When in Doubt...
the process of blind belief
Posted Aug 22, 01:25 pm in branding, business, consumerism, experiences, human nature, marketing
Here’s an experiment that I’ve personally conducted dozens of times, and it never ceases to give me a brief moment of insane pleasure. Next time you’re standing at a crosswalk and there’s traffic coming, just take a step into the street. Chances are, even if there are cars zooming by at a hundred miles an hour, all the other people at the crosswalk will follow you, lemming-like, to their deaths. Of course, the proper thing to do is to stop before anyone dies, but my point is that many people will instinctively follow your lead no matter how foolish you are. Sometimes this is because they choose to abide by the heuristic that someone who confidently proceeds couldn’t possibly be trying to kill himself, and therefore they are being effectively led and protected by this the decisions of this “leader.” Sometimes it’s because they were just too ignorant to notice the conditions of the road themselves. And sometimes it’s because they willfully discard any evidence of danger that may have presented itself because they doubt the veracity of their own thoughts.
This kind of thing happens all the time.
Human beings are creatures that doubt themselves a lot, and as a result they are prone to blindly following others. That’s why it seems like persons of mediocre intelligence can market their horrible ideas so effectively with their presence and apparent conviction, while people with really good ideas but poor presentation can’t get anyone to listen to them. Politics is an excellent example of this.
A politician who constantly repeats his assertions, even in the presence of strongly contradictory empirical evidence, can manufacture ‘truth.’
Here’s a phrase that might sound familiar:
Iraq possesses of weapons of mass destruction.
Politics aside, we now know this assertion to be false. Nevertheless polls still show that a statistically staggering number of Americans still believe that an invasion of Iraq was necessary. Why? Is it because these people have not read the news? No, it’s because the assertion made by the Bush administration recreated reality in such a way that it effectively supplanted and destroyed any evidence that violated its argument. Any incoming facts that may have called into question the assertion were discarded.
A recent roast of comedian Bob Saget featured a great routine by Gilbert Gottfried in which he repeats a phrase about how Bob Saget “raped and killed a girl in 1990” about 4 times with an increasingly dramatic air. Despite the fact that, in the context of the full sentences, Gottfried is actually saying that this incident didn’t happen at all, this shocking phrase is the one that really makes its mark on you.
Though this was in the context of a joke, it’s not unthinkable that such vivid repetitions of phrases actually hurt people in real life. People are routinely tarred with accusations of being rapists and murderers in the absence of evidence or despite their innocence, and are unable to revert to their former selves in the eyes of others. They will always be psychopaths to those who learned of them in a context that branded them with those epithets through infinite repetition.
An age-old adage from the advertising industry suggested that if you can’t make an argument through logic, use song. That’s one method, but if you ask me, the best way to manufacture truth is to just repeat something ad nauseum. The public’s internal BS detector will eventually shut off because they reach a point where their own capacity to question ceases in the face of nagging self-doubt. Tragic and sad, but alas, true.