Delusion is an important element in the destruction of our nation. Tyrants cannot stand up to logic or the free exercise of expression and association.
It is important to the left that they organize isolate, and manipulate with talking points, with the aid of the media, and with fear and pseudo-enthusiasm to instill mass delusion.
Adolf Hitler wrote in Mein Kampf, “the art of propaganda consists in putting a matter so clearly and forcibly before the minds of the people as to create a general conviction regarding the reality of a certain fact….it must appeal to the feelings of the public rather than to their reasoning power.” Hitler continued, “propaganda must not investigate the truth objectively” especially when its favorable to the other side but must “present only that aspect of the truth is favorable” to the agenda they are pushing.
Driven by a changing culture and the rise of social media, political propaganda has never been more successful. And that’s very bad news for democracy because political propaganda isn’t just inflammatory rhetoric aimed at weakening a political foe. It’s a much larger force that is intended to increase fear and anxiety and divide society against itself.
Political propaganda is not just a tool to mislead; it is false information distributed to cause harm and advance a political cause. A key element of propaganda is that it sows distrust, confusing people about what to believe and what not to believe. Over time, this causes many people to tune out of political debate altogether because it becomes too hard to figure out what you can believe and who you can trust.
When people are in fear for their religion, personal security, traditions or economic security, they tend to be highly motivated to vote for those they perceive as protecting their way of life. Over time, this will shift the populace toward supporting authoritarian tendencies, as they are deceived into believing these threats and are then willing to trade some of their own rights and freedoms to help the government defend the country from these contrived threats.
The left is adept as using political propaganda to shape the minds of the uninformed, the mildly informed and the “if it doesn’t affect me, I don’t really care” masses without it being patently visible.
When it comes to understanding the inner workings of social psychology and political correctness, we seem to be at a loss to understand it while the power elites that control the media, academia and Hollywood, that exceed in “collective belief formation” exploit it on a massive scale.
A good book that cracks the code on what we are living through today was written by Dutch psychiatrist Joost A.M. Meerloo about 60 years ago. The Rape of the Mind: The Psychology of Thought Control, Menticide, and Brainwashing, written in 1956, explores the methods by which systematic mental pressure brings people to abject submission, and by which totalitarians imprint their subjective “truth” on their victims’ minds.
The emotional stew in which we find ourselves today doesn’t allow logic or reason to prevail. We can never fight back as long as we are in the dark about how our minds can be manipulated. And, as more people succumb to PC conditioning and cede freedom of thought, it becomes more difficult for the rest of us to maintain integrity of mind.
Tyrants always pretend to promote the very thing they seek to destroy. Freedom depends on breaking down the walls of separation that tyranny builds. It means cultivating the art of friendship, exercising our rights to free association and to communicate our thoughts to others. It means cultivating knowledge instead of ignorance.
Source: Modern Political Propaganda by Liberties EU; How To Escape The Age of Mass Delusion by Stella Morabito; The Federalist
