How To Take Over The World, And Why You Shouldn’t

Yesterday, we were thinking about how good leaders are good communicators. Then we got into ethics and started talking about how not to hurt people with our effective communication: 

1. Learn to listen even better than you speak.
2. Be ruthlessly honest with yourself about what you are saying and your motive. 
3. Be ruthlessly honest with your followers about what you are saying and your motive. 
4. Related to 2 and 3 is never, ever, ever, distort facts.
5. Never exploit people’s emotions.
6. Never exploit people’s vulnerabilities. 
7. Never imply threats to make someone do something they wouldn’t otherwise do. Coercion involves removing choices by some kind of force (“You’ll be shunned if…”)
8. Use your words to promote autonomy in your hearers/followers.
9. Be passionate about your views, but encourage others to come to their own conclusions with no strings (think Bereans here).

My choir buddy, a retired speech comm professor, saw yesterday’s post and sent me his definition of propaganda: “Any communication that narrows the hearer’s freedom to choose.”
 
Or put another way:
Any way of talking that makes it harder for someone to make their own choices.
That’s what it comes down to. I realized in thinking about his definition that I’m always put off by speakers who assert with confidence something debatable as though it were not debatable. Preachers do it all the time with their interpretation of Scripture. 
“This is what the text means,” which leads to “so the only application could be…” 
This is said even in cases where scholars notoriously disagree. The worst is when they claim they know the right interpretation, ”because God told [them].”
Why does this work on people? 
Because people want it. 
Not everyone, but enough people want to be relieved of the task of deciding. Just because they want that, doesn’t mean we give it to them. In fact, it's the very reason we should not give it to them. 
Many things in Scripture or logic are just plain black and white truth. That should be obvious to everyone in those cases (e.g. killing is wrong). A leader’s job is to communicate clearly, give all the facts, and even tell others his or her opinion. A leader’s case should appeal to the mind.  
But crowds are easier to move with emotion. Now I’m thinking about a great book called The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements, by Eric Hoffer, who was a well-read doc worker in San Francisco in the 1940s. Hoffer spent his spare time reading and writing philosophy. 
This book is scary brilliant. 
If you are trying to start a mass movement (not the good kind), then you have no time for facts and logic. You need to whip up a herd who can be whipped up into a mob, who can be whipped up into an army in a short time. 
According to Hoffer there are some key ingredients of such a movement. 
(Rather than do the painstaking work of going back through the book, I have simply asked ChatGPT for the ingredients of a mass movement according to Hoffer.) 
You need: 
1. A Sense of Frustration: People need to feel they are not doing well, they are marginalized, they are unable to achieve, and they need to feel it is someone’s fault. 
2. The Desire for a New Identity: You need a group of people who are not very individualistic and slightly ashamed of who they are. They will be longing for a powerful group identity to restore a sense of pride. 
3. The Promise of a Better Future: Now we’re back to a compelling vision, but this must be a utopian wish dream for people to sign up for. This promise should be for the individual and society as a whole—a better world—and it definitely needs to be in the future.
4. The Need for a Common Enemy: This scapegoat can be a people, a person, or even an abstract concept, but it must be hated and destroyed in order to achieve the new thing.
5. The Appeal of Absolute Certainty: Mass movements only work when masses crave certainty in an uncertain world. Nothing less than a leader who is 100% sure of their ideology will do. There is no room for doubt when you’re trying to control people. 
6. Charismatic Leadership: The leader must be highly inspiring, especially in his or her speech. They must inspire loyalty to themselves (think ”Father” Hitler here).
7. The Power of Group Action: Ashamed and insecure individuals will draw strength on the power of their collective action. This also reinforces the ideology that brought them together. 
8. The Willingness to Sacrifice: This is a big one. When the leader is asking for great big sacrifices for something that is bigger than yourself, you may be seeing mass movement manipulation. It’s all “for the greater good.” 
Side note: It concerns me how often churches talk this way about their giving campaigns. Of course we should be generous as Christians and not love our money, but it smells different when the leadership is encouraging Christlike generosity versus when they are fundraising for their personal ambitions. Maybe it has to do with the level of guilting that is taking place in the rhetoric. 
Mass movements do not have to be rational, and in fact, they rarely are more than an appeal to psychology. 
The call to action is just this: Leave your followers room to say “no.” Effective communication is not manipulation. It’s a clear presentation of an argument for or against something. 
By-the-way, wouldn’t it be fun if that’s how political campaigns were run? Two candidates constantly presented their philosophy of governing, their policy ideas, and the rational reasons behind those policies? We could then just measure them up to see which one we think is making the most logical sense and vote accordingly. 
But of course, that’s very inefficient. Playing on emotions and confusing the electorate is much faster.
Until tomorrow…