Perception Management – Moon of Alabama

September 30, 2004

Perception Management

I am flabbergasted by a recent Program on International Policy Attitudes (PIPA) study that shows these results:

Majorities of Bush supporters favored including labor and environmental standards in trade agreements (93%), and the US being part of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (68%), the International Criminal Court (75%), the treaty banning land mines (66%), and the Kyoto treaty on climate change (54%). Only 33% of Bush supporters wanted to build a new missile defense system now, while more wanted to do more research until its capabilities are proven (56%). Forty percent of Bush supporters favored increased defense spending, while 47% wanted it kept about the same (9% wanted to cut).

Suddenly I find myself agreeing with Bush supporters on several important foreign policy issues.

But why will they vote for somebody, who does not favor the positions they support? PIPA says they do not know Bush’s real position.

Majorities of Bush supporters incorrectly assumed that Bush favors including labor and environmental standards in trade agreements (84%), and the US being part of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (69%), the International Criminal Court (66%), the treaty banning land mines (72%), and the Kyoto Treaty on global warming (51%). They were divided between those who knew that Bush favors building a new missile defense system now (44%) and those who incorrectly believe he wishes to do more research until its capabilities are proven (41%). However, majorities were correct that Bush favors increased defense spending (57%)

Two possibilities come to mind:

Bush supporters do not want to know Bush’s real position.
Bush supporters are managed to perceive his position as they do.

The U. S. Department of Defense defines Perception Management as:

Actions to convey and/or deny selected information and indicators to .. audiences to influence their emotions, motives, and objective reasoning as well as to intelligence systems and leaders at all levels to influence official estimates, ultimately resulting in .. behaviors and official actions favorable to the originator’s objectives. In various ways, perception management combines truth projection, operations security, cover and deception, and psychological operations.

Are these the results of such actions? How can they be countered?

Posted by b on September 30, 2004 at 09:17 UTC | Permalink

Comments

because it is not about issues, but about ‘values’, image, ‘presidential hair’, emotions, Reagan’s cowboy hat, ‘I believe the candidate shares my values’ .
stolen quote:
To a lot of people it’s about America being number one!, kicking some ass, killing some ragheads, bashing some faggots, being the alpha-dog-top-gun testosterone king.
There’s a lot of jerks out there.
And Bush is the perfect president for these people.

Posted by: Anonymous | Sep 30 2004 10:18 utc | 1

I expect that one day Hannity will ask his guests:
“Why do you say Preznit Bush should not kick some ass? You want America not to be Number One? ”

Posted by: Anonymous | Sep 30 2004 10:59 utc | 2

Bush is a carefully constructed figure. (Not self-constructed of course.) His idiocy; meaningless, empty speech, combined with his authorative position turns him into an icon, or a symbol, something like a moving statue that one can venerate and project good qualities, fair intentions, correct opinions, etc. on. His religiosity helps here – he himself says that he is guided by God, God gives him wisdom. God is good, merciful, just, right, true. Bush must be too.
What is mind boggling is that the trick works!
I think both B’s possibilities are right, a combination of them is operating.
Bush supporters are denying reality, I suppose because they somehow do perceive that reality at present is a total * -up. They are clinging to some imagined past state of affairs, hanging over the cliff, gripping desperately with their fingernails.
The only puff of wind that will dislodge them is Bush being knocked off his pedestal. Bush stumbling (e.g. breaking out in tongues at a press conference) would probably not be enough. Such figures are not judged on the basis of their actions or opinions, but admired just because they *are*. To knock him off, it would be necessary to show that he is not who he is. He has to be turned into a fiend, have some atrocious stigma attached to him – treason, pedophilia, some horror that symbolicaly burns him up.
At the same time, if he could become a better, more rational, honest and articulate man, he would loose his iconic status and become ‘real’, and would loose voters in droves. If he did express some coherent opinions, many Bush supporters would be against them and would start to doubt.
Not the whole story, but a piece of the puzzle.

Posted by: Blackie | Sep 30 2004 11:19 utc | 3

@b, Blackie
It’s like the appeal of junk food, Bushs image must taste good, look good, feel good, and most of all be easy, easy to consume as the wishful image of the self as better than the real self — that somehow this new food is better than real food, real food lacking the perfection of that which is from replication. It’s why people so love that TV show about radical makeover, subjecting themselves to all manner of cosmetic and surgical transformation to emerge at the end as some giant step closer to what they imagine that they could be, a step closer to the replicant mode of perfection — And this my friends, is why Andy Warhol wanted to “become a machine” and probably part of the reason why some people just love George Bush, no matter what.

Posted by: anna missed | Sep 30 2004 18:44 utc | 4

link to http://www.seattlepi.com for op-ed ” Advisers shape Bush presidency”, by Walter Williams

Posted by: anna missed | Sep 30 2004 19:01 utc | 5

“The Constitution, the National Assembly, the dynastic parties, the blue and the red republicans, the heroes of Africa, the thunder from the platform, the sheet lightning of the daily press, the entire literature, the political names and the intellectual revolutions, the civil law and the penal code, the liberte, egalite, fraternite and the second of May 1852 – all have vanished like a phantasmagoria before the spell of a man whom even his enemies do not make out to be a magician. Universal suffrage seems to have survived only for a moment, in order that with its own hands it may make its last will and testament before the eyes of all the world and declare in the name of the people itself: Everything that exists has this much worth, that it will perish.
“It is not enough to say, as the French do, that their nation has been taken by surprise. A nation and a woman are not forgiven the unguarded hour in which the first adventurer that came along would violate them. The riddle is not solved by such terms of speech, but merely formulated in another way. It remains to be explained how a nation of thirty-six millions can be surprised and delivered unresisting into captivity by three high class swindlers.”
Karl – The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte
I am less elegant than this, and am convinced that this all starts when enough people buy the idea that the shit they do to others will, heavens no, never be done to them.
But read the “Eighteenth Brumaire.” It teaches clearly where others simply mutter.
“Driven by the contradictory demands of his situation, and at the same time, like a conjurer under the necessity of keeping the public gaze fixed on himself, as Napoleon’s substitute, by constant surprises, hence of executing a coup d’etat en miniature every day, Bonaparte throws the entire bourgeois economy into confusion, lays hands on everything that seemed inviolable to the revolution of 1848, makes some tolerant of revolution, others desirous of revolution, and produces actual anarchy in the name of order, while at the same time he divests the whole state machine of its halo and makes it at once loathsome and ridiculous.”
Sound increasingly familiar?

Posted by: Citizen | Sep 30 2004 20:28 utc | 6

Back to Main