One of the most important skills for modern humans is understanding and having resistance to social manipulation.

Social media and our digital hyper-connectedness is powerful, I know it, you know it, government agencies know it, corporations know it.

It’s very important to know how it works so that you can develop a resistance to it. This rests on two often uncomfortable truths.

First: We need to accept that human’s are pack animals. Our survival depends on our having a place in a tribe. Your brain stem knows this, your nervous system knows this… you need to be sure that your prefrontal cortex knows this as well. We are wired to align with the group, that keeps us alive, and it also makes us vulnerable to manipulation and the madness of crowds.

Second: Language and the subtleties of language effect our subconscious beliefs. The language we use alters the lens that we see the world through. Like it or not, we need to pay very close attention to the subtleties of the words that we use and that others use. Via subtle language is how new norms are added to our “collective unconscious.”

With these two core pieces understood, we can create a plan for altering common culture. This happens on a long time line, at least 5-10 yrs. Here is how it works…

We have team A and team B, we want to alter the common culture to see team A as the enemy an see team B as the savior… human’s like simplicity… “good guy” vs “bad guy”, no nuance.

First we select a crappy thing that team A is legitimately doing. A way in which team A has indeed fumbled the ball. Then we call it out clearly, make it dramatic, create a sense of injustice and/or fear. And… here is the important part, when we talk about it we slip in subtle language that favors team B.

This works best if you can create little chat phrases again based of a core of truth but with subtleties snuck in. These spread fast. People use them for ingroup signaling, we pick them up quickly to show our belonging to the tribe.

Over time, if you can get people worked up but about the error that team A is making, most will be too distracted by the injustice/danger that they won’t notice the subtlety that you’ve slipped in and they will grow to accept that subtlety. Like the frog in the pot, you slowly turn the temperature up. You find another error, or even slight discrepancy in team A and work on that one, again slipping in more subtle assumptions.

Keep going for years and watch the collective unconscious change. If you can build enough momentum there is a tipping point where these new assumptions become common knowledge and others will blindly go along with them because their instinct to align with the group pushed them to not question too much.

Once you understand this, you can watch this play book in action. It is both fascinating and terrifying.