This blog post, an instant candidate for the Ethics Alarms Awards’ most unethical blog post of 2015, initially had me fooled. It announced itself as a list of the “16 Basic Principles of Mass Indoctrination,” and since there has been a lot of that going around lately, especially as the news media clears its collective throat to cover for President Obama’s failures and stump for a Democrat to succeed him, I scrolled through it. Indeed the principles listed were all spot on:
1. Start while they’re young.
2. Create the illusion of political freedom.
3. Use simplistic stereotypes to sway public opinion.
4. Mix facts with lies.
5. A big lie is more convincing than a small lie.
6. Give the masses “bread and circuses” to keep them well-fed and distracted.
7. Simplify complex issues by portraying them as dichotomies. Eliminate nuance.
8. Spread propaganda by all means possible.
9. Ostracize dissident voices through ridicule or defamation.
10. Faith in the correctness of a religion or ideology is more powerful than force.
11. Manipulate history records to support your religion or ideology.
12. Control different sides of the same debate and you control the outcome.
13. The masses are less swayed by reason than by stirring their emotions.
14. Drive the opposition in a corner. When they fight back, act like a victim.
15. Label all non-conforming behavior as pathological and promote “cures” for them.
16. Use rituals and mass events to keep people occupied and strengthen their faith.
Each was also illustrated, often very effectively, by a drawing, chart or cartoon. When I hit #14—“Drive the opposition in a corner. When they fight back, act like a victim”-–the illustration was the cartoon above, a standard issue, anti-Israel, fact-slanting slur coming uncomfortably close to anti-Semitic bigotry. More importantly, given the topic of the post, the cartoon embodied many of the techniques of indoctrination that blogger “Aspie Savant” was supposedly warning against. Among them: #3. Use simplistic stereotypes to sway public opinion, #4. Mix facts with lies, #8. Spread propaganda by all means possible, #9. Ostracize dissident voices through ridicule or defamation, #11. Manipulate history records to support your religion or ideology, and #13. The masses are less swayed by reason than by stirring their emotions.
Wow: a post condemning mass indoctrination that suddenly employs six out of the sixteen mass indoctrination methods cited! What’s going on here? In fact, what the hell is going on here?
Was this entire post just a set-up to make a typical pro-Hamas/ anti-Israel/ poor Palestinians argument? Is the author really so biased and ideologically slanted that he simultaneously deplores indoctrination techniques but can’t even recognize when he’s using them himself? Is he making some kind of complex, Mobius strip, double-reverse satirical argument ridiculing critics who engage in the same tactics they claim to deplore?
I have no idea. At this point, I’m grateful for the list, but I would never trust this blogger’s judgment or analysis regarding anything, since he obviously lacks integrity, consistency, objectivity, perspective and judgment.
I’m grateful for the list, though.
Too bad Aspie Savant doesn’t understand it.
Ethics Alarms 
You should see this.
View at Medium.com
Ok, this is strange. When I load the page, I have to stop the page right before it finishes loading or that link in both of your comments disappears. Anyone else get experiencing that?
Yep.
Also grateful for the list. Idle curiosity, who or what is an Aspie Savant? Never heard the name before.
That’s one of those people who can’t wipe their own ass, but can play the bejesus out of a piano, I think.
Actually, a pretty good definition. You are aware that Asperger’s was dropped from DSM 5, yes? In favor of high-functioning autistic spectrum? Or something like that.
I’m going to guess he’s also self-diagnosed. And not a very good diagnostician.
I know now. Hard to keep up.
Actually, never mind. Not enough coffee yet. Aspie = Aspergers, Savant, obvious enough. Obviously an alias, and obviously an Ethics Dunce.
Can you self-label as a savant?
Well clearly this guy can’t…
View at Medium.com
“14. Drive the opposition in a corner. When they fight back, act like a victim.”
Yup, that’s a pretty exact summary of Arab treatment of Israel.
This deranged blogger gets the roles exactly reversed, including a perception of how the media acts that is exactly opposite reality. It’s not even rose-colored glasses. It’s like he or she has TV goggles on, permanently set to the Crazy Channel.
So if the cartoon had been reversed, Israeli corpses and crying Palestinian baby, I take it you would have liked it?
Why do you take that? The reverse would also embody exactly the same indoctrination techniques, and be exactly as unfair and unethical. All analysis can’t be attributed to bias, you know. and asserting otherwise is a cheap shot….like your comment.
What is it about “Simplify complex issues by portraying them as dichotomies. Eliminate nuance” that you don’t understand? It seems pretty clear to me, an also that a cartoon like that epitomizes it regardless of which side it adopts.
This is some deep, convoluted, multidimensional 1984 doublespeak.
Jack, you were savagely critical of Savant ….”he obviously lacks integrity, consistency, objectivity, perspective and judgment”. Yes, of course the cartoon pitched either way is unbalanced. Only the ignorant are totally unbiassed and the best we can do is to be conscious of our prejudices. My guess is that you wouldn’t have written your post if the cartoon had supported rathen than confronted your position. You were more immediately provoked by the underlying message (anti Israel) than you were by the (unbalanced, emotional, manipulative) way it was expressed? I very much doubt whether Isaac would have piled in to this ‘deranged blogger’ if the cartoon had been switched. I hope Savant wrote his blog consciously to encourage us to think about how we manage our biases. If so, it has worked for me.
Oh, bullshit, Andrew. I resent your accusation, and it is 100% wrong. He’s a phony and a hypocrite, and deserved exactly what he got from me. I don’t appreciate bait-and-switches, or bloggers who pose as making non-political, non-partisan points about objective journalism, politics and debate and then prove that their principles only extend to their ideological enemies…essentially what you are accusing me of doing here with no provocation. I read most of the post agreeing with every point, and then he proves that he either doesn’t understand them or will use the same devices he claims to deride when they suit his agenda. HE is a large part of the problem he pretending to be exposing, meaning he’s either too dumb to understand his own post, or a liar. “I hope Savant wrote his blog consciously to encourage us to think about how we manage our biases.” If he did, then that’s a dishonest technique, and the equivalent of a web hoax. Reading his other posts in the wake of this one, however, it’s clear that his sense of ethics misconduct flows one way, meaning he’s untrustworthy. Mine does not. I won’t be reading him or trusting his posts again. Nobody should.
I have no biases in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict at all, and unlike most, I actually know the history and how we got to the current Gordian Knot. Israel certainly doesn’t have clean hands, but an adversary who refuses to concede your right to exist and engages in terrorism automatically cedes the moral high ground.
Yes, he mentioned the Palestine-Israel thing just to provoke a response; you know, for illustrative purposes. Not that he (Aspie) had an opinion either way.
I’m just now reading Jack’s response to you, and I, for one, can most certainly verify his neutrality in that matter.
Jack. I honestly don’t follow why you are so outraged. My reading is that the cartoon simply and effectively illuminates Savant’s principle 14 of mass indoctrination (“drive the opposition into a corner and when they fight back act the victim”). It is certainly not Savant talking about Israel / Palestine. Haven’t you overreacted?
Idiot savant is attempting to indoctrinate, using several of his own listed methods, in order to push his crap opinion. Even if he were to have gotten the cartoon correct, I, and evidently Jack and others, would be alerted to the hypocrisy, and a sinister-looking agenda due to the manner it’s presented. The left seems absolutely numb to hypocrisy, though, so maybe that’s the simpler and more plausible explanation. It’s almost as if hypocrisy is some sort of twisted version of the categorical imperative.
No. I explained why. If he can’t illustrate the point without using six of the other tricks he was supposedly exposing, then he actually believes in indoctrination. You’re saying I overreacted to the “ends justify the means” adopted not only by the supposed critic of indoctrination members, but in the middle of the criticism! The only way anyone could not be outraged is if they personally think the Gaza-Israel conflict is black and white, which it isn’t, that the violence in the relationship is all on one side, which is ridiculous, that the news media slants to the Israelis, which is an outright lie, and that Israel is falsely stating that it is a victim and whining about it, when both the Palestinians and Israel have legitimate claim to victim status for different reasons. Political cartoons these days are usually intellectually dishonest and unfair. If that same cartoon was used to illustrate one of the six techniques that were being used by the cartoonist, then it would be appropriate. But the cartoon alleges that the technique is being used by Israel and the media. Wrong, untrue and dishonest. If you shrug your shoulders at that, it’s because you are pro anti-Israeli propaganda, or already indoctrinated..
I’d say that anyone who uses “savant” as part of his handle has an overextensive sense of self worth that, by itself, renders his judgment and intellect impaired. That pathetic cartoon, however, proves it just as well.
Who are the likes of you to say? Are you a savant, like him? Let’s see your card!
Ah’m the most savvy savant you ever done seen, boy!!
He has interesting stuff on occasion, but he lost me with most of it…especially the conspiracy mumbo jumbo and the nonsense false dichotomy with the “how privilege works” post.
Describe the false dichotomies in the “how privilege works” post?
In summary:
“Privilege” doesn’t always work out, and vice versa lack of “privilege” doesn’t always work out as he describes. Additionally, he’s chosen the “privilege” route as receiving PRIVILEGE at EVERY SINGLE turn in life, and sought to pick “negatives” for the “non-privileged” AT EVERY SINGLE TURN IN LIFE.
It’s an incredible series of non-sequiturs for the vast MAJORITY of people in life as they fall on the “successful/less-successful/unsuccessful” continuum (a continuum already marred by materialist concepts of success).
He should have compared the life of a modern-day American with a 13th century Irish peasant. That would have gotten the point across much better.
Then for his point, it would be a false analogy and for other points probably “comparative virtue” or “it’s not the worst thing”