Receiving compliments is a good feeling known to each of us. It makes us feel worthy, providing us with a tangible experience with the abstract question of why we live. The more the compliment is directed towards what we personally think we are good at or want to be good at, the more satisfaction we get from being complimented. We feel heard and valuable. Compliments support us emotionally, motivating us to repeat the behaviour that led to the positive feedback. In essence, they are verbal approvals of our own thoughts and feelings from others. In other words, we believe something to be true in one way or the other, and compliments assure us of those beliefs. For example, I believe to be quite good at predicting political and societal developments. Receiving positive feedback on my predictions naturally flatters me as I am firmly investing time and mental power into crafting those predictions, which is no more than a statement about what I believe is right to do. Complimenting me on this issue implicitly means that the efforts are being seen, producing a tangible value against invisible work into something I know is purposeful. Therefore, compliments can bring people together, create positive biases and, ultimately, lead to manipulation.
The reason for that is rooted in our longing for purpose if we are unfamiliar with the devletist school. People educated in the devletist policy school know that the purpose of our existence is to constantly pursue the understanding of the objective truth by engaging in genuine knowledge production. This means that they know that they need to build on their personal talent, their special trait, and produce real outcomes with it. Doing so is the act of fulfilment and is inexhaustible. Doing so also means one becomes immune to the flattering effect of compliments. Once in balance with our own purpose, external validation or acknowledgement no longer carries any excessive meaning. Then, receiving compliments is merely nice, but it cannot manipulate us. However, this is not the case for many people. Unknowing the true purpose of our existence, the human mind went on to invent many things to fill the void that this missing information is creating. Usually, this place is occupied by things and people that we associate pleasant feelings with. Conditioned to this feeling, whatever it may be, and stuck with chasing its constant persistence, the human being is generally seeking happiness and satisfaction rather than fulfilment. Whenever a better feeling comes his way, the human being follows it, and this is where manipulation starts and why it is so powerful.
Manipulation, Trust and Purpose
One of the most effective manipulation methods is to aim for this weakness of the human mind. By evoking the feeling of purpose, people can be easily manipulated as they exchange their trust against the feeling of being worthy. Trust essentially means that the elasticity to freely act in accordance with other’s preferences is higher. When we trust someone, we are more lenient towards moving along the way with the preferences and decisions of others. In order to establish trust, we must subconsciously feel that we benefit from trusting someone. We trust our parents because we believe that they will protect us and take care of us. We trust our partner because they will hide our secrets, support us emotionally and love us. We trust friends because they help us whenever we need their help. These are reciprocal agreements that involve normative values on which both sides are leaning. By trusting someone, there is always the implicit message that one is willing to move along the decisions of the trusted person. This is also why betrayal is perceived as so horrible: We readily give away autonomy by trusting someone – not for free, but nonetheless, we give up some freedom. However, moving out of the personal context forces us to ask ourselves why we should trust governments and their media outlets. As we have seen above, trusting means that we are essentially giving up room to operate as we are outsourcing some decision-making and action-taking through trusting someone else. Why do we do this? Where is the trade? The government receives the trust of the people, who then follow its laws and regulations. The media is trusted that their information is true and people act and think accordingly. But what in exchange for all this trust? It is the false perception of purpose.
Democratic Manipulation
Especially in those faulty democratic systems of our time, the exchange is quite clear. With mechanisms such as political parties and voting systems, people feel in control of their nation’s political workings. Every four to six years, people take a pen and make one or two crosses on a piece of paper. They were made to believe that this enables us to steer the development of our nation. This, so it is portrayed, is the act of the sovereign who decides how the nation is going to develop. It creates the false belief that we are in power and the government executes the will of the people. In exchange, we trust the government – power in exchange for trust. Of course, ruling a nation requires more than just a cross on a piece of paper every couple of years. However, this method of creating a closed, elitist political system is highly effective. Installing an absolute monarch is clearly a degradation of the population because we have seen above that due to lacking awareness of the true purpose of life, we are constantly seeking to fill the void with other elements. Being put so glaringly on a second or third level below the political elite surely does not evoke the feeling of having a purpose. Strangely, assuring the population that they are the ruler of the nation does, and giving them a pen to draw a cross on a piece of paper seems to convince people of being powerful and having a purpose by influencing the nation. It is the feeling of being able to control something that creates purpose. However, the rulers of contemporary democracies can still act at will. The feeling of purpose satisfies the population so much that the leniency to proactively shape politics or even to revolt is very low. They do not have a pressing sense of lacking purpose to overcome. This is also why political activism is very low in such oligarchic democracies. As we also know from various philosophical streams, material and immaterial comfort leads to reduced development rates as higher physical, financial and social statuses make inner-societal competition less relevant. In other words, our motivation to move up in society decreases with the distance we move on the ladder. The same applies to politics. The more we feel involved, heard and satisfied, the less we are about the affairs of the state. By reducing the participation to merely a vote and portraying it as a sovereign act, populations can be manipulated easily with their consent.
The same applies to the processing of information. In media manipulation, it is not the feeling of power or control that is utilised to influence people but the feeling of freedom and independence. Again, if we do not know about the true purpose of life, we want to give it a purpose, and we want to do it ourselves. It is the implicit belief that we could stay above nature and decide what would fulfil us. The imposed purpose feels like a cage and is disempowering. That being so, manipulation through media must be built around the idea that the objects of manipulation do not feel like a claim of truth is imposed on them. In the end, media manipulation can be defined as the imposition of the validity of an informational claim. For example, we can look at the statement: social security is necessary or unnecessary. Objectively, this statement is false in either form. There is no such thing as a necessity in policymaking. However, if a specific group believes this to be true and needs popular support to realise such a policy agenda, it will likely resort to media forces to influence public opinion. It is, however, ineffective to make a rational comparison of the advantages and disadvantages of one’s own view against others as the receiver of the information will know that the information is transmitted to achieve a particular outcome. Instead, the manipulating media force will have to preserve the receiver’s need to feel free in his thoughts. This is done mainly by applying two tactics simultaneously: agenda-setting and counter-balancing.
Setting Everyone’s Agenda
Agenda-setting power in informational discourse refers to a situation in which the media outlet preselects topics and the linguistic nature in the mode of transmitting the information. By selecting what is discussed, the media already determines what is not being discussed. It can, therefore, create popular discussions as a central medial focal point and create an organisational advantage in favour of certain discourses at the expense of others. The other topics fall short of treatment as the organisation of a popular discourse from the population itself is too difficult. For example, the topic of climate change is discussed in the media and has become an outright public debate. However, wildlife and natural habitat preservation are far more critical topics that need to be addressed to achieve the effect of a balanced ecosystem and sustainable economics. However, the lack of placement of this debate in the media led to a one-sided focus on carbon emissions, leaving other important aspects out of the popular picture. The efforts of small groups to address those issues are insufficient to create broad awareness and public discourse on this topic. Hence, the agenda-setting power limits our scope of view and convinces us of the importance of certain predefined aspects. Moreover, this can even be carried into the societal realm. In the last couple of decades, the entertainment industry has been discovered as a medium of manipulation. Music, sports, art and literature subconsciously shape our thoughts through the prominent placement of ideas and influence the normative landscape of a society. If music constantly reiterates the notion of accumulating capital to earn societal acknowledgement, the human mind adapts to this thought, and through normalising such thoughts, the norms of a society change. Therefore, the media does place political notions in entertainment channels to achieve political goals. Making some politically aligned content more accessible and available than others is a cheeky way to influence public thought. The feeling of freedom of choice is preserved, and the consumer thinks that the decision to consume those contents was purely made out of informed freedom, while the reality is that it was the agenda-setting of the media outlet that determined what was listened to or watched. We can hypothesise that contemporary music, art and literature are not driven by consumer demand but by conscious agenda-setting of media outlets to influence societal norms. It functions so well because the consumer believes that he decides what to consume.
Legitimising Through Counter-Balancing
Returning to the example of climate change, we can now shift our focus to the side of those debates that are equally relevant but are being ignored. As described above, there will always be groups that support certain views, streams of thought or actions but are being left out of the public discourse. Above, we illustrated it by looking at organisations concerned with wildlife preservation. Not giving them a platform in the broader media landscape is not considered a freedom-limiting approach by the media; however, punishing them is. This means that promoting the own political agenda can be supported only in limited terms by also pushing against the opposition. Rather, the feeling of purpose is evoked in opposing streams of the debate by selectively placing their points on the agenda and then proactively ignoring them. The conflict between Israelis and Palestinians is the best example of this situation. As the media influence of Israelis is much greater than that of Arabs, they theoretically could ban all flows of negative information on Israel that they control. However, the broader public will understand this and react. The reaction is not driven out of a feeling of fairness towards Palestinians but out of the feeling that one is being patronised – a feeling associated with a lack of control and, therefore, also with a lack of purpose, as the purpose is being implicitly imposed externally. Feeling the inorganic promotion of an external focus has the effect of proactivity, even in larger masses. Therefore, the media is smart enough to avoid bans and punishments for the flow of information. Opposing views are being allowed. They are also selectively placed in prominent places of the discussion. And then they are being ignored. In the Israel-Palestine conflict, the suffering of Palestinians was never hidden. It was selectively shown and underlined with emotional, linguistic frames by pointing to civilian casualties. The broader public was also rhetorically involved by the placement of the slogan “Free Palestine”. Then, the discourse was left to itself. This created a false feeling of freedom and self-selected purpose on the side of the supporters of the Palestinian cause. Because of that, the urgency to push against the opposing view gradually decreased. Humans act very selfishly in this sense. As the urgency to underline the own independent purpose fades, the need for action also decreases. Manipulative media, therefore, places oppositional views and forces selectively in its own discourse and then ignores them to create a false perception of freedom and fair discourse. This is also the reason why autocratic governments have huge continuity problems. They shut down oppositional voices, which triggers the need for action on the side of the opposition to restore the feeling of freedom and the need to feel in control of their own purpose. Until those are achieved, the opposition will stay alive. Media in contemporary democracies is much smarter as it is understood that manipulation can only be successful if the person across the table believes that he himself was the creator of the idea. He must feel in control of his actions. He must feel free to decide what to do. He must feel that he has attached a purpose to what he is doing. If those conditions are fulfilled, you can make anyone do anything you want them to. Therefore, we must always be reflective of all interactions in our lives because manipulation often feels better than it sounds.
