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“The individual has always had to struggle to keep from being overwhelmed by the tribe. If you try it, you will be lonely often, and sometimes frightened. But no price is too high to pay for the privilege of owning yourself.” -Friedrich Nietzsche

How can you hope to find unbiased and truthful information if only five or six giant corporations controls the information you receive? If it’s in the corporation’s best interest to keep you from knowing something, and when I say ‘best interest’ I mean profitability, then there’s no way you will receive information that will endanger that profitability.

We are a nation of television addicts. According to A.C. Neilsen Co (those are the ratings people), the average American watches more than four hours of television per day. That’s twenty-eight hours a week. Two months out of each year. By the time you’re 65, that’s nine full years of television.

Fortunately for the advertisers and maybe unfortunately for us, the same thing that happens when we hear a story, happens when we watch TV. Our critical minds shut down. We absorb what they want us to hear with little resistance. In other words, we become passive and allow the message to sink in and carry us away. It sucks us in, alters our consciousness and that is why it is so absolutely powerful. Another reason is it uses so many of our senses, it engages us fully.

The days of real news, the kind of news that kept us engaged in the world, are over. Instead we have infotainment and celebrity gossip. Could this be happening on purpose? Could the ‘powers that be’ have taken a hint from Lao-Tzu when he said, “People are difficult to govern because they have too much knowledge.”

Recently I was in line at the grocery store and overheard a young woman talking a blue streak to her father. She was rehashing all the current gossip and referring to the celebrities by their first names, as if she knew them personally. This went on for a while until her father said, ‘Do you know who the Secretary of State is?’ A blank stare was all he got back.

Even stranger than the girl not knowing the answer was that she was completely unashamed at the fact that she didn’t know. What does this illustrate? The media diverts our attention from what is truly important. We now know all there is to know about who’s in rehab and sharks off the coast of Florida or whatever couple is divorcing keeping us in a dumbed-down, altered state so that we don’t object very loudly.

Here’s another tactic used to keep us from concentrating on what’s really happening: terror. The terror alert level never drops below orange never allowing us to feel “safe”, but in a constant state of fear. This also allows for a political slight of hand. Using ‘terror’ they were able to get the Patriot Act passed chiseling away at our civil liberties.

Think of some ways you can use diversion to help in business and sales. And more importantly, think of the ways these persuasion skills can be used to protect yourself from others trying to divert and persuade you.

Tags: NLP

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