6 Brainwashing Techniques They're Using On You Right Now

[MikeWB]

Excellent stuff!!

http://www.cracked.com/article_16656_6- ... t-now.html


I'll just extract #2 since I see a lot of people here and around me at work being victims of it. It's of the form "everyone's bad", "no good people", "no shades of gray" etc.

2) Black and White Choices

Listen to an argument between your friends. Any argument. Listen to one guy say John McCain is a Fascist, while his opponent says Barack Obama is a Communist. Watch as even fans of the same football team bitterly divide themselves over whether the new quarterback is going to be "awesome" or "garbage."
Never anything in between. Everyone is a friend or enemy, every band either rules or sucks, black and white, nothing in the middle. They (capital T) love this, because They can convince you that you must choose either their way, or the most utterly retarded option on the opposite extreme.

Sounds like:
"Will we fight? Or run away as cowards?!?"
"You're not in favor of the death penalty? So you want murderers to just roam free then!"
"Are you going to the strip club with us, or are you a fag?"
Why It Works:
Because we evolved from creatures who were always in danger of being eaten, our brains were built on a very simple foundation: the "fight or flight" mechanism. This let us make lightning-fast decisions by boiling every situation into two options. Anyone who preferred to stop and mull over the subtleties of the scenario wound up in the digestive system of a saber-tooth tiger.
Fast forward thousands of years and you find a humanity with much fancier brains but that still prefers all-or-nothing choices when we're put under stress.

So if somebody wants to bypass your critical thinking circuitry, all they need to do is make you scared or anxious, often with a time limit or urgent threat ("We need to act now, or lose our way of life!").
Instead of pondering the situation with the analytical neocortex, you're using the primitive limbic system, scanning the landscape for the "Right" and "Wrong" move. You'll have no patience for wishy-washy talk about "a spectrum of options."


Recently Seen:
After the trauma of 9/11, the whole country dragged subtlety into the alley and shot it in the head.

But you can't blame us. After all, our entire fucking mythology and popular culture are based on the idea. There's a dark side of the force and a light side. Choose your path! Now! Ain't a fucking gray side, Luke!

Now, as bad as this one is, and you could make the case that 80% of the stupid choices humans make is because of this, there's one even more powerful. It's a spin-off of this one, and it's by far the best way to get thinking humans to respond like trained dogs.