From my perspective, there are varying degrees of evil in this world, but clearly one of those evils that positively makes me seethe with anger, is that evil which seeks to tweak the behavior of others so as to conform to acceptability of our self anointed ruling elite class of bureaucrats. Examples of this would be Government agents who wish to convince Americans to stop smoking, not through education, but through varying forms of taxation, subsidization, social engineering, or flat out legal reform which intrudes itself upon the personal property rights and other freedoms of the citizenry of our formerly free society. Another example would be the taxation on sugary drinks or the taxation on trans fats or the subsidy for electric cars. All of these things are meant to cajole us into wanting different things than what we would want without government interference, but done in such a way that we don’t really notice the coercion.
An even more sinister application of this process is the forced, “toleration,” which finds itself often at odds with what is left of our First Amendment Rights. Make no mistake about it, what we are seeing with the spate of politically correct hysteria is the result of years of mass manipulation and the fruits of an organized campaign to mold american thought, preferences, and reactions to fit a preconceived mold, deemed acceptable by our political ruling class. If you don’t believe that it’s possible for our government, or even any horses hind end, to sway national opinion towards a complete 180 on any issue that they desire, I’d like to introduce you to the man who wrote the how to manual. Meet Kurt Lewin, the father of Group Dynamic Theory. His theories in Social Psychology in a nut shell, deal with controlling large masses of people and using the mob mentality to affect social change.
You might think that someone with so evil an agenda might find himself out of favor with sentient beings, but sadly, this is not the case. Lewin is heralded as a hero to the entirety of those who call themselves Social Psychologists, a select profession that deserves to a man, to be run from town via torch and pitch fork. What’s more, there’s not a leadership seminar utilized by any organization in the world that does not use Lewin’s benign sounding, but evil none the less theories as a template for training organizational leadership. Diversity training? It’s all Lewin. Group Dynamics? It’s all Lewin. Conflict Resolution? It’s all Lewin. Change Management? It’s all Lewin.
Before you sound off with the, “what’s the big deal,” non alarm bells, let me clue you into the malevolent origins of this field of study. During pre WWII Germany, Lewin was a young psychologist who escaped the Nazis, but not before he was able to make some personal observations. How was a failed art student, drunkard, and life time human zero able to convince an entire nation to follow him to their ultimate destruction, and at the same time destroy any trace of their own humanity in the process? We after all aren’t speaking of a few people willing to throw away any semblance that they belonged to the human race, but the vast majority of an entire nation.
What Lewin concluded was that as a mob, or a large group, people were indeed easier to control and manipulate. He quantified the specifics of how to do that manipulating, and concluded that such manipulations could not only be done for the purposes of evil, but for good as well. There by the way, is where I have a problem with Mr. Lewin’s theory. Who gets to define what’s good and what’s evil, because with this theory, it ain’t God. While Lewin himself may not have sought to control groups of people for the purposes of evil, that does not excuse him from the applications that will undoubtedly develop. Any act of controlling mass behavior, no matter how well intentioned, is in my estimation an affront against humanity. It is an insult to my individual nature, and the individual nature of every man, woman, and child alive today. That anyone would presume themselves more worthy than I in conducting the affairs of my private life, or in forming my opinions is that very definition of an evil that makes me seethe.
Once again, this article is not out of the blue so to speak. It was prompted by a very specific event, and one that I’ve already sounded off on. I was going to keep my virtual mouth shut on the entire gay marriage issue, until somebody set me off. Quite frankly, I could not care less about the sexuality of somebody that I’m not having sexual relations with. I am a monogamous fellow, and my better half pretty much demands my fidelity. (She’s made it a point to tell me that she has Cutco knives, and has no compunctions about using them on a certain piece of my anatomy should I stray.) Even more than not caring to know about other people’s preferences, I actively wish that they would refrain from telling me about such things. I guess you could call me a don’t ask, don’t tell kind of a guy. I won’t ask, and would beg you to not supply unsolicited information.
What prompted me to get into it this time was a piece of opinion delivered from a friend whom I respect. His statement was that he’ll never vote for a Republican again, unless they find some sanity as a party. The inference being that the Arizona Legislature had gone too far with their Religious Liberty Bill. Never mind the small and inconsequential fact that Republican Governor Janice Brewer vetoed the Bill, he found this to be beyond the pale, and what’s more, that the Arizona Legislature now somehow has been elevated to the position of speaking for all Republicans, everywhere.
It’s not the first time that I’ve read one of those, “this is beyond the pale,” comments about the Republican brand. I’ve indeed seen several dozen screeds about how so and so was a former Republican stalwart until some perceived indefensible position had been taken that proved beyond a doubt what an intolerant bunch the Party of Lincoln has now become. Never mind that the other side is never held to similar account for their indefensible positions. Just a day and a half prior for instance, Harry Reid, the Senate Majority Leader, went to the well of the Senate and declared that all people who had balked at the royal screwing they’d received at the hands of the Obamacare Law were lying, and paid agents of those evil Koch Brothers. Not a peep from the former Republicans about how this was beyond the pale for common human decency. Ted Kennedy killed a girl, and he received a free pass in the decency judgement arena, nothing beyond the pale here, as well as his entire life time’s achievement in the field of misogyny and sexual harassment. Robert Bird was a grand something or other within the KKK, and yet that was not considered to be too far towards the area of racism to forgive. Alan Grayson has stated on the House Floor, on multiple occasions, that all Republicans want to kill the old and in-firmed, and yet not a single peep from the, “beyond the pale,” crowd. I could go on and on for hours with examples of Democrats not being held to similar account, including by the way a health care reform law that has seen a huge swath of our nation lose their health care access, while being told that everything is now better than it’s ever been for them.
Before anyone gets upon their personal high horse and declares that they’re immune from having their minds made up for them, and that your Jedi Mind Tricks won’t work on me boy, perhaps you should read a little something about the Stanley Milgram experiments. He first conducted this experiment at Yale University in 1961, and was fired from that University for performing it. (Several of the test subjects required psychological counseling once they realized that they’d just killed a guy for answering a simple question wrong.) He did manage to discover something rather hideous about mob behavior versus our behavior as individuals. Approximately 35 out of 36 of us would be perfectly willing to administer a lethal dosage of electricity to a student who answered a question wrong on a test, because they were simply told to do so by a person in authority combined with copious amounts of peer pressure from others in the room seen as equals. The results of that experiment have been reproduced repeatedly over the years, and the only time those results have failed to manifest in that way is when the test subjects have had foreknowledge of what was happening.
Over the last decade, there have been about 50 separate instances of gay rights legislation that have appeared on ballots at the State level. Not one single victory was garnered by the gay and lesbian crowd. Gay Marriage as a matter of fact even failed voter approval in Massachusetts and California. Now, I’m not going to say whether or not I agree with the court’s intervention to impose gay marriage on the voters of those states, or in any of the states where the courts have done so. If your state has gay marriage I know two things about your situation there. The voters of your state turned it down, and did so overwhelmingly, and the court system in your state overturned the voters there. So be it. This is a discussion about how the psychology of group dynamics is being employed to change people’s minds and reshape public opinion.
Here we are, not even a year removed from the last one of these initiatives failing so miserably, and it would appear as though anyone who would dare vote against gay marriage is somehow not only perceived to be in the minority, but now so evil that they exist beyond the pale of minimal human decency. Make no mistake about it, people are now being outcast for merely having an opinion that runs counter to the approved opinion. It will not take long for public opinion to be swayed in this fashion. The firestorm in Arizona has served notice to any who feel contrary, change your mind or prepare to face the same fate.
I am not saying that the outrage over a bakery owner who does not want to serve gay couples is wrong, just that passing a law to coerce their behavior and how they administer their private property rights is. In fact, I share that outrage. The national convulsions experienced this past week however went well beyond that. The next time you find yourself as part of a national chorus, stop for one moment and try to quantify your position without emotion. Make sure you are not just part of a mob whipped into frenzy for somebody else’s agenda. No matter how benevolent that agenda holder feels himself to be, the implications of this are malevolent. While Kurt Lewin felt his manipulation of people was somehow a nobler purpose than Adolf Hitler’s, make no mistake, they are opposite sides of the same dangerous coin.
Cross Posted from Musings of a Mad Conservative.
Tags: Arizona, gay marriage, Jan Brewer
