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.

It Is Not All Being Handled For You

I think people have some idea that the infrastructure of the world is just all being handled competently and intelligently by somebody, somewhere. Like, that somebody is making sensible decisions about the fundamental parts of our civilization, like water, power, food, etc. But I’ve been involved to some degree in some of the highest levels of the world’s infrastructure, at least tangentially, and my experience is that there are a few desperate people trying to make things go right in the face of numerous restrictions and barriers from governments and other agencies that “know best.” And on top of that they have to wrangle their own organizations, most of which are full of well-meaning but very confused and overwhelmed people who feel like they are not allowed to (or not supposed to) make sensible decisions.

I’m not amazed when I see things go drastically wrong—I’m amazed when I see things go right!

If Everybody Would Just Do What I Say…

One of the greatest errors that a government or politician makes is believing that they can plan a civilization.

Perhaps we’ve all had the thought, “If I were in charge of this mess, surely I could fix it,” about one thing or another. But for some of us, I think we’ve conceived this as, “If everybody would just do what I say, then everything would work out.” Sadly, this is a fatally flawed idea, and I believe it is one that many politicians actually possess. The problem is that the people we are moving around are not inanimate objects, but rather beings of free will. If you remove that free will from them, nothing good happens. It doesn’t improve them as people. It’s sometimes necessary in brief emergency circumstances, like when somebody is on a drug-fueled rampage to kill your family. In that case, sure, take somebody’s free will away. But this whole civilization is not in that circumstance, and never has been. When you take away the free will and self-determinism of a sane individual, you degrade them. Yes, sometimes people make mistakes, but that doesn’t balance out the harm you can do to a person by severely restricting their self-determinism. Yes, there are circumstances in which it’s necessary, but in no way does that make for a sensible argument for why you (or any politician) should be in a position to plan the activities and pattern of an entire civilization.

You may think that I’m just talking about fascism, but I’m not. There is a gradient between total freedom and total control, and on both sides the civilization goes awry. Sadly, in current condition of Mankind, if you were to let everybody do anything they want all the time, many bad things would happen. Also, in order to have a civilization, there does have to be some structure in which people can make decisions and play the game of life. But many (perhaps most) governments of Earth today have taken this much too far. In an attempt to solve the evils they have seen when some people are given too much freedom, they have set up systems that punish or restrict the freedoms of every person.

One of the greatest errors made here is generalization. Some wealthy people are evil, so we want to punish all wealthy people. Some employers are unjust to their employees, so we punish all employers. Some websites have made mistakes about censorship, so we punish all websites. This has happened for so long that we believe this is the way that it must be. That, oh sorry, there’s evil in the world so we have to restrict the freedoms of everybody. But I will put forth a wild opinion–that the restrictions that are put in place almost always lead themselves to more evil in the world than they were designed to prevent.

The only thing that I believe a government can successfully do is provide freedom and safety for its citizens, plus some sort of structure in which they can operate. This may sound like some sort of wild anarchism or libertarianism or whatever you want to say as an -ism. And there are plenty of arguments against it, most of which start with pointing out what happens when you allow people to have freedom. Many of these arguments start with the story of some individual or group that was oppressive when provided that freedom. Often, we have been taught about these individuals or groups as though they were the whole civilization, but usually if you look deeply into it, it was not everybody who was doing the bad behavior, but rather a minority of people involved.

But I’m not forwarding any -ism. I’m saying that this is the only safe thing a government can do. At some point, you have to accept that you’re governing a flawed populace. You’re not going to “fix” people by passing laws. That’s for their religions, therapists, and friends to do. But you could provide a civilization in which their friends, therapists, and religions can operate safely, and in which everybody would be able to do the positive things that they want to do.

Evil is Complex

One of the things that is hard to comprehend about evil is how absurdly complex it is. For a person who thinks about things simply, it’s hard to imagine the level of complexity involved in evil. I often see people post theories that are implausible because the evil they claim to be attacking is much too simple.

It’s hard to explain this, but in essence, if somebody has an evil intention, it almost always expresses itself in some stupidly complex way. You can observe this in evil you have experienced personally. Why did the person who did evil do it? There was always some reason, often a set of reasons. The reasons often didn’t make sense. Often, the more evil the activity was, the more complex and convoluted the reasons were, sometimes to the point of being incomprehensible.

You may think about things in a straightforward manner, and thus expect that there is some straightforward reason that evil is done. Movies and stories are made this way, which might reinforce that idea—the evil villain wants power and money, so they come up with a plan to destroy the hero! I’ve never met evil that was that simple or thought in that straightforward a manner.

A more realistic example would sound something like this: a person goes through life failing constantly. One day they see a cat on the street and recall that somebody once told them that cats are evil, so that’s why they are failing—cats. So they decide that they have to get rid of that cat. But they can’t, because it belongs to their neighbor. So they have to now go around saying bad things about cats, and campaigning for making cats illegal. Except nobody wants cats to be illegal, so they just have to advocate for laws that make it harder to operate a cat shelter. But they have to make it sound like they want to improve the safety of car shelters, because otherwise somebody will stop them. And they have been operating like this for decades, so they know exactly how to talk about it so that people will accept their message. Plus they have learned that if they can just get people outraged about cat shelter safety, they can get what they want.

Think I’m exaggerating? I’m vastly understating it. The example that I gave is drastically simpler than what is happening with most evil people that I’ve come to know well enough to deeply understand their mental processes.

Now, I want to be clear—I’m not saying “evil is something you can never understand.” What I’m saying is that when people present some theory of evil that sounds waaaaayyyy toooo simple, and which presents no actual hard evidence, be skeptical. Similarly, if somebody’s theory of how the world works is way too complex and relies on illogical data or is simply missing true observations, be skeptical too!

The truth of things is simple. Some people do intend harm to others! That’s the simplicity. And somewhere underneath all of their complexity, there are simple reasons for why they are acting the way they are. But how they go about it and all the detailed reasons they have and how all of their mental processes work—man, don’t worry about trying to figure that out, either for a person or for a group or for a nation. It’s almost never worth it.

All Communications Have Intentions

When you communicate something, if somebody receives it, you have some sort of effect on that person. When you share something, you might think (even if briefly) about what effect you are trying to have.

Similarly, when other people write or communicate something, they too have some intention. There is always an intention behind every communication. There is a reason a headline is phrased the way that it is. There is a reason that certain articles or posts are written the way that they are–because they are intended to have a specific effect. So on the other side of this, when you look at a communication, think about the intention of the author–what effect are they actually trying to have? Keep in mind that they might bias everything they are writing in an attempt to have that effect. The intention might not be (in fact, usually isn’t) to “just give people some data.” There is almost always some other intention. Even sometimes in casual Facebook posts, there is some other intention, like “I would like to get some attention.”

It doesn’t require vast evil or some complicated conspiracy for one writer (or one news editor, more accurately, if you understand how news organizations work) to have one intention to have one effect on you. And the intention is very often not “to help the reader.” There’s sometimes a little bit of that intention, but it’s usually confused with a lot of other intentions, such as forwarding some message that the author believes in, getting people to read/watch (because that’s how the news organizations survive), trying to prove somebody else wrong, or sometimes simply masked hatred of something.

So please, keep that in mind, and read those communications with that understanding.

Things That Exist

When you talk about things, make sure you’re talking about things that exist.

When you read articles, look at the words they use and the way they describe what they are talking about to see if that thing actually exists.

This might sound stupid, but almost every single news headline I see is about something that doesn’t exist. Let’s take a common example that isn’t about any current events. How many times have you seen a headline that says, “Scientists prove….” But there is no such group called “scientists.” That’s not a thing. It’s not even a term that requires proof. I could call myself a scientist tomorrow and nobody could prove it true or false.

Most of the things that news articles talk about are things that sound like they exist, but in reality are not actually a thing. If somebody says “the so and so movement,” ask yourself, “Is that an actual organization that has a concrete existence, or just a fiction created by enough news stories saying the same words over and over?”

What do you do with these articles? Just skip them. They contain non-data. Talking about a thing that doesn’t exist isn’t being done to inform you. There’s no good reason to do that, especially for professional journalists who have the time, resources, and skills to get specific about what they are actually talking about. It’s not an accident that an article is written that way. It’s intentional, and the only thing I can imagine is that it’s an attempt to manipulate you for reasons best known to the newspaper’s editor.

Protect Yourself from the World’s Most Powerful Weapon

The most powerful weapon in the world is PR.

However, there is a way to protect yourself from this. Nowadays, we live in a world where you can get almost all information directly from the source. You actually don’t have to believe any news site or random social media post. You can just check the data yourself, from the source. It’s very easy, actually. Most websites are quite easy to read.

What are people’s arguments against just checking the source themselves? I don’t really know. Maybe they think the source material would be hard to read. But that’s rarely true, and you can use a dictionary to look up the harder words when you do come across a few words you don’t know. Maybe people think that just reading or seeing a piece of news is sufficient. That’s also rarely true.

You can just find things out for yourself. It’s not even hard. If it’s about a person, you can find out from that person themselves or look up the actual facts from some website that just contains those facts (not articles or stories). If it’s about some world situation, there are almost always websites of some official agency that contains the current actual facts about it.

The danger to yourself is being attacked by PR. This is almost always more dangerous to you than whatever threat the PR claims exists. So go and educate yourself; that’s the best defense. The truth shall, indeed, set you free.

Crazy Year

Oh, okay. It’s Crazy Year in the US, again. Happens every four years. Probably something to do with the extra day, or something. 😉

Some thoughts for Crazy Year:

1. It doesn’t make sense to make abstract arguments about people you have no personal experience with, as a vast generality to justify systems you’re proposing imposing on a whole country.

2. There are a lot of things that sound true, but aren’t actually facts.

3. Even if something is true, that doesn’t mean it’s important.

4. There are people with billions or trillions of dollars on the line in political decisions in the USA. If you think they won’t try everything in their power to deceive or manipulate you in order to be voted into power (or have their shills voted into power), then you’re naive.

5. When people ask, “But how/why is [some political thing] different in the US?” the first thing you think of should be point #4 above.

6. There are more than two sides to almost everything. In some cases, there are infinite “sides” to an argument. When somebody forces you to pick between two sides, it’s because they want to force you into picking one of those two choices and not any of the other choices. It is a method of manipulating you.

7. When somebody uses their power and platform to demean or attack somebody else, and the person being attacked isn’t an actual criminal, that’s an act of hatred. It’s just a mechanism of manipulating you. They are using it because it showed up in marketing surveys as a successful marketing method for the demographic they were trying to reach. But if you’re a person who values peace and opposes hatred, it would be hypocritical to support politicians who vigorously attack their fellow human beings.

Balance

The world is obsessed with balance and harmony, as though things being equal or balanced were itself a natural good, a basic truth that is never questioned. But there is no necessity that a being inherently has for balance in everything, as far as I know. Existence doesn’t demand fairness, balance, or equilibrium.

What imbalance seems to violate is simply people’s idea that something should be balanced. But it’s not necessarily true. There isn’t always a yin for every yang, a good for every bad, a success for every failure. There is only what you cause to be and the results of that work. If you do more good, you have more good. If you do more evil, you have destruction and unhappiness. The “universe” will not turn around and then make everything all right for you, because that’s simply not how things work.

In fact, it’s probably not even good to hold everything in equilibrium at all times. What fun would that be? How would you ever get any challenges? For somebody who is presently overwhelmed, a calm state of balance probably sounds pretty great. But I assure you, eventually you would find something else to do, some way of unbalancing that equilibrium.

So not only does the world not demand balance, in fact, beings will probably demand some level of imbalance if you look at it over a long enough time scale.

Making Things Go Away

The solution to making something go away is, mostly, to make it uninteresting or unimportant.

The problem with fighting something very aggressively is that (depending on how you do it) usually you end up making the subject very interesting. People are sooooo interested in Trump, or the government, or whatever, that they end up causing the whole subject to become VERY INTERESTING, which causes it to LIVE.

The way to fight something you believe is a societal ill is to simply make it become totally uninteresting to everybody, including the people involved in it. If nobody is interested in the thing, nobody will do it.

This is probably the answer to why some things that society tries to eliminate (like drugs, for example) have tended to become more prevalent VIA the mechanisms that have been used to try to get rid of them. I’m not saying that that’s why those things became popular in the first place. But I’m saying that once they were introduced into society, some groups made them VERY INTERESTING. Some people did this by fighting them the wrong way.

It’s not just fighting things that makes them interesting. Things become interesting in many ways. But I’m pointing out that if you want to eliminate something, and you’re fighting it, try to avoid fighting it in a way that makes the subject INTERESTING to people.