“When someone can´t control you, they will control how others see you.”

The quote above was said to me a few years ago when I was first entering high school. It was meant to warn me about social manipulation– how word of mouth can spread like wildfire, how identities and images of people are easily created, and how quickly people accept it as truth. 

Normally, in a situation like high school, it manifests itself in the form of simple class rumors. If you’ve ever had a rumor spread about you, you might have experienced that people will place an “identity” on you. This identity, although it is natural for us to place people in certain groups, is an internal thought process we tend to brush aside.

In extreme cases, you might recognize that people start ignoring you. Maybe they ignore you because it’s easier to believe what everyone else says, regardless of what you have to say. Or maybe– they ignore you because their own image might be tarnished by the crowd. Yet, this social manipulation breeds suppression, and when everyone follows the cluster, nobody seems to question the malicious intent behind the culprit.

I only remembered this quote once again when the reality of today hit me. It turns out, the control of perception isn’t limited to just social life. 

In our current state, I can see true political discussion around me start to lessen, and arguments with real anger start to escalate. I notice when I turn on the news, there is no such thing as providing just the facts. Every news channel sprinkles in their own opinions, and the same national stories are being told and worded in very different ways depending on which channel you happen to be watching. It’s as if the two parties are living in separate realities. 

Politicians speak to the press with manipulative tactics. When it comes to talking about the opposing party, it becomes very evident– categorizing, depicting, fear mongering, rumors. All for the means of influence. 

But once the media and our politicians began labelling their opposers, so did society. All of a sudden, based on the beliefs you carry, you become the image associated with them. I see buzzwords getting thrown around for the purpose of shutting down what the other person has to say. “You’re just a fascist” or  “You’re just a communist.” Maybe you were just a racist, or just too sensitive. 

“Just” as if you are nothing less than an extremity and chalked up as nothing more. 

Now, your entire identity is based on society, and you find yourself suppressing your opinions around others who disagree. Maybe you even join the crowd of the majority to avoid being classified as any of these terms.

I’ve realized the malicious game being played, where we are just the pawns. How do you control millions of people into a subset of beliefs? The answer is simple-  let them do it to themselves. If you’re team blue, you now must follow this category of beliefs, and team red is not any different.

This social engineering creates a tyranny of the majority, easily ignited by just a smidge of influence by those in power. But when everyone’s fighting each other, who’s watching the ones above us?

The fear I have stems from my worries that individualism is being erased, the very building block of our country. You are now not just a person with opinions, but a label. Political parties are turned into an identity, and when that’s the case, ignorance spikes. Nobody actually seeks the truth because it could go against everything they’ve based themselves on. We feel more comfortable thinking we know the truth than we do to actually try to find it.

The idea that the opposing party is all bad can inherently misplace trust that your party is good. In actuality, it has been true that no government has our interests in mind. So I beg that we understand what our founding fathers warned us about, I beg that we separate from playing teams and discuss with one another as people, not pawns. 

And finally, I beg that we protect the individual over the party, before we are unable to distinguish any difference.