Searching for truth in a world of manipulation | Whale’s Tales

The word pops up from time to time, but most of us are unlikely to pay it much attention.

Well, in this case, we must pay attention.

The word is “PsyOps,” a modern mash-up of “Psychological Operations.” In the strictest sense, this noun signifies “operations to convey selected information and indicators to audiences to influence their motives and objective reasoning, and ultimately the behavior of governments, organizations, groups.”

For “influence,” read “manipulation.”

The United States uses psychological operations to induce or reinforce behavior it perceives to to be favorable to U.S. objectives. They are part of the range of diplomatic, informational, military and economic activities available to the U.S. They can be used during peacetime and conflict.

“In wartime,” said Winston Churchill, “truth is so precious that she should always be attended by a bodyguard of lies.”

Those words suggest that deception, misinformation and subterfuge are necessary to protect vital information during a conflict. This is a strategy, not an endorsement of lying for its own sake.

I mean, duh.

What I am talking about here, however, is the PsyOps bleed over into peacetime. How our government routinely lies to us to cover up its own failings and misdeeds. How corporate America has turned PsyOps into a marketing strategy to sow doubt, anger and fear among us. The goal is to get us to buy into whatever product they are hawking, material objects, ideas, ideologies, etc.

Perhaps it should go by a different name when it’s employed domestically in peacetime.

Its practitioners take advantage of a quality most human beings share: a hunger to know the truth. But instead of truth, they sow doubt where there should be none, for example with man-made global warming, making it a subject of never-ending debate and setting us at each other’s throats.

“Flood the zone with shit,” said former presidential adviser Steve Bannon. That is, sow doubt in people so they no longer know up from down, right from wrong. They are easier to manipulate that way.

It conjures in me images of cloaked figures manipulating us from dark recesses by any technological means.

Ever wonder if what you’re hearing or seeing or reading is telling you the truth or trying to manipulate you?

It so happens that Applied Behavior Research and NCI University have developed a useful tool to break down and score messages for potential signs of manipulation. It’s called the NCI Engineered Reality Scoring System, and it uses a scale from 1 (Not Present) to 5 (Overwhelmingly Present) for evidence of manipulation, with a total score range of 0-100 to assess the likelihood of a PsyOp.

Here are several of those reality checks you can ask yourself.

• Timing: Does the timing seem suspicious or coincide with other events? For instance, during the lead-up to the first Gulf War, a young Kuwaiti woman moved people to fury with a heartrending, infuriating story about Iraqi soldiers breaking into a maternity ward, removing infants from their incubators, and then placing them on the floor to die. Was it true? No, but it took several years to discover the whole thing was a lie. The United States hired a company to manufacture the story, and the young woman was the daughter of the Kuwaiti ambassador.

• Emotional manipulation: Does the message provoke fear, guilt or outrage without solid evidence? In the months before the 2024 election, a story about a town back east circulated with the claim that illegal immigrants were eating the pets of the town’s inhabitants. True? No. But it provoked rage and garnered support among people keen on then-candidate Trump’s plans to remove illegal immigrants from the country.

• Simplistic narrative: Is the story reduced to a good vs. evil framework?

• Uniform messaging: Are key phrases or ideas repeated across media?

• Authority overload: Are questionable “experts” pushing the narrative?

• Is there a call for urgent action?

• Is the event framed as shocking or unprecedented?

• Do powerful groups benefit disproportionately?

• Does outrage seem sudden or disconnected from facts?

I’ve noticed one used all of the time by people hawking their wares on the internet. Its hook is that powerful entities, like government, phone companies, internet service providers, etc., “have hidden this truth because they don’t want you to know this.”

To paraphrase the character Gordon Gekko’s famous “greed is good” speech in “Wall Street” — “The point is, ladies and gentlemen, that anger, fear, suspicion and doubt, for lack of a better word, are good. They are right, they work.”

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Robert Whale can be reached at robert.whale@soundpublishing.com.