Mark A. Sammut and Anna Carnesecchi
We have recently witnessed two episodes of mass manipulation in Malta: the national orchestra will play the Prime Minister’s favourite songs in a concert planned for next year and public figures have been threatened on the social media and in public places. In this article, we propose to have a look at the mechanisms at play in such situations.
It is well known that the more important demagogues of the 20th century, from Lenin to Mussolini, were avid readers of Machiavelli’s The Prince. But on their bedside table they also kept a copy of a pamphlet called The Crowd: a Study of the Popular Mind, written by the French thinker Gustave Le Bon (1841-1931).
The Enlightenment had understood how the evolution of the state underwent a profound paradigmatic change on the emergence of a powerful socio-political protagonist: the crowd – described by Le Bon as the ‘last surviving sovereign force’. Nazi-Fascism and Leninism – the Enlightenment’s bastard children – regarded, to borrow Le Bon’s words again – ‘popular imagination as the basis of their power’.
Latin American socialist-inspired populism – a veritable pain in the neck for the United States – left Washington no choice but to change geopolitical tack. From the 1930s onwards, when Roosevelt’s Good Neighbour Policy was launched, the White House put aside the language of power of the Big Stick Policy in favour of a new cultural diplomacy meant to facilitate the ‘encounter’ between the two Americas. In subsequent years, a “cultural cold war” was waged in parallel to the Cold War itself: new propaganda agencies mushroomed alongside philanthropic foundations such as those of Ford and Rockefeller, while huge stashes of cash were splashed out to feed and sustain cultural bodies and cultural exchange programmes.
The age of social engineering thus began: an age of blind faith in the social sciences that exclusively targeted the psyche of the crowds. The idea followed an asymmetrical and top-down logic: one entity emits and another, receiving entity conforms to the will of the former to create a modern society which, in the years to come, would lead other nations in their progressive march towards the attainment of ‘universal democracy’.
Le Bon believed that crowd psychology is shaped by mental contagion through a type of difficult-to-explain hypnotism, individual isolation and suggestibility. Nowadays, we would employ commonly-used terms such as ‘viral’ to describe media content that spreads like an epidemic, and ‘fake news’ to describe how the masses are influenced into accepting short and evocative descriptions comprised of strong images.
According to Le Bon, the crowd ‘thinks in images’. Social media such as Instagram and Facebook, and the new profession of ‘influencer’, use the image as their preferred tool to achieve neurolinguistic reprogramming. The underlying notion is that, since everything is perceived by the eye, then there is no need for the intellect to dig any deeper. The truth of the image, as the sociologist Baudillard claims, replaces reality and its analysis, which is obviously much more complex. The individual, loosened from himself and the others and lacking all sense of self-awareness and sense of criticism, is afflicted by computer autism and can be easily manipulated.
From the totalitarianism of the past we have moved to the totalitarianism of the pensée unique, created by the unstoppable exposure to all-pervasive media constantly broadcasting an apparently pluralistic and inclusive image, which is in reality the sociological mirror of a technocratic and ultra-liberal economy. To be sure, the media offers space to voices that don’t sing the song of political correctness (another euphemism used by the system). These are put in the digital pillory of public opinion and their views are often derided as airy-fairy fantasies, Orwellian conspiracy theories, reactionary bigotry or philosophical whims, completely detached from the commonsense of everyday life.
No longer an implement in the hands of the organs of powers, ideological censorship is used by a society that, for far too long, has been exposed to the influence of the media. It all boils down to the sum total of the lacklustre thoughts of individuals who are increasingly poorer on the intellectual level. Software is updated and bugs debugged without the need for human intervention.
We are thus living in a newer phase of mass manipulation and it’s even more subtly aggressive. It shuts up those who propose alternative visions of society intended to deconstruct the myths. These are quashed and repressed by a fanatical and intolerant mass society, which renders redundant the use of force by the institutions.
So we ask ourselves how is it that, given all the obscenities we have witnessed (foremost among which the Panama Papers revelations), there has been no tangible commotion. The answer has to be that we are obliged to add soft power to the equation, in addition to the power of incumbency and the performance of the economy. Soft power manipulates our desires and our worldview. As Le Bon put it: “The memorable events of history are the visible effects of the invisible changes of human thought”.