Simply being exposed to the claim of low risk/high success can influence you to buy a poo-filled franchise

Communications designed to persuade mislead and damage you using untruths and half-truths is called propaganda.

Social psychologists define something called priming: unconscious memories influence your behavior. Sometimes fo a very long time. Through repetition (a form of brainwashing).

Franchising trade magazines and trade shows influences potential franchisees to see franchising (in relation to independent business) as lower risk and higher success. Banks write their booklets in a very pro-franchise manner. McDonald’s success and its use as a bell weather (“the McDonald’s of the poo-collection industry”) primes candidates to attribute success where none exists.

Neither of these “truths” is true but that’s irrelevant. By the time the candidate franchisee is looking the low risk/high success bias is part of their DNA. They’ve created a stereotype.

As the scientifically-based research indicates, just looking at words associated with either youth or old age influence how you behave.

What kind of chance do you think you have at a trade show or a franchisor’s open house when every tiny detail is controlled for a positive sales effort? No one’s brain is very good at defending against these extremely powerful persuasion trick and traps. The technology of franchising is the science of neutralizing your defenses and then when the financial loss happens, re-assigning blame from these techniques to you (ie. On Cooling the Mark Out).

—BBC Replicates Bargh’s Famous Priming Study at The Situationist, John Bargh

The real violence exerted by propaganda, Thomas Merton

Quote:

The real violence exerted by propaganda is this: by means of apparent truth and apparent reason, it induces us to surrender our freedom and self-possession. It predetermines us to certain conclusions, and does so in such a way that we imagine that we are fully free in reaching them by our own judgment and our own thought. Propaganda makes up our mind for us, but in such a way that it leaves us the sense of pride and satisfaction of men who have made up their own minds. And, in the last analysis, propaganda achieves this effect because we want it to.

This is one of the few real pleasures left to modern man: this illusion that he is thinking for himself when, in fact, someone else is doing his thinking for him.

And this someone else is not a personal authority, the great mind of a genial thinker, it is the mass mind, the general “they,” the anonymous whole. One is left, therefore, not only with the sense that one has thought things out for himself, but that he has also reached the correct answer without difficulty – the answer which is shown to be correct because it is the answer of everybody. Since it is at once my answer and the answer of everybody, how should I resist it?

— Thomas Merton 1915 -1968

The Horatio Alger books are wonderful propaganda for the capitalist system.

Northrop Frye saw through hype.

From The Developing Imagination [this post]:

It is of course true that a great deal of trash which passes as literature, or at least as entertaining reading, also articulates social myths with great clarity. I read many of the novels of Horatio Alger at an early age, and as I have a good verbal memory, a journey round my skull would unearth a great many pages of some of the most pedestrian prose on record.

I wish very much that a surgical operation could remove it and substitute something better, but still Alger probably did me no permanent damage, as I was never inspired to adopt the virtues of his heroes, and this leads me to hope that the children of today may emerge similarly unscathed from their similar experiences.

[An Educated Imagination]

You know, being a franchisee invokes a mental stupor

But you can awaken from this corrosive form of hypnosis.

Your job is to try to trust again. Ask your spouse and children to unhook you from the propaganda intravenous.

Start with trusting yourself.

— [This Ain’t Happiness]

Don’t think, please.

It only makes it tougher.

For both of us.

[Propaganda Times]

Franchising boasts the truthfulness of its least sincere bottom-feeder

Success propaganda this time quoted on Blue MauMau from an email from BeTheBoss.com:

Fact

Franchises have over a 90% success rate, compared to about a 15% success rate for those individuals starting their own business from scratch.

A bald-faced lie.

If I had a Rocket Launcher, Bruce Cockburn at Live 8 concert, introduced by Dan Aykroyd in, Barrie, Canada, 2005

Here comes the helicopter — second time today
Everybody scatters and hopes it goes away
How many kids they’ve murdered only God can say
If I had a rocket launcher(3x)… I’d make somebody pay

I don’t believe in guarded borders and I don’t believe in hate
I don’t believe in generals or their stinking torture states
And when I talk with the survivors of things too sickening to relate
If I had a rocket launcher(3x)…I would retaliate

On the Rio Lacantun, one hundred thousand wait
To fall down from starvation — or some less humane fate
Cry for Guatemala, with a corpse in every gate
If I had a rocket launcher(3x)…I would not hesitate

I want to raise every voice — at least I’ve got to try
Every time I think about it water rises to my eyes.
Situation desperate, echoes of the victims cry
If I had a rocket launcher(3x)…Some son of a bitch would die

Rank beliefs not according to their plausibility but by the harm they may cause.

The greatest misrepresentation is: “franchises are less risky than independent businesses”.

1. It is Große Lüge
2. The Big Lie
3. A propaganda technique.

Much of Nassim Nicholas Taleb‘s work is about risk.

• Mine too.

Humans are extremely limited in their ability to determine financial risk accurately.

It is now the scientific consensus that our risk-avoidance mechanism is not mediated by the cognitive modules of our brain, but rather by the emotional ones. This may have made us fit for the Pleistocene era.

Our risk machinery is designed to run away from tigers; it is not designed for the information-laden modern world.

Mom-and-pops who are 1st and only “one-off” small business owners face an impossible task in assessing franchise risks.

The Franchisees are our Misfortune

Der Stürmer was a German weekly newspaper from 1923 to 45.

It published some of the most vicious anti-Semitic propaganda in the history of the world. Its publisher Julius Streicher was executed for his crimes.

NOTE: At he bottom of its front page (every front page) was a simple saying:

• Die Juden sind unser Unglück!, The Jews are Our Misfortune.

A simple statement repeated often enough becomes accepted.

Franchisees get blamed for their fate, even though 95% of their business model is created by others. Others want to deflect true ownership of systemic failures; they operate on a motto of:

• Die Franchisenehmer sind unser Unglück!, The Franchisees are our misfortune.

Our Industry: Love it or leave it

Different Gods have different values; or so some people think.

Atheists have a harder time but so do non-Christians. Visible minorities, that much more.

Religious believers tend to associate their religion closely with morality. Some go so far as to think that the two are inseparable — that without their religion, or religion generally, or at least some sort of theism, morality and moral behavior are impossible. Depending on their attitude, this can lead people to insist that unless a person is a member of their religion, or is a member of some religion, or is at least a theist, then they cannot be moral and if they are given any power then they will end up promoting immorality.

Without God, All Things are Permitted, Godless Atheists Promote a Valueless, Immoral World without Order or Structure, Austin Cline

Franchising, race and religion are often linked

It is much easier to degrade someone who is different from you.

Franchisees sense this degradation because class are not so vehemently denied in their country of origin.

Impertinent franchisees must learn to keep in their rightful place.

America as a Christian Nation, America as a White Nation, Racism & White Supremacy in American Christianity, Austin Cline