Persuasion And The Media

"The individual has always had to struggle to keep from being overwhelmed by the tribe. If you try it, you will be lonely often, and sometimes frightened. But no price is too high to pay for the privilege of owning yourself." -Friedrich Nietzsche

How can you hope to find unbiased and truthful information if only five or six giant corporations controls the information you receive? If it's in the corporation's best interest to keep you from knowing something, and when I say 'best interest' I mean profitability, then there's no way you will receive information that will endanger that profitability.

We are a nation of television addicts. According to A.C. Neilsen Co (those are the ratings people), the average American watches more than four hours of television per day. That's twenty-eight hours a week. Two months out of each year. By the time you're 65, that's nine full years of television.

When we watch television the same thing happens to our brains as happens when we hear a story. . . our critical minds shut down and we absorb what the story is saying. In other words, we become passive vessels which allows the whatever message the storyteller wants us to receive to sink into our other than conscious and carry us to where they want us carried.

The days of real news, the kind of news that kept us engaged in the world, are over. Instead we have infotainment and celebrity gossip. Could this be happening on purpose? Could the 'powers that be' have taken a hint from Lao-Tzu when he said, "People are difficult to govern because they have too much knowledge."

In the grocery store recently I was in line next to a father and daughter. The daughter was probably around seventeen or eighteen, not a kid most definitely. And she was reading a gossip magazine talking about all the celebrities, what they were wearing, when their new perfume was coming out, who was dating whom, etc. She seemed to know an awful lot about all of them. And at one point her father said, 'Who's the Secretary of State?' I suppressed a chuckle. The girl responded with a blank stare.

The girl was absolutely unashamed of the fact that she didn't know. Willfully ignorant. 'What difference does that make in my life?' she said. And what does this illustrate? Increasingly, the media diverts our attention from what is truly important and funnels it to starlets in rehab, or sharks off the coast of Florida or who is in rehab. All kinds of things keep us in an altered state so that we don't object very loudly.

At the same time that infotainment keeps us numb and uninformed, politics uses the concept of 'terror' to keep us complacent. With a slight of hand, they pass the Patriot Act chiseling away at our civil liberties, but the populace accepts it without much struggle because it's keeping us "safe" from "terror".

Think of some ways you can use diversion to help in business and sales. And more importantly, think of the ways these persuasion skills can be used to protect yourself from others trying to divert and persuade you.

Article Source: http://www.rightbiz.com

Kenrick Cleveland teaches strategies to earn the business of affluent prospects using persuasion. He runs public and private seminars and offers home study courses and coaching programs in persuasion strategies.

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