

Threats work well for scams. People who couldn’t be bothered to move by promises of something new and better can be motivated by fear of losing what they already have.
It’s really unfortunate psychology is looked down upon and psychologists are viewed as some “soft” profession. Zuck is a psychology major. It’s been 2 decades, most of the radical changes in which were not radical in anything other than approach to human psychology.
BTW, I’ve learned recently that in their few initial years Khmer Rouge were not known as communist organization to even many of their members. Just an “organization”. Their rhetoric was agrarian (of course peasants are hard-working virtuous people, and from peasantry working the earth comes all the wisdom, and those corrupt and immoral people in the cities should be made work to eat), Buddhist (of course the monk-feudal system of obedience, work and ascese is the virtuous way to live, though of course we are having a rebirth now so we are even wiser), monarchist (they referred to Sihanouk’s authority almost to the end), anti-Vietnamese (that’s like Jewish for German Nazis, Vietnamese are the evil). And after them taking power for some time they still didn’t communicate anything communist. They didn’t even introduce their leadership. Nobody knew who makes the decisions in that “organization” or how it was structured. It didn’t have a face. They only officially made themselves visible as Democratic Kampuchea with communism and actual leaders when the Chinese pressured them. They didn’t need to, because they were obeyed via threat (and lots of fulfillment) of violence anyway.
This is important in the sense that when you have the power, you don’t need to officially tell the people over which you have it that you rule them.
So - in these 2 decades it has also came into fashion to deliberately stubbornly ignore the fact that psychology works over masses. And everybody acts as if when there’s no technical means to make people do something, then it’s not likely or possible.
Do you really believe that?
Much of those countries’ population are peasants.
You in USA don’t quite understand what a peasant is. It’s not a farmer. It’s not a hillbilly. It’s not an uneducated worker class member. It’s not a shantytown inhabitant.
A peasant doesn’t know any kind of work other than physical work, everything else they consider dishonest. A peasant only believes in blood, soil and fortunetellers. They really do, take a peasant from any culture across the world and they’ll be deeply racist (believe that human’s personality is defined by genes) and deeply superstitious (believe in magic and every “sign” out there, believe that “heart” and emotion affect more in life than your actions). A peasant’s idea of morality is that people with pitchforks and torches can’t be wrong, and if they lynch someone, even their family member, then they were right. A peasant’s idea is that poor people are virtuous and rich people (everyone who’s not poor) are always worse. A peasant considers lying and stealing and scamming from “rich” people cunning and a virtue.
It’s a human animal, with their lifestyle very slowly adjusted by evolution for a bunch of such people coexisting without any legal or moral authority in one place for many years.
They are by default, naturally anti-vaxxers. Their “natural” existence is virtuous and vaxxines are poison.
They are by default, naturally anti-LGBTQ, if something is less than 30 percent of the population, then it either hides or is killed with fire.
Turning a peasant into a human to which you can turn your back is a hard problem of education, in USSR and in China and in many other countries they haven’t fully succeeded with that! There are still plenty of masquerading peasants among their population.
Thank you for your attention to my opinion. My dad was such a person (maybe not the worst kind, but a carrier of such worldview, and I have met others).