I remember watching a movie (Darius help me here to remember the name) about a TV presenter that because of stress and personal problems became psychological unstable so during a live broadcast he started ranting that “I cannot take it anymore”. The TV executives wanted to fire the guy in beginning, but the viewers saw the sincerity in the guys screaming and decided to join in so they started to scream out as well to let off their despair and personal problems. The “tv star” now had his own fan base.
Acknowledging that the TV executives decided to promote him and give him his own show where he could talk about the daily problems and the high point of the show would be where he screamed that he could not take it any more. Of course this made the guy disillusioned even more and he started making more grandiose plans. I do not remember the ending of the movie since it was very long time ago I saw it but I remember that it did not have a happy ending, since the guy did not have any plans and was just psychologically ill.
Populism is not a new phenomena, it works since it plays to basic cores of us all. When Mr Ahmaghinejad sits in the TV station and looks us in the eyes and tells us what a brave and knowledgeable people we all are, how much we have suffered, and that our enemies are now attacking us like never before. How he has been a brave and fought them, how he has been courageous in front of the evil from the inside and from the outside, well it makes it hard to dislike him. Even though you know the truth, you hear the sincerity in his voice and you feel that he is for real and you start to question yourself. Because how can it be that Mr Ahmadinejad speaks the truth and be wrong at the same time? He speaks truth so he must be right, and if he is right then the other guys are wrong.
I would start by saying that because someone seems to tell the truth and is not hesitating does not mean that he is telling the truth. Two examples are Hitler and Saddam. Both of them were damn sure that they were not guilty all the way to their death. Saddam was even more resolute and courageous when he was hanged than ever , but does this mean he was right or truthful? Of course not. He started 2 wars, he killed his own people.
Secondly, truth is not an absolute, you can cover the same story from different angles and so focus on different things in the story so that the audience “understand” it in different ways. For example when Mr Ahmaghinejad pulls out his Excel sheets and starts pinpointing on them, he is not there to show you the “absolute truth”, he is there to show you his view of the truth.
Mark Twain said, there are lies, there are damned lies and there is statistics. It is said so because statistics if used wrongly could show whatever you want it to show. For an uneducated person it could look perfectly ok, but when Ahmaghinejad says that Iran has reduced its almost unemployment last year although almost all other countries have increased theirs sounds like one of those statistics Mark Twain talked about. To decrease your unemployment rate during a recession is unheard of, it could only be the case if the unemployment rate is already very big or if the statistics data is not correct.
But then again Mr Ahmaghinejad does not say those things to me or educated people, he tells it to the uneducated mass. The same mass that goes out and scream “I can not take it anymore”. Hopefully the “TV executives” in Iran stop this crazy guy before the unhappy ending.
