(c) Copyright 1998: Graham L. Strachan
Tim Fischer was quoted [Australian News Network 14-10-98] as saying that One Nation needed to be “dealt out once and for all” from the democratic process in Australia. One might have thought it already had been ‘dealt out’, thanks to the efforts of Mr. Fischer and his political cronies in all the other Parties. After all Mr. Fischer’s own Party polled only 564,000 votes and got a swag of seats, while One Nation polled 876,000 and got none. If that’s not being ‘dealt out’ what is?
But Mr. Fischer can’t leave it there. To him and the financial interests he serves the 876,000 One Nation voters present a problem: what to do about them, particularly since the time is not yet ripe for using concentration camps. So the strategy is to keep hammering the general public about One Nation and its alleged internal organisational problems through the media until the people are thoroughly exhausted, till they rue the day they even heard the name ‘One Nation’, until they publicly demand that the 876,000 heretics renounce their evil ways and let the entrenched political oligarchy control everything forever. Mr. Fischer wishes.
The idea of manipulating and controlling the public mind is ancient, but the modern techniques were devised post-World War II by the American advertising industry. The methods had their origins in a special kind of market research described as ‘in depth’, which employed the techniques and theories of psychiatry and the social sciences to determine why people made particular buying decisions, and to infuence those decisions towards buying certain products [see Vance Packard, ‘The Hidden Persuaders’ (1957), and ‘The People Shapers’(1977)].
After conducting ‘in-depth’ interviews with the buying public the researchers concluded that people didn’t make conscious buying decisions at all. They mostly didn’t know what they wanted. If they did they didn’t know why. They were acting on whim, responding to irrational influences from their subconscious minds: fear, guilt, insecurity, narcissism, and so on. The way to flog products was to ‘appeal to’, in other words prey upon, those unconscious influences.
Corporate capitalism and the media put the knowledge to work in the interests of ‘economic growth’, generating the ever-expanding profits needed to service the ever-expanding interest payments on ever-expanding corporate debt. Instead of finding a need and filling it (the formula behind entrepreneurial capitalism), the strategy of monopoly capitalism was to create the need by manipulating the public psyche, and then fill it. This got around those pesky things called ‘market forces’ which monopoly capitalists recommend for every sort of business except their own.
Inevitably, however, after several decades of manufacturing needs the mind manipulators came to regard the public as having no mind of its own, other than what was put there by themselves and the media. The public mind was considered a blank slate on which anything could be written which furthered the interests and consolidated the power of the ruling elites. The public were to be conditioned to behave however the elites willed in the manner of Pavlov’s salivating dogs and B. F. Skinner’s button-picking laboratory pigeons [see William Sargant, ‘Battle for the Mind’, and B. F. Skinner, ‘Beyond Freedom and Dignity’]. There is no contempt like the contempt of a mind manipulator for the minds it manipulates.
It was also inevitable that these techniques, preying on the fears, guilt feelings and insecurities of the public, should be applied to the gaining and monopolising of political power. Political policies came to be looked upon as ‘products’ which needed to be ‘sold’ to the public in return for votes, and all the hype applied to the selling of consumer goods came to be applied to political campaigns, beginning in America around 1956. To sell the policies the voter could be conditioned by in-depth marketing techniques to respond to certain symbols in predictable ways: favourably towards those portrayed as ‘good’ ....like GST=good, duh?....and aversively to those portrayed as ‘bad’....like ‘racism=bad, duh! Honesty, truth, morality and even rationality had nothing to do with it. They no longer had any place in business or politics. The end justifies the means.
Since it cannot tolerate market forces in the real marketplace, and since it needs a captive government to protect its interests, monopoly capitalism could not afford to tolerate market forces in the political arena either. The idiot public could have its goddamn democracy, provided there were only two permissible Parties to choose from, and both represented the interests of big business, a state of affairs secured in Australia by 1983. And since big business controls the media through its advertising dollar, it was inevitable that the media would jettison their role as the investigative watchdogs of democracy, staunch upholders of the ‘public’s right to know’, and to adopt instead the role of mass-marketers, actively promoting particular policies and ensuring the ‘right’ people got into power.
As Vance Packard observed, forty years ago now, “Much of this seems to represent regress rather than progress for man in his long struggle to become a rational and self-guiding being.” Indeed. Thanks largely to the employment of these techniques, that ‘struggle’ is now a death throe. A rational self-guiding being is the last thing big business or its political stooges want. They want a mentality arrested at the six year-old level, which is where most TV advertising is pitched. So pumped full of bullshit have people become, they are incapable of distinguishing right from wrong, good from bad, violence from fun, news from entertainment, or the real from the unreal. Western society is now in terminal decline.
Any qualms about destroying man as a ‘rational self-guiding being’ were put to rest by academic fraternity. As Ayn Rand showed [see Ayn Rand, ‘For the New Intellectual’] modern philosophy since Immanuel Kant has devoted most of its effort to ‘proving’ that there is no such thing as ‘a rational self-guiding being’, so how could something be destroyed which was nothing but a myth to begin with? Man is ‘just another ape’, is entitled to behave like one, and no consequences should flow from treating him like one, which includes pumping his mind full of garbage so he’ll buy the right brand of soft drink, and vote the ‘right’ people into power.
Imagine the chagrin of the Australian ideas-shapers when they discovered that despite their best efforts at demonising One Nation as ‘racist’, despite slandering its founder, despite all the lies, half truths, bias, propaganda and hate-journalism pumped daily into the public psyche for more than a year, there are still 876,000 people out there whose thinking is outside their control. The media’ s response has been apparently to believe that what failed before the election will somehow work after it. They appear to think they can bring the 876,000 to heel by continuing to pound away at Hanson and One Nation. It’s not that simple.
It is one thing to recognise that people can be irrational and to play on that irrationality to influence their buying and voting patterns, but it is quite another thing to assume they have no rational faculty at all. The greatest enemy of public mind-controllers is the very real capacity of the human mind, every mind, for rational thought. It used to be called ‘common sense’. In-depth promotional techniques might succeed in suppressing it up to a point, but there is no evidence that the suppression is permanent. There is always a risk to the mind-manipulators that a catalyst of some sort will jolt the people out of their apathy and start them thinking for themselves.
That’s why Tim Fischer wants One Nation “dealt out once and for all”. It might just be that catalyst. The 876,000 might begin to grow as more and more people come to realise that their government his handing over their country to global ownership and control on the sly. The people might demand a return to proper democracy, and they might even cheer when the mind-manipulators try to demonise that as ‘populism’. They might also demand that Tim Fischer himself be ‘dealt out once and for all’, if his own Party hasn’t dealt him out in the meantime. And that’s ‘on the cards’.