Re: [-empyre-] Tactics and Strategies

[Alexis Turner <subbies@redheadedstepchild.org>]

On Mon, 23 Oct 2006, G.H. Hovagimyan wrote:

::On Oct 20, 2006, at 9:40 AM, Renee Turner wrote:
::
::> > But in today's societies, dominated by applied behavioral research
::
::What does that means?  Is the President of France a behavioral researcher.
No.

::Does premiere of China use behavioral research to dictate how people act in
::China?  
Yes.

::In my opinion today's societies are dominated by manufacturing, trade,
::war and religion.

Of course they are.  But why would people willingly allow themselves to be 
dominated by such things?  The point of the line you plucked out of context, 
quite rightly, I believe, is that people can so easily be dominated by these 
machinations because the people employing and running them understand how to 
sell them to people.  They understand how people will respond (behave -> 
"behavioral") to being told one thing versus another.  Why would, say, the 
President of the United States proclaim a false reason for going to war?  And 
what does it mean that that was, and -still is-, successful?  As an 
example, there are a shocking number of people in the US who still believe that 
Al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein were tied together, in spite of overwhelming factual 
evidence indicating that Saddam Hussein didn't trust or have anything to do 
with that organization.

That is not an accident.  It wasn't a lucky guess on the President's part that 
people would hear that connection, make it, or keep it, even after all credible 
reason to do so had faded away.

The only point I would disagree on from the previous article is the use of the 
word "today's."  Societies have always been dominated from the top level by a 
very profound understanding of human behavior, and it is by no means a new 
phenomena - religion, which you have cited, is one of the oldest forms of social 
control known to man.  It couldn't possibly work, or resonante, if it didn't 
understand how people behave. 
-Alexis