I wonder how we can effectively influence the masses. One thing I have realized very acutely over the past few days is how much of a role genetics have in our perceptions of reality. Different people have different biochemical makeups and this influences the way in which they perceive the world. For example: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/02/20/republican-democrat-brain-politics-fmri-study_n_2717731.html This study tells me that if I wanted to influence Republicans I would make propaganda playing on their fear. For example, they are already highly afraid of the government and socialism. So even though they are normally against drug legalization, if I was attempting to influence their minds, I would try to convey the message that their tax dollars funding prohibition is a form of socialism, that the rewards from doing this are very small (as evidenced by the large amount of drugs currently used by everybody), and that if they keep supporting prohibition they risk the socialist government stripping all of their rights and taxing them into oblivion in the name of fighting drug use. It is no longer about prohibition or anything to do with drugs, it is all about the totalitarian socialist government robbing them blind and them getting nothing out of it. On the other hand in the case of democrats I would pick a strategy that plays up on their oversensitivity to emotional cues, as well as perhaps some of their political theory as well. Perhaps an image of a happy rich white man drinking alcohol, and a clearly distressed looking black man sitting in a prison cell, with the accompanying text that prohibition IS racism. Another idea would be an image of a child holding a revolver to his head, open to reveal the bullets, with some of the bullets being MDMA tabs and some of them being actual bullets. That accompanied by text saying that prohibition makes their children play russian roulette with black market pills, and that this risk has not come with the reward of lower drug use rates. I think this would be great as it would play on the fear of republicans as well as create a negative emotional state in democrats that they would link with prohibition. It isn't about drugs and civil liberties anymore, it is about their poor child metaphorically blowing his brains out because of the government. It isn't about fighting for drug users anymore, it is about fighting against racism. In general I think that is how you influence the behavior of the masses. You don't find people who value different things than you do and try to convince them to value what you value. Rather, you present the things you value as if they are the things that the target audience values. I become more and more convinced the older I get that people are, with few exceptions, set in their belief systems. Younger children are easily molded into any particular belief system (just look at religion), but after a certain age people sort of become cemented into their belief system. So the first strategy is of course influencing the minds of children trying to mold them into what you desire, but that takes generations to be effective, even assuming that you are capable of doing it to the children of the entire population, which is hard to do unless you are already the established power (ie: the government with their D.A.R.E classes). The other strategy is to divide the population into groups that hold different value systems, and then present the sub populations with your values as if your values are things that they already value. You don't try to convince someone that we should legalize drugs, you try to get them to associate legalization with lower taxation, or with fighting racism, or whatever it is that they already value.