If there is one thing liberals tend to agree
on it is that the United States is an oppressive nation that uses its wealth
and power to keep so called “underprivileged people” in poverty. Liberals
believe in a collective greater good, and just like so many times throughout
history, those who tend to disagree with this greater good end up being labeled
and often times de humanized to the point of genocide. The left use this argument
of working for the “collective greater good” to advocate for the reformation of
our economic system from one of free enterprise to centralized control. This is
generally referred to as socialism and has historically led to nothing but
greater human suffering. The reason being is because socialism limits
initiative and ingenuity, people who produce wealth are accused of doing so
only for their own benefit only, therefore the goods and service provided are
overlooked. The belief that government should be everyone’s providers becomes
set in stone and a society’s means of economic growth is destroyed. Given the
historical failure of socialism and the suffering it has produced one has to
wonder how so many people could once again be calling for socialism to replace
our capitalist system. After all, the United States has produced the world’s largest
middle class and highest standard of living for the average citizen the world
has known, and it wasn’t because of centralized control. Much of this can be
attributed to a “group think mentality.”
Controlling perception through a
“group think mentality” is the ultimate goal; psychological techniques, which
create unconscious associations to a given set of circumstances, can be used to
guide and control human emotions. Group think is defined as-
“A phenomenon developed
in groups and marked by the consensus of opinion without critical reasoning or
evaluation of consequences or alternatives. Groupthink revolves around a common
desire to not upset the balance of a group of people by creating conflict, with
creativity and individuality considered potentially harmful traits that should
be avoided.”
A desire to conform, or to not be the one
going against the grain seems to be a good comparative description of group think.
It is a common phenomenon whenever people are together for the purpose of decision
making. It is safe to say that liberal’s fascination with the “collective” is
certainly without critical evaluation, and often times many liberals can’t even
tell you what socialism really is. This describes the notion of not wanting to
upset a balance perfectly. Finally all liberals seem to utter the same nonsense
over and over so there is a definite effect on a person’s individual attributes
when dealing with a group think mentality.
As noted above, one of the purposes of
group think is to change a perception, or create a mental association in
order to change a perception for the purpose of accomplishing a larger
objective. Let’s look at a couple of examples.
Under the current administration, there is a
massive effort underway to give the perception that patriotic Americans are
terrorists. This is easy to do as the actions of this administration are
creating the very conditions in which these Americans are being baited into
responding. The mental association with terrorism has already been established
through the war on terror so all that needed to be done to shift that
perception was take the focus off of Islam and put it on the patriot movement.
The technique is so successful that it doesn’t matter that not one act of
terror has been committed by right wing Christian extremists. The fact that
Timothy Mcveigh was associated with “right wing groups” was possibly enough to
make a conscious connection in the minds of the collective.
Our veterans are another good example. The
Obama administration is going to great lengths to disarm honorable men who have
served their country, in the name of mental health. The association between
mental health and deranged mad men going on shooting sprees has already been
established. The only thing that remained was pushing this perception on to
veterans by labeling them with PTSD. Senator Diane Feinstein had recently
announced that all veterans suffered from PTSD and shouldn’t be allowed to own
guns. This turns into fear in the minds of the public as they now suddenly
believe that the thousands of returning war vets are a threat to public safety.
This was intended to remove one of the administrations biggest obstacles to
fundamentally transforming the United States. It achieved its desired results
in more than one way as well. This blatant attack against those that have
served this country has resulted in an up swell of social activism on the right
which, in turn, is just more that the administration can use to justify their
claims that veterans are mentally ill and dangerous as many of them have made
their willingness to fight for freedom again publicly known.
In the case of liberal’s acceptance of
socialism and greater government control, the class room has been the
facilitator of techniques which reinforce a group think mentality. Techniques
like Delphi-
“A method of group decision-making and forecasting that involves
successively collating the judgments of experts,”
are used to
manipulate the opinions of students out of a fear of appearing as a non
conformist. Classroom discussions that focus on social issues are designed to
bring out the opinions of those with differing opinions and they are
systematically discredited in front of the whole class in an effort to get them
to conform to the general consensus. Text books that routinely lie about America’s
social issues while comparing statistics to socialist countries are used to
create the mental association of capitalism being greedy and selfish, while
socialism is compassionate. The argument over universal health care is an
excellent example here. False statistics about poverty in America are continuously
shoved down the throats of students without the opportunity to give a critical
analysis and ask questions. If one were to ask why the poverty rate is higher
now than when the war on poverty began, after spending nearly 15 trillion
dollars for example, the student would be thoroughly discredited not only by
the professor but by those who have already succumbed to group thinking as
well. Without an effective method of regaining control or perception and
encouraging “individual analytical thought,” social science and those who seek
control will, through these techniques, maintain an advantage.
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