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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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Examples

    Comics 

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    Literature 

    Live Action TV 

    Opera 

    Video Games 

    Web Comics 

    Web Original 

    Western Animation 

    Real Life