You Do Not Need to Control Everything a Population Thinks. It May Be Enough to Control What It Can Keep Thinking About

When Words Begin to Trap Us

Imagine an election in which, for weeks, almost every public conversation revolves around threat.

Threat to jobs. To family. To security. To freedom. To the future.

Some of the news may be true. Other reports may be partially true. Some may be misleading or false. But even before discussing the truthfulness of each sentence, there is another question:

What happens to other spaces of representation while certain themes are continuously called upon to participate?

Perhaps influencing a population does not require controlling everything it thinks. It may be enough to gain an advantage over what it will continue thinking about tomorrow.

Political dispute also takes place over the perception that never arrived.

And our central question becomes:

To influence someone, is it necessary to control the truth, or is it enough to know the paths that lead to their feelings?

Propaganda does not need to invent the feeling

In the previous texts, we made an important distinction:

feeling is an event, not a verdict.

A person can experience genuine fear in response to a mistaken interpretation. They can experience genuine belonging within a false narrative. They can feel real relief when they find an explanation that reduces uncertainty.

Political communication can operate precisely within this interval.

It does not need to create fear, anger, hope, pride, or resentment from nothing. It can find feelings that are already present and offer words, images, groups, or characters capable of functioning as addresses for them.

A circuit then emerges:

word -> familiar feeling -> interpretation -> confirmation of belief

McLoughlin and colleagues showed in 2024 that misinformation content was more likely to evoke moral outrage and that this outrage was associated with greater sharing. The study does not show that outrage is false, nor that all outrage produces misinformation. It shows that certain types of content can exploit a feeling with a particularly strong capacity for circulation.

Efficient propaganda may not need to manufacture a feeling. It can learn where that feeling already exists and offer a path through which it can return.

The phenomenological anchor of abstraction enters politics

We have called the phenomenological anchor of abstraction the capacity of a representation to move far away from the reality of its referent without losing contact with movements that the Body-Territory recognizes.

In fiction, a monster does not need to exist for fear to exist.

In politics, a narrative may also begin with real unemployment, violence, abandonment, insecurity, or loss and then add:

"You feel this because of them."

The experience may be real.

The feeling may be real.

The causal attribution still needs to be investigated.

A factual correction may reach the sentence without reaching the bodily world that the sentence was able to open.

Whoever sets the agenda enters the dispute with an advantage

Here we can make a stronger claim:

whoever succeeds in setting the agenda gains a competitive advantage.

It is not an absolute advantage, nor does it guarantee victory.

It is an advantage because it helps define part of the terrain on which everyone else will have to compete.

In 2026, Daniel Sandvej Eriksen, writing in the American Political Science Review, presented a model of "Issue Initiation" to describe how political parties can introduce attention to previously underexplored issues and attempt to elevate them within political and media agendas.

Political competition, therefore, does not take place only within a fixed list of issues.

Actors also compete over which issues will enter that list.

Whoever successfully introduces a theme can force opponents, journalists, and citizens to respond.

And responding also gives attention, even when the response is a denial or correction.

In the language of 5D Consciousness, we might say that whoever sets the agenda gains a pre-activation advantage.

When the opponent arrives, certain spaces are already in Movement.

Some words have already acquired Qualia.

Certain causal relationships have already become familiar.

The second actor does not begin from zero.

They begin by responding within a landscape partially organized by whoever arrived first.

This may be one of the least visible political advantages of agenda-setting:

You do not necessarily need to persuade first. You may only need to make everyone else think inside the question you managed to put into circulation.

If, for a week, one candidate succeeds in making everyone discuss security, even their opponents begin spending time explaining what they think about security.

Another candidate may have excellent proposals on education, the biome, health, or income distribution.

But now they must compete inside a space that someone else helped pre-activate.

You can also be massified by the perception that never came

We usually imagine massification as millions of people receiving the same message.

But we can also be massified through the repeated absence of other possibilities.

If a small set of issues receives continuous attention, other subjects must compete for the limited resources of the public sphere and of Body-Territories themselves.

Preventive health.

Sanitation.

Childhood.

Science.

Biomes.

Inequality.

Infrastructure.

These subjects may remain available somewhere.

But availability does not mean participation.

Lorenz-Spreen and colleagues reviewed 496 studies on digital media and democracy. Digital media were associated both with increased participation and, in several contexts, with polarization, populism, misinformation, and reduced trust. The effects vary according to political system, platform, and population.

We do not need to imagine a single central manipulator.

There is competition for attention.

And whoever succeeds in keeping an issue alive for longer may force everyone else to spend part of their own resources responding to the agenda that received priority.

In this sense, another form of massification becomes possible:

You can be massified not only by what you repeatedly perceive, but by the possibilities that stop receiving the conditions necessary to participate in your perception.

The conscious search space

Within the BrainLatam 5D Consciousness hypothesis, we can call the conscious search space the set of configurations that, at a given moment, have sufficient conditions to participate in perception, elaboration, and decision.

This is not everything a person knows.

Someone may know about many issues in an election and still make their decision primarily from the few that have been continuously pre-activated.

Some spaces are active or pre-activated.

Others remain available but fail to enter that Movement.

Our conceptual hypothesis would be:

repetition -> pre-activation -> recruitment -> Movement -> Qualia -> reduced participation of alternatives -> decision

We are not saying that a political campaign mechanically controls consciousness.

We are asking whether political competition can also be understood as competition over the momentary availability of the spaces capable of participating in a choice.

This distinction matters.

A person may possess a piece of information and, nevertheless, that information may not participate in the Movement at the moment of decision.

Knowing does not necessarily mean recruiting.

The group can keep speaking after the message ends

A preregistered EEG study published by Chen and colleagues in 2024 offers a small experimental approximation.

Participants evaluated the attractiveness of faces and then received evaluations attributed to members of groups. Later, even when social evaluation was no longer explicitly present, researchers observed changes in spontaneous neural representations associated with attractiveness.

The experiment concerned facial perception, not politics, and should not be used as a direct explanation of voting behavior.

But it allows us to preserve a question:

How much of a social relationship continues to participate in our perception after the group has left the room?

Perhaps some words carry not only meanings, but communities, expectations, and histories of belonging.

Why correcting information may not be enough

Correcting misinformation remains necessary.

The review by Ecker and colleagues shows that corrections can reduce false beliefs, but it also describes the continued influence effect: corrected information may continue to influence later inferences.

In our language, perhaps there is a difference between:

correcting the sentence

and

reopening the search space.

Someone may accept that a specific story was false and still remain within the causal architecture that made the story plausible:

"That story was false, but they would do something like that."

The proposition collapsed.

The Movement remained.

Factual debate is still indispensable, but perhaps it needs to be accompanied by new questions, experiences, and relationships capable of allowing other spaces to participate.

Neuromarketing is only part of the problem

Neuromarketing can use EEG, eye tracking, and other physiological measures to investigate attention, emotion, memory, and decision-making. Recent reviews show precisely this attempt to combine different measures to understand how stimuli acquire relevance during consumer decisions.

But what we are discussing here is broader.

It involves agenda-setting, framing, propaganda, social influence, repetition, and belonging.

The possible contribution of 5D Consciousness would be to change the experimental question.

Not only:

"Which message received the most attention?"

But:

"Which spaces did this message make more available, and which spaces stopped participating in the trajectory that followed?"

Freedom may depend on what is still able to participate

A democracy does not need to eliminate persuasion.

But freedom of choice may also depend on the diversity of spaces that are able to reach the moment of decision.

Whoever sets the agenda gains an advantage because they begin organizing that space before everyone else.

If their opponents spend an entire week denying their question, they may still be helping to keep that question at the center.

A mature democratic strategy, therefore, may require more than producing better answers.

It may require recovering the capacity to formulate other questions, other problems, and other possible futures.

It is not necessary to control everything a population thinks.

It may be enough to gain an advantage over the paths that will continue receiving Movement and Qualia while other paths stop arriving.

So when a message produces fear, anger, pride, or hope in us, perhaps we can add another question:

Which other spaces could participate in this decision if I did not have to respond exactly to the agenda that was handed to me?

Because sometimes the greatest political advantage is not convincing someone that your answer is correct.

It is managing, before anyone else, to decide which question everyone will spend their time trying to answer.

References

ERIKSEN, Daniel Sandvej. Initiate and Elevate! How Political Parties Can Set an Agenda. American Political Science Review, 2026.

MCLOUGHLIN, Killian L. et al. Misinformation exploits outrage to spread online. Science, 2024.

CHEN, Danni et al. Social conformity updates the neural representation of facial attractiveness. Communications Biology, 2024. Preregistered EEG study.

LORENZ-SPREEN, Philipp et al. A systematic review of worldwide causal and correlational evidence on digital media and democracy. Nature Human Behaviour, 2023.

ECKER, Ullrich K. H. et al. The psychological drivers of misinformation belief and its resistance to correction. Nature Reviews Psychology, 2022.

VALENZUELA, Sebastián; HALPERN, Daniel; ARANEDA, Felipe. A Downward Spiral? A Panel Study of Misinformation and Media Trust in Chile. The International Journal of Press/Politics, 2022.

GUPTA, R. et al. Neuro-insights: a systematic review of neuromarketing perspectives across consumer buying stages. Frontiers in Neuroergonomics, 2025.