Being an engineer my mind tends to focus on hard things, not the soft warm fuzzy kind of things that make up a great portion of what drives people in their day to day processes. Don’t get me wrong, I can motivate a team, and drive them to levels of performance that they didn’t think they could achive. But that is an explicit, transparent action playing to their values and desires. There are so many in this world that understand the subliminal. Everytime I run across an article or a conversation that breaks something very simple down into alternate messages and goals, it is fascinating.
Recently, the White House released a photo of the VC-25 flyby in New York. I saw the image and thought “No, wonder it wasn’t released look at the canopy glare. Another tax payer boondoggle, those photos would not be used for anything useful”. But on some level, the image was bothersome to me. It didn’t insipre me or send that patriotic chill up my spine that many things do. Now, I have seen Air Force One coming through the clouds and dropping in for a landing. It is an inspiring aircraft, just something about it as an icon for America. But this image, just doesn’t convey that.
At American Thinker, Victor Massad has taken the image and broken down the subtext. This is why I was bothered by it.
The message and its purpose could not be clearer: we must reset our priorities. Now that the democracy is at last headed by this magnificent and elegant man, we must put the federal government and its needs ahead of our paltry individual freedoms. Of what value, after all, is the property Americans have spent their lifetimes to acquire, or one’s right to defend oneself with a firearm, or even the privilege of living in an upwardly mobile society that used to be the envy of the rest of the world, in comparison to the Leader’s magnificently powerful icon, glistening like a phoenix in the sun?
The question is whether, in the absence of any mainstream reporting as to the symbolic purpose of the photo, its wide dissemination will actually have the originally-intended effect? In psychology, this is referred to as the “perpiheral route to persuasion.” It refers to the phenomenon whereby an audience is more affected by symbols in a message than by the logic of the message itself. It is most effective when the audience is passive, such as the state of mind of the average television viewer. It is a technique that is commonly used in advertising (for example, when the man running on the beach throwing a Frisbee to his dog is shown as the announcer recites a drug’s perilous side effects).
