Back in the 1920’s, when Henry Ford was running his massive factories, all was well for him except for one problem: the union.
He was not at all happy about the prospect of his many thousands of workers getting organized into a union, and thus being able to demand concessions for themselves.
Being a pragmatic sort of fellow, he decided that the best way to keep unions from forming was to keep his workers from talking to one another. He actually had gangs of “goons” whose job was to physically intimidate, and even viciously beat, any Ford assembly line worker who looked like they were conferring with any co-workers. Unfortunately, his efforts ultimately failed, as the workers found ways around his clunky methods.
I experienced a similar situation in the industrial poor-kid elementary school I attended, which was based on the car factory model. Even though communication skills are key to success in life, if any of us made any attempt to communicate with fellow students by passing notes or talking in study hall, we faced severe corporal punishment.
But let’s make a grand mental leap here, and instead of trying to maintain control over a Model T Ford factory or a classroom of seventh graders, let’s assume you are trying to maintain control over an electorate of 175 million people. How would you do it?
Various police states have tried to keep citizens from chatting amongst themselves by using fear of violence, but as Henry ford and my third grade teacher discovered, the use of brute force ultimately does not work. What to do?
Well, one nifty way to keep voters from communicating with one another is to simply create an environment where they don’t want to communicate with one another. This is far more effective and efficient.
So . . . if you flip thru Fox News or the AM radio dial, you will find station after station of people informing you of how disgusting, criminal, immoral, unethical, sexually deviant, and just generally cooties-infested all the people are who are on “the left.” And if you flip through the liberal media / intellectual NPR Radio/ blogosphere or Comedy Central, you will find the exact same message of how disgusting, criminal, immoral, unethical, sexually deviant, and just generally cooties-infested are all the people on “the right.” If you remove your own bias, approving of one and tsk tsk-ing the other, you will see that the emotional responses they are trying to evoke are identical mirror images of one another.
Is life really so simple that there are only 2 opposite ways of doing everything? Can a state only be blue or red? Most of us are actually centrists with many common interests, such as aging bridges and gas and water pipes. But that is not how Voters Inc. works.
Like the farm factories (See “Food Inc.“) that have carefully and relentlessly redesigned cows and chickens to suit their purposes, the real underlying purpose of the vast political propaganda media industrial complex (of which the “parties” are a mere subdivision) is not about “issues.” Issues, visions, and policies are secondary to simply acquiring and maintaining power.
Like industrial farmers who work with chickens or corn, the owners of Voters Inc. think strategically about voters, i.e., how they can inject us with hormones of fear and anger to alter how we normally function, to suit their grander purpose. They do it on a massive industrial scale. And like the food conglomerates, they shun the spotlight.
I invite you, dear reader, to step back for a moment and think, not about policies, and further, not think about specific candidates and their personalities or character, and instead ask yourself this:
If the overriding number-one goal of the people with the most power was simply to create an environment where consensus among the middle and lower tiers of society is impossible, would our current situation, where a 49 % – 49% even split of totally opposite irreconcilable differences is the norm, not be a near perfect manifestation of that goal?
All the emotional noise-making that you see should not be taken at face value. Even those in office who execute the planning are not conscious of it. It all has a shadowy hidden purpose. It is all carefully designed to distract, and cause so much emotional distress in the moment, that is it very hard to see what is really going on. It just makes it feel “icky” to seek compromise and consensus. Thus we are all relegated to minority status, being members of, at best, a 49.5% minority party that can never make the changes that most of us want.
The next time you are feeling incensed, disgusted, or shocked at the statements or positions of some leader of an opposing party, stop and think . . . is this the entire story, or . . . is it all part of a grand ruse to distract you and make it impossible for you, on a deep gut level, to find consensus with your fellow citizens? Isn’t it all just a little too symmetrical, a little too consistent, a little too absent any centrist news stations? Is your delicious sense of contempt and moral outrage evidence of your being played?
– JL
