Selling a Bad Idea: Censorship as Propaganda

I just finished reading a book recommended by my brother-in-law, a PR specialist. In Influence: the Psychology of Persuasion, Dr Robert Cialdini unpacks the techniques used by a group he calls "compliance practitioners" (in other words, people engaged in marketing, advertising and public relations, etc.).  Cialdini explains the psychological processes and factors behind the effectiveness of strategies like free taste samples in the grocery aisle, celebrity testimonials, and Pampered Chef parties (or the Tupperware Parties my mother's generation put on). I was especially impressed with his treatment of "social proof," but that lies beyond the scope of this post. (You'll have to read the book!)

What I'm more interested in today is the technique of invoking scarcity: Limited Time Only! Limit: Two per Customer! 

Included in Cialdini's study of scarcity techniques is the concept of censorship. Censorship creates a kind of "scarcity" mentality with regard to the information or images that an authority seeks to restrict, making it seem all the more desirable. This is hardly news. What impressed me was a further elaboration of the scarcity-through-censorship strategy as a means for promoting or furthering an otherwise detestable point of view—because this has become an almost everyday occurrence in our civic news.

Here's what Cialdini writes (my emphasis added):

...When University of North Carolina students learned that a speech opposing coed dorms on campus would be banned, they became more opposed to the idea of coed dorms. Thus, ever hearing the [banned] speech, they became more sympathetic to its argument. This raises the worrisome possibility that especially clever individuals holding a weak or unpopular position can get us to agree with that position by arranging to have their message restricted. The irony is that for such people—members of fringe political groups, for example—the most effective strategy may not be to publicize their unpopular views, but to get those views officially censored and then to publicize the censorship.

Now look at your newspaper (or the social media you get your news from). Perhaps this struck me in a particular way because the day I read it my social media feeds had images of violence being unleashed by anarchists against a peaceful protest gathering. Are today's headliners instinctively taking a page from Cialdini's book?

In his Epilogue, Cialdini warns that the avalanche of information we now receive on a regular basis can compromise our judgment: "...when we are rushed, stressed, uncertain, indifferent, distracted, or fatigued,  we tend to focus on less of the information available to us." We revert to shortcuts. We leave ourselves vulnerable to manipulation. Human nature being what it is, we can find ourselves growing sympathetic toward causes that we perceive as suppressed. 

Just another reason we need to promote (and practice!) media literacy.

Turning from Our Idols

In today's first reading, Paul congratulates the Thessalonians on their profound conversion from the worship of idols to the "living and true God." In the Gospel we find somewhat the reverse: Jesus castigates the religious experts and complains that when they do win a convert over, it is to the detriment of the community. In part, Jesus hints that this is because the scribes and Pharisees themselves are given over to idols. We get a glimpse of that in the examples Jesus cites: "If one swears by the temple, it means nothing, but if one swears by the gold of the temple, one is obligated." The gold of the temple and the gift on the altar become the core value at stake, rather than "the living and true God" of the temple.

Unfortunately for us, the tendency to substitute idols for God did not end with the destruction of the temple.

A sad example of this was in last week's news. In fact, I can't quite get it out of my mind (or my prayers), it is so illustrative of the hold that our idols, any idol, can take on us. I'm referring to last week's news story about the New Jersey priest who got so involved in poker games and tournaments that his life began to revolve around them. Lost games began to seem like a nasty joke on God's part. (Shouldn't God have been helping a priest win--and win big?) Finally, the priest got fed up with all those losses. To get back at God, he came up with the foulest offense he could think of. He started a child porn collection on his computer. He wasn't even into porn--his idol was poker, and it became the center of his life, the value by which he measured every other good, even God. Now he's in jail, stripped of his ministry, and poker can do nothing to help him.

It can happen to anyone.

One of the benefits of a retreat is to distance us from our everyday idols so that with the light of the Holy Spirit we can begin to recognize the hold they have on us and cooperate with the liberating grace of God. The Lord helped me on my recent annual retreat to identify one of those miserable idols of mine; in these weeks since then I have been surprised at how many times (and in how many ways!) that idol has woven itself into my day.

Paul tells us, "You are the slaves of the one whom you obey" (Rom 6:16). We do not merely "worship" our idols, we serve them; we obey them. Little by little, our idols reset our center of gravity to the point that we enter into a worldview that, for all practical purposes, has been established by our idols.

Each time I become aware of my idol, I'm resolved to hand it over to Our Lady so that in this centennial year of her appearances at Fatima, I can begin to really "be transformed by the renewal of my mind" (Rom 12:2) and become more and more interiorly free.  "For freedom Christ has set us free!" (Gal 5:1).

Our idols can be material (like money, pleasure, or poker) or more subtle in nature (security, power, status--even spiritual status!). Has God freed you from an enslaving idol in your life? How has this changed the way you live?

From Retreat Silence to the Shouting in the Streets

After a week of retreat (eight days without Twitter or Facebook!), I find myself again immersed in a river of conversations, comments, epithets and headlines, this time mostly circulating around the provocatively racist and nativist actions of young, self-styled "neo Nazis."

It seems to me that I am seeing a new expansion of an important area of the Pauline mission and spirituality. Not that we can issue the definitive answer to the social problems or ideological errors behind the things we see in the news: no. Our mission is not only to publish and spread the truth of things, it also has a spiritual dimension of offering reparation for the ways media are put at the service of error and ideology. Because those racist ideologies are not springing full-grown from the tabula rasa of a naive human brain; they are being communicated (with a certain perverse effectiveness) through various forms of media.

A Berlin courtroom. 

Used to be, people spoke of the "loss of a sense of sin." Maybe that was only Stage One. Now we are witnessing the "loss of a sense of truth." These particular untruths would have nowhere to go if our society has a whole had not already lost its moorings in objective truth.  And with that loss of a sense of truth, are we not also witnessing the loss of a sense of community? Looking at those angry young men I have to wonder what motivates them to follow a standard dress code, or carry a shield, or wield a torch in the name of their ... skin color?

What a contrast with the young people whose writings I was reading while on retreat! A few weeks earlier, I had received a review copy of At the Heart of the White Rose: Letters and Diaries of Hans and Sophie Scholl. The Scholl siblings (Sophie was the subject of a recent biopic) were about the same age as many of the white supremacists we have seen on parade these past several weeks.

Immersed in Nazi Germany (the real thing, not the romanticized and mythical version that so enraptures our American Johnny-come-latelies), by all rights the Scholls should have completely bought into the system that surrounded them. They had been members of Hitler Youth. Hans was even in the German Army (as a medic). But somewhere along the way these two young people (at their execution, Hans was 24, Sophie 21) had discovered a point of reference outside of themselves. They discovered philosophy through wise mentors who had not yet been eliminated from society, and then they discovered the foundation of all truth, God.

And so instead of enthusiastic (or at least resigned) cooperation with the goals of the Third Reich, they became a unique part of the Resistance, boldly calling other young adults in the name of the "White Rose" to reject Nazi ideology and to resist it in any way they could. Members of the White Rose wrote and printed newsletters in secret, distributing them through a variety of channels to university students. Each issue included the invitation, "Make and distribute as many copies of this as you can."

While they were doing this, the Scholls continued a lively correspondence with friends and family, sometimes alluding in coded language to their illegal enterprise. There had been hints even earlier of the direction their lives would take. A few years before the first White Rose bulletin came out, Sophie had written to her boyfriend, Fritz (like Hans, on active duty, but unlike Hans, a firm believer in "my country, right or wrong"):

"...one constantly meets the view that, because we've been born into a world of contradictions, we must defer to it. ... If it were so, how could one expect fate to make a just cause prevail when so few people unwaveringly sacrifice themselves for a just cause?" 

Hans, similarly, had written to his sweetheart: "This war (like all major wars) is fundamentally spiritual. I sometimes feel as if my puny brain is the battle ground for all these battles. I can't remain aloof because there's no happiness for me in so doing, because there's no happiness without truth--and this war is essentially a war about truth."

The Scholls knew it wouldn't be long before the Gestapo traced the paper, the envelopes, perhaps the typewriters, to their little group of confederates, and that once discovered, they would be ruthlessly eliminated. And yet, in the middle of their doomed enterprise, Sophie wrote to a dear friend, "Isn't it mysterious--and frightening, too, when one doesn't know the reason--that everything should be so beautiful in spite of the terrible things that are happening? My sheer delight in all things beautiful has been invaded by a great unknown, an inkling of the creator whom his creatures glorify with their beauty. --That's why man alone can be ugly, because he has the free will to disassociate himself from this song of praise. Nowadays one is tempted to believe that he'll drown the song with gunfire and curses and blasphemy. But it dawned on me last spring that he can't, and I'll try to take the winning side."

Hans, too, noticed and delighted in beauty. At about the same time as the White Rose was about to blossom, he had written to a girlfriend:

"The sun's shining. The snowdrops are out, and white clouds are sailing across the sky. Dark earth and bright sky. I feel like saying yes to everything. I feel like saying, yes, I love you, yes, I know the way, oh, yes, it's bliss to be a human being."

These are not sentiments we would expect to find our American neo-Nazis expressing. I think that's significant.

Meanwhile, there's this:



Disclosure of Material Connection: Some of the links in the post above are “affiliate links.” This means if you click on the link and purchase the item, I will receive an affiliate commission that can help me...get more books. In addition, I received a free copy of the book mentioned above. I am committed to giving as honest a review as possible, as part of my community's mission of putting media at the service of the truth. I am disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission’s 16 CFR, Part 255: “Guides Concerning the Use of Endorsements and Testimonials in Advertising.”

Coming Soon: a New NunBlog Feature

I process things in writing and still have a stack of old journals that I haven't been able to get rid of (despite having shredded up three garbage sacks' worth of journals when I packed up in Chicago!). Last week, I decided that having extra space on my shelves for books was worth more to me than hanging on to old notebooks, I started the process of pitching a stack of journals. I've been typing away, saving up anything I had bookmarked or underlined--from personal insights to quotes to entire passages from books I was reading--and the rest is going to the friendly neighborhood shredder.

I'll start with these...

Most of what I am keeping is for me, of course, but some of it is worth sharing. (You don't know how many earlier NunBlog posts or retreat talks already came out of my journaling!) So at the risk of oversharing, I will be offering a "Page from the Past" every other week here on NunBlog. I've regretted my infrequent posts since my stint in England, and this gives me a way to keep refreshing the content on the blog without getting overwhelmed. I hope that some of what will be appearing will be helpful to you. I can't be the only person facing some of these issues, or asking these questions!

I'm afraid that most of what I will be sharing are only the half-baked thoughts of an inconsistent disciple. Some are scraps that I jotted down, sometimes in the hope of developing them a bit more before sharing them. But since Bl. James Alberione once told the Daughters of St Paul, "the world is starving for the crumbs of what you know," I will offer these incomplete tidbits even knowing that they may reveal far more of my own brokenness than I really want out out there!

Your comments and sharing in response to the posts will also be very welcome. Look for "Pages from the Past" to begin in September.