It might have been psyops, but, all those years ago, who could have known, for sure? ‘Psyops’ wasn’t, exactly, a household word.
But, in the news, lately, I’ve been hearing about it, and I’ve been reading about it, occasionally, in adventure novels.
In dictionaries, ‘psyops,’ or ‘psychological operations,’ can mean conveying selected information — or, words, in other words — “to audiences to influence their emotions.”
Since, all during my PR career, influencing emotions was a measure of success, my colleagues and I could have been doing a little psyops every now and then.
Around the 1990s might have been, for me, an early foray into it, even if it hadn’t dawned on me that that’s what I might have been doing.
I had banished the word ‘fees’ from my conversations with reporters, when they were asking about financial industry fees, an issue that was stirring controversy.
Instead of saying ‘fees,’ I talked about financial firms ‘pricing’ products and services, just as most other businesses had been doing — establishing prices for their goods and services — probably since the dawn of capitalism.
Wondering, just recently, in the Daily Post, if the will of the people means all that much, these days, I mentioned taxpayers’ tax dollars, perhaps, being spent willy-nilly, on government buildings, and offices, and such.
‘Willy-nilly’ came to me, from somewhere, maybe because when something’s being planned, whether it’s desired or not — like spending tax dollars, in certain ways? – might that be perceived as spending tax money on certain things… willy-nilly?
And, in another article, with ‘liberty’ linked to the words ‘creeping up’— getting folks to, maybe, imagine their nation’s liberty being under duress, with someone, or something, creeping up on — could that, too, have been a little psyops, in the works?
I now realize I’ve maybe been using other words, in a psyops sort of way, like when I’ve written about lawmakers’ cantankerous behavior, and when I recounted, around this time, a year ago, a nightmare featuring the snake-haired Medusa, from Greek mythology…
… and a high-profile family that had shifted somewhat from their family business, on over to politics.
Writing, a while back, about a PR crisis in heaven, God’s crisis PR manager was telling his boss about a rather fiendish individual in the American government, who, at that time, was claiming to have America’s evangelicals in his pocket.
Several years ago, in a Nevada business publication, I discussed disruptive problems plaguing disruptive businesses, with short-term rental firms being mentioned in the article.
So… thinking, lately, about words, like ‘Willy-nilly,’ and ‘fiendish,’ and ‘creeping up on liberty,’ and the evil ‘Medusa,’ and linking disruptive problems with disruptive businesses… is it psyops, I’ve been getting into… sort of?
Harvey Radin is former senior vice president in charge of corporate communications and media relations, Bank of America Western Region. He makes his home in Redwood City, CA.