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The Big Lie: As Effective in FINANCIAL As In MILITARY Warfare

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Washington’s Blog

Many of the world's top economists and financial experts have said
that the too big to fail banks are destroying the world economy, that
they must be broken up in order to restore stability, and that small
banks can easily pick up the slack and make all of the loans which are
needed needs. See this, this and this.

And yet many people still believe the myth that the giant banks have to be saved at all costs.

How could that be?

Well, as Adolph Hitler wrote in Mein Kampf:

All this was inspired by the principle--which is quite true in itself--that in the big lie there is always a certain force of credibility;
because the broad masses of a nation are always more easily corrupted
in the deeper strata of their emotional nature than consciously or
voluntarily; and thus in the primitive simplicity of their minds they
more readily fall victims to the big lie than the small lie, since
they themselves often tell small lies in little matters but would be
ashamed to resort to large-scale falsehoods
. It would never come
into their heads to fabricate colossal untruths, and they would not
believe that others could have the impudence to distort the truth so
infamously. Even though the facts which prove this to be so may be
brought clearly to their minds, they will still doubt and waver and
will continue to think that there may be some other explanation. For
the grossly impudent lie always leaves traces behind it, even after it
has been nailed down, a fact which is known to all expert liars in this
world and to all who conspire together in the art of lying.

Similarly, Hitler's propaganda minister, Joseph Goebbels, wrote:

That
is of course rather painful for those involved. One should not as a
rule reveal one's secrets, since one does not know if and when one may
need them again. The essential English leadership secret does not depend
on particular intelligence. Rather, it depends on a remarkably stupid
thick-headedness. The English follow the principle that when one lies, one should lie big, and stick to it. They keep up their lies, even at the risk of looking ridiculous.

Science has now helped to explain why the big lie is effective.

As I've previously pointed out in another context:

 

 

Psychologists
and sociologists show us that people will rationalize what their
leaders are doing, even when it makes no sense ....

Sociologists
from four major research institutions investigated why so many
Americans believed that Saddam Hussein was behind 9/11, years after it
became obvious that Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11.

The researchers found, as described in an article in the journal Sociological Inquiry (and re-printed by Newsweek):

  • Many Americans felt an urgent need to seek justification for a war already in progress
  • Rather
    than search rationally for information that either confirms or
    disconfirms a particular belief, people actually seek out information
    that confirms what they already believe.
  • "For the most part people completely ignore contrary information."
  • "The study demonstrates voters' ability to develop elaborate rationalizations based on faulty information"
  • People
    get deeply attached to their beliefs, and form emotional attachments
    that get wrapped up in their personal identity and sense of morality,
    irrespective of the facts of the matter.
  • "We
    refer to this as 'inferred justification, because for these voters,
    the sheer fact that we were engaged in war led to a post-hoc search
    for a justification for that war.
  • "People were basically making up justifications for the fact that we were at war"
  • "They
    wanted to believe in the link [between 9/11 and Iraq] because it
    helped them make sense of a current reality. So voters' ability to
    develop elaborate rationalizations based on faulty information, whether
    we think that is good or bad for democratic practice, does at least
    demonstrate an impressive form of creativity.

An article
yesterday in Alternet discussing the Sociological Inquiry article
helps us to understand that the key to people's active participation in
searching for excuses for actions by the big boys is fear:

Subjects
were presented during one-on-one interviews with a newspaper clip of
this Bush quote: "This administration never said that the 9/11 attacks
were orchestrated between Saddam and al-Qaeda."

 

The Sept. 11 Commission, too, found no such link, the subjects were told.

 

"Well,
I bet they say that the commission didn't have any proof of it," one
subject responded, "but I guess we still can have our opinions and
feel that way even though they say that."

 

Reasoned another: "Saddam, I can't judge if he did what he's being accused of, but if Bush thinks he did it, then he did it."

 

Others declined to engage the information at all. Most
curious to the researchers were the respondents who reasoned that
Saddam must have been connected to Sept. 11, because why else would the
Bush Administration have gone to war in Iraq?

 

The desire to believe this was more powerful, according to the researchers, than any active campaign to plant the idea.

 

Such a campaign did exist in the run-up to the war...

 

He won't credit [politicians spouting misinformation] alone for the

phenomenon, though.

 

"That
kind of puts the idea out there, but what people then do with the
idea ... " he said. "Our argument is that people aren't just empty
vessels. You don't just sort of open up their brains and dump false
information in and they regurgitate it. They're actually active
processing cognitive agents"...

 

The alternate explanation raises queasy questions for the rest of society.

 

"I
think we'd all like to believe that when people come across
disconfirming evidence, what they tend to do is to update their
opinions,"
said Andrew Perrin, an associate professor at UNC and another author of the study...

 

"The
implications for how democracy works are quite profound, there's no
question in my mind about that," Perrin said. "What it means is that we
have to think about the emotional states in which citizens find
themselves that then lead them to reason and deliberate in particular
ways."

 

Evidence suggests people are more likely to pay attention to facts within certain emotional states and social situations. Some may never change their minds. For others, policy-makers could better identify those states, for example minimizing the fear that often clouds a person's ability to assess facts ...

The Alternet article links to a must-read interview with psychology professor Sheldon Solomon, who explains:

A
large body of evidence shows that momentarily [raising fear of
death], typically by asking people to think about themselves dying,
intensifies people's strivings to protect and bolster aspects of their
worldviews, and to bolster their self-esteem. The most common finding
is that [fear of death] increases positive reactions to those who
share cherished aspects of one's cultural worldview, and negative
reactions toward those who violate cherished cultural values or are
merely different.

I would argue that the fact that the governments of the world have given trillions to the giant banks has invoked the same mental process - and susceptibility to propaganda - as the war in Iraq.

Specifically, many people assume that because the government has launched a war to prop up the giant banks, it must have a good reason for doing so.

Why
else would trillions in taxpayer dollars be thrown at the giant banks?
Why else would the government say that saving the big boys is vital?

And
I would argue that the fear of another Great Depression (an economic
death, if you will) is analogous to the fear of death triggered in many
Americans by 9/11.

This creates a regression towards
old-fashioned thinking about such things as banks and the financial
system, even though the giant banks actually do very little traditional banking these days.

In other words, the big lie appears to be as effective in financial as in military warfare.

 

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Mon, 11/29/2010 - 13:19 | 761310 Ripped Chunk
Ripped Chunk's picture

Thanks for the "cute" complement anyway.

Most people don't really have much money in the bank. Millions of small accounts being drained will hurt. Larger business accounts: wire transfer big chunks to smaller bank accounts. If you have your wire authorizations set up properly, they can't stop you.

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