Off Topic Rant: Social Conditions

Blog Article/Post Caveat (Read First Please: Click the Link)

We live according to social conditions and social conditioning, i.e., the tapes or sub-routines/functions that go click-whirr when certain stimuli trigger them in our instinct-like primal conditioned response-actions. It would seem that group dynamics in social conditions also have effects on the individual and the group mind. Here in lies the rub, media does have a huge effect on humans and social media of the Internet by its saturation of our world with all kinds of emotionally driven effects will rub off on both the group and its individuals. 

In the psychology of persuasion by Dr. Robert P. Cialdini, PhD, he speaks to social proof, a proof humans as individuals who are driven by social survival conditions to look to ‘others’ in groups to make decisions one way or another. So much so that when media reports grave violent news that very report will effect the mind-state of others who are exposed toward actually, at the extreme, taking their own lives in response. 

It is my theory that social media and the saturation of emotionally changed monkey dancing dramatized so-called news or just information in an information driven Internet our very emotional maturity toward life itself has become ‘IN-affected’. 

Look at it as the electronic version of groups who gather for a demonstration where a few within the group, another smaller group whose agenda is to inflame and incite, start actions out certain agenda driven emotional actions, words and events to stimulate and effect the others into taking actions they normally would not subverting the original intent of the demonstration into an inflamed violent action.

Take a look at how the current elections are going and the emotions that are flaming around indiscriminately causing others to follow the herd, it is being fed by those with the agenda through social media to inflame and incite others to follow along, follow the herd so to speak. 

Dr. Cialdini’s group actually is believed and reported to be involved in one candidate’s actual change of strategy and tactics using his influential psychology programs. If all he studied and presented in his results and now in his two books on the subject is true then social media and the platforms like Facebook, Twitter and Youtube and so on are all contributing heavily toward the direction our society is going and that to my mind is an emotionally immature direction. 

Sigh!

“In order for any life to matter, we all have to matter.” - Marcus Luttrell, Navy Seal (ret)

p.s. to bring some of the actual topic to bear regarding this article, in self-fense of avoidance and deescalation this part about social conditions, conditioning and proof principles can teach us the how of the mind so we recognize when events are going to trigger certain tapes, sub-routines and functions more automatic in nature so we can stop the triggers and use that information and the art of persuasion to avoid violence and eve deescalate offending adversary’s  but that is a whole article unto itself for later.