Influence, Distraction and Complexity in the Age of Information

Psychology, Consciousness & Thinking, Society

Simply by speaking we influence others, and can even manipulate them. Tell others what they want to hear, true or false, and you will be able to influence them more. Tell them things they don’t want to hear, true or false, and they will likely reject your influence and maybe you. This can be used by people to get you to do what they want you to do. NLP involves this predetermined directing of responses through open and closed questions.

Influence involves knowing the rhetoric to get a particular message accepted. The more negative form of influence diverges from speaking truth as it is. This can be to influence others according to your will for your gains alone, and not the will aligned with what is right, good and true objectively all around. Someone who seeks to influence others to do what they want them to do regardless if it’s also desired or of benefit for all concerned.

It may take successive message repetitions or reconfigurations for it to be accepted and the desired behavior to manifest. This is the affect of gradualism or incrementalism, with the slow rising temperature that we don’t realize we are being cooked and conned by someone. This applies not only in individual influences, but also on a wide scale through the influence of the media.

If you can’t influence and control what people think with your information directed at them, then there are other ways to control them indirectly:

  1. Restrict information. Control what they have available to think about. Don’t talk about core fundamentals of life that can empower people. Occult, make hidden or hard to access.
  2. Distractions. Give them other things to think about that are less important but more fun, more comforting, more convenient, more pleasurable. Bread and circus, entertainment, gratification, intoxication, etc. The “feel-good” pleasure trap.
  3. Information overload. Flood the market with so much information, misinformation, and disinformation, that they don’t know up from down and only want to be left alone to do their own thing, to be happy in their lives free from the mental stress of figuring out what is happening in the world. “I don’t need to know this.”, “Don’t hassle me, leave me alone!”

The more complex things get, the more difficult it is for people to see what is actually occurring, and the more difficult it is to understand how things can be changed away from the madness it currently is.

Most likely, the complexity of the information impact, and the general unwillingness to learn developed from learned helplessness of an apparent hopeless situation, will result in a perpetuation of the system. Cycles and bubbles will repeat and be re-inflated, until the system collapses from its own falsity that can no longer be managed nor recycled anymore. At some point it collapses for good and cannot be “resuscitated”. Something else evolves to take it’s place, some new way…

Too much information can be also be a distraction and cause confusion as well. Some people see the amount of information as a reason to not bother. They are distracted and detracted from looking into what is going on in reality, in the world, because of how daunting the task is. If they do start to look into things, then information overload is an actual problem. People will turn off input because it’s too much for them to process, since they have been trained to not think, to not process information well, they don’t do well when going up against so much information to discern for accuracy and truth. It’s easier to not bother and just go back to “living” your life.

There are distractions in alternative information (alternative media) sources as well. The quality knowledge about philosophy, psychology, consciousness and morality, that allows us to find ourselves at our core being, is not in high quantity or demand in the information people are sharing and talking about.

People are mostly into pleasure, gratification, enjoyment, amusement or other distraction from reality and truth that matters more to help us to raise ourselves and evolve together. Distractions work as a winding road to finding truth, preventing access by diverting our attention from learning quality knowledge by feeding us mostly garbage or easily digestible information stimulation.

Garbage in, garbage out. Quality in, quality out. It works with everything we input, both physically in our body and “metaphysically” in consciousness. If nothing new is going in, then nothing new is likely to come out. Don’t fear the information, just realize truth takes time and you won’t understand any of it if you ignore all of it.

[Image sources: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7]