So, I ran across this interesting little snippet on the interwebs:
To reiterate – a small minority that has access to, and control of, information, can manipulate a large majority, as demonstrated by this “game” which is essentially a sociology experiment.
The first thought that came to my mind was how closely this coincides with communist methodology.
In his book, <i>Witness</i>, Whitaker Chambers relates the fact that when he was the editor of Time Magazine, he would observe that during their planning meetings, 2 or 3 people that he knew to be communists, would stand up and suggest angles to their stories that would help the communist agenda, or reflect the communist “line” or narrative.
Because the rest of the reporters, who were in the majority, did not know that the few were agenda driven, they would usually go along. It was that easy for just a couple of people to drive the agenda.
In <i>What We Must Know About Communism</i> it lays out the same principle:
“Many non-Communists, of course, have been active sympathizers and collaborators. But the overwhelming majority of those whom the Party has used have never suspected the Communist source of various opinions they have accepted and relayed to- others; nor have they suspected how often they have looked at domestic and foreign problems through distorting lenses which the Party has held up before their eyes. It would take, in fact, a peculiarly naive or self-confident American to assert definitively that he had never thus been influenced.
It was said of Sir Galahad, the “perfect knight,” that his strength was as the strength of ten because his heart was pure. The strength of the Communist has all too often been “as the strength of ten” because he has known ten persons of pure heart to serve his purposes: p have profoundly wanted peace; who have believe justice and equality; who have sorrowed over “poverty in the midst of plenty”; who have wanted to make an an-out stand for civil liberties.
If we could check this insidious multiplication of influence; if we could make the strength of each Communist as the strength of one only-not of ten or a hundred-most other problems that stem from the Party’s activities among us could be taken in stride. For except where the aim has been to prevent actual subversion, sabotage, and espionage, governmental efforts to control the CPUSA have largely been stop-gap substitutes for a grassroots understanding of Communist tactics of multiplied influence.
Among these tactics, none bas been more tenaciously relied on than the united front. Wherever Communists are in a minority, they work to extend their influence beyond their numbers by forming a coalition with other groups in behalf of some common cause -civil rights, social security, peace, or whatever-and then, gradually, taking over the leadership functions of the whole movement. Thus they further at least four aims.
The Party’s first aim in thus working with non-Communists is to insinuate its “line” into their consciousness, so that they will unwittingly begin to talk its language about issues, will retail stories that it has planted about the abuses of the “ill capitalist police state,’ and will echo its characterizations of individuals and its interpretations of events.
It might seem that influence by contagion, in an atmosphere of shared struggle, would be a two-way process. Sometimes it is; but usually riot. For the Communists are acting, on a calculated and concerted plan for influencing the noncommunist, which the latter are simply acting like individuals who want to get a job done, who know that the problems at issue are complex, and who welcome such clarifying insights as others have to give. The Communists, moreover, are insulated against reciprocal influence by their ideology, their contempt for “bourgeois liberals and reformists,” and the sense of superiority they derive from knowing that they are manipulating the situation.”
Progressivism, if you prefer to call it that, operates in precisely the same way.