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. . . if you tell somebody to do something, nine times out of ten he will do it.
Will Cuppy, The Decline and Fall of Practically Everybody

A favorite Social Engineering tactic of Parker Lewis Ferris Bueller and MacGyver type characters is to get what you need done (or just confuse the hell out of people) by shouting that it's an emergency and enlisting them in your Stone Soup or Fence Painting project. In some series, all you need to do is look like you're in charge and know what you're doing.

Commonly used to criticize modern culture as overly sheeplike, and/or show the main character as cool, intelligent, and rebellious. The idea is, if you push the Authority Button on the drones, they'll do whatever you tell them to, no matter how absurd.

See also Refuge In Audacity. It's For A Book is often a subtrope of this. Often Truth In Television.


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