Noam Chomsky is one of the most respected intellectuals in the world, this American thinker was considered the most important of the contemporary era by the New York Times, one of his main contributions is to have proposed and analyzed the mass manipulation strategies that exist in the world. the world today.
Noam Chomsky became known as a linguist, but also a philosopher and political scientist; at the same time, he became a prominent activist for libertarian causes; his texts have circulated around the world and continue to amaze readers.
“How do we have so much information, but we know so little?-Noam Chomsky-
Chomsky has produced a didactic text in which he synthesizes mass manipulation strategies, his reflections on this subject are deep and complex. However, for educational purposes, he summed it up in simple principles accessible to all.
According to Chomsky, the most recurrent of mass manipulation strategies is distraction, it is essentially a question of directing the public’s attention to irrelevant or worldly issues, which in this way occupy people’s minds.
To distract people, they leave them full of information. Excessive emphasis is placed, for example, on sporting events, programs, TV shows, etc. , which causes people to lose sight of their real problems.
Sometimes power does not respond or does not respond deliberately to certain realities, make it a citizen problem that requires an external solution, they themselves propose a solution.
This is one of the mass manipulation strategies to make unpopular decisions, for example, when they want to privatize a public company and intentionally increase their level of service, which in the end justifies the sale.
This is another of the mass manipulation strategies to introduce measures that people would not normally accept and consists of applying them little by little, so that they are practically imperceptible.
For example, with the reduction of workers’ rights, measures or forms of work have been implemented in different societies that make the worker un guaranteed social security.
This strategy aims to make citizens believe that a temporarily harmful measure is being taken, but that, in the future, it can bring great benefits to society as a whole and, of course, to people.
The goal is for people to get used to it and not reject it, thinking about the assumption of good it will bring tomorrow. The time has come, the effect of “normalization”?it has already worked and people are not protesting because the promised benefits are not enough.
Many television messages, especially advertising ones, tend to target the audience as if they were children, using gestures, words and attitudes reconciled and imbued with a certain aura of naivety.
The goal is to overcome people’s resistances, this is one of the mass manipulation strategies that seeks to neutralize people’s critical sense, tactics that politicians also use, sometimes presenting themselves as father figures.
The messages that power projects are not directed at the reflective mind of people, what they seek mainly is to generate emotions and reach the unconsciousness of individuals, so many of these messages are emotional.
The goal is to create a kind of “short circuit” with the most rational area of people. Emotions capture the overall content of the message, not its specific elements, thus neutralizing critical capacity.
Keeping people in the dark is one of the goals of power, ignorance means not giving people the tools to analyze reality for themselves, tell them the anecdotal data, but don’t let them know the internal structures of the facts.
Maintaining ignorance also does not focus on education. Promote a large gap between the quality of private education and public education. Sleep your curiosity about knowledge and give little value to intelligence products.
Most fashions and trends are not created spontaneously, they are almost always induced and promoted from a center of power that exerts its influence to create massive waves of tastes, interests or opinions.
The media generally promotes certain fads and trends, most of which revolve around silly, superfluous or even ridiculous lifestyles. They convince people that behaving like this is “what’s fashionable. “
Another strategy of mass manipulation is to make people believe that they are responsible for their problems, and that only they, anything that goes negative to them depends only on themselves, so they are made to believe that the environment around them is perfect and that, if a failure occurs, it is the responsibility of the individual.
As a result, people end up trying to integrate and also feel guilty about not doing so, turning the outrage that the system could provoke into a permanent fault in themselves.
In recent decades, science has managed to gather an impressive amount of knowledge about the biology and psychology of humans; however, not all of this information is available to most people.
Only a minimum amount of information reaches the public. In the meantime, elites have all this knowledge and use it to their liking. Once again, it is clear that disrecognisment facilitates the action of power over society.
All these mass manipulation strategies aim to keep the world as is in the best interest of the most powerful, block the critical capacity and autonomy of most people, but it also depends on being passively manipulated or offering resistance when possible.