Another “quick takes” on items where there is too little to say to make a complete article, but is still important enough to comment on.
The focus this time: What the Progressive Left wants: YOU.
The Progressive Left are on the verge of winning total power and are letting their mask not only slip, but be thrown to the floor. Charles Krauthammer notes the increasing honesty the Left have with their totalitarianism.
“Six million Californians joined Eich in the crime of “privileging” traditional marriage. So did Barack Obama. In that same year, he declared that his Christian beliefs made him oppose gay marriage.
“Yet under the new dispensation, this is outright bigotry. By that logic, the man whom the Left so ecstatically carried to the White House in 2008 was equally a bigot.
“The whole thing is so stupid as to be unworthy of exegesis. There is no logic. What’s at play is sheer ideological prejudice — and the enforcement of the new totalitarian norm that declares, unilaterally, certain issues to be closed.”
It has never been so clear that “tolerance” was just an excuse to normalize behavior and beliefs that were anathema to society. Now that they have normalized their favored behaviors and beliefs, they will become paragons of intolerance in order to deny anyone else from using the weasel methods that they used to gain power.
Of course, convincing people to think the way the Progressive Left wants them to think isn’t quite that easy, and sometimes it is necessary to turn the public at large into one huge group of victims suffering from Stockholm Syndrome:
“So is it possible something even bigger is in the making? Other nations in history have seen overnight ‘transformations’ in character. Why not us? In fact, can we be transformed en masse so that we all conform to more ‘beneficial’ ways of living our lives, ways that are in accordance with those who dub themselves ‘choice architects?’
“Behavior modification has in fact gone mainstream, even though its tactics often seem a well-kept secret. Last year, the White House launched a ‘behavioral insights team’ assigned with the task of “improving policies” through insights into human behavior. These insights into our behavior, please note, are not for us to understand for our own benefit, but for the government to use for us, as it sees fit.”
There are six major conditions that create an environment conducive to “coercive persuasion”:
- Keep the person unaware that there is an agenda to control or change the person and their thoughts
- Control time and physical environment
- Create a sense of powerlessness, fear, and dependency
- Suppress old behavior and attitudes
- Instill new behavior and attitudes
- Put forth a closed system of logic.
“The atmosphere of coercion is reinforced by peer-modeled behavior. Basically, this means that in a room full of people who whisper, you will likely whisper too. Or if you are exposed to a slogan often enough, you will repeat it, even if you don’t understand what it means.”
The shift in attitude on same-sex marriage is one such example of “coercive persuasion”:
“As people become increasingly fearful of expressing a heretofore innocuous understanding of marriage as a man-woman institution, they silence themselves and thereby fuel the opposing agenda. The threat of isolation – labeling, shunning, and firings – is a powerful motivator because human survival is tied to it.”
To paraphrase Grand Moff Tarkin, “fear will keep them in line.”
The best way, of course, to control what people think is to deny them any alternate viewpoint, which includes any voice from the past that is contrary to the proffered Progressive truth. Maoist China gives the perfect examples:
“The party, starting in the early Maoist era, replaced what are now called ‘traditional’ Chinese characters for a set of ‘simplified’ ones, thereby making a wholesale change of the script. The new set of characters may be easier to write, but the forced adoption meant that young Chinese in the Mainland can no longer read classic works in their own language unless they have been transcribed into the new characters.”
The only truth that will be allowed is their truth…
TTFN.
