Cognitive Policy Works » Building a Culture of Trust in Politics
A culture of trust is vital to solving the big problems of our age.
Without trust, there can be no hope of real and lasting positive change in the world. Our challenges are too big to solve on our own. We must be able to work together and collaborate on an unprecedented scale to build a stable economy, restore health to our communities, and manage the tremendous global changes unfolding around us.
And yet we live in a world filled with manipulative messages, the very presence of which threatens the foundation of democracy. From a very early age, our hidden motivations (in the form of emotional tendencies and networks of associated knowledge embedded in our unconscious minds) have been exploited to trick us into thinking we need things that we don’t.
And now this pervasiveness of sophisticated commercial marketing has corroded the fabric of political engagement. We no longer trust most of the information we receive. Our skepticism is a cultural pathology – a deeply rooted belief that those in power are trying to trick us. Unfortunately, this distrust is grounded in the truth that we have indeed been tricked many times in the past.
Via: Cognitive Policy Works » Building a Culture of Trust in Politics.
First off to Jeff – Thanks for reposting my article here. I appreciate your help with passing it around.
In response to Nitewriter:
You bring up some very interesting points that deserve further consideration. First off, I’d enjoy learning about your research on propaganda and the methodologies of the Institute for Propaganda Analysis because they strike close to the core of my own work in many ways.
That said, I would like to respond to your concern that getting beyond FUD techniques takes away our side’s (however we choose to define it) ability to employ the same tactics. I don’t see this as being a problem if the goal is to change the nature of the game entirely so that such tactics are generally recognized as problematic and discouraged. I believe it is possible to cultivate a deep cultural change that leads to this widespread rejection of FUD. But it depends upon organizing people and information flows in fundamentally different ways than they were during the 20th Century. Also, it requires a new understanding of the human mind – one that is based on advances that have occurred since the mid-20th Century.
There is much more than I can unpack in this comment about these thoughts, but I merely want to ask you to consider what the world could be like if our economy were based on sharing, rather than hording (a shift that we are in the midst of on a global scale), and if the modes of production for media were profoundly democratized (all the way down to understandings of human cognition and the neurophysiology of semantics). This would be a very different world with a different set of socially acceptable practices, values, and norms.
I realize that this is a very ambitious vision, but it is becoming possible through a series of shifts in media production, norms and expectations around a sharing economy, and paradigm shifts around understanding the nature of humanity and the workings of the mind.
All the best,
Joe Brewer
Founder, Cognitive Policy Works
Sounds like a great idea. It would be wise to look at the experience of the pre-WWII Institute For Propaganda Analysis, however. They did a great job of identifying the propaganda techniques of the Axis powers and isolationists at home, but they eventually realized that the Allies were using essentially the same techniques, albeit in the service of the opposing cause. They wound up voluntarily going out of business so as not to provide tools to neutralize Allied propaganda during World War II and never reorganized afterward.
The lesson here is simple: The persuasive devices, cognitive vulnerabilities and manipulative techniques are more-or-less universal. When you neutralize the opposition’s weapons in this regard, you also neutralize your own. The only hope is that if your opposition is too stupid to realize what you’re doing, and that isn’t likely. I can’t see any way to get around this. Stereotyping, demonizing and marginalizing is the same whoever does it, and so is hypocrisy. The use of these, or any other devices, would have to assume that the end justifies the means and as I understand it, that’s precisely what you’re wanting to avoid.
I’ve published a list of several hundred quotations on propaganda, persuasion and deception if anyone is interested.
Got any ideas?