Mass Hypnosis

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Registered: 04-16-2003
Mass Hypnosis
10
Fri, 07-23-2004 - 5:42pm
I have often mussed that something has happened to American reason after 9/11. For those interested this is an article, well documented, that explans what is going on. Even the recent shift from "war president" to "peace president". BTW does anyone know the new name that has replaced Saddam?

HYPNOTIZING THE MASSES

By Russell M. Drake

Said by some to be more dangerous than Osama bin-Laden, he has been condemned as a "war maniac," called a "moron" by the Canadian prime minister’s chief spokeswoman, ridiculed as "The English Patient" for his struggles with language, and likened to Adolf Hitler.

Of all the labels hung on George W. Bush, the hardest to shake may be the comparison with Hitler.

Perhaps the clearest likeness between the two men lies in their use of emotionally induced hypnosis to plant in the mass consciousness an image of themselves as protectors of their subjects from threats to national survival both inside and outside the fatherland.

In a June, 2003 article written for The Nation about Bush’s "mastery of emotional language, especially negatively charged emotional language," clinical psychologist Reanna Brooks observed that "Bush creates and maintains negative frameworks in his listeners’ minds with a number of linguistic techniques borrowed from hypnosis and advertising to instill the image of a dark and evil world around us."

His subliminal messages to justify religious war against "evildoers" are right out of Madison Avenue. Writing in The New Yorker of July 12 & 19, David Greenberg tells how Bush speechwriter Michael Gerson, "himself an evangelical, laces the President’s addresses with seemingly innocuous terms that the devout recognize as laden with meaning: ‘whirlwind,’ ‘work of mercy,’ ‘safely home,’ ‘wonderworking power.’"

Aspiring political hypnotists would do well to study Hitler as an introduction to Bush.

"Without in any way straining language we can truthfully say that he (Hitler) was one of the great hypnotists of all time," says George H. Estabrooks in Hypnotism, the ne plus ultra of Hitler hypnosis books. Dr. Estabrooks was chairman of Colgate University’s psychology department, and taught at the school from 1927 to 1964.

Demonizing Saddam

"The efficiency of the truly national leader consists primarily in preventing the division of the attention of the people, and always in concentrating it on a single enemy." Hitler said that, in Mein Kampf.

Bush could just as easily have said it. Having lost public focus on Osama bin Laden by his inability to capture the wily 9/11 bomber, he found it not just convenient, but necessary, to replace bin Laden with Saddam Hussein as the new "single enemy," a stratagem inherited from the first President Bush who damned Hussein as "worse than Hitler" in the run-up to Desert Storm, the first Iraq war. On the eve of war in early October, 1990, ex-president Ronald Reagan picked up the beat before a crowd of Houston Republicans, denouncing his former Iraqi ally as "the reincarnation of Hitler."

"Depicting Saddam Hussein as an evil man made it easier to justify U. S. involvement in the Persian Gulf War. Psychology is an important part of any war strategy." from Introduction to Psychology, a textbook by Mark Garrison, Kentucky State University. If demonizing Saddam was effective strategy in the first Gulf war, the current administration worked wonders with it, with a little help from people like 60 Minutes' Andy Rooney and Bill Clinton who, on the David Letterman show, September 11, 2002, called Saddam "a threat, a murderer and thug..." while endorsing his removal.

Fear Hypnosis

In search of support for shaky WMD charges against Saddam, Bush found the torture issue and put it on the front burner in his January 2003 State of the Union address: "This dictator who is assembling the world’s most dangerous weapons has already used them on whole villages, leaving thousands of his own citizens dead, blind or disfigured. Iraqi refugees tell us how forced confessions are obtained by torturing children while their parents are made to watch. International human rights groups have catalogued other methods used in the torture chambers of Iraq: electric shock, burning with hot irons, dripping acid on the skin, mutilation with electric drills, cutting out tongues and rape."

Bush went on to urge Americans to come together in an orgy of fear induced self hypnosis by mentally imaging the dreadful prospect of Iraqi sponsored terrorists attacking the U. S., and tried again to link the Iraqi leader to the 9/11 attack on the twin towers: "Imagine those 19 hijackers with other weapons and other plans - this time armed by Saddam....We will do everything in our power to make sure that that day never comes." If Saddam had not existed, Bush would have invented him.

Press Supports War on Iraq

With skillful use of fear hypnosis, Bush not only gulled the public, but played a credulous press like a Steinway baby grand.



The establishment press fell in behind Bush almost to a man in endorsing his war aims against Iraq. This blind procession is amply documented by reporter Chris Mooney in the March/April 2004 issue of the Columbia Journalism Review. The L. A. Times and the N. Y. Times weakly dissented from war without UN approval but rolled over when Bush went ahead anyway. Even the usually skeptical The New Yorker saw merit in Bush’s war plans, warning that absent "Saddam’s abdication, or a military coup...a return to a hollow pursuit of containment will be the most dangerous option of all."

Hypnosis Contagion



The demonization of Saddam spread like germs.



"The mob leader will count on emotional contagion....Emotions are far more contagious than the measles. This fact of emotional contagion was very important to Hitler," says Estabrooks. Emotional statements by a hypnotic leader, he avers, are "burned" into receptive subconscious minds with the permanence of an image engraved on a photographic negative.



To be hypnotized by one such as Bush is to be branded with his ideology and to bend to his will as he so directs. This is true of anyone drawn uncritically to any leader or dominant figure. Be it Bush or Clinton, Hitler or Churchill, Reagan or FDR, the difference in the degree of hypnotically induced allegiance depends on the skill of the hypnotist and the suggestibility of the subject.

In The Group Mind, first published in 1920 by Putnam, author William McDougall says, "It is well recognized that almost any emotional excitement increases the suggestibility of the individual, though the explanation of the fact remains obscure."

By putting the horror mask on Saddam, by petrifying U. S. citizens with tales of Saddam’s gases and torture chambers and terrorist connections, Bush dusted off and refined an old Hitler trick.



"The one means that wins the easiest victory over reason: terror and force." Hitler, Mein Kampf.



Putting his own spin on Hitler’s formula, Bush induced fear-of-Saddam hypnosis in Americans to set them up for repetition hypnosis, to deepen and fix the fear. "Axis of evil" - "weapons of mass destruction" - "torture chambers" - "Iraqi terrorists" - "grave and gathering danger," all gained dominance in the thought patterns of Americans to lure them to Bush’s side against the evil Saddam.



"The influence of repetition on crowds is comprehensible when the power is seen which it exercises on the most enlightened minds. This power is due to the fact that the repeated statement is embedded in the long run in those profound regions of our unconscious selves in which the motives of our actions are forged." So said Gustave Le Bon in The Crowd, his seminal study of political hypnosis, published in 1897.

Bush Power Hypnosis

Why did Bush thus goad Americans to war by hypnotizing them? The answer seems to be that from day one, he intended the chaos of crisis and war to put in place a domestic agenda that he knew stood little chance of succeeding in peace.

He gambled that the electorate would be reluctant to change leaders in the crisis of war just as crewmen would hesitate to pull the captain from the bridge of their ship even as he sailed into a field of icebergs.

Bush’s incendiary bluster on taking office would seem to support this scenario. In turn, he dissed North Korean and Iranian leaders, sat by while the intafada exploded into the bloodiest, most enduring sequel of suicide bombings and Israeli retaliation in the history of the war, trashed the Kyoto treaty to reduce global air pollution, unilaterally revoked the Anti-Ballistic Missile treaty with Russia, and vetoed U. S. support of a world court to try war crimes.

The Republican ‘Pearl Harbor’

His actions appeared designed to escalate seething world resentment of America’s imperial transgressions to flash point, provoking an outbreak of hostilities that would draw the nation into armed conflict.

While Bush and his handlers may not have expected a reaction to their warmongering so costly as 9/11, when it came may well have regarded it as God-sent. The twin towers disaster has been called "the Republicans’ Pearl Harbor," because of the opportunity it presented to rally the electorate around Bush and continue him in power, as Pearl Harbor did for FDR.



In Bush’s Brain, by James Moore and Wayne Slater, Bush advisor Karl Rove is seen as agitating for the Iraq invasion to keep war fever alive when the hunt for bin Laden faltered and as 9/11 receded in the public consciousness. Other administration figures stepped forward to beat the war drums.

A March 5, 2004 article in the New York Times said, "Mr. Bush and his aides have planned for more than a year to make the president’s response to terrorist attacks the centerpiece of his re-election effort."

"We are fighting a global war on terrorism," said National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice, on "Meet the Press," Sunday, March 14, 2004.

In early February on "Meet the Press," Bush referred to himself as a "war president" and said he had "war on my mind" when he made decisions in the Oval Office.

Verbal Confusion Hypnosis

While Bush may have led the nation into war with Hitler hypnosis he has kept it there with hypnosis of his own making, a technological tour de force of classical, textbook hypnosis that eclipses anything Hitler used and sets Bush apart as a political hypnosis stylist in his own right.

When it became apparent as time passed that Weapons of Mass Destruction in Iraq was an illusion, Bush segued smoothly into verbal confusion hypnosis, which is discussed at some length in Handbook of Clinical and Experimental Hypnosis, by Jesse E. Gordon:

"The verbal confusion technique, which is quite difficult to administer, involves an approximation of double-talk in which instructions of a somewhat contradictory kind are given in rapid succession making it impossible for the attentive subject either to quite comprehend or quite acquiesce to any of them. Finally, he simply gives up all attempts and more or less collapses into a hypnotic state."

Exactly. A review of the Bush hocus-pocus in his 2004 State of the Union address, for example, shows how nimbly he skipped through a maze of issues such as WMD - deftly changed to "weapons of mass destruction-related program activities" - no child left behind, "the sanctity of marriage," senior drug discount cards, invading Iraq in the interests of national survival and world peace, "foreign terrorists," permanent tax relief, jobs, and much, much more. Holding up one theme card after another for public review, before they could "quite comprehend or quite acquiesce to any of them," Bush fanned the deck and flashed yet another card at his bewildered audience.

A "GOP strategist" complained to the Los Angeles Times, "He’s all over the map now, sending a lot of confused messages to the voters." Of course.

Many now openly wonder how so obvious a lie as WMD could have passed muster with such a large majority of Americans.



One answer is provided by Hitler in Mein Kampf: "In the size of the lie there is always contained a certain factor of credibility, since the great masses of the people....will more easily fall victim to a great lie than to a small one." Thus was born the concept of the "Big Lie," yet another Hitler crowd manipulation tool co-opted by Bush.

Even the most skeptical may succumb to hypnotic contagion but later find the resources to cast off the devil spell, says William McDougall. Among the most fervent Bush supporters have been people now coming forward to say that they are "uncomfortable" with reports that the reasons given for going to war may have been nothing more than a pack of Bush lies. Call them recovering Bush dupes.

War is Peace

Perhaps the biggest challenge he has given the public is asking them to think of his war making as, actually, peace making. Think of the Pentagon as the "Ministry of Peace," charged with making perpetual war in George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four.

Bush has been almost studious in application of the hypnotic word "peace" to sugarcoat his designs for war.

"Peace" has become his slogan.

"Slogans are both exciting and comforting, but they are also powerful opiates for the conscience....Some of mankind’s most terrible misdeeds have been committed under the spell of certain magic words or phrases," said Harvard University president James Bryant Conant in the Baccalaureate Address to Harvard College, June 17, 1934.

"How many people in the confusion of a defeat or crisis have been reassured by one word? Peace. Independence. Reconstruction. Without taking a closer look, they adopt the leader in whose name this ideal has been proposed. It is the ideal that unites them and leads them into the venture. If necessary, technicians will be responsible for conducting it from the inside so long as the figurehead maintains his prestige." Jean Dauven, The

Powers of Hypnosis.

Nixon national security advisor Henry Kissinger intoned "Peace is at hand" as voters prepared to go to the polls in November, 1972 to choose between George McGovern and Richard Nixon as the candidate most likely to end the Vietnam War. In one of the most cynical betrayals of public trust on record, Kissinger the technician lied to a desperate nation about the prospects of peace in order to get the figurehead reelected.

After Nixon was safely reinstalled in the White House, saturation bombing to coerce North Vietnam to U. S. peace terms started again, with the unspeakable Christmas bombing of Hanoi as the main attraction.

Author, foreign correspondent and broadcaster William L. Shirer, who witnessed Hitler’s rise to power, commented in The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich on Hitler’s masterful use of the peace card.

"On the evening of May 21 (1935), he delivered another ‘peace’speech....one of the cleverest and most misleading of his Reichstag orations.....He rejected the very idea of war, it was senseless, it was useless, as well as a horror."

But while the world was lulled by his peace offensive, the master of the Thousand Year Reich plotted the war he said he abhorred.

George W. Bush misses no chance to reaffirm his dedication to peace and to denounce those who he says threaten peace.

He mounted the pulpit of the United Nations, September 17, 2002 to bully the international body with his peace message: "The United Nations must act. It’s time to determine whether or not they’ll be a force for good and peace or an ineffective debating society."

He stood before Congress and the press, sent an emissary to the Orwellian sounding United States Institute of Peace, went on the radio, appeared at factories and military bases, hawking his peace message while putting U. S. forces in place to invade Iraq.

Sometimes, to justify keeping the country in a state of war, he combines "peace" with "freedom" and "security" as in his commencement address to the students of Concordia University, May 14 this year when he said, "America works for peace and freedom....For the sake of peace, for the sake of security, we stand for freedom." Administration spokespersons, notably Condoleezza Rice, repeat these buzz words in their own speeches.

Bush Radio Hypnosis

With his regular Saturday radio addresses, Bush works heroically on turning Americans into automatons of subservience to his goals. John Kerry, refusing to concede the airwaves to Bush, is using the medium to respond to Bush attack ads and launch attacks of his own, giving every indication that he will continue the tradition of Saturday presidential radio if elected.

Radio is the most hypnotic of the media as, in the words of Jean Dauven, "It is through the spoken word that the hypnotist exercises his power." The audio nature of broadcast fosters an illusion of privacy that allows the hypnotist to flatter the listener that he/she is being addressed exclusively, enhancing the listener’s suggestibility.

Hate-Talk Radio Hypnosis

Estabrooks witnessed the birth of political radio hypnosis and the advent of the craft’s earliest stars, FDR, Churchill, and Hitler. He predated Rush Limbaugh’s lobotomized rabble by decades, but was in on the beginnings of hate-talk radio when Father Charles Coughlin and the Rev. Gerald L. K. Smith poisoned the airwaves in the 1930s.

Estabrooks would have been fascinated with the emergence of Ronald Reagan, radio hypnotism’s modern master. With his banal gipperisms, deeply imbedded fear of communism and Soviet nuclear threat obsessive-compulsive anxiety disorder, all delivered in the polished tones of a professional broadcaster, Reagan robbed a generation of Americans of their capacity to think critically, a condition perpetuated by his disciples as witnessed in the transcontinental state funeral of early June, 2004, a seven-day binge of national hypnosis. Brain dead from Alzheimer’s for 10 years, Reagan was resurrected from the public media files to extend his hypnotic hold on Americans, all part of the Republican power keeping machinery which includes putting Reagan’s picture on money and carving his likeness either on Mt. Rushmore, or "our own mountain," as one of his adherents puts it.

Men of Action Don’t Apologize

The president, by the very nature of his position at the pinnacle of power, is hypnotic. Probably no president, with the possible exceptions of Nixon and Reagan, has marshaled so powerful an arsenal of hypnosis, or exercised it so energetically and effectively as George W. Bush.

Successful hypnosis of the electorate satisfies a demagogue’s dream - uncritical

acceptance of the man and his policies by a majority. Bush has been good enough at it to acquire an aura of invincibility that predictably has led to an excess of hubris in his conduct.

As Reagan and the elder Bush did not apologize for Iran-Contra, do not expect George W. Bush to ever forswear his actions in Iraq. It is not in his nature to admit mistakes or reflect on his misdeeds, nor apparently is it in the nature of his closest aides and subordinates to do so either. Gustave Le Bon described the type in The Crowd.

"The leaders we speak of are more frequently men of action than thinkers. They are not gifted with keen foresight, nor could they be, as this quality generally conduces to doubt and inactivity. They are especially recruited from the ranks of those morbidly nervous, excitable, half-deranged persons who are bordering on madness...their convictions are so strong that all reasoning is lost on them. Contempt and persecution do not affect them, or only serve to excite them more."

George Estabrooks spoke of such men possessing ".....an uncanny drive, a restless energy, as they push forward toward their own self-centered ideal, and they will be utterly ruthless in attaining their ends. The rights of others, even the lives of others, are simply of no consequence if they stand between the dictator and his determined goal....

The dictator really believes that he is God’s chosen instrument - or society’s chosen instrument if he does not believe in God - to lead his group, or possibly the entire world, into the promised land."

Bush apparently has long held the notion that God wants him to be president. On the occasion of his second inauguration as Texas governor, he "gathered a few trusted colleagues in his office to announce, ‘God wants me to be president,’" according to Southern Baptist leader Richard Land as quoted in online Slate magazine, April 29, 2004.

Bush’s Hypnotized Supporters

Bush spinmeisters will continue to place their candidate in front of unsuspecting NASCAR dads, right wing religious fundamentalists, teenage soldiers, home owners, sports fans, snow mobilers and dirt bikers, loggers and roughnecks, teamsters and hard-hats, 2nd Amendment zealots, high school dropouts, Orange County developers, and field hands, where the president can work his inspirational way into their hearts and minds. This has been called targeting "the lowest common denominator," but Nazi propaganda chief Paul Joseph Goebbels had a better description, revealed in his diaries discovered in the rubble of the Propaganda Ministry at the end of World War II:

".....the rank and file are usually much more primitive than we imagine. Propaganda must therefore always be essentially simple and repetitious. In the long run only he will achieve basic results influencing public opinion who is able to reduce problems to the simplest terms and who has the courage to keep forever repeating them in this simplified form despite the objections of the intellectuals."

Bush, the Elected Dictator

Will all of this lead to a New Thousand Year Reich in America?

George Estabrooks warned that such an outcome, while not inevitable, is not impossible.

"How can we guarantee that our choice at the polls will be a wise one?......on this matter of electing a potential dictator, you will make that mistake once only. From then on, he will take care that your mistakes are always in his favor......

"Sit down and think over that last spellbinder you heard on the platform, over the radio or on television.....Were you listening to a man of reason or to a hypnotist who aimed to limit your field of consciousness? You say you cannot be hypnotized against your will. Perhaps you were hypnotized last night as you listened to that political address over your TV.....The most dangerous hypnotist may be the man you listened to last week over the radio. You were his subject....As a matter of fact, you were a very excellent subject. Think it over....."



Hitler aide Albert Speer and newscaster William L. Shirer commented on a recent moment in history when a great people became the eager followers of a hypnotic leader who led them to ruin.



".....as I see it today, these politicians in particular were in fact molded by the mob itself, guided by its yearnings and daydreams...Certainly the masses roared to the beat set by Hitler’s and Goebbel’s baton, yet they were not the true conductors. The mob determined the theme." - Albert Speer, Inside the Third Reich.



"The Germans imposed the Nazi tyranny on themselves." William L. Shirer, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich.

http://www.altpr.org/modules.php?op=modload&name=News&file=article&sid=226&mode=thread&order=0&thold=0

iVillage Member
Registered: 03-27-2003
In reply to: hayashig
Fri, 07-23-2004 - 9:59pm
You should post this on the Politics Today board.


Elaine

iVillage Member
Registered: 03-18-2000
In reply to: hayashig
Sat, 07-24-2004 - 10:48am

Very interesting article.


Contrary to the article I can't stand to listen to Bush. For me

 


Photobucket&nbs

iVillage Member
Registered: 04-16-2003
In reply to: hayashig
Sat, 07-24-2004 - 12:27pm
Elaine,

If I had posted the article just to bash Bush, I would have posted it on the Politics board. I had hoped to spread the word about the techniques that Bush uses that make him so convincing. It is important to understand what he is doing, so we can find a way to counteract it. One wonders if GWB is not to bright, how he has mastered this technique. What runs though my mind is the preachers on the RR. Here's another article, progressives can learn from.

On the day that George W. Bush took office, the words "tax relief" started appearing in White House communiqués. Think for a minute about the word relief. In order for there to be relief, there has to be a blameless, afflicted person with whom we identify and whose affliction has been imposed by some external cause. Relief is the taking away of the pain or harm, thanks to some reliever.

This is an example of what cognitive linguists call a "frame." It is a mental structure that we use in thinking. All words are defined relative to frames. The relief frame is an instance of a more general rescue scenario in which there is a hero (the reliever), a victim (the afflicted), a crime (the affliction), a villain (the cause of affliction) and a rescue (the relief). The hero is inherently good, the villain is evil and the victim after the rescue owes gratitude to the hero.

The term tax relief evokes all of this and more. It presupposes a conceptual metaphor: Taxes are an affliction, proponents of taxes are the causes of affliction (the villains), the taxpayer is the afflicted (the victim) and the proponents of tax relief are the heroes who deserve the taxpayers' gratitude. Those who oppose tax relief are bad guys who want to keep relief from the victim of the affliction, the taxpayer.

Every time the phrase tax relief is used, and heard or read by millions of people, this view of taxation as an affliction and conservatives as heroes gets reinforced.

The phrase has become so ubiquitous that I've even found it in speeches and press releases by Democratic officials -- unconsciously reinforcing a view of the economy that is anathema to everything progressives believe. The Republicans understand framing; Democrats don't.

When I teach framing in Cognitive Science 101, I start with an exercise. I give my students a directive: "Don't think of an elephant." It can't be done, of course, and that's the point. In order not to think of an elephant, you have to think of an elephant. The word elephant evokes an image and a frame. If you negate the frame, you still activate the frame. Richard Nixon never took Cognitive Science 101. When he said, "I am not a crook," he made everybody think of him as a crook.

If you have been framed, the only response is to reframe. But you can't do it in a sound bite unless an appropriate progressive language has been built up in advance. Conservatives have worked for decades and spent billions on their think tanks to establish their frames, create the right language, and get the language and the frames they evoke accepted. It has taken them awhile to establish the metaphors of taxation as a burden, an affliction and an unfair punishment -- all of which require "relief." They have also, over decades, built up the frame in which the wealthy create jobs, and giving them more wealth creates more jobs.

Taxes look very different when framed from a progressive point of view. As Oliver Wendell Holmes famously said, taxes are the price of civilization. They are what you pay to live in America -- your dues -- to have democracy, opportunity and access to all the infrastructure that previous taxpayers have built up and made available to you: highways, the Internet, weather reports, parks, the stock market, scientific research, Social Security, rural electrification, communications satellites, and on and on. If you belong to America, you pay a membership fee and you get all that infrastructure plus government services: flood control, air-traffic control, the Food and Drug Administration, the Centers for Disease Control and so on.

Interestingly, the wealthy benefit disproportionately from the American infrastructure. The Securities and Exchange Commission creates honest stock markets. Most of the judicial system is used for corporate law. Drugs developed with National Institutes of Health funding can be patented for private profit. Chemical companies hire scientists trained under National Science Foundation grants. Airlines hire pilots trained by the Air Force. The beef industry grazes its cattle cheaply on public lands. The more wealth you accumulate using what the dues payers have provided, the greater the debt you owe to those who have made your wealth possible. That is the logic of progressive taxation.

No entrepreneur makes it on his own in America. The American infrastructure makes entrepreneurship possible, and others have put it in place. If you've made a bundle, you owe a bundle. The least painful way to repay your debt to the nation is posthumously, through the inheritance tax.

Those who don't pay their dues are turning their backs on our country. American corporations registering abroad to avoid taxes are deserting our nation when their estimated $70 billion in dues and service payments are badly needed, for schools and for rescuing our state and local governments.

Reframing takes awhile, but it won't happen if we don't start. The place to begin is by understanding how progressives and conservatives think. In 1994, I dutifully read the "Contract with America" and found myself unable to comprehend how conservative views formed a coherent set of political positions. What, I asked myself, did opposition to abortion have to do with the flat tax? What did the flat tax have to do with opposition to environmental regulations? What did defense of gun ownership have to do with tort reform? Or tort reform with opposition to affirmative action? And what did all of the above have to do with family values? Moreover, why do conservatives and progressives talk past one another, not with one another?

The answer is that there are distinct conservative and progressive worldviews. The two groups simply see the world in different ways. As a cognitive scientist, I've found in my research that these political worldviews can be understood as opposing models of an ideal family -- a strict father family and a nurturant parent family. These family models come with moral systems, which in turn provide the deep framing of all political issues.

The Strict Father Family

In this view, the world is a dangerous and difficult place, there is tangible evil in the world and children have to be made good. To stand up to evil, one must be morally strong -- disciplined.

The father's job is to protect and support the family. His moral duty is to teach his children right from wrong. Physical discipline in childhood will develop the internal discipline adults need to be moral people and to succeed. The child's duty is to obey. Punishment is required to balance the moral books. If you do wrong, there must be a consequence.

The strict father, as moral authority, is responsible for controlling the women of the family, especially in matters of sexuality and reproduction.

Children are to become self-reliant through discipline and the pursuit of self-interest. Pursuit of self-interest is moral: If everybody pursues his own self-interest, the self-interest of all will be maximized.

Without competition, people would not have to develop discipline and so would not become moral beings. Worldly success is an indicator of sufficient moral strength; lack of success suggests lack of sufficient discipline. Those who are not successful should not be coddled; they should be forced to acquire self-discipline.

When this view is translated into politics, the government becomes the strict father whose job for the country is to support (maximize overall wealth) and protect (maximize military and political strength). The citizens are children of two kinds: the mature, disciplined, self-reliant ones who should not be meddled with and the whining, undisciplined, dependent ones who should never be coddled.

This means (among other things) favoring those who control corporate wealth and power (those seen as the best people) over those who are victims (those seen as morally weak). It means removing government regulations, which get in the way of those who are disciplined. Nature is seen as a resource to be exploited. One-way communication translates into government secrecy. The highest moral value is to preserve and extend the domain of strict morality itself, which translates into bringing the values of strict father morality into every aspect of life, both public and private, domestic and foreign.

America is seen as more moral than other nations and hence more deserving of power; it has earned the right to be hegemonic and must never yield its sovereignty, or its overwhelming military and economic power. The role of government, then, is to protect the country and its interests, to promote maximally unimpeded economic activity, and maintain order and discipline.

From this perspective, conservative policies cohere and make sense as instances of strict father morality. Social programs give people things they haven't earned, promoting dependency and lack of discipline, and are therefore immoral. The good people -- those who have become self-reliant through discipline and pursuit of self-interest -- deserve their wealth as a reward. Rewarding people who are doing the right thing is moral. Taxing them is punishment, an affliction, and is therefore immoral. Girls who get pregnant through illicit sex must face the consequences of their actions and bear the child. They become responsible for the child, and social programs for pre- and postnatal care just make them dependent. Guns are how the strict father protects his family from the dangers in the world. Environmental regulations get in the way of the good people, the disciplined ones pursuing their own self-interest. Nature, being lower on the moral hierarchy, is there to serve man as a resource. The Endangered Species Act gets in the way of people fulfilling their interests and is therefore immoral; people making money are more important than owls surviving as a species. And just as a strict father would never give up his authority, so a strong moral nation such as the United States should never give up its sovereignty to lesser authorities. It's a neatly tied-up package.

Conservative think tanks have done their job, working out such details and articulating them effectively. Many liberals are still largely unaware of their own moral system. Yet progressives have one.

The Nurturant Parent Family

It is assumed that the world should be a nurturant place. The job of parents is to nurture their children and raise their children to be nurturers. To be a nurturer you have to be empathetic and responsible (for yourself and others). Empathy and responsibility have many implications: Responsibility implies protection, competence, education, hard work and social connectedness; empathy requires freedom, fairness and honesty, two-way communication, a fulfilled life (unhappy, unfulfilled people are less likely to want others to be happy) and restitution rather than retribution to balance the moral books. Social responsibility requires cooperation and community building over competition. In the place of specific strict rules, there is a general "ethics of care" that says, "Help, don't harm." To be of good character is to be empathetic and responsible, in all of the above ways. Empathy and responsibility are the central values, implying other values: freedom, protection, fairness, cooperation, open communication, competence, happiness, mutual respect and restitution as opposed to retribution.

In this view, the job of government is to care for, serve and protect the population (especially those who are helpless), to guarantee democracy (the equal sharing of political power), to promote the well-being of all and to ensure fairness for all. The economy should be a means to these moral ends. There should be openness in government. Nature is seen as a source of nurture to be respected and preserved. Empathy and responsibility are to be promoted in every area of life, public and private. Art and education are parts of self-fulfillment and therefore moral necessities.

Progressive policies grow from progressive morality. Unfortunately, much of Democratic policy making has been issue by issue and program oriented, and thus doesn't show an overall picture with a moral vision. But, intuitively, progressive policy making is organized into five implicit categories that define both a progressive culture and a progressive form of government, and encompass all progressive policies. Those categories are:

Safety. Post-September 11, it includes secure harbors, industrial facilities and cities. It also includes safe neighborhoods (community policing) and schools (gun control); safe water, air and food (a poison-free environment); safety on the job; and products safe to use. Safety implies health -- health care for all, pre- and postnatal care for children, a focus on wellness and preventive care, and care for the elderly (Medicare, Social Security and so on).

Freedom. Civil liberties must be both protected and extended. The individual issues include gay rights, affirmative action, women's rights and so on, but the moral issue is freedom. That includes freedom of motherhood -- the freedom of a woman to decide whether, when and with whom. It excludes state control of pregnancy. For there to be freedom, the media must be open to all. The airwaves must be kept public, and media monopolies (Murdoch, Clear Channel) broken up.

A Moral Economy. Prosperity is for everybody. Government makes investments, and those investments should reflect the overall public good. Corporate reform is necessary for a more ethical business environment. That means honest bookkeeping (e.g., no free environmental dumping), no poisoning of people and the environment and no exploitation of labor (living wages, safe workplaces, no intimidation). Corporations are chartered by and accountable to the public. Instead of maximizing only shareholder profits, corporations should be chartered to maximize stakeholder well-being, where shareholders, employees, communities and the environment are all recognized and represented on corporate boards.

The bottom quarter of our workforce does absolutely essential work for the economy (caring for children, cleaning houses, producing agriculture, cooking, day laboring and so on). Its members have earned the right to living wages and health care. But the economy is so structured that they cannot be fairly compensated all the time by those who pay their salaries. The economy as a whole should decently compensate those who hold it up. Bill Clinton captured this idea when he declared that people who work hard and play by the rules shouldn't be poor. That validated an ethic of work, but also of community and nurturance.

Global Cooperation. The United States should function as a good world citizen, maximizing cooperation with other governments, not just seeking to maximize its wealth and military power. That means recognizing the same moral values internationally as domestically. An ethical foreign policy means the inclusion of issues previously left out: women's rights and education, children's rights, labor issues, poverty and hunger, the global environment and global health. Many of these concerns are now addressed through global civil society -- international organizations dedicated to peacekeeping and nation building. As the Iraq debacle shows, this worldview is not naive; it is a more effective brand of realism.

The Future. Progressive values center on our children's future -- their education, their health, their prosperity, the environment they will inherit and the global situation they will find themselves in. That is the moral perspective. The issues include everything from education (teacher salaries, class size, diversity) to the federal deficit (will they be burdened with our debt?) to global warming and the extinction of species (will there still be elephants and bananas?) to health (will their bodies be poisoned as a result of our policies, and will there be health care for them?). Securing that future is central to our values.

These are the central themes of a progressive politics that comes out of progressive values. That is an important point. A progressive vision must cut across the usual program and interest-group categories. What we need are strategic initiatives that change many things at once. For example, the New Apollo Program -- an investment of hundreds of billions over 10 years in alternative energy development (solar, wind, biomass, hydrogen) is also a jobs program, a foreign-policy issue (freedom from dependence on Middle East oil), a health issue (clean air and water, many fewer poisons in our bodies) and an ecology issue (cleans up pollution, addresses global warming). Corporate reform is another such strategic initiative.

Promoting a Progressive Frame

To articulate these themes and strategic initiatives, using government as an instrument of common purpose, we have to set aside petty local interests, work together and emphasize what unites us. Defeating radical conservatism gives us a negative impetus, but we will not succeed without a positive vision and cooperation.

An unfortunate aspect of recent progressive politics is the focus on coalitions rather than on movements. Coalitions are based on common self-interest. They are often necessary but they are usually short term, come apart readily and are hard to maintain. Labor-environment coalitions, for example, have been less than successful. And electoral coalitions with different interest-based messages for different voting blocks have left the Democrats without a general moral vision. Movements, on the other hand, are based on shared values, values that define who we are. They have a better chance of being broad-based and lasting. In short, progressives need to be thinking in terms of a broad-based progressive-values movement, not in terms of issue coalitions.

It is also time to stop thinking in terms of market segments. An awful lot of voters vote Democratic because of who they are, because they have progressive values of one kind or another -- not just because they are union members or soccer moms. Voters vote their identities and their values far more than their self-interests.

People are complicated. They are not all 100 percent conservative or progressive. Everyone in this society has both the strict and nurturant models, either actively or passively -- actively if they live by those values, passively if they can understand a story, movie or TV show based on those values. Most voters have a politics defined almost exclusively by one active moral worldview.

There are certain numbers of liberals and conservatives, of course, who are just not going to be swayed. The exact numbers are subject to debate, but from talking informally to professionals and making my own best guesses, I estimate that roughly 35 percent to 39 percent of voters overwhelmingly favor the progressive-Democratic moral worldview while another 35 percent to 38 percent of voters overwhelmingly favor the conservative-Republican moral worldview.

The swing voters -- roughly 25 percent to 30 percent -- have both worldviews and use them actively in different parts of their lives. They may be strict in the office and nurturant at home. Many blue-collar workers are strict at home and nurturant in their union politics. I have academic colleagues who are strict in the classroom and nurturant in their politics.

Activation of the progressive model among swing voters is done through language -- by using a consistent, conventional language of progressive values. Democrats have been subject to a major fallacy: Voters are lined up left to right according to their views on issues, the thinking goes, and Democrats can get more voters by moving to the right. But the Republicans have not been getting more voters by moving to the left. What they do is stick to their strict ideology and activate their model among swing voters who have both models. They do this by being clear and issuing consistent messages framed in terms of conservative values. The moral is this: Voters are not on a left-to-right line; there is no middle.

Here is a cognitive scientist's advice to progressive Democrats: Articulate your ideals, frame what you believe effectively, say what you believe and say it well, strongly and with moral fervor.

Reframing is telling the truth as we see it -- telling it forcefully, straightforwardly and articulately, with moral conviction and without hesitation. The language must fit the conceptual reframing, a reframing from the perspective of progressive values. It is not just a matter of words, though the right ones are needed to evoke progressive frames.

And stop saying "tax relief."

http://www.prospect.org/print/V14/8/lakoff-g.html

iVillage Member
Registered: 04-16-2003
In reply to: hayashig
Sat, 07-24-2004 - 1:20pm
<>

Nor I, but I do read. What struck me about this article is how can average George accomplish all this hypnosis. The following sentence caught my eye:

"Bush creates and maintains negative frameworks in his listeners’ minds with a number of linguistic techniques borrowed from hypnosis and advertising to instill the image of a dark and evil world around us."

We know at a very rudimentary level black images create fear immediately leads to a flight or fight response. What pops into my mind is WHY? Has this been a well thought plan by the neo-cons, orchestrated by Carl Rowe. Why this tactic, why these words. I have no doubt that the simple dialectic is comfortable in GWB's mind, but who's the brains behind the operation?

You have to read about 3/4 of the article before you realize the sinister plot behind the dark image.

"Why did Bush thus goad Americans to war by hypnotizing them? The answer seems to be that from day one, he intended the chaos of crisis and war to put in place a domestic agenda that he knew stood little chance of succeeding in peace."

Reason tells me this is a plausible explanation. Bush was thinking of a war with Iraq from the get go, and he was planning on tax cuts and other governmental changes that the republicans knew wouldn't fly in the then political climate. It just so happens that the terrorists gave him a Christmas gift early. The rest is history.

How did we get from al Qaeda and Afghanistan to Iraq? "The verbal confusion technique, which is quite difficult to administer, involves an approximation of double-talk in which instructions of a somewhat contradictory kind are given in rapid succession making it impossible for the attentive subject either to quite comprehend or quite acquiesce to any of them. Finally, he simply gives up all attempts and more or less collapses into a hypnotic state." I had a boss once who used this technique. At the time, I taught Head Start, the the audience was the parents of the children. He encouraged me to use it, but I was much to plain spoken to use deception, but it is a very useful to get what you want from people who if they understood the true reasons would permit it. This tells you what the Republicans think of the American intelligence. "This has been called targeting "the lowest common denominator."

I myself feel rather dumb because I am so delayed in catching on. Sigh

This really isn't hypnosis in the traditional sense, it is psychological mumbo jumbo, the sad part is that I mind works in certain ways and people can and have learned to manipulate us. Why else would people vote against their own interests. Believe reassuring words like "We're safer" in the face of contradictory information.




This leads me to the targets of GWB's hypnosis:

iVillage Member
Registered: 03-18-2000
In reply to: hayashig
Sat, 07-24-2004 - 5:26pm

I'm sure this method is cleverly contrived, but not by Bush, his speech writers.

 


Photobucket&nbs

iVillage Member
Registered: 04-16-2003
In reply to: hayashig
Sun, 07-25-2004 - 10:04am
<>

I don't remember this. But this is the techniques that advertisers study.

iVillage Member
Registered: 03-18-2000
In reply to: hayashig
Sun, 07-25-2004 - 11:20am

I can't find an article about this person. She was on CNN in an interview back then.


There's this, but it's not what/who I was refering to.


New Group to Peddle War.


http://www.commondreams.org/views02/1108-02.htm

cl-Libraone~

 


Photobucket&nbs

iVillage Member
Registered: 04-16-2003
In reply to: hayashig
Mon, 07-26-2004 - 12:44pm
Very insightful article; wish I had found this source earlier.

"Decision makers in the Bush administration are obviously more interested in out maneuvering the will of the American public than considering its calls for diplomacy. Since the pro-war forces can’t convince America to go to war on its own merits, the CLI has been put in place to sell it to the public. But the public isn’t buying it."

But the public did buy it. The interesting fact about public relations is that it works. These ad men are wizzards at getting in to the people's psychi. It is an effective art. I only hope Democrates are doing the same thing.

I took a look at the site and this is what I found, "Is Corporate Social Responsibility an Oxymoron?" The following in an excerpt--a thought right out of my mind. I have bookmarked the cite, Thanks.

"People who run corporations are mostly decent human beings; many are pillars of their communities. They care about the environment and other people; they want to be recognized as good citizens. Corporate abuse of the public interest does not stem from flaws in the characters of corporate personnel; it stems from a flaw in the rules under which corporations operate.

State laws that create corporations promote behavior which managers and shareholders do not condone in their personal lives. Those laws encourage managers to act as if shareholders are psychopaths -- concerned only that their company makes more and more money without regard for the human or environmental costs. They allow managers to excuse the damage they do by claiming they are only doing what the law requires - promoting the interests of shareholders."

http://www.commondreams.org/views04/0726-11.htm

iVillage Member
Registered: 03-18-2000
In reply to: hayashig
Sat, 07-31-2004 - 10:10am
Study: Fear shapes voters' views
Responses to candidates differ after thinking about tragedy.

http://www.cnn.com/2004/TECH/science/07/30/vote.psych.reut/index.html


President George W. Bush may be tapping into solid human psychology when he invokes the September 11 attacks while campaigning for the next election, U.S. researchers said on Thursday.


Talking about death can raise people's need for psychological security, the researchers report in studies to be published in the December issue of the journal Psychological Science and the September issue of the Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin.


"There are people all over who are claiming every time Bush is in trouble he generates fear by declaring an imminent threat," said Sheldon Solomon of Skidmore College in Saratoga Springs, New York, who worked on the study.


"We are saying this is psychologically useful," said Solomon.


Jeff Greenberg, a professor of psychology at the University of Arizona in Tucson, said generating fear was a common tactic.


"A lot of leaders gain their appeal by helping people feel they are heroic, particularly in a fight against evil," Greenberg said in a telephone interview from Hawaii, where he presented the findings to a meeting of the American Psychological Association.


"Sometimes that may be the right thing to do. But it is a psychological approach, particularly when death is close to peoples' consciousness."


For their first study, Solomon, Greenberg and colleagues asked students to think about either their own death or a neutral topic.


They then read the campaign statements of three hypothetical candidates for governor, each with a different leadership style. One was charismatic, said Solomon.


"That was a person who declared our country to be great and the people in it to be special," Solomon, who worked on the study, said in a telephone interview.


The others were task-oriented -- focusing on the job to be done -- or relationship-oriented -- with a "let's get it done together" style, Solomon said.


Fearing doom, choosing charisma

The students who thought about death were much more likely to choose the charismatic leader, they found. Only four out of about 100 chose that imaginary leader when thinking about exams, but 30 did after thinking about death.


Greenberg, Solomon and colleagues then decided to test the idea further and set up four separate studies at different universities.


"In one we asked half the people to think about the September 11 attacks, or to think about watching TV," Solomon said. "What we found was staggering."


When asked to think about television, the 100 or so volunteers did not approve of Bush or his policies in Iraq. But when asked to think about Sept. 11 first and then asked about their attitudes to Bush, another 100 volunteers had very different reactions.


"They had a very strong approval of President Bush and his policy in Iraq," Solomon said.


Solomon, a social psychologist who specializes in terrorism, said it was very rare for a person's opinions to differ so strongly depending on the situation.


Another study focused directly on Bush and his Democratic challenger, Massachusetts Sen. John Kerry.


The volunteers were aged from 18 into their 50s and described themselves as ranging from liberal to deeply conservative. No matter what a person's political conviction, thinking about death made them tend to favor Bush, Solomon said. Otherwise, they preferred Kerry.


"I think this should concern anybody," Solomon said. "If I was speaking lightly, I would say that people in their, quote, right minds, unquote, don't care much for President Bush and his policies in Iraq."


He wants voters to be aware of psychological pressures and how they are used.


"If people are aware that thinking about death makes them act differently, then they don't act differently," Solomon said. Solomon says he personally opposes Bush but describes himself as a political independent who could vote Republican.

cl-Libraone~

 


Photobucket&nbs

iVillage Member
Registered: 04-16-2003
In reply to: hayashig
Sat, 07-31-2004 - 3:28pm
<>

I must admit that I was unaware of this; what I did know is that spreading fear is contrary to the American values I hold dear. In my view it is dangerous to play the fear card--knowing it creates a fight or flight response, you need to tell people what they can do to protect themselves. The response will eventually work to the disadvantage of someone, I hope it will be Bush, but it could be the American people when they stop listening.