A Plea To Emotion - Why This Underhanded Tactic Is Necessary

When you're losing the war sometimes the best tactic is to adopt the underhanded tactics of the enemy.

I just finished watching this tear jerking snippet from Adam Ruins Everything:

It ends with a heartwarming scene where a father promises his young daughter that he will fight climate change and leave her with a better world. Made me a bit sick over how manipulative it is.

Climate change is a cause I support wholeheartedly, but this is such an obvious appeal to emotions rather than simply stating the facts. I truly believe there is no more pressing issue in the world today outside of climate change, but do we need to use such underhanded and manipulative messaging to get the point across?

Well, yes, we probably do.

This is a sort-of follow up on the Wizards First Rule if you haven't read it yet:

https://steemit.com/philosophy/@johnyliltoe/wizards-first-rule-people-will-believe-anything

To summarize though, people will believe anything if they fear it's true or want it to be true.

There aren't really better ways to convince a mass group of people about a problem than an appeal to emotion. Not everyone is smart enough to understand the science nor is everyone willing enough to seek out the facts. That leaves these manipulation tactics to try to convince people that your side is right.

Throughout human history we have been using appeals to emotion to get public support for wars, changes to law and pretty much anything that affects more than a small subset of a given population. It's what lead to both the Iraq war and equal rights. For good or bad, the world moves on an emotional level.

Humanity as a whole doesn't respond to facts. It responds to emotion.

Find a topic that you thoroughly know, then try to explain it to someone who knows nothing about it. Present the facts that you've used to come up with your conclusion and they will likely believe you. Until opposing information is offered from a more emotional perspective.

Find an anti-vaxxer with several kids. They'll often tell you how they used to vaccinate until they heard about the kind of damage it can do to their kids. This isn't someone who did their research and came to a logical conclusion; It's someone who did their research and latched on to the most emotionally appealing evidence, then rejected the alternative.

So why resort to such deceptive tactics? Because you can't stop the other side from doing the same. Once someone has had the seed of panic planted in their skull it will grow like a weed until their mind can't be changed. You can't control human nature, but you can control the nature of the seed that is planted.

It's not glamorous. It's easy to argue that it isn't right, but it's the only thing that will work. If you care about your issue enough to actively defend it, you can't take the moral high ground, because that high ground is above the people you're going to have to convince.