Poets, priests, and political operatives have, for centuries, exploited the persuasive influence of emotion, noting its ability to effectively take control of a person’s thought and behavior.
Given the fact that emotions are far more powerful than thoughts, totalitarian dictators, guerrilla revolutionaries, and others with nefarious designs on your life, choose to employ one of the most powerful of all emotions: the emotion of fear.
As has been universally demonstrated, fear can completely overwhelm even the strongest elements of our intelligence. This is why intellectual arguments are rarely compelling when pursued within the arena of emotion. Facts become secondary. Fear is primary.
Anglo-Irish statesman and philosopher Edmund Burke believed, “No passion so effectually robs the mind of all its powers of acting and reasoning as fear.”
Fear is a natural, powerful, and primitive human emotion that has the ability to shade all competing notions cast within its foreboding shadow.
Clinical Psychologist Dr. Dan Short authored an article in June 2018 titled, “What’s more powerful than fear?” In the article, Short references a study he undertook with some 13 million subjects. He found when compared to other emotional terms, “fear” is 12 times as likely to be used to describe an event in which a person feels controlled by emotion.
Short recalled a lecture by Steven Hassan, a leading authority on cult abduction and mind control. Hassan was asked how cult recruiters can convince highly intelligent, well-educated, free citizens to leave the comfort of their friends and family to work like slaves for a cult leader. Hassan responded, “It is done through fear. They intentionally create phobias in the minds of their targets. Having done so, they can make them believe anything.”
Cautions multicultural artist Efrat Cybulkiewicz, “Restriction of knowledge creates ruthless beings.”
Pause a moment to think about that …ruthless: merciless, cruel, callous, cutthroat, vindictive, relentless.
Deprived of truth and governed by fear, all human beings have this capacity for great evil, especially when put under the right social and political circumstances.
The historical Jesus experienced this firsthand. Pontius Pilot was fully aware of the chief priest’s miscreant motives for dragging Jesus before him.
Upon interrogating Jesus, within earshot of his accusers, the former Roman equestrian knight could only respond, “I find no fault in him, no fault at all.” This was not what those “at the top” wanted to hear. So they further incited the crowd, which grew more violent. Pilot’s wife urged her husband, “Have nothing to do with that just man!”
But the chief priests and scribes, who capitalized on Pilot’s vulnerability to obtain a legal death sentence on Jesus, had fixed their minds on destroying Jesus. Unrelenting, they continued to stir up the people as they stood and vehemently accused him, convincing the multitude and pushing Pilot into coerced conformity, electing to ignore his better judgment, his wife’s counsel, and to content the people, Pilot delivered Jesus to their will.
Even the stalwart Apostle Simon Peter, leader of Jesus’ 12 disciples, caved to social pressure the night Jesus was arrested. Huddled around the warmth of a fire, he cowered out of fear, to those who singled him out seated there in the firelight …denying that he ever knew Jesus.
It was the fiery Thomas Paine who astutely observed, “He who dares not offend cannot be honest.”
This is our present day crisis: ideologues who introduce an alternate system of reality and restrict access to ideas that dare challenge it.
“Stereotyped prejudices are not only legitimized from the top, but promoted, accompanied by whipped-up fears of supposed dangers to the in-group community, in a context where active minorities are not only prepared to engage in violence but also have the physical means to do so.” So writes Mary Fulbrook, a Professor of German History at University College London, in a November 2018 article titled, “Jewish Germans Had Their Lives Destroyed by Nazis During Kristallnacht. Their Neighbors Let It Happen.”
Such ideologues, who seek to influence other people’s beliefs and behavior, can ‘weaponize’ this fear to control their subjects for their own advantage. Scholars like Dr. Margaret Thaler Singer, a leading expert on brainwashing, and Dutch psychologist Joost Meerloo, who, in his 1971 book, The Rape of the Mind, describes how our own culture both blatantly and unobtrusively shows symptoms of pressurizing people’s minds.
Singer and Meerloo expose a systematic totalitarian strategy that employs use of mass psychology, mental torture and coercion contrived to, in essence, ‘rape the mind.’
First, manipulators seek to undermine the subject’s identity— destabilizing his or her sense of self in order to sow self-doubt and increase vulnerability to outside influencers.
Second, they introduce an alternate, closed system of reality, and restrict access to ideas that challenge it.
Finally, they use ‘emotional blackmail’ tactics— including threats of social rejection backed up by group pressure—to compel subjects to accede to groupthink.
These manipulative tactics are so powerful that, when successful, people subjected to them can be made to believe they did something they didn’t do.
One of the most successful novelists of his generation, Michael Crichton, advanced the notion that “Social control is best managed through fear.”
Michael’s right.
Our current pandemic of ‘social engineering,’ ironically, has served only to dehumanize us.
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