we see a soda commercial on television, we understand (at least we should) that the words and images used were selected because they were designed to trigger a certain response. Buy more flavored sugar water!
We should be sensible enough to understand that politicians are doing the same thing —that campaigns are trying to manipulate voters’ emotions the same way that corporations do.
Comments can be sent to imlisanenjamir@gmail.com
