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Edited on Sat Jun-14-08 06:41 AM by tom_paine
As far as I can tell, logic and rationality gets it's ass kicked by Bushie Propaganda almost every single time.
Mind you, I am not advocating we become like them, but we sure do need to find some grit and backbone to hit back, rhetorically-speaking. It's not the way I'd have it, if I had the choice of an ideal world, but it's what IS.
Be above the idiots... and you will sway people.
Again, a lovely sentiment I wish were true. But the entire edifice of advertising, marketing, psychology, and PR proves to the tenth decimal place it simply is not so. That is why propaganda works, and it almost always works. Even when it defeated it is usually because it "went to the well once too often" and failed to adapt/change/camoflauge itself frequently enough, or because reality so trumpted the propaganda on a personal level that people could no longer buy it.
That's one of the main reasons were are so swiftly heading for a New Dark Age, why the Enlightenment is over. The Enlightenment, itself the product of a reaction 1000 years of brutal Rule by The Evil Using Idiots Like Mules, was based on something that at bottom was untrue, though, like your sentiments, I wish it was so. That is that human beings are rational creatures. We're not. Not even close. You, me, and everyone, are at bottom an infantile bundle of emotions with a thin coating of reason plastered above it.
Read the research, it's all around, from the Milgrim Experiments to the massive body of data our many advertising institutions have compiled using psychological scientific methods and everything in between. The data is overwhelming.
The Enlightment was correct in that it is certainly something we should strive for, to reduce the role of our reptile brain and increase the role of the neocortex; to move away from the animal evolutionary imperatives that saved our species when we were in our infancy and are turning out to being pure poison in a modern technical society. On example of many of these evolutionary adaptions that our now maladaptaions: The insatiable desire to procreate, hard-wired into us, is now flooding the world with people, exceeding the Earth's carrying capacity and setting us up for overshoot and die-off.
That's just one example. There are others. many others.
To circle back to the original point of this post, I am not saying we should become Evil Bushies, lying and propagandzing 100% of the time, or even 10% of the time. But we MUST recognize what we face if we are ever to figure out a way to counter the Bushies and their ilk without becoming them.
Like an alcoholic who keeps doing the same behaviors over and over with the same tragic results, we will NEVER fix the problem unless we recognize we have a problem and what the problem is.
And one of them is the belief that sweet reason alone defeats well-constructed propaganda that has the vehicles to deliver it en masse. It doesn't, and outside of the all-too-brief Enlightenment, I challenge you to find examples where sweet reason alone prevailed. During the Enlightenment too, now that I consider history more carefully.
I am happy to give you two of many examples where it didn't: Ghandhi and MLK. Both great men, both with truth and reason 100% on their side (and that almost never hapens, this not being a black and white world but one of shades of grey), and yet, both needed to come up with a primary strategy that eschewed reason: the strategy of nonviolent resistance, which was a primarily emotional strategy of exposing the cruelty of the oppressors by going limp and letting the oppressors expose themselves as bullies and unlovable people, as it were, thus jolting everyone else awake.
Ghandhi and King were also perfect examples, now that I consider it, of finding ways to defeat propaganda and massive lies without becoming like those propagandists and liars.
I don't know what the solution is today: I doubt that MLK/Ghandhi strategies would work anymore. The Bushies have long ago gamed how to blunt such a strategy, so we need a new one, one that does not resort to violence (no one wants that), but a new counter nonetheless. Hopefully someone or many someones are working on it right now, though I have a hard time believeing it.
Oh, and just one more thing...smugness won't convince people, but perhaps you were just being glib and threw that in without really considering it.
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