Macchiavelli’s The Prince is a handbook on how to conquer and rule a land. Macchiavelli prescribes chapters on how to be in power and stay in power through tools of force and persuasion. How does one lead and persuade people to fear and to follow?
“Providing people with accurate information doesn’t seem to help; they simply discount it. Appealing to their emotions may work better, but doing so is obviously antithetical to the goal of promoting sound science” (Kolbert). This NY Times article uses information from a science experiment to explain why people can’t think straight. Even after giving people proven facts, it is hard to persuade them to change their mind or convince them of the absolute truth. This relates to tools of persuasion, or furthermore, and explanation of why people think the way they do or continue to have their beliefs even after shows evidence. So doing so, in current politics, we play towards people’s emotions more rather than the truth.
Performance Studies scholar Richard Schechner discusses the terms make believe versus make belief, which relates also to how we stage ideology and community. Make believe is something that is staged to be false, that we can clearly decipher as fictitious. Make belief is a world or character that has been fabricated and appears to be true and genuine to the audience, and often times can’t be distinguished as fake. This make belief is a tool of persuasion that is very familiar when we think of the US president Donald Trump.