Animal Farm Nostalgia Manipulation

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If one is to rise to power and manipulate the perceptions of society, they must take advantage of history, more specifically the past of the public. An example of nostalgia’s effectiveness is particularly when advertising to older generations, since the products advertised would remind the older generations of their younger, childhood days. In the NPR podcast The Good Old Days, during a discussion about nostalgia, Dr. Routledge of North Dakota State University uncovers a connection between the person and the product: “If you give people a list of products, things like movies or music or automobiles, people tend to have a preference for the products that were popular during their youth. And so people have this natural attraction to things from their past…. …show more content…

Dr. Routledge explains that the feeling of youth is connected to certain products, which inclines older consumers to purchase those products. Because of this tendency, the advertisements of may often point to the past in order to convince the consumer to buy that specific product. This manipulation of human emotion is used in a commercial sense in order to gain more revenue and economic profit, rather than the use of nostalgia for political purposes. An example of that use of nostalgia in politics is in Orwell’s Animal Farm, more specifically Napoleon’s exploitation of the animals’ fear of Jones in order to justify his tyrannical rulings and shortcomings. In the Animal Farm, Squealer is indicted as the head of propaganda and “warns” of Jones’ coming back while testifying that the pigs’ consumption of the apples and milk was

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