Propaganda and persuasion

[robbo203]

Interesting little piece that appeared in my MSN feed

 

https://www.msn.com/en-gb/news/offbeat/this-350-year-old-trick-can-get-anyone-to-change-their-minds/ar-AAtoA9m?li=AAmiR2Z&ocid=spartandhp

 

How could we apply these insights in putting acorss the case for socialism?

[alanjjohnstone]

I think you have brought up an issue on approach that we should always keep at the forefront of how we write. And i'm not quite certain we are too guilty of this. Many articles i have read begin by a neutral history and exposition of the problem and acknowledge positions held by our critics.But somehow, i have a niggling feeling that it is a bit simplistic.I say this because i have tried to engage those who have conspiratorial beliefs in the assassination of JFK, (a pet hobby of mine) from ridicule of their ideas (not to be recommended) to respect for their theories (and in the process providing some undeserved legitimacy). But when many are fixated to facts that are not facts that have been proved not to be and are simply not accepted – i hit the wall of irrationality. They simply shift the discourse to some other irrelevancy of unprovable assertion.At work i once spent a whole night-shift debating the time required to shoot…and despite the testimony of colleagues who were all ex-soldiers and understood the efficiency of a bolt-action rifle and recognised it was possible…my antagonist merely then changed the topic to why did LHO shoot after the car had turned and not when it was approaching..as if anyone could get into the mind of LHO on the timing of his shot but it sufficed to maintain denial and a leave his confirmation bias intact.What i have learned is to always treat people with civility. On this forum, i sometimes think lack courtesy to those who hold different opinions to ourselves. We (perhaps rightly) hold one another to high standards but should we expect others to match our understanding. Should we not be prepared to lower the bar on occasions?I find we are very prone at high-lighting differences rather than pointing them out and trying to reach some sort of agreement and then discuss where we diverge.

[robbo203]

alanjjohnstone wrote:

 What i have learned is to always treat people with civility. On this forum, i sometimes think lack courtesy to those who hold different opinions to ourselves. We (perhaps rightly) hold one another to high standards but should we expect others to match our understanding. Should we not be prepared to lower the bar on occasions?I find we are very prone at high-lighting differences rather than pointing them out and trying to reach some sort of agreement and then discuss where we diverge.

 Yes that seems a good rule of thumb to apply, Alan.  Start with the commonalities you share with your opponents and only then move on the differences.  It makes them more receptive to what you have to say if they dont feel they are at risk of having to lose face completely.

[Ike Pettigrew]

alanjjohnstone wrote:

What i have learned is to always treat people with civility. On this forum, i sometimes think lack courtesy to those who hold different opinions to ourselves.

Ahem…cough….you're not wrong….Your lack of courtesy includes:- spamming threads with information dumps when your opponent is winning the argument, in order to hide the embarrassing fact that you can't defeat a "racist";- throwing hissy fits, and insulting and libelling your opponent;- putting words in his mouth and twisting and misrepresenting his argument;…it's a long list, and I was on the receiving end of it all.

alanjjohnstone wrote:

We (perhaps rightly) hold one another to high standards but should we expect others to match our understanding. Should we not be prepared to lower the bar on occasions?I find we are very prone at high-lighting differences rather than pointing them out and trying to reach some sort of agreement and then discuss where we diverge.

I accept that most non-socialists who come on here appear not to understand socialism.  I think it's also the case that most self-declared socialists do not understand socialism.  Five minutes talking to any "socialist", or a few minutes spent browsing web forums like Urban75, will confirm that.  But you also have to accept that some people, like myself, do understand your case and simply disagree with you.The root of my disagreement with socialism is that it does not take account of all general factors in human nature: most especially, the pre-rational tribal instinct and the territorial instinct that human beings have.  You will say that human beings have no such instincts (or there is insufficient evidence for the notion) or that even if they do, they are unimportant.  I think differently.  Thus we are at deadlock.  You have your opinion, which is that human beings can be 'educated' (i.e. cognitively re-engineered in a Promethean manner); I have mine, which is that human nature is immutable (and even if not, in my view it would not be desirable to change our essential nature). Since you hold a cemented position on the matter, any further discussion would be of little benefit to either of us.  You would just become angrier than you already are because you hold to a 'total' system as the answer to all humanity's ills, and my views are well outside your ken and may even appear 'stupid' to you, much like a militant Dawkian atheist may smugly think evangelical Christians are stupid without perhaps understanding much about Christianity.  Analogously, the Dawkian atheist just regards Christianity as a set of superstitions; you regard my 'nationalism' as a set of irrational bigotries.  In both cases, there is a kernel of truth in the criticism, but what you and the militant atheist have not considered is how and why superstition and bigotry might be defensible, even essential.

[alanjjohnstone]

Dawkins position has been criticised by ourselves in more than one article so i won't dwell on your reference to himI returned to the migrants topic to see if i was guilty of personal disrespect to yourself. It wasn't until #53 that i accused you of being a racist, I gave you lengthy replies to your posts since that is what serious debate is all about, covering all the ground…And you, in return, responded at length point by point. I decided it was no longer a fruitful exchange and declined to continue it as i was frustrated by your state of denial…racism and racialism being somehow differentI may well have misunderstood your argument but i think not although  pot  and kettle comes to mind when you assume we agree with "social engineering and do not expect workers themselves to learn by self-education and i gave a concrete example to cement my case by referring to local miners attitudes changing to Lithuanians simply by experience of working alongside and sharing in the class struggle together as comrades in arms and not enemies.But i am pleased that you continue to take an interest in the forum and note that our case has been consistent in that we have opposed the 2014 Scottish referendum and the 2017 Catalan referendum and opposed the ethnic/religious poitical divide and rule tactics being practice throughout the world. Certainly, one sure thing we cannot be accused of is courting popularity by abandoning our principles

[Ike Pettigrew]

I mentioned Dawkinian atheists, not Dawkins, and it was as an analogy.  I was not suggesting that socialists agree with him.  That's clear to anybody who reads my comment.  I also did not mention social engineering.  I referred specifically to cognitive re-engineering, which is how I view what would be required to make people socialists.  Since socialism is contrary to human nature. you would have to change not so much the way people think and what they think, but override their thinking with the concepts, assumptions and mental frameworks that align with your ideas.  In other words, basically brainwash people and turn them into autoscripted zombies – which, not coincidentally, rather reflects the cultish way many SPGB members engage with others.I am not in a state of denial about my views.  The only reason for separating 'racism' and 'racialism', other than that they are two different words with separate meanings, is that 'racism' and any mention of race is, for people like you, a powerful trigger that puts you under a sort of weird hypnosis in which your thinking parts go to sleep, rational discussion becomes impossible and you turn into an online version of the real ale character in Viz, presumably with a Scotch beret and kilt on.

[robbo203]

Ike Pettigrew wrote:

 The root of my disagreement with socialism is that it does not take account of all general factors in human nature: most especially, the pre-rational tribal instinct and the territorial instinct that human beings have.  You will say that human beings have no such instincts (or there is insufficient evidence for the notion) or that even if they do, they are unimportant.  I think differently.  Thus we are at deadlock.  You have your opinion, which is that human beings can be 'educated' (i.e. cognitively re-engineered in a Promethean manner); I have mine, which is that human nature is immutable (and even if not, in my view it would not be desirable to change our essential nature).  

 What "territorial instinct"? For the great bulk of our time on this planet, we human beings lived in a small immediate-return hunter-gatherer band societies whose outstanding characteristic was that they were nomadic and lacked any sense of teriitory.  That sense of territory came with the domestication of plants and animals – a comparatively recent development.  So too is the development of tribes.  Band societies are quite different in structure and organisation to tribal societies and if we are genetically programmed to live in any kind of society it would probably be the former since we lived so much longer in that kind of society. But even assuming a fixed romantic attachment to some place – e.g. my home town – I dont see how this is incompatible with socialism. Do you? Nationalism is a different though since nationalism is essentially a product of capitalism and nationalist mythology literally had to be invented to bind together the "imagined community" that is the nation state.  Read Benedict Anderson on this

[jondwhite]

You tell us what 'tribal and territorial' human (homo sapiens sapiens?) instincts are immutable (irrespective of economics) and we and other non-socialists will knock it down.

[Bijou Drains]

Ike Pettigrew wrote:

Since socialism is contrary to human nature. you would have to change not so much the way people think and what they think, but override their thinking with the concepts, assumptions and mental frameworks that align with your ideas.  In other words, basically brainwash people and turn them into autoscripted zombies – which, not coincidentally, rather reflects the cultish way many SPGB members engage with others.I am not in a state of denial about my views.  The only reason for separating 'racism' and 'racialism', other than that they are two different words with separate meanings, is that 'racism' and any mention of race is, for people like you, a powerful trigger that puts you under a sort of weird hypnosis in which your thinking parts go to sleep, rational discussion becomes impossible and you turn into an online version of the real ale character in Viz, presumably with a Scotch beret and kilt on.

You insist that you are interested in logical debate, fair enough. Could you therefore explain you assertion that "socialism is contrary to human nature". To do this you would have to explain what "human nature" is and in what way it stops humans from cooperating on a large scale in their own interests. In doing so if you could also please enlighten us as to how this "immutable" human nature, did allow the change from primitive communistic society to classical slave society, the change from that society to feudalistic society and the change from feudalistic society to capitalist society. It would seem to me that if your assertion that human nature mitigates against change, then the changes I have outlined could not have been impossible.Moving on to you views on "racialism" it would also seem important to define what you mean by race. In line with this could you please outline any serious scientific writer who has writen anything which in any way supports the biological concept of race. It would seem to me that to have "racialism" i.e. immutable differences between races, it is a requirement that you are able to define what a race actually is and back this up with scientific evidence.In line with the way that logical debate runs, I would argue that if you are not able to adequately define human nature, explain how it allows only the historical changes that I have outlined, but acts as a barrier to socialism, scientifically define what is meant by the term "race", etc. then you have some transformational thinking to do.By the way "Mr Logic" was one of my favourite Viz characters, you could learn a lot from him

[Ike Pettigrew]

robbo203 wrote:

What "territorial instinct"?

Why does your neighbour have a wall or fence round his property?  Maybe he doesn't, but all mine do.  Why?  You will attribute this to capitalism.  Well let's assume this is correct, we then have to ask, where did capitalism come from?  The regression leads us back to human nature: the collection of qualities that are essential to the human being. The basic point is that you begin from a different axiom, in which either human nature and its various moral endowments are denied, or these essential facets are acknowledged but it is asserted that they can be re-engineered in some Promethean manner.  I disagree with this.  My axiom is not the improvement of Man, but the improvement of men – it is this fundamental disagreement that separates us.

robbo203 wrote:

For the great bulk of our time on this planet, we human beings lived in a small immediate-return hunter-gatherer band societies whose outstanding characteristic was that they were nomadic and lacked any sense of teriitory. 

Being nomadic does not mean a lack of a sense of territory.  Lions are nomadic and also territorial.  Lots of animals that do not have or possess any apparent fixed territory are nevertheless territorial.  You may also want to consider the possibility that territorialism and its various manifestations like farms, tribes and nations are meta-phenomena that arise from deeper insincts: such as protection of family, etc.

robbo203 wrote:

That sense of territory came with the domestication of plants and animals – a comparatively recent development.  So too is the development of tribes.  Band societies are quite different in structure and organisation to tribal societies and if we are genetically programmed to live in any kind of society it would probably be the former since we lived so much longer in that kind of society.

These are just shifts in material conditions (i.e. realities).  As explained above, I refer to human nature, not as a purely naturalistic explanation or lazy catch-all premise, but as the result of evolution and changes in the environment.  

robbo203 wrote:

But even assuming a fixed romantic attachment to some place – e.g. my home town – I dont see how this is incompatible with socialism. Do you? Nationalism is a different though since nationalism is essentially a product of capitalism and nationalist mythology literally had to be invented to bind together the "imagined community" that is the nation state.  Read Benedict Anderson on this

Nationalism is incompatible with socialism as you would have it, and surely that is your own position anyway.  A synergy of the two positions is possible and I suspect that if socialism ever did come about in practice, it would work along ethnic/tribal lines and there would probably be national/cultural borders of some sort.  The difficulty here is that our vobaculary might not be able to articulate how such arrangements could work, as we tend to verbally pigeon-hole certain concepts, especially when the relevant word is emotionally triggering.  For instance, mention of 'borders' is anathema to you and sends you into apoplexy, but you forget that all sorts of invisible borders exist in everyday life – between individuals, between families, between groups of people.  Is this not human nature?  I understand the SPGB's case for socialism, but I wonder if you have stopped to consider that you might not be understanding mine?  Have you really thought about this beyond your autoscripting posts in which you parrot various received ideas?

[robbo203]

Ike Pettigrew wrote:

robbo203 wrote:

What "territorial instinct"?

Why does your neighbour have a wall or fence round his property?  Maybe he doesn't, but all mine do.  Why?  You will attribute this to capitalism.  Well let's assume this is correct, we then have to ask, where did capitalism come from?  The regression leads us back to human nature: the collection of qualities that are essential to the human being. 

As it so happens I dont have a fence or wall around the house I live in and rent.  I used to own a little shack up in the mountains behind me plus half a hectare of land which Pepe's goat herd and the odd rambler would regularly walk over.  I didnt mind. Nor did any of my neighbours,  Its the norm in this part of the world (southern Spain).  The hunters too freely walk across everyone's land in pursuit of wild boar though I dont approve of hunting myself,  Perhaps in the UK neighbours declare war on each if you so much as move the boundary post by one inch.  Here we couldnt care  a toss. In fact the catastral maps are notoriously unreliable and vague much to the consternation of northern Europeans who move into the area Private property predates capitalism of course but capitalism considerably reinforced this instiitution.  Think of the Enclosure Acts. You infer from the very existence of capitalism that there must be regression that  leads us back to human nature.  In other words that capitalism is rooted in human nature.  But thats nonsense since if it were the case, how is that for the great bulk of our existence on this planet we humans lived in a totally different kind of society in which none of the attributes of capitalism were to be found?.  Granted our genetic endowment does influence our behaviour in various ways but this does not happen in the simplistic reductionist manner you portray

Ike Pettigrew wrote:

.

robbo203 wrote:

For the great bulk of our time on this planet, we human beings lived in a small immediate-return hunter-gatherer band societies whose outstanding characteristic was that they were nomadic and lacked any sense of teriitory. 

Being nomadic does not mean a lack of a sense of territory.  Lions are nomadic and also territorial.  Lots of animals that do not have or possess any apparent fixed territory are nevertheless territorial.  You may also want to consider the possibility that territorialism and its various manifestations like farms, tribes and nations are meta-phenomena that arise from deeper insincts: such as protection of family, etc.

 Lions are not particularly nomadic but tend to to stick around in the same locality for generations Farms, tribes and nations are not "meta-phenomena" arising from "deeper insincts",  That makes it sound like they represent some kind of unfurling of a pre-ordained human nature which progressively and irresistably moves in a single direction towards some preordained end.  Thats nonsense.  These are social phenomna and as such are the product of particular historical circumstances influencing the direction that society takes in their own right. We  see this very clearly in the case of the invention of agriculture as a human response to  a changing physical environment  (climate change)

Ike Pettigrew wrote:

.

robbo203 wrote:

That sense of territory came with the domestication of plants and animals – a comparatively recent development.  So too is the development of tribes.  Band societies are quite different in structure and organisation to tribal societies and if we are genetically programmed to live in any kind of society it would probably be the former since we lived so much longer in that kind of society.

These are just shifts in material conditions (i.e. realities).  As explained above, I refer to human nature, not as a purely naturalistic explanation or lazy catch-all premise, but as the result of evolution and changes in the environment.  .

Well why in that case come out  with such a misleading statement as territorialism and its various manifestations like farms, tribes and nations are meta-phenomena that arise from deeper insincts: such as protection of family

Ike Pettigrew wrote:

.

robbo203 wrote:

But even assuming a fixed romantic attachment to some place – e.g. my home town – I dont see how this is incompatible with socialism. Do you? Nationalism is a different though since nationalism is essentially a product of capitalism and nationalist mythology literally had to be invented to bind together the "imagined community" that is the nation state.  Read Benedict Anderson on this

Nationalism is incompatible with socialism as you would have it, and surely that is your own position anyway.  A synergy of the two positions is possible and I suspect that if socialism ever did come about in practice, it would work along ethnic/tribal lines and there would probably be national/cultural borders of some sort.  The difficulty here is that our vobaculary might not be able to articulate how such arrangements could work, as we tend to verbally pigeon-hole certain concepts, especially when the relevant word is emotionally triggering.  For instance, mention of 'borders' is anathema to you and sends you into apoplexy, but you forget that all sorts of invisible borders exist in everyday life – between individuals, between families, between groups of people.  Is this not human nature?  I understand the SPGB's case for socialism, but I wonder if you have stopped to consider that you might not be understanding mine?  Have you really thought about this beyond your autoscripting posts in which you parrot various received ideas?

 Nationalism is fundamentally incompatible with socialism.  You forget that nationalism as a product of capitalism is inextricably bound up with the emergence of the capitalist state and that in socialism as classically defined there is no state and can be no state since the very institution of the state itself arose from the division of socety into classes which will cease to exist in a socialist society.There are some proponents of a "stateless" nationalism like the 19th century anarchist Gustav Landauer but I think his resoning is faulty.  Nationalism by definition implies the existence of a state and hence classes. And you are mistaken. I am not averse to the notion of boundaries per se.  You mention individuals.  As individuals we all have a sense what is our personal space and feel uncomforable  when this is encroached upon by strangers.  Interestingly enough, this varies from culture to culture.  Talking of which, I have no problem either with the idea of cultural variation or ethnic diversity.  In fact if anything it is capitalism that is the great enemy of ethnic diversity.  In a socialist world I would hope to see a great flowering of diverse cultural forms but forms that look outwards to the wider world rather than look purely inwards or react with hostility to other forms

[Ike Pettigrew]

As I think I have said, we are arguing from different axioms.  For that reason, I think any further discussion is unlikely to be productive for either of us.  Your fundamental principles conflict with mine.  Neither of us has a monopoly on wisdom, and you may be right about some things, just as I may turn out to be right about things.  For now, we are at deadlock.  And I am busy.

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