How To Get People To Do What You Want

I heard someone say that the biggest career opportunities are in programming computers and programming people.

Programming people can be called persuasion and manifests as marketing.

Marketing communications are designed to make people do things that other people else want them to do:

Click a button … Buy a thing … Provide information … Watch a video … Vote for this … Or boycott that  …

These are things we do all the time, because people are trying to program us all the time … For money or power or whatever else people crave.  

It Works

Many people thinks that persuasion might work on other people, but they themselves are immune.

No-one is immune.

We are bombarded – online especially – and only a tiny fraction of the prompts need to succeed for the whole machine to work.

And the machine works incredibly well.

The internet has accelerated the techniques of marketing and made them effective, to the point when it is clear that human beings can be trained like dogs.

How does it work?

Direct marketing is designed to train people to take specific actions.

To get people to act you have to arouse emotion. The bigger the action the stronger the emotion a person should feel.

Emotions are psychological phenomena that involve physical changes (facial expression), nervous system reactions, feeling states, and urges to act in specific ways.

I am amazed at how persuasion techniques have taken over the news business in particular in recent years.

In the UK and US especially.

I write about finance and investments. In the financial industry the most effective feelings to arouse are:

• Greed (desire to get something)
• Fear (desire not to lose something)
• Curiosity (desire to know something)

Curiosity is most effective – and least risky legally – as wild fear and greed plays are regulated out of existence in the English-speaking financial industry.  

The news is designed to manipulate your emotions

It was very different when I was kid. Back then, the news featured dignified-looking people about what happened.

Not anymore. Now the news tells us how to feel about things that happened … Or didn't happen … Or might happen one day.

And constant appeals to emotion signal heavy manipulation.

It doesn’t matter if it's so-called right wing news or so-called left wing news. The programming techniques are the same, although the flavor, values and presentation are tailored to their audiences.

In Nineteen Eighty-Four George Orwell wrote:

In our world there will be no emotions except fear, rage, triumph, and self-abasement.

Mainstream/social media shows that George Orwell got that prediction right.

The main emotions I see aroused in the news are:

• Fear of some future event or enemy: 'Expert Warns That X May Cause Y'.
• Outrage at some person acting in ways the group does not condone: 'Shocking behaviour of  [person or group you don't like]'

What you are reading now is intended to evoke curiosity. One question you might ask is:

What's this got to do with world's debt Superbubble?

The Superbubble view is that we are heading into one of the craziest epochs in human history. But this is all fairly normal and easy to understand if looked at through the lens of economic history.

Why am I telling you  this?

The global currency system is failing and almost no-one is reporting this accurately and in simple ways that you can understand.

Superbubble is intended to help non-experts understand the failure of the US dollar-based global monetary system, and the transition to something new.

A big subject, plenty enough to cover there, but it is no longer possible to simply focus on that.

Not with an activist media and broadcasters using mass persuasion techniques to assign opinions to people on behalf of the richest people on the planet.

That makes it even harder to see and understand what's really happening, especially as inflation increases, and supply chain, crises get worse.

Most of what we are told about economics and is pure nonsense.

And UK and US news are worth watching the most, because they are the most skilful at manipulation, and have the furthest to fall economically.

The news stories we see – or don't see – are because they connect to powerful interest's desire to assign specific thoughts and behaviors to you.

So I recommend healthy distrust.

I recommend that, as you consume news media, try to notice what emotions are being aroused in you. Be aware of what are you being led to feel and think and believe and do.

And ask who might benefit from you feeling and thinking and believing and doing those things.

Happy holidays

x C x