Godfather of Influence
One important and critical insight of Dr. Cialdini is that we often are influenced by things outside of our conscious awareness.
But then our ego driven conscious brains need to come up with a post event, logical sounding reason why we did what we just did.
This is never the real reason, but we think it is, and if we use this post event rationalization to persuade others, it won’t work.
Memes and Genes
Then we come to the false conclusion that persuading others is haphazard and mysterious, something that is more of an art than a science.
Richard Dawkins coined the term meme a long time ago.
He as attempting to draw a parrallel between genes being copied from physical body to physical body.
Memes are a kind of hallucination that gets copied from brain to brain.
Random Unfolding of History
There is a theory that everything that happened in history was completely unpredictable and unexpected before it happened.
But after it happened, the people in charge had to pretend they, at the very least, knew it was coming.
When in reality they had no idea it was coming, but as a society, we very much need to believe that our leaders are in charge.
Brain Destroying TV
There has bee a very insidious advertising program going on essentially since the economic boom that happened after World War II.
It’s based on Dunbar’s Number, the idea that everybody has a certain number of potential memory slots for the people in our social reference group.
This is an upper limit, thought to be around 200 people.
Tribal Brain
Because humans are bound by social proof and authority, this means that each group of 200 people can be thought of as an individual node.
Each node can have a certain personality, characteristic, etc.
Managing so many nodes in a society of a few hundred millions is very difficult.
Kind of like trying to unite a million different tribes.
The advertising strategy which has been embedded in nearly all TV advertisements since the end of World War II has intended to detach our dependency on our local Dunbar number.
Dunbar Detachment
This was an attempt to create one large tribe, with one large authority figure.
Unfortunately, the scientists that created these experiments had no idea or perhaps no concern of any unintended consequences.
They did detach our dependency on our internal Dunbar number, but the negative consequences were an absolute destruction of our attention span.
It turns out that the smaller your Dunbar number is, the longer your attention span and the greater your intelligence.
The larger your Dunbar number, the shorter your attention span and the less your intelligence.
Global Amnesia
This means they CAN create a large 300 million large tribal cohesion, but this tribal cohesion will be very short lived.
Which is precisely why your mind can remember so little.
Ideas flow through, slightly alter your neurology, but as soon as you understand this, you forget this.
Of course, this may have been their intention all along.
False History
They say that winners write the history books.
If you are in charge, and a bunch of significant and unpredictable events suddenly happen, you will do everything you can to take ownership of any positive outcomes, and externalize any negative outcomes.
This means that most of history is completely false.
A post rational description of that which was completely unexpected and misunderstood.
Brain ReplicatorsBrain Dirt
And our minds are like soil.
And just like seeds and soils, if you plant too many seeds in the same soil, the soil will soon be devoid of any nutrients.
Which is why it is so hard to remember things.
So many different memes with so many different structures have been planted in our brains, the nutrients in our brains are gone.
Nobody Home
That’s why it’s so easy to feel like your brain is empty.
The only things that can exist in your brain are the things that are temporarily passing through.
Every idea that passes through, since this will be the only idea in your brain, will seem like a wonderful idea.
But as soon as this idea slides out, you’ll be left wondering if you have anything in your brain at all.
Authority and Social Proof
Cialdini recognized that if you can understand the normally out of conscious awareness triggers of influence, namely social proof and authority, you can easily get anybody to do anything.
His main idea was that influence and persuasion, and to a large degree, seduction, really is a science.
All you have to do is get outside your conscious awareness, and stay outside of your target’s conscious awareness, and you can very easily get anybody to do anything.
Out Of Mind
And since this will always be outside of your conscious awareness, nobody will ever know.
You can get anybody to do anything, and nobody will ever know what’s happening, since this is never inside of your conscious mind.
What’s inside your conscious mind is only what is needed outside of their conscious mind to get them to behave exactly how you like.
And they will do whatever you want.
And nobody will ever know what just happened.
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