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I’ve often been asked if the statement ‘Controversy Creates Cash’ still holds true.
I would suggest that it’s truer today than it was when I wrote the book with that tagline - in all aspects of life.
Let’s look at social media, which is driven by controversy. The content that receives the most attention is, to one degree or another, combative, seeking attention and creating controversy in order to accomplish that. I think if you look at so much of what's driving our culture - and our politics reflect our culture in many aspects - it's driven by controversy.
Controversy creates emotion, and people act on emotion - unfortunately. I think the world would be a better place if people responded to things more on an intellectual level, but our news media is more like professional wrestling than professional wrestling is! It's all designed to create emotion.
Having spent time in North Korea, I can tell you first-hand what happens to a population when they’re closed off from outside ideas, outside information or outside knowledge. They get fed a steady diet of state-run propaganda – presented to them as ‘the news’ – but in the United States, while we have a completely different system, an all-too-obvious phenomena is happening here, too. Almost everything in our culture is driven by the mass media, which creates controversy in order to create a desired emotion – either to get people to want to watch something, buy the product that’s being advertised while they watch, or to get certain people elected.
I’ve been discussing this subject for a long time. In December 2006, I posted the following observations at EricBischoff.com:
“The American people know (insert a political agenda here so that it sounds like the speaker is wired directly into the minds of 300+ million people like some kind of Super Nielson Consciousness Meter)”
…We've heard that phrase – The American people know - thousands of times. It’s one of the most over-used yet effective means of swaying public opinion. Don’t believe me? Just listen to CNN and almost any democrat running for office or speaking on behalf of their party. Democrats are always anxious to step in front of a microphone and speak on behalf of “The American People”.
The problem is…. I’m an American and the democratic party and those who represent them, rarely espouse a position that is close to one that I hold. Yet they claim to speak for me. Don’t get me wrong, if I hear the words “The American people know….” coming out of the mouth of a republican….it drives me just as crazy. It’s presumptuous, arrogant, and elitist. But unfortunately, it is also effective, because it attracts the disaffected (and most vocal) members of society, and that special breed of parasite that feeds off of them.
It's gotten even worse since then. The people that produce news media know that people react based on emotion – they don’t react based on thought. They don’t think about why they are reacting the way that they are, they’re just justifying the way that they feel, based on whatever they’ve read or whatever they subscribe to.
Any political system that’s driven, at its core, by controversy, is likely to be characterized by much of the volatility we see today.
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Once upon a time - when Loree and I were living part of the year in Cave Creek, Arizona - I found myself following the local political scene.
Cave Creek is a beautiful little community – home to about 5,000 residents or so – and it’s successfully retained a lot of its Western heritage (during the late 1800’s, it became somewhat of a ‘boom town’ after gold was discovered in the Bradshaw Mountains). You can actually ride a horse into town, as I often did - making use of the trails that go through the downtown area - and actually ‘park’ your horse outside a bar or a restaurant (using the corrals that are plentiful in that area).
Shortly after we moved to town, however, a lot of new construction got underway – condominiums and hotels primarily. It looked like the community was going to rapidly change - at the cost, I worried, of the charm, warmth and quaintness that attracted people there in the first place. As the subject was being discussed at the local town council meetings, I decided to stick my head in the door and witness the process for myself.
It was ridiculous. After I saw the process, and in particular the type of people that comprise these town council meetings, I knew that I didn’t have the patience for it.
Thus ended my brief flirtation with politics.
The preceding excerpt was taken from Grateful, the new book by Eric Bischoff and Guy Evans and has been reprinted with the permission of the authors.
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