All entries for Tuesday 23 February 2010

Brainwashing techniques

The brainwashing techniques I used in my talk on Ballard last week are readily available at Cracked.com.

I also picked up an interesting article about how the brain plays to simplicity. The article extends one of the Cracked techniques - #3, keeping you in line with shame - which points to an evolutionary security developed through tribal conformity:

Psychologists have determined, for example, that shares in companies with easy-to-pronounce names do indeed significantly outperform those with hard-to-pronounce names. Other studies have shown that when presenting people with a factual statement, manipulations that make the statement easier to mentally process - even totally nonsubstantive changes like writing it in a cleaner font or making it rhyme or simply repeating it - can alter people’s judgment of the truth of the statement, along with their evaluation of the intelligence of the statement’s author and their confidence in their own judgments and abilities. Similar manipulations can get subjects to be more forgiving, more adventurous, and more open about their personal shortcomings.

Relating this to Ballard's call, in an interview with V Vale for RE/Search, for individuals to establish a "moral microclimate", you could argue that post-surrealism's struggle for social progress involves resistance to the tribe. (This implies Dadaism's moral aesthetics also - non-conformity as a fundamentally optimistic activity, that originality leads eventually to the notion of a better society.)

There's a need to resist conformity in order to protect one's rights, the ability to decide for oneself whether, e.g. a given text is of value to society, or simply part of the herd buzz; and to resist government actions that are morally reprehensible. But there's also security to be had in finding like minds and some people just can't stand that. I've a feeling that if everyone had started thinking the way Ballard did, he'd have tried to a way out of that grouping, to keep individualising and criticising his social environment. He tried to write the present by keeping himself outside of it.

The article goes on:

A handful of scholars have already started to explore the ways that advertisers, educators, political campaigners, or anyone else in the business of persuasion can use these findings. And some of the implications are surprising. For example, to get people to think through a question, it may be best to present it less clearly. And to boost your self-confidence, you may want to set out to write a dauntingly long list of all the reasons why you’re a failure.

Happily, this reinforces my hatred of cliché. To be understood well, to force a cerebral engagement with creative writing, as well as an emotional connection, one has to write in a way that is original. I don't agree with the idea that the writing needs to be unclear - I hate trying to read badly presented critical texts with too much verbosity. They blind me. But clearly presented language, originally phrased, allows readers to engage with ideas in ways that cannot be lapped up and dismissed.

So to quote my favourite ever quote, ever, ever, by Ezra Pound:

The secret of popular writing is never to put more on a given page than the common reader can lap off it with no strain whatsoever on his habitually slack attention.

George Ttoouli : 23 Feb 2010 09:00 |  Tags: Brainwashing Creative Writing Jg Ballard Politics |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem