The Most Powerful Weapon

The most powerful weapon in the world is PR. It is not the atomic bomb, guns, tanks, planes, chemical, or biological weapons. All of these things can be overcome or stopped by PR, and far more people can be hurt or helped by PR.

What is PR? Well, more or less, it’s the handling of human emotions, usually on a broad scale. It turns out that most people are driven by how they feel about something as opposed to what they think about it. As such, you can get people to feel certain emotions and thus get them to take specific actions or believe specific things. Because emotion is the senior quality for most people, even more so than reason.

Even if people think they are being logical, they often miss the emotional component behind their reasoning. But you can see it—people will talk about how they feel about a piece of data or express their conviction (itself an emotional state) that something is the case in some very emotional way. I’m not saying everybody is irrational all the time. I’m just saying that people are more driven by emotion, more easily, than they are driven by data. Data is helpful, but mostly if it drives them emotionally in some way. I’m not saying that this is how I think things should be, I’m saying that this is most commonly how the civilization works, and if you ignore it, it’s hard to get very far in affecting society on a broad scale.

At some point, somebody realized this and started to develop some of the only truly workable social technology that man has—the technology of Public Relations. I would love to tell you that the initial users of this technology intended to help man, but as far as I can see, that was not the case. Since its inception (which I suppose in the West one could trace to Charlemagne in about 800 AD or so, but that’s debatable) it has been used by people in power (or those who wish to be in power) to consolidate their power, eliminate their enemies, and manipulate the populace into doing their will.

Although in modern times this technology has been extended to be very helpful to business and individuals, as far as I can see, its most common use is still the same—to manipulate populaces to satisfy some agenda, often an agenda that is actually harmful to that populace but which they will buy with full love and hunger, because they have been so convinced that it is true, right, and good.

Today the technology of PR has become very sophisticated. It recognizes that you won’t get to everybody with the same message. That different types of people need to have different messages.

Let’s say that your goal was to get everybody to stop buying bananas. There are a lot of things you have to look at here. What’s the emotion you want to cause people to have? What’s the emotion that stops things? Well, hate or anger. Fear, if you want to stop the listener themselves, but hate or anger if you want to get people to stop the banana companies. So, you have to figure out how to get people to feel hate or anger about bananas, or the companies that make them, or the people that eat them, etc.

So first, one thing you have to look at it—who do people listen to? Or perhaps more accurately, who is most capable of driving people’s emotions? For some people, this is the “mainstream media,” like NBC, CNN, Fox News, etc. So you have to craft a message that (a) the readers of those channels will agree with and that (b) gets them to hate bananas.

However, many clever people who work in PR have realized that there is, today, widespread distrust of the “mainstream media.” So what do you do? You create numerous small websites and spread the data through social media. You use a _different_ message, but still one that will get people to hate bananas in the end. This works because the data doesn’t come from “the mainstream media,” but instead it comes from your “friends,” or from “independent sources.” If you do this well enough, you’ll even convince people to start spreading your message themselves, which is great, because word of mouth is still one of the most effective advertising methods around. Maybe you can even convince some famous people, and then they will spread your message too—for free! It helps if you use your “independent media” to amplify some of these famous people’s statements too—it’s a great cycle for you, the PR agent.

One of the best parts of this strategy is that, for the most part, it is not strictly necessary that the data you are spreading is _true_. Now, don’t get me wrong—lying in broad PR is absolutely going to backfire against you eventually. But it does still work (in terms of having the effect you want on the society) if you do it fast enough and broadly enough, because remember, it’s not about what’s true—it’s about what makes people feel the way you want them to feel, a feeling that they agree with and that fits into their framework of ideas.

There really are people in the world who would do literally anything to get what they want. Not everybody thinks about the fate of humanity, many people think just about their own desires or about their own family. And some of these people have the power, money, and connections to do almost anything to get what they want. It turns out that the most effective way to accomplish that, in the modern world, is very often via PR. It’s a subtle weapon that will let somebody do almost anything if they can use it with enough skill and force (force meaning, usually, money).

The force that is today attacking most people, most nations, most companies, is PR. It is using (or trying to use) you to do its work, and nowhere is that more apparent than on social media platforms like Facebook.

There are some things you can do to avoid this:

1. Understand that you live in a world where, unfortunately, PR is being used as a weapon all the time, and you are the target.

2. Always ask for the whole data. Don’t accept one picture, one snippet of a video, one sentence that somebody said. Ask for the source material and read the whole thing. Ask for specifics—don’t accept data that says “they” or “people.” Don’t accept data that doesn’t have a location or time. Don’t accept data that says “a group” but doesn’t say how many or who are in it.

3. Don’t participate in spreading messages that will produce hatred, anger, or fear. These are almost always the tools of PR agents being used to manipulate you into being their free advertiser. Instead, it’s usually possible to do #2 above and then, if there is something bad happening, share something uplifting or empowering that tells people about true solutions that have been actually proven to solve the problem that’s being talked about.

It’s often hard to learn the exact truth of something, but it is possible to recognize when the data you are being given is just weaponized PR, and simply ignore it. Like, you don’t have to solve every mystery, you don’t have to have an opinion about every cause, you don’t have to take a side in every debate. You aren’t morally broken if you choose simply to not be involved. If the data is being thrown at you just to get you to feel some emotion and thus take action on the speaker’s behalf, but you can’t actually get the full data or be confident that any of it is provable, then it’s fine to just skip it. We don’t have to be the victims of this. We just decide to be, sometimes.