http://www.cracked.com/blog/5-ways-powerful-people-trick-you-into-hating-underdogs/
Fascinating.
I clicked on this article, thinking it would be about one thing - how a political dictator would strategize to divide a country, but really, it’s talking about much smaller entities and how yes, powerful people (not necessarily politicians) divide and conquer. I wonder what kind of college class this kind of strategy would be studied. It is pretty interesting. And true given all the examples he provides. He’s right about PETA… most people think of them when they think of groups that are looking out for the welfare of animals, but really, there are TONS of groups that do this in not such a dramatic/flashy manner and those groups get overlooked for the good work they do because PETA gets so much mostly negative attention, so therefore, all animal welfare groups must be bad.
Sometimes, the more extreme and noxious groups play along with what is described, because they want to incite others to hate and the authorities to oppress the larger group that they claim to act in the interests of, so that they can recruit more members of said larger group who would not otherwise be attracted to such extreme or noxious groups. Al Qaeda and Daesh (IS) have been particularly successful doing this, much to the detriment of everyone.
Fascinating.
Divide and conquer. Pretty simple. Been used for thousands of years and is still effective. Humans have no defense against it.
Absolutely ridiculous article. Pure brainwashing…
I thought we edicate people to defend against something like this. Not sure if we are doing a good job if people are so easily manipulated. You’d think minimal critical thinking would stop most of it.
You’d think that minimal critical thinking would stop a lot of things but, clearly, that isn’t always the case.
Explains a lot, and still happening every day.
It won’t be happening if it doesn’t work. Why don’t we question how widespread it is when someone takes an extreme example to make a point?
I found it a very interesting read. And then I got sucked into several of his other articles. It goes a long way towards showing how internet commenting can so easily get derailed by knee jerk/reptilian reactions. Present company excluded of course!
it is the oldest trick in the book, it is using the radical, the wacky, the fringe, to characterize the group and thereby denouncing their message. For example, when the G5 protests happened in Seattle and there was rioting, automatically the message was “these people are not protestors, they are agitators and anarchists out to cause trouble”, and it totally blew out the message the protests were supposed to be about, the problems with globalization (kind of ironic that those who blame globalization for lack of jobs and so forth, probably agreed that Seattle was just about people wanting to cause trouble…). You see this in political discourse, where “liberal” and “conservative” as labels have become villified, and if you ask someone why they villify the lable, you would get the extremes “Liberal means someone who wants to to take away money you have earned and give it to people who don’t want to work”, “Conservative means someone who is a white supremacist and a religious nut”, while there are people from both groups who fit that bill, they are just that, voices, but the label has come to be categorized by that, which means that it is hard to try and convince people those definitions aren’t always true (and this leads to the knee jerk reaction, to the label, not the ideas being discussed).
The one person I remember insisting on the average view of a group was Gwen Ifil at PBS. More a few times she pushed on to get a feel for the majority in a group. That makes a dialogue possible.
Yup. I don’t see how anyone can deny this exists. Maybe you just haven’t realized. The mockery of those who disagree is pretty prevalent…
It’s not just the formal media, though, that brings attention.
I agree with you in part here. I agree that violent protestors tend to shut down any message being made (and that is unfortunate), but on the flip side, those violent protestors are are also supposed to represent the group doing the protesting. The association is important. That violent behavior strikes right in the heart of hypocrisy, and hypocrisy absolutely kills any message trying to be made.
When a group is protesting against bigotry and intolerance, and then a subset of that group goes out and displays bigotry and intolerance, it is fundamentally hypocritical. Yes it may be a different ‘flavor’ of bigotry and intolerance, but in the eyes of those on the opposite side, it looks as though the other side has no room to talk, and that just makes them more defensive.
IMO, protesting groups need to do a better job condemning/shutting out their own people who are violent, rather than passing the blame. Peaceful protests, and setting an example, are the way to go about getting your point across.
However, the violent extremists are not easily controlled by the peaceful protesters. Indeed, the violent extremists often consider the peaceful protesters to be the enemy and may attack them with as much fervor as they attack those on the other end of the political spectrum, because they alone want to control the message.
But realize peaceful protests are dismissed, too. Hooligans, ruffians, “privileged college students,” it happens so often that I think some aren’t even aware, much less process this summary dismissal. Gaslighting.
I happen to love a good protest, people willing to stand up for their beliefs and values.
Check out Saul Alinsky’s " Rules for Radicals: A Practical Primer for Realistic Radicals."
published in 1971.