People want to be liked and respected. They are acutely conscious of their social status: their emotional well-being depends upon their sense of how others see them: they want to be able to hold their heads up high and not feel that others pity or despise them. That emotional need makes them vulnerable – a trait that can be exploited by those who wish to influence them, who might be chance acquaintances or even people they haven't met.
Insecurity and status anxiety arouse powerful emotions, as described in Isabel Wilkerson’s book Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents: “downward social mobility was a constant fear” (p. 167). People whose jobs are threatened, for example, are likely to believe a politician who offers to solve all their problems. They are also easily lured into believing conspiracy theories – which provide them with someone to blame, as described later (6.4.2.7).
Imitation can lead to new fashions and behavioural norms, as with the hippy phenomenon in the 1960s. As described in a BBC article, Did the Hippies have nothing to say?, the movement was influential: “While the hippies have been largely understood as a cultural movement, often infantilised and satirised, they were also highly political”. They were a powerful anti-establishment influence.
With improved communications, people can exert global influence on each other – for example by blogs and through social media such as Twitter. Group identities can be forged and strengthened by using the Internet – as countless organisations solicit people to join them, to contribute money etc.
As an example of the influence of public opinion across an entire society, John Stuart Mill described moral pressure in Victorian England as oppressive, in his book On Liberty:
“there needs protection also against the tyranny of the prevailing opinion and feeling; against the tendency of society to impose, by other means than civil penalties, its own ideas and practices as rules of conduct on those who dissent from them”. (Chapter 1, p. 6)
The pressure of public opinion can also be counter-productive: driving those who do not conform to the edges of society and making their behaviour less acceptable to other people.
(This is an archived page: a later version than the one published in Patterns of Power Edition 3a. The latest versions are at book contents).