pinkfloydpsw's Blog

What started with a man called Sigmund likely didn’t really start with a man called Sigmund, but it became a tool when used by his nephew Edward (Bernays) in the early part of the 20th Century to help governments influence the voting, and often demonstrating, public. It is now referred to as Communications Strategy (I think), it was understood by many to be Marketing, it once had the name Propaganda until that gained an opprobrium it still cannot shake. What I’m referring to here is the mass mind, what the Romans called “the mob” – meaning the body of people that will react to changing information with the strongest and least rational feelings, often possessing not much more of that information than they have been allowed to swallow, and often that small morsel is very deliberately apportioned.

The two monkeys problem is a way of looking at perceived (and real) inequality and can form the basis for much unrest, even revolution. When understood and used wisely, and sometimes nefariously, it is a powerful weapon. If you’re not aware of it I will now explain….

2 monkeys live in cages, each performs their task for a reward, their reward and their task are the same as each others.

Aware of what each other monkey is doing, these guys are relatively satisfied with their reward

The experimenter then changes things, monkey A is given a greater reward, and this makes monkey B unhappy, we note that nothing has changed for monkey B

Then monkey B gets given the same reward as monkey A, both are now happy

Both monkeys are then reduced to the initial reward, both become unhappy until the revised reward is restored and both become happy again

The point is that inequality is perceptual, it is not about the reward, it is about the comparison between the reward and the reward others get, as well as a comparison with historic data

So what does this teach us?…

When you are aware of the effect of perceived inequality, and have the power to control the comparison, you can make people who are happy into people who are angry. You can also make people who really should be very unhappy into people who happen to be remarkably happy. You can make people angry at other people who have become unhappy. You can make everyone look in the wrong place to find their view on who should be happy and why.

I watch a lot of TV, and I think a lot about what I am viewing, “nothing is left to chance in the world of television” – David J Watts because those that seek to control television realised long ago what an effect the big flat rectangle in the corner of every room in every house in every country has on us and how we vote, spend, feel about everything and everyone. It is not a simple home appliance, it does not reflect the world as much as it is a tool of driving it. Let us take the now and interrogate it a little by posing a few questions that might point toward lifting the veil on this subject.

Vlad invades Ukraine, our media acts immediately to create the big Russian hardman as a bloodthirsty devil character bent on destruction, and seemingly for no reason at all. What is the truth of this though when we look at all that leads up to a conflict? Is it true that prominent European politicians discussed the possibility of disbanding NATO in the early 90s because there was no longer a purpose for it in the wake of the fall of the Soviet Union, and was NATOs neck saved from the chopping block for the sole reason that western powers realised that this, already well structured, political and military force could continue to exert an ever greater influence on the countries bordering their old, and new, nominated enemies?

Watch a TV advert and you might notice something that Slavoj Zizek has pointed out a few times, that each product contains the reward of a compensation that the buyer can be assured by for the ecological damage that the producer does in making it. A cup of coffee is Fair Trade, some shoes sponsor education in the third world, a tea bag plants a tree in a tea growing region etc. Now why would this be necessary and what does it achieve? I would contend that the very reassurance is an anti-revolutionary act, it actually prevents action by letting the buyer think that they are contributing to a better world, so it’s a do-nothing strategy.

Every product also contains the idea that it can repair society and historical wrongs, we know these companies do not really care in a moral way, but we know they need desperately to compete with each other in the idea that they do. Let’s take a look at an ad for a bank, how friendly and helpful are they now in the wake of the financial crisis, but how much have they actually helped keep people from getting into ruin? Or an ad for a feminine hygiene product, how often now do they feature just the right ethnic mix or nod to the current trend of not separating their product from use by men? I swear I recently saw a man in an advert for a sanitary product!

Simon Reeve travels the world on TV so that we don’t have to, he explores the history and the now of each country, meeting ordinary people as he goes he tells their story so we know it. His show is an expose of the things we likely should know about what goes on, from what it’s like to live in a country ruled after a military coup, to how a fisherman is coping with having no fish to catch, to what it’s like to be a war refugee, I’m a big fan…but… the point at which it stops is just before getting to developed western countries involvement in the why of the what. Why are there no fish, who backed the military takeover, what caused all these refugees? Was it, as I almost always suspect, our need for a materials and resources?

Question Time is a BBC politics flagship show where the format is supposed to have a broad spectrum of political debaters facing questions from an audience of politically minded persons, but where were the ultra nationalist audience members that represented support for Nick Griffin of the British National Party when he appeared on it? This man, who I am not a fan of, is unfortunately a person who represents a possibly growing body of people who wish to be heard on race and immigration matters, so they invited him on and then didn’t let him speak more than to open his mouth in the response to a question and be shouted down and drowned out by the audience. Now I would contend that in the 50s Enoch Powell was allowed to speak and in the 1920s so was Oswald Mosely, that’s how come we know how to argue with them, that’s how I can know I don’t agree with them. The BBC maybe deliberately acted to silence the BNP instead of using reasoned argument to demolish their biased perspective, and in doing so may have actually given them an audience in people that then went online to see what they were about for themselves. The dialectic needs reason not power.

So when we watch the TV do we realise that we are learning all the time, that we are making comparisons between things, objects, us and them, wealth and poverty, do we realise that we are being programmed just like the monkeys are to be happy at times and dissatisfied at others?

Paul S Wilson