In my last post I wrote about cognitive dissonance. This refers to what happens psychologically when we are confronted with contradictory ideas. Most of the time we opt to stay with what we know on those issues in which we have a heavy emotional investment to support our egos need to be right or safe. All the time.
The current sign of the times is the debate over health care reform. What I'm seeing happening in the public debate is that what is no longer being debated are the relevant issues. What is at stake is a lifestyle. Obama is being demonized as a socialist, that he's taking us down the road to communism. It's no longer about adequate medical care and health insurance, it's about freedom versus slavery, the banner theme of American Life. This is what American blood has been shed for over two hundred years.
How did this happen? Well it's quite easy actually. If you're on the defense and backed into a corner, you start to lash out in anyway possible. The best way is to hit where it will hurt the most. What you do is manipulate the conversation so that it stimulates powerful primal emotions. Brain scans show that when our brain is flooded with strong emotions, that part of our brain that controls critical thinking is underactivated or temporarily offline. To witness: just look at those crazy lovers out there. They just stare at each other and don't realize it's raining and cold.
Enter one of the more powerful primal emotions that can be used for ulterior purposes: helplessness. Make people believe their way of life is about to go away. One news clip I saw about a town hall meeting showed a woman crying about her America she wants back (she was white of course). Make people believe they will be the victim of an all powerful Orwellian style government that robs them of their freedom to choose.
You can also use emotionally powerful terms like "Nazi" or "death panels." Now it's about our very lives and potentially violent deaths. That's enough to scare the bejeezus out of most of middle America. People are buying guns in droves. Militias are on the rise again. Remember the Clinton years when the same thing was happening and Clintonista was a popular slur? I wouldn't be surprised if someone somewhere is making this into God vs Satan.
Obama strikes me as a detail man. Someone with a firm grip on the fine print of things. But it's hard to have an objective discussion, debate if you will, about facts when the other side is coming at you with powerful emotions that have nothing to do with your details. Fear, anger, helplessness, powerlessness. They think those emotions are the issues.
I have to hand it those who pulled the strings behind the scenes to create these perceptions. Effective propaganda is the art of selectively misrepresenting information, either by omission or over generalization or stereotyping (it's quite a list, check Wiki) so as to elicit strong emotions that are compelling to those you want to influence.
Seems to me that's exactly what is happening. It's hard to escape from powerfully charged emotions. And so cognitive dissonance, or mind blur as I like to call it, is being powerfully activated.
I've stated before that unfortunately some people will prefer the fiction they know than consider a practical, possibly beneficial alternative. It will be interesting to see where this all ends up. What I don't understand is why people who want things to stay the same seem to ignore the fact that the US is usually near the bottom of the list of industrialized nations in being able to provide adequate medical care to most of its citizens.
In my book, one of the strengths of a nation is seen in its ability to take care of its weakest members. A system of "for profit medical care for insurers and providers" is going to omit a considerable portion of the population. That's why we're near the bottom of the list.
