The twentieth century introduced us to a very serious experience in transforming the picture of the world in the mass consciousness. Totalitarian states were especially active in this.
But the achievement of the result in their case was facilitated by the fact that they had the whole system in their hands: education and science, literature and art, media. All printed, written and oral information flows were completely controlled.
But the term brainwashing doesn't come from them. This is the result of what the Chinese instructors did with the American POWs during the Korean War. In a closed environment, punishing everyone for disobedience, not just the guilty one, the instructors managed to make the Americans afraid to return home to this terrible imperialism. They could only be convinced by the fact that the United States has its own Communist Party, which will protect them.
This phenomenon began to be investigated, and it was called "brainwashing" (brainwashing).
Then the same type of influence was recognized in totalitarian sects, which are also a closed group, and there is a complete dependence of the individual on the collective headed by the leader of the sect. Stein writes, "If the situation is serious and the person is in great isolation with no clear way to avoid it, then the average person surrenders to the traumatic pressure of brainwashing."
As you can see, another parameter has appeared - the inevitability, the impossibility of getting out of this situation, so a person finds the only salvation - survival in submission to the situation in which he finds himself. He himself becomes an active and sincere participant in the formatting of his brains, since this is where his salvation lies. Physical fear conquers reason. It may look awful, but it's true.
Lifton, who has studied this brainwashing phenomenon in the most detail, distinguishes two stages in this process: recognition and re-education (see also: Lifton RJ Thought Reform And The Psychology Of Totalism. - Chapel Hill - London, 1989). It was an acknowledgment of past mistakes and the reworking of a person in accordance with communist demands.
In more detail, this process is decomposed into eight components: control of the environment (by the way, closed monasteries that have no connection with the world are best suited for this), mystical manipulation, which creates the feeling that everything that happens is interconnected, recognition, purification, an aura of sacred science, a loaded language, the principle - the group is more important than the person, the principle - the group is more important than the rest of the world.
The CIA puts more emphasis on the methods of interrogating the prisoner. They believe that these methods arose more through trial and error, rather than through the participation of scientists. It is also interesting to note that if a prisoner is chosen for brainwashing, he cannot avoid the entire set of techniques, even if he agrees to sign any confession.
The CIA is singling out two tools in the brainwashing process. The first is demoralization, which leads to the fact that the prisoner cannot clearly distinguish between what is true and what is false, as well as what is logical and what is not. The second is reorganization, where he must build his recognition, develop it, defend it, believe in it. By the way, the most important element of the CIA's brainwashing process is interrogation, since it allows demoralizing the prisoner and attacking his value system. There are ten emotional states that a person goes through during the brainwashing process, and guilt is just one of them. The CIA considers isolation of a person to be one of the effective methods of control. Being in such a state is quite difficult for many, although some may endure it.
Another name for this approach is thought-reform. By the way, China actively used the term "re-education" both during the Cultural Revolution and today in relation to the camps for the re-education of its Muslim population - the Uighurs. This is also a closed environment, but it contains a million people. And it is clear that the methods are the same, since a closed environment is not afraid of anything, and its inhabitants, on the contrary, are afraid of everything.
It should be admitted that practically the same experiment on the re-education of millions was carried out by the Soviet Union for 20 years from 1917 to 1937, ending it with repressions that "sealed the mouths" of all those who hold a different opinion and a different memory. The state, with all the forces of science and education, literature and art, the media, introduced and retained a new memory of the past and a new model of the present, and those who were dissatisfied with this fell under the roller of repression.
Not only entering a totalitarian organization, but also leaving it is fraught with a number of difficulties. In one case, it is necessary to introduce a new model of the world, which a person sincerely accepts, in the other - to destroy it.
Under the influence of Lifton, Hassan, who himself passed through the sect, proposed his BITE model: Behavior, Information, Thought, Emotional, that is, Behavior Control, Information Control, Mind Control and Emotion Control. This model is used in deprogramming a person when he leaves a totalitarian sect. He also did a series of interviews with Lifton.
In principle, in our time, this direction has acquired relevance again, since the problem arose of involving new recruits in radical Islam and, accordingly, bringing them out of this state. These are all methods of controlled behavior (see research, for example, on left-wing extremists). In this dissertation, Stein, and she herself went through the totalitarian sect The Organization (The O), argues that the defining parameter for totalitarian organizations is form, and not the specific ideological, religious, political or other dogmas that are used there. That is, the content itself is secondary, the impact of various kinds of techniques is primary.
Stein is of the opinion that information processing can be central and peripheral. Central processing focuses on the content of the message, its quality, its arguments. In peripheral processing, people pay attention to secondary characteristics - the perceived level of expertise or attractiveness of the communicator, the number of his arguments. People can be distracted from central processing in favor of generating fear, fast delivery, which leads to a lack of time for processing, excessive repetition, and complexity of the language.
Close to this is the model of Petty et al, who developed it to analyze the impact on consumers. According to this model, peripheral influence does not lead to an assessment of the reliability of arguments, but to factors of their presentation, for example, acceptance of the message because it was expressed at a good lunch for the participants. Stein considers peripheral influence very important for her study of a totalitarian sect, since such influence does not allow her to concentrate on the arguments themselves.
But if you think about it, the Soviet totalitarian propaganda also used this method, for example, the endless repetition of the same thing automatically pushed him to the periphery of perception. But here it entered purely automatically, without provoking resistance.
Another "classic" in the study of the Chinese version of brainwashing is Edgar Shane. Then he worked in the field of management theory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. And he called brainwashing itself, as it seems to us, the apt term "coercive influence". At the same time, he personally took part in conversations with those who were released from captivity before being sent to the United States.
In an anonymous review of the CIA in the book Shane, which emphasizes that it is not only the Chinese, but also the Soviet method, quoted an American veteran of the security sector, believes that the main here is the ideological approach. Important for understanding the phenomenon of brainwashing, in his opinion, are the points of reference of those who conduct it and those over whom it is conducted. That is, we are faced with a very clear engineering task: if we have this, we should get this as a result.
Shane saw such stages in the brainwashing model, highlighting them in the framework of the well-known Levin model, which consisted of the following components: Defrost, Change, Freeze. This means that you first need to "unfreeze" existing representations, then replace them and "freeze" again.
The "change" phase, from Shane's perspective, uses the following:
And another specialist who has done a lot in this area is Singer. She emphasizes that all this is not mysticism, but the systematic application of techniques of influence, which as a result leads to changes in behavior. Singer also saw the affinity of this situation with Stockholm Syndrome: “It was then for the first time that the world really saw that when someone was held hostage and realized that the kidnapper could have done them more harm, but did not, the result is a feeling of gratitude towards them. This is also true in domestic violence. A bond develops between the victim and the person who hits her, because after he stops, she is grateful that he did not kill her. And the abuser almost always apologizes."
Psychologist Yevgeny Volkov did a lot in this area with his editorial and translation work, for example, we owe him the appearance of the books of Hassen and Lifton (see works: Hassen S. Liberation from psychological violence: destructive cults, mind control, methods of help. - St. Petersburg., 2001.; Lifton RJ "Correction of thinking" and the psychology of totalitarianism. - SPb., 2004), as well as his own research.
Today's scientific approaches have reached new heights, since they allow brainwashing to be performed not in a closed, but in an open environment. A person sits in front of a TV screen or at a computer. He receives messages that take into account his group characteristics, suggesting that he can change his opinion in the direction of the desired candidate, and this is exactly what happens when voting. A person, of course, can evade this influence, but this does not happen, because, relatively speaking, he hears himself in these words, and you cannot get away from yourself.
In the journal Foreign Affairs, it was proposed, by analogy with the hard and soft power of Joseph Nye, to call this new phenomenon of influence of sharp power - sharp power. However, Nye opposed, recognizing sharp force, which was described as " deceiving information for hostile purposes, " a variant of his hard power. He writes: “What is new is not the basic model, but the speed with which this disinformation can spread and the low cost of this spread. Electrons are cheaper, faster, safer, and easier to discard than spies. With an army of paid trolls and a network of bots, along with distributors such as Russia Today (RT) and Sputnik, Russian intelligence infiltrating Democratic National Committee emails and high-level Clinton campaign officials can confuse and disrupt news cycles week after week. " ...
True, there is another important component of the new system, which came as a result of the decentralization of the Internet, this is the opportunity for each user to become a media himself. It is this, and not bots or trolls, that is the main driving model of information dissemination on the Internet, where users themselves retweet and repost what came to them.
Even Shnurov, in a dispute with the Russian Minister of Culture Medinsky, said: “ Any person who has Twitter is a producer of meanings and a producer of culture. It is theoretically impossible to regulate these producers of culture - it is only possible to create an atmosphere of favor and respect. This will not work, since all verticals have been falling for a long time, since a horizontal society has already been built, since now, in fact, a worker in culture and the arts is any blogger . " And here he emphasizes not so much the user's ability to broadcast, as to create other meanings.
Man, rightly or wrongly, now feels himself to be a communicative center, not to say the center of the Universe. Users of social networks are really no one, but millions of such no one, at the beck of the troll conductors, suddenly begin to output one single melody that everyone hears. Without these conductors, the melodies do not merge.
That said, white nationalist platforms do not receive the same pressure from tech giants as Islamic ones (see also an analysis of the factors behind why some messages spread better than others). Conspiracy studies are spreading well on social networks, although non-anonymous sources are also suitable for this.
The concept of sharp power mentioned above continues to evolve despite Nye's objections. A few ideas that have already sounded today:
Another argument in his favor is that theorists are confused today: “ These regimes do not rely solely on hard power, they are not so successful in generating soft power, but at the same time they are able to project real influence abroad. Seeing the resurgence of authoritarianism in the world, it is time to think about this clear paradox . "
The unification of thinking has a long history. The emergence of "evil" gods in the history of mankind is explained by the fact that it happened when there were too many people. A complex society demanded moralizing gods to unify behavior, and therefore thinking. This was shown by a study of 414 societies from 30 regions for 10 thousand years.
After the use of the gods, who unified thinking and behavior, today propaganda has taken up this, a prime example of which were the totalitarian states. They actively moved to the West, where the most powerful communist propagandist was Willie Münzenberg, one of the books about whom is called "The Red Millionaire". While working for the Comintern, he communicated with many Western intellectuals, creating a victorious aura for the USSR. They write about his methods of work as follows: “Münzenberg often took “famous” intellectuals and controlled them through group psychology and bribery. He allowed them to feel completely independent, which it never entered their heads to test their imaginary freedom. Writers such as Lincoln Steffens, Ernst Hemingway, John Dos Passos, and Heinrich Mann were so well manipulated that they often did not realize it until it was too late. Then their own personal vanity made it impossible to admit that they were easily and cunningly cheated, especially by such a person who was clearly their intellectual dwarf . "Münzenberg created many organizations to help himself, which he called to himself" clubs of the innocent. "
By the way, it turns out that this is the model of working with public intellectuals for the subsequent capture of the entire population, which was applied closer to our time to promote liberal capitalism, as a result of which both Thatcher and Reagan abandoned their versions of state capitalism in his favor. It was then that the first think tanks appeared.
Münzenberg not only published the book "Propaganda as a Weapon" himself, but the books about him emphasize his gift as a propagandist, which was also influenced by Albert Einstein, Upton Sinclair, Henri Barbusse, Bertold Brecht in addition to the names that we have listed above (see: McMeekin S. The Red Millionaire: A Political Biography of Willy Münzenberg, Moscow's secret propaganda tzar in the West. - New Haven - London, 2003). After the First World War, he fought a real ideological war, being the main Soviet propagandist in the West.
Latynina rightly notes that Münzenberg did not create a network of spies, but a network of agents of influence: “He created a system of ideology of the modern left-wing lumpen bureaucracy and all its characteristic memes, all these committees of fighters for peace and against fascism. He created a system for manipulating useful idiots. And all the main methods of modern mass propaganda - representing the criminal as an unfortunate victim, attributing all his crimes to his enemies, total disregard of the facts - all these methods that are now used by rogue countries and Islamic terrorists, and on which numerous people of good will are caught, were created in the 1920s by Willy Münzenberg, as well as the very practice of creating endless commissions, committees to give outright lies the status of public opinion. Actually, Goebbels was very jealous of Münzenberg and never achieved his success".
However, in any case, all this is work in an open information environment, which has many complexities. It is clear that it is greatly facilitated in a closed information environment, characteristic of totalitarian and authoritarian states, when information competition is destroyed, and messages that are correct from the point of view of the authorities receive significant advantages.
And Dmitry Bykov's phrase about modern propaganda will add to the picture of simplification of thinking and propaganda already in our time: “ You see, some people say:“ Why does she (the authorities. - G. P.] such bad propagandists? ”She can afford, this is her meaning. She does not need smart propagandists, she does not need good propagandists. And this is happiness, this is the absence of a very important temptation. Because a lot of people ... I, of course, do not include myself in this mass, I have no such temptation, but it could appear, a weak person. A lot of people would want to go to the ideological service of this power, if this power needed an ideological service. No, just the opposite is important to her to show that we can afford to be like that. We are satisfied with such cynical, hardened, tactless, stupid propagandists. We are satisfied with the clumsy style of this propaganda, because it shows our right to be anything. We don't need smart ones, we need faithful ones. This principle of the Strugatskikhs is absolutely exact... "
Authoritarian regimes have proven to be strong in the simplicity of their models of influence, since they rely on the simple truths they produce, which is also one of the options for simplifying thinking. And if social media clearly leads to a simplification of the discussion, since emotions prevail there, and not rationality, then this also leads to a simplification of the propaganda created for these users.
However, both democratic regimes and even democratic parties in them are eager to get rid of the diversity of interests of their voters. Those who work in the American democratic field, for example, argue that there is no single spectrum from the center to the left, where the optimal middle of the voters' views lies. There are a large number of subgroups of voters for whom a particular issue is central.
We are all becoming too different. And this "difference" must be learned to find, take into account and be able to work with it. Gudkov gives an example of the emergence of sociology in the West and in our country: “ Historically, sociology arose and developed in the West at the moments of transition from a closed traditional class society to a mass, open, representative, market one, etc ... It had to provide answers to the needs of society itself: new forms of collective or mass life appeared - big cities with their special intensity of spiritual, economic or political life, stock exchanges, parties, newspapers, trade unions, new trends in art, philosophy, etc. What it is? What are the consequences of this? How does a person himself change in these circumstances?
And in our country, from the very beginning, sociology was formed as another management tool for the bosses. A means of increasing the effectiveness of propaganda. Political consulting, an additional source of information. Some bosses began to decorate their reports with some references to polls by sociologists of the population, confirming their intentions to slightly change the priorities in financing, say, the construction of cultural objects . " However, the Soviet person was in many respects the same, this must also be understood. Or he had tougher conditions of survival that forced him to be unified in the public sphere.
Controlling thinking in its rigid version is associated with the use of punishments for evading the imposed rules. The mild option does not punish, but attracts with more comfortable living conditions, for example, as it was in the USSR, if you did not go against the existing ideology. Religion and ideology are very disliked by heretics, as they can become an example for other possible apostates.
Shane wrote about the standard Chinese version of the work does not prisoners of war, and with the citizens of the so-called reform of thinking, which can be traced all the same characteristics: " The reform of thinking was held in China with the help of groups that were engaged in criticism, self-criticism, accusations, expression complaints and study, usually run by a party official who reported upstairs on the progress of group members. Such groups of 10-12 people have been organized in every village, school , factory, prison, farm to rationalize the material given through a reading or lecture, giving each member an opportunity to think about how the theoretical provisions can be used in their own case " (see also another story about the time of the cultural revolution).
And we should not look down on this time, since we also had trials over the enemies of the people before the war, as well as discussions of cosmopolitans and others after the war, where everyone was required to shout out their condemning words about the sacrifice ... And in all these cases, the person is led not by the mind, but by the body, since he does not want to be in the place of the condemned.
But the achievement of the result in their case was facilitated by the fact that they had the whole system in their hands: education and science, literature and art, media. All printed, written and oral information flows were completely controlled.
But the term brainwashing doesn't come from them. This is the result of what the Chinese instructors did with the American POWs during the Korean War. In a closed environment, punishing everyone for disobedience, not just the guilty one, the instructors managed to make the Americans afraid to return home to this terrible imperialism. They could only be convinced by the fact that the United States has its own Communist Party, which will protect them.
This phenomenon began to be investigated, and it was called "brainwashing" (brainwashing).
Then the same type of influence was recognized in totalitarian sects, which are also a closed group, and there is a complete dependence of the individual on the collective headed by the leader of the sect. Stein writes, "If the situation is serious and the person is in great isolation with no clear way to avoid it, then the average person surrenders to the traumatic pressure of brainwashing."
As you can see, another parameter has appeared - the inevitability, the impossibility of getting out of this situation, so a person finds the only salvation - survival in submission to the situation in which he finds himself. He himself becomes an active and sincere participant in the formatting of his brains, since this is where his salvation lies. Physical fear conquers reason. It may look awful, but it's true.
Lifton, who has studied this brainwashing phenomenon in the most detail, distinguishes two stages in this process: recognition and re-education (see also: Lifton RJ Thought Reform And The Psychology Of Totalism. - Chapel Hill - London, 1989). It was an acknowledgment of past mistakes and the reworking of a person in accordance with communist demands.
In more detail, this process is decomposed into eight components: control of the environment (by the way, closed monasteries that have no connection with the world are best suited for this), mystical manipulation, which creates the feeling that everything that happens is interconnected, recognition, purification, an aura of sacred science, a loaded language, the principle - the group is more important than the person, the principle - the group is more important than the rest of the world.
The CIA puts more emphasis on the methods of interrogating the prisoner. They believe that these methods arose more through trial and error, rather than through the participation of scientists. It is also interesting to note that if a prisoner is chosen for brainwashing, he cannot avoid the entire set of techniques, even if he agrees to sign any confession.
The CIA is singling out two tools in the brainwashing process. The first is demoralization, which leads to the fact that the prisoner cannot clearly distinguish between what is true and what is false, as well as what is logical and what is not. The second is reorganization, where he must build his recognition, develop it, defend it, believe in it. By the way, the most important element of the CIA's brainwashing process is interrogation, since it allows demoralizing the prisoner and attacking his value system. There are ten emotional states that a person goes through during the brainwashing process, and guilt is just one of them. The CIA considers isolation of a person to be one of the effective methods of control. Being in such a state is quite difficult for many, although some may endure it.
Another name for this approach is thought-reform. By the way, China actively used the term "re-education" both during the Cultural Revolution and today in relation to the camps for the re-education of its Muslim population - the Uighurs. This is also a closed environment, but it contains a million people. And it is clear that the methods are the same, since a closed environment is not afraid of anything, and its inhabitants, on the contrary, are afraid of everything.
It should be admitted that practically the same experiment on the re-education of millions was carried out by the Soviet Union for 20 years from 1917 to 1937, ending it with repressions that "sealed the mouths" of all those who hold a different opinion and a different memory. The state, with all the forces of science and education, literature and art, the media, introduced and retained a new memory of the past and a new model of the present, and those who were dissatisfied with this fell under the roller of repression.
Not only entering a totalitarian organization, but also leaving it is fraught with a number of difficulties. In one case, it is necessary to introduce a new model of the world, which a person sincerely accepts, in the other - to destroy it.
Under the influence of Lifton, Hassan, who himself passed through the sect, proposed his BITE model: Behavior, Information, Thought, Emotional, that is, Behavior Control, Information Control, Mind Control and Emotion Control. This model is used in deprogramming a person when he leaves a totalitarian sect. He also did a series of interviews with Lifton.
In principle, in our time, this direction has acquired relevance again, since the problem arose of involving new recruits in radical Islam and, accordingly, bringing them out of this state. These are all methods of controlled behavior (see research, for example, on left-wing extremists). In this dissertation, Stein, and she herself went through the totalitarian sect The Organization (The O), argues that the defining parameter for totalitarian organizations is form, and not the specific ideological, religious, political or other dogmas that are used there. That is, the content itself is secondary, the impact of various kinds of techniques is primary.
Stein is of the opinion that information processing can be central and peripheral. Central processing focuses on the content of the message, its quality, its arguments. In peripheral processing, people pay attention to secondary characteristics - the perceived level of expertise or attractiveness of the communicator, the number of his arguments. People can be distracted from central processing in favor of generating fear, fast delivery, which leads to a lack of time for processing, excessive repetition, and complexity of the language.
Close to this is the model of Petty et al, who developed it to analyze the impact on consumers. According to this model, peripheral influence does not lead to an assessment of the reliability of arguments, but to factors of their presentation, for example, acceptance of the message because it was expressed at a good lunch for the participants. Stein considers peripheral influence very important for her study of a totalitarian sect, since such influence does not allow her to concentrate on the arguments themselves.
But if you think about it, the Soviet totalitarian propaganda also used this method, for example, the endless repetition of the same thing automatically pushed him to the periphery of perception. But here it entered purely automatically, without provoking resistance.
Another "classic" in the study of the Chinese version of brainwashing is Edgar Shane. Then he worked in the field of management theory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. And he called brainwashing itself, as it seems to us, the apt term "coercive influence". At the same time, he personally took part in conversations with those who were released from captivity before being sent to the United States.
In an anonymous review of the CIA in the book Shane, which emphasizes that it is not only the Chinese, but also the Soviet method, quoted an American veteran of the security sector, believes that the main here is the ideological approach. Important for understanding the phenomenon of brainwashing, in his opinion, are the points of reference of those who conduct it and those over whom it is conducted. That is, we are faced with a very clear engineering task: if we have this, we should get this as a result.
Shane saw such stages in the brainwashing model, highlighting them in the framework of the well-known Levin model, which consisted of the following components: Defrost, Change, Freeze. This means that you first need to "unfreeze" existing representations, then replace them and "freeze" again.
The "change" phase, from Shane's perspective, uses the following:
- new identification,
- behavior modification techniques,
- mystical manipulation,
- thinking change techniques,
- achieving recognition.
And another specialist who has done a lot in this area is Singer. She emphasizes that all this is not mysticism, but the systematic application of techniques of influence, which as a result leads to changes in behavior. Singer also saw the affinity of this situation with Stockholm Syndrome: “It was then for the first time that the world really saw that when someone was held hostage and realized that the kidnapper could have done them more harm, but did not, the result is a feeling of gratitude towards them. This is also true in domestic violence. A bond develops between the victim and the person who hits her, because after he stops, she is grateful that he did not kill her. And the abuser almost always apologizes."
Psychologist Yevgeny Volkov did a lot in this area with his editorial and translation work, for example, we owe him the appearance of the books of Hassen and Lifton (see works: Hassen S. Liberation from psychological violence: destructive cults, mind control, methods of help. - St. Petersburg., 2001.; Lifton RJ "Correction of thinking" and the psychology of totalitarianism. - SPb., 2004), as well as his own research.
Today's scientific approaches have reached new heights, since they allow brainwashing to be performed not in a closed, but in an open environment. A person sits in front of a TV screen or at a computer. He receives messages that take into account his group characteristics, suggesting that he can change his opinion in the direction of the desired candidate, and this is exactly what happens when voting. A person, of course, can evade this influence, but this does not happen, because, relatively speaking, he hears himself in these words, and you cannot get away from yourself.
In the journal Foreign Affairs, it was proposed, by analogy with the hard and soft power of Joseph Nye, to call this new phenomenon of influence of sharp power - sharp power. However, Nye opposed, recognizing sharp force, which was described as " deceiving information for hostile purposes, " a variant of his hard power. He writes: “What is new is not the basic model, but the speed with which this disinformation can spread and the low cost of this spread. Electrons are cheaper, faster, safer, and easier to discard than spies. With an army of paid trolls and a network of bots, along with distributors such as Russia Today (RT) and Sputnik, Russian intelligence infiltrating Democratic National Committee emails and high-level Clinton campaign officials can confuse and disrupt news cycles week after week. " ...
True, there is another important component of the new system, which came as a result of the decentralization of the Internet, this is the opportunity for each user to become a media himself. It is this, and not bots or trolls, that is the main driving model of information dissemination on the Internet, where users themselves retweet and repost what came to them.
Even Shnurov, in a dispute with the Russian Minister of Culture Medinsky, said: “ Any person who has Twitter is a producer of meanings and a producer of culture. It is theoretically impossible to regulate these producers of culture - it is only possible to create an atmosphere of favor and respect. This will not work, since all verticals have been falling for a long time, since a horizontal society has already been built, since now, in fact, a worker in culture and the arts is any blogger . " And here he emphasizes not so much the user's ability to broadcast, as to create other meanings.
Man, rightly or wrongly, now feels himself to be a communicative center, not to say the center of the Universe. Users of social networks are really no one, but millions of such no one, at the beck of the troll conductors, suddenly begin to output one single melody that everyone hears. Without these conductors, the melodies do not merge.
That said, white nationalist platforms do not receive the same pressure from tech giants as Islamic ones (see also an analysis of the factors behind why some messages spread better than others). Conspiracy studies are spreading well on social networks, although non-anonymous sources are also suitable for this.
The concept of sharp power mentioned above continues to evolve despite Nye's objections. A few ideas that have already sounded today:
- Russia and China are not "tough" in their actions, but they are also not "soft";
- authoritarian influence is not based on attraction or persuasion, it is based on distraction and manipulation;
- an acute force penetrates the political and information environment of the target countries,
- the Russian and Chinese approaches are based on an ideological model, where the power of the state prevails over personal freedoms.
Another argument in his favor is that theorists are confused today: “ These regimes do not rely solely on hard power, they are not so successful in generating soft power, but at the same time they are able to project real influence abroad. Seeing the resurgence of authoritarianism in the world, it is time to think about this clear paradox . "
The unification of thinking has a long history. The emergence of "evil" gods in the history of mankind is explained by the fact that it happened when there were too many people. A complex society demanded moralizing gods to unify behavior, and therefore thinking. This was shown by a study of 414 societies from 30 regions for 10 thousand years.
After the use of the gods, who unified thinking and behavior, today propaganda has taken up this, a prime example of which were the totalitarian states. They actively moved to the West, where the most powerful communist propagandist was Willie Münzenberg, one of the books about whom is called "The Red Millionaire". While working for the Comintern, he communicated with many Western intellectuals, creating a victorious aura for the USSR. They write about his methods of work as follows: “Münzenberg often took “famous” intellectuals and controlled them through group psychology and bribery. He allowed them to feel completely independent, which it never entered their heads to test their imaginary freedom. Writers such as Lincoln Steffens, Ernst Hemingway, John Dos Passos, and Heinrich Mann were so well manipulated that they often did not realize it until it was too late. Then their own personal vanity made it impossible to admit that they were easily and cunningly cheated, especially by such a person who was clearly their intellectual dwarf . "Münzenberg created many organizations to help himself, which he called to himself" clubs of the innocent. "
By the way, it turns out that this is the model of working with public intellectuals for the subsequent capture of the entire population, which was applied closer to our time to promote liberal capitalism, as a result of which both Thatcher and Reagan abandoned their versions of state capitalism in his favor. It was then that the first think tanks appeared.
Münzenberg not only published the book "Propaganda as a Weapon" himself, but the books about him emphasize his gift as a propagandist, which was also influenced by Albert Einstein, Upton Sinclair, Henri Barbusse, Bertold Brecht in addition to the names that we have listed above (see: McMeekin S. The Red Millionaire: A Political Biography of Willy Münzenberg, Moscow's secret propaganda tzar in the West. - New Haven - London, 2003). After the First World War, he fought a real ideological war, being the main Soviet propagandist in the West.
Latynina rightly notes that Münzenberg did not create a network of spies, but a network of agents of influence: “He created a system of ideology of the modern left-wing lumpen bureaucracy and all its characteristic memes, all these committees of fighters for peace and against fascism. He created a system for manipulating useful idiots. And all the main methods of modern mass propaganda - representing the criminal as an unfortunate victim, attributing all his crimes to his enemies, total disregard of the facts - all these methods that are now used by rogue countries and Islamic terrorists, and on which numerous people of good will are caught, were created in the 1920s by Willy Münzenberg, as well as the very practice of creating endless commissions, committees to give outright lies the status of public opinion. Actually, Goebbels was very jealous of Münzenberg and never achieved his success".
However, in any case, all this is work in an open information environment, which has many complexities. It is clear that it is greatly facilitated in a closed information environment, characteristic of totalitarian and authoritarian states, when information competition is destroyed, and messages that are correct from the point of view of the authorities receive significant advantages.
And Dmitry Bykov's phrase about modern propaganda will add to the picture of simplification of thinking and propaganda already in our time: “ You see, some people say:“ Why does she (the authorities. - G. P.] such bad propagandists? ”She can afford, this is her meaning. She does not need smart propagandists, she does not need good propagandists. And this is happiness, this is the absence of a very important temptation. Because a lot of people ... I, of course, do not include myself in this mass, I have no such temptation, but it could appear, a weak person. A lot of people would want to go to the ideological service of this power, if this power needed an ideological service. No, just the opposite is important to her to show that we can afford to be like that. We are satisfied with such cynical, hardened, tactless, stupid propagandists. We are satisfied with the clumsy style of this propaganda, because it shows our right to be anything. We don't need smart ones, we need faithful ones. This principle of the Strugatskikhs is absolutely exact... "
Authoritarian regimes have proven to be strong in the simplicity of their models of influence, since they rely on the simple truths they produce, which is also one of the options for simplifying thinking. And if social media clearly leads to a simplification of the discussion, since emotions prevail there, and not rationality, then this also leads to a simplification of the propaganda created for these users.
However, both democratic regimes and even democratic parties in them are eager to get rid of the diversity of interests of their voters. Those who work in the American democratic field, for example, argue that there is no single spectrum from the center to the left, where the optimal middle of the voters' views lies. There are a large number of subgroups of voters for whom a particular issue is central.
We are all becoming too different. And this "difference" must be learned to find, take into account and be able to work with it. Gudkov gives an example of the emergence of sociology in the West and in our country: “ Historically, sociology arose and developed in the West at the moments of transition from a closed traditional class society to a mass, open, representative, market one, etc ... It had to provide answers to the needs of society itself: new forms of collective or mass life appeared - big cities with their special intensity of spiritual, economic or political life, stock exchanges, parties, newspapers, trade unions, new trends in art, philosophy, etc. What it is? What are the consequences of this? How does a person himself change in these circumstances?
And in our country, from the very beginning, sociology was formed as another management tool for the bosses. A means of increasing the effectiveness of propaganda. Political consulting, an additional source of information. Some bosses began to decorate their reports with some references to polls by sociologists of the population, confirming their intentions to slightly change the priorities in financing, say, the construction of cultural objects . " However, the Soviet person was in many respects the same, this must also be understood. Or he had tougher conditions of survival that forced him to be unified in the public sphere.
Controlling thinking in its rigid version is associated with the use of punishments for evading the imposed rules. The mild option does not punish, but attracts with more comfortable living conditions, for example, as it was in the USSR, if you did not go against the existing ideology. Religion and ideology are very disliked by heretics, as they can become an example for other possible apostates.
Shane wrote about the standard Chinese version of the work does not prisoners of war, and with the citizens of the so-called reform of thinking, which can be traced all the same characteristics: " The reform of thinking was held in China with the help of groups that were engaged in criticism, self-criticism, accusations, expression complaints and study, usually run by a party official who reported upstairs on the progress of group members. Such groups of 10-12 people have been organized in every village, school , factory, prison, farm to rationalize the material given through a reading or lecture, giving each member an opportunity to think about how the theoretical provisions can be used in their own case " (see also another story about the time of the cultural revolution).
And we should not look down on this time, since we also had trials over the enemies of the people before the war, as well as discussions of cosmopolitans and others after the war, where everyone was required to shout out their condemning words about the sacrifice ... And in all these cases, the person is led not by the mind, but by the body, since he does not want to be in the place of the condemned.
