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Comment by aaron695 | Hacker News Reader

What about health fads.

Eating all meat is great for you. You'll feel better. They seem pretty successful.

Church and religion, I would say mostly works on positivity.

The argument would be these campaigns degrade to negativity. This certainly seems like it's playing out. Movement X goes more extreme. The internal members chose negativity over positivity.

The stereotype of the Chinese is they will work towards a common goal but leave a traffic accident victim on the street. Not sure how true that is. And not sure what the actual goal is.

Very good question.

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> Church and religion, I would say mostly works on positivity.

Depends on the religion, I guess. I was raised Catholic, and a lot of it was about making people fell guilty about their sins and telling them if they keep doing bad things and don't repent, they'll spend an eternity in hell.

Not exactly positive, IMO. Sure, there was always mention of how if you're a good, Christ-believing person, you'll get eternal rewards, but that always felt like a relative afterthought to me.

> The stereotype of the Chinese is they will work towards a common goal but leave a traffic accident victim on the street.

It's funny that you mention that; just today a friend in San Diego saw a car accident out his window (driver was unconscious after crashing into a parked car). He ran downstairs to see if the guy needed help, and saw four people standing there, gawking, taking pictures and video. He asked if anyone had called 911, and no one had.

I guess that's not exactly the same as ignoring an accident victim, but it's just as bad, if not worse.

Yes, my association with the catholic church ist also mostly about guilt and fear. Scaring people to make them do the right thing.

In general the church was the dark symbol of fear. Have you ever been to the vatican? The same in big. Everything there is big, with the intention of making you small and fear them. At least that was my impression. Other people I was with had different experience

The catholic religion in itself is also a lot about loving and doing the right thing out of love and wanting to help for the sake of it. But yes, for me it mostly comes down to doing good things out of the fear of bad things happening to you.

"and saw four people standing there, gawking, taking pictures and video. He asked if anyone had called 911, and no one had."

And wow, I have to say I cannot imagine this happening here in germany. Except maybe for some very dark areas on a bad time of the day.

I sadly can very much imagine this happening here in Germany... Almost exactly the same story happened to me too -- and it was not a "very dark area on a bad time of the day", it was one of the nicest cities around here at lunchtime. I assume it can happen everywhere, it is even more likely the more people are around: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bystander_effect

> Have you ever been to the vatican? The same in big. Everything there is big, with the intention of making you small and fear them.

Yup. Religious architecture is generally designed to make humans feel insignificant and powerless. Which is true, in the universal scheme of things, if you think about it. But religions use this as a carefully curated tool of propaganda, manipulation, and control.

I think these Catholic ads are a positive way to try and get people to come back to the Catholic church, I'm sure you can find negative ads though.

https://www.catholicscomehome.org/our-evangomercials/

There's a lot of complexity going on

Getting them to start doing something.

To keep them doing something.

Competing with alternative ideas as they run negative campaigns.

I totally think guilt works, I just can't workout how well, I do know it can spark a organised backlash, guilt in the church probably strengthens Atheism but might also strengthen current members.

> saw four people standing there, gawking, taking pictures and video.

Like the Chinese examples I'm always cautious how to interpret these stories/footage. Rough rule in life, people are good as long as you make it easy for them to be good.

I'm not sure panicked propaganda that's there to plead with lapsed Catholics to return to the fold is particularly representative of doctrine. It's advertising, so by its very nature is designed to be manipulative.

And using guilt to keep people in a belief system is just psychological manipulation. It doesn't matter if it works; it's disgusting and dishonest, the opposite of what these people laughably claim to believe in.

> people are good as long as you make it easy for them to be good.

It's not all that hard to press four buttons on a phone, wait a few seconds, and say some simple words about what happened and where. But no, that would distract from making a "cool" crash video to share on Instagram.

I get that my story is a third-hand story to you, and you have no idea who I am, so you have no idea if I'm relating it faithfully (or if I even know enough to relate it faithfully). But I know who I am, and I know the person who told me this story (and, after calling 911, took and sent a photo of the useless gawkers), and it greatly troubles me.

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