Amerika

You can manipulate anyone with this basic psychological technique:

1. Your experience was rough
2. It’s not your fault
3. Someone else did this to you
4. In order to get back at them, you’re going to self-destruct too

Amazingly, as cops and politicians know, it works.

(For all those people out there complaining that the powers that be control us: this is how they do it, and they couldn’t do it if we had no stupid people and the smart people got their heads out of their egos and used a modicum of self-control. As with all really big fixes, it’s easy but seems difficult so “no one” does it.)

Let’s see it in action:

President Obama took aim Thursday at conservative critics who claim that he is using the economic crisis to ram through an unrelated, expansive domestic agenda.

Obama said that any delay for new investments in education, energy and health care would only continue “the same irresponsibility that led us to this point” and ultimately weaken the recovery.

CNN

Trans:

1. You’re in a recession and it hurts
2. It’s not your fault, it’s Bush’s fault
3. The callow elites did this to you
4. Let’s make big government more powerful to destroy them, even though you hate big government and know it’s ineffective

Stated in a less dogmatic form:

It’s easy to fool people.

Flatter them.

Promise them big ideas and big, vague solutions.

Tell them that everyone is equally important.

That’s how you make a Crowd happy. Of course, to do that you, you have to be a cynical bastard. That’s why most Revolutionary leaders are corrupt people who plunge their countries into New Dark Ages.

Obama, coming from the most corrupt political machine in North America (the Chicago machine), is undoubtedly aware of all these things, and knows how to manipulate them for personal gain. Again, very cynical. But that’s the RealPolitik(tm) when you have a huge crowd of people out there who vote with their emotions, based on the appearance of realities they’re too lazy to research.

Hope! Change! Hope! Change!

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Tags: cognitive dissonance, obama, passive aggression