Chris Dillow’s got a post up about how when the ruling class say something, people sometimes assume the opposite. He gives examples:
1. Gordon Brown says there’s little interest in a petition calling for an early election, leading thousands of people to sign the petition they had previously ignored.
2. When Schillings try to stop Craig Murray making allegations against Alisher Usmanov, hundreds of bloggers and MEP Tom Wise refer to those allegations, giving them far more publicity than they’d have got if Schillings had done nothing.
3. After the FSA, Chancellor and British Bankers Association say Northern Rock is solvent, depositers rush to withdraw their money from the bank.
These are examples of statements by the ruling class – politicians, lawyers, bosses – being wholly counter-productive, leading to events that would probably not have happened had they stayed quiet.
Here’s some more examples:
4. Countries with “Democratic” in their name invariably are not.
5. Government scandals. When the Prime Minister says that a minister has his full support, you know he will soon be sacked or resign.
There appears to be a common mechanism for many of these. It starts with a widespread perception that something (call it X) is false. The authorities want it to be believed that X is true, so they say “X is true”. But the perception that X is false existed for a reason; quite likely because X was in fact false. So one would expect many cases where someone saying “X is true” ought to make one think that maybe it isn’t.
