Once you are able to speak the unspeakable, people will begin to think the unthinkable and that is how you beat the establishment. – Nigel Farage, speaking to a German right-wing rally in Berlin Sept 2017
If a new idea or opinion is presented to our conscious mind we will normally evaluate it and might reject it, or at least modify it before we ‘let it in’. But if it can by-pass the conscious go direct to a lower level of consciousness, it won’t be evaluated, because that is not what the lower level does. If the message is ‘subliminal’ or we are distracted we may adopt new ideas without even knowing we have done so.
An Overton Window (after Joseph P Overton 1960 – 2003) is a range of opinion considered acceptable in a given context. Slavery was once normal but is now considered immoral – outside the window. Racism or anti-semitism are usually outside the window but in some groups it is accepted. If you hold ideas that are outside the normal window and want people to agree with you, then you need to ‘nudge’ their windows in a certain direction so that what was previously unthinkable becomes thinkable, then accepted, then normal, until it is so ‘natural’ you don’t have to think about it at all. The most effective propaganda tends to work like this, in stages, trying to sneak round the conscious ‘goal keeper’ and nudge the Overton window along in the subconscious. Social media is very useful for that purpose.
Next – social media and fake news