Manipulating Emotions to control the populace

The prime aim of those in power, whether that power is political or financial (and above a certain level money IS power) is to stay in power for as long as possible.

In order to do this they employ any means they can. One way is to create a sense of indignation focused on some minority group, or an emotionally charged issue, another is to appeal to the nobler aspects of a gullible populace.

Here I look at some examples of opinion management using highly dubious and emotionally charged figures and arguments. Whether you are in the USA, the UK or anywhere else you need the techniques mentioned here.

Ecological Activists are idealist and tend to be Authoritarian followers, which means they are vulnerable to manipulation by the powers that be, political or industrial.

Some years ago there was a flap about the amount of atmospheric pollution caused by aircraft. An eco-spokesman on UK TV (wherethey are normally as rare as hen's teeth) fulminated that cheap flights should be stopped because air travel produced 3% (yes three percent, three parts in one hundred) of all carbon emissions. Soon after that there were all the signs of a campaign going into reverse as then Prime Minister Tony Blair said being ecologically responsible did not mean having to wear a hair shirt. When Chancellor Gordon Brown doubled airport tax the campaign went dead, though even now the myth (probably) of high aircraft emissions is floating around from place to place like spam advertising “real Viagra” , despite real efforts by airlines to reduce emissions. The result of this scare was a doubling of airport tax and the introduction of compulsory carbon taxes on some US airlines.

I do not know if the emission figures were valid or just invented. But I read into it an unpleasant undercurrent: the campaign concentrated on CHEAP flights, and this to me read as a desire to reserve the air for the rich and for the poor – i.e those who are not rich to stay where they are put. This would benefit Government by helping produce a more docile and conformist public.

To me therefore it looks like the flap was engineered by governments in order to justify the imposition of extra travel taxes with the dual benefit of raising revenue and making it harder for the serfs to travel outside their area and perhaps see that things were done differently elsewhere and legitimising the idea that the skies should only be for the rich – our political masters and employers, and us plebs should be grateful for what we have.

The warning signs here were the sudden appearance of ecological activists on prime time TV and the little publicised fact that the then chancellor Gordon Brown wanted to increase airport tax. The fact that the estimated percentage of carbon emissions contributed by aircraft was only 3% and the lack of a source for this figure.

Before I go further I am NOT debating the percentage of carbon emissions caused by aircraft, even though I have pointed out the arithmetical flaws in the original panic. I am looking at what might loosely be called the sociology of such panics.

Later various eco-pundits started claiming that a plane ride generates as much emission as a car journey. Cars were previously cited as causing 25% of all emissions. Now the plane emissions cannot be per head as otherwise planes would generate 2500% of all emissions, that is they would generate three times as much emissions at there are emissions. So if a plane ride generates as much as a car journey it generates roughly 1/100^th the emission per head. Since these same pundits claimed train and car journeys have roughly the same carbon footprint it implies that power stations and factories ( and oil tankers) contribute “only” about 25% of all emissions. This conveniently lets industry off the hook: we, with our desire to travel and broaden our minds, are the culprits and should squat in our own little dungheap while the investment bankers jet over the world to plan the next recession and subsequent raid on the taxpayer.

My reading of this was that Government and Industry used gullible and well intentioned environmental groups to create a climate where industry could be let off the hook for carbon emissions and by implication, for pollution.

There IS a problem with Social Security Fraud in the UK. It has provided funding for the IRA and more recent terrorist groups, and according to recent reports, for certain organised groups that import and claim social security for children and use these children as props for begging. There is also understandable irritation from the employed when it is known that some Social Security claimants get a tax free sum of around £2500 a month, corresponding to a salary of around £40,000 per annum while pensioners live in poverty. It is not clear what the scale of the “single Mother problem” is, since if the figures come from government they cannot be trusted these days, and if they are from personal observations then they may be the result of a biased sample.

Unfortunately the resolution of the problems with UK Social Security is difficult, especially when, according to the economist more than half the population is getting money from the state. The situation is not helped by spin like the following:

Back in the Thatcher regime in the UK during the mid 1990s, there was a “clampdown” on Social Security fraud. The claim, broadcast on radio, was that it was costing £600 million pounds a year. I noted this was less than one third of a penny in the pound of government revenue and suggested to my elected representative that supermarkets and insurance companies would be ecstatic if their losses from fraud and theft were that low.

I got the normal anodyne letter from my MP and kept watching. Two years and two clampdowns later the claim was that Social Security fraud was costing the tax payer £12 billion per year. Twenty times the previous estimate

So what did a twenty fold increase in two years mean?

Did the crackdowns reveal unexpectedly high levels of Fraud? That the original figure was just the tip of the iceberg. I would doubt it, especially as the first clampdown should have reduced the figure anyway.

Did the crackdowns cause a heightened awareness of how to defraud the system and therefore lead to more fraud? If so the answer would be to stop having crackdowns.

Or were the cost estimates simply plucked out of thin air, or suspect data, like the 12 year old Graduate Thesis used to bolster the Blair Regime's claim, later found fraudulent, that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction?

You decide on that. My point is a little different.

The assumed prevalence of Social Security Fraud was used to justify increased surveillance of the populace and later used by New “Labour” to justify the introduction of compulsory ID cards in the UK. I suspect that as with the wave of anger in the US after 9/11 various agencies with designs on reducing liberty and increasing surveillance of the citizen saw an opening and took it. Whether they created that opening is another matter.

The warning signs here were the original unsourced figures, happily parroted by the media, and the subsequent escalation of these figures with no explanation given for the rise in the estimates.

In 2009 British Churches called for an amnesty on illegal immigrants. While I disapprove of the way the immigration system in the UK has been manipulated by Government to allow employers to sack white workers and bring in cheap workers from the Indian subcontinent ( and I do not blame them for coming) - my gripe is with employers and government, not the workers, who are generally exploited – I tend to sympathise with the churches.

Nevertheless I fear this was a government ploy to justify further discrimination against British workers on behalf of their paymasters in industry. It is now 2011 and Big Business can, despite cosmetic changes to the laws introduced by a new government (which I read signed a treaty ensuring Indian workers had to be treated as if they were from the European Union), still fly in workers, externalising the social cost, or worse, outsource work overseas, which means the money an immigrant would have spent in Britain is going overseas.

When a public figure makes a statement examine it closely and ask what might be their hidden agenda.

Be especially skeptical if the statement is something you agree with for example. If there are no figures it is waffle and suspect. If there are figures where did they come from and is there independent evidence for their accuracy.

Become numerate. Realise a million, even a billion, is trivial to most governments, even if it is uncounted wealth to a person. If Government want to scare you they will tell you they are losing a billion to X, but if they want to reassure you they will say that X ( a billion remember) is only 0.01% of government revenue. Equally if they want to scare you they will say that Y is 70% of the cost of Z but if they want to reassure you they will say that Z is only 100,000 and is “just a drop in the ocean”. They will say “We are putting a billion into Job Creation” and “forget” to say that is spread over 50 years and half a billion people.

But what else do you expect when the concept of leadership has been replaced by “opinion management”?

What the UK needs is the equivalent of the US site factcheck.org which will, with no party bias, check every statement made by a public figure for accuracy, and highlight the use of ploys such as emotional blackmail and imprecise statements. So far no one has started this. It would take money and time and experience of investigative journalism