Societal Engineering: Fait Accompli
This article is a part of a series on societal engineering techniques — that is, those strategies that are most effectively used by the elites to control our culture.
As a quick recap, societal engineering is defined as:
“the study of the creation and influence of human societies. It is a field of social science, dealing with those social dynamics which operate on a large enough scale to affect entire populations.”
(Read the full introductory article here)
Have you ever had the experience of coming home to your mother, or your spouse, and having them tell you what “we’re doing” that night? Laying out plans which you are apparently involved in, but did not have a hand in making?
This is a small scale application of the societal engineering technique of “fait accompli”.
“Fait accompli” is a phrase of French origin that literally means “accomplished fact”. It is used to denote “a thing that has already happened or been decided before those affected hear about it, leaving them with no option but to accept it” according to Google.
When someone close to you tells you that they have made plans for you, you can protest if you like…but you usually don’t. Or you protest, but then go along with the plan anyway.
Right?
The reason we do this is because the plans are “already made”. Because we consider the planning phase to be over, and the execution phase about to begin, we realize the futility in protesting the event.
You come home from work one day and there is fresh, hot, plate of pasta sitting on the table for you. You weren’t planning on eating pasta that night — you had some barbequed steak in mind. But being that the pasta is already there…you just eat that.
You go out for a night on the town with the boys…but they’re not at the usual watering hole. They text you that they’ve met up at a different place down the road. So what can you do? They are already there. So you go too.
The idea of an event already being accomplished, or a plan already in motion tends to influence the mind in that direction. It takes out the work of decision making — which the mind generally finds as a stressful activity — and places the “correct” choice neatly in front of you.
This technique is extremely powerful when used by the media or public figures.
Andrew Yang, a democratic presidential candidate for 2020, is running on a promise of implementing a wealth redistribution plan known widely as “universal basic income”. Under his plan, taxes would be used to collect funds that would pay for each American citizen to receive $1000 per month, for free.
On his official website, he features an FAQ section, one of the most relevant questions being, “I’ve never heard of universal basic income. Where did it come from? Who supports it?”
The answer is a great one from a psychological point of view. He opens with:
The idea of guaranteeing every citizen an income from the government is an old one, first recorded during the Renaissance. In America, it was picked up by founding father Thomas Paine, who referred to the payments as a “natural inheritance.”
Take a look at the words I put in bold. They try to impress on the reader that this concept which is undoubtedly revolutionary and new, is in fact rooted in old, accepted ideas.
The idea is an “old one”, it was picked up by “founding father” Thomas Paine, and it was called a “natural” inheritance.
Well then, it might as well already have been done!
He goes on to give a whole slew of examples of famous and (hopefully) trusted people who also agreed with the basic idea.
UBI and similar cash programs began picking up steam in the mid 20th century during the industrial revolution as early as 1918.
In the 1960s, Martin Luther King Jr. gave his support, alongside over 1,000 economists from over 125 universities who signed a letter to President Nixon requesting income guarantees.
The idea of a guaranteed income floor was pushed into a bill under President Nixon in 1970 where it passed the United States House of Representatives. It died in the Senate because Democrats sought a higher guaranteed income.
Today the idea has gained support from Mark Zuckerberg, Robert Reich, Elon Musk, Bill Gross, Richard Branson, Ta-Nehisi Coates, Noam Chomsky, the conservative Cato Institute, and many others.
Universal Basic Income is not new — it is an old idea whose time has come.
Obviously there is a lot of effort put in to cite authority figures here, and show approval from multiple sources, but there also continues to be this idea that Universal Basic Income is already accepted.
And if its already accepted, you should accept it too.
Same deal with the legalization of marijuana in the U.S.
It isn’t legal in all 50 states yet — and on the federal level is still fully criminalized — but that won’t be the case for too much longer.
Even the reddest of red states aren’t pushing back too hard on the movement these days.
A major contributor towards this acceptance of a traditionally feared and loathed substance was the spreading of the word that marijuana is already accepted and already used by large swathes of the population.
Colorado was the first state in the union to legalize the drug for recreational purposes, but the advance did not just come out of the blue. It took years of state legalization of medical marijuana before such an option could even be considered.
With California legalizing medical marijuana all the way back in 1996, it started a trend which other states began to follow. But it took 16 years and 19 states making the drug legal for medical purposes before Colorado pulled the trigger on recreational legalization.
The reason it took so long, and the reason that medical use had to be approached before recreational, was that the advocates of the legalization movement needed to push forth some kind of proof that marijuana was not as dangerous as previous propaganda had labelled it. In other words, paradoxically, they had to submit documented evidence that something which was illegal was also being used safely in a widespread way.
The solution was medical marijuana—an effective compromise to placate those who still believed that recreational use would lead to the collapse of modern civilization, but also a way to prove those people wrong by building up a track record of safe and effective use.
After Colorado, each state that legalized afterwards became easier than the last, as they had more evidence to draw on that legalization was an “accomplished fact”. It pushed opponents into a defeatist mindset and left the anti-legalization crowd to move on with other, more winnable causes.
Similar arguments are being made with regards to certain socialist programs like those that are seen in the Scandinavian countries, such as prison reform.
The same goes for arguments made from the American right against socialism.
By showing that a certain idea is already an accomplished fact, you implant the truth of that idea in the mind of your audience, thereby getting their agreement.
People, by their biological nature, do not want to fight against ideas which are already accepted, or events which are already in motion. In humanity’s formative years, natural selection would have dictated that those who were psychologically predisposed to such contrarian inclinations were removed from the gene pool, as they would be ostracized from the tribe or even labelled as an enemy. Therefore, natural revolutionaries are hard to find, and programming the masses based on accomplished fact becomes an effective method.
So the next time you need to convince some audience of a particular angle, all you have to do is remind them: this is already true. This is how it is now. It been this way for a while, and its working out just fine.
Join the conversation over at our subreddit, r/societalengineering. We feature only the best content on social influence, curated specifically for those looking to keep up with the best and latest techniques.
Check out my personal development book, Ideal Attainment: How to Reprogram the Mind and Undo Your Faulty Conditioning. This book contains the basic laws of the mind on which all societal engineering is based, and outlines exactly how to apply those laws to attain any goal.
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