Cialdini's 'Edge Case' Students
Robert Cialdini's bestselling book Influence has some fringe exponents of social proof.
A. Australian media coverage (such as by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation today) of the recent March for Australia and the National Socialist Network (NSN) founder Thomas Sewell turn up some interesting observations. One is a throwback to a 2021 Crikey article on a leaked NSN recruitme nt manual (which OpenAI’s ChatGPT refuses to locate for me online) which notes “social proof” (and therefore “bandwagoning”) as recruitment and radicalisation strategies.
The NSN have evidently read Robert Cialdini’s bestselling book Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion (New York: HarperCollins, 2021), which has sold over 5 million copies globally and is physically in stock at Melbourne CBD’s Dymocks bookstore. 5 million copies and a leading US trade publisher means that Influence copies are bound to fall into the hands of political extremists.
The ABC article also notes the far right news website The Noticer whose editorial ‘news values’ and pre-framing language could be a potential BA Honours case study for a Media & Communications, Sociology, or Political Science oriented student. Slogans like “Australia for the White Man” (whose pro-ethnostate memes turns up in far right and white nationalist literature including variants in Wilmot Robertson’s self-published 1972 book The Dispossessed Majority) highlight that the NSN has probably been reading The Unz Review but is yet to develop the more nuanced PR strategies of Jared Taylor (American Renaissance) or Greg Johnson (Countercurrents). Offshore radicalisation sources are about 20 years ahead in PR terms of where NSN rhetoric and public messaging currently is - reflecting the contours of the immigration debate in the United States since the early Clinton administration - whose most successful policymakers have all denied being V (1983) devotees.
B. The Nation asks: “Will AI kill your job?” Not if you are interviewee Brian Merchant who edits the newsletter and who wrote the book both called Blood In The Machine. Of course, this is just a contemporary riff on the cybernetics founder Norbert Weiner who raised these very concerns in the 1950s and 1960s. Little is actually new in substack newsletter world.
C. Today’s MIT OCW free course is on Theories and Methods in the Study of History developed by now Emeritus Professor Jeffrey S. Ravel.
D. In the halycon 1990s, I read the late philosopher Jacob Needleman’s work and interviewed his student, the cyberpunk author and musician John Shirley (who is perhaps most well known as the scriptwriter for the 1994 original film version of The Crow). The Gurdjieff International Review features a classic Needleman essay called G.I. Gurdjieff and His School that is a nuanced introduction to “the Work.”
E. There are several ways to read the interview below with Palantir founder Peter Thiel about his advocacy of the mimetic philosopher Rene Girard. We all (in the social sciences, anyway) have formative encounters in our undergraduate studies years with accomplished Professors who are major authors and public intellectuals. (Mine included La Trobe University’s Emeritus Professor Robert Manne.) These experiences can shape our values and worldviews - and our subsequent life trajectories in some unexpected and even tangential ways.
Thiel also riffs below about the transition from grad school to early career and then to how in 2002 (in the aftermath of the 1995-2000 Dotcom speculative bubble that I covered at the time for New York City’s former website Disinformation) he became an investor - including for an obscure startup called Facebook (as their first outside investor). The Straussian reading of this brief interview is that is very useful for Early Career Academics who want to be industry-focused and to engage in translational research or even to launch a startup, spinout, or equity carveout. I would like to think that Thiel’s observation about Girard’s scapegoats framework becoming more well known might end or at least halt the deficit-based behaviour and the highly emotional, dogmatic persecutory witch-hunts that I have seen occur in various organisations. Girard unlike Silicon Valley marketers is yet to “cross the chasm” or to diffuse as an innovation into the broader society.
Maybe The School of Life could include Girard - or at least a Thiel-penned introduction to him - in a future philosophy book.