The New South Wales government used behavioural experts to increase compliance during the “pandemic” through psychological manipulation or ‘nudging,’ The Daily Telegraph has revealed.
According to secret documents obtained by the outlet under the Freedom of Information Act, the state government’s “Behavioural Insights Unit,” which operates as part of the Department of Customer Service, reportedly told the government to minimise the public perception of the risk of vaccine side-effects by using decimal figures instead of easy to comprehend round figures.
“When discussing (vaccine) risks, use the absolute percentage (i.e. 0.000004 per cent) rather than 1 in 250,000. We find it easier to imagine ourselves as the ‘1’ so perceive the risk expressed this way as greater.”
The Daily Telegraph also noted that politicians were told to “change the default by framing vaccination as the status quo,” because “framing something as a loss will have greater impact than framing it as a gain.”
What that means is telling the public that not being vaccinated would result in a “loss of freedom.”
The report highlighted one presentation in which the government was urged to employ a message of “appealing to ego: Real heroes wear masks.” This, it was said, would result in 10 per cent more young people wearing masks on public transport.
Behavioural scientists were similarly employed in the UK to scare or ‘nudge’ the public into compliance through the use of propaganda – a tactic that has been slammed as “anti-democratic.”
British social commentator Frank Furedi described it as a new form of technocratic governance designed to remould the way people think and act. As such, it “eliminates the discursive back-and-forth that ought to characterise the relationship between citizens and their rulers.”
“Behavioural scientists start from the assumption that human beings cannot be trusted to make rational choices,” he said.
“People’s behaviour, they conclude, should be the subject of government management. They treat people’s emotional lives, lifestyles and relationships as legitimate objects of policy-making and professional intervention.”
But the thing about propaganda is that while it may, for a time, be effective in manipulating the naïve and vulnerable, the truth eventually comes out. The unavoidable result of that is that its propagators are entirely discredited. When that is one’s own government, the end can be disastrous. Every announcement issued, every decision made, is at best, looked upon with a strong dose of suspicion.
It was over a year ago that we warned about the long-term effects of governments employing such tactics on their own people.
At the time, we said that when you feed the public what they consider to be blatant propaganda, the people will be less likely to believe you, even when you’re speaking the truth.
While the government still laments the prevalence of “conspiracy theories” and vaccine scepticism, what they fail to grasp is that these things are largely the product of dishonest power. And as long as the government continues to be untrustworthy, the public is going to be untrusting — and rightly so.
When the government, or the mainstream media for that matter, lies to the public, it creates a suspicious people, hesitant to heed any warnings and advice from those who have previously abused their trust.
Fast-forward a year and it’s safe to assume most people have caught up to what we’ve been banging on about for so long. The public were largely duped. While your friends and family may be too embarrassed to admit it, particularly if they mistreated you for your lack of naivety, their reversion to pre-Covid behaviours reveals they’re no longer swallowing what they were previously consuming.
So, hats off to everyone who withstood the largest propaganda campaign of social pressure and psychological intimidation the world has ever known.
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