What could go wrong? A crowded staircase and slogans, plus W.J. Clinton's graveyard quote

I like Gerald Ashley. He tweeted this one:

Please, when using the stairs

Stay to the right when going up
stay to the left when going down.

This will keep people from
running into each other.

What could go wrong?

Assuming that you are not looking for an error, the middle of this goes right by. If you look closer it takes two or three seconds to decode the staircase image. You need to switch modes and imagine walking the stairs both ways to see what these "right-up"/"left-down" directions generate.

You started out reading. Not visualizing. The pairing of "stay to the right" with "stay to the left" gets read and it overwhelms the language processor.

That has to work, right? It's simple. Why would you think ???

Why think at all? And political slogans exploit the same patterns.

Once you see the staircase words as a puzzle, you look for the flaw. What makes this example stand out is the efficiency of its verbal trick. This is also one of the rarities where you need to go over from language to visualization processing to catch the error.

Meta Land

You need to issue a "meta" instruction to your brain, first, to start your progress. You tell yourself to change your mode of thought. Once that happens for this example, your work to reach a correction comes more or less naturally. You think of walking up on the right and down on the left. You walk right into yourself.

Propaganda slogans are similar but with one difference. These slogans are selected to minimize error detection. They use positive words. They imply strength and virtue. They aim by simplicity at generating belief.

Like the ads during the Super Bowl, they do appeals that have nothing to do with logic. They offer attractiveness, not evidence. If there is one main point of political slogans it is that they aim to keep you from doing your own thinking.

Politics

Consider the following list of political slogans. One way and another all of them became famous because they worked:

"Moral Majority"

"Better Dead Than Red !"

"Deeds Not Words"

"Support the Troops"

"Ein Volk, ein Reich, ein Führer" (or similarly: "One Direction")

"Führer befiehl, wir folgen dir" (The Leader commands, we follow.)

"Fifty-Four Forty or Fight"

"War on Marriage" (equally, "War on Christmas")

"God made Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve"

"Welfare Dependency"

"Vaccines Cause Autism"

"No Surrender!"

The simplicity impresses. Their imagery touches common pattern recognition processes. They moved their propaganda targets toward acts of belief.

And belief is more powerful than logic.

When Occupy got rolling in New York City, the very first "demand" clarified a change-yourself-first basis for democracy:

"We Are Our Own Leaders"

OMG... people thinking for themselves ! It's pretty darn hard to throw off all the slogans. At the edge of impossible?

Now, back to that staircase............