this post was submitted on 05 Aug 2025
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[–] vacuumflower@lemmy.sdf.org 7 points 2 days ago (1 children)

Threats work well for scams. People who couldn't be bothered to move by promises of something new and better can be motivated by fear of losing what they already have.

It's really unfortunate psychology is looked down upon and psychologists are viewed as some "soft" profession. Zuck is a psychology major. It's been 2 decades, most of the radical changes in which were not radical in anything other than approach to human psychology.

BTW, I've learned recently that in their few initial years Khmer Rouge were not known as communist organization to even many of their members. Just an "organization". Their rhetoric was agrarian (of course peasants are hard-working virtuous people, and from peasantry working the earth comes all the wisdom, and those corrupt and immoral people in the cities should be made work to eat), Buddhist (of course the monk-feudal system of obedience, work and ascese is the virtuous way to live, though of course we are having a rebirth now so we are even wiser), monarchist (they referred to Sihanouk's authority almost to the end), anti-Vietnamese (that's like Jewish for German Nazis, Vietnamese are the evil). And after them taking power for some time they still didn't communicate anything communist. They didn't even introduce their leadership. Nobody knew who makes the decisions in that "organization" or how it was structured. It didn't have a face. They only officially made themselves visible as Democratic Kampuchea with communism and actual leaders when the Chinese pressured them. They didn't need to, because they were obeyed via threat (and lots of fulfillment) of violence anyway.

This is important in the sense that when you have the power, you don't need to officially tell the people over which you have it that you rule them.

So - in these 2 decades it has also came into fashion to deliberately stubbornly ignore the fact that psychology works over masses. And everybody acts as if when there's no technical means to make people do something, then it's not likely or possible.

[–] sturger@sh.itjust.works 1 points 1 day ago (1 children)

You don’t have to influence a populace. Just purchase a subgroup willing to do violence on the populace.

[–] vacuumflower@lemmy.sdf.org 2 points 1 day ago

Violence is influence too. You still need to calculate its effects.