Hopeful Thinking - Saturday, October 12, 2019 - The Act of Persuasion

I was recently watching the television show Mad Men for the first time. It’s about the advertising industry in the 1960’s. I’m not sure what part about it I found the most surprising. The blatant sexism, The constant smoking, the drinking during working hours, or the rampant belittling of the smaller by the larger.

For a split second, I felt like a prude. A voice in my head told me, “Boys will be boys. Don’t be a killjoy.” Where did a thought like that come from? Especially when I disagree with it completely?

Strange as it sounds, before I caught it, I was actually belittling myself for taking a critical view of the destructive behavior being depicted on that program.

How it happens that we second-guess our own judgment of what’s right and wrong at any given moment is dependent upon our personal experiences. My inner criticism of their behavior came from being bullied as a child. I let my childhood bullies’  dialogue about me become my own without realizing it. Even as a full-grown man, I see evidence of my having been persuaded as a child to believe that what I was seeing was not what I was seeing. That their wrong behavior was somehow not wrong. They had persuaded me that their behavior against me was not only justified, but somehow also my fault.

Remember to check your beliefs. Of what are we being persuaded and why?

The mid-century world of American advertising depicted in Mad Men is Persuasion Ground Zero. What might we learn from it?

None of it surprised me—though it shocked me nonetheless—the methods and morals of those who construct advertising campaigns. One wonders who raised them as children and how. I wish I could believe that the advertising world has today learned its lesson and mended its former ways. But we can’t un-see this glimpse behind the green curtain covering the psychology of persuasion. We know it’s still going on, and worse than before. Through the very Internet to which we are so drawn in our curiosity about one another and the world, they are using our natural tendency toward unity against us. We see it in the reports of foreign countries persuading us to their own benefit. We see it in deodorant commercials. It’s literally everywhere.

It’s partly why there are so many in our country who wish we could go back to the “good old days.“ The times before we knew all these things which go on behind closed doors. The loss of our innocence. We know too much. The rapid increase of transparency in our world is exhausting and we wish sometimes to just be able to go back to before, when we didn’t know about it all. Back when we thought America was great for different reasons.

I heard once that weakness is merely strength in excess. I think a lot about what that might mean in terms of our egos. How much does our bruised ego masquerade as honor? It’s equivalent to how much we hate to be wrong. We hate to be mistaken about what we believed to be reality. We are mistaking our weakness for strength. We are so resistant to changing our beliefs once they’ve been ground into us. Others know how to persuade us perfectly well, but we haven’t yet figured out how to un-persuade ourselves of things which cannot be true.

This is starting to sound like conspiracy theory thinking, and I don’t mean for that. I don’t really think it’s a conspiracy at all so much as it’s a natural reaction to very human fears of limited resources in troubling times. A survival mechanism misused, misunderstood. We have been persuaded to divide ourselves rather than unite in order to solve our problems.

When people are afraid of disaster, the natural biological reaction is to horde resources. They begin use their creativity to survive at all costs. The sense of ‘us versus them’ is enhanced because in survival mode we seek to clearly know the boundaries of our own tribe. The creativity of persuasion is informed by their fear. Ethics don’t stand a chance.

But we are not unarmed in this battle of wits.

Assimilating new knowledge is difficult, but also powerful. Once we brush the dust off of our awareness that things have never been as they seemed, we will be OK. We have been persuaded to believe a lot of things that weren’t true for a very long time. It’s painful to look in the mirror. But we will make an excellent garden of this manure.

Those who use the art of persuasion for exclusive gain at the expense of others do so because they do not see how the concept of abundance really works. They have no faith. They think that they must take from others in order to accumulate for themselves. They don’t get it yet. Pray for them.

Listen to the ideas of others honestly. Don’t just hear their words, hear their hearts. Assume that no one is evil, just afraid. Point your compassion toward their fear. Then they will only ever be able to persuade you of the truth. Because you will compassionately see right through everything else. Keep a wary, but loving eye. All shall be well.