The first thing I learned while studying advertising was that nobody buys a solution before buying the problem. Before I can sell you a cream, I must persuade you that your skin is inadequate. Before I can sell you a new car, I must make the one in your driveway feel embarrassing. Before I can sell you security, I must make you afraid. The first product is not the object being advertised. The first product is the conviction that something is wrong with your life—and that you need what I am offering to correct it.

Professional communication begins long before the slogan. It begins inside the mind of the person receiving it. Each of us perceives the world through a grid of interpretation. Imagine it as if in front of our eyes there was a layer that might alter the reality in front of us. That grid is constructed from our culture, identity, education, family memories, personal experiences and passive culture: the countless assumptions we absorb without remembering when or where we learned them. We do not approach every new event as a blank page. We attach it to something already present on that grid.

When reaching out to you, a skilled communicator does not necessarily need to persuade you of an entirely new idea. It is usually more effective to locate specific spots on that grid, called anchors, which you feel as already yours and connect the desired message to them. Once that connection has been made, the message can feel true before it has been examined. Advertising works this way. Political propaganda works this way too.

And among all the emotions available to a propagandist, perhaps none is more powerful than disgust. The perfect political product.

Disgust is wired into our brains as a form of protection. We recoil from rotten food, contamination, disease and decay. It creates distance between ourselves and something our brain identifies as unbearable to a healthy existence. But disgust is not limited to physical objects. The most effective ads to stop you from driving dangerously do not show you a catastrophic car accident. Your brain would immediately reject it and you would not identify in that tragic scenario. That ad is probably for someone else. But if the ad shows you a dad or mother coming home to their children after driving home, safely, then that’s when they get you.

Unfortunately, as Nazism and other genocidal ideologies have already proven, human beings can be trained to experience other people, ideas and entire populations as forms of contamination. Something to find a solution for.

Research on what psychologists sometimes call the behavioral immune system suggests that disgust directed toward social groups can suppress empathy and encourage dehumanization. Other studies have found that people belonging to groups associated with disgust may be processed differently from ordinary social subjects—as though they were closer to objects than to individuals with minds, histories and feelings. This is what makes disgust so politically valuable.

Anger still permits an argument. You may be angry with someone and nevertheless recognize that there is another side to the story. Disgust does something more radical: it tells you that listening itself would be a form of contamination. You do not debate with something disgusting. You move away from it. You silence it. You remove it from polite society. Eventually, you may persuade yourself that whatever happens to it is not your moral responsibility.

Disgust therefore performs two operations simultaneously. It pushes the target downward, outside the boundaries of acceptable humanity. At the same time, it elevates the person experiencing the emotion.

I am disgusted; therefore, I am good.

From that moral pedestal, curiosity begins to look like complicity. Context becomes an excuse. History becomes propaganda. Asking a question becomes evidence that you are morally defective. The success of the campaign is complete when people no longer feel they need to know anything. They only need to feel. When suffering becomes an accusation the horrors of war provide almost perfect material for this machinery.

A dead child is unbearable. It should be unbearable. Tens of thousands of victims, including many children, are even more horrifying. The suffering of Palestinian civilians is real, and no serious moral argument should require us to deny it. Netanyahu’s government conduct,........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)